# An Angler at Large/Chapter 12

The Cloud Artist has been having a week's holiday and has left his job to the Rain Man, one of his two assistants. The other is the Blue Person. These functionaries are a discovery of my wife's. Between them they look after the arrangement of the sky. The Blue Person has had a long innings lately. Morning, noon, and evening he has spread his canvas, glowing azure overhead and at the edges soft purple, from one down to another. He had stolen a few little pink clouds from his Superior's store, and with these he would ornament his border from time to time, cleverly enough. He is a one effect man, yet the amazing beauty of what he does raises him above the charge of working in a groove. There are countries where he gets too much rope, and in such places they curse him for his monotony. England, favoured in so many ways, never sees the Blue Person too often, and his quite undeviating art meets with our hearty approval whenever he chooses to exercise it. As a matter of fact, the ​Blue Person is not an artist at all. He is a canvas-stretcher just as the Rain Man is a maker of cloud in bulk for the Cloud Artist's use. So when the master is not in the studio, and the Rain Man is playing hookey, the Blue Person has it all his own way. If the Cloud Artist has an inspiration, then the Blue Person steps aside and we have pictures. Or perhaps the Rain Man comes rushing in and throws great lumps of his manufactures all over the Blue Person's pretty canvas, and then we put on mackintoshes.
A hill-top is the best stance for looking at the Cloud Artist's work. It is impossible to see too large an area of it. No one can paint in small compass better than he, and I have often framed a marvellous little six-foot-by-five with my bedroom window. But to see him as he should be seen one wants the whole vault of heaven. Then the fellow's infinite variety becomes properly apparent. I never can decide in which vein I prefer him. When he is doing his big bold work with his great masses of cumulus, flinging them all day exuberantly across the blue, tearing continents of cloud to pieces and sending them swimming, he is at his liveliest and strongest. Then, too, he indulges his undoubted gift of humour. He becomes Rabelaisian, scolloping his edges into pompous, mile-long Bourbon faces, all chins, or ​pulling out bulging elephants and rocs and exaggerated humpy babies, and showing them to us and turning them into something different. My wife and I applaud him to the echo at such times, and would surely write letters to him thanking him for our entertainment, only we do not know his address. On cirrus days he is poetic, setting aloft filmy dreams in shell pink and pale gold, whose shapes the more ambitious kinds of birds have copied clumsily in their most delicate feathers, whose tints the more fragile sorts of flowers have tried to imitate in their petals. Earth, by gazing continually upwards and by striving her hardest to reproduce what she sees there, has succeeded in acquiring the beauty which we so much admire. The Alps, what are they but the expression of her desire to possess cumulus? And of a hot morning at Naples you may look over to Capri and see where she has almost achieved one of those soft blue mysteries which cost the Cloud Artist hardly a thought. And with what landscape can Earth rival his least-considered sunset display of purple plain and rosy hill and lake of molten gold?
I say nothing against the beauty of Earth. On the contrary, I spend a great deal of time here and elsewhere in extolling it. But I think that, being creatures of Earth, we push our admiration ​of her too far. There are men, who can ill afford it, who buy weeks in Lovely Lucerne from Mr. Cook—(the extent of human discomfort caused by this person is shocking to contemplate)—and standing upon the Rigi Kulm, congratulate themselves that modern civilisation has brought this marvel within their reach for a five-pound note. My wife and I go up on to the Beacon Down, and, lying very comfortably on our backs, feast our eyes in half an hour with ten spectacles infinitely more gorgeous than that which these men have gone so far to see. For our mountains change, sir. They change. The Cloud Artist (having the root of the matter in him) never rests and says, "This is good enough." You say, "Ah, but the mountains change." I admit it. Within limits the mountains do change. But who, I ask you, changes them? The Cloud Artist.
It is, I think, this Great Lovely Lucerne Joke which makes the Cloud Artist so humorous on days of cumulus. While humanity is staring fixedly at its own element he, aloft there, for his own amusement, caricatures its treble-chinned self-satisfaction. And Earth, who knows her own limitations, shares the jest at her children's expense; but, the while, like a good mother, smiles indulgently on the loyal little things, and spares no pains to make them happy.