Dry Autumn

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Title:     Dry Autumn
Author: Alice Meynell [More Titles by Meynell]

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.

[The end]
Alice Meynell's essay: Dry Autumn

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