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Colour of Life

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<h2>WINDS OF THE WORLD</h2> Every wind is, or ought to be, a poet; but one is classic and converts everything in his day co-unity; another is a modern man, whose words clothe his thoughts, as the modern critics used to say prettily in the early sixties, and therefore are separable.  This wind, again, has a style, and that wind a mere manner.  Nay, there are breezes from the east-south-east, for example, that have hardly even a manner.  You can hardly name them unless you look at the weather vane.  So they do not convince you by voice or colour of breath; you place their origin and assign them a history according as the hesitating arrow points on the top of yonder ill-designed London spire. The most certain and most conquering of all is the south-west wind.  You do not look to the weather-vane to decide what shall be the style of your greeting to his morning.  There is no arbitrary rule of courtesy between you and him, and you need no arrow to point to his distinctions, and to indicate to you the right manner of treating such a visitant. He prepares the dawn.  While it is still dark the air is warned of his presence, and before the window was opened he was already in the room.  His sun—for the sun is his—rises in a south-west mood, with a bloom on the blue, the grey, or the gold.  When the south-west is cold, the cold is his own cold—round, blunt, full, and gradual in its very strength.  It is a fresh cold, that comes with an approach, and does not challenge you in the manner of an unauthorised stranger, but instantly gets your leave, and even a welcome to your house of life.  He follows your breath in at your throat, and your eyes are open to let him in, even when he is cold.  Your blood cools, but does not hide from him. He has a splendid way with his sky.  In his flight, which is that, not of a bird, but of a flock of birds, he flies high and low at once: high with his higher clouds, that keep long in the sight of man, seeming to move slowly; and low with the coloured clouds that breast the hills and are near to the tree-tops.  These the south-west wind tosses up from his soft horizon, round and successive.  They are tinted somewhat like ripe clover-fields, or like hay-fields just before the cutting, when all the grass is in flower, and they are, oftener than all other clouds, in shadow.  These low-lying flocks are swift and brief; the wind casts them before him, from the western verge to the eastern. Corot has painted so many south-west winds that one might question whether he ever painted, in his later manner at least, any others.  His skies are thus in the act of flight, with lower clouds outrunning the higher, the farther vapours moving like a fleet out at sea, and the nearer like dolphins.  In his “Classical Landscape: Italy,” the master has indeed for once a sky that seems at anchor, or at least that moves with “no pace perceived.”  The vibrating wings are folded, and Corot’s wind, that flew through so many springs, summers, and Septembers for him (he was seldom a painter of very late autumn), that was mingled with so many aspen-leaves, that strewed his forests with wood for the gatherer, and blew the broken lights into the glades, is charmed into stillness, and the sky into another kind of immortality.  Nor are the trees in this antique landscape the trees so long intimate with Corot’s south-west wind, so often entangled with his uncertain twilights.  They are as quiet as the cloud, and such as the long and wild breezes of Romance have never shaken or enlaced. Upon all our islands this south-west wind is the sea wind.  But elsewhere there are sea winds that are not from the south-west.  They, too, none the less, are conquerors.  They, too, are always strong, compelling winds that take possession of the light, the shadow, the sun, moon, and stars, and constrain them all alike to feel the sea.  Not a field, not a hillside, on a sea-wind day, but shines with some soft sea-lights.  The moon’s little boat tosses on a sea-wind night. The south-west wind takes the high Italian coasts.  He gathers the ilex woods together and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the sheep.  They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also, with its strong base to the sea, receives them.  It is blank and sunny, and the trees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept and flattened by months of sea-storms.  On the farther side there are gardens—gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in all the world and most windless, box-hedges and ponds.  The gardens take shelter behind the scared and hurried ilex woods, and the sea-wind spares them and breaks upon the mountain.  But the garden also is his, and his wild warm days have filled it with orange-trees and roses, and have given all the abundant charm to its gay neglect, to its grass-grown terraces, and to all its lapsed, forsaken, and forgotten dainties. Nothing of the nature in this seaward Italy would be so beautiful without the touch of man and of the sea gales. When the south-west wind brings his rain he brings it with the majestic onset announced by his breath.  And when the light follows, it comes from his own doorway in the verge.  His are the opened evenings after a day shut down with cloud.  He fills the air with innumerable particles of moisture that scatter and bestow the sun.  There are no other days like his, of so universal a harmony, so generous. The north wind has his own landscape, too; but the east wind never.  The aspect which he gives to the day is not all his own.  The sunshine is sweet in spite of him.  The clouds go under his whip, but they have kinder greys than should be the colours of his cold.  Not on an east-wind day are these races in heaven, for the clouds are all far off.  His rain is angry, and it flies against the sunset.  The world is not one in his reign, but rather there is a perpetual revolt or difference.  The lights and shadows are not all his.  The waxing and waning hours are disaffected.  He has not a great style, and does not convince the day. All the four winds are brave, and not the less brave because, on their way through town, they are betrayed for a moment into taking part in any paltriness that may be there.  On their way from the Steppes to the Atlantic they play havoc with the nerves of very insignificant people.  A part, as it were, of every gale that starts in the far north-east finds its goal in the breath of a reluctant citizen. You will meet a wind of the world nimble and eager in a sorry street.  But these are only accidents of the way—the winds go free again.  Those that do not go free, but close their course, are those that are breathed by the nostrils of living creatures.  A great flock of those wild birds come to a final pause in London, and fan the fires of life with those wings in the act of folding.  In the blood and breath of a child close the influences of continent and sea. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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