Chapter 7

WINTER SUNSHINE

ADOLPHE COTTE, the Breton essayist, has a story of a quaint old musician who lived in the woods outside St. Brieue, whose corn .positions included nothing of note except a brilliant little frolic entitled ‘Winter Sunshine’. Against a subdued and even sombre background, there stood out melodious patches of remarkable beauty and infectious gaiety. Asked as to the inspiration of this exceptional creation, the good little peasant replied that he had always held that the happiest man on the face of the earth is the man who can make the most of the sunshine that breaks u p and brightens the winter.

  No phase of human life is unadulterated. There are bright days in winter-time and bleak days in summer-time. The sunshine is not switched off in the autumn, to be switched on again in the spring. Midwinter’s Day may be wet and cold and uninviting, but if, as may easily happen, it proves to be bright and sunny, with scarcely a cloud in its deep blue sky, we do not assume that the mechanism of the universe has been thrown out of gear.

  Life is like that. It is a thing of medleys and mixtures. Henry Field ing-‘the father of our fiction’ as Sir Walter Scott called hi m-made this doctrine the basis on which all his books are built. There is no such thing, he insisted, as unadulterated virtue or unmitigated vice. You might as well look for a summer without a single shower or a winter without one burst of brightness. Mr. Fielding’s works, the heroines, however loveable, are never angelic; the scoundrels, however detestable, are never fiendish. He found him fellow-man very much of a mixture and he so depicts them. His heroes are speckled by grievous faults and his villains occasionally astound you by their downright goodness of heart. The literary critics of the eighteenth century looked askance at this unusual interpretation of human nature. Fielding, they said, was running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He could not have it both ways. Men must be good or they must be bad; there was no halfway house. These critics forgot the story of the little girl who had a little curl right down the middle of her forehead —

When she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid.

  In a telling reply, Fielding as good as told his assailants that there is no law operating in the solar system that would prevent a burst of dazzling sunshine at midwinter or a biting wind, chilling you to the bone, in the height of summer. He would venture to affirm, he wrote, that he had known men who were universally and deservedly esteemed who would not have scrupled, under certain circumstances, to cut a friend’s throat; and he had known fellows, with whom no self-respecting man should be seen in conversation, perform acts of the most exemplary kindness and benevolence. Nothing is so unpredictable as sunshine.

  The genial little philosopher who set the forests of Brittany to music argued that the secret of happiness lies in making the most of those sudden bursts of brightness that break upon us at unusual times or that break upon us from unexpected sources. Instead of regarding the spasmodic goodness of doubtful characters as a species of hypocrisy, it is more in accordance with all the facts of the case to appraise it at its face value. Trouble is a bleak and bitter experience; but it is invariably accompanied by little acts of thoughtfulness and generous offers of helpfulness that warm the heart at the time and enrich the memory for ever after.

  In his Cheapside to Arcady, Arthur Scammell says that, for some weeks, he had occasion to pass daily down a dingy street in London. It was winter-time. Sitting on tae edge of a stonewall in this squalid and sunless alley was a cripple, his crutches beside him, shivering with the cold. A few yards further on, beside the river, was a sunny open space surrounded by trees and flowers, lawns and fountains, with a comfortable seat from which one could drink in the loveliness spread around. But, says Mr. Scammell, the unhappy man never even looked that way. He was by no means alone in his failure to appreciate the peculiar value of the sunshine that comes to us in winter.

Dr. F. W. Boreham