Chapter 24

THE ILLUSIONS OF WINTER

IN the captivating programme of changing phases and alternating seasons, which the round of the year offers for our entertainment, winter plays the part of the Great Illusionist. Look, for example, at the role taken by her star performer, popularly known as Jack Frost. His repertoire contains the most incredible tricks. We have all heard of the Scandinavian traveller who, on being received at an Oriental court, regaled the king with the most audacious fictions that his fertile fancy could suggest. The simple-minded monarch believed every word and applauded vociferously. At length, the visitor’s imagination flagging under the strain of invention, he was reduced to the humiliating necessity of telling the truth. ‘In my country,’ he declared, ‘water is carried about in great blocks and . . .’ But the king would hear no more. ‘Ah, now I know that thou liest the exclaimed indignantly, and ordered the adventurer to be beheaded. His Majesty found the facts about the frost more difficult of credence than the most preposterous fictions relating to other things.

The frost masquerades. It pretends, for example, to be murderous. It is, Richard Jefferies asserts, the most ruthless of the slayers with which the creatures of the wild have to contend. It destroys the kingfisher on his perch and paralyses the swiftest hare. Jefferies could scarcely bear to walk round the fields after a sharp frost because of the agonizing; deaths of which he everywhere saw evidence. But is the frost a destroyer of life? In an article on ‘Weather and Health’, a doctor tells a very different tale. ‘In my district,’ he says, ‘we get all kinds of miserable little epidemics during the autumn, but one good hard frost cleans it up and the germs perish in billions.’ The doctor’s testimony exposed the illusion by which we might easily and pardonably have been duped.

Judging by superficial appearances, we should naturally conclude that a spell of frost is a period of absolute stagnation. In its icy grip the earth seems dormant and dead. All its energies are palsied. There appears to be nothing doing. It is, of course, pure nonsense. Prof. Sir Edgeworth David has shown that the frost is an indefatigable worker. The frigid severities of remote geologic ages did more, he says, to batter the earth into shape than the accumulated sunshine of innumerable summers. During the ice age, plains were torn up, valleys were scooped out, and mountains were crushed out of existence as though they were molehills. Professor David shows that the character, climate and altitudes of these Australian lands have been determined almost entirely by the frost.

Especially was this the case here in Tasmania. ‘My own idea,’ the Professor says, ‘is that the great ice ages, beginning about three hundred million years ago, piled a huge weight on one portion of Tasmania, bending down the earth’s crust with a hinging movement near Bass Strait. The whole of Tasmania to the east of Mt. Lyell has been severely depressed.’ And Sir Edgeworth goes on to say that, to the melting of the ice at the close of this geologic period we owe the rise of the ocean, the existence of Bass Strait and many of the most marked features of Australian life. By the titanic activities of the frost, islands have been submerged and continents smashed to splinters. Nor is Jack Frost resting on his laurels. He is still at work. Frank Buckland has shown that the white cliffs along the English downs are being constantly nibbled away by the frost. The whole contour of the coast is slowly but surely changing. And yet we say that the frost is the emblem of stagnation ! It is a cunning piece of make-believe. In reality, the frost is as active as quicksilver.

The frost often assumes an appearance of spiteful hostility; it nips and blights and withers. But before classifying it on that account as one of the antagonisms of life, it will be as well to consult the farmer. Or ask the gardener. The gardener looks ruefully upon his tomatoes and dahlias all blackened and spoiled; but he bears no malice. The frost plays havoc with the potatoes and the French beans, but see how it sweetens the celery and the Brussels sprouts! Moreover, the soil itself is being incalculably enriched. Farmers and gardeners are quiet folk; they do not talk much or write much; but, lest their silence should be misconstrued, Mr. Amos R. Wells has taken up the pen on their behalf. He sings:

When the frost is in the ground, with its sharp silver pick,

It is digging and prospecting all around;

There are millions of brisk workers, ever eager, ever quick,

Ever toiling when the frost is in the ground.

Those familiar with life in the Homeland will remember how, on throwing up the blinds on winter mornings, the world was hidden by the frost upon the window pane. But, in the concealment of the landscape, imagination was born. Finding pictures in the frozen panes was like finding faces in the fire. Peter Martin, the great Lancashire designer, gathered the inspirations for his laces and tapestries from the delicate traceries that he found on the glass on frosty mornings. In his delineation of the fall of Wolsey, Shakespeare depicts the Cardinal, in the hour of his chagrin and mortification, telling Cromwell that he has been bitten by ‘a frost, a killing frost’. And he continues:

O Cromwell, Cromwell!

Had I but served my God with half the zeal

I served my king, He would not in mine age

Have left me naked to mine enemies!

The poet’s meaning is clear. In that tragic hour the fallen Chancellor discovered that the frost that leads us, in tearful contrition, to the God whom we have forgotten, and to a new realization of the preciousness of things unseen, is not so dire a calamity after all.

Dr. F. W. Boreham