Winter Page 4

  And nowhere could one see more winter from safer places than in the Alps. The same English prosperity (and Scottish ingenuity) that heated the Houses of Parliament gave even the upper-middle-class family the chance for instructive and improving travel, and those with no taste for the scary German forests found that their steps led to one destination on the other side of the Alps. Winter led the world to Switzerland.

  Today, it’s hard for us to feel very much of anything for Switzerland as a soulful destination. The Swiss themselves can’t see it that way. We think of Switzerland as a bureaucratic place, we think of Switzerland as a wealthy place, we think of Switzerland — in the words of Orson Welles in The Third Man — as a place of chocolate and cuckoo clocks and of absolute bourgeois stolidity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, though, Switzerland was the ultimate Romantic destination, the place you travelled to witness scary winter and sweet winter together — the place where scary winter (snow-topped Alps) actually became sweet winter (comfortable ski auberges). Switzerland offered both mountain gloom and mountain glory, its mix of lowlands and heights — a powerfully emotional metaphor for man and nature — and of Protestant and Catholic faiths. (Protestant liberty established on the highlands, Catholic commonality by the lakes.) If Russia and northern Germany were the places where modern winter was made, Switzerland was the place where modern winter was seen, and seasoned, and made safe for an increasingly popular audience.

  Two Englishmen lead us into Switzerland. The first is the great painter and watercolourist J. M. W. Turner. Turner “owned” Venice and Dieppe alike, but he makes Switzerland, the snows and glaciers of the Alps, his particular poetic subject. So much so that in Turner’s watercolours of the 1830s and 1840s, it is hard to distinguish between what is snow and what is light. There is in his Swiss watercolours a merging of the picturesque light of the mountains with the sublime snows of winter, so that we no longer can tell, in effect, white from white.

  And then the art critic John Ruskin, Turner’s great advocate and analyst, follows his hero-painter to Switzerland, as John the Baptist might have followed Jesus, to articulate a whole kind of natural theology of the mountains and glaciers in Turner’s honour and in light of what Ruskin imagined to be his practice (though Ruskin, as he later admitted, generally overrated Turner’s piety and underrated his sensuality). Central to that new theology was a new equality of seasons: “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” Ruskin wrote. He thought too that the stellate form of snowflakes and ice crystals — delicate spurred spokes radiating from a centre — was more beautiful even than the holy cruciform.

  Ruskin’s love of winter, form small, was reinforced by his love of winter, form large — by his exhilarated sense that, in their sweep and their capacity for catastrophe, the glaciers in Switzerland are in themselves proof of God’s design, massive brushstrokes sweeping through time. This artistic and theological argument about glaciers would become a technical and scientific argument when Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz, a great scientist and a Christian, fought over the real age of the glaciers, Agassiz insisting that they were signs of the kinds of ancient catastrophes one found in the Bible, Darwin countering that they were instruments of incremental change.

  You can hear this alteration, the piercing Romantic questioning turning into more pious Victorian doubt, in the music of the era. Do you recall Virginia Woolf’s question about what Shakespeare’s sister might have written had she had the chance to write at all? Well, Fanny Hensel was Shakespeare’s sister, or Mendelssohn’s at least, and though her work didn’t get the publicity of her brother’s, it’s consistently wonderful, partly for its enforced smallness. She wrote a sequence of seasonal piano pieces in 1841, The Year, and her “December” announces a new era of winter feeling. It doesn’t have the bite and exhilaration of Vivaldi, nor the deep melancholy of Schubert; her winter music is rich and Romantic in a different sense — lulling and enclosing and bourgeois. Written on a long sabbatical holiday in Italy, her music signals the arrival of a different and evolving and more cosmopolitan Romantic sense of winter. It’s music written in a hotel for the first generations of hotel-and-auberge people. Even her January storm is broken by a bright light of lyricism, and her February is positively gay.

  For its first half-century, then, the Romantic rediscovery of winter as a site of splendour and significance took too many turns, from a scary one in Denmark to a more comfortable one in the Alps. But the romance of winter always kept a complex relationship with the central nineteenth-century question: Is God still up there? Hello, God, it’s me, Franz — or John, or Joseph. Winter was the significant season, the X-ray time, when the green veil of warmth and verdure was stripped away and we saw the world bare, as it really was. But was it a place of order or a place of accident, made to look orderly only by our imaginations? Winter showed both, and you stood by the window to watch and choose.

  Or took a boat across the Atlantic to be instructed. That fascination with the problem of the meaning of glaciers, with the predicament of the meaning of frost, and even with the question of a winter God all naturally coalesces in Canada.

  There is an old tradition in Canadian criticism and aesthetics, derived from the great critic Northrop Frye, that the first Canadian artists and poets didn’t know what to make of the experience of winter. They cringed in fear, they withdrew into their houses, and they wished that they were back in the mother country. It was only much later that a genuine aesthetic of winter began to emerge in Canada. Before that, we all just suffered. The Canadian poet Susan Glickman has argued, quite rightly, that this misunderstands history, removes Canada unduly from the history of European responses to winter. Her point, I think the right one, is that all of the first generation of Canadian artists and poets responded to winter in Canada in exactly the same pretty or potent terms that European artists and composers and poets had responded to theirs. They were scared, sure, by glaciers and blizzards and mountains and vast whiteness — but hey, you were supposed to be scared. It was the trendy emotion of the time. They did what we all do: they took the conventional emotions of their age and refined them in the light of their own experience. That we sense the conventions along with the new landscape is only to say that we recognize the taste of real life.

  But I do think there is a significant difference. The experience of the mysterium tremendum, the encounter with holy otherness that was at the heart of Friedrich’s experience with winter — and of Schubert’s and of Turner’s — was one that, like a battle plan, could not survive too much contact with the enemy of real experience. Canadian poets and painters certainly felt what their European cousins felt, but it was a feeling that was always checked or chastened by another kind of awareness. Winter in Canada is an inescapable fact rather than a part-time recreational possibility. Quebec was not Switzerland. You couldn’t go back to the green temperate climate on the morning train. You couldn’t get away from winter even if you wanted to. You might tremble in wonder, but eventually you were going to have to go get the milk and break the ice in the pail.

  And so a quixotic cultural historian might torment himself with the question of what might have happened if a highly cultivated person imbued in German Romanticism, in love with German Romanticism — someone fully aware of the responses to winter that had become part of the common coin of European civilization in the first half of the nineteenth century, from Goethe to Andersen — what if someone like that had come to Canada in the middle of the nineteenth century? What might that person have written and thought? Too much to hope for, surely . . .

  But there was such a person! He does exist, or rather, she does exist, and her name is Anna Brownell Jameson. In 1836 Anna Brownell Jameson was an Irish governess in an English household. She married a prim, dull English lawyer who was then sent to Canada to become the chief justice of Upper Canada
, and she followed him to Toronto. It was a very unhappy marriage, for complicated reasons — or rather, for the uncomplicated reason that she was smarter than he was and he was richer than she was — but she kept a diary of that year, which was later published as Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada.

  She had a first-rate mind; Jameson’s notes on Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe remain profound and original, and her comparisons between Eckermann’s treatment of Goethe and Boswell’s treatment of Dr. Johnson are, so far as I know, still unique. She runs with shocking ease from one reference to another and from one language to the next. (“The accusation which has been made frequently against Goethe, that notwithstanding his passionate admiration for women, he has throughout his works wilfully and systematically depreciated womanhood, is not just, in my opinion. No doubt he is not so universal as Shakespeare, nor so ideal as Schiller; but . . . his portraits of individual women are as true as truth itself. His idea of women generally was like that entertained by Lord Byron, rather oriental and sultanish.” That’s a completely typical February-in-Toronto entry from her journal.)

  And so she began to write about a Canadian winter through the eyes of a European Romantic. She saw Canada through the prism of this kind of European sensibility — but she saw Canada. Niagara Falls was her first goal, as it was every Romantic’s, and arriving there on a January day, she couldn’t help but be disappointed.

  Well! I have seen these cataracts of Niagara, which have thundered in my mind’s ear ever since I can remember — which have been my “childhood’s thought, my youth’s desire,” since first my imagination was awakened to wonder and to wish. I have beheld them, and shall I whisper to you! — but, O tell it not among the Philistines! — I wish I had not! I wish they were still a thing unbeheld — a thing to be imagined, hoped, and anticipated — something to live for: — the reality has displaced from my mind an illusion far more magnificent than itself — I have no words for my utter disappointment: . . . Terni, and some of the Swiss[!] cataracts leaping from their mountains, have affected me a thousand times more than all the immensity of Niagara.

  What went wrong? She had gone with a benediction of winter, sure that was the best and truest time to see the wonder — “where Nature is wholly independent of art, she does not die, nor yet mourn; she lies down to rest on the bosom of Winter, and the aged one folds her in his robe of ermine and jewels, and rocks her with his hurricanes, and hushes her to sleep.” But on arriving she saw

  at one glance a flat extensive plain; the sun having withdrawn its beams for the moment, there was neither light, nor shade, nor color. In the midst were seen the two great cataracts, but merely as a feature in the wide landscape. The sound was by no means overpowering, and the clouds of spray, which Fanny Butler called so beautifully the “everlasting incense of the waters,” now condensed ere they rose by the excessive cold . . . All the associations which in imagination I had gathered round the scene, its appalling terrors, its soul-subduing beauty, power and height, and velocity and immensity, were all diminished in effect, or wholly lost.

  “All the associations which in imagination I had gathered round the scene . . .” Robbed of those associations by the hard, mineral truth of January, Niagara the everlasting incense vanishes and is replaced by Niagara the world’s biggest cold-water faucet. Taken out of the safe Swiss sphere of imaginative projections, it’s not sublime; it’s just one big spigot. The ultimate destination of the Romantic imagination is, in reality and in the dead of a Canadian winter, big — too big to quite take in, and at the same time set against not the diminutive wilderness of Alpine scenery but the expansive reach of the true North: too small, too easily dwarfed by its surroundings to be quite impressive.

  And then it turns out to be bordered by small, shivering hotels: “We held on our way to the Clifton hotel, at the foot of the hill; most desolate it looked with its summer verandahs and open balconies cumbered up with snow . . . its forlorn, empty rooms, broken windows, and dusty dinner tables. The poor people who kept the house in winter had gathered themselves for warmth and comfort into a little kitchen, and when we made our appearance, stared at us with a blank amazement, which showed what a rare thing was the sight of a visitor at this season.”

  She senses the two things at once — the wonder of winter scenes, the absurdity of idealizing them — and she senses them again and again. But there was more there than just the comedy of disillusion. She also gave herself an education in the real romance of a Canadian winter, the things that really did shine. She recognized, for instance, the thing that Pushkin had sensed in Russia — that where in other places winter was a time of stasis, in Canada it was paradoxically a time of freedom and movement. She writes: “It should seem that this wintry season, which appears to me so dismal, is for the Canadians the season of festivity . . . Now is the time for visiting, for sleighing excursions, for all intercourse of business and friendship . . .” Rushing off in the dead of a January winter to see Niagara. Winter sets us free.

  Or else she sees that the evergreen forests, which in Germany, as we saw at the very beginning of this story, stand for the enveloping primeval forest, stand in Canada only for the occluded way. Trees in Canada are things that block your access to the next town, and so the denigration of trees and the denuding of the landscape are, in Canada, a primary and good thing — it is the thing everyone strives to make happen all the time. This is, of course, for someone raised on the paintings of Friedrich and attuned to the poetry of Pushkin, very strange — this notion of trees as the enemy of civilization, the enemy of a cultivated mind. But she likes it, and she learns from it.

  Above all, Jameson is knocked out by the way, in a true winter, a Canadian winter, the slow sequencing of seasons from one to the other no longer takes place. She writes that the ice seems so thick and the snow so steep that you lose hope — it is eternal winter here. And then a month later everything is green and verdant, as though winter had never arrived. The lesson for someone experiencing a Canadian winter isn’t just that Demeter has gone away, it’s that when she gets back she’ll have a kind of Alzheimer’s; she won’t be able to remember that she was ever gone. Anna Jameson sees sublimity but she reinforces it with sense.

  What we see in Canadian winter imagery then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is not some sad repetition of a template borrowed from abroad, nor mere journalism, but a significant variation on the Romantic sensibilities that are in place right around the Western world — similar, yet more subtly teased out and adjusted for a bracingly new and different place. Even if you look at such an easy, often patronized painter as Cornelius Krieghoff, that seemingly naive émigré painter in Quebec throughout the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s — a kind of Christmas card painter who is always depicting sleighing scenes and pieces of merriment — we always see, somewhere in the background, a deep, cold whistle into an unknown North. What looks enormously naive and cosmetic is disciplined by the real observation that all this pleasure-taking activity, all this fun-seeking, takes place in the very shallow foreground of a white scene that reaches off into the distant snow and into eternity. That sense of pleasure-seeking in the near distance and of eternal snow far off — the sweet foreground, the scary background — is one that is the particularly Canadian articulation of the sublime vision. In Europe, sweet and scary mix pleasantly in a Swiss day; in Canada the sweet is won and the scary stays.

  My favourite story about the Canadian winter, of this double experience of winter that is in some ways unique to Canada, comes when Jameson goes back to Niagara Falls during her second year in Canada, feeling hopeful again, fully poetic. An Irishman behind her, she tells us, “suddenly exclaimed, in a most cordial brogue, and an accent of genuine admiration — ‘Faith, then, that’s a pretty dacent dhrop o’ water that’s coming over there!’” The sublime hand of God and “a dacent dhrop o’ water.” Poetical feelings and emergent realisms — seeing them both was the hard work of a new
country.

  Yet if in Canada at mid-century the Romantic vision of winter was receiving a bracing charge of realism, in Europe another winter mood was falling. In 1866 the young Russian musician Pyotr Tchaikovsky composed his very first symphony and called it Winter Daydreams. Composed under the influence of Mendelssohn (and thus conceivably connected to the older man’s sister and her snow pieces), the symphony suggests a wholly new sense of winter. A new poignancy, a new serenity, a new turn to folk music’s bejewelled instrumentation — winter tamed, surely, as it had been before. But also winter made exquisite. It is the first signal of a new winter feeling that will blossom best in French Impressionist painting in the 1870s and ’80s, when for the first time “effets de neige,” effects of snow, appear in the paintings of Alfred Sisley and Pissarro and, above all, Claude Monet.

  In the Romantic vision of winter I’m sure that Anna Jameson would have recognized many elements familiar to the Romantic movement in all its faces and phases: the fascination with the extreme, the love of the frightening, the prizing of passion for its own sake, watching water falling for the noise alone. But there is one key element in the Romantic mind, one crucial element, that is missing from the Romantic imagination of winter as we’ve described it so far, and that’s a dream of the exotic — not of the unshaped other, the wilderness, but of a remote-seeming civilization where ideas and experiences take different forms.

  The usual romantic sources lie in Egypt or North Africa — no good at all for our wintry purposes. The one distant, exotic culture that was known to have a fully articulated poetry of winter was Japan. And it was the Japanese idea of winter as it entered French culture in the 1870s and ’80s, through the spread of japonisme, particularly woodblock prints, that marked the final transformation of winter, and the idea of winter, in Europe in the nineteenth century. Not the sublime snows of the Romantics, not the wilderness of Turner, not the peasant picturesque of the Swiss Alps and Quebec, but a winter of furs and finery and graces, of falling snowflakes and passing pleasures. This comes from Japan, and particularly from the Japanese woodprints of ukiyo-e, the floating world.