AND ANOTHER THING
Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and reassuring thoughts about destiny
PAUL JOHNSON
A week ago, our garden was like the Ama- zonian forest, luxuriating in dark, dense foliage which the steady variations of sum- mer heat, sun and rain had brought out in choking abundance. Then we hired a deter- mined, brawny New Zealander and his two vigorous assistants. These three muscular young men, in the course of a long, toilsome day, removed immense quantities of green- ery and cut back fiercely the woody branches and stalks beneath, so that now the entire area is empty, trim, bare, stripped, tidy, stark, bony and emaciated. It is as though the garden, after months of gluttony and greedy self-indulgence, reflected in sprawl- ing quantities of vegetable flesh, had been frogmarched into a draconian health farm, starved and pummelled and exercised, and had suddenly emerged as an unrecognisable botanical Twiggy. And to top it all, autumn is now eroding what little is left. Outside the window of my study, where I write, two acri- monious pigeons, fighting in the branches of the almond tree, have just brought down hundreds of browning leaves which other- wise might have clung on for a few more days.
I like the seasons. My idea of a peniten- tial climate is to be stuck in southern Cali- fornia or the Caribbean, or some Pacific paradise where the seasons are impercepti- ble. The pulsating march of time, reflected first in the icy protective cover of winter, then in thawings and sproutings, in growth and luxurious superabundance, finally in decay and senescence and loss, before clos- ing down again for rest — and each of these perennial but still fresh and surpris- ing phases marked by characteristic winds and temperatures, clouds and fruits, special treats, climatic adversities and moods — is the very essence of the dynamic variety which makes life fascinating and creative. Autumn is melancholy but there is a time for melancholy, which has its own rewards, pleasures and imaginative compensations. I like to see those myriad seasonal birds, the true international jet-setters, gathering and circling as they prepare to board their air currents to winter resorts. No worries about tickets or luggage or bills to pay for these happy travellers! I like to see gardeners pil- ing up the fallen leaves in neat pyres and skilfully lighting them in such a way that regular spirals of sweet smoke curl up from them until the whole is usefully consumed.
My favourite colours are those of winter, especially in the Quantocks, where, though the days are short, they are often clear and golden, bringing out the deep blues and warm browns, the almost midnight greens. But autumn colours are fine too, especially what Shelley calls the 'hectic' reds, and those gradated yellows which no human artistry can ever quite reproduce in paint. And I like the tart taste of the air, mood- swinging between shiny clarity and mist, damp and tangy on the tongue.
Most people, I think, welcome all the seasons and would be lost without them. That must be the reason why those four long poems by James Thomson — a raw- boned Scot with not much of elegance to recommend him, who sometimes wrote English as though (to use Burke's phrase) it were a dead language he understood but could not speak properly — were such a sensational success in the London of Hoga- rth. That crude, violent, lustful and com- mercial society took Thomson's Seasons to its rough heart because they struck a popu- lar nerve which jangled sympathetically in everyone's body. People had always taken the seasons for granted, had welcomed, even loved them subconsciously, but Thom- son taught them to give these redolent quarterings of the year positive artistic and moral merits. It was the beginning of a new sensibility which prefigured romanticism, and so the modern age. So this (to us) pon- derous work became the most successful My wife finally understood me.' volume of poetry ever published, was set to music by Haydn and inspired countless painters, print-makers and genteel embroi- derers to furnish images.
Those of us brought up in the Western cul- tural-religious tradition, springing from clas- sical Greece and Rome and the Hebrew Bible, reject the primitive notion of life as an endless repetitive cycle, as it is seen further east and in the animal world. We see time as an arrow, flying purposefully from the begin- ning of history to its unforeseen but inescapable climax. We accept, most of us anyway, that we have a beginning and an end, just as the planet and whole universe do — the entire creation — and we welcome the fact that we are born to die, and that one day time, and everything else, must have a stop. So we will have nothing to do with rein- carnation and pantheism and all the other forms of pseudo-mystical escapism. Whether or not we believe in eternity, the phase of being which opens up after time has stopped, we face what the future holds for us squarely and bravely.
All the same, we like, we value the sea- sons. Each cycle, we know, is part of the arrow of time, and brings us closer to our eventual destiny or annihilation. But they are a reassuring aspect of the rhythm of continu- ing life or, to vary the metaphor, the com- fortable, worn but never threadbare furni- ture of chronology. They were waxing and waning for millennia before we were born, and will be pursuing their orderly and stately progress long after we have rotted into the soil. And autumn, as the timekeeper of the seasons, the phase which marks this year's maturity from next year's conception, is the one we feel most and notice most, because it arouses in us such mixed feelings. A Stone Age man, living in the heights over the Thames Valley, will have sniffed the definite arrival of autumn just as I did on Sunday, and made elaborate calcula- tions and dispositions accordingly. Julius Caesar will have worked its coming into his military calculations and begun to think of winter quarters. Its unusual delay, in the Russia of 1812, lulled Bonaparte into false security and fatal error. And people who will regard us as ignorant savages will be welcoming or dreading or cursing or simply putting up with autumn, just as we do, in thousands of years' time. Will they still be reading Keats on the subject, as I have just done? I hope so, for their sakes, poor, unborn philistines!
Previous page
