We could indeed wish that Mr. Ruskin had more deeply studied peasant life and peasant habits. The meaning of the clouds in Turner^s "Salisbury" and "Stonehenge" would have then been more thoroughly appreciated. Fine and poetical as is Mr. Ruskin's interpretation, yet we venture to think that he misses the truth when, in this case, he refers Turner's inspiration to Greek sources. To those who have lived near the Plain, and have mixed with the shepherds, the meaning and the symbolism come far nearer home, and more closely touch the heart. Turner was here no Greek, except as all men who love beauty are Greeks. Here he was, at all events, intensely English. Sprung like so many great poets and painters from the lower class, he could sympathize with the shepherds of the Plain. To them, as to the shepherd in the "Iliad," standing on the hill-top facing the sea, shepherding their flocks, far away from any village, on the vast treeless down, the clouds become a constant source of fear or joy. Their hearts gladden as the light white clouds roll up from the English Channel, and then, as they say, "purl round" and retreat. [{218}] In spring and summer they joyfully hail the "water dogs," the "gossamer" of the Yorkshire peasant, which herald the fine weather. They, above all other English peasants, solitary on that wide plain, watch with fear the "sun-galls," Shakespeare's "water-galls," as the broken bits and patches of rainbows are called, hanging glorious, but wrathful, in the far horizon. They mark with dread "the messengers" and "water streamers," and at night, too, anxiously note the amber "wheel-cloud" round the moon.
With all this, like a true poet, Turner sympathized. He entered into the reality of shepherd life upon the Plain; its joys and its dangers. In one picture, therefore, he has given us the rain-clouds showering their blessings upon man, and in the other revealed the dread fatalistic power that ever darkens the background of life.
But we must leave the peasant, and turn to the fisherman. More even than the peasant, he naturally regards the weather in its effects upon his calling. The rain with him—we are speaking more especially now of the North Country fisherman—is "dirt," and a rainy sky a "dirty sky." The "water-galls" of the Salisbury shepherd, from which Shakespeare took those most exquisite similes, have with him lost their beauty, and are changed into "sea-devils," evil prophets of tempest. The flying clouds, that herald the storm, are with him "the flying devil and his imps." He realizes the danger, and therefore christens the clouds with rough names.
He too, like the peasant, is learned in weather-lore, and keeps an almanac of weather-rhymes in his memory. In such fishing villages as Staithes and Runswick, on the north-east Yorkshire coast, a large collection might easily be formed. They partake of the roughness and the truthfulness of the inhabitants. Such jingles as:
"When wind comes before rain
Then let your topsails remain:
But if the wind follows rain.
Then you may close reef again,"
are certainly more accurate in sense than rhythm. Again, the couplet:
"When the sun crosses line, and wind's in the east.
It will hand (hold) that way meast, first quarter at least,"
contains a warning not always to be despised. The riddle of the "brough," that amber halo of clouds seen sometimes round the moon, which the shepherds of Salisbury Plain call "the wheel," and the midland peasants "the burr," is solved by the rhyming adage:
"A far off brough
Means a near hand rough."
But we must not be too critical, and demand both sense and rhythm. It is something if in poetry we obtain truth. At all events, the Yorkshire fishermen's rhymes are quite as good as a great many of those in which Apollo formerly conveyed his prophecies to mankind. And we think that Admiral Fitzroy might have profitably added some of them to his collection.