Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and converts
everything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose words
clothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in the
early sixties, and therefore are separable. This wind, again, has a
style, and that wind a mere manner. Nay, there are breezes from the east-
south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner. You can hardly
name them unless you look at the weather vane. So they do not convince
you by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and assign them
a history according as the hesitating arrow points on the top of yonder
ill-designed London spire.
The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind. You
do not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of your
greeting to his morning. There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy between
you and him, and you need no arrow to point to his distinctions, and to
indicate to you the right manner of treating such a visitant.
He prepares the dawn. While it is still dark the air is warned of his
presence, and before the window was opened he was already in the room.
His sun--for the sun is his--rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom on
the blue, the grey, or the gold. When the south-west is cold, the cold
is his own cold--round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength. It
is a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not challenge you
in the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly gets your leave,
and even a welcome to your house of life. He follows your breath in at
your throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even when he is cold.
Your blood cools, but does not hide from him.
He has a splendid way with his sky. In his flight, which is that, not of
a bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once: high with
his higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to move
slowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and are
near to the tree-tops. These the south-west wind tosses up from his soft
horizon, round and successive. They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover-
fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the grass is
in flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow. These
low-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before him,
from the western verge to the eastern.
Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might question
whether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others. His
skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning the
higher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and the
nearer like dolphins. In his "Classical Landscape: Italy," the master
has indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves
with "no pace perceived." The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot's
wind, that flew through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him
(he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with so
many aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer,
and blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness,
and the sky into another kind of immortality. Nor are the trees in this
antique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot's south-west
wind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights. They are as quiet
as the cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have never
shaken or enlaced.
Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind. But elsewhere
there are sea winds that are not from the south-west. They, too, none
the less, are conquerors. They, too, are always strong, compelling winds
that take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun, moon, and stars,
and constrain them all alike to feel the sea. Not a field, not a
hillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights. The
moon's little boat tosses on a sea-wind night.
The south-west wind takes the high Italian coasts. He gathers the ilex
woods together and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the sheep.
They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also, with its
strong base to the sea, receives them. It is blank and sunny, and the
trees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept and
flattened by months of sea-storms. On the farther side there are
gardens--gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in all
the world and most windless, box-hedges and ponds. The gardens take
shelter behind the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the sea-wind spares
them and breaks upon the mountain. But the garden also is his, and his
wild warm days have filled it with orange-trees and roses, and have given
all the abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown terraces,
and to all its lapsed, forsaken, and forgotten dainties.
Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy would be so beautiful without
the touch of man and of the sea gales.
When the south-west wind brings his rain he brings it with the majestic
onset announced by his breath. And when the light follows, it comes from
his own doorway in the verge. His are the opened evenings after a day
shut down with cloud. He fills the air with innumerable particles of
moisture that scatter and bestow the sun. There are no other days like
his, of so universal a harmony, so generous.
The north wind has his own landscape, too; but the east wind never. The
aspect which he gives to the day is not all his own. The sunshine is
sweet in spite of him. The clouds go under his whip, but they have
kinder greys than should be the colours of his cold. Not on an east-wind
day are these races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off. His rain
is angry, and it flies against the sunset. The world is not one in his
reign, but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference. The lights
and shadows are not all his. The waxing and waning hours are
disaffected. He has not a great style, and does not convince the day.
All the four winds are brave, and not the less brave because, on their
way through town, they are betrayed for a moment into taking part in any
paltriness that may be there. On their way from the Steppes to the
Atlantic they play havoc with the nerves of very insignificant people. A
part, as it were, of every gale that starts in the far north-east finds
its goal in the breath of a reluctant citizen.
You will meet a wind of the world nimble and eager in a sorry street. But
these are only accidents of the way--the winds go free again. Those that
do not go free, but close their course, are those that are breathed by
the nostrils of living creatures. A great flock of those wild birds come
to a final pause in London, and fan the fires of life with those wings in
the act of folding. In the blood and breath of a child close the
influences of continent and sea.