UNSEASONABLE WEATHER.
THE unseasonably bad weather of this week, coming as it has at the close of an unusually long and severe winter, has given a certain pungency of sympathy to the usual introductory conventionalities of English talk, that may be reckoned as some- thing of a set-off against the miseries of the weather itself. You find strangers sympathising on the subject, on their first acquaintanceship, with a kind of ardour that almost equals or surpasses the effect of profound political sympathy. They ex- change their thoughts on the spring with an emotion almost approaching that of prisoners in neighbouring cells who have established some method of secret conversation. Out of the depth and intensity of the common gloom there flashes a ray of warm fellow-feeling, which at least touches the confines of mutual regard. Indeed, the weather makes otherwise conven- tional young ladies the next thing to original, and mute middle- aged men all but eloquent. The adjectives and illustrations of their suffering are selected with a propriety and an obvious refer- ence to distinct personal experience, that are clearly above the ordinary conversational powers of the speakers. "They learn in suffering what they teach," not exactly "in song," but in language raised a point or two above common-place. Indeed the weather is having something of the effect which a war on our own soil, or a famine, or a pestilence, woullil have in a much greater degree. It is making men think of the same thing in the same way, and with an energy of fellow-feeling that cancels a certain amount of that cold, stiff, superficial reserve for which, as a nation, we are distinguished. If this goes on, the Positivists themselves, in spite of their sublime composure, will be moved to modify their "commemora- tion" of Space, and to speak of it not only with gentle encomium and regard, as having always been of great service to man, and as "destined to be of greater by his wise use, as it becomes the recognised seat of abstraction, the seat of the higher laws which collectively constitute the Destiny of man," but also with a cer- tain accent of warning and reproach, as the scat of those biting winds and unrelenting snow-storms, which collectively modify the Destiny of man in a sense which even the great Pontiff of Positivism himself would have regretted, if only because he had wholly failed to anticipate it.
No doubt, amongst those who read the newspapers, the in- tensity of the feeling with which the horrors of the weather is regarded, is partly due to the increased suffering caused by the American telegrams, which send us the earliest notice of all the miseries we are to expect, and thereby greatly add to them, while they never give us a single happy anticipation to balance these prophecies of evil. It is like having all your bills sent in before they are due, without even any "anticipation sketch- estimate" of your resources for paying them. There is no doubt that these weather forecasts have touched our life with a new melancholy, which, especially in a season like this, tells seriously on the classes who are unwise enough to consult them. Even in the few genial spring days we have had, the weather forecast of the Times has played the part of the skull at the Egyptian feast, to bid us be quite sure that the festivity of the moment was not to last. The coming adversity cast its shadow over the brief prosperity, and made men shudder at the approaching snow-storm, even while the sun shone.
But there is a certain advantage even in unseasonable weather, besides the advantage of breaking through the frost of English manner, and opening a vein of sympathy on the very surface of English life. It has, we imagine, a very great, though to a considerable extent unconscious, influence in moulding the practical logic of men. When they see, as they so often do, the chief cause to which the variation of the seasons is due, not only counteracted for considerable periods together by minor causes, but so far counteracted that, but for the invariable changes in the length of the day, they would suppose that that chief cause of seasonal change itself had been seriously impaired, they get a lesson in "the logic of facts" which sticks by them, however little they attend to it at the time, and seriously affects all their habits of practical life. And indeed, it is the sort of lesson which Englishmen very much need to have repeated at the present time. They see before them a time of political and of commercial depression,—of re- action in politics, and of contraction in trade,—which they are, very many of them, disposed to treat as if it were to endure. They might really just as well regard the unseasonable weather pf the spring as likely to last through the year, and expect a long succession of severe frosts in July, and of biting snow-storms iu August. The truth is that particular combinations of minor causes will neutralise for a long time even the most potent cause of all amongst the many causes which affect a particular phenomenon. Lord Beaconsfield is one of those minor causes in politics which have averted beyond its due season the return of the political sunshine ; he has been in the world of politics what Mr. Kinglake once described as "a mysterious, unaccount- able, uncomfortable work of God, which may have been sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter." Famine, protection, and political unrest are among the other temporary causes which have averted beyond its due season the return of commercial prosperity. But there is no more reason to suppose that this combination of temporary causes can avert the steady pres- sure of the permanent cause tending to a mollification of the political and commercial, than of the physical season. We know that the frosts and snow-storms will not endure, because we know that the same cause which leads to the lengthening of the day must eventually lead to the preponderance of light and heat over darkness and cold. And so we know that Lord Beaconsfield and his showy mismanagement cannot endure,— that special phenomena like famines cannot endure,—that even if Protection in some form endures, it cannot wholly cancel all the accumulations of industry, or blind completely the eyes of ordinary sagacity ; and that if it is certain that, to some extent, rashness and rascality,—the main causes of widespread distrust, —will endure, yet they will, for a time, be greatly diminished by the severe lessons which their consequences bring. So long as the knowledge, inventiveness, and industry of the world go on accumulating, and the moral vices do not positively gain on the virtues of xnau, we may feel quite certain that the steady causes which tend to political and commercial prosperity are gaining ground, as surely as the sun gains in approach towards the zenith from month to month,—and this, even though the temporary causes which prevent the natural result from being seen, are so curiously combined for the moment, that the issue is as difficult to discern as it is to see the progress towards genial weather between January and March. And on this point the uncomfortable American telegrams which are always discounting our griefs, and which never discount our joys, no doubt add to the impressiveness of this lesson in the logic of facts. We know that the Americans can send us word only of temporary causes. If they are suffering from severe weather, and the wind is either westerly, or rotating with a westerly movement of its centre, they know that we shall probably have their weather before long ; and this, or something like this, is the basis of most of their predictions. But this is, on the very face of it, a purely temporary phenomenon, which, whatever its cause, cannot well be due to anything likely to out- weigh the permanent effect of the sun, as it rises day by day higher in the heavens ; and so we have fair notice, even with the worst news, that the cause of that news is not one to vie for a moment with the steady and constant cause promising us more light and more heat. Unseasonable weather is, therefore, a sort of practical lesson in the logic of facts,—a useful warning that when everything seems to be going in the opposite direction to that we had had, on the whole, a fair reason to expect, we need not be in any degree discomposed, so long as the reactionary causes are but temporary, and the permanent causes tend to a revival of all the energies which seem for the time to be paralysed or re3trained.
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