Winter Read online

  One of Friedrich’s most important pictures, from 1812, is The Chasseur in the Forest; it shows a tiny French soldier who is just overwhelmed by the pine trees of the German winter woods. He is clearly going to get lost, going to be sucked up, snowed over — going to be overwhelmed by the northern forest that defies not only Napoleon’s army but defies the larger intellectual army of French reason. It is a picture not only about nationalist resistance to the French; it’s also about northern, German resistance, Romantic resistance, to the Enlightenment idea of reason. The snows of the mystical past will cover you over, little man, and with it your pathetic faith in your encyclopedic organization of the world. Summer and the Mediterranean are mere sweet reason; winter is sharp instinct and keen memory.

  Winter, for Friedrich, is the place where the revolt against reason begins, a place of national convocation more profound than cosmopolitan conversation. In return it gives elbow room for the imagination. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, Goya said, and the sleep of nature, in winter, brings forth . . . Well, it brings forth bringing forth — it creates a space for imagination where ice floes become ghost ships and snowdrifts become cathedrals and the red light of sunset becomes the Red Sea parting. What will become the brutal hallucinations of the Arctic explorers begins as benign projections of the German painters. Winter becomes in this way, in Friedrich’s work, not only a place where you can see your own past and hallucinate about the lost days of religious purity; winter also becomes a powerful symbol of rejection of the French empire of arms and the French empire of mind.

  Of all Friedrich’s images, the most resonant and perhaps the most famous — perhaps the most famous of all nineteenth-century winter images, still visible on CD cases and paperback covers — is from 1824. Called The Sea of Ice, it shows a sailing ship being crushed in the ice, as helpless as a mouse half-devoured by a boa constrictor. It used to be thought of as reportage, an account of an actual incident, but it seems now to have been entirely imaginary, the fascinated dream of a northern mind. It is evident that this kind of neat pressure of a vision — in this case the ice that crushes the ship — also creates ghostly inanimate forms: the ship is being eaten by a second ship, itself made of ice, a sort of scary, hallucinatory parody of constructed form produced by the lethality of the cold.

  Winter forms, ice and snow, are once again potentially lethal and potently labile; ice is capable of making forms, by accident, that are Gothic in their intricate tracery — a typical hallucination of the era, when the bergs and glaciers were constantly seen as passing ships, castles, cathedrals. A nineteenth-century vein of feeling climaxed, perhaps, in the observation of one of the few sailors who saw the fatal iceberg from the deck of the Titanic and lived to say that it looked like a six-masted schooner, a ghost ship floating by. For Friedrich, winter is the red pill of an awakened northern consciousness. Summer is the Matrix, the lie; winter is the truth. It might be bitter, but at least it’s real. At the same time, if sweet winter is the season of intimacy, scary winter is the season of the imagination. By, so to speak, stripping down nature to her underwear, it lets us project our fantasies upon her.

  So northern Europeans in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were drawn to winter as the season of the counter-Enlightenment, as the poster scene of a national revival, and as a landscape of the real. But they also were drawn to winter as a kind of X-ray of nature that showed her as she really is. You could therefore see the hand of God — or its absence — more clearly in cold weather than at any other time. The argument over whether the architecture of ice and snow was really a sign of God’s purpose or only looked that way was a real one at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it reaches a slightly alarming — and, in its way, comic — climax in a fierce, peculiar debate over winter windows between Goethe and his friend Knebel. It was a debate that took as its object the seemingly unoffending, indeed unspectacular, presence of eisblumen, “ice flowers” — hoarfrost, as it’s sometimes called — on winter windows.

  We live in an age in which frost flowers on windows appear very rarely, even in cold countries. But in a time when there was still no central heating and windows were made of cast glass filled with impurities, frost patterns “grew” on small irregularities in the window’s dappled surface. And these frost patterns really do have an uncanny resemblance to biological forms. They look like ferns, like flowers — they have a graceful bend and sweep, that look of subtle variation within repeated shapes, of structure swelling outwards from an inner nucleus, that marks our experience of biological form. In fact they are merely — well, not merely, but truly — crystal lattices, the striking facets and lines that grow according to simple rules of molecular chemistry, combined with chance seizing on chance flaws — not organic generation. They’re fascinating but they’re really not alive.

  Yet the German Romantic poets and scientists — the two disciplines were not yet ghettoized — became fascinated by these forms, and troubled by the question of whether they were truly living forms, made by the hand of God, or merely mimicry, an accident, a random constellation of crystals that only seemed to be alive. It seems, as I said, a very peculiar argument to absorb intellectuals and poets, but so it did, and for more than a decade. (Perhaps we can grasp what they felt was at stake if we recall the passion with which theologians and physicists have argued in our own time that the indeterminacy of the subatomic quantum world gives some reassurance of the existence of free will. We seem always to seize on the smallest strange thing we can detect to prove that there are more things in heaven than our physics can entirely show.)

  In the end, as Andrea Portman explains in her eye-opening study of the subject, Goethe intervened to make a very powerful neoclassical and scientific statement: that you could not have faith in the patterns of ice flowers on windows, that they were the signs of death and not of life, that they were simply shallow mineral mimicry of biological form, and that they should be dismissed from the repository, from the vocabulary of the Romantic imagination. Winter’s forms for Goethe were not, as they were for his contemporary Novalis, signs of life but of the hollow mimicry of life by rocks — just as for Goethe the cult of winter was a morbid nationalism that turned its back on Italian light and lucidity. (Goethe’s own taste in winter was more hygienic and high-minded: as we’ll see, he loved to skate.)

  The ice-flower business might have sunk into the archival depths of scholarship had it not been quietly planted as a root fable beneath two great works of art: the best and most mysterious of all Romantic winter fables, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” and the most beautiful of all Romantic plaints of the season, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. Everyone has read “The Snow Queen,” I suspect; it is the most many-sided and cruel and memorable of all Andersen’s invented folk fables. Published in 1845, the crucial moment comes when Kay, the hero, gets a chip of glass in his eye — glass from an evil goblin’s mirror that distorts his vision. Then, for the first time, Kay looks at a snowflake and sees its intricate internal form — and thinks it’s more beautiful than a flower.

  This isn’t an accidental or spontaneous invention of Andersen’s; it is a summation of the larger argument about the relation of crystal form, mineral form, to biological form. It’s all about snowflakes and flowers. The notion that Andersen takes up is that only someone who has been paralyzed by reason — the Snow Queen sits in the centre of a cracked and broken “Mirror of Reason” — will confuse the cold form of death with the burgeoning warmth of life. What makes the Snow Queen so alluring is that she sits — reigns — between two traditions: the classical Christian idea of the North as bad, dangerous, to be escaped, and the Romantic idea of the wintry North as alluring, seductive, to be followed. The mirror of reason was always broken. Winter is a trap for the Romantic imagination, because it makes dead forms look as nice as living ones. The Snow Queen looks terrific, but she’ll freeze your soul.

  You find the same pattern, the
same notion, in Schubert’s great song cycle of the 1820s, perhaps the first true masterpiece of modern times devoted to the new idea of winter. Winterreise — the winter journey — is sung by a tenor to piano accompaniment. Adapted from poems by Wilhelm Müller, the songs tell the story of a lover, a traveller, a pilgrim who has been expelled from his home and is forced to wander through that German winter that Friedrich’s painting describes in such unsparing and alluring detail. It’s the tale of a man forced to live in Friedrich’s paintings, and singing his pain at being lost there.

  In the eleventh song, “Frühlingstraum,” you hear the singer, the voice of the wanderer in the white wilderness, looking at the frost patterns, the ice blooms, on the window — which he sees, significantly, from outside rather than from inside — and wondering who placed them there, who is their author. Is it God? Is it man? Are they merely accident? It’s unanswered and unanswerable, and presents again the essential question that winter raises for the Romantic mind, the Romantic imagination: who made winter, and why was it made? Do we project form and meaning onto something that is just an absence, a non-happening of the natural order of warmth and sunshine, or does winter offer some mysterious residual sign of divinity — perhaps in a piercing and haunting musical form or, for that matter, etched on a window? If winter is ours, who are we?

  All these visions and versions of winter take place at the pressure point where indoor warmth meets the frozen window. The joy of winter is to see in imagination Gothic cathedrals and fleeing Israelites and passing ships and blood-red fields where there are really only accidents of ice. The terror of winter is to recognize that these visions are just hallucinations, that mindless crystals have no meaning, that snowflakes can’t stand for souls, that ice comes not from God’s hand but from the broken mirror of the mind — from our will to invest the world with meanings of our own. The joy is in projecting our imaginations; the fear is of getting locked inside our own heads. In Schubert, as in Hans Christian Andersen, winter’s brutality to the wanderer in the wilderness is compensated for by its opening up of winter’s mystery to the witness at the window. The special beauty of Schubert’s song is that he imagines that the most soulful role is to be both wanderer and witness, and at the same time.

  This Romantic reassertion of the possibilities of winter, both as poetic material and as patriotic matter, is even more vehement at that early nineteenth-century moment in Russia. Russia is, with Canada, the other great winter nation, a place where snow is not a likely happenstance but a fixed certainty. In Germany the winter romance is always balanced by longing for Italy and the South — even Friedrich could not break the authority of Italy in the German mind. But in Russia the North–South dialogue was more narrowly centred on France, and so when the great Napoleonic invasion happened, a great reaction happened too.

  Winter in Russia is an inescapable fact, an absolute force, and yet throughout the eighteenth century, Slavic scholars tell us, there is almost no literature, no poetry in Russian devoted to the praise of winter. But if winter became a potent symbol of German nationalism in the Napoleonic period, it became a still more powerful and potent symbol of Russian nationalism and Russian national identity. Napoleon could be symbolically “defeated” by the epic German snows; he was, in the campaign of 1812, actually defeated by the reality of the Russian winter. The French came, the winter arrived, the French fled. So there is a whole line of political cartoons around 1812 that show Napoleon being swamped by an avalanche of snow. It was so strong an idea that the tsarist government had to put out propaganda denying that Napoleon had been defeated by the Russian winter and had instead been defeated by the Russian generals.

  This new patriotic appreciation of winter among Russian poets at the beginning of 1812 produces a great poetic literature. It produces it first in the work of Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, who writes what is probably the first Romantic snow poem in Russia — for in Russia this new Romantic interest in winter takes an essentially poetic rather than pictorial or musical form, quite predictably, if you believe, as I do, in national genius. Vyazemsky’s “First Snow,” that first snow poem, becomes as central to Russian literature of the period as first love poems are elsewhere. It becomes a genre, something that every young Russian poet has to attempt: a description of the first snow as though it were a first love.

  The poetry might not have come to maturity were it not for the reality that Vyazemsky was the best friend of Alexander Pushkin. Where the German embrace of winter was essentially melancholic, Pushkin makes his love of winter national and invigorating — even joyful — and always sexy. It is the superabundance of energy, not a window onto death, that winter gives to Russia that fills Pushkin’s heart and poems. In 1824 he writes a wonderful poem called “Winter Morning,” singing to a girl with whom he has, it seems, just spent the night — a long way from Dr. Johnson’s gloomy Augustan winter wooing — which celebrates the season both as post-coital paradise and as the haunt of memory:

  Frost and sun, what a glorious day!

  Yet still, sweet friend, you sleep away.

  It’s time, beloved, for you to stir:

  Open wide your dreamy eyes

  To catch the dawn glow in northern skies —

  Rise up yourself, my love, like a northern star . . .

  One of the things Pushkin emphasizes throughout all of his winter poetry is the essential paradox, known to Russians and Canadians alike, that while in the summer and fall roads can be impassable, in winter countries, especially before the days of paving, winter turns life in just the opposite direction. “A sliding car,” as Cowper puts it a little coyly, is the sleigh Pushkin races around in. In the true North, winter becomes the season of speed, the season where you can put your loved one in a sleigh and whisk her off to an erotic rendezvous, and that theme — the eroticism of winter — is a peculiarly Russian one. It’s all tied up in furs and snows and secrets, and it runs right through the Russian literature of the nineteenth century. It begins here with Pushkin. The Germans saw the enigmas of winter; the Russians see its eroticism. Where Dr. Johnson and his date had only a winter walk, Pushkin and his lover fly across the snow.

  Yet if the northern Europeans in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars were the first to make a new winter art from the season’s scary side, the real victor of the Napoleonic Wars was England, and it would be Britain and British culture that would set the tone and the key for a new, and on the whole sweeter, vision of winter in the 1830s and 1840s — those two decades of enormous prosperity and progress that marked the beginning of the Pax Angleterra.

  Exactly the thing that haunted the Romantic imagination in Germany — that is to say, the permeable membrane between winter and the self, represented in the most literal way by the window — was no longer so strong a fact in England. Instead of pockets of warmth there was, increasingly, an envelope of warm air. Central heating was born in Britain.

  Now, North Americans who have spent a winter in England and who, clutching teacups and shivering in shaggy sweaters, wonder if they will ever be warm again, may find it hard to believe that this was the first warm modern place. But in the 1830s and 1840s it was the first country with even a hint of central heating. Heating engineers from Poland and France actually emigrated to England because that’s where the Silicon Valley — or, rather, the coal valley — of the time was. It’s one of the oddities of cultural history that we tend to overlook the authors of our comforts, even though we are almost always perfectly knowledgeable about the poets of our distress. Everybody has heard of Caspar David Friedrich but nobody knows the names of the men who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, invented central heating, and particularly steam heating by radiating pipes. Let us name them now: they included Thomas Tredgold and H. R. Robertson and an immigrant genius of central heating, the French engineer F. W. Chabannes (a Russian, Franz San Galli, would soon invent the radiator). For the most part they were, true to the Star Trek stereotype
, from the north of England, the world of the Darwins, the Wedgwoods, the free thinkers and scientists who made industrial England.

  The idea of centrally heating a large enclosed space had begun in hothouses and incubators as a solution to the problem of keeping vegetables and fruits warm in winter. But the British engineers soon realized — and it was no accident that among them was James Watt, inventor of the steam engine — that essentially the problem of central heating was more or less the problem of running a locomotive-like steam engine that wasn’t meant to go anywhere. You had to build pipes that were simultaneously strong enough to withstand the press of steam heat but not so large that they made it impossible for people to live within them.

  But the real triumph was intellectual. For the first time engineers and architects began to think of architecture explicitly in terms of interior air, of inner space. The Scottish engineer David Boswell Reid, put in charge of centrally heating the new Houses of Parliament after the great fire in the 1830s, wrote, “Though forgotten amidst the more obvious attractions of architectural art, still in a practical point of view, the visible structure is only the shell or body of that interior atmosphere without which existence could not be supported.” The future of northern architecture might lie in making space mean more than structure. The mall and the underground city, with their interior atmospheres, incubate in those words. And central heating sweetened the view too. Once you were truly warm, winter was, more than ever, for watching. Winter became first of all a thing to see.