The reason autumn has so bad a name in the world’s poetry and prose is that autumn in Northern Europe is a miserable season. In London, Paris, Berlin, November (and often October) is one of the worst times of the year. A chronically overcast sky, a continual drizzle, a damp chill even on mistily rainless days, combine to produce gloom. The first autumn and winter I spent in Paris revised my notions of those two seasons. As an American, I had thought of the difference between summer and winter as a difference only in temperature; I reasonably expected as much sunshine in autumn and winter as in summer. A typical January day in New York is cold and cloudless.
Well, in Paris the sun disappeared for weeks at a time, and on the rare occasions when it shone people ran out in the street to look at it. One of the worst jokes in the world is the expression, “sunny France.” The French themselves know better. François Coppée wrote of the “rare smiles” of the Norman climate, and Anatole France, describing a pretty girl, wrote “Her eyes were grey; the grey of the Paris sky.”
For the same reason “Italian skies” have been overpraised, because their eulogists are English or French or German. The Italian sky is usually so much better than the sky of more northerly European localities that it seems good by contrast. Now, as a matter of fact the winter sky over Bridgeport, Conn., is superior in brightness and blueness to the sky over Florence or Venice.
November, one of the best months of the year in America, is dreaded by all who live in France, England or Germany. Walking in New Haven one brilliant (and quite typical) day in mid-November, exhibiting the university and city to a visiting French professor, I enquired, “What do you think of our November climate?” He replied, “It is crazy.”
A strange thing is that Bryant, born in the glorious Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where autumn, instead of being pale and wet as the European poets have described it, is brilliant and inspiring, all blue and gold, did not use his eyes; he followed the English poetical tradition.
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year.
James Whitcomb Riley used the evidence of his senses, and wrote an autumnal masterpiece.
O it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best....
They’s something kind o’ hearty-like about the atmosphere
When the beat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here—Of