“Noises of river and of grove
And moving things in field and stall
And night birds’ whistle shall be all
Of the world’s speech that we shall hear.”

William Morris.

“The poetry of earth is never dead.”

Keats.

I

The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come within its ken; the delight of a passionate soul in the riotous wealth of the Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid in the splendid sanity of the sunlight—these are the sentiments that well up from the writings of Richard Jefferies.

By comparison with him, Thoreau’s Earth-worship seems quite a stolid affair, and even Borrow’s frank enjoyment of the open air has a strangely apathetic touch about it.

No doubt he felt more keenly than did the Hermit of Walden, or the Norfolk giant, but it was not so much passionate intensity as nervous susceptibility. He had the sensitive quivering nerves of the neurotic which respond to the slightest stimulus. Of all the “Children of the Open Air” Jefferies was the most sensitive; but for all that I would not say that he felt more deeply than Thoreau, Borrow, or Stevenson.

Some people are especially susceptible by constitution to pain or pleasure, but it would be rash to assume hastily that on this account they have more deeply emotional natures. That they express their feelings more readily is no guarantee that they feel more deeply.

In other words, there is a difference between susceptibility and passion.

Whether a man has passion—be it of love or hate—can be judged only by his general attitude towards his fellow-beings, and by the stability of the emotion.

Now Jefferies certainly had keener sympathies with humankind than Thoreau, and these sympathies intensified as the years rolled by. Few men have espoused more warmly the cause of the agricultural labourer. Perhaps Hodge has never experienced a kinder advocate than Jefferies. To accuse him of superficiality of emotion would be unfair; for he was a man with much natural tenderness in his disposition.

All that I wish to protest against is the assumption made by some that because he has written so feelingly about Hodge, because he has shown so quick a response to the beauties of the natural world, he was therefore gifted with a deep nature, as has been claimed for him by some of his admirers.

One of the characteristics that differentiates the Vagabond writer from his fellows is, I think, a lack of passion—always excepting a passion for the earth, a quality lacking human significance. In their human sympathies they vary: but in no case, not even with Whitman, as I hope to show in my next paper, is there a passion for humankind. There may be curiosity about certain types, as with Borrow and Stevenson; a delight in simple natures, as with Thoreau; a broad, genial comradeship with all and sundry, as in the case of Whitman; but never do you find depth, intensity.

Jefferies then presents to my mind all the characteristics of the Vagabond, his many graces and charms, his notable deficiencies, especially the absence of emotional stability. This trait is, of course, more pronounced in some Vagabonds than in others; but it belongs to his inmost being. Eager, curious, adventurous; tasting this experience and that; his emotions share with his intellect in a chronic restless transition. More easily felt than defined is the lack of permanence in his nature; his emotions flame fitfully and in gusts, rather than with steady persistence. Finally, despite the tenderness and kindliness he can show, the egotistic elements absorb too much of his nature. A great egotist can never be a great lover.

This may seem a singularly ungracious prelude to a consideration of Richard Jefferies; but whatever it may seem it is quite consistent with a hearty admiration for his genius, and a warm appreciation of the man. Passion he had of a kind, but it was the rapt, self-centred passion of the mystic.

He interests us both as an artist and as a thinker. It will be useful, therefore, to keep these points of view as separate as possible in studying his writings.

II

Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that strikes a reader is his power to convey sensuous impressions. He loved the Earth, not as some have done with the eye or ear only, but with every nerve of his body. His scenic pictures are more glowing, more ardent than those of Thoreau. There was more of the poet, less of the naturalist in Jefferies. Perhaps it would have been juster to call Thoreau a poetic naturalist, and reserved the term poet-naturalist for Jefferies. Be that as it may, no one can read Jefferies—especially such books as Wild Life in a Southern County, or The Life of the Fields, without realizing the keen sensibility of the man to the sensuous impressions of Nature.

Again and again in reading Jefferies one is reminded of the poet Keats. There is the same physical frailty of constitution and the same rare susceptibility to every manifestation of beauty. There is, moreover, the same intellectual devotion to beauty which made Keats declare Truth and Beauty to be one. And the likeness goes further still.

The reader who troubles to compare the sensuous imagery of the three great Nature poets—Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, will realize an individual difference in apprehending the beauties of the natural world. Wordsworth worships with his ear, Shelley with his eye, Keats with his sense of touch. Sound, colour, feeling—these things inform the poetry of these great poets, and give them their special individual charm.

Now, in Jefferies it is not so much the colour of life, or the sweet harmonies of the Earth, that he celebrates, though of course these things find a place in his prose songs. It is the “glory of the sum of things” that diffuses itself and is felt by every nerve in his body.

Take, for instance, the opening to Wild Life in a Southern County:—

“The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer sunshine. A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream—a sibilant “sish-sish”—passes along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of the wind rushes through the bennets and the dry grass. There is the happy hum of bees—who love the hills—as they speed by laden with their golden harvest, a drowsy warmth, and the delicious odour of wild thyme. Behind, the fosse sinks and the rampart rises high and steep—two butterflies are wheeling in uncertain flight over the summit. It is only necessary to raise the head a little way, and the cod breeze refreshes the cheek—cool at this height, while the plains beneath glow under the heat.”

This, too, from The Life of the Fields:—

“Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch, told the hour of the year, as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate scent of green, so, too, have ferns very different to that of grass or leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems, enlarged a little in the middle like classical columns, and heavy with their sap and freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes—the common rushes—were full of beautiful summer.”

Jefferies’ writings are studies in tactile sensation. This is what brings him into affinity with Keats, and this is what differentiates him from Thoreau, with whom he had much in common. Of both Jefferies and Thoreau it might be said what Emerson said of his friend, that they “saw as with a microscope, heard as with an ear-trumpet.” As lovers of the open air and of the life of the open air, every sense was preternaturally quickened. But though both observed acutely, Jefferies alone felt acutely.

“To me,” he says, “colour is a sort of food; every spot of colour is a drop of wine to the spirit.”

It took many years for him to realize where exactly his strength as a writer lay. In early and later life he again and again essayed the novel form, but, superior as were his later fictions—Amaryllis at the Fair, for instance, to such crude stuff as The Scarlet Shawl—it is as a prose Nature poet that he will be remembered.

He knew and loved the Earth; the atmosphere of the country brought into play all the faculties of his nature. Lacking in social gifts, reserved and shy to an extreme, he neither knew much about men and women, nor cared to know much. With a few exceptions—for the most part studies of his own kith and kin—the personages of his stories are shadow people; less vital realities than the trees, the flowers, the birds, of whom he has to speak.

But where he writes of what he has felt, what he has Richard Jefferies realized, then, like every fine artist, he transmits his enthusiasm to others. Sometimes, maybe, he is so full of his subject, so engrossed with the wonders of the Earth, that the words come forth in a torrent, impetuous, overwhelming. He writes like a man beside himself with sheer joy. The Life of the Fields gives more than physical pleasure, more than an imaginative delight, it is a religion—the old religion of Paganism. He has, as Sir Walter Besant truly said, “communed so much with Nature, that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. He lies upon the turf, and feels the embrace of the great round world.” [147]

Even apart from fiction, his earlier work varied greatly in quality. With the publication of The Game-keeper at Home, it was clear that a new force had entered English literature. A man of temperamental sympathies with men like Borrow and Thoreau, nevertheless with a power and individuality of his own. But if increasing years brought comparative recognition, they brought also fresh physical infirmities. The last few years of his life were one prolonged agony, and yet his finest work was done in them, and that splendid prose-poem, “The Pageant of Summer,” was dictated in the direst possible pain. As the physical frame grew weaker the passion for the Earth grew in intensity; and in his writing there is all that desperate longing for the great healing forces of Nature, that ecstasy in the glorious freedom of the open air, characteristic of the sick man.

At its best Jefferies’ style is rich in sensuous charm, and remarkable no less for its eloquence of thought than for its wealth of observation.

III

One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the mystical quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of Nature. The power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like Keats and Shelley could not always command it successfully—and perhaps Blake, Coleridge, and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the highest degree. It is comparatively an easy matter to deal with the mysticism of the night. The possibilities of darkness readily impress the imagination. But the mysticism of the sunlight—the mysticism not of strange shapes, but of familiar things of every day, this, though felt by many, is the most difficult thing in the world to suggest in words.

The “visions” of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics. The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the same sense of physical detachment from the body.

In that fascinating volume of autobiography The Story of my Heart, Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is one:—

“I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then up through the elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me—the house, the people, the sound—seemed to disappear and to leave me alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly. My thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very short time, only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning. I was exalted.”

One is reminded of Tennyson’s verses:—

“Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—

“Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no knowledge may declare.” [149]

“Ah!” says the medical man, with a wise shake of the head, “this mental condition is a common enough phenomenon, though only on rare occasions does it express itself in literature. It is simple hysteria.”

The transcendentalist who has regarded this state of mind as a spiritual revelation, and looked upon its possessor as one endowed with special powers of intuition, is indignant with this physiological explanation. He is more indignant when the medical man proceeds to explain the ecstatic trances of saints, those whom one may call professional mystics. “Brutal materialism,” says the transcendentalist.

Now although hysteria is commonly regarded as a foolish exhibition of weakness on the part of some excitable men and women, there is absolutely no scientific reason why any stigma should attach to this phenomenon. Nor is there any reason why the explanation should be considered as derogatory and necessarily connected with a materialistic view of the Universe.

For what is hysteria? It is an abnormal condition of the nervous system giving rise to certain physiological and psychical manifestations. With the physiological ones we are not concerned, but the psychical manifestation should be of the greatest interest to all students of literature who are also presumably students of life. The artistic temperament is always associated with a measure of nervous instability. And where there is nervous instability there will always be a tendency to hysteria. This tendency may be kept in check by other faculties. But it is latent—ready to manifest itself in certain conditions of health or under special stress of excitement. It does not follow that every hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in literature and philosophy.

This psychical condition is far commoner in the East than in the West. Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga. [151a] The passive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours this ecstatic condition.

“The science of the Sufis,” says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh century, [151b] “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature?—what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.”

It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual formulÆ. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the reference to “touch” in the quotation just made will remind the reader of the important part played by the tactile sense in Jefferies’ Æsthetic appreciations.

We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations involved in these “trance conditions.” All that concerns us is the remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained psychical condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces beyond our immediate ken which compel recognition from certain imaginative minds, how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or, in other words, how far these visions are objective realities, how far subjective, are questions that he beyond the scope of the present paper. One thing, however, is indisputable; they have exercised a great fascination over men of sensitive, nervous temperaments, and are often remarkable for the wider significance they have given to our ideals of beauty.

The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as “the fruit of a degenerate brain.” Such a criticism is at one with the linking of genius with insanity—an argument already broached in the paper dealing with Hazlitt.

Professor William James—who certainly holds no brief for the mystic—makes the interesting suggestion that “these mystical flights are inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative to which we as yet know nothing.” [153a]

“As a rule,” he says elsewhere, “mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.”

The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with the writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson’s mysticism is more speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a greater share in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite apart from, perhaps even transcending, their literary interest is the psychological significance of stories like Markheim and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones, [153b] has said, when speaking of his “ecstasies”: “His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the visions of Kubla Khan; he saw ‘no damsel with a dulcimer,’ but thrilled with yearning unspeakable for the ‘fuller soul,’ and felt in every trembling fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality.”

This attempt to exalt Jefferies at the expense of De Quincey and Coleridge seems to me unfortunate. Enough has been said already in the remarks on De Quincey to show that the dreams of De Quincey were no mere opium dreams. De Quincey was a born dreamer, and from his earliest days had visions and ecstatic moods. The opium which he took (primarily at any rate to relieve pain, not, as Dr. Jones suggests, to excite sensuous imagery) undoubtedly intensified the dream faculty, but it did not produce it.

I confess that I do not know quite what the Doctor means by preferring the “purer delight” of the Jefferies exaltation to the vision that produced Kubla Khan. If he implies that opium provoked the one and that “the pure breath of Nature” (to use his own phrase) inspired the other, and that the latter consequently is the purer delight, then I cannot follow his reasoning.

A vision is not the less “pure” because it has been occasioned by a drug. One of the sublimest spiritual experiences that ever happened to a man came to John Addington Symonds after a dose of chloroform. Nitrous oxide, ether, Indian hemp, opium, these things have been the means of arousing the most wonderful states of ecstatic feeling.

Then why should Kubla Khan be rated as a less “pure” delight than one of the experiences retailed in The Story of my Heart? Is our imagination so restricted that it cannot enjoy both the subtleties of Coleridge and the fuller muse of Jefferies?

The healing power of Nature has never found happier expression than in The Story of my Heart. In words of simple eloquence he tells us how he cured the weariness and bitterness of spirit by a journey to the seashore.

“The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force of the sea.”

Those who know Jefferies only by his quieter passages of leisurely observation are surprised when they find such a swirl of passionate longing in his autobiography.

IV

The points of affinity between Thoreau and Jefferies are sufficiently obvious; and yet no two writers who have loved the Earth, and found their greatest happiness in the life of the woods and fields, as did these two men, have expressed this feeling so variously. Thoreau, quiet, passive, self-contained, has seized upon the large tranquillity of Nature, the coolness and calm, “the central piece subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.” Interspersed with his freshly observed comments on the myriad life about him are moral reflections, shrewd criticism of men and things, quaint and curious illustrations from his scholarly knowledge. But although he may not always talk of the Earth, there is the flavour of the Earth, the sweetness and naturalness of the Earth, about his finest utterances.

Jefferies, feverish, excitable, passionate, alive to the glorious plenitude of the Earth, has seized upon the exceeding beauty, and the healing beauty of natural things. No scholar like Thoreau, he brings no system of thought, as did the American, for Nature to put into shape. Outside of Nature all is arid and profitless to him. He comes to her with empty hands, and seeks for what she may give him. To Thoreau the Earth was a kind and gracious sister; to Jefferies an all-sufficing mistress.

The reader who passes from Thoreau to Jefferies need have no fear that he will be wearied with the same point of view. On the contrary, he will realize with pleasure how differently two genuine lovers of the Earth can express their affection.

In Jefferies’ song of praise, his song of desire—praise and desire alternate continually in his writings—there are two aspects of the Earth upon which he dwells continually—the exceeding beauty of the Earth, and the exceeding plenitude of the Earth. Apostrophes to the beauty have been quoted already; let this serve as an illustration of the other aspect:—

“Everything,” [157a] he exclaims, “on a scale of splendid waste. Such noble broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold. Never was there such a lying proverb as ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’ [157b] Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the waste the greater the enjoyment—the nearer the approach to real life. Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures abroad, puffs them with open lips along on every breeze; piles up lavish layers of them in the free, open air, packs countless numbers together in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped on everything she does.”

This is no chance passage, no casual thought. Again and again Jefferies returns to the richness and plenty of the Earth. And his style, suiting itself to the man’s temperament, is rich and overflowing, splendidly diffuse, riotously exulting, until at times there is the very incoherence of passion about it.

Thus, in looking at the man’s artistic work, its form of expression, its characteristic notes, something of the man’s way of thinking has impressed itself upon us.

V

It may be well to gather up the scattered impressions, and to look at the thought that underlies his fervid utterances. Beginning as merely an interested observer of Nature, his attitude becomes more enthusiastic, as knowledge grows of her ways, and what began in observation ends in aspiration. The old cry, “Return to Nature,” started by Rousseau, caught by the poets of the “Romantic Revival” in England, and echoed by the essayists of New England, fell into silence about the middle of last century. It had inspired a splendid group of Nature poets; and for a time it was felt some new gospel was needed. Scientific and philosophical problems took possession of men’s minds; the intellectual and emotional life of the nation centred more and more round the life of the city. For a time this was, perhaps, inevitable. For a time Nature regarded through the eyes of fresh scientific thought had lost her charm. Even the poets who once had been content to worship, now began to criticize. Tennyson qualified his homage with reproachings. Arnold carried his books of philosophy into her presence. But at last men tired of this questioning attitude. America produced a Whitman; and in England William Morris and Richard Jefferies—among others—cried out for a simpler, freer, more childlike attitude.

“All things seem possible,” declared Jefferies, “in the open air.” To live according to Nature was, he assured his countrymen, no poet’s fancy, but a creed of life. He spoke from his own experience; life in the open, tasting the wild sweetness of the Earth, had brought him his deepest happiness; and he cried aloud in his exultation, bidding others do likewise. “If you wish your children,” says he, “to think deep things, to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the meadows.” On the futility of bookish learning, the ugliness and sordidness of town life, he is always discoursing. His themes were not fresh ones; every reformer, every prophet of the age had preached from the same text. And none had put the case for Nature more forcibly than Wordsworth when he lamented—

“The world is too much with us.”

But the plea for saner ways of living cannot be urged too often, and if Jefferies in his enthusiasm exaggerates the other side of the picture, pins his faith over much on solitudes and in self-communion, too little on the gregarious instincts of humankind, yet no reformer can make any impression on his fellows save by a splendid one-sidedness.

The defect of his Nature creed which calls for the most serious criticism is not the personal isolation on which he seems to insist. We herd together so much—some unhappily by necessity, some by choice, that it would be a refreshing thing, and a wholesome thing, for most of us to be alone, more often face to face with the primal forces of Nature.

The serious defect in his thought seems to me to lie in his attitude towards the animal creation. It is summed up in his remark: “There is nothing human in any living Animal. All Nature, the Universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human outside, and has no concern with man.” In this statement he shows how entirely he has failed to grasp the secret of the compelling power of the Earth—a secret into which Thoreau entered so fully.

Why should the elemental forces of Nature appeal so strongly to us? Why does the dweller in the open air feel that an unseen bond of sympathy binds him to the lowest forms of sentient life? Why is a St. Francis tender towards animals? Why does a Thoreau take a joy in the company of the birds, the squirrels, and feel a sense of companionship in the very flowers? Nay, more: what is it that gives a Jefferies this sense of communion? why, if the Earth has no “concern with man,” should it soothe with its benison, and fire his being with such ecstatic rapture? If this doctrine of a Universal Brotherhood is a sentimental figment, the foundation is swept away at once of Jefferies’ Nature creed. His sense of happiness, his delight in the Earth, may no doubt afford him consolation, but it is an irrational comfort, an agreeable delusion.

And yet no one can read a book of Jefferies without realizing that here is no sickly fancy—however sickness may have imparted a hectic colouring here and there—but that the instinct of the Artist is more reliable than the theory of the Thinker. Undoubtedly his Nature creed is less comprehensive than Thoreau’s. Jefferies regarded many animals as “good sport”; Thoreau as good friends. “Hares,” he says, “are almost formed on purpose to be good sport.” The remark speaks volumes. A man who could say that has but a poor philosophic defence to offer for his rapt communion with Nature.

How can you have communion with something “anti- or ultra-human”? The large utterance, “All things seem possible in the open air” dwindles down rather meanly when the speaker looks at animals from the sportsman’s point of view. Against his want of sympathy with the lower forms of creation one must put his warm-hearted plea for the agricultural poor. In his youth there was a certain harsh intolerance about his attitude towards his fellows, but he made ample amends in Hodge and his Master, still more in The Dewy Morn, for the narrow individualism of his earlier years.

One might criticize certain expressions as extravagant when he lashed out against the inequalities in society. But after all there is only a healthy Vagabond flavour about his fling at “modern civilization,” and the genuine humanitarian feeling is very welcome. Some of his unpublished “Notes on the Labour Question” (quoted by Mr. Salt in his able study of Jefferies) are worthy of Ruskin. This, for instance, is vigorously put:—

“‘But they are paid to do it,’ says Comfortable Respectability (which hates anything in the shape of a ‘question,’ glad to slur it over somehow). They are paid to do it. Go down into the pit yourself, Comfortable Respectability, and try it, as I have done, just one hour of a summer’s day, then you will know the preciousness of a vulgar pot of beer! Three and sixpence a day is the price of these brawny muscles, the price of the rascally sherry you parade before your guests in such pseudo-generous profusion. One guinea a week—that is one stall at the Opera. But why do they do it? Because Hunger and Thirst drive them. These are the fearful scourges, the whips worse than the knout, which lie at the back of Capital, and give it its power. Do you suppose these human beings, with minds, and souls, and feelings, would not otherwise repose on the sweet sward, and hearken to the song-birds as you may do on your lawn at Cedar Villa?”

Really the passage might have come out of Fors Clavigera; it is Ruskinian not only in sentiment, but in turn of expression. Ruskin impressed Jefferies very considerably, one would gather, and did much to open up his mind and broaden his sympathies. Making allowance for certain inconsistencies of mood, hope for and faith in the future, and weary scepticism, there is a fine stoicism about the philosophy of Jefferies. His was not the temperament of which optimists are made. His own terrible ill-health rendered him keenly sensitive to the pain and misery of the world. His deliberate seclusion from his fellow-men—more complete in some ways than Thoreau’s, though not so ostensible—threw him back upon his own thoughts, made him morbidly introspective.

Then the Æsthetic Idealism which dominated him made for melancholy, as it invariably does. The Worshipper at the shrine of Beauty is always conscious that

“. . . . In the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”

He realizes the tragic ineffectuality of his aspiration—

“The desire of the moth for the star,”

as Shelley expresses it, and in this line of poetry the mood finds imperishable expression.

But the melancholy that visits the Idealist—the Worshipper of Beauty—is not by any means a mood of despair. The moth may not attain the star, but it feels there is a star to be attained. In other words, an intimate sense of the beauty of the world carries within it, however faintly, however overlaid with sick longing, a secret hope that some day things will shape themselves all right.

And thus it is that every Idealist, bleak and wintry as his mood may be, is conscious of the latency of spring. Every Idealist, like the man in the immortal allegory of Bunyan, has a key in his bosom called Promise. This it is that keeps from madness. And so while Jefferies will exclaim:—

“The whole and the worst the pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man.” He will also declare, “There lives on in me an impenetrable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.”

It is a mistake to attach much importance to Jefferies’ attempts to systematize his views on life. He lacked the power of co-ordinating his impressions, and is at his best when giving free play to the instinctive life within him. No Vagabond writer can excel him in the expression of feeling; and yet perhaps no writer is less able than he to account for, to give a rational explanation of his feelings. He is rarely satisfactory when he begins to explain. Thoreau’s lines about himself seem to me peculiarly applicable to Jefferies:—

“I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide
Methinks
For milder weather.

“A bunch of violets without their roots
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

“Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah, the children will not know
Till Time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.”

Jefferies was a brave man, with a rare supply of resolution and patience. His life was one long struggle against overwhelming odds. “Three great giants,” as he puts it—“disease, despair, and poverty.” Not only was his physical health against him, but his very idiosyncrasies all conspired to hinder his success. His pride and reserve would not permit him to take help from his friends. He even shrank from their sympathy. His years of isolation, voluntary isolation, put him out of touch with human society. His socialistic tendencies never made him social. His was a kind of abstract humanitarianism. A man may feel tenderly, sympathize towards humanity, yet shrink from human beings. Misanthropy did not inspire him; he did not dislike his fellow-men; it was simply that they bewildered and puzzled him; he could not get on with them. So it will be seen that he had not the consolation some men take in the sympathy and co-operation of their fellows. After all, this is more a defect of temperament than a fault of character, and he had to pay the penalty. Realizing this, it is impossible to withhold admiration for the pluck and courage of the man. As a lover of Nature, and an artist in prose, he needs no encomium to-day. In his eloquent “Eulogy” Sir Walter Besant gave fitting expression to the debt of gratitude we owe this poet-naturalist—this passionate interpreter of English country life.

What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for the brooding life of the fields. What Thoreau did for the woods at Maine and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wiltshire streams and the Sussex hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern England with a new glamour, a tenderer sanctity; has arrested our indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into a comprehending affection.

Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist; one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.