The Catholic World
Chapter 159 : We could indeed wish that Mr. Ruskin had more deeply studied peasant life and peasant

We could indeed wish that Mr. Ruskin had more deeply studied peasant life and peasant habits. The meaning of the clouds in Turner^s "Salisbury" and "Stonehenge" would have then been more thoroughly appreciated. Fine and poetical as is Mr. Ruskin's interpretation, yet we venture to think that he misses the truth when, in this case, he refers Turner's inspiration to Greek sources. To those who have lived near the Plain, and have mixed with the shepherds, the meaning and the symbolism come far nearer home, and more closely touch the heart.

Turner was here no Greek, except as all men who love beauty are Greeks. Here he was, at all events, intensely English. Sprung like so many great poets and painters from the lower cla.s.s, he could sympathize with the shepherds of the Plain. To them, as to the shepherd in the "Iliad," standing on the hill-top facing the sea, shepherding their flocks, far away from any village, on the vast treeless down, the clouds become a constant source of fear or joy.

Their hearts gladden as the light white clouds roll up from the English Channel, and then, as they say, "purl round" and retreat.

{218} In spring and summer they joyfully hail the "water dogs," the "gossamer" of the Yorks.h.i.+re peasant, which herald the fine weather.

They, above all other English peasants, solitary on that wide plain, watch with fear the "sun-galls," Shakespeare's "water-galls," as the broken bits and patches of rainbows are called, hanging glorious, but wrathful, in the far horizon. They mark with dread "the messengers"

and "water streamers," and at night, too, anxiously note the amber "wheel-cloud" round the moon.

With all this, like a true poet, Turner sympathized. He entered into the reality of shepherd life upon the Plain; its joys and its dangers.

In one picture, therefore, he has given us the rain-clouds showering their blessings upon man, and in the other revealed the dread fatalistic power that ever darkens the background of life.

But we must leave the peasant, and turn to the fisherman. More even than the peasant, he naturally regards the weather in its effects upon his calling. The rain with him--we are speaking more especially now of the North Country fisherman--is "dirt," and a rainy sky a "dirty sky."

The "water-galls" of the Salisbury shepherd, from which Shakespeare took those most exquisite similes, have with him lost their beauty, and are changed into "sea-devils," evil prophets of tempest. The flying clouds, that herald the storm, are with him "the flying devil and his imps." He realizes the danger, and therefore christens the clouds with rough names.

He too, like the peasant, is learned in weather-lore, and keeps an almanac of weather-rhymes in his memory. In such fis.h.i.+ng villages as Staithes and Runswick, on the north-east Yorks.h.i.+re coast, a large collection might easily be formed. They partake of the roughness and the truthfulness of the inhabitants. Such jingles as:

"When wind comes before rain Then let your topsails remain: But if the wind follows rain.

Then you may close reef again,"

are certainly more accurate in sense than rhythm. Again, the couplet:

"When the sun crosses line, and wind's in the east.

It will hand (hold) that way meast, first quarter at least,"

contains a warning not always to be despised. The riddle of the "brough," that amber halo of clouds seen sometimes round the moon, which the shepherds of Salisbury Plain call "the wheel," and the midland peasants "the burr," is solved by the rhyming adage:

"A far off brough Means a near hand rough."

But we must not be too critical, and demand both sense and rhythm. It is something if in poetry we obtain truth. At all events, the Yorks.h.i.+re fishermen's rhymes are quite as good as a great many of those in which Apollo formerly conveyed his prophecies to mankind. And we think that Admiral Fitzroy might have profitably added some of them to his collection.

Many a time have we seen at some little fis.h.i.+ng village the fishermen all detained by some "breeder," or "flyer," whose meaning their eyes alone could read. If the threatened storm has not visited the coast, yet the heavy sea tumbling in without a breath of air has shown that the gale has broken not far distant. Still mistakes arise. Life is constantly sacrificed. But the glory and the pride of science is, that, whilst serving the sublimest ends, it still helps the humblest.

We may be unable to control the elements. But we shall triumph over the law by obeying the law. The day will come when the notion of chance will be altogether eliminated, and the law by which the clouds are governed recognized. And in the blessings of science all men are partakers. Alike shall the fisherman steer his craft with a firmer faith in the essential goodness of all things, and the hand of the artist gain strength and his eye see a {219} deeper beauty when each knows that the clouds are as regular in their movements as the stars.

Of course men living by the sea, daily watching the clouds, life itself hanging upon a knowledge, however uncertain, of the meaning of their color and their shapes, have naturally named them in a rude fas.h.i.+on. Landsmen, who only now and then gaze at the clouds, are apt to regard them as ever changing. But not "a wisp" flies in the highest air, not "a creeper" rises out of the sea, whose shapes are not moulded by a definite law. Day by day the same forms repeat themselves with unceasing regularity. The clouds might be mapped out like the land and sea over which they fly. More than half a century has pa.s.sed since Howard first gave them names. After him Forster wrote, and like him ill.u.s.trated his theory with diagrams of the princ.i.p.al cloud-forms.

And now Admiral Fitzroy has so improved upon their nomenclature, that there is not a cloud that cannot be scientifically named and defined.

But our sailors and fishermen have long ago known these facts. Not a stray waif of film flecks the heavens which they have not christened.

They know all kinds and shapes, from the "crow-nests," those tiny white spots (_cirriti_) dotting the sky, up to the glorious "Queen Anne's feather," waving far away into the horizon its soft downy plume, rippled and barred by the wind.

Thus to take a few examples. The North Yorks.h.i.+re fisherman has his "dyer's neif," a small dark purple cloud, so called from its supposed resemblance to the black grained fist (neif) of a dyer. Some three thousand years ago, Elijah's servant, on Mount Carmel, cried that he saw a little cloud rising out of the sea like a man's hand. And still on the Yorks.h.i.+re coast the fisherman utters the same language, and knows that cloud still as the forerunner of storm and rain. Quite as striking, too, is the way in which his names of clouds throw a light upon Shakespeare. All readers will remember the pa.s.sage between Hamlet and Polonins, ending with "Very like a whale;" a phrase which has pa.s.sed into a proverb for anything very improbable. And no actor can utter it on the stage without producing a peal of laughter. Yet the proverb and the laughter are equally inappropriate. The names of the clouds in the pa.s.sage are all real names. The "dromedary cloud," or, as Shakespeare calls it, "the camel cloud," is well known to sailors.

It is a species of c.u.mulus, a white, packed, humped cloud, and when seen in the southern hemisphere is said to foretell heat; but, in the northern, cold. It is also called the "hunchback cloud." "See, there's the hunchback; look at its pads," North Country fishermen will say.

The "weasel-cloud" also is known, though not so well, and is more often called "the hog-cloud" and the "wind-bog," from its being the forerunner of wind. But the "whale-cloud" is as well known to sailors, especially those employed in the Greenland trade, as the "bridge-cloud," or "feather-cloud," or any other well recognized form.

"We shall hae a bit o' a puff, lads. See that sea-devil; and yonder's a regular finner to the norrard," have we heard North Sea captains say. A "finner," it should be explained, is a small whale. If ever there was a realist, Shakespeare was. He drew direct from nature. But, like a true artist, he knew how to mould and shape mere barren naturalism by the vitalizing power of the imagination. In its white heat he fused all things. And so, noting the common names of clouds as daily used in conversation by sailors and fishermen and seafaring folk, he could rise from the satire of Hamlet to the high pathetic pitch of Antony's speech:

"Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapor, sometime, like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory.

With trees upon't, that nod into the world, And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast these signs; They are black vesper's pageants.

_Eros._ Ay, my lord.

_Antony_.

That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns; and makes it indistinct As water is in water.

_Eros._ It does, my lord.

_Antony_.

My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body."

_Anthony and Cleopatra, Act iv, Sc._ 12.

{220}

Here the whole scene is colored by the imagination and enn.o.bled by human pathos, such as no other man ever possessed. But the basis of the thought is the simplest naturalism, such as other men had seen and observed a thousand times before. The Flying Dragon is mentioned as far back as the latter part of the sixteenth century by Hyll in his "Contemplation of Mysteries," where the first rude ideas of weather forecasts may be found. The "pendent rock" and "forked mountain" are nothing more than the "rock-clouds" of the Derbys.h.i.+re peasant, concerning which a local rhyme runs:

"When clouds appear like rocks and towers, The earth's refreshed by fragrant showers."

We must not, however, lose sight of our North Country fisherman. If to him the sky is at times black with terror, yet it is also splendid with beauty. In fine weather it is his garden, the heavenly "meadow,"

as St. Chrysostom would say, blossomed over with flakes and garlands of cloud-bloom, white and peach-colored. He has his names for them, his "crow buds," and his "cherry flowers," and the great "tree cloud"

with its purple branches. It is, too, his fairyland full of loveliest shapes flying and wandering here and there, "pigeons," as he calls those white detached winged "flyers," "flying fish," "streamers," and pencilled "plumes."

Thus far of the peasant and the sailor. They certainly more than any one else recognize the terror and the beauty of cloud scenery. The well-to-do man knows the clouds only as they affect his pleasures.

Life is not dependent upon them, and he therefore misses that true enjoyment which springs from reality. On the whole, he thinks with the Epicurean that rain ought to fall by night, whilst his wife sighs for Italy and blue skies. But let us, on the contrary, love the grey cloud, and rather hold with that fine old skipper, who, after enduring six months of unbroken weather in the Bay of Naples, cried out on seeing a cloud, "Turn out, boys, turn out; here's weather as is weather; none of your everlasting blue sky." Let us rather love the storm-rack that beats against our island. This it is that gives the color to the cheeks of our maidens; this that has moulded our features, and deepened the lines of our faces, and hardened the national character.

Let us be thankful, with Mr. Raskin, that nowhere can the swiftness of the rain-cloud be seen as in England, nowhere in such perfection as among the Derbys.h.i.+re hills; nowhere the keenness of the storm be felt as on a Yorks.h.i.+re wold. [Footnote 36] But in these days even the power of the elements is threatened. We have seen in Derbys.h.i.+re, when the west wind blows, the cloughs filled, not with troops of clouds das.h.i.+ng slantwise up the valleys, but choked with dull rolling Lancas.h.i.+re smoke; seen, under this canopy of fog, the snow on the Edges turn yellow and brown. One by one, too, the blast furnaces are burning up the Yorks.h.i.+re moors. And instead of white wreaths of clouds crowning the wolds, a pillar of fire lights them up by night, and a cloud of smoke darkens them by day.

[Footnote 36: "Modern Painter," vol v., part vii., chap. iv., -- 14.]

Luckily the sea-coast still remains unpolluted. And if any one really wishes to study the clouds, let him go to the North Yorks.h.i.+re and Northumberland coasts in winter. Then will he understand something of their majesty and power; then will he see the true purple wind-tints, see the sky a wilderness full of strange weird creatures--"wild hogs,"

those purple hump-backed clouds running one after another in a line, and the "Flying Devil and his imps" marshalling the storm, which is banking up out of the German ocean; see, too, the "Norway bishop"

rise--a man's figure clothed {221} in white, with outstretched arms, under whose ban many a fisherman from Staithes and Runswick has sunk; see the figure melt and disappear in a mist of sleet and snow and hail; and then, last of all, see "the weather-gleam," when all objects loom against the one pale rift of sky, as s.h.i.+ps loom in an east wind.

These sights have never been painted, and never can. Even Turner cannot give them. For who can give that which is the greatest pleasure in watching the clouds, the feeling of change? Yon cannot paint the movement of the rack, as the vapor s.h.i.+fts from form to form, now a mountain, now a dragon, now a fish, each change answering to the changes of the spirit. Only the poets can paint the clouds and their lessons--only Sh.e.l.ley and Shakespeare. But put away even Shakespeare himself. Love them, study them from nature. And, as St. Chrysostom says, the poor man, more than any one else, enjoys "the luxury of the elements." The lawyer may hold _cujus solum ejus ad coelum_; but he who most enjoys the clouds, as with all things else, is their real possessor. And the artist and the poor man, though they may not have a rood of ground to call their own, here reign over an empire.

Translated from the German.

MALINES AND WuRZBURG.

A SKETCH OF THE CATHOLIC CONGRESSES HELD AT MALINES AND WuRZBURG.

BY ANDREW NIEDERMa.s.sER.

CHAPTER II.

ART.

The Catholic reunions, both in Belgium and in Germany, have taken a special interest in Christian art; for religion is at once the source and the end of true art. "Religion," says Lasaulx, "is the soul of every useful measure, the vivifying principle in the life of nations, the permanent basis of true philanthropy. In its infancy, as well as during its most flouris.h.i.+ng periods, at all times and among all nations, art has ever been the handmaid of religion. What is the last and highest aim of architecture? The erection of churches. How has sculpture won its n.o.blest triumphs? In pagan antiquity, by representations of the heathen deities; since the dawn of Christianity, by presenting to the admiration of the world statues of our Saviour and his saints. In like manner the n.o.blest subjects of painting have been furnished by religion, and by history, both sacred and profane. And do we not meet with the same phenomenon in music and religions poetry? Hence we may safely conclude that art is the barometer of a nation's civilization, and above all of its religious status. A people animated with a lively faith will not hesitate to manifest it outwardly, sparing neither trouble nor expense, and art affords the most suitable means of giving expression to its feelings.

If, on the other hand, art is neglected by a nation, it is a certain sign that its mental and spiritual condition is abnormal; that it must be under the influence of some disturbing agency.

Art, in its relations to religion and the Church, is one of the subjects that have claimed the attention of the Catholic congresses; they discussed the principles of religious architecture, painting, sculpture, and of church music; they considered the subject of decorating the sanctuaries of religion in all its branches, and examined the highest and most important problems of art.