How the snow lights up the 'dark backward and abysm of time'
PALL JOHNSON
Snow is the great transformer. It obliterates countless objects, including what is dingy, worn and ugly, so that it appears to purify and to render the world new, pristine, immaculate, as though God had just taken it out of its Christmas box of tissue paper and cellophane. But other objects it heightens. The tree-trunks and naked branches become black and significant against the whiteness, as though they really were the ebony bones of the landscape, the skeletal infrastructure holding all together. Hedgerows which you hardly notice as a rule suddenly become high, menacing walls of black granite, barring entry to fields of virgin snow. The woods are smoky grey fastnesses of cold darkness, housing a population of black furry creatures, for the delicate gradations of colour which mark them in temperate times are indistinguishable in the wintry, monochrome world.
Most remarkable of all is the way the fallen snow usurps the sky. One of the most successful of all chilly paintings, Old Brueghel's 'Hunters in the Snow', now the pride of the Vienna Museum, makes the point powerfully. As the dark hunters, with their pack of greyhounds and terriers, stride down the frozen hill towards the warm village at the bottom, you suddenly realise that the snow is the source of light. Its reflections alone enable you to distinguish man from beast and cottage from barn. For though it is daylight, the sky is an impenetrable grey, glowering down darkly on the rigid countryside. As I look out of the window now — it is 10.15 in the morning — I see nothing but opaline clouds of sooty moisture, the colour of wet slate, hovering obscurely over the dazzling white hills. In snowy times, the sky may be yellow, streaked with red, towards evening, but this glows feebly; it does not cast light. For most of the day, the sky is merely a dark and ghostly backdrop to the snow from which all radiance comes. That in itself is a joy to painters, for it breaks all the rules of illumination, turns the world upside down and enables them to see everything with fresh eyes.
This transforming effect is strikingly illustrated in a work which hangs in the Ca' Pesaro. It was painted by that grand and neglected master. Ippolito Caffi, in 1840. He called it 'Snow and Fog on the Grand Canal', and that is exactly what it portrays. Canaletto's blue and white skies are ban ished. There are no shadows, or sunlight to pick out the architectural details of palace and church. The flaunting figures in silk, satin and velvet are hidden inside, by the fire. All Caffi shows are three melancholy gondolas, black as sin and heavily laden, conveying muffled workers to their business. The snow rests on the cornices, the sloping roofs and the tops of the chimney funnels. It picks out the wooden knobs on those striped posts to which the gondolas are tied. No stripes now, however: they are invisible. The glorious gradations of the palazzo colours — lime green, salmon pink, cerulean, raw sienna and burnt ochre — all are merged in a misty yellow-brown, which is not so much a colour as a suggestion of the colours which lie beneath, if only you could see them. The cold, oleaginous waters of the canal reflect this dense monochrome, and the enveloping blue-grey haze into which it recedes. Visibility is no more than 50 yards, so that you look up the canal not into the crystalline grandeur of the baroque and the rococo but into the blurred outlines and the clumsy shapes of the Dark Ages. This is a chill, shivering, hungry and colour-starved Venice, from which all sources of light — save perhaps a submarine glow from the murky waters themselves — have been dowsed, and you see nothing lit up at all, merely subtle gradations of darkness.
The world of snow is not merely dim and colourless; it is silent too. Living creatures, unlike ourselves, are not so foolish as to welcome the snow as a delightful rarity, an invitation to play and make-believe. They are consternated by its coming. On Thursday morning, when I woke up at dawn, I knew it had been snowing before I even went to the window, for the entire world was soundless. The geese slept or cowered. The ducks were struck dumb; their pond was frozen, its reedy rim bound fast in icy bonds. No sign of the chickens, and their cock had nothing to crow about. The small birds who infest our eaves, and fly in and out of the old stables, had vanished. No crow perched on the telegraph lines. The buzzards, normally up early and on patrol, were still in their nests. And where were the sheep — or indeed the cows? Not a sign. Animals know that a snowfall, bringing cruel ice and iron-hard ground, adds an extra dimension of difficulty to their daily struggle for life, their constant, unremitting efforts to find enough food each day to keep themselves warm and nourished. They cling to their beds till hunger drives them out.
If we look into the animal world of the birds and wild creatures, we see the human world of old, before our discovery of mechanical energy, and our ingenuity in building things of iron and steel to exploit it, made our lives so infinitely easier. Not so many centuries ago, life was a daily struggle for nine tenths of the human race. It had to think in the short term: 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' Old men and women and small children died in the night of cold and hunger, as small birds do now in wintertime. Most human energy and thought and cunning went into staying alive, until the next day brought its own problems. Gathering enough to eat was the main, often the sole, occupation in life, as it still is for the wild creatures of the woods. And not just the wild ones, either. If the sheep which graze on the Quantock hills could speak, what a troubling tale they would have to tell. What is your occupation in life? 'Eating.' What is your ambition? 'Staying alive one more day.'
I often give silent thanks to those unknown, unknowable forebears who, over countless generations, freed us from the iron grip of subsistence living. They are the real heroes of humanity, if truth be told. The rest was comparatively easy. And we are now hurtling into the future so fast that new marvels have become reality before most of us are aware they are theoretically possible. Where will it all end? Perhaps in the chaos from which we climbed, so slowly and painfully, many millennia ago. There is nothing like a brief spell of snqw and ice — once so formidable to' man, still terrifying to many small creatures — to set us thinking about the dark backward and abysm of time.
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