One who has much and often protested against the season of Autumn, her
pathos, her chilly breakfast-time, her "tints," her decay, and her
extraordinary popularity, saw cause one year to make a partial
recantation. Autumn, until then, had seemed to be a practitioner of all
the easy arts at once, or rather, she had taken the easy way with the
arts of colour, sentiment, suggestion, and regret.
She had often encouraged and rewarded, also, the ingratitude of a whole
nation for a splendid summer, somewhat officiously cooling, refreshing,
allaying, and comforting the discontent of the victims of an English sun.
She had soothed the fuming citizen, and brought back the fogs of custom,
effaced the skies, to which he had upturned no very attentive eye,
muffled up his chin, and in many other ways curried favour. Not only did
she fall in with his landscape mood, but she made herself his housemate
by his fireplaces, drew his curtains, shut out her own wet winds in the
streets, and became privy to the commoner comforts of man, like a wild
creature tamed and conniving at human sport and schemes. "Domesticated"
Gothic itself, or the governesses who daily by advertisement describe
themselves by that same strange modern adjective, could not be more bent
upon the flattery of man in his less heroic moments.
Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accomplice of
daily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now accepted sense
of a once noble word, comfortable. Besides, her show of stormy forests
is done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment, with dashings
and underlinings--we all know the sort of letter, for instance, which
answers to the message and proclamation of Autumn, as she usually is in
the outer world. A complete sentimentalist is she, whether in the open
country or when she looks in at the lighted windows, and goodnaturedly
makes her voice like a very goblin's outside, for the increasing of the
bourgeois' _bien-etre_.
But that year all had been otherwise. Autumn had borne herself with a
heroism of sunny weather. Where we had been wont to see signals of
distress, and to hear the voluble outpouring of an excitable temperament,
with the extremity of scattered leaves and desperate damp, we beheld an
aspect of golden drought. Nothing mouldered--everything was consumed by
vital fires. The gardens were strewn with smouldering soft ashes of late
roses, late honeysuckle, honey-sweet clematis. The silver seeds of rows
of riverside flowers took sail on their random journey with a light wind.
Leaves set forth, a few at a time, with a little volley of birds--a
buoyant caravel. Or, in the stiller weather, the infrequent fall of
leaves took place quietly, with no proclamation of ruin, in the privacy
within the branches. While nearly all the woods were still fresh as
streams, you might see that here or there was one, with an invincible
summer smile, slowly consuming, in defiance of decay. Life destroyed
that autumn, not death.
The novelist would be at a loss had we a number of such years. He would
lose the easiest landscape--for the autumn has among her facile ways the
way of allowing herself to be described by rote. But there were no
regions of crimson woods and yellow--only the grave, cool, and cheerful
green of the health of summer, and now and then that deep bronzing of the
leaves that the sun brought to pass. Never did apples look better than
in those still vigorous orchards. They shone so that lamps would hardly
be brighter. The apple-gathering, under such a sun, was nearly as warm
and brilliant as a vintage; and indeed it was of the Italian autumn that
you were reminded. There were the same sunburnt tones, the same brown
health. There was the dark smile of chestnut woods as among the
Apennines.
For it was chiefly within the woods that the splendid autumn without
pathos gave delight. The autumn _with_ pathos has a way there of
overwhelming her many fragrances in the general odour of dead leaves
generalized. That year you could breathe all the several sweet scents,
as discriminated and distinct as those of flowers on the tops of
mountains--warm pine and beech as different as thyme and broom,
unconfused. Even the Spring, with her little divided breezes of
hawthorn, rose, and lilac, was not more various.
Moreover, while some of the woods were green, none of the fields were so.
In their sunburnt colours were to be seen "autumn tints" of a far
different beauty from that of a gaudy decay. Dry autumn is a general
lover of simplicity, and she sweeps a landscape with long plain colours
that take their variations from the light. When the country looks "burnt
up," as they say who are ungrateful for the sun, then are these colours
most tender. Grass, that had lost its delicacy in the day when the last
hay was carried, gets it again. For a little time it was--new-reaped--of
something too hard a green; then came dry autumn along, and softened it
into a hundred exquisite browns. Dry autumn does beautiful things in
sepia, as the water-colour artist did in the early days, and draws divine
brown Turners of the first manner.
The fields and hedgerows must needs fade, and the sun made the fading
quick with the bloom of brown. For one great meadow so softly gilded, I
would give all the scarlet and yellow trees that ever made a steaming
autumn gorgeous--all the crimson of the Rhine valleys, all the patched
and spotted walnut-leaves of the _muhl-thal_ by Boppard, and the little
trees that change so suddenly to their yellow of decay in groups at the
foot of the ruins of Sternberg and Liebenstein, every one of their
branches disguised in the same bright, insignificant, unhopeful colour.
An autumn so rare should not close without a recorded "hail and
farewell!" Spring was not braver, summer was not sweeter. That year's
great sun called upon a great spirit in all the riverside woods. Those
woods did not grow cold; they yielded to their last sunset.