CHAPTER IX

THE STORM-CLOUD (1884-1888)

The sky had been a favourite subject of study with the author of “Modern Painters.”  His journals for fifty years past had kept careful account of the weather, and effects of cloud.  He had noticed since 1871 a prevalence of chilly, dark bise, as it would be called in France; but different in its phenomena from anything of his earlier days.  The “plague wind,” so he named it—­tremulous, intermittent, blighting grass and trees—­blew from no fixed point of the compass, but always brought the same dirty sky in place of the healthy rain-cloud of normal summers; and the very thunder-storms seemed to be altered by its influence into foul and powerless abortions of tempest.  We should now be disposed to call this simply “the smoke nuisance,” but feeling as he did the weight of human wrong against which it was his mission to prophesy, believing in a Divine government of the world in all its literalness, he had the courage to appear before a London audience,[50] like any seer of old, and to tell them that this eclipse of heaven was—­if not a judgment—­at all events a symbol of the moral darkness of a nation that had “blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly; and had done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it was in his power to do.”

[Footnote 50:  “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” London Institution, February 4th, 1884; repeated with variations and additions a week later.]

In the autumn, at Oxford, he took up his parable again.  His lectures on “The Pleasures of England” he intended as a sketch of the main stream of history from his own religious standpoint.  It was a noble theme, and one which his breadth of outlook and detailed experience would have fitted him to handle; but he was already nearing the limit of his vital powers.  He had been suffering from depression throughout the summer, unrelieved by the energetic work for St. George’s Museum, which in other days might have been a relaxation from more serious thought.  He had been editing Miss Alexander’s “Roadside Songs of Tuscany,” and recasting earlier works of his own, incessantly busy; presuming upon the health he had enjoyed, and taking no hints nor advice from anxious friends, who would have been glad to have seen the summer spent in change of scene and holiday-making.

At Oxford he was watched with concern—­restless and excited, too absorbed in his crusade against the tendencies of the modern scientific party, too vehement and unguarded in his denunciations of colleagues, too bitter against the new order of things which, to his horror, was introducing vivisection in the place of the old-fashioned natural history he loved, and speculative criticism instead of “religious and useful learning.”

He was persuaded to cancel his last three attacks on modern life and thought—­“The Pleasures of Truth,” of “Sense,” and of “Nonsense”—­and to substitute readings from earlier works, hastily arranged and re-written; and his friends breathed more freely when he left Oxford without another serious attack of brain-disease.  He wrote on December 1st, 1884, to Miss Beever: