Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Psalms"

Bao Gan 300 A.D. - "Sou Shen Ji, volume 1 3"

William H. Ryus - "The Second William Penn"

Alexandre Dumas, Pere - "The Vicomte de Bragelonne"

The Ethics of the Dust

J >> John Ruskin >> The Ethics of the Dust




DORA. That does not seem much to depend upon.

L. Pardon me, puss. When once we gain some real notion of the
extent and unconquerableness of our ignorance, it is a very broad
and restful thing to depend upon: you can throw yourself upon it
at ease, as on a cloud, to feast with the gods. You do not
thenceforward trouble yourself,--nor any one else,--with theories,
or the contradiction of theories; you neither get headache nor
heart-burning and you nevermore waste your poor little store of
strength or allowance of time.

However, there are certain facts, about this agate-making, which I
can tell you; and then you may look at it in a pleasant wonder as
long as you like, pleasant wonder is no loss of time.

First, then, it is not broken freely by a blow; it is slowly
wrung, or ground, to pieces. You can only with extreme dimness
conceive the force exerted on mountains in transitional states of
movement. You have all read a little geology; and you know how
coolly geologists talk of mountains being raised or depressed.
They talk coolly of it, because they are accustomed to the fact;
but the very universality of the fact prevents us from ever
conceiving distinctly the conditions of force involved. You know I
was living last year in Savoy; my house was on the back of a
sloping mountain, which rose gradually for two miles behind it;
and then fell at once in a great precipice toward Geneva, going
down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now
that whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer
strength from the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as
soft as biscuit. Put four or five captains' biscuits on the floor,
on the top of one another; and try to break them all in half, not
by bending, but by holding one half down, and tearing the other
halves straight up;--of course you will not be able to do it, but
you will feel and comprehend the sort of force needed. Then, fancy
each captains' biscuit a bed of rock, six or seven hundred feet
thick; and the whole mass torn straight through; and one half
heaved up three thousand feet, grinding against the other as it
rose,--and you will have some idea of the making of the Mont
Saleve.

MAY. But it must crush the rocks all to dust!

L. No; for there is no room for dust. The pressure is too great;
probably the heat developed also so great that the rock is made
partly ductile; but the worst of it is, that we never can see
these parts of mountains in the state they were left in at the
time of their elevation; for it is precisely in these rents and
dislocations that the crystalline power principally exerts itself.
It is essentially a styptic power, and wherever the earth is torn,
it heals and binds; nay, the torture and grieving of the earth
seem necessary to bring out its full energy; for you only find the
crystalline living power fully in action, where the rents and
faults are deep and many.

DORA. If you please, sir,--would you tell us--what are "faults"?

L. You never heard of such things?

DORA. Never in all our lives.

L. When a vein of rock which is going on smoothly, is interrupted
by another troublesome little vein, which stops it, and puts it
out, so that it has to begin again in another place--that is
called a fault. _I_ always think it ought to be called the fault
of the vein that interrupts it; but the miners always call it the
fault of the vein that is interrupted.

DORA. So it is, if it does not begin again where it left off.

L. Well, that is certainly the gist of the business: but, whatever
good-natured old lecturers may do, the rocks have a bad habit,
when they are once interrupted, of never asking "Where was I?"

DORA. When the two halves of the dining-table came separate,
yesterday, was that a "fault"?

L. Yes; but not the table's. However, it is not a bad
illustration, Dora. When beds of rock are only interrupted by a
fissure, but remain at the same level, like the two halves of the
table, it is not called a fault, but only a fissure; but if one
half of the table be either tilted higher than the other, or
pushed to the side, so that the two parts will not fit, it is a
fault. You had better read the chapter on faults in Jukes's
Geology; then you will know all about it. And this rent that I am
telling you of in the Saleve, is one only of myriads, to which are
owing the forms of the Alps, as, I believe, of all great mountain
chains. Wherever you see a precipice on any scale of real
magnificence, you will nearly always find it owing to some
dislocation of this kind; but the point of chief wonder to me is
the delicacy of the touch by which these gigantic rents have been
apparently accomplished. Note, however, that we have no clear
evidence, hitherto, of the time taken to produce any of them. We
know that a change of temperature alters the position and the
angles of the atoms of crystals, and also the entire bulk of
rocks. We know that in all volcanic, and the greater part of all
subterranean, action, temperatures are continually changing, and
therefore masses of rock must be expanding or contracting, with
infinite slowness, but with infinite force. This pressure must
result in mechanical strain somewhere, both in their own
substance, and in that of the rocks surrounding them; and we can
form no conception of the result of irresistible pressure, applied
so as to rend and raise, with imperceptible slowness of gradation,
masses thousands of feet in thickness. We want some experiments
tried on masses of iron and stone; and we can't get them tried,
because Christian creatures never will seriously and sufficiently
spend money, except to find out the shortest ways of killing each
other. But, besides this slow kind of pressure, there is evidence
of more or less sudden violence, on the same terrific scale; and,
through it all, the wonder, as I said, is always to me the
delicacy of touch. I cut a block of the Saleve limestone from the
edge of one of the principal faults which have formed the
precipice; it is a lovely compact limestone, and the fault itself
is filled up with a red breccia, formed of the crushed fragments
of the torn rock, cemented by a rich red crystalline paste. I have
had the piece I cut from it smoothed, and polished across the
junction; here it is; and you may now pass your soft little
fingers over the surface, without so much as feeling the place
where a rock which all the hills of England might have been sunk
in the body of, and not a summit seen, was torn asunder through
that whole thickness, as a thin dress is torn when you tread upon
it.

(The audience examine the stone, and touch it timidly, but the
matter remains inconceivable to them.)

MARY (struck by the beauty of the stone). But this is almost
marble?

L. It is quite marble. And another singular point in the business,
to my mind, is that these stones, which men have been cutting into
slabs, for thousands of years, to ornament their principal
buildings with,--and which, under the general name of "marble,"
have been the delight of the eyes, and the wealth of architecture,
among all civilized nations,--are precisely those on which the
signs and brands of these earth agonies have been chiefly struck;
and there is not a purple vein nor flaming zone in them, which is
not the record of their ancient torture. What a boundless capacity
for sleep, and for serene stupidity, there is in the human mind!
Fancy reflective beings, who cut and polish stones for three
thousand years, for the sake of the pretty stains upon them; and
educate themselves to an art at last (such as it is), of imitating
these veins by dexterous painting; and never a curious soul of
them, all that while, asks, "What painted the rocks?"

(The audience look dejected, and ashamed of themselves.)

The fact is, we are all, and always, asleep, through our lives;
and it is only by pinching ourselves very hard that we ever come
to see, or understand, anything. At least, it is not always we who
pinch ourselves; sometimes other people pinch us; which I suppose
is very good of them,--or other things, which I suppose is very
proper of them. But it is a sad life; made up chiefly of naps and
pinches.

(Some of the audience, on this, appearing to think that the others
require pinching, the LECTURER changes the subject.)

Now, however, for once, look at a piece of marble carefully, and
think about it. You see this is one side of the fault; the other
side is down or up, nobody knows where; but, on this side, you can
trace the evidence of the dragging and tearing action. All along
the edge of this marble, the ends of the fibers of the rock are
torn, here an inch, and there half an inch, away from each other;
and you see the exact places where they fitted, before they were
torn separate: and you see the rents are now all filled up with
the sanguine paste, full of the broken pieces of the rock; the
paste itself seems to have been half melted, and partly to have
also melted the edge of the fragments it contains, and then to
have crystallized with them, and round them. And the brecciated
agate I first showed you contains exactly the same phenomena; a
zoned crystallization going on amidst the cemented fragments,
partly altering the structure of those fragments themselves, and
subject to continual change, either in the intensity of its own
power, or in the nature of the materials submitted to it;--so
that, at one time, gravity acts upon them, and disposes them in
horizontal layers, or causes them to droop in stalactites; and at
another, gravity is entirely defied, and the substances in
solution are crystallized in bands of equal thickness on every
side of the cell. It would require a course of lectures longer
than these (I have a great mind,--you have behaved so saucily--to
stay and give them) to describe to you the phenomena of this kind,
in agates and chalcedonies only,--nay, there is a single
sarcophagus in the British Museum, covered with grand sculpture of
the 18th dynasty, which contains in magnificent breccia (agates
and jaspers imbedded in porphyry), out of which it is hewn,
material for the thought of years; and record of the earth-sorrow
of ages in comparison with the duration of which, the Egyptian
letters tell us but the history of the evening and morning of a
day.

Agates, I think, of all stones, confess most of their past
history, but all crystallization goes on under, and partly
records, circumstances of this kind--circumstances of infinite
variety, but always involving difficulty, interruption, and change
of condition at different times. Observe, first, you have the
whole mass of the rock in motion, either contracting itself, and
so gradually widening the cracks, or being compressed, and thereby
closing them, and crushing their edges,--and, if one part of its
substance be softer, at the given temperature, than another,
probably squeezing that softer substance out into the veins. Then
the veins themselves, when the rock leaves them open by its
contraction, act with various power of suction upon its
substance;--by capillary attraction when they are fine,--by that
of pure vacuity when they are larger, or by changes in the
constitution and condensation of the mixed gases with which they
have been originally filled. Those gases themselves may be
supplied in all variation of volume and power from below; or,
slowly, by the decomposition of the rocks themselves; and, at
changing temperatures, must exert relatively changing forces of
decomposition and combination on the walls of the veins they fill;
while water, at every degree of heat and pressure (from beds of
everlasting ice, alternate with cliffs of native rock, to volumes
of red hot, or white hot, steam), congeals, and drips, and throbs,
and thrills, from crag to crag; and breathes from pulse to pulse
of foaming or fiery arteries, whose beating is felt through chains
of the great islands of the Indian seas, as your own pulses lift
your bracelets, and makes whole kingdoms of the world quiver in
deadly earthquake, as if they were light as aspen leaves. And,
remember, the poor little crystals have to live their lives, and
mind their own affairs, in the midst of all this, as best they
may. They are wonderfully like human creatures,--forget all that
is going on if they don't see it, however dreadful; and never
think what is to happen to-morrow. They are spiteful or loving,
and indolent or painstaking, and orderly or licentious, with no
thought whatever of the lava or the flood which may break over
them any day; and evaporate them into air-bubbles, or wash them
into a solution of salts. And you may look at them, once
understanding the surrounding conditions of their fate, with an
endless interest. You will see crowds of unfortunate little
crystals, who have been forced to constitute themselves in a
hurry, their dissolving element being fiercely scorched away; you
will see them doing their best, bright and numberless, but tiny.
Then you will find indulged crystals, who have had centuries to
form themselves in, and have changed their mind and ways
continually; and have been tired, and taken heart again; and have
been sick, and got well again; and thought they would try a
different diet, and then thought better of it; and made but a poor
use of their advantages, after all. And others you will see, who
have begun life as wicked crystals; and then have been impressed
by alarming circumstances, and have become converted crystals, and
behaved amazingly for a little while, and fallen away again, and
ended, but discreditably, perhaps even in decomposition; so that
one doesn't know what will become of them. And sometimes you will
see deceitful crystals, that look as soft as velvet, and are
deadly to all near them; and sometimes you will see deceitful
crystals, that seem flint-edged, like our little quartz-crystal of
a housekeeper here (hush! Dora), and are endlessly gentle and true
wherever gentleness and truth are needed. And sometimes you will
see little child-crystals put to school like school-girls, and
made to stand in rows; and taken the greatest care of, and taught
how to hold themselves up, and behave: and sometimes you will see
unhappy little child-crystals left to lie about in the dirt, and
pick up their living, and learn manners where they can. And
sometimes you will see fat crystals eating up thin ones, like
great capitalists and little laborers; and politico-economic
crystals teaching the stupid ones how to eat each other, and cheat
each other; and foolish crystals getting in the way of wise ones;
and impatient crystals spoiling the plans of patient ones,
irreparably; just as things go on in the world. And sometimes you
may see hypocritical crystals taking the shape of others, though
they are nothing like in their minds; and vampire crystals eating
out the hearts of others; and hermit-crab crystals living in the
shells of others; and parasite crystals living on the means of
others; and courtier crystals glittering in attendance upon
others; and all these, besides the two great companies of war and
peace, who ally themselves, resolutely to attack, or resolutely to
defend. And for the close, you see the broad shadow and deadly
force of inevitable fate, above all this: you see the multitudes
of crystals whose time has come; not a set time, as with us, but
yet a time, sooner or later, when they all must give up their
crystal ghosts:--when the strength by which they grew, and the
breath given them to breathe, pass away from them; and they fail,
and are consumed, and vanish away; and another generation is
brought to life, framed out of their ashes.

MARY. It is very terrible. Is it not the complete fulfillment,
down into the very dust, of that verse: "The whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain?"

L. I do not know that it is in pain, Mary: at least, the evidence
tends to show that there is much more pleasure than pain, as soon
as sensation becomes possible.

LUCILLA. But then, surely, if we are told that it is pain, it must
be pain?

L. Yes; if we are told; and told in the way you mean, Lucilla; but
nothing is said of the proportion to pleasure. Unmitigated pain
would kill any of us in a few hours; pain equal to our pleasures
would make us loathe life; the word itself cannot be applied to
the lower conditions of matter in its ordinary sense. But wait
till to-morrow to ask me about this. To-morrow is to be kept for
questions and difficulties; let us keep to the plain facts to-day.
There is yet one group of facts connected with this rending of the
rocks, which I especially want you to notice. You know, when you
have mended a very old dress, quite meritoriously, till it won't
mend any more--

EGYPT (interrupting). Could not you sometimes take gentlemen's
work to illustrate by?

L. Gentlemen's work is rarely so useful as yours, Egypt; and when
it is useful, girls cannot easily understand it.

DORA. I am sure we should understand it better than gentlemen
understand about sewing.

L. My dear, I hope I always speak modestly, and under correction,
when I touch upon matters of the kind too high for me; and
besides, I never intend to speak otherwise than respectfully of
sewing;--though you always seem to think I am laughing at you. In
all seriousness, illustrations from sewing are those which Neith
likes me best to use; and which young ladies ought to like
everybody to use. What do you think the beautiful word "wife"
comes from?

DORA (tossing her head). I don't think it is a particularly
beautiful word.

L. Perhaps not. At your ages you may think "bride" sounds better;
but wife's the word for wear, depend upon it. It is the great word
in which the English and Latin languages conquer the French and
the Greek. I hope the French will some day get a word for it, yet,
instead of their dreadful "femme." But what do you think it comes
from?

DORA. I never did think about it.

L. Nor you, Sibyl?

SIBYL. No; I thought it was Saxon, and stopped there.

L. Yes, but the great good of Saxon words is, that they usually do
mean something. Wife means "weaver". You have all the right to
call yourselves little "housewives," when you sew neatly.

DORA. But I don t think we want to call ourselves 'little
housewives'.

L. You must either be house-wives, or house-moths; remember that.
In the deep sense, you must either weave men's fortunes, and
embroider them, or feed upon, and bring them to decay. You had
better let me keep my sewing illustration, and help me out with
it.

DORA. Well, we'll hear it, under protest.

L. You have heard it before, but with reference to other matters.
When it is said, "no man putteth a piece of new cloth on an old
garment, else it taketh from the old," does it not mean that the
new piece tears the old one away at the sewn edge?

DORA. Yes; certainly.

L. And when you mend a decayed stuff with strong thread, does not
the whole edge come away sometimes, when it tears again?

DORA. Yes; and then it is of no use to mend it any more.

L. Well, the rocks don't seem to think that: but the same thing
happens to them continually. I told you they were full of rents,
or veins. Large masses of mountain are sometimes as full of veins
as your hand is; and of veins nearly as fine (only you know a rock
vein does not mean a tube, but a crack or cleft). Now these clefts
are mended, usually, with the strongest material the rock can
find; and often literally with threads; for the gradually opening
rent seems to draw the substance it is filled with into fibers,
which cross from one side of it to the other, and are partly
crystalline; so that, when the crystals become distinct, the
fissure has often exactly the look of a tear, brought together
with strong cross stitches. Now when this is completely done, and
all has been fastened and made firm, perhaps some new change of
temperature may occur, and the rock begin to contract again. Then
the old vein must open wider; or else another open elsewhere. If
the old vein widen, it MAY do so at its center; but it constantly
happens, with well filled veins, that the cross stitches are too
strong to break; the walls of the vein, instead, are torn away by
them: and another little supplementary vein--often three or four
successively--will be thus formed at the side of the first.

MARY. That is really very much like our work. But what do the
mountains use to sew with?

L. Quartz, whenever they can get it: pure limestones are obliged
to be content with carbonate of lime; but most mixed rocks can
find some quartz for themselves. Here is a piece of black slate
from the Buet: it looks merely like dry dark mud; you could not
think there was any quartz in it; but, you see, its rents are all
stitched together with beautiful white thread, which is the purest
quartz, so close drawn that you can break it like flint, in the
mass; but, where it has been exposed to the weather, the fine
fibrous structure is shown: and, more than that, you see the
threads have been all twisted and pulled aside, this way and the
other, by the warpings and shifting of the sides of the vein as it
widened.

MARY. It is wonderful! But is that going on still? Are the
mountains being torn and sewn together again at this moment?

L. Yes, certainly, my dear: but I think, just as certainly (though
geologists differ on this matter), not with the violence, or on
the scale, of their ancient ruin and renewal. All things seem to
be tending towards a condition of at least temporary rest; and
that groaning and travailing of the creation, as, assuredly, not
wholly in pain, is not, in the full sense, "until now."

MARY. I want so much to ask you about that!

SIBYL. Yes; and we all want to ask you about a great many other
things besides.

L. It seems to me that you have got quite as many new ideas as are
good for any of you at present: and I should not like to burden
you with more; but I must see that those you have are clear, if I
can make them so; so we will have one more talk, for answer of
questions, mainly. Think over all the ground, and make your
difficulties thoroughly presentable. Then we'll see what we can
make of them.

DORA. They shall all be dressed in their very best; and curtsey as
they come in.

L. No, no, Dora; no curtseys, if you please. I had enough of them
the day you all took a fit of reverence, and curtsied me out of
the room.

DORA. But, you know, we cured ourselves of the fault, at once, by
that fit. We have never been the least respectful since. And the
difficulties will only curtsey themselves out of the room, I
hope;--come in at one door--vanish at the other.

L. What a pleasant world it would be, if all its difficulties were
taught to behave so! However, one can generally make something, or
(better still) nothing, or at least less of them, if they
thoroughly know their own minds; and your difficulties--I must say
that for you, children,--generally do know their own minds, as you
do yourselves.

DORA. That is very kindly said for us. Some people would not allow
so much as that girls had any minds to know.

L. They will at least admit that you have minds to change, Dora.

MARY. You might have left us the last speech, without a retouch.
But we'll put our little minds, such as they are, in the best trim
we can, for to-morrow.





LECTURE 10.

THE CRYSTAL REST


Evening. The fireside. L's arm-chair in the comfortablest corner.

L. (perceiving various arrangements being made of footstool,
cushion, screen, and the like.) Yes, yes, it's all very fine! and
I am to sit here to be asked questions till supper-time, am I?

DORA. I don't think you can have any supper to-night:--we've got
so much to ask.

LILY. Oh, Miss Dora! We can fetch it him here, you know, so
nicely!

L. Yes, Lily, that will be pleasant, with competitive examination
going on over one's plate: the competition being among the
examiners. Really, now that I know what teasing things girls are,
I don't so much wonder that people used to put up patiently with
the dragons who took THEM for supper. But I can't help myself, I
suppose;--no thanks to St. George. Ask away, children, and I'll
answer as civilly as may be.

DORA. We don't so much care about being answered civilly, as about
not being asked things back again.

L. "Ayez seulement la patience que je le parle." There shall be no
requitals.

DORA. Well, then, first of all--What shall we ask first, Mary?

MARY. It does not matter. I think all the questions come into one,
at last, nearly.

DORA. You know, you always talk as if the crystals were alive; and
we never understand how much you are in play, and how much in
earnest. That's the first thing.

L. Neither do I understand, myself, my dear, how much I am in
earnest. The stones puzzle me as much as I puzzle you. They look
as if they were alive, and make me speak as if they were; and I do
not in the least know how much truth there is in the appearance.
I'm not to ask things back again to-night, but all questions of
this sort lead necessarily to the one main question, which we
asked, before, in vain, "What is it to be alive?"

DORA. Yes; but we want to come back to that: for we've been
reading scientific books about the "conservation of forces," and
it seems all so grand, and wonderful; and the experiments are so
pretty; and I suppose it must be all right: but then the books
never speak as if there were any such thing as "life."

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