Winter Read online

  For fear of falling;

  To go fast, to slip and fall down;

  To go on the ice again and run fast

  Until the ice cracks and opens up;

  To hear coming out of the iron gates

  Sirocco, Boreas and all the winds at war:

  That’s winter! but of a kind to gladden one’s heart.

  This is one of the early intimations we have in modern times of there being something specifically pleasure-giving, pleasure-seeking, about winter. A Venetian winter — of the kind that Vivaldi, with his all-girl orchestra at the Pietà who first played this piece, knew — is not exactly a Whitehorse winter. But it is more biting than one might expect, as any December visitor to Venice knows, and the decision to embrace it, to embroider it, to make it a musical subject as pleasing as any other is a moment to “gladden one’s heart.”

  Now, while I said my subject is not winter as a physical fact but rather winter as a poetic act — winter in mind rather than winter in matter — nonetheless those subjects raise a simple question: What is winter? Why do we have winter? What is its reality? So, with Vivaldi’s sharp strumming still in our ears, let me discuss briefly, and as best as a non-meteorologist can, why real winter happens and why real winter is cold.

  Real winter — the planetary fact rather than the enshrined season — comes to us for a simple reason: the planet tilts. The punishment that Milton’s God gives to Adam and Eve, of placing the planet’s axis at an angle, really is the reason we have winter. As the planet passes through its orbit, we get less sunlight. Less sunlight makes us a lot colder. It cools the air and brings us winter. What before was water freezes in ponds and lakes and rivers and becomes ice; what before was rain freezes in clouds and becomes snow. And that, very simply, is that.

  Cold, of course, is in itself a variable, a relative concept. The world is always weather-tilted, but there have been warmer periods in earth’s history, when the poles themselves were temperate and the temperature of the seawater around the South Pole practically tropical. And, of course, there have been colder periods, ice ages, when what we experience now as winter ran right through the year. In this way, what we mean by winter is, more narrowly, the experience of most northern climates as we feel it now, and have felt it for most of the past few thousand years.

  Winter also arrives in long cycles, ice ages that come and go. We all know about the great ice age — which has been the subject of animated movies and elementary school classes — the vast one that swept over the planet fifty thousand years ago, but most climate scientists believe, and most historians second this belief, that for reasons still not well understood, a second and smaller and shorter ice age conquered our planet sometime between 1550 and 1850. Whether that cooling was limited to the northern hemisphere or was in fact earth-wide, it is certainly the case that Europe was much colder between 1550 and 1850 than it had been in the 2,000 years before or the 150 years since.

  And as a consequence, the pre-modern winter scenes — those Bruegel pictures of hunters in the snow, the Dutch pictures of skaters on the ice, all of that world of Netherlandish recreation — are occasional art owed to the tiny period when people were first fully aware that the world had suddenly become very cold. There was, one might say, a kind of false spring of winter art right around the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much of the pre-modern winter material — Shakespeare’s poem in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “When icicles hang” (the one with the great Greasy Joan who doth keel the pot) — comes from that period. And that little ice age persisted, if not at that same extreme of cold, right through the eighteenth century, and even well into the nineteenth, and in that little ice age people expected the world to be very, very cold in winter. (That’s why you always have a white Christmas in eighteenth-century English literature; it’s why, as no longer happens, the canals of Holland froze over.)

  Yet, over time, one has the sense that what had been exciting in its first appearance became merely tiresome in its extension. So much so that as we approach the transition period between old and new, as we approach the birth of modern time — close to the moment when Vivaldi wrote his Four Seasons — we find the great Dr. Samuel Johnson sitting down in 1747 to write a poem called “The Winter’s Walk.” He writes:

  Behold, my fair, where’er we rove,

  What dreary prospects round us rise,

  The naked hill, the leafless grove,

  The hoary ground, the frowning skies,

  Nor only through the wasted plane,

  Stern Winter is thy force confess’d;

  Still wider spread thy horrid reign,

  I feel thy power usurp my breast.

  That’s a perfect sober statement of the neoclassical Augustan view of winter, as something impressive in its way but fundamentally negative, fundamentally unappealing, fundamentally off. Naked hills, frowning skies, horrid rain . . . Dating Dr. Johnson in December was no fun.

  Perhaps the first unmistakable clear statement of an entirely new and modern attitude towards winter — neither the sporadic excitement of the little ice age nor the depression of the neoclassical attitude — is a poem written right towards the end of the eighteenth century by the modest and largely forgotten but gifted British poet William Cowper. Cowper was famous in his day as a writer of hymns and as a maker of popular verse. But in truth he had the most unique and undervalued of all poetic gifts, and that was the gift of chattiness. He was a wonderfully chatty poet. We tend to underrate chattiness in poets because we like sublime lyricism or melodramatic confession, but the ability to write a conversational poem (to give it a more dignified name), and to make it sound like conversation while still looking like a poem, is one of the rarest poetic gifts.

  In 1783 Cowper wrote to a friend, “I see the winter approaching without much concern, though a passionate lover of fine weather, and the pleasant scenes of summer, but the long evenings have their comforts too, and there is hardly to be found upon earth, I suppose, so snug a creature as an Englishman by the fireside in the winter.” And in a poem he wrote in 1785, “The Winter Evening,” he turns that honest confessed pleasure into a beautifully chatty bit of poetry. He describes at length the arrival of the coachman at his suburban cottage — that herald of modernity coming from London to his rather remote vicarage — bringing him the paper full of parliamentary news, and the poet sitting down by the fire to read it, a cup of hot tea at his side. It’s an incredibly modern moment: a little caffeine in one hand, the newspaper in the other hand, a fire going, while you’re taking in all the political news of the metropolis at a reassuring and comforting distance. And after reading his newspaper he writes,

  O winter, ruler of the inverted year,

  Thy scatter’d hair with sleet like ashes fill’d,

  Thy breath congeal’d upon thy lips, thy cheeks

  Fringed with a beard made white with other snows

  Than those of age, thy forehead wrapp’d in clouds,

  A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne

  A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,

  But urg’d by storms along its slippery way,

  I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,

  And dreaded as thou art! . . .

  I crown thee king of intimate delights,

  Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,

  And all the comforts that the lowly roof

  Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours

  Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

  What an alteration in twenty-odd years! No longer winter as the grim overlord of Dr. Johnson’s not very winning walk, but Winter, “king of intimate delights and fireside enjoyments,” drawing the family near. Now the whole new world of the bourgeois family, sharing one common hearth, one common table, is made more appealing in winter than it is at any other time of the year. That’s Cowper’s new
view. In his own simple, chatty, informal, middle-class way, Cowper announces a profound switch, a change in sensibility. It is a change that we tend to coalesce around a philosophical ideal that historians like to call “the picturesque” — turning to nature not as a thing to be feared or even as a thing to seek religious comfort from, but as a thing simply to enjoy, to take pleasure in. “I love thee, all unlovely as thou seemst.”

  Now, all poems have their place in time, and there is a great deal of dour economic history going on in the background here. One of the things that beleaguered England throughout the eighteenth century was, in effect, a crisis of “peak wood.” The entire island was being deforested, and fuel-wood prices rose ten times in the span of eighty years, so the problem of how you were going to heat all those cottages was enormous. But by the time Cowper is writing, that problem has largely been solved by the beginnings of a full-fledged coal industry, and though Cowper is probably sitting by a wood-burning fire, the existence of cheap and abundant coal has brought down the price of wood and helped invent those modern pleasures — a newspaper delivered to your door, warmth in the kitchen, and the family gathered round.

  This is the first unambiguous declaration of the winter picturesque, winter as all the more lovely because it is so entirely exterior. With Cowper we’re not simply experiencing an emotion that has never been registered before; in a sense we are experiencing an emotion that has never been felt before. For the first time you can have a cheap fire and a family around it and winter going on outside. A crucial zone of safety has been sought and found (or bought, at least, by a snug and lucky few). The boy at the window is born today.

  But there’s another feeling about winter that begins to appear for the first time in the same orbit of English poets. That’s not a sense of the winter picturesque, of winter as soothing, comforting, or appealing — by its very forbidding nature forcing people closer together indoors. It’s the opposite sense: of winter as a mysterious magnetic season that the wanderer is expelled into for his own good, for the purification and improvement of his soul. And you find that new emotion first, appropriately enough, right at the turn of the century — in 1799, when the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge goes to Germany on a winter walking trip and writes home to his wife:

  But when first the ice fell on the lake, and the whole lake was frozen, one huge piece of thick transparent glass, O my God! what sublime scenery have I beheld. Of a morning when I have seen the little lake covered with Mist; when the Sun peeped over the Hill, the Mist broke in the middle, and at last stood as the waters of the Red Sea are said to have done when the Israelites passed — and between these two walls of Mist the Sunlight burnt upon the Ice in a strait road of golden Fire, all across the lake . . . About a month ago the vehemence of the wind had shattered the Ice — part of it, quite shattered, was driven to shore and had frozen anew; this was of a deep blue, and represented [resembled] an agitated sea — the water that ran up between the great islands of ice shone of a yellow green (it was at sunset) and all these scattered islands of smooth ice were blood; intensely bright blood.

  “What sublime scenery I have beheld!” Coleridge’s words are one of those rare passages of prose that truly mark the arrival of an epoch. It would be impossible to find anything like it in European literature only twenty-five years before. The intellectual machinery might have been in place, but not the immediate emotional pressure. This kind of love of the winter scene is not of the force outside pressing in on the window, bringing the family together. Instead it is for the ice-spirit pulling us out.

  That new idea is, of course, most often associated with Edmund Burke’s great essay on the sublime and beautiful, from the middle of the eighteenth century. Burke’s was one of the three or four most powerful ideas in the history of thought, because he wrenched aesthetics away from an insipid idea of beauty towards recognition of the full span of human sympathy. Oceans and thunderstorms, precipices and abysses, towering volcanoes and, above all, snow-capped mountains — they rival and outdo the heritage of classical beauty exactly because they frighten us; they fill us with fear, with awe, with a sense of the inestimable mystery of the world. This winter window is wrenched open by the lever of the sublime.

  And beyond that there is a sense, one that will fill the minds of the artists of winter throughout the nineteenth century, that what makes winter wonderful, what makes winter sublime, what makes winter essential is this sense that you can project onto its forms of ice and snow anything you want to see. To Coleridge the sun on the ice looks as it did when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. Later he goes on to say that “the water that ran up between the great islands of ice shone of a yellow green . . . and all these scattered islands of smooth ice were blood; intensely bright blood.” Snow and ice, the winter forms, are potentially lethal but also potently labile; they can be re-formed, re-imagined, projected in ways that allow you to see Israelites and the blood of the Lamb and golden fire-shattered seas of ice and scattered islands of bright blood where there is really only a German lake, frozen hard as an ice cube.

  Now, these categories — pretty, cozy nature on the one hand, scary, awe-inspiring nature on the other — are usually covered by those terms picturesque and sublime, and it does no harm to use that convenient shorthand. But such simple ideas are too crude and schematic to capture the complicated responses of artists to winter, or anything else — such categories are for critics to think up and for artists and poets to keep out of. (In truth, in the nineteenth century, sublime came to be used as a one-size-fits-all word, just as ironic was used in the twentieth century to take in both the deadpan parody of pop culture of Duchamp’s sort and sincere tributes to it, as in Warhol. Everything, sooner or later, was sublime.)

  Simpler and more transparent, then, to call these types “sweet winter” and “scary winter” — in tribute to the now disbanded Spice Girls — with the understanding that what is scary can also be sweet, what is charming, divine. A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an auberge, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.

  Of those two sensations, though, the one that first gets fully realized as art among the northern Romantic painters and musicians of the early decades of the nineteenth century is the scary and sad side of winter. Searching for the first true winter masters, rather than just winter visitors — major artists who made winter one of their central obsessive subjects — we find two Germans: the painter Caspar David Friedrich and, later but still better, the composer Franz Schubert.

  Friedrich, who lived and worked in the first decades of the century, mostly painting in obscurity around Dresden, was born in 1774. His is in some ways closer to what we think of as a Scandinavian rather than German sensibility, basing most of his painting on the Baltic island of Rügen. Gloomy, guilt-ridden, mystical — sort of an oil-painting Ingmar Bergman. He’s an artist who has become newly fashionable in the past thirty years, partly because some aspects of his art anticipate the sublime stretches and blank forms of abstract expressionism, partly because he is, at times, a peculiarly pedantic painter, and therefore appeals to the pedantic imagination. (Professors like painters who anticipated the art of our time and were obviously part of the thought of their time: then the lectures practically write themselves.)

  Friedrich’s fascination with winter has a personal core: the key emotional event in his life was the death of his favourite younger brother in a skating accident when they were thirteen and fourteen; in front of Friedrich’s eyes he fell through the ice and drowned. So for Friedrich the experience of winter is loaded with the most powerful kind of emotional freight, with intimations of death and hopes for immortality. An important early painting, from around 1819, is calle
d Monastery Graveyard in the Snow, and it shows exactly what the title suggests, that is, a cemetery ruin, in winter. Fallen leaves, naked black velvet trees silhouetted against a violent and orange-gilt evening sky, intimations of Gothic architecture — all his winter landscapes are designed to reveal by this kind of stripping away that the forms of the German forest eerily mimic and echo the forms of medieval Gothic. The dead season echoes the lost time. Very often he has hallucinatory Gothic churches rising up in the middle of a winter landscape. The act of stripping away, the act of accepting winter as it is — and Friedrich is one of the very few painters of his generation who never goes to Italy or wants to go to Italy — is, in its first appearance, an assertion of religious faith, an assertion of a remade kind of medievalism that allows him access through winter to the lost Romantic past. Winter is haunting, but it’s also healing.

  But there also quickly came to be a nationalist politics linked to Friedrich’s painting of winter. When Napoleon invades Germany in 1806, images of winter, which first have essentially a spiritual resonance, suddenly mark the arrival of modern nationalism in art. For what Germany has that France does not have is winter, a real winter, and its assertion in art marks the assertion of the German national genius.

  The metaphors of the Enlightenment are, as the name suggests, those of sunlight (the French is even simpler: les Lumières). Its metaphors are of warmth, light, the sun returning to warm the human mind. Yet one of the ironies of the Enlightenment is that it also gives birth to the counter-Enlightenment idea of distinct national cultures reflecting different national climates. “If it be true that the temper of the mind and the passions of the heart are extremely different in different climates, then laws ought to be in relation . . . to the variety of those tempers,” Montesquieu writes in 1751. Southern peoples have southern moods and northern ones have a temper made for winter. One law for both the winter lion and the spring lamb is folly.

  This tolerant imperative is made, in resistance to Napoleon, into a form of national self-assertion, and the embrace of winter is its engine: we have our own season up here. In a Germany still marked by a longing for the South — the dream of the twin sisterhood of Germania and Italia was a pet subject of Goethe’s generation — the imagery of winter works both as a thing to give identity to the newly unifying (or just beginning to be unified) German nation and also as a symbol of the things that the French Enlightenment and French reason will never understand.