“Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,” says Shelley; and I am apt to
think there are a good many other things concerning which their
knowledge might be largely increased without becoming burdensome. Nor
are they altogether reluctant to be taught,--not so reluctant, perhaps,
as unable,--and education is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her hand
by which to get a purchase on them. For most of us, I have noticed, are
not without an amiable willingness to assist at any spectacle or
entertainment (loosely so called) for which no fee is charged at the
door. If special tickets are sent us, another element of pleasure is
added in a sense of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in a
democracy) so deeply rooted in human nature that I have seen people take
a strange satisfaction in being near of kin to the mute chief personage
in a funeral. It gave them a moment’s advantage over the rest of us
whose grief was rated at a lower place in the procession. But the words
“admission free” at the bottom of a handbill, though holding out no bait
of inequality, have yet a singular charm for many minds, especially in
the country. There is something touching in the constancy with which men
attend free lectures, and in the honest patience with which they listen
to them. He who pays may yawn or shift testily in his seat, or even go
out with an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has bought the
right to do any or all of these and paid for it. But gratuitous hearers
are anæsthetized to suffering by a sense of virtue. They are performing
perhaps the noblest, as it is one of the most difficult, of human
functions in getting Something (no matter how small) for Nothing. They
are not pestered by the awful duty of securing their money’s worth. They
are wasting time, to do which elegantly and without lassitude is the
highest achievement of civilization. If they are cheated, it is, at
worst, only of a superfluous hour which was rotting on their hands. Not
only is mere amusement made more piquant, but instruction more
palatable, by this universally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the
philosophic observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation in the
audience, as they listen to a discourse on the probability of making
missionaries go down better with the Feejee-Islanders by balancing the
hymn-book in one pocket with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or
to a plea for arming the female gorilla with the ballot, he also takes a
friendly interest in the lecturer, and admires the wise economy of
Nature who thus contrives an ample field of honest labor for her bores.
Even when the insidious hat is passed round after one of these
eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by a conscientious
refusal to disturb the satisfaction’s completeness with the rattle of a
single contributory penny. So firmly persuaded am I of this
_gratis_-instinct in our common humanity, that I believe I could fill a
house by advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a
philosophic poet, or on my personal recollections of the late James K.
Polk. This being so, I have sometimes wondered that the peep-shows which
Nature provides with such endless variety for her children, and to which
we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, should be so
generally neglected. To be sure, eyes are not so common as people think,
or poets would be plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers
are cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not
getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of nature, however,
contrive to get even _this_ solace; and Wordsworth looking upon
mountains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else
who ventured upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if
_such_ fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense of
what-d’ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him! Marry come up!
Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive
passion, but on the whole I am not sorry to have been born and bred
among more domestic scenes, where I can be hospitable without a pang. I
am going to ask you presently to take potluck with me at a board where
Winter shall supply whatever there is of cheer.
I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice done him in the
main. We make him the symbol of old age or death, and think we have
settled the matter. As if old age were never kindly as well as frosty;
as if it had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the
noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of youth, or
the pompous mediocrity of middle life! As if there were anything
discreditable in death, or nobody had ever longed for it! Suppose we
grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then? I take it upon me
to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking
rivals.
“Sleep, Silence’ child, the father of soft Rest,”
is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are better employed in
his company than anywhere else. For my own part, I think Winter a pretty
wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more
congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, than any charms of
which his rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mistress, who either
does not know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether you
shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at last of her
pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to her to be cheered up a bit,
and ten to one catch her in the sulks, expecting you to find enough
good-humor for both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a little
more staid in her demeanor; and her abundant table, where you are sure
to get the earliest fruits and vegetables of the season, is a good
foundation for steady friendship; but she has lost that delicious aroma
of maidenhood, and what was delicately rounded grace in the girl gives
more than hints of something like redundance in the matron. Autumn is
the poet of the family. He gets you up a splendor that you would say was
made out of real sunset; but it is nothing more than a few hectic
leaves, when all is done. He is but a sentimentalist, after all; a kind
of Lamartine whining along the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber
of, and begging a contribution of good-spirits from your own savings to
keep him in countenance. But Winter has his delicate sensibilities too,
only he does not make them as good as indelicate by thrusting them
forever in your face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a
mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you down to your
bare manhood, and bids you understand him out of that, with no
adventitious helps of association, or he will none of you. He does not
touch those melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a master as
Heine. Well, is there no such thing as thrumming on them and maundering
over them till they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand would
crash through them and leave them dangling brokenly forever? Take Winter
as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow,
with no nonsense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a great
comfort in the long run. He is not what they call a genial critic; but
bring a real man along with you, and you will find there is a crabbed
generosity about the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the
creamy concessions of Autumn. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,”
quotha? That’s just it; Winter soon blows your head clear of fog and
makes you see things as they are; I thank him for it! The truth is,
between ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the whole family, who
always welcome me without making me feel as if I were too much of a poor
relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you
know, to give the true relish. They are as good company, the worst of
them, as any I know, and I am not a little flattered by a condescension
from any one of them; but I happen to hold Winter’s retainer, this time,
and, like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a showing as I
can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon the rest of the household.
Moreover, Winter is coming, and one would like to get on the blind side
of him.
The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of
the mind, is a modern thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man
was brought into fashion by Rousseau; for his prototype Petrarch, though
he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the
grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mont Ventoux, but
it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a
century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe
employment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the
Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic,
the ancient or mediæval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian
would try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and
leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The
ancients were certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was
natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with
forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep
their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they
had fine roads, and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the
Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of
the moral meaning of the outward world; and I think none has approached
him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of
the “Prelude.” But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of
as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry.
Chaucer opens his Clerk’s Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its
large style, and as well composed as any Claude.
“There is right at the west end of Itaille,
Down at the root of Vesulus the cold,
A lusty plain abundant of vitaille,
Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold,
That founded were in time of fathers old,
And many an other délectable sight;
And Salucës this noble country hight.”
What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a sure eye for
the points of character in landscape! But the picture is altogether
subsidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin show
that there must have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible
in scenery; but the British poet Thomson (“sweet-souled” is Wordsworth’s
apt word) was the first to do with words what they had done partially
with colors. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a
translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was
dead; but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but
European literature is largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap
amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for the asking. It
was his impulse which unconsciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it
is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper,
Châteaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Ruskin,--the
great painters of ideal landscape.
So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping out cold or
checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest,
especially in the country. There he was the bearer of a _lettre de
cachet_, which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few
resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost-stories, which
had lost all their freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed was
to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose
casement or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose-flesh. Bussy
Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it
was in the country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and
windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to
keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better in
the city, to judge by Ménage’s warning against the danger of our
dressing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing
blaze. The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, with
his hand through a hole in the blanket; and we may suspect that it was
the warmth quite as much as the company that first drew men together at
the coffee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to Wedgewood: “I
am sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat.... It is most barbarously cold,
and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it only by perpetual
imprisonment.” This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a
depressing one; for I think there is nothing so demoralizing as cold. I
know of a boy who, when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home
dead, said only, “Now we can burn as much wood as we like.” I would not
off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I remember with a shudder a
pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of
fresh air, I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by
the freezing vapor of our breath, and plotted the assassination of the
conductor every time he opened the door. I felt myself sensibly
barbarizing, and would have shared Colonel Jack’s bed in the ash-hole of
the glass-furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more
charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was natural enough
that Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pontus by the number
of winters.
Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister,
Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris:
Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I
In Pontus was, thrice Euxine’s wave made hard.
Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel in which Winter
and Summer dispute which is the better man. It is not without a kind of
rough and inchoate humor, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets
tolerably fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of living,
with that contempt of poverty which is the weak spot in the burly
English nature.
Jà Dieu ne place que me avyenge
Que ne face plus honour
Et plus despenz en un soul jour
Que vus en tote vostre vie:
Now God forbid it hap to me
That I make not more great display,
And spend more in a single day
Than you can do in all your life.
The best touch, perhaps, is Winter’s claim for credit as a mender of the
highways, which was not without point when every road in Europe was a
quagmire during a good part of the year unless it was bottomed on some
remains of Roman engineering.
Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre
Et à bon droit le dey estre,
Quant de la bowe face caucé
Par un petit de geelé:
Master and lord I am, says he,
And of good right so ought to be,
Since I make causeys, safely crost,
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost.
But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door company.
Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any,
confesses,
“The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ear, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence.”
Winter was literally “the inverted year,” as Thomson called him; for
such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What
cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace’s _dissolve
frigus ligna super foco large reponens_, so pleasantly associated with
the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of
Walton’s friend Cotton, which won the praise of Wordsworth:--
“Let us home,
Our mortal enemy is come;
Winter and all his blustering train
Have made a voyage o’er the main.
* * * * *
“Fly, fly, the foe advances fast;
Into our fortress let us haste.
Where all the roarers of the north
Can neither storm nor starve us forth.
“There underground a magazine
Of sovereign juice is cellared in,
Liquor that will the siege maintain
Should Phœbus ne’er return again.
* * * * *
“Whilst we together jovial sit
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit,
Where, though bleak winds confine us home
Our fancies round the world shall roam.”
Thomson’s view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile one, though he
does justice to his grandeur.
“Thus Winter falls,
A heavy gloom oppressive o’er the world,
Through Nature shedding influence malign.”
He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though more
refined:--
“While without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene,
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead.”
Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, follows Thomson.
With him, too, “Winter desolates the year,” and
“How pleasing wears the wintry night
Spent with the old illustrious dead!
While by the taper’s trembling light
I seem those awful scenes to tread
Where chiefs or legislators lie,” &c.
Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had the conceptions of a
great poet with less faculty than many a little one, and is one of those
versifiers of whom it is enough to say that we are always willing to
break him off in the middle with an &c., well knowing that what follows
is but the coming-round again of what went before, marching in a circle
with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder
that the short days of that cloudy northern climate should have added to
winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have
experienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is alleviated by the
longer daylight and the pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in
Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost
lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the
chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in
the sky. The enforced seclusion of the season makes it the time for
serious study and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken
time. This is why Milton said “that his vein never happily flowed but
from the autumnal equinox to the vernal,” though in his twentieth year
he had written, on the return of spring,--
Fallor? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest?
Err I? or do the powers of song return
To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring?
Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the cheerfulness
of snow in sunshine. His _Harz-reise im Winter_ gives no hint of it, for
that is a diluted reminiscence of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of
Job in nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting and
characteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during the
journey, he says: “It is beautiful indeed; the mist heaps itself
together in light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, and the snow over
everything gives back a feeling of gayety.” But I find in Cowper the
first recognition of a general amiability in Winter. The gentleness of
his temper, and the wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural for
him to find good in everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed
distilled from the darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries compelled him
against his will to see in _that_ the one evil thing made by a God whose
goodness is over all his works. Cowper’s two walks in the morning and
noon of a winter’s day are delightful, so long as he contrives to let
himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape. Your muscles
grow springy, and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along
with him. You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs
lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing that
gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than the easy verses of
this escaped hypochondriac. But Cowper also preferred his sheltered
garden-walk to those robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the
depressing influence of the darkened year. In December, 1780, he writes:
“At this season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfortable climate,
it is no easy matter for the owner of a mind like mine to divert it from
sad subjects, and to fix it upon such as may administer to its
amusement.” Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton?
Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual feeling, for it
is only there that poets disenthral themselves of their reserve and
become fully possessed of their greatest charm,--the power of being
franker than other men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms
his preference of the country to the city even in winter:--
“But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed
By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt,
And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure
From clamor, and whose very silence charms,
To be preferred to smoke?...
They would be, were not madness in the head
And folly in the heart; were England now
What England was, plain, hospitable, kind,
And undebauched.”
The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking mainly of fireside
delights, not of the blusterous companionship of nature. This appears
even more clearly in the Fourth Book:--
“O Winter, ruler of the inverted year”;
but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant it always is to
track poets through the gardens of their predecessors and find out
their likings by a flower snapped off here and there to garnish their
own nosegays. Cowper had been reading Thomson, and “the inverted year”
pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the zodiac
moving round through its spaces infinite. He could not help loving a
handy Latinism (especially with elision beauty added), any more than
Gray, any more than Wordsworth,--on the sly. But the member for Olney
has the floor:--
“O Winter, ruler of the inverted year,
Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled,
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,
But urged by storms along its slippery way,
I love thee all unlovely as thou seem’st,
And dreaded as thou art! Thou hold’st the sun
A prisoner in the yet undawning east,
Shortening his journey between morn and noon,
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,
Down to the rosy west, but kindly still
Compensating his loss with added hours
Of social converse and instructive ease,
And gathering at short notice, in one group,
The family dispersed, and fixing thought,
Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares.
I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening know.”
I call this a good _human_ bit of writing, imaginative, too,--not so
flushed, not so ... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word!) as the
modern style since poets have got hold of a theory that imagination is
common-sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed,--but
wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly
occupied with its theme. To me Cowper is still the best of our
descriptive poets for every-day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has!
How he heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening seclusion,
by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge! That horn has rung in
my ears ever since I first heard it, during the consulate of the second
Adams. Wordsworth strikes a deeper note; but does it not sometimes come
over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for
a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavor of W.
W.? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that--but! For my part, I will
make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can’t look at a mountain
without fancying the late laureate’s gigantic Roman nose thrust between
me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift’s profane version of _Romanos
rerum dominos_ into _Roman nose! a rare un! dom your nose!_ But do I
judge verses, then, by the impression made on me by the man who wrote
them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the character
and its intellectual product are inextricably interfused.
If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his magnificent
skating-scene in the “Prelude”) has not much to say for winter out of
doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason
may possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter storms bring
rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas visits of Crabb
Robinson, because they “helped him through the winter.” His only hearty
praise of winter is when, as Général Février, he defeats the French:--
“Humanity, delighting to behold
A fond reflection of her own decay,
Hath painted Winter like a traveller old,
Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day,
In hooded mantle, limping o’er the plain
As though his weakness were disturbed by pain:
Or, if a juster fancy should allow
An undisputed symbol of command,
The chosen sceptre is a withered bough
Infirmly grasped within a withered hand.
These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn;
But mighty Winter the device shall scorn.”