THE CHARM OF WINTER SCENERY.
THE present writer, when praising the charms of the country and the superiority of a green field to Fleet Street, is sometimes told by his friends that such talk is well enough as regards summer in the country, but that winter is a different thing. The doleful nature of country life in the winter is then depicted in language of exaggerated gloom. The dripping, leafless trees, the roads ankle-deep in mud, the short dark days and the long dreary evenings with no theatres or brilliant restaurants, and with your nearest friend two miles away. Such is the criticism of winter in the country,—generally pro. ceeding from persons who know it from hearsay and who are as much attached to London bricks as Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb. We do not purpose to balance the conflicting claims of a London and a country winter, though we may point out that the length of the day is the same in either case, that trees in any guise are at least as pleasant objects to gaze at as the houses in the Strand, and that, whereas with stout boots you need not mind the muddiest country road in England, in London on a dirty day a couple of passing hansoms may ruin your clean collar and splash your best overcoat from top to bottom in the space of one minute. What we design is to say a word for the exquisite loveliness of winter scenery.
As one grows older many of one's early tastes give way to riper and very different feelings :—
" Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age."
In no sphere of interest does this change manifest itself more than in regard to scenery. The young. full of light romance, are all for rugged, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls which haunt them, as in the case of Wordsworth's youth, like a passion, wild ravines, fearful precipices, great glaciers, and fields of snow. At no time will a man of imagination be unmoved by these more unusual features of Nature, but as life proceeds he will care less for them than for the placid, sylvan scenery so common in England, yet so satisfying, so healing, to the soul. As in literature and art, it is not the startling, the bizarre, the grandiose, but the sane, the simple, the universal, which lives through the ages, so in Nature it is the calm, the simple, the common, which finds its charmed way into the depths of the human heart. Where would one rather live permanently (climate apart),—amid the awful gorges and roaring torrents of the Simplon, or among the green hills and dales, the blooming orchards and yellow cornfields of many an English shire ? Youth may declare for the romantic regions of rocks and ice, but the mature mind will find its permanent source of happiness in the quiet and mellow beauty of the simple woodland and green pasture. The contrast of feeling about winter and summer scenery is somewhat analogous. Summer has, in the main, had it her way with the young and with the romantic poets who write for the young. "Summer is a-coming in," as the old English song says, is the delighted cry of youth, to whom the wintry woods merely present " bare, rained choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." Summer seems the season of hope, winter that of decay. The blood leaps in the pulse as the sap rises in the tree, the carol of the birds is answered by the merry shout of youth. Well, it is true that in the very earliest days of summer, while the trees are still arrayed in their first green, there is a certain rare beauty which enchants all hearts. But how soon it is over, especially in the town. A week of unusual beat will change the whole face of things, and once changed you cannot regain that early leafy paraslise—e
"Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade."
What does the rest of summer yield? The finest song-birds soon cease, the blackbird ceases to trill in the neighbouring wood, the cuckoo is flying south, masses of dull green replace that exquisite verdure the vision of which is but a memory, the eternal blue of the sky and the dusty, arid white of the road irritate, the sun scorches, you pant for freshening air and cooling rain. July and August, it is true, yield some of the most brilliant flowers that adorn our landscape, but in many respects they are the least interesting and pleasure- giving months of the year. Their burning sunshine has neither the glad brightness of May nor the soft, mellow beams of October. Their foliage, like prosaic middle life, has neither the tender loveliness of spring nor the grey, almost spiritual, beauty of winter.
Now, if we turn to winter scenery, it is this mystic, all but spiritual, aspect which most appeals to our mind. Take a spacious park on a fine winter afternoon about an hour before sunset ; and, if we except the most sublime Alpine solitudes, what can be more ethereal in its beauty, what can suggest more subtly to the sensitive mind the close, vital contact of spiritual life ? The air is still with that dead stillness which only winter knows ; no wind sweeps the leaves, no insect hums in the breeze. The Western sky is a sea of pale golden and crimson light, infinite gradations of delicate colour, and ranged in naked outline against it see the trees. The young passing passion of spring, the dull, monotonous, settled green of summer, the yellow decay of autumn have all suc- ceeded one another in Nature's year of miracle, and the trees are dead ; their skeletons are there. But what delicacy of beauty ! You see each tiniest twig standing out against the yellow light, and you feel a subtle thrill of emotion as the very spirit of Nature unveils herself before you. The grosser aspects of things die away, you scarcely breathe, so impres- sive is the witchery ; you almost feel as one disembodied, dead, passed into a world where the Platonic copies of things are. If in spring and early summer one is conscious of the fullness of sensuous life, in these ideal winter days the mind which is attuned to the external scene is equally conscious of a vast spiritual life in which man and Nature are subtly enfolded. The heat of passion is over, and reason and calm imagination hold their sway.
It may be said that we have idealised winter, which is not all made up of golden sunshine and peaceful parks. But even on the dullest day, on the muddiest country road, aspects of remarkable beauty appeal with the more power since we are not, as in summer, oppressed by an embarrass. ment of riches. Our appetite is not cloyed, the wood is not hidden by the trees. In an open winter such as the actual modern English winter is and the conventional winter of the Christmas cards is not, one notes the rich chocolate of the upturned soil,—a colour more deeply satisfying than at any other time. The dusty hedgerows have been cleansed, and the fluttering leaves of the blackberry bushes present a fresh- ness of green which almost startles you as you see it against the background of bare, delicate stems, be-diamonded by Nature's own hand. The little bite of green in the wood- land paths, nestling in their beds of brown and yellow leaves, are dearer than the rank growth of early May. The economy of Nature fills you with perpetual surprises; she can do without all that earlier wealth you thought so captivating ; the very bareness of her winter beauty steals into your heart, and you surrender without conditions. You begin to feel in love with the Cinderella of the seasons And in England, where geological conditions have given us such a wondrous variety within so small an area, a little world in itself " set in a silver sea," we may find, even in the winter season, a wealth of life and a series of scenic effects which should take from winter the reproach, so undeserved, of being unattractive. Cowper did not find it so, nor Thomson, nor Wordsworth. But we confess we are still waiting for the poet and the artist who will do supreme justice to the English winter.
Previous page
