1 September: Boreham on Spring

The Bane of Spring
Spring involves Spring-cleaning, and, however a woman may revel in it, Spring-cleaning is, to the average man, the desolation of abomination. He loathes, abhors and detests it. It gets on his nerves. For him the witchery of Spring-time is clouded by the thought of the unhallowed festival of the bucket and the broom. He resents the way in which, at every turn, the most poetical and the most prosaical conceptions blend and intermingle. The snowdrops and the swallows bring with them the swish of the scrubbing-brush and the hideous aroma of soft soap. He gazes with speechless bewilderment, and with something akin to alarm, at the infatuation that Spring-cleaning possesses for the feminine mind.

A man would cheerfully dispense with the jonquils and the violets if, by making such a sacrifice, he could insure himself against the dreaded upheaval. A woman, on the contrary, conveys to her husband the impression that she loves the vernal phenomena all the more because it provides her with the opportunity of tearing everything up, pulling everything down, turning everything round, and reducing everything to a state of unutterable chaos. In the Spring, according to Tennyson, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, but the Laureate omitted to mention that, at the same vivacious and picturesque season a housewife's fancy turns to such a series of domestic cyclones, waterspouts, earthquakes, and similar convulsions as must fill the heart of her unhappy husband with trepidation and dismay.

When Accumulation Bursts Its Bounds
And yet, although most men hate Spring-cleaning as fiercely as they are capable of hating anything, they confess to themselves in secret—they would never dream of confessing it even to themselves in the presence of their wives—that the horrid thing is a necessary nuisance. Repulsive as the task may be, things have to be sorted out and tidied up at some time or other. As a matter of fact, although his wife knows nothing of it, and he is too shrewd to enlighten her, he finds himself under the same devastating necessity at his own office. Papers, carefully filed, mountainously accumulate. In course of time they are stacked away and the dust of ages gently enfolds them. But a time comes when he is compelled, through sheer lack of space, to effect a clearance, and then, just for one brief moment, he thinks tolerantly, perhaps even admiringly, of the feminine genius that reduces this barbaric business to a regular system.

A certain amount of sentiment enters into the matter. Every man receives a number of letters that, although not needed for reference, he cannot bring themselves to destroy. They remind him of enchanting scenes, charming people and delightful experiences. Or perhaps they are letters of appreciation and encouragement—letters at which he likes to glance when skies seem grey. Or they may be letters from old friends and comrades who have passed away. He may, on sober reflection, decide to cherish these precious missives a little longer, but at any rate he will be wise to emulate his wife's example in overhauling once a year his desks and pigeonholes. He will be surprised at the multitude of papers that, doomed to go to the incinerator at some time or other, may as well go now. As soon as the leaves, beautiful and valuable as they have been, are of no further use to the tree, it sheds them, its own life and vigour being augmented in the process. It is Nature's Autumn-time observance of a woman's Spring-time festival.

Civilisation Submits To Its Supreme Ordeal
The march of civilisation is largely a matter of Spring-cleaning. As the world's old Winter passes away, and the genial Spring-time of which the ages have dreamed comes in, we instinctively jettison heaps of rubbish that we have amassed in the darker centuries and set up in their stead lovelier and brighter things. Clumsy and cumbersome old institutions are replaced by simpler and more efficient ones. Education itself is a species of Spring-cleaning. It is a tidying up of the mind. We unlearn and we learn. We fling out our mental rubbish and store the mind with what is really useful and beautiful. The man who knows how to forget the things that are best forgotten, and to remember the things that are best remembered, is a past-master of the high art of Spring-cleaning. It is really absurd to clutter the pigeon-holes of the mind with worthless rubbish.

Let us forget the things that vexed and tried us,
The worrying things that
caused our souls to fret;
The hopes that, cherished long, were still denied
us
Let us forget!

"Finish every day and be done with it!" says Emerson. "You have done your best. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in; forget them as soon as you can! Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with old nonsense!" Here is Spring-cleaning of a really sublime kind. And yet it leaves something to be said. For it deals only with the life without; is there no such thing as Spring-cleaning of the life within? "I am going," says Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, the brilliant young Frenchman, "I am going to sweep and garnish the very soul of me and to set up in it some true ideas, some honest intentions and some sincere affection." The man who knows how to spruce up his inner being after this fashion has reached the very pinnacle of life's dizziest successes. And, after all, what are the visions of seers and prophets but a forecast of a majestic Spring-cleaning? The Golden Age is ahead, they say; the world's high Spring-time is coming! And, depend upon it, when that everlasting Spring rushes in and the never-withering flowers at last appear, the world's old cobwebs will be swept into the uttermost abyss. Sin and sorrow and sickness must all go, while not one thing that contaminates or defiles will remain. The noblest songs ever sung concern themselves with that ultimate Spring-cleaning. The dust of the ages must vanish and the fragrance of the Spring-time flowers perfume a new and better age.

F W Boreham

Image: Spring Cleaning