'What American Beauty Should Be'

An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along Otter Creek in southern Vermont near Dorset. Often we hiked in Otter Creek, which is filled with granite boulders. It was less hiking than climbing horizontally. Between the stones and away from the current, red and yellow maple leaves had already fallen, and swirled in small eddies. I was a newly transplanted Ohioan but fell hard for autumn in New England and upstate New York. 

Henry James returned to the United States in 1904 after twenty years in Europe. In 1907 he published The American Scene, an account of his eleven-month visit. In the first chapter, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” he describes seeing the Saco River in New Hampshire:

 

“There hung over these things the insistent hush of a September Sunday morning; nowhere greater than in the tended woods enclosing the admirable country home that I was able to enjoy as a centre for contemplation; woods with their dignity maintained by a large and artful clearance of undergrowth, and repaying this attention, as always, by something of the semblance of a sacred grove, a place prepared for high uses, even if for none rarer than high talk.”

 

We don’t think of James as a nature writer, and his interest in the landscape is utterly unscientific, but New York City-born James is nostalgic for a bucolic scene he has never known before:

 

“I went down into the valley—that was an impression to woo by stages; I walked beside one of those great fields of standing Indian corn which make, to the eye, so perfect a note for the rest of the American rural picture, throwing the conditions back as far as our past permits, rather than forward, as so many other things do, into the age to come. The maker of these reflections betook himself at last, in any case, to an expanse of rock by a large bend of the Saco, and lingered there under the infinite charm of the place.”

 

Though he’s a quintessentially urban writer, James makes the countryside his own with his late-style prose:

 

“The analyst [that is, himself] in fact could scarce be restless here; the impression, so strong and so final, persuaded him perfectly to peace. This, on September Sunday mornings, was what American beauty should be; it filled to the brim its idea and its measure—albeit Mount Washington, hazily overhung, happened not to contribute to the effect. It was the great, gay river, singing as it went, like some reckless adventurer, goodhumoured for the hour and with his hands in his pockets, that argued the whole case and carried everything assentingly before it.”

 

Earlier in the same chapter, James composes one of my favorite metaphors, almost too rich to endure. I think of it every autumn here in Texas: “. . . the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”