'
There is a fine ignoring of self in Mr.
There is a fine ignoring of self in Mr.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 to v25 - Rab to Tur
For what infinite wonderfulness there is in this vegeta-
tion, considered, as indeed it is, as the means by which the earth
becomes the companion of man- his friend and his teacher! In
the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could
only be seen preparation for his existence; - the characters which
enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily-in
all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to
it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The
earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except
of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human be-
ings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil
of strange intermediate being; which breathes, but has no voice;
moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life
without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the
beauty of youth, without its passion; and declines to the weak-
ness of age, without its regret.
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JOHN RUSKIN
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And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordi-
nate to us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just
the greater power as we have the less responsibility for our
treatment of the unsuffering creature, most of the pleasures which
we need from the external world are gathered, and most of the
lessons we need are written, all kinds of precious grace and
teaching being united in this link between the Earth and Man:
wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and disci-
pline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beauti-
ful means of life. First a carpet to make it soft for him; then,
a colored fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of
foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen
rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay
to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this
leafage; easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for
him, or instruments (lance shaft, or plow handle, according to his
temper): useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous;
useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage
falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs
remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which
are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are
made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal
to the fancy of man or provision for his service: cold juice or
glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin,
medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these
presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness
and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness as
of temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on
the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the
storms of ages, or wavings to and from with faintest pulse of
summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or bind-
ing the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the
desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage
far tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean-
clothing with variegated, everlasting films the peaks of the track-
less mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest
passion and simplest joy of humanity.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful,
and good for food and for building and for instruments of our
hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and
--
## p. 12552 (#612) ##########################################
12552
JOHN RUSKIN
admiration from us, become, in proportion to their obtaining it,
a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and
way of life: so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves
the trees enough; and every one is assuredly wrong in both who
does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
is clearly possible to do without them, for the great companion-
ship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a
noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between
dark stone walls. Still, if human life be cast among trees at all,
the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that
"country," in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has
hitherto been the source of reproach to its inhabitants; and that
the words "countryman," "rustic," "clown," "paysan," "villager,"
still signify a rude and untaught person, as opposed to the words
townsman" and "citizen. " We accept this usage of words, or
the evil which it signifies, somewhat too quietly; as if it were
quite necessary and natural that country people should be rude,
and townspeople gentle. Whereas I believe that the result of
each mode of life may, in some stages of the world's progress,
be the exact reverse; and that another use of words may be
forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find
ourselves saying: "Such-and-such a person is very gentle and
kind, he is quite rustic; and such-and-such another person is
very rude and ill-taught, he is quite urbane. "
«
At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of
their good report through our evil ways of going on in the world
generally;-chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fight-
ing with each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe
from devastation, and every country lane yielding easier passage
to the marauders, peacefully minded men necessarily congregated
in cities, and walled themselves in, making as few cross-country
roads as possible; while the men who sowed and reaped the
harvests of Europe were only the servants or slaves of the
barons. The disdain of all agricultural pursuits by the nobility,
and of all plain facts by the monks, kept educated Europe in
a state of mind over which natural phenomena could have no
power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning.
Men learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they
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JOHN RUSKIN
12553
mistook for education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked
on all the broad space of the world of God mainly as a place
for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.
There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness
of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that
picture of Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio, in which
the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild
roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the helmets and glow-
ing between the lowered lances. For in like manner the whole
of Nature only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of
helmet crests: and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of
the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life
of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm
springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of Eng-
land her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the
sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the
twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities, on the hori
zon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles
of the Apennines, the twisted olive trunks hid the ambushes of
treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the lilies
which were white at the dawn were washed with crimson at sun-
set.
Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of
man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended
especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be
in broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is
to be the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth,
falling into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden.
walks, or casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Asso-
ciated always with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all
possible elements of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly
always among scenes disordered and desolate, brings into them
all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may
lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that
bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean
aslope. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the
pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will
nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot
down the stem; it shall point to the centre of the earth as
long as the tree lives.
## p. 12554 (#614) ##########################################
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JOHN RUSKIN
Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and
thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular
shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing
and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained,
desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted comple-
tion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will
be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees
that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the
sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-
set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which
would bury him; to hold in divided drops at our sword points
the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure fields;
to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings
that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against
the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the
plain; such service must we do him steadfastly while we live.
Our bodies also are at his service: softer than the bodies of
other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take
them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may
be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their
leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain
passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere.
But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds.
We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads
with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.
-
And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for
the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from
their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the
sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as
our warring; we give up our lives without reluctance, and for
ever.
I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these
two great characters of the pine,-its straightness and rounded
perfectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though
they have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. I say
first, its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest
scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples
of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or
disease. Of course such instances are frequent. The soil of the
pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which
## p. 12555 (#615) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12555
.
it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young
stems aslope; or the whole mass of earth around it is undermined
by rain; or a huge bowlder falls on its stem from above, and
forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of
tons leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose
cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places
liable to disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique;
and in Turner's 'Source of the Arveron,' he has, with his usual
unerring perception of the main point in any matter, fastened
on this means of relating the glacier's history. The glacier can-
not explain its own motion, and ordinary observers saw in it
only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was
its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the
banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered
as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his
foreground loose-rolling and tottering down together; the pines,
smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.
But the pine was
Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression
of the pine's character. I said long ago, even of Turner:
« Into
the spirit of the pine he cannot enter. " He understood the gla-
cier at once: he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to
miss the action of those crystal-crested waves.
strange to him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing
line; he refused its magnificent erectness. Magnificent! — nay,
sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield
to the form and sway of the ground; clothe it with soft compli-
ance; are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its com-
forters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained;
nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff,
far from all house or work of men, looking up to its compa-
nies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous
ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the
shadow of the one beside it-upright, fixed, spectral as troops of
ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other-
dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them:
those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all
sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs.
All comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Va-
cancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will that the rock itself
looks bent and shattered beside them,-fragile, weak, inconsistent,
## p. 12556 (#616) ##########################################
12556
JOHN RUSKIN
compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of
enchanted pride; - unnumbered, unconquerable.
Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most
people's minds must have been received more from pictures than
reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine;
whereas its chief character in health is green and full round-
ness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly
curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some
Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression,
forms the softest of all forest scenery: for other trees show their
trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in
luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be
seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down
to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there
is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only
softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it
casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead,
and checkers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in
scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its
gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine.
strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling
comes over me among the pine glades, it is never tainted with
the old German forest fear, but is only a more solemn tone of
the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that
I have always called the prettiest pine gláde in Chamouni,
"Fairies' Hollow. " It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent
above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding
path which goes down from the top of the hill; being indeed
not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning
in a formidable precipice (which however the gentle branches
hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many-
colored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered
by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among
the pines; for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of
seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it from mist,
and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is
only the mossy silence; and above, for ever, the snow of the
nameless Aiguille.
And then the third character which I want you to notice in
the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the
## p. 12557 (#617) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12557
sky in dots and knots, but this in fringes. * You never see the
edges of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of
trees, so far as I know, is capable of the fiery change which
we saw before had been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun
rises behind a ridge crested with pine,-provided the ridge be
at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear,
all the trees,
for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun, become
trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and
dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to
the actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused
by the cloud dew upon them,-every minutest leaf carrying its
diamond. It seems as if these trees, living always among the
clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and, them-
selves the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendor to the
sun itself.
-
Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished
delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral
hills of the Emmenthal or lowland districts of Berne; where
they are set in groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs
* Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into
one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I
have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him,
so discontented he makes me with my own work; but others must not leave
unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that mar-
velous ode to Psyche. Here is the piece about pines:-
"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains, steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win;
A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,
To let the warm Love in. »
## p. 12558 (#618) ##########################################
12558
JOHN RUSKIN
(they also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts,
golden and orange in the autumn sunshine, gleam on the banks
and lawns of hillside,- endless lawns, mounded and studded and
bossed all over with deeper green hay heaps, orderly set, like
jewelry (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs,
being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after
it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field,
the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankin-
cense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white,
looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and
their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by
the pale radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each
other along the soft hill ridges, up and down.
I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper inter-
est, because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on
human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great,
has been divided by mingled species: elm and oak in England,
poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain,
share their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing
charm of successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of
the pine absorbs and molds the life of a race. The pine shad-
ows rest upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after
century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the
Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests,
as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other
horizon; - still the dark-green trees, or the dark-green waters,
jagged the dawn with their fringe or their foam. And whatever
elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domes-
tic justice, were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth
against the dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe,
were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of
the pine.
LEAVES MOTIONLESS
From Modern Painters >
•
LEAV
EAVES motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and
the weak grasses tremble beside them: but the blue stars
rest upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far
along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests
of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet
## p. 12559 (#619) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12559
the stillest leaves. Others there are subdued to a deeper quiet-
ness, the mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe perhaps
thanks and tenderness the most profound of all we have to
render for the leaf ministries.
It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and
withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves,- from the sweep
of the chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close
shrinking trefoil and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and at
last to the leaves that are not merely close to earth, but them-
selves a part of it,- fastened down to it by their sides, here
and there only a wrinkled edge rising from the granite crystals.
We have found beauty in the tree yielding fruit, and in the
herb yielding seed. How of the herb yielding no seed,* the fruit-
less, flowerless lichen of the rock?
Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance are
deep and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest
of the green things that live),- how of these? Meek creatures!
the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its
dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and
tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin,-laying quiet finger
on the trembling stones, to teach them rest. No words, that I
know of, will say what these mosses are. None are delicate
enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one
to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,
the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock
Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass, the traceries of
intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, bur-
nished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy
traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and
framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They will not
be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love token; but of
these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his
pillow.
-
And as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us.
When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft
mosses and gray lichen take up their watch by the headstone.
The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done
their parts for a time; but these do service for ever. Trees for
* The reader must remember always that my work is concerning the
aspects of things only. Of course a lichen has seeds, just as other plants
have; but not effectually or visibly, for man.
## p. 12560 (#620) ##########################################
12560
JOHN RUSKIN
the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the
granary, moss for the grave.
Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
most honored of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the
worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in
lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To
them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is intrusted the weaving of
the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-penciled,
iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing
the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endur-
ance and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white
hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the
parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip gold,-far above,
among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest starlike on the
stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder
western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.
CLOUD-BALANCINGS
From Modern Painters'
W®
E HAVE seen that when the earth had to be prepared for
the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate
being was spread between him and its darkness, in which
were joined, in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility
of the earth and the passion and perishing of mankind.
But the heavens also had to be prepared for his habitation.
Between their burning light-their deep vacuity—and man,
as between the earth's gloom of iron substance and man, a veil
had to be spread of intermediate being;- which should appease
the unendurable glory to the level of human feebleness, and sign
the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of human
vicissitude.
Between earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven
and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling
leaf, and partly as the flying vapor.
Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are ?
We
had some talk about them long ago, and perhaps thought their
nature, though at that time not clear to us, would be easily
enough understandable when we put ourselves seriously to make
it out. Shall we begin with one or two easiest questions?
## p. 12561 (#621) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12561
That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley,
level and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if
through an inundation,—why is it so heavy? and why does it lie
so low, being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly
into splendor of morning, when the sun has shone on it but a
few moments more? Those colossal pyramids, huge and firm,
with outlines as of rocks, and strength to bear the beating of the
high sun full on their fiery flanks,-why are they so light, their
bases high over our heads, high over the heads of Alps? why
will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but as he descends,
and leave the stars of twilight clear, while the valley vapor gains.
again upon the earth like a shroud?
Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of
pines; nay, which does not steal by them, but haunts them,
wreathing yet round them, and yet-and yet, slowly; now falling
in a fair waved line like a woman's veil; now fading, now gone:
we look away for an instant, and look back, and it is again
there. What has it to do with that clump of pines, that it
broods by them and weaves itself among their branches, to and
fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among the moss at their
roots, which it watches thus? Or has some strong enchanter
charmed it into fond returning, or bound it fast within those.
bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's
bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hill,- that
white arch which never forms but over the supreme crest,- how
is it stayed there, repelled apparently from the snow; nowhere
touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge,
yet never leaving it, poised as a white bird hovers over its
nest?
Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested,
tongued with fire;-how is their barbed strength bridled? what
bits are these they are champing with their vaporous lips, fling-
ing off flakes of black foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of
Heaven, out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are
like the eyelids of the morning. The sword of him that layeth
at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.
Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the
measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each
other from morning until evening,- what rebuke is this which
has awed them into peace? what hand has reined them back by
the way by which they came?
XXI-786
## p. 12562 (#622) ##########################################
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JOHN RUSKIN
How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to
ask, concerning its material or its aspect, its loftiness and lumi-
nousness,-how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or
spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose; extend-
ing over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You
cannot have, in the open air, angles and wedges and coils and
cliffs of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as
a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of
a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across,
like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into
waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels
is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's
clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into
domes of marble?
## p. 12563 (#623) ##########################################
12563
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
(1844-)
ILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL, a disciple of George Cupples the un-
rivaled, is the story-teller of the sea: not so picturesque as
Cooper, not so broadly humorous as Marryat, not so imagi-
native as Stevenson; but now that they have ceased spinning yarns,
its story-teller par excellence.
W
The ocean is his stage, the ship his drawing-room or tennis court,
the launch his bicycle; his heroes the brave sailors who stand for
pluck, endurance, promptitude, courage. Through a dozen or more
tales the sea lashes in a most beautiful
manner, the sails creak, the salt breeze
blows. Black night, blazing noon, starlight
and moonlight are shifted over it; terrible
tempests come and go. The author of the
'Wreck of the Grosvenor,' most thrilling
and absorbing exposé of the sailor's life of
peril and privation in the service of the
British ship-owner, writes stories strangely
compounded of romance and reality; curi-
ously realistic in the delineation of charac-
ter, wildly improbable in plot and situation.
When he sits down to spin his yarn, all
things are possible to him, and to us. Early
in the action we give the ship over to him,
and do not attempt to account for motive or situation; but swal-
low the whole impossible, perfectly credible story, as we swallowed
'Red Rover' in its time.
W. CLARK RUSSELL
Perhaps, with all the freedom of the broad seas, the story is told by
a young girl, who mentions in the opening chapter that this is her
first voyage; or perhaps the strange methods of ocean life, the evo-
lutions of a ship, and its seizure by convicts in a storm, are related
in nautical phraseology by another young woman who now first
smells salt water.
Perhaps the hero and heroine are picked up in an open boat
which also holds her venerable father, presumably a thousand miles
distant; - but we do not demur. The art of life, the "ernst ist das
leben" kind, is a trifling matter to him and to us. His men and
women, on the contrary, barring the nautical wisdom of his hero-
ines, make no demands on credulity. They are drawn with unadorned
## p. 12564 (#624) ##########################################
12564
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
plainness; they have matter-of-fact affections, and straightforward
views of duty. The reader's first sensation, when he has finished one
of Mr. Clark Russell's stories, is the amused perception that he has
been in the hands of an entirely independent genius, who has sat
down before bare walls, with a sheet of paper in front of him, and
told his tale, undisturbed by the hobgoblin Consistency or the scourge
of tradition, who would perhaps have written as he writes, if nobody
had ever written a novel before or since.
His material-shipwrecks, storms, fires at sea-is not novel to us;
but it is new to him, and he revels in it with all the joy of discov-
ery. We may look for nothing modern in the treatment or style; no
note of mental alertness, of swift moral process or subtle inference.
It is all plain sailing in the world of motive and character. The
sea is the deus ex machina: it battles with the privateers, frees the
prisoners on the convict ship, bears the emigrant vessel sailed by its
woman crew safely into port. With its calm loveliness the author
contrasts the blood-stained decks of a vessel after a sea fight; the
darkness of the hold where the brave heroine hides, a stowaway, is
heightened by the sunrise on the ocean, its broad breast bathed in
rainbow hues.
.
The sea is his stage of impossible actions, where his characters
perform their courageous, self-forgetful deeds.
William Clark Russell was born in New York city, of English
parents, February 24th, 1844; the son of Henry Russell the composer,
author of the popular songs 'Cheer, Boys, Cheer,' and 'A Good Time's
Coming. ' He went to school in France and at Winchester; and enter-
ing the merchant service at thirteen and a half years of age, made
voyages to Japan, India, and Australia.
After he came of age he left the sea, and was on the staff of the
Newcastle Chronicle, and afterwards of the London Daily Telegraph.
His first positive success in literature, 'The Wreck of the Grosvenor,'
was published anonymously in London in 1878: but his second book,
'A Sea Queen,' betrayed his identity, and since that time he has
gone the way of the popular author; at his best perhaps in his first
book, in the 'Sea Queen,' Jack's Courtship,' 'An Ocean Free Lance,'
'A Sailor's Sweetheart,' and 'The Good Ship Mohonk.
'
There is a fine ignoring of self in Mr. Clark Russell's novels; and
all his romances are healthy food for healthy appetites. His is a
Homeric conception of sea life: his picture of the British seaman
noble, generous, confiding in unprofessional matters, imperious, cruel,
unscrupulous to the enemy-has the value of a portrait. To appre-
ciate the splendid word-painting, the subtle delicate touches, one has
only to turn the pages of any one of his stories. Rarely has the sea
had a truer lover, a more faithful interpreter.
-
## p. 12565 (#625) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12565
A STORM AND A RESCUE
From the Wreck of the Grosvenor
LL that night it blew terribly hard, and raised as wild and
raging a sea as ever I remember hearing or seeing de-
scribed. During my watch-that is, from midnight until
four o'clock — the wind veered a couple of points, but had gone
back again only to blow harder; just as though it had stepped
out of its way a trifle to catch extra breath.
I was quite worn out by the time my turn came to go below;
and though the vessel was groaning like a live creature in its
death agonies, and the seas thumping against her with such
shocks as kept me thinking that she was striking hard ground,
I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, and never
moved until routed out by Duckling four hours afterward.
All this time the gale had not bated a jot of its violence, and
the ship labored so heavily that I had the utmost difficulty in
getting out of the cuddy on to the poop. When I say that the
decks fore and aft were streaming wet, I convey no notion of
the truth: the main deck was simply afloat, and every time the
ship rolled, the water on her deck rushed in a wave against
the bulwarks and shot high in the air, to mingle sometimes with
fresh and heavy inroads of the sea, both falling back upon the
deck with the boom of a gun.
I had already ascertained from Duckling that the well had
been sounded and the ship found dry; and therefore, since we
were tight below, it mattered little what water was shipped above,
as the hatches were securely battened down fore and aft, and the
mast-coats unwrung.
But still she labored under the serious dis-
advantage of being overloaded; and the result was, her fore parts
were being incessantly swept by seas which at times completely
hid her forecastle in spray.
Shortly after breakfast, Captain Coxon sent me forward to dis-
patch a couple of hands on to the jib-boom to snug the inner jib,
which looked to be rather shakily stowed. I managed to dodge
the water on the main-deck by waiting until it rolled to the star-
board scuppers, and then cutting ahead as fast as I could; but
just as I got upon the forecastle, I was saluted by a green sea
which carried me off my legs, and would have swept me down
on the main-deck had I not held on stoutly with both hands
to one of the fore-shrouds. The water nearly drowned me, and
## p. 12566 (#626) ##########################################
12566
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
kept me sneezing and coughing for ten minutes afterward. But
it did me no further mischief; for I was incased in good oilskins
and sou'-wester, which kept me as dry as a bone inside.
Two ordinary seamen got upon the jib-boom, and I bade them
keep a good hold, for the ship sometimes danced her figure-head
under water and buried her spritsail-yard; and when she sunk
her stern, her flying jib-boom stood up like the mizzenmast. I
waited until this job of snugging the sail was finished, and then
made haste to get off the forecastle, where the seas flew so con-
tinuously and heavily that had I not kept a sharp lookout, I
should several times have been knocked overboard.
Partly out of curiosity and partly with a wish to hearten the
men, I looked into the forecastle before going aft. There were
sliding-doors let into the entrance on either side the windlass,
but one of them was kept half open to admit air, the forescuttle
above being closed. The darkness here was made visible by an
oil lamp,-in shape resembling a tin coffee-pot with a wick in
the spout, which burned black and smokily. The deck was
up to my ankles in water, which gurgled over the pile of swabs
that lay at the open entrance. It took my eye some moments to
distinguish objects in the gloom; and then by degrees the strange
interior was revealed. A number of hammocks were swung
against the upper deck; and around the forecastle were two rows
of bunks, one atop the other. Here and there were sea-chests
lashed to the deck; and these, with the huge windlass, a range of
chain cable, lengths of rope, odds and ends of pots and dishes,
with here a pair of breeches hanging from a hammock, and there
a row of oilskins swinging from a beam,-pretty well made up
all the furniture that met my eye.
-
The whole of the crew were below. Some of the men lay
smoking in their bunks, others in their hammocks with their
boots over the edge; one was patching a coat, another greasing
his boots; others were seated in a group talking; while under the
lamp were a couple of men playing at cards upon a chest, three
or four watching and holding on by the hammocks over their
heads.
A man, lying in his bunk with his face toward me, started up
and sent his legs, incased in blanket trousers and brown woolen
stockings, flying out.
"Here's Mr. Royle, mates! " he called out. "Let's ask him
the name of the port the captain means to touch at for proper
food, for we aren't goin' to wait much longer. ”
## p. 12567 (#627) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12567
"Don't ask me any questions of that kind, my lads," I re-
plied promptly, seeing a general movement of heads in the
bunks and hammocks. "I'd give you proper victuals if I had
the ordering of them; and I have spoken to Captain Coxon about
you, and I am sure he will see this matter put to rights. "
I had difficulty in making my voice heard, for the striking of
the seas against the ship's bows filled the place with an over-
whelming volume of sound; and the hollow, deafening thunder
was increased by the uproar of the ship's straining timbers.
"Who the devil thinks," said a voice from a hammock, "that
we're going to let ourselves be grinded as we was last night
without proper wittles to support us? I'd rather have signed
articles for a coal-barge, with drowned rats to eat from Gravesend
to Whitstable, than shipped in this here cursed wessel, where the
bread's just fit to make savages retch! "
I had not bargained for this, but had merely meant to address
them cheerily, with a few words of approval of the smart way
in which they had worked the ship in the night. Seeing that
my presence would do no good, I turned about and left the fore-
castle, hearing, as I came away, one of the Dutchmen cry out:-
"Look here, Mister Rile, vill you be pleashed to ssay when
we are to hov' something to eat? - for by Gott! ve vill kill te
dom pigs in the long-boat if the skipper don't mindt-so look
out!
As ill-luck would have it, Captain Coxon was at the break of
the poop, and saw me come out of the forecastle. He waited
until he had got me alongside of him, when he asked me what I
was doing among the men.
"I looked in to give them a good word for the work they did
last night," I answered.
"And who asked you to give them a good word, as you call
it ? »
"I have never had to wait for orders to encourage a crew. "
"Mind what you are about, sir! " he exclaimed, in a voice.
tremulous with rage. I see through your game, and I'll put a
stopper upon it that you won't like. "
"What game, sir? Let me have your meaning. "
"An infernal mutinous game! " he roared. "Don't talk to me,
sir! I know you! I've had my eye upon you! You'll play false
if you can, and are trying to smother up your d-d rebel mean-
ings with genteel airs! Get away, sir! " he bellowed, stamping
## p. 12568 (#628) ##########################################
12568
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
his foot. "Get away aft! You're a lumping, useless incumbrance!
But by thunder! I'll give you two for every one you try to give
me! So stand by! "
And apparently half mad with his rage, he staggered away in
the very direction in which he had told me to go, and stood near
the wheel, glaring upon me with a white face, which looked
indescribably malevolent in the fur cap and ear-protectors that
ornamented it.
I was terribly vexed by this rudeness, which I was powerless
to resist, and regretted my indiscretion in entering the forecastle
after the politic resolutions I had formed. However, Captain
Coxon's ferocity was nothing new to me; truly I believed he was
not quite right in his mind, and expected, as in former cases,
that he would come round a bit by-and-by when his insane tem-
per had passed. Still his insinuations were highly dangerous, not
to speak of their offensiveness. It was no joke to be charged,
even by a madman, with striving to arouse the crew to mutiny.
Nevertheless I tried to console myself as best I could by reflect-
ing that he could not prove his charges; that I need only to
endure his insolence for a few weeks, and that there was always
a law to vindicate me and punish him, should his evil temper
betray him into any acts of cruelty against me.
The gale, at times the severest that I was ever in, lasted three
days; during which the ship drove something like eighty miles
to the northwest. The sea on the afternoon of the third day was
appalling: had the ship attempted to run, she would have been
pooped and smothered in a minute; but lying close, she rode
fairly well, though there were moments when I held my breath
as she sunk in a hollow like a coal-mine, filled with the astound-
ing noise of boiling water,-really believing that the immense
waves which came hurtling towards us with solid, sharp, trans-
parent ridges, out of which the wind tore lumps of water and
flung them through the rigging of the ship, must overwhelm the
vessel before she could rise to it.
The fury of the tempest and the violence of the sea, which
the boldest could not contemplate without feeling that the ship
was every moment in more or less peril, kept the crew subdued;
and they eat as best they could the provisions, without com-
plaint. However, it needed nothing less than a storm to keep
them quiet: for on the second day a sea extinguished the galley
fire, and until the gale abated no cooking could be done; so that
## p. 12569 (#629) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12569
the men had to put up with the cold water and biscuit. Hence
all hands were thrown upon the ship's bread for two days; and
the badness of it, therefore, was made even more apparent than
heretofore, when its wormy moldiness was in some degree quali-
fied by the nauseousness of bad salt pork and beef and the sickly
flavor of damaged tea.
round a little a few
I think his temper
Like others of his
My character was
As I had anticipated, the captain came
hours after his insulting attack upon me.
frightened him when it had reference to me.
breed, he was a bit of a cur at the bottom.
a trifle beyond him; and he was ignorant enough to hate and
fear what he could not understand. Be this as it may, he made
some rough attempts at a rude kind of politeness when I went
below to get some grog, and condescended to say that when I
had been to sea as long as he, I would know that the most
ungrateful rascals in the world were sailors; that every crew he
had sailed with had always taken care to invent some grievance
to growl over: either the provisions were bad, or the work too
heavy, or the ship unseaworthy; and that long ago he had made
up his mind never to pay attention to their complaints, since
no sooner would one wrong be redressed than another would be
coined and shoved under his nose.
I took this opportunity of assuring him that I had never
willingly listened to the complaints of the men, and that I was
always annoyed when they spoke to me about the provisions, as
I had nothing whatever to do with that matter; and that so far
from my wishing to stir up the men into rebellion, my conduct
had been uniformly influenced by the desire to conciliate them
and represent their conditions as very tolerable, so as to repress
any tendency to disaffection which they might foment among
themselves.
To this he made no reply, and soon we parted; but all the
next day he was sullen again, and never addressed me save to
give an order.
On the evening of the third day the gale broke; the glass had
risen since the morning; but until the first dog-watch the wind
did not bate one iota of its violence, and the horizon still re-
tained its stormy and threatening aspect. The clouds then broke
in the west, and the setting sun shone forth with deep crimson
light upon the wilderness of mountainous waters. The wind fell
quickly, then went round to the west and blew freshly; but
## p. 12570 (#630) ##########################################
12570
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
there was a remarkable softness and sweetness in the feel and
taste of it.
A couple of reefs were at once shaken out of the maintopsail,
and a sail made. By midnight the heavy sea had subsided into
a deep, long, rolling swell, still (strangely enough) coming from
the south; but the fresh westerly wind held the ship steady, and
for the first time for nearly a hundred hours we were able to
move about the decks with comparative comfort. Early the next
morning the watch were set to wash down and clear up the
decks; and when I left my cabin at eight o'clock, I found the
weather bright and warm, with a blue sky shining among heavy,
white, April-looking clouds, and the ship making seven knots
under all plain sail. The decks were dry and comfortable, and
the ship had a habitable and civilized look, by reason of the row
of clothes hung by the seamen to dry on the forecastle.
It was half past nine o'clock, and I was standing near the
taffrail looking at a shoal of porpoises playing some hundreds of
feet astern, when the man who was steering asked me to look
in the direction to which he pointed-that was, a little to the
right of the bowsprit- and say if there was anything to be seen
there; for he had caught sight of something black upon the hori
zon twice, but could not detect it now.
I turned my eyes toward the quarter of the sea indicated,
but could discern nothing whatever; and telling him that what
he had seen was probably a wave, which, standing higher than
his fellows, will sometimes show black a long distance off, walked
to the fore part of the poop.
The breeze still held good; and the vessel was slipping easily
through the water, though the southerly swell made her roll
and at times shook the wind out of the sails. The skipper had
gone to lie down,- being pretty well exhausted, I daresay; for he
had kept the deck for the greater part of three nights running.
Duckling was also below. Most of my watch were on the fore-
castle, sitting or lying in the sun, which shone very warm upon
the decks; the hens under the long-boat were chattering briskly,
and the cocks crowing, and the pigs grunting, with the comfort
of the warmth.
Suddenly, as the ship rose, I distinctly beheld something
black out away upon the horizon, showing just under the foot of
the foresail. It vanished instantly; but I was not satisfied, and
went for the glass which lay upon the brackets just under the
## p. 12571 (#631) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12571
companion. I then told the man who was steering to keep her
away a couple of points for a few moments; and resting the
glass against the mizzen-royal backstay, pointed it toward the
place where I had seen the black object.
For some moments nothing but sea or sky filled the field of
the glass as the ship rose and fell; but all at once there leaped
into this field the hull of a ship, deep as her main-chains in the
water, which came and went before my eye as the long seas lifted
or dropped in the foreground. I managed to keep her sufficiently
long in view to perceive that she was totally dismasted.
"It's a wreck," said I, turning to the man: "let her come to
again and luff a point. There may be living creatures aboard of
her. »
Knowing what sort of man Captain Coxon was, I do not think
that I should have had the hardihood to luff the ship a point out
of her course had it involved the bracing of the yards; for the
songs of the men would certainly have brought him on deck, and
I might have provoked some ugly insolence. But the ship was
going free, and would head more westerly without occasioning
further change than slightly slackening the weather-braces of the
upper yards. This I did quietly; and the dismantled hull was
brought right dead on end with our flying jib-boom. The men
now caught sight of her, and began to stare and point; but did
not sing out, as they saw by the telescope in my hand that I
perceived her. The breeze unhappily began to slacken somewhat,
owing perhaps to the gathering heat of the sun; our pace fell
off and a full hour passed before we brought the wreck near
enough to see her permanently,- for up to this she had been
constantly vanishing under the rise of the swell. She was now
about two miles off, and I took a long and steady look at her
through the telescope. It was a black hull with painted ports.
The deck was flush fore and aft, and there was a good-sized
house just before where the mainmast should have been. This
house was uninjured, though the galley was split up, and to star-
board stood up in splinters like the stump of a tree struck by
lightning. No boats could be seen aboard of her. Her jib-boom
was gone, and so were all three masts,-clean cut off at the
deck, as though a hand-saw had done it; but the mizzen-mast was
alongside, held by the shrouds and backstays, and the port main
and fore shrouds streamed like serpents from her chains into the
water. I reckoned at once that she must be loaded with timber,
## p. 12572 (#632) ##########################################
12572
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
for she never could keep afloat at that depth with any other kind
of cargo in her.
She made a most mournful and piteous object in the sunlight,
sluggishly rolling to the swell which ran in transparent volumes
over her sides and foamed around the deck-house. Once when
her stern rose, I read the name Cecilia in broad white letters.
I was gazing at her intently, in the effort to witness some
indication of living thing on board, when, to my mingled con-
sternation and horror, I witnessed an arm projecting through the
window of the deck-house and frantically waving what resembled
a white handkerchief. As none of the men called out, I judged
the signal was not perceptible to the naked eye; and in my ex-
citement I shouted, "There's a living man on board of her, my
lads! " dropped the glass, and ran aft to call the captain.
I met him coming up the companion ladder. The first thing
he said was, "You're out of your course," and looked up at the
sails.
"There's a wreck yonder! " I cried, pointing eagerly, "with a
man on board signaling to us. "
"Get me the glass," he said sulkily; and I picked it up and
handed it to him.
He looked at the wreck for some moments; and addressing
the man at the wheel, exclaimed, making a movement with his
hand, "Keep her away! Where in the devil are you steering to? "
"Good heaven! " I ejaculated: "there's a man on board-
there may be others! "
Damnation! " he exclaimed between his teeth: "what do
you mean by interfering with me? Keep her away! " he roared
out.
During this time we had drawn sufficiently near to the wreck
to enable the sharper-sighted among the hands to remark the
signal, and they were calling out that there was somebody flying
a handkerchief aboard the hull.
"Captain Coxon," said I, with as firm a voice as I could com-
mand, for I was nearly in as great a rage as he, and rendered
insensible to all consequences by his inhumanity,- "if you bear
away and leave that man yonder to sink with that wreck when
he can be saved with very little trouble, you will become as
much a murderer as any ruffian who stabs a man asleep. "
When I had said this, Coxon turned black in the face with
His eyes protruded, his hands and fingers worked as
passion.
-
## p. 12573 (#633) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12573
though he were under some electrical process, and I saw for the
first time in my life a sight I had always laughed at as a bit
of impossible novelist description, a mouth foaming with rage.
He rushed aft, just over Duckling's cabin, and stamped with all
his might.
"Now," thought I, "they may try to murder me! " And with-
out a word I pulled off my coat, seized a belaying-pin, and stood
ready; resolved that happen what might, I would give the first
man who should lay his fingers on me something to remember
me by while he had breath in his body.
The men, not quite understanding what was happening, but
seeing that a "row" was taking place, came to the forecastle
and advanced by degrees along the main-deck. Among them I
noticed the cook, muttering to one or the other who stood near.
Mr. Duckling, awakened by the violent clattering over his
head, came running up the companion-way with a bewildered,
sleepy look in his face. The captain grasped him by the arm,
and pointing to me, cried out with an oath that "that villain was
breeding a mutiny on board, and he believed wanted to murder
'him and Duckling. "
I at once answered, "Nothing of the kind! There is a man
miserably perishing on board that sinking wreck, Mr. Duckling,
and he ought to be saved. My lads! " I cried, addressing the
men on the main-deck, "is there a sailor among you all who
would have the heart to leave that man yonder without an effort
to rescue him? "
"No, sir! " shouted one of them. "We'll save the man; and
if the skipper refuses, we'll make him! "
"Luff! " I called to the man at the wheel.
"Luff at your peril! " screamed the skipper.
"Aft here, some hands," I cried, "and lay the main-yard aback.
Let go the port main-braces! "
The captain came running toward me.
"By the living God! " I cried in a fury, grasping the heavy
brass belaying-pin, "if you come within a foot of me, Captain
Coxon, I'll dash your brains out! "
My attitude, my enraged face and menacing gesture, produced
the desired effect. He stopped dead, turned a ghastly white, and
looked round at Duckling.
"What do you mean by this (etc. ) conduct, you (etc. ) muti-
nous scoundrels? " roared Duckling, with a volley of foul lan-
guage.
## p. 12574 (#634) ##########################################
12574
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
"Give him one for himself if he says too much, Mr. Royle! "
sung out some hoarse voice on the main-deck; "we'll back yer! "
And then came cries of "They're a cursed pair o' murderers! "
"Who run the smack down? ” "Who lets men drown? " "Who
starves honest men? " This last exclamation was followed by a
roar.
The whole of the crew were now on deck, having been
aroused by our voices. Some of them were looking on with a
grin, others with an expression of fierce curiosity. It was at
once understood that I was making a stand against the captain
and chief mate; and a single glance at them assured me that by
one word I could set the whole of them on fire to do my bid-
ding, even to shedding blood.
In the mean time, the man at the wheel had luffed until the
weather leeches were flat and the ship scarcely moving. And
at this moment, that the skipper might know their meaning, a
couple of hands jumped aft and let go the weather main-braces.
I took care to keep my eyes on Coxon and the mate, fully pre-
pared for any attack that one or both might make on me.
Duckling eyed me furiously but in silence, evidently baffled by
my resolute air and the position of the men. Then he said
something to the captain, who looked exhausted and white and
haggard with his useless passion. They walked over to the lee
side of the poop; and after a short conference, the captain to
my surprise went below, and Duckling came forward.
-
"There's no objection," he said, "to your saving the man's
life, if you want. Lower away the starboard quarter-boat; — and
you go along in her," he added to me, uttering the last words in
such a thick voice that I thought he was choking.
"Come along, some of you! " I cried out, hastily putting on
my coat; and in less than a minute I was in the boat with the
rudder and thole-pins shipped, and four hands ready to out oars
as soon as we touched the water.
Duckling began to fumble at one end of the boat's falls.
"Don't let him lower away!
tion, considered, as indeed it is, as the means by which the earth
becomes the companion of man- his friend and his teacher! In
the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could
only be seen preparation for his existence; - the characters which
enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily-in
all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to
it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The
earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except
of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human be-
ings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil
of strange intermediate being; which breathes, but has no voice;
moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life
without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the
beauty of youth, without its passion; and declines to the weak-
ness of age, without its regret.
## p. 12551 (#611) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12551
And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordi-
nate to us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just
the greater power as we have the less responsibility for our
treatment of the unsuffering creature, most of the pleasures which
we need from the external world are gathered, and most of the
lessons we need are written, all kinds of precious grace and
teaching being united in this link between the Earth and Man:
wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and disci-
pline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beauti-
ful means of life. First a carpet to make it soft for him; then,
a colored fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of
foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen
rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay
to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this
leafage; easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for
him, or instruments (lance shaft, or plow handle, according to his
temper): useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous;
useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage
falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs
remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which
are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are
made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal
to the fancy of man or provision for his service: cold juice or
glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin,
medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these
presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness
and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness as
of temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on
the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the
storms of ages, or wavings to and from with faintest pulse of
summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or bind-
ing the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the
desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage
far tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean-
clothing with variegated, everlasting films the peaks of the track-
less mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest
passion and simplest joy of humanity.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful,
and good for food and for building and for instruments of our
hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and
--
## p. 12552 (#612) ##########################################
12552
JOHN RUSKIN
admiration from us, become, in proportion to their obtaining it,
a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and
way of life: so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves
the trees enough; and every one is assuredly wrong in both who
does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
is clearly possible to do without them, for the great companion-
ship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a
noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between
dark stone walls. Still, if human life be cast among trees at all,
the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that
"country," in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has
hitherto been the source of reproach to its inhabitants; and that
the words "countryman," "rustic," "clown," "paysan," "villager,"
still signify a rude and untaught person, as opposed to the words
townsman" and "citizen. " We accept this usage of words, or
the evil which it signifies, somewhat too quietly; as if it were
quite necessary and natural that country people should be rude,
and townspeople gentle. Whereas I believe that the result of
each mode of life may, in some stages of the world's progress,
be the exact reverse; and that another use of words may be
forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find
ourselves saying: "Such-and-such a person is very gentle and
kind, he is quite rustic; and such-and-such another person is
very rude and ill-taught, he is quite urbane. "
«
At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of
their good report through our evil ways of going on in the world
generally;-chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fight-
ing with each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe
from devastation, and every country lane yielding easier passage
to the marauders, peacefully minded men necessarily congregated
in cities, and walled themselves in, making as few cross-country
roads as possible; while the men who sowed and reaped the
harvests of Europe were only the servants or slaves of the
barons. The disdain of all agricultural pursuits by the nobility,
and of all plain facts by the monks, kept educated Europe in
a state of mind over which natural phenomena could have no
power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning.
Men learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they
## p. 12553 (#613) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12553
mistook for education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked
on all the broad space of the world of God mainly as a place
for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.
There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness
of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that
picture of Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio, in which
the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild
roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the helmets and glow-
ing between the lowered lances. For in like manner the whole
of Nature only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of
helmet crests: and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of
the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life
of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm
springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of Eng-
land her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the
sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the
twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities, on the hori
zon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles
of the Apennines, the twisted olive trunks hid the ambushes of
treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the lilies
which were white at the dawn were washed with crimson at sun-
set.
Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of
man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended
especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be
in broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is
to be the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth,
falling into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden.
walks, or casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Asso-
ciated always with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all
possible elements of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly
always among scenes disordered and desolate, brings into them
all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may
lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that
bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean
aslope. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the
pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will
nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot
down the stem; it shall point to the centre of the earth as
long as the tree lives.
## p. 12554 (#614) ##########################################
12554
JOHN RUSKIN
Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and
thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular
shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing
and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained,
desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted comple-
tion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will
be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees
that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the
sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-
set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which
would bury him; to hold in divided drops at our sword points
the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure fields;
to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings
that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against
the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the
plain; such service must we do him steadfastly while we live.
Our bodies also are at his service: softer than the bodies of
other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take
them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may
be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their
leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain
passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere.
But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds.
We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads
with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.
-
And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for
the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from
their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the
sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as
our warring; we give up our lives without reluctance, and for
ever.
I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these
two great characters of the pine,-its straightness and rounded
perfectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though
they have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. I say
first, its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest
scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples
of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or
disease. Of course such instances are frequent. The soil of the
pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which
## p. 12555 (#615) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12555
.
it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young
stems aslope; or the whole mass of earth around it is undermined
by rain; or a huge bowlder falls on its stem from above, and
forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of
tons leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose
cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places
liable to disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique;
and in Turner's 'Source of the Arveron,' he has, with his usual
unerring perception of the main point in any matter, fastened
on this means of relating the glacier's history. The glacier can-
not explain its own motion, and ordinary observers saw in it
only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was
its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the
banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered
as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his
foreground loose-rolling and tottering down together; the pines,
smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.
But the pine was
Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression
of the pine's character. I said long ago, even of Turner:
« Into
the spirit of the pine he cannot enter. " He understood the gla-
cier at once: he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to
miss the action of those crystal-crested waves.
strange to him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing
line; he refused its magnificent erectness. Magnificent! — nay,
sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield
to the form and sway of the ground; clothe it with soft compli-
ance; are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its com-
forters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained;
nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff,
far from all house or work of men, looking up to its compa-
nies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous
ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the
shadow of the one beside it-upright, fixed, spectral as troops of
ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other-
dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them:
those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all
sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs.
All comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Va-
cancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will that the rock itself
looks bent and shattered beside them,-fragile, weak, inconsistent,
## p. 12556 (#616) ##########################################
12556
JOHN RUSKIN
compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of
enchanted pride; - unnumbered, unconquerable.
Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most
people's minds must have been received more from pictures than
reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine;
whereas its chief character in health is green and full round-
ness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly
curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some
Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression,
forms the softest of all forest scenery: for other trees show their
trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in
luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be
seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down
to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there
is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only
softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it
casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead,
and checkers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in
scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its
gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine.
strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling
comes over me among the pine glades, it is never tainted with
the old German forest fear, but is only a more solemn tone of
the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that
I have always called the prettiest pine gláde in Chamouni,
"Fairies' Hollow. " It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent
above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding
path which goes down from the top of the hill; being indeed
not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning
in a formidable precipice (which however the gentle branches
hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many-
colored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered
by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among
the pines; for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of
seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it from mist,
and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is
only the mossy silence; and above, for ever, the snow of the
nameless Aiguille.
And then the third character which I want you to notice in
the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the
## p. 12557 (#617) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12557
sky in dots and knots, but this in fringes. * You never see the
edges of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of
trees, so far as I know, is capable of the fiery change which
we saw before had been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun
rises behind a ridge crested with pine,-provided the ridge be
at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear,
all the trees,
for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun, become
trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and
dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to
the actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused
by the cloud dew upon them,-every minutest leaf carrying its
diamond. It seems as if these trees, living always among the
clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and, them-
selves the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendor to the
sun itself.
-
Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished
delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral
hills of the Emmenthal or lowland districts of Berne; where
they are set in groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs
* Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into
one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I
have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him,
so discontented he makes me with my own work; but others must not leave
unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that mar-
velous ode to Psyche. Here is the piece about pines:-
"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains, steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win;
A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,
To let the warm Love in. »
## p. 12558 (#618) ##########################################
12558
JOHN RUSKIN
(they also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts,
golden and orange in the autumn sunshine, gleam on the banks
and lawns of hillside,- endless lawns, mounded and studded and
bossed all over with deeper green hay heaps, orderly set, like
jewelry (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs,
being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after
it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field,
the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankin-
cense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white,
looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and
their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by
the pale radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each
other along the soft hill ridges, up and down.
I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper inter-
est, because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on
human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great,
has been divided by mingled species: elm and oak in England,
poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain,
share their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing
charm of successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of
the pine absorbs and molds the life of a race. The pine shad-
ows rest upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after
century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the
Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests,
as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other
horizon; - still the dark-green trees, or the dark-green waters,
jagged the dawn with their fringe or their foam. And whatever
elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domes-
tic justice, were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth
against the dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe,
were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of
the pine.
LEAVES MOTIONLESS
From Modern Painters >
•
LEAV
EAVES motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and
the weak grasses tremble beside them: but the blue stars
rest upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far
along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests
of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet
## p. 12559 (#619) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12559
the stillest leaves. Others there are subdued to a deeper quiet-
ness, the mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe perhaps
thanks and tenderness the most profound of all we have to
render for the leaf ministries.
It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and
withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves,- from the sweep
of the chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close
shrinking trefoil and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and at
last to the leaves that are not merely close to earth, but them-
selves a part of it,- fastened down to it by their sides, here
and there only a wrinkled edge rising from the granite crystals.
We have found beauty in the tree yielding fruit, and in the
herb yielding seed. How of the herb yielding no seed,* the fruit-
less, flowerless lichen of the rock?
Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance are
deep and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest
of the green things that live),- how of these? Meek creatures!
the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its
dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and
tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin,-laying quiet finger
on the trembling stones, to teach them rest. No words, that I
know of, will say what these mosses are. None are delicate
enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one
to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,
the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock
Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass, the traceries of
intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, bur-
nished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy
traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and
framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They will not
be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love token; but of
these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his
pillow.
-
And as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us.
When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft
mosses and gray lichen take up their watch by the headstone.
The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done
their parts for a time; but these do service for ever. Trees for
* The reader must remember always that my work is concerning the
aspects of things only. Of course a lichen has seeds, just as other plants
have; but not effectually or visibly, for man.
## p. 12560 (#620) ##########################################
12560
JOHN RUSKIN
the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the
granary, moss for the grave.
Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
most honored of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the
worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in
lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To
them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is intrusted the weaving of
the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-penciled,
iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing
the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endur-
ance and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white
hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the
parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip gold,-far above,
among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest starlike on the
stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder
western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.
CLOUD-BALANCINGS
From Modern Painters'
W®
E HAVE seen that when the earth had to be prepared for
the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate
being was spread between him and its darkness, in which
were joined, in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility
of the earth and the passion and perishing of mankind.
But the heavens also had to be prepared for his habitation.
Between their burning light-their deep vacuity—and man,
as between the earth's gloom of iron substance and man, a veil
had to be spread of intermediate being;- which should appease
the unendurable glory to the level of human feebleness, and sign
the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of human
vicissitude.
Between earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven
and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling
leaf, and partly as the flying vapor.
Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are ?
We
had some talk about them long ago, and perhaps thought their
nature, though at that time not clear to us, would be easily
enough understandable when we put ourselves seriously to make
it out. Shall we begin with one or two easiest questions?
## p. 12561 (#621) ##########################################
JOHN RUSKIN
12561
That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley,
level and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if
through an inundation,—why is it so heavy? and why does it lie
so low, being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly
into splendor of morning, when the sun has shone on it but a
few moments more? Those colossal pyramids, huge and firm,
with outlines as of rocks, and strength to bear the beating of the
high sun full on their fiery flanks,-why are they so light, their
bases high over our heads, high over the heads of Alps? why
will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but as he descends,
and leave the stars of twilight clear, while the valley vapor gains.
again upon the earth like a shroud?
Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of
pines; nay, which does not steal by them, but haunts them,
wreathing yet round them, and yet-and yet, slowly; now falling
in a fair waved line like a woman's veil; now fading, now gone:
we look away for an instant, and look back, and it is again
there. What has it to do with that clump of pines, that it
broods by them and weaves itself among their branches, to and
fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among the moss at their
roots, which it watches thus? Or has some strong enchanter
charmed it into fond returning, or bound it fast within those.
bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's
bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hill,- that
white arch which never forms but over the supreme crest,- how
is it stayed there, repelled apparently from the snow; nowhere
touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge,
yet never leaving it, poised as a white bird hovers over its
nest?
Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested,
tongued with fire;-how is their barbed strength bridled? what
bits are these they are champing with their vaporous lips, fling-
ing off flakes of black foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of
Heaven, out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are
like the eyelids of the morning. The sword of him that layeth
at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.
Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the
measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each
other from morning until evening,- what rebuke is this which
has awed them into peace? what hand has reined them back by
the way by which they came?
XXI-786
## p. 12562 (#622) ##########################################
12562
JOHN RUSKIN
How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to
ask, concerning its material or its aspect, its loftiness and lumi-
nousness,-how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or
spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose; extend-
ing over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You
cannot have, in the open air, angles and wedges and coils and
cliffs of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as
a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of
a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across,
like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into
waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels
is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's
clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into
domes of marble?
## p. 12563 (#623) ##########################################
12563
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
(1844-)
ILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL, a disciple of George Cupples the un-
rivaled, is the story-teller of the sea: not so picturesque as
Cooper, not so broadly humorous as Marryat, not so imagi-
native as Stevenson; but now that they have ceased spinning yarns,
its story-teller par excellence.
W
The ocean is his stage, the ship his drawing-room or tennis court,
the launch his bicycle; his heroes the brave sailors who stand for
pluck, endurance, promptitude, courage. Through a dozen or more
tales the sea lashes in a most beautiful
manner, the sails creak, the salt breeze
blows. Black night, blazing noon, starlight
and moonlight are shifted over it; terrible
tempests come and go. The author of the
'Wreck of the Grosvenor,' most thrilling
and absorbing exposé of the sailor's life of
peril and privation in the service of the
British ship-owner, writes stories strangely
compounded of romance and reality; curi-
ously realistic in the delineation of charac-
ter, wildly improbable in plot and situation.
When he sits down to spin his yarn, all
things are possible to him, and to us. Early
in the action we give the ship over to him,
and do not attempt to account for motive or situation; but swal-
low the whole impossible, perfectly credible story, as we swallowed
'Red Rover' in its time.
W. CLARK RUSSELL
Perhaps, with all the freedom of the broad seas, the story is told by
a young girl, who mentions in the opening chapter that this is her
first voyage; or perhaps the strange methods of ocean life, the evo-
lutions of a ship, and its seizure by convicts in a storm, are related
in nautical phraseology by another young woman who now first
smells salt water.
Perhaps the hero and heroine are picked up in an open boat
which also holds her venerable father, presumably a thousand miles
distant; - but we do not demur. The art of life, the "ernst ist das
leben" kind, is a trifling matter to him and to us. His men and
women, on the contrary, barring the nautical wisdom of his hero-
ines, make no demands on credulity. They are drawn with unadorned
## p. 12564 (#624) ##########################################
12564
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
plainness; they have matter-of-fact affections, and straightforward
views of duty. The reader's first sensation, when he has finished one
of Mr. Clark Russell's stories, is the amused perception that he has
been in the hands of an entirely independent genius, who has sat
down before bare walls, with a sheet of paper in front of him, and
told his tale, undisturbed by the hobgoblin Consistency or the scourge
of tradition, who would perhaps have written as he writes, if nobody
had ever written a novel before or since.
His material-shipwrecks, storms, fires at sea-is not novel to us;
but it is new to him, and he revels in it with all the joy of discov-
ery. We may look for nothing modern in the treatment or style; no
note of mental alertness, of swift moral process or subtle inference.
It is all plain sailing in the world of motive and character. The
sea is the deus ex machina: it battles with the privateers, frees the
prisoners on the convict ship, bears the emigrant vessel sailed by its
woman crew safely into port. With its calm loveliness the author
contrasts the blood-stained decks of a vessel after a sea fight; the
darkness of the hold where the brave heroine hides, a stowaway, is
heightened by the sunrise on the ocean, its broad breast bathed in
rainbow hues.
.
The sea is his stage of impossible actions, where his characters
perform their courageous, self-forgetful deeds.
William Clark Russell was born in New York city, of English
parents, February 24th, 1844; the son of Henry Russell the composer,
author of the popular songs 'Cheer, Boys, Cheer,' and 'A Good Time's
Coming. ' He went to school in France and at Winchester; and enter-
ing the merchant service at thirteen and a half years of age, made
voyages to Japan, India, and Australia.
After he came of age he left the sea, and was on the staff of the
Newcastle Chronicle, and afterwards of the London Daily Telegraph.
His first positive success in literature, 'The Wreck of the Grosvenor,'
was published anonymously in London in 1878: but his second book,
'A Sea Queen,' betrayed his identity, and since that time he has
gone the way of the popular author; at his best perhaps in his first
book, in the 'Sea Queen,' Jack's Courtship,' 'An Ocean Free Lance,'
'A Sailor's Sweetheart,' and 'The Good Ship Mohonk.
'
There is a fine ignoring of self in Mr. Clark Russell's novels; and
all his romances are healthy food for healthy appetites. His is a
Homeric conception of sea life: his picture of the British seaman
noble, generous, confiding in unprofessional matters, imperious, cruel,
unscrupulous to the enemy-has the value of a portrait. To appre-
ciate the splendid word-painting, the subtle delicate touches, one has
only to turn the pages of any one of his stories. Rarely has the sea
had a truer lover, a more faithful interpreter.
-
## p. 12565 (#625) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12565
A STORM AND A RESCUE
From the Wreck of the Grosvenor
LL that night it blew terribly hard, and raised as wild and
raging a sea as ever I remember hearing or seeing de-
scribed. During my watch-that is, from midnight until
four o'clock — the wind veered a couple of points, but had gone
back again only to blow harder; just as though it had stepped
out of its way a trifle to catch extra breath.
I was quite worn out by the time my turn came to go below;
and though the vessel was groaning like a live creature in its
death agonies, and the seas thumping against her with such
shocks as kept me thinking that she was striking hard ground,
I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, and never
moved until routed out by Duckling four hours afterward.
All this time the gale had not bated a jot of its violence, and
the ship labored so heavily that I had the utmost difficulty in
getting out of the cuddy on to the poop. When I say that the
decks fore and aft were streaming wet, I convey no notion of
the truth: the main deck was simply afloat, and every time the
ship rolled, the water on her deck rushed in a wave against
the bulwarks and shot high in the air, to mingle sometimes with
fresh and heavy inroads of the sea, both falling back upon the
deck with the boom of a gun.
I had already ascertained from Duckling that the well had
been sounded and the ship found dry; and therefore, since we
were tight below, it mattered little what water was shipped above,
as the hatches were securely battened down fore and aft, and the
mast-coats unwrung.
But still she labored under the serious dis-
advantage of being overloaded; and the result was, her fore parts
were being incessantly swept by seas which at times completely
hid her forecastle in spray.
Shortly after breakfast, Captain Coxon sent me forward to dis-
patch a couple of hands on to the jib-boom to snug the inner jib,
which looked to be rather shakily stowed. I managed to dodge
the water on the main-deck by waiting until it rolled to the star-
board scuppers, and then cutting ahead as fast as I could; but
just as I got upon the forecastle, I was saluted by a green sea
which carried me off my legs, and would have swept me down
on the main-deck had I not held on stoutly with both hands
to one of the fore-shrouds. The water nearly drowned me, and
## p. 12566 (#626) ##########################################
12566
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
kept me sneezing and coughing for ten minutes afterward. But
it did me no further mischief; for I was incased in good oilskins
and sou'-wester, which kept me as dry as a bone inside.
Two ordinary seamen got upon the jib-boom, and I bade them
keep a good hold, for the ship sometimes danced her figure-head
under water and buried her spritsail-yard; and when she sunk
her stern, her flying jib-boom stood up like the mizzenmast. I
waited until this job of snugging the sail was finished, and then
made haste to get off the forecastle, where the seas flew so con-
tinuously and heavily that had I not kept a sharp lookout, I
should several times have been knocked overboard.
Partly out of curiosity and partly with a wish to hearten the
men, I looked into the forecastle before going aft. There were
sliding-doors let into the entrance on either side the windlass,
but one of them was kept half open to admit air, the forescuttle
above being closed. The darkness here was made visible by an
oil lamp,-in shape resembling a tin coffee-pot with a wick in
the spout, which burned black and smokily. The deck was
up to my ankles in water, which gurgled over the pile of swabs
that lay at the open entrance. It took my eye some moments to
distinguish objects in the gloom; and then by degrees the strange
interior was revealed. A number of hammocks were swung
against the upper deck; and around the forecastle were two rows
of bunks, one atop the other. Here and there were sea-chests
lashed to the deck; and these, with the huge windlass, a range of
chain cable, lengths of rope, odds and ends of pots and dishes,
with here a pair of breeches hanging from a hammock, and there
a row of oilskins swinging from a beam,-pretty well made up
all the furniture that met my eye.
-
The whole of the crew were below. Some of the men lay
smoking in their bunks, others in their hammocks with their
boots over the edge; one was patching a coat, another greasing
his boots; others were seated in a group talking; while under the
lamp were a couple of men playing at cards upon a chest, three
or four watching and holding on by the hammocks over their
heads.
A man, lying in his bunk with his face toward me, started up
and sent his legs, incased in blanket trousers and brown woolen
stockings, flying out.
"Here's Mr. Royle, mates! " he called out. "Let's ask him
the name of the port the captain means to touch at for proper
food, for we aren't goin' to wait much longer. ”
## p. 12567 (#627) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12567
"Don't ask me any questions of that kind, my lads," I re-
plied promptly, seeing a general movement of heads in the
bunks and hammocks. "I'd give you proper victuals if I had
the ordering of them; and I have spoken to Captain Coxon about
you, and I am sure he will see this matter put to rights. "
I had difficulty in making my voice heard, for the striking of
the seas against the ship's bows filled the place with an over-
whelming volume of sound; and the hollow, deafening thunder
was increased by the uproar of the ship's straining timbers.
"Who the devil thinks," said a voice from a hammock, "that
we're going to let ourselves be grinded as we was last night
without proper wittles to support us? I'd rather have signed
articles for a coal-barge, with drowned rats to eat from Gravesend
to Whitstable, than shipped in this here cursed wessel, where the
bread's just fit to make savages retch! "
I had not bargained for this, but had merely meant to address
them cheerily, with a few words of approval of the smart way
in which they had worked the ship in the night. Seeing that
my presence would do no good, I turned about and left the fore-
castle, hearing, as I came away, one of the Dutchmen cry out:-
"Look here, Mister Rile, vill you be pleashed to ssay when
we are to hov' something to eat? - for by Gott! ve vill kill te
dom pigs in the long-boat if the skipper don't mindt-so look
out!
As ill-luck would have it, Captain Coxon was at the break of
the poop, and saw me come out of the forecastle. He waited
until he had got me alongside of him, when he asked me what I
was doing among the men.
"I looked in to give them a good word for the work they did
last night," I answered.
"And who asked you to give them a good word, as you call
it ? »
"I have never had to wait for orders to encourage a crew. "
"Mind what you are about, sir! " he exclaimed, in a voice.
tremulous with rage. I see through your game, and I'll put a
stopper upon it that you won't like. "
"What game, sir? Let me have your meaning. "
"An infernal mutinous game! " he roared. "Don't talk to me,
sir! I know you! I've had my eye upon you! You'll play false
if you can, and are trying to smother up your d-d rebel mean-
ings with genteel airs! Get away, sir! " he bellowed, stamping
## p. 12568 (#628) ##########################################
12568
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
his foot. "Get away aft! You're a lumping, useless incumbrance!
But by thunder! I'll give you two for every one you try to give
me! So stand by! "
And apparently half mad with his rage, he staggered away in
the very direction in which he had told me to go, and stood near
the wheel, glaring upon me with a white face, which looked
indescribably malevolent in the fur cap and ear-protectors that
ornamented it.
I was terribly vexed by this rudeness, which I was powerless
to resist, and regretted my indiscretion in entering the forecastle
after the politic resolutions I had formed. However, Captain
Coxon's ferocity was nothing new to me; truly I believed he was
not quite right in his mind, and expected, as in former cases,
that he would come round a bit by-and-by when his insane tem-
per had passed. Still his insinuations were highly dangerous, not
to speak of their offensiveness. It was no joke to be charged,
even by a madman, with striving to arouse the crew to mutiny.
Nevertheless I tried to console myself as best I could by reflect-
ing that he could not prove his charges; that I need only to
endure his insolence for a few weeks, and that there was always
a law to vindicate me and punish him, should his evil temper
betray him into any acts of cruelty against me.
The gale, at times the severest that I was ever in, lasted three
days; during which the ship drove something like eighty miles
to the northwest. The sea on the afternoon of the third day was
appalling: had the ship attempted to run, she would have been
pooped and smothered in a minute; but lying close, she rode
fairly well, though there were moments when I held my breath
as she sunk in a hollow like a coal-mine, filled with the astound-
ing noise of boiling water,-really believing that the immense
waves which came hurtling towards us with solid, sharp, trans-
parent ridges, out of which the wind tore lumps of water and
flung them through the rigging of the ship, must overwhelm the
vessel before she could rise to it.
The fury of the tempest and the violence of the sea, which
the boldest could not contemplate without feeling that the ship
was every moment in more or less peril, kept the crew subdued;
and they eat as best they could the provisions, without com-
plaint. However, it needed nothing less than a storm to keep
them quiet: for on the second day a sea extinguished the galley
fire, and until the gale abated no cooking could be done; so that
## p. 12569 (#629) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12569
the men had to put up with the cold water and biscuit. Hence
all hands were thrown upon the ship's bread for two days; and
the badness of it, therefore, was made even more apparent than
heretofore, when its wormy moldiness was in some degree quali-
fied by the nauseousness of bad salt pork and beef and the sickly
flavor of damaged tea.
round a little a few
I think his temper
Like others of his
My character was
As I had anticipated, the captain came
hours after his insulting attack upon me.
frightened him when it had reference to me.
breed, he was a bit of a cur at the bottom.
a trifle beyond him; and he was ignorant enough to hate and
fear what he could not understand. Be this as it may, he made
some rough attempts at a rude kind of politeness when I went
below to get some grog, and condescended to say that when I
had been to sea as long as he, I would know that the most
ungrateful rascals in the world were sailors; that every crew he
had sailed with had always taken care to invent some grievance
to growl over: either the provisions were bad, or the work too
heavy, or the ship unseaworthy; and that long ago he had made
up his mind never to pay attention to their complaints, since
no sooner would one wrong be redressed than another would be
coined and shoved under his nose.
I took this opportunity of assuring him that I had never
willingly listened to the complaints of the men, and that I was
always annoyed when they spoke to me about the provisions, as
I had nothing whatever to do with that matter; and that so far
from my wishing to stir up the men into rebellion, my conduct
had been uniformly influenced by the desire to conciliate them
and represent their conditions as very tolerable, so as to repress
any tendency to disaffection which they might foment among
themselves.
To this he made no reply, and soon we parted; but all the
next day he was sullen again, and never addressed me save to
give an order.
On the evening of the third day the gale broke; the glass had
risen since the morning; but until the first dog-watch the wind
did not bate one iota of its violence, and the horizon still re-
tained its stormy and threatening aspect. The clouds then broke
in the west, and the setting sun shone forth with deep crimson
light upon the wilderness of mountainous waters. The wind fell
quickly, then went round to the west and blew freshly; but
## p. 12570 (#630) ##########################################
12570
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
there was a remarkable softness and sweetness in the feel and
taste of it.
A couple of reefs were at once shaken out of the maintopsail,
and a sail made. By midnight the heavy sea had subsided into
a deep, long, rolling swell, still (strangely enough) coming from
the south; but the fresh westerly wind held the ship steady, and
for the first time for nearly a hundred hours we were able to
move about the decks with comparative comfort. Early the next
morning the watch were set to wash down and clear up the
decks; and when I left my cabin at eight o'clock, I found the
weather bright and warm, with a blue sky shining among heavy,
white, April-looking clouds, and the ship making seven knots
under all plain sail. The decks were dry and comfortable, and
the ship had a habitable and civilized look, by reason of the row
of clothes hung by the seamen to dry on the forecastle.
It was half past nine o'clock, and I was standing near the
taffrail looking at a shoal of porpoises playing some hundreds of
feet astern, when the man who was steering asked me to look
in the direction to which he pointed-that was, a little to the
right of the bowsprit- and say if there was anything to be seen
there; for he had caught sight of something black upon the hori
zon twice, but could not detect it now.
I turned my eyes toward the quarter of the sea indicated,
but could discern nothing whatever; and telling him that what
he had seen was probably a wave, which, standing higher than
his fellows, will sometimes show black a long distance off, walked
to the fore part of the poop.
The breeze still held good; and the vessel was slipping easily
through the water, though the southerly swell made her roll
and at times shook the wind out of the sails. The skipper had
gone to lie down,- being pretty well exhausted, I daresay; for he
had kept the deck for the greater part of three nights running.
Duckling was also below. Most of my watch were on the fore-
castle, sitting or lying in the sun, which shone very warm upon
the decks; the hens under the long-boat were chattering briskly,
and the cocks crowing, and the pigs grunting, with the comfort
of the warmth.
Suddenly, as the ship rose, I distinctly beheld something
black out away upon the horizon, showing just under the foot of
the foresail. It vanished instantly; but I was not satisfied, and
went for the glass which lay upon the brackets just under the
## p. 12571 (#631) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12571
companion. I then told the man who was steering to keep her
away a couple of points for a few moments; and resting the
glass against the mizzen-royal backstay, pointed it toward the
place where I had seen the black object.
For some moments nothing but sea or sky filled the field of
the glass as the ship rose and fell; but all at once there leaped
into this field the hull of a ship, deep as her main-chains in the
water, which came and went before my eye as the long seas lifted
or dropped in the foreground. I managed to keep her sufficiently
long in view to perceive that she was totally dismasted.
"It's a wreck," said I, turning to the man: "let her come to
again and luff a point. There may be living creatures aboard of
her. »
Knowing what sort of man Captain Coxon was, I do not think
that I should have had the hardihood to luff the ship a point out
of her course had it involved the bracing of the yards; for the
songs of the men would certainly have brought him on deck, and
I might have provoked some ugly insolence. But the ship was
going free, and would head more westerly without occasioning
further change than slightly slackening the weather-braces of the
upper yards. This I did quietly; and the dismantled hull was
brought right dead on end with our flying jib-boom. The men
now caught sight of her, and began to stare and point; but did
not sing out, as they saw by the telescope in my hand that I
perceived her. The breeze unhappily began to slacken somewhat,
owing perhaps to the gathering heat of the sun; our pace fell
off and a full hour passed before we brought the wreck near
enough to see her permanently,- for up to this she had been
constantly vanishing under the rise of the swell. She was now
about two miles off, and I took a long and steady look at her
through the telescope. It was a black hull with painted ports.
The deck was flush fore and aft, and there was a good-sized
house just before where the mainmast should have been. This
house was uninjured, though the galley was split up, and to star-
board stood up in splinters like the stump of a tree struck by
lightning. No boats could be seen aboard of her. Her jib-boom
was gone, and so were all three masts,-clean cut off at the
deck, as though a hand-saw had done it; but the mizzen-mast was
alongside, held by the shrouds and backstays, and the port main
and fore shrouds streamed like serpents from her chains into the
water. I reckoned at once that she must be loaded with timber,
## p. 12572 (#632) ##########################################
12572
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
for she never could keep afloat at that depth with any other kind
of cargo in her.
She made a most mournful and piteous object in the sunlight,
sluggishly rolling to the swell which ran in transparent volumes
over her sides and foamed around the deck-house. Once when
her stern rose, I read the name Cecilia in broad white letters.
I was gazing at her intently, in the effort to witness some
indication of living thing on board, when, to my mingled con-
sternation and horror, I witnessed an arm projecting through the
window of the deck-house and frantically waving what resembled
a white handkerchief. As none of the men called out, I judged
the signal was not perceptible to the naked eye; and in my ex-
citement I shouted, "There's a living man on board of her, my
lads! " dropped the glass, and ran aft to call the captain.
I met him coming up the companion ladder. The first thing
he said was, "You're out of your course," and looked up at the
sails.
"There's a wreck yonder! " I cried, pointing eagerly, "with a
man on board signaling to us. "
"Get me the glass," he said sulkily; and I picked it up and
handed it to him.
He looked at the wreck for some moments; and addressing
the man at the wheel, exclaimed, making a movement with his
hand, "Keep her away! Where in the devil are you steering to? "
"Good heaven! " I ejaculated: "there's a man on board-
there may be others! "
Damnation! " he exclaimed between his teeth: "what do
you mean by interfering with me? Keep her away! " he roared
out.
During this time we had drawn sufficiently near to the wreck
to enable the sharper-sighted among the hands to remark the
signal, and they were calling out that there was somebody flying
a handkerchief aboard the hull.
"Captain Coxon," said I, with as firm a voice as I could com-
mand, for I was nearly in as great a rage as he, and rendered
insensible to all consequences by his inhumanity,- "if you bear
away and leave that man yonder to sink with that wreck when
he can be saved with very little trouble, you will become as
much a murderer as any ruffian who stabs a man asleep. "
When I had said this, Coxon turned black in the face with
His eyes protruded, his hands and fingers worked as
passion.
-
## p. 12573 (#633) ##########################################
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12573
though he were under some electrical process, and I saw for the
first time in my life a sight I had always laughed at as a bit
of impossible novelist description, a mouth foaming with rage.
He rushed aft, just over Duckling's cabin, and stamped with all
his might.
"Now," thought I, "they may try to murder me! " And with-
out a word I pulled off my coat, seized a belaying-pin, and stood
ready; resolved that happen what might, I would give the first
man who should lay his fingers on me something to remember
me by while he had breath in his body.
The men, not quite understanding what was happening, but
seeing that a "row" was taking place, came to the forecastle
and advanced by degrees along the main-deck. Among them I
noticed the cook, muttering to one or the other who stood near.
Mr. Duckling, awakened by the violent clattering over his
head, came running up the companion-way with a bewildered,
sleepy look in his face. The captain grasped him by the arm,
and pointing to me, cried out with an oath that "that villain was
breeding a mutiny on board, and he believed wanted to murder
'him and Duckling. "
I at once answered, "Nothing of the kind! There is a man
miserably perishing on board that sinking wreck, Mr. Duckling,
and he ought to be saved. My lads! " I cried, addressing the
men on the main-deck, "is there a sailor among you all who
would have the heart to leave that man yonder without an effort
to rescue him? "
"No, sir! " shouted one of them. "We'll save the man; and
if the skipper refuses, we'll make him! "
"Luff! " I called to the man at the wheel.
"Luff at your peril! " screamed the skipper.
"Aft here, some hands," I cried, "and lay the main-yard aback.
Let go the port main-braces! "
The captain came running toward me.
"By the living God! " I cried in a fury, grasping the heavy
brass belaying-pin, "if you come within a foot of me, Captain
Coxon, I'll dash your brains out! "
My attitude, my enraged face and menacing gesture, produced
the desired effect. He stopped dead, turned a ghastly white, and
looked round at Duckling.
"What do you mean by this (etc. ) conduct, you (etc. ) muti-
nous scoundrels? " roared Duckling, with a volley of foul lan-
guage.
## p. 12574 (#634) ##########################################
12574
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
"Give him one for himself if he says too much, Mr. Royle! "
sung out some hoarse voice on the main-deck; "we'll back yer! "
And then came cries of "They're a cursed pair o' murderers! "
"Who run the smack down? ” "Who lets men drown? " "Who
starves honest men? " This last exclamation was followed by a
roar.
The whole of the crew were now on deck, having been
aroused by our voices. Some of them were looking on with a
grin, others with an expression of fierce curiosity. It was at
once understood that I was making a stand against the captain
and chief mate; and a single glance at them assured me that by
one word I could set the whole of them on fire to do my bid-
ding, even to shedding blood.
In the mean time, the man at the wheel had luffed until the
weather leeches were flat and the ship scarcely moving. And
at this moment, that the skipper might know their meaning, a
couple of hands jumped aft and let go the weather main-braces.
I took care to keep my eyes on Coxon and the mate, fully pre-
pared for any attack that one or both might make on me.
Duckling eyed me furiously but in silence, evidently baffled by
my resolute air and the position of the men. Then he said
something to the captain, who looked exhausted and white and
haggard with his useless passion. They walked over to the lee
side of the poop; and after a short conference, the captain to
my surprise went below, and Duckling came forward.
-
"There's no objection," he said, "to your saving the man's
life, if you want. Lower away the starboard quarter-boat; — and
you go along in her," he added to me, uttering the last words in
such a thick voice that I thought he was choking.
"Come along, some of you! " I cried out, hastily putting on
my coat; and in less than a minute I was in the boat with the
rudder and thole-pins shipped, and four hands ready to out oars
as soon as we touched the water.
Duckling began to fumble at one end of the boat's falls.
"Don't let him lower away!
