CLOUDS.
THE atmospheric vicissitudes of this showery summer have often recalled to our mind a name never to be remembered without gratitude by the lover of Nature,—that of John Ruskin. It was by a passage in his first work that many an eye, suddenly opened to the scenery of the sky, was taught to linger with delight in regions previously visited merely by some hasty glance, given with no higher object than the desire to escape a wetting. What do we not owe to the man who has taught us to look at the clouds ! To have enriched our walls with a noble picture would less have enlarged our wealth of accessible beauty. The Claude or the Turner shows a single aspect of Nature ; but the pictures we may watch from our window, as we read or write, are not mere pictures; they symbolise in their silent beauty all that is most dramatic in the changes of human life. See that battle-field for the armies of the glory and the gloom : no campaign was ever fuller of unexpected turns of good or evil fortune. The page grows dark ; we look up and see preparations for a storm ; the dark squadrons are hurrying up into the sky ; the blue shrinks, vanishes ; the gathering contingents have formed a compact army ; the sky is a single cloud. Then suddenly some potent ally seems to have reinforced the powers of light; we see glimpses of sky beyond the clouds, and soon rich, heaped masses spread their glittering domes against the unveiled azure, while far behind them, pale flakes of stratified vapour reveal another stage of aerial distance. Nothing is seen of the dark army but broken fragments, and these fugitives seem forced against their will to mirror the splendours of their foe. Turn again to the interrupted employment, finish the page, close the letter, and all is changed once more. The flying squadrons have rallied, have combined; we watch the darkening landscape instead of the closely covered sky, till the concentrated masses choose their ground, and we see an advancing shadow, blurring half the landscape, and touching with delicate pencil every hedge- row, only to blot it out the next minute in the volleying rain that soon shuts us in, and releases us from the importunate drama of the heavens for our interrupted employment. These fitful visitants are for ever baffling our anticipations, and though their movements always suggest those of an army, no army has fortunes sufficiently various for their changes. They seem to represent in their shadow world the unexpected moods to which it is due that-
" not the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh."
Every change of mood, from monotonous gloom, through gentle melancholy, to joyous brightness, seems expressed more definitely in their varied influence than by any words.
The clouds in another respect mirror the influences of human companionship,—they go with us everywhere; we do not quit them as we turn to realms given up, except for their bright presence, to hopeless ugliness. As we pace dreary, monotonous streets, or squalid alleys, we may lift our eyes to their pearly shadows and amber lights, and follow their invita- tion into the far above and the far beyond which they express and suggest. They do not call us away from earth,—in the crowded haunts of men, indeed, all they can do is to invite us to soar above what is unlovely—but give them only space to work on, and they turn a mere stretch of tillage or pasture into a succession of pictures. The gleam which they pursue seems to bring Art into Nature, for it invests the commonplace with that expression of sympathy which is of the very soul of Art. " There, there," the hurrying sunbeam calls to us ; " look at these despised meadows, these uninteresting middle-aged trees, that new, dull farm, that every-day haystack; look at every- thing you quit in order to hunt the picturesque in Switzerland or Italy, and see, for a moment, its beauty and charm." Banish
these limiting shadows, let the sunbeams have it all their own way, and you need an artist to show you all that you were forced to see when sudden, transient brightness touched this and that point in the landscape, and by the mere magic of selection banished the commonplace from Nature. An empty sky is almost as unpicturesque as one completely covered ; before we can see a picture, some influence must make a selection for us, and no merely natural scene so much seems to copy—or might we not rather say, to suggest ?— the sympathetic touch of an artist, as the fitful, evanescent glimpses of landscape shut in by the shadows of the clouds.
The traveller to Southern lands knows best the charm only he can lose ; he learns to loathe the monotony of blue above, of dazzle everywhere ; but now and then, even in our watery England, a few weeks of summer approach the lesson of the tropics. • "Another blue-sky day," the artist sighs as he opens his eyes on the fine-weather horizon so dear to children, and feels his powers wane apart from the inspiration of Nature's fitful suggestions and varying moods. None of those moods can be recorded without creating a picture ; never can a picture charm the eye of an artist without some such record.
Careful portraiture of an Alpine valley gives less pleasure than hasty suggestion of a suburban common, if the first lack all impression of a passing gleam or gloom, and the second mark its influence. Where the pencil has failed to fix some record of what is transient, there the characteristic charm of Art is lacking.
We see this charm of the transient most commonly in pictures of twilight. Such a one hangs before our eyes as we write, painted a hundred years ago by Wright of Derby for a friend. Nothing, probably, would be less picturesque than the scene, if you were to look at it under a noonday sun. A steep hill shuts in the spectator so closely that the bushes at the top are clearly seen; an eight-roomed house, in sufficiently good repair to be taken for one's summer lodgings, stands at its foot,—that is all; not a single picturesque object to be seen. Uniform dark-brown below meets uniform pale-grey above ; nothing of the exceptional is present in earth or sky. Yet the picture breathes the very spirit of all that gives a picture charm. It expresses that vague feeling of satisfaction and repose in the coming darkness that Wordsworth has given in more than one of his sonnets, and which the poetic Scotch tongue gathers up in a single word„—it paints the " gloaming?'
We have not yet the twilight commemorated in the poet's stately verse, twilight " studious to destroy Day's mutable distinctions ;" we look into the lingering clearness that just precedes that obliteration, when the advancing darkness has washed out colour, while it still spares form,—an interval dear to the heart of the artist and the poet, although many persons pass their lives without feeling more about it than that it is time for the candles to come in. The painter, with the temperance of true art, trusts to the faithful expression of a fleeting phase of every day's decline, and gives us nothing that we might not see for ourselves every twenty-four hours, if we had eyes to look for it. One passes the picture, for the hundredth time, with a sort of fresh surprise to see that the twilight holds out—that we can still so easily make out those clothes hanging out to dry, when manifestly in a few minutes one will have difficulty in picking one's way along the muddy road. The impression of a moment is all there is, but it is all we want.
The evening of the year is a subject no less dear to artists than the evening of the day, and although the russet and orange of autumn may seem enough to justify their choice, yet in truth those glowing hues would lose half their charm if they were permanent. " October's workmanship to rival May " touches us all as with a sense of music,—we feel, as it were, the dominant chord, seeking its resolution. Perhaps, indeed, the wonderful power of music has this among other elements of its mystic charm,—that it addresses itself to the time-sense in us, that the voice which in twilight and autumn whispers softly, " Passing away," here attains its full scope, and breathes a meaning from the suggestion of which all other art takes its purest charm. At any rate, what may be called the musical element in Nature and in Art is inseparable from the sense of Time. Trite words touch the spring of tears if they do but bring the far near ; and a vivid than makes poetry, as a vivid there makes a picture,—indeed, we cannot have the one without the other.
The poetic affinities of the mere thought of Time must have been brought home to our readers of late by the various specimens of inscriptions on sun-dials contained in these columns, and the discovery how little is needed to make such an inscription poetic. Take one of the last given us by a correspondent :- " L'ombre passe et repasse, Et sans repasser rhomme passe."
There we have a mere truism, and there we have poetry. The writer of our most graceful vers de societ6—Mr. Austin Dobson —has rendered the same thought in some poetic lines, the point of which is given in these two,—
"Time flies, we say—ah no !
Alas ! Time stays ; we go :" —and probably we could fill many pages with citations which told no more than this, and yet should be felt to say much. The tranquil rhythm of this fair Nature, the hurrying throb of the human interests it measures, there is the eternal poem of human life. It is already familiar in Homer ; it is not stale after the two and a half millenniums by which we are divided from him ; and when an equal space divides our descendants from us, it will, we believe, keep all its freshness. For it depends on principles deeply rooted in the permanent part of our nature, and which no advance of civilisation can render obsolete.
How shall we explain this mystic alliance between the sense of Time and all that is most catholic in Poetry and Art P It results, we believe, from man's craving for the Eternal. Our nature discovers everywhere the throb of rhythmic vibration that demands opposites, and whichever element of the con- trast be suppressed, that which is left loses half its meaning. When the Everlasting loses its awfulness, then the fleeting will lose its pathos. " The clouds that gather round the setting 81111" will cease to take their colouring from an eye " that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." The thought of man's mortality, when it is dissociated from that of his immortality, will become a fact of science, and lose all connection with the ideas of poetry. The transient lights that flit across the landscape will lose the symbolism by which they associate themselves with fleeting dreams; for if everything be transient, it is all one as though nothing were so. But what are we imagining P Our theme recalls us to the world of reality. These vapours veil and hide the orb to which they owe their existence ; but without them his powers would lack half their manifestation ; his effulgence is manifested to our eyes mainly through their splendour. The hidden sun glows in the visible cloud, and in the daily drama of the sunset and the dawn, the changeless and the changing meet in an embrace as old as Time itself,—an embrace recorded in the first legends of our race, and hymned in the songs that our Aryan ancestors knew before they left their Asiatic home. We and they look on the same sun, and no one looks twice on the same cloud; yet, as we gaze upwards and around, it were impossible to separate the influence of either. So inseparable, we believe, is the influence of the Eternal, from the play of art, the melody of words and of music. They wither in its eclipse, and our hope for its re-emergence, if it could need such secondary reinforcement, would be adequately supported by their indirect testimony to troths which they can never establish, which they always ignore, and which at times they may appear to deny.
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