Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

by Richard Le Gallienne

And against all this marble and blood and bronze, what frail fantastic attack is this? What quaint expedition from fairy-land that comes so insignificantly against these battlements on which the Roman helmets catch the setting sun?

A Star in the Sky. Some Shepherds from Judea. Three Wise Men from the East. Some Frankincense and Myrrh. A Mother and Child.

Yes, a fairy-tale procession—but these are to conquer Rome, and that child at his mother's breast has but to speak three words, for all that marble and bronze to melt away: "Love One Another."

It may well have seemed an almost ludicrous weapon—three gentle words. So one might attack a fortress with a flower. But Rome fell before them, for all that, and cruel as the world still is, so cruel a world can never be again. The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors by the passive imperative of the three gentle words. Stone and iron are terribly strong to the eye and even to the arm of man, but they are as vapour before the breath of the soul. Many enthroned and magisterial authorities seem so much more important and powerful than the simple human heart, but let the trial of strength come, and we see the might of the delicate invisible energy that wells up out of the infinite mystery to support the dreams of man.

Christmas is the friendly human announcement of this ghostly truth; its holly and boar's-head are but a rough-and-tumble emblazonment of that mystic gospel of—The Three Words; the Gospel of the Unseen Love.

And how well has the church chosen this particular season of the year for this most subtly spiritual of all its festivals, so subtle because its ghostly message is so ruddily disguised in human mirth, and thus the more unconsciously operative in human hearts!

Winter, itself so ghostly a thing, so spiritual in its beauty, was indeed the season to catch our ears with this ghost-story of the Invisible and Invincible Love. The other seasons are full of sensuous charm and seductiveness. With endless variety of form and colour and fragrance, they weave "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." They are running over with the pride of sap, the luxury of green leaves, and the intoxicating fulness of life. The summer earth is like some voluptuous enchantress, all ardour and perfume, and soft dazzle of moted sunshine. But the beauty of winter seems a spiritual, almost a supernatural, thing, austere and forbidding at first, but on a nearer approach found to be rich in exquisite exhilaration, in rare and lofty discoveries and satisfactions of the soul. Winter naturally has found less favour with the poets than the other seasons. Praise of it has usually a strained air, as though the poet were making the best of a barren theme, like a portrait-painter reluctantly flattering some unattractive sitter. But one poet has seen and seized the mysterious beauty of winter with unforced sympathy—Coventry Patmore, whose "Odes," in particular, containing as they do some of the most rarely spiritual meditation in English poetry, are all too little known. In one of these he has these beautiful lines, which I quote, I hope correctly, from memory:

I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than light and warmth asleep,
And intermittent breathing still doth keep
With the infant harvest heaving soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.

The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself. The loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits. When we first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.

Similarly with winter. It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy. The beauty of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort. To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur of a million wings. But winter's is no such idle lesson. In summer we can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to go out. We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its ice-in-the-pail. But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a sunlit winter's morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat! Indoors, indeed, the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and the abhorred coldness thereof. We have hardly walked a hundred yards, however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as pleasantly heightening the rest.