The Four Winds

FOR a season it was my fortunate lot to live in a villa called The Tower of the Four Winds. Just where it lies is no matter. Enough to say that behind it fissured crags and gaunt monoliths tear the song from the strong winds, while below it olives and trellised vines answer to every whisper of the fairer breeze. From its terrace one surveys at will either a gulf bordered by monumental peaks, or an endless expanse of proper sea, — to wit, the Mediterranean. From such a watch-tower one might recognize the winds from afar. Evening after evening one saw the bland Northwestern breeze ripple over the gulf, and shake the still leaves of the vines before it filled our loggia with perfumed coolness. Over the shattered cliff behind, the West wind combed out the fleecy clouds and gave back the shreds to the blue ether. The crag itself would be full of the petulant wail of the Levantine or of the more stolid complaint of the African wind, long before either had visibly tarnished the waters. In such a place, with abundant leisure, it was natural that I should look much at the waters, and hearken much to the winds. Thus they became familiar to me — my friends and my foes — persons to me as much as ever they were to Greek or Roman suppliant. And as the Ancients set up fanes to the bad winds, but not to the good, and as my master Chaucer teaches me that men

I will begin with the bad winds in general; and then, Sirocco, that I may the sooner have done with thee, I will deal with thee specifically. Afterwards let the order be as the winds themselves shall intimate.

The evil winds, in a word, are the Norther (though not, as you shall see, invariably), the three southern winds, and the Levantine. If any one doubts, let him watch the scared sails flutter landward when the clouds declare one of these winds in the upper air. For a more solemn demonstration we have only to turn to Virgil, and note what befell Æneas fleeing from Troy when Juno had persuaded Æolus to do his worst. We read that all together the East wind, the South, and the Southwester rushed squally upon the sea, —

and rolled the huge waves shorewards, et vastos volvunt ad littora fluctus. Then, as if this southeastern concentration were not enough, a howling Norther was added, which naturally caught Æneas’s sail aback, —

How Æneas, whose seamanship was usually impeccant, should have been carrying more than a rag of try-sail in such weather I have never understood. Possibly there was no time to clew up the bellying lateen sails and bring the yard inboard. Yet the poet makes Æneas pray at length, with the mainsail aback. Or Virgil may have been

no sailor-man. Still again, the crew may have dropped work for prayer and ululation, as well might be, when three of the worst winds were unitedly threatening a jibe. However this be, Æolus’s choice of bad winds for Æneas — East, South, Southwest, and North — would still strike a Mediterranean skipper as a suitable combination for a hated rival.

Since Virgil has passed for a sentimentalist and an over-literary chap, — just why this should seem a defect in a poet has never been wholly clear to me,

— I feel glad that his roster of evil winds is confirmed by that good head Horace. Be it noted too that Horace does not name these winds academically, he invokes them most practically upon the loathed poetaster Mævius, who is about to set sail. Horace’s famous imprecation involves an artistic crescendo of merely terrifying, positively damaging, and completely destructive winds. He starts Mævius rather gently with a stiff South wind (Auster, the equivalent of Virgil’s Notus): —

This induction is clearly intended to be more disconcerting than dangerous. For the steady work of punishment, Horace very properly depends on the East wind: —

Now the ill-omened bark of the vile Mævius wallows helplessly in the worst

— shall we say the most ‘inverted ’? — of seas, and Horace calls upon a Northern blast, such as finally wrecked Æneas, to complete the job: —

The urbane cool-headed Horace agrees so closely with Virgil that we may be sure the tearful poet has, after all, recorded truly the actual proceedings of Æolus re Æneas. Like a finished man of the world, Horace simplifies matters. An unaided South wind suffices for Mævius, whereas Æneas endures also a Southwester. But then Æneas had offended, not a poet, but a goddess. It appears that Æolus prudently kept one bad wind, the Southeaster, in reserve, on the off chance that Æneas might outmanœuvre that buffeting Norther.

So much concerning foul winds, and now for the worst of them.

Sirocco, the Southeaster, may seem to divide the infernal honors with his brother Mezzogiorno (the South wind) and his remoter kinsman Libeccio, the Southwester. In fact, it seems to have been Libeccio that the ancients regarded as the ‘pestilent African.’ But Sirocco is after all the type of a hot and humid storm-wind, and the others merely borrow and live on his unhallowed repute. A moaning and persistent blast when once he starts, he often comes insidiously, in disguise. For hours it has been calm; the sun beats pitilessly upon the trembling sea; humid vapors shimmer whitely before distant headlands; above, only a few light clouds fleck the vibrant blue. The sea sparkles uniformly, except where meeting currents etch the surface with dull filaments, or plaques of smooth enamel tell that the last ripple is at rest. Soon an invisible breeze scatters a grayness over the sea, powders it with the dust of black pearls. Then the lower air surges with inchoate vapors, something between mist and cloud. These giant embryons cast deeply-blue shadows upon the sea. Through thin places in the mist-cover the sunshine strikes, and penumbral iridescences play slowly across the waters. The surface now is mottled with lines of cream, deep blue, rose-gray. These widely-spaced nacreous areas unite in a satiny iridescence, which soon tarnishes to a pewtery gleam.

At the Tower of the Four Winds is heard a moaning. The mist-wrack smites our mountain at mid-cliff, and flings itself upward over the crest. The torn fragments fly over the bay, dulling its sheen as they go, till they shut out the farther shore and the darkling blue mountains beyond. Seaward the waves are rising, and their breaking becomes a steady clamor. Under the crags and in the grottoes, the island wears a hem of whitest spume. A light diffused from the mist strikes thousands of dull reflections from the leaden wave-crests. Here and there the worrying blast strains the cloud-veil to the tearing point, and then a shifting spot of zinc-like lustre hurries across the lumpy surface. The African wind is here, and may stay for three days, nay, five. ‘It is Sirocco, have patience,’ one says to his neighbor.

If one could but look at the African blast without breathing it or moving in it, one might enjoy the spectacle. About his operations over the sea, in the cliff crannies, and in the cloud-wrack, there is something grandiosely willful and potent. It is only to unhappy mortals that he demonstrates his seamy side. A hundred times I have loyally trusted Sirocco, believing the native report of him to be too black, and a hundred times I have been pitifully undeceived. With the same sentiment,

I can never reconcile myself to the notorious historical fact that Titian, like Sirocco a great tonalist, like Sirocco was ‘close.’

A discomfort is announced in the first breathings of this wind. At the slightest motion the sweat starts out, and the breeze chills it upon you. If you sit still, the air seems too thick for respiration. Watery humors seem to enter one’s head and curdle. Thinking passes into deliquescence; reading produces no mental response; business decisions become a tribulation, — no wise man makes them while Sirocco blows, — personal adjustments, a torment. We may, however, unburden ourselves, if we must, in unknightly phrase or gesture. It will be resented, but as soon forgiven us. ‘ Bah! is it not Sirocco?’

Like other disagreeable wights, he has his usefulness, for which he receives small gratitude. His humidity is drunk up by powdery fields and thirsty trees and vines. Three days of him equal perhaps an hour of overt drizzle. Above the parched terraces of the vineyards, you will find the mountains clothed deep with a moist tangle of roots and herbage. It has not rained for three months. What is this precious liquor, then, but so much lifeblood drawn from Sirocco’s battering wings? Without him, would there be summer roses drooping from the Amalfi cliffs? I doubt it. These apologies should be made; and as for his disagreeable habit of saturating the air we breathe with hot and sticky vapors, does not kind Doctor Watts in explanation hold that ‘’tis his nature to’? Consider his origin. He begins to moan and speed on the torrid Libyan sands, the mere desiccated ghost of a wind. What wonder that he quaffs to bloating when his brittle pinions touch the tideless sea. Destiny wills that he come to land again with his desert heat unquenched, nay, raised to a tropical fervor by the humors he licks up as he flies. It is, as the Italians say, ‘a combination’ that oppresses him and us. Yes; on days when he bloweth not, much may be said for Sirocco.

After he has sufficiently belabored the sea, a change comes over his sullen, humid spirit. The orchards, vineyards, and porous cliffs have sucked the courage out of him. The lower vapors evade his harrying, and assert themselves in the upper air as clouds. The moaning ceases in the crannies of the rocks, the island drops its hem of ermine into a mild and hesitant sea. Large tranquil undulations cross the choppy gray waves, carrying a pale cerulean blue piecemeal through the trembling surface. Above, the clouds wheel uncertainly, then set to the east with draperies proudly trailing. The West wind is here. Ave, Zephyrus! May thy going be delayed!

Of all the winds the most openhearted, the most delicately attentive to mankind, the West wind alone comes freighted with oceanic mystery. We scent the desert in the three southern gales, the North wind carries the witness of its abode in Alpine heights, the testy Levantine has clearly had its stride and temper broken upon the countless islands of the Ægean and Ionian seas. But the West wind obeys a rhythm that admits of no proximate terrestrial explanation. Is it merely the echo of the rise and fall of Atlantic waves, the stress of currents that rise from the unfathomed depths,

A thousand miles to westward of the West?

Or is there a hint of spice-laden Fortunate Islands? A memory of blest Atlantises sunk in the blue sea when the world was yet young? Something of all this there is in the throb of the West wind, but his secret is not thereby exhausted.

With a sense of this, the Romans called him the tricksy wind, Favonius, — the Fauns’ wind. To him they imputed all manner of gracious offices. As Zephyr, accompanied by Venus and Cupid, he was the harbinger of spring. On the Ides of March he became more specifically the swallow-bringer, Chelidonios. It is Favonius, sings Horace, that after sharp winter drags the dry hulls to the wave; or, again, it is Favonius that shall waft back the lover Gyges to waiting Asteria.

The Fauns’ wind can also be heroic. In such an exceptional phase Shelley invokes him: —

In some such guise the West wind presents himself at the autumnal equinox, but the year round I fancy he would hardly know himself in Shelley’s magnificent lines. It would particularly surprise him to find himself serving as a symbol of death, for by and large he represents joy of life, intense, varied, and capricious. There is in him something of Puck, more of Ariel, with a good deal of sheer woman to boot. He is at once a soothing and a teasing elf. There is in him as little stability as treachery. Variable like a woman, like one who puts heart into her caprices, his inconstancy is ever fertile in unhackneyed delights. Of all winds he is the most personal. His endearments are so modulated that you never take them for granted. Your gratefulness to him is as unintermittent as his own mindfulness of you.

Like most serene and joyous things, the outer signs of Favonius are only diminished by transcription. Let me, then, say bluntly that his tokens are the contented sibilation of the olives and the smoother rustle of the vines; the even sailing of bright clouds athwart cerulean skies; the frosty splendor of blue water, argentine where the flaws pass; the measured dancing of sapphire waves, over which a swimmer may reach a rhythmically clasping arm. Though wind and sea rise high, the cadence is never broken. An opaline blue gleams in the greater as in the lesser billows. Ships charge lightly through such a sea. Even the pounding brigs assume the poise of skimming birds, their sordid patches of weathered canvas catching a silvery quality from the universal azure.

The racing waves carry the celestial hue into the grottoes. Shoot your deft skiff into one or another and hold it away from the rounding walls, and you shall see gleam and brightness and casual reflections of the rocks mingle in sanguine, verdant, and silver harmonies, or in some triple distillation of the blue outside.

Always the Fauns’ wind prizes his blue and silver, but when he must spend either, the silver goes first. Watch him clearing up the heavens after the East or the South wind. He urges the shapeless clouds and they fall apart in negotiable masses. At the frayed edges he nibbles playfully. The fringes whirl as he breathes. Silver strands detach themselves, hang dwindling for a moment in the blue, turn thin and ashen, then vanish like snowflakes in the surface of a lake. So Favonius forms and fines his cloud-argosies, each of which trails over the leaping sea its shadow disk of darkling azure.

Like all elfin creatures, the West wind plays most freely by moonlight; and mad work he makes with the lunar refulgences on a coursing sea. Here he effaces, there imposes a steely coruscation; here he spreads silver miles, and there mottles them with dusky cloud shadows. So, in velvety mood, he weaves over the waters; and, as he wills, the waves stifle in blue murkiness or exult in lunar incandescence, while the firm silhouettes of clouds or sails move with funereal precision across the serene or pulsing blue.

This is the wind of all pageantry and romance. It has bellied the sails of the dromonds of Tyre and Sidon, bearing gold from Iberia or tin from the Hyperborean Isles. Upon its wings the Norsemen drave their bucklered hulls into fragrant Sicilian havens. It carried to Paynim ears the distant canticles of Crusaders pent up in castellated galleys. The course of empire is admittedly western, but empire is content to crawl trader-like by land, or beat its way on sea against the headwinds. The course of adventure, on the contrary, is down the Western wind. The causes that perish, the proud races that vanish, the fond quests of sunnier dominions or of desecrated holy sepulchres, have all spread their sails and banners to a following West wind. Favonius then is in some fashion the patron of the extravagant element in us, of the quality that makes the knight-errant, the corsair, and the saint — he blows not merely to refresh us, but to keep our souls alive. We need not live, but we must set sail, is his message: a profitable one to meditate, since it draws all terrors from the storm-winds.

At the Tower of the Four Winds we were doubly favored. The Fauns’ wind parted at a mountain behind us and came from the south, rebounding gustily from immense cliffs, and again more suavely from the north across vineyards and rustling groves of saplings. By moving from one end of a terrace to the other we might enjoy Favonius in his boisterous or caressing mood. But his winning quality was ever the same. At every lull you craved renewal of his touch on your brow. Before your ear grew dull to his constant murmur, it fell to a sigh, or rose to a vibrant organ note. So delicately he fingered the keys of your flesh and spirit, that you were always aware of him, ever awaiting the surprise of his next benefaction. Yes, incorrigibly variable, woman-like refusing to be monotonous in blessing, delicately personal, insinuating himself in the realms below thought — such is Favonius. And some women take from him the hue and rhythm of their souls. Happy he who domesticates such a woman, more blest than one about whose ivory tower the West wind should ever blow. And if such a woman, like the Fauns’ wind of our terrace, should at intervals have a gustier phase, why that would be only an enhancement of her life-giving variety.

There is a kindly theory, Aristotelian I believe, by which a vice is to be regarded merely as the excess of a virtue. If this be so, the East wind may be taken as a reversed caricature of the West wind. The capricious and playful qualities of Favonius, that is, reappear in Eurus, but in extravagantly intensified form, all sprightly geniality of the Fauns’ wind being converted into active malevolence. The East wind is a booming and impatient spirit — should you personify him it must be as a mad giant, the Hercules furens of Æolus’s family. He abounds in wanton violence. Stirring the sea to its depths, he also torments its surface. Whatever great rollers he launches toward the Pillars of Hercules, he straightway falls upon and decapitates. The spindrift smitten from their crests slides level and dense above the slower billows, low clouds clash above, stinging showers unite tumbling vapors with frothing sea, a spectral pallor seems churned up from phosphorescent depths. This is ‘the tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,’ before which St. Paul’s ship drave helpless upon the reefs of Malta. Woe to the ill-fated bark that lacks a roadstead now. On shore the tall pines are being wrenched to their spreading roots. Some fall before the test. Achilles fell, so Horace sings, ‘like a cypress smitten of the East wind,’ —

Again, he writes from the shelter of the Sabine roof-tree, ‘To-morrow a tempest from the East shall strew the woods with many leaves and the strand with useless sea-weed, unless indeed that augur of the rains, the crow, deceives us.’

Nobody speaks disrespectfully of the giant Eurus. His cousin AusterNotus (the South wind) men call rash and heady, the sweltering African blast (the Southwester, the Libeccio of modern sailors) is qualified abusively as scorching, pestilent, and the like, but the East wind is dealt with reverently. When the shade of a drowned mariner begs a handful of sand for his mound, — Archytas overtaken and ignobly stranded by the South wind (Notus), —what does he promise the pious wayfarer? Why, protection against Eurus.

‘Howsoever Eurus shall threaten the Hesperian waves, let the Venusian forest be shattered, thou being safe!’

And again, when Horace wants a simile to tell the ruthless speed of care, he finds that it boards the ships more swift than Eurus bearing storms.

Yes, a battering, potent wind is Eurus, full withal of significant sound and fury, for he can make good every threat. Like most of the bad winds he is a tarnisher, blazoning with nothing brighter than lead or zinc. He beats the clouds down close to earth and sea as if to form low corridors in which he may rage the more terribly. In him there is something insensate, yet also purposeful. He exhausts by his steady pounding, and overwhelms by his sudden furious blasts. His frenzies are calculated. Beside the Anarch in him there is much of the Jacobin. He plays the leveler. Perhaps he was long ago the great wind that sounded before Elijah, in which God was not.

The younger Pliny declares that the North wind is the most healthful of them all. Otherwise I have never read a good word about Tramontano. In winter the shivering Italians shut him out with muffling cloaks; in summer even, they regard him as a mixed blessing. On the sea he is almost always an enemy, for he stirs the waves, if not from the bottom, like Sirocco, at least most lamentably from the top. He dashes the powdery dust from the mainland upon island vineyards and parched decks far beyond the looming of the cliffs. And yet, summer or winter, he is a brave and revealing wind. The well-moulded clouds rise high and escape him in the upper blue, crisp jets of foam flower at random through the level sea. Above them spreads a mist infinitely subtile in texture, — a lens, not a screen, — for through it one may see beyond a chaplet of white cities the blue bulwark of far-away mountains. At sunset the rugged sea rejects the glow, and the gulf lies like a sombre slab of rippled porphyry between its amethystine headlands. Above, the heaven, barred with flaming clouds, passes from a coppery red at the horizon through yellow to palest green and an upper blue interspersed with rose.

Other winds are harmonizers, melting into a single element earth and sea and sky. Not so your North wind. He is a stickler for distinctions. The land, though it be ten leagues distant, remains the firm rim of the sea. The mountains project their gaunt ribs toward you like an athlete swelling his chest. Artists shut up their paintboxes in despair, and protest they are not topographers. The uttermost mountains rise clear and massive against the sky. In the jargon of the studios, there is no atmosphere, but there is a crystalline something in the air that for the plain man’s purpose is better.

I suppose the bad name Aquilo had with the Romans, and Tramontano equally with the Italians, comes from the fact that, being a good thing, one almost always has too much of him. And as our unperceptive fellow beings are too prone to judge us by those very rare occasions when we are at our worst, so Tramontano, perhaps, takes his unpopularity from the unusual phase in which he well deserves the epithet ‘black.’ A black Tramontano may bring thunder, and always, as the case may be, rain, sleet, or hail. It brings along also pretty much anything that is detachable, favoring, however, shutters, tiles, chimney-pots, and like articles of vertu. After two days of the sable North wind a great liner came in salted from water-line to truck. You would have declared her to be sprayed with whitewash. Hardy revelers in the grill-room forty feet above the spume were forced to desist, as their table was covered with a mixture of salt water and shattered window-panes. It was this wind that Horace invoked against the driveling Mævius, and that overcame Æneas when black night settled upon the deep, —

Was it not this wind which the patriarch Job had in mind when he groaned, ‘O remember that my life is wind: mine eyes shall no more see good’? And Horace rejoiced that his monument more durable than brass was not to be exposed to the gnawing of the frosty North wind.

But why judge old Boreas by his worst blowing? There was once a very young clergyman who discoursed on the duty of cheerfulness. When, by way of illustration, a jackal slays a child or a tiger a man, we are too prone to say, ‘Unlucky child! unhappy man!’ Why look only at one side of the transaction, protested the apostle of cheerfulness. Why not say rather, ‘Lucky jackal! happy tiger!’ The plea was so effective with the parish that now I venture to borrow it in behalf of my boisterous friend. Why not say, ‘Fine old Boreas, how he enjoys himself!’ when he playfully prostrates a row of cypresses, or casually removes a few square metres of your tiles? Or, better yet, let us judge the North wind not at his worst, but at his best. Mark that loveliest of the winds, the refresher of sultry sun-settings, Maestrale.

For long hours there has been no breeze. The heat reverberates from the cliffs in visible whorls. The shingly strand is scorching even to a bather’s wet skin. Fishermen snore in the shadow of their warping boats. The vines are still, and the fig-leaves stand out motionless against a coppery sky as if cut in enameled metal. The olives drenched with the sunlight sparkle from within. All is silence save for the minor drone of a returning goat-herd. On the crest of the bluff far below, the ilexes stand stiffly before the smooth water. The burnished level rises for miles unruffled, but variously polished and tinted and veined by the slow play of invisible currents. A sullen mistiness broods over all. The marbled expanse receives streams of orange and crimson from the sinking sun. Far up, under the looming white cities, the polished sheet is tarnished. The corroding area sweeps down toward our island, and at the edge may be seen a violet ripple racing for the shore. As it passes, the brighter hues of sunset yield. Soon the undulation vanishes under the projecting cliffs, and in a moment there is a tossing of their crowning ilexes; far down the slopes the vines are already sibilant, and their increasing rustle deepens into a cheer which flapping figleaves and vibrating olives take up more sonorously. A great freshness surges into our loggia: Maestrale is here.

As he leaps down through vineyards and orchards, the formerly silent peasants hail each other from terrace to terrace. Below, the snorers under the boats have counted upon his coming. A dozen tiny sails begin to mount a sea fairly damasked by the passing flaws. In hurdling our craggy island, Maestrale has literally gone to pieces. To pull himself together on the farther side he may need a mile. As the climbing boats scatter right and left, another dozen dart out from the port, and then a score. The tiny patches of sail soon lose themselves in the growing dusk, but if the moon withhold her rays, ever unfriendly to fisher-folk, covey after covey of these winged skiffs will rise from somewhere under the cliff and disappear in the gloom. Wait but a moment and lights will be twinkling on the deep. Tens, twelves, whole constellations will merge into one greater figure, until you may see a hundred beacons deployed in even lines upon the mysterious parade-ground below. To-morrow the whole island will feast on slender young octopuses fried to a golden crisp. As for Maestrale, his day’s work is done. He may sleep until to-morrow needs him.

The Ancients are on the whole ungrateful to Maestrale, giving to the gentle West wind, Zephyr, a praise that should be shared. But a wind of a few hours’ duration may perhaps hardly expect better treatment, insistent repetitiousness being of the very essence of popular impressiveness.

I think, however, we may believe it was Maestrale that wafted Æneas on the last stretch of his fateful voyage from Gaeta to Tiber mouth. The sense of gentleness and sudden breathing in two of Virgil’s loveliest lines forbids me to think that the stronger, and for this course slightly adverse, West wind is intended. No, it can only be Maestrale of which it is written, —

Such were the winds that visited our tower. While we sojourned there we naturally took the seafarer’s self-interested view of them, and perhaps dwelt overmuch upon the bad winds. Would Sirocco blow and make climbs impossible? Would the Levantine blast make the shallows too rough and turbid for bathing? Might too vigorous a Tramontano keep in port the little steamer that brought the mails? — These were the questions we asked of the winds. We quite understood why the mariners of old Rome set up a fane to the tempests near the Porta Capena, whereas the Fauns’ wind and the delectable Maestrale have never, I think, boasted altar nor obtained votive garlands of flowers and fruit. So in all our traffic with Nature we are wont to take her favors for granted, while shabbily calling upon the gods to avert her buffets. This, I confess, was our pagan mood so long as the winds had power to work us annoyance. But now that the Tower itself is becoming a fading memory, and vague and featureless winds play about our American cottage, our minds hold most clearly the buoyant Western wind and the healing northern breeze that preludes the setting of the sun. May these erstwhile benefactors deign to accept an humble altar of alien sod, and thereon some modest oblation of New World posies, propitiatory, I trust, albeit uncouth to Favonius.