The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

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Ruskin John. The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

PREFACE

THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH. CENTURY

LECTURE II

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Let me first assure my audience that I have no arrière pensée in the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and it would have been only too like me to mean, any number of things by such a title;—but, to-night, I mean simply what I have said, and propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice or description from meteorologists.

So far as the existing evidence, I say, of former literature can be interpreted, the storm-cloud—or more accurately plague-cloud, for it is not always stormy—which I am about to describe to you, never was seen but by now living, or lately living eyes. It is not yet twenty years that this—I may well call it, wonderful, cloud has been, in its essence, recognizable. There is no description of it, so far as I have read, by any ancient observer. Neither Homer nor Virgil, neither Aristophanes nor Horace, acknowledge any such clouds among those compelled by Jove. Chaucer has no word of them, nor Dante;1 Milton none, nor Thomson. In modern times, Scott, Wordsworth and Byron are alike unconscious of them; and the most observant and descriptive of scientific men, De Saussure, is utterly silent concerning them. Taking up the traditions of air from the year before Scott's death, I am able, by my own constant and close observation, to certify you that in the forty following years (1831 to 1871 approximately—for the phenomena in question came on gradually)—no such clouds as these are, and are now often for months without intermission, were ever seen in the skies of England, France, or Italy.

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I suppose the thick air, as well as the transparent, is in both cases saturated with aqueous vapor;—but also in both, observe, vapor that floats everywhere, as if you mixed mud with the sea; and it takes no shape anywhere: you may have it with calm, or with wind, it makes no difference to it. You have a nasty haze with a bitter east wind, or a nasty haze with not a leaf stirring, and you may have the clear blue vapor with a fresh rainy breeze, or the clear blue vapor as still as the sky above. What difference is there between these aqueous molecules that are clear, and those that are muddy, these that must sink or rise, and those that must stay where they are, these that have form and stature, that are bellied like whales and backed like weasels, and those that have neither backs nor fronts, nor feet nor faces, but are a mist—and no more—over two or three thousand square miles?

I again leave the questions with you, and pass on.

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