firm for you to depend on, I am stopped by the quite frightful inaccuracy of the scientific people's terms, which is the consequence of their always trying to write mixed Latin and English, so losing the grace of the one and the sense of the other. And, in this point of the diffraction of light I am stopped dead by their confusion of idea also, in using the words undulation and vibration as synonyms. "When," says Professor Tyndall, "you are told that the atoms of the sun vibrate at different rates, and produce waves of different sizes,—your experience of water-waves will enable you to form a tolerably clear notion of what is meant."
'Tolerably clear'!—your toleration must be considerable, then. Do you suppose a water-wave is like a harp-string? Vibration is the movement of a body in a state of tension,—undulation, that of a body absolutely lax. In vibration, not an atom of the body changes its place in relation to another,—in undulation, not an atom of the body remains in the same place with regard to another. In vibration, every particle of the body ignores gravitation, or defies it,—in undulation, every particle of the body is slavishly submitted to it. In undulation, not one wave is like another; in vibration, every pulse is alike. And of undulation itself, there are all manner of visible conditions, which are not true conditions. A flag ripples in the wind, but it does not undulate as the sea does,—for in the sea, the water is taken from the trough to put on to the ridge, but in the flag, though the motion is progressive, the bits of bunting keep their place. You see a field of corn undulating as if it was water,—it is different from the flag, for the ears of corn bow out of their places and return to them,—and yet, it is no more like the undulation of the sea, than the shaking of an aspen leaf in a storm, or the lowering of the lances in a battle.
And the best of the jest is, that after mixing up these two notions in their heads inextricably, the scientific people apply both when neither will fit; and when all undulation known to us presumes weight, and all vibration, impact,—the undulating theory of light is proposed to you concerning a medium which you can neither weigh nor touch!
All communicable vibration—of course I mean—and in dead matter: You may fall a shivering on your own account, if you like, but you can't get a billiard-ball to fall a shivering on its own account.18
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1
The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno,' the clogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circle of Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of the Plague-wind very closely,—but are conceived only as supernatural. The reader will no doubt observe, throughout the following lecture, my own habit of speaking of beautiful things as 'natural,' and of ugly ones as 'unnatural.' In the conception of recent philosophy, the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be as natural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and the more distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, as prepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agencies of health and disease, of which the first may be aided by his industry, p
1
The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno,' the clogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circle of Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of the Plague-wind very closely,—but are conceived only as supernatural. The reader will no doubt observe, throughout the following lecture, my own habit of speaking of beautiful things as 'natural,' and of ugly ones as 'unnatural.' In the conception of recent philosophy, the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be as natural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and the more distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, as prepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agencies of health and disease, of which the first may be aided by his industry, prudence, and piety; while the destroying laws are allowed to prevail against him, in the degree in which he allows himself in idleness, folly, and vice. Had the point been distinctly indicated where the degrees of adversity necessary for his discipline pass into those intended for his punishment, the world would have been put under a manifest theocracy; but the declaration of the principle is at least distinct enough to have convinced all sensitive and earnest persons, from the beginning of speculation in the eyes and mind of Man: and it has been put in my power by one of the singular chances which have always helped me in my work when it was in the right direction, to present to the University of Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principle of mediæval Theology which, so far as I know, exists in fifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentine book which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the British Museum, some ten or twelve years since; being a compendium of classic and mediæval religious symbolism. In the two pages of it, forming one picture, given to Oxford, the delivery of the Law on Sinai is represented on the left hand, (contrary to the Scriptural narrative, but in deeper expression of the benediction of the Sacred Law to all nations,) as in the midst of bright and calm light, the figure of the Deity being supported by luminous and level clouds, and attended by happy angels: while opposite, on the right hand, the worship of the Golden Calf is symbolized by a single decorated pillar, with the calf on its summit, surrounded by the clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouths of fiends;—uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, above the broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in the foreground.
2
These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of the lower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to be illuminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then more softly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have the qualities of painted, instead of burnished or inflamed, color.
They were thus described in the 4th chapter of the 7th part of 'Modern Painters':—
"Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form soft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, and blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk, looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted rain.
"No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various, inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, putting out his whole strength, could have painted them,—no other man."
3
I did not, in writing this sentence, forget Mr. Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr. Newton's for Athenian—(I wish it had not been also for Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself—through her death—and to his own; while the subsequent refusal of England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable, of all our base commercial impolicies.
4
'Deepening' clouds.—Byron never uses an epithet vainly,—he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful, of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentially necessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers are continually unaware of
<p>18</p>
'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering on its own account.'—I am under correction in this statement by the Lucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules of bodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more natural than to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferous ether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules of sensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, swinging on their own account, produce vibrations in the luminous ether, and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of these vibrations depend upon the periods in which the molecules are disposed to swing." ('On the Changes of Refrangibility of Light,' p. 549.)
It seems to me a pleasant conclusion, this, of recent science, and suggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there be light' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there be a disposition of the molecules to swing,' and the destinies of mankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, depend thereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at all events not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition!
Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so high mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word 'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of the body?
It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as the writer in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affect the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised) "command of language"—of never allowing a sentence to pass proof in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is able properly to say anything,—and secondly, whether his conceit permits him to say anything properly.
Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative statement that he rejoices as a strong man to run his course, is one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the stove's workmanship,—and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own coal-scuttles.
Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the 'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the present world is concerned,—by clothing in a "properly scientific garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can penetrate through oak-wood or through water—or (alas! that it should be so often tried) through the human body; and this power of penetration" (italics now mine) "is the distinguishing characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity. Let us define by the term 'Energy,' this power which the rifle ball possesses of overcoming obstacles, or of doing work."
Now, had Mr. Stewart been a better scholar, he would have felt, even if he had not known, that the Greek word 'energy' could only be applied to the living—and of living, with perfect propriety only to the mental, action of animals, and that it could no more be applied as a 'scientific garb,' to the flight of a rifle ball, than to the fall of a dead body. And, if he had attained thus much, even of the science of language, it is just possible that the small forte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have been energized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertly moving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world, is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights and velocities; that the effect of their impact depends—not merely on their pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms and stability of the substances they encounter, and that there is no more quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in the swiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in the deliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat's proboscis, or a seamstress' needle.
Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, do not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,—for a bad writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into one,—but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that of a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo the damage.
firm for you to depend on, I am stopped by the quite frightful inaccuracy of the scientific people's terms, which is the consequence of their always trying to write mixed Latin and English, so losing the grace of the one and the sense of the other. And, in this point of the diffraction of light I am stopped dead by their confusion of idea also, in using the words undulation and vibration as synonyms. "When," says Professor Tyndall, "you are told that the atoms of the sun vibrate at different rates, and produce waves of different sizes,—your experience of water-waves will enable you to form a tolerably clear notion of what is meant."
