The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies

CHAPTER IX.

THE COUNTRY LIFE

It was then, very slowly, and after many hesitations, false starts, deviations, and mistakes, that Jefferies at last discovered himself and his real powers. He had written, for obscure country papers, pages of local descriptions: he had written feeble and commonplace novels, which all fell dead at their birth, and of which none survive to reproach his memory or to darken the splendour of his later work. He had also written practical common-sense papers on agriculture, the farmer and the farm-labourer. He thus worked his way slowly, first to the mere mechanical art of writing, that is, to the expression, somehow or other, of thought and ideas; next, when this was acquired, he endeavoured to depict society, of which he knew nothing, and its manners, of which he was completely ignorant; thirdly, after many years of blundering along the wrong road, he advanced to the perception of the great truth that he who would succeed in the great profession of letters must absolutely write on some subject that he knows, and that he should understand his own limitations. For instance, Jefferies, as we have seen, ardently desired to become a novelist. If a man be habitually observant of his fellow-men, if he have the eye of a humourist, a brain which is like a store-house for capacity, a fair measure of the dramatic faculty, an instinctive power of selection, and the faculty of getting away from his own individuality altogether, he will perhaps do well to try the profession of a novelist. But Jefferies possessed one only of these faculties: he had a brain which would hold millions of facts, each consigned to its proper place: but he had little or no humour: he had no power of creating situation and incident: and he could never possibly get outside himself and away from his own people. He could not, therefore, become a novelist: that line of work – though he never understood it – was closed to him from the beginning. Nature herself stood before him, though he neither saw nor heard her, as Balaam could not see the angel, and barred his way. But when he discovered his own incomparable gift, which was not until he was nearly thirty years of age, he sprang suddenly before the world as one who could speak of Nature and her wondrous works in field and forest, as no man ever spake before.

There is a passage in Thomas Hardy's "Woodlanders" which might have been written of Richard Jefferies. The words, which could only have been written by one who himself knows the country life, concern a pair, not one:

"The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been, with these two, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which seen in few were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay; and by the state of its upper twigs the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator."

There are not in the whole of the English-speaking world, which now numbers close upon a hundred million, more, I suppose, than forty thousand who read Jefferies' works. Out of the forty thousand not one-half have read them all. For some are contented with the "Gamekeeper at Home," "Red Deer," and the "Amateur Poacher." Some have on their shelves "The Life in the Fields," or "The Open Air." Few, indeed, have read all those books which came from his brain in so full and clear a stream. This stream may be likened unto the river by whose banks Petrarch loved to wander; inasmuch as it springs full grown from the foot of a great bare precipice. All around is tumbled rock. So, among the heaped and broken rocks of disappointed hopes and baffled attempts, this full, strong, and clear stream leaped forth triumphant.

For the greater part of mankind Jefferies is too full. They cannot absorb so much; they are more at their ease with the last century poets who use to talk vaguely of the perfumed flowers, the rustling leaves, the finny tribe, and the warbling of the birds in the bosky grove. It fatigues them to read of so much that they can never see for themselves; it irritates them, perhaps, even to think that there is so much; they are more at home among their geraniums in the conservatory; they even call his style a cataloguing.

There is also another thing where Jefferies is outside the sympathies of the multitude. This solitary, who was never so happy as when he wandered alone upon the downs with no human creature in sight, is yet intensely human. All kinds of injustice, and especially social injustice, the grinding and robbery and oppression of the producer, the pride of caste and class, the pretensions of rank and the insolence of money – these things make him angry. Now, if there be one thing more lamentably sure and certain than another, it is that injustice does not make the average man angry. If money is to be made by injustice, he will be unjust. He will call his injustice, unless he covers and hides it up, the custom of the trade, and persuade himself that it is laudable and even Christian so to act. When another man speaks the truth about these injustices, he gets uncomfortable. Because, you see, he goes to church, and perhaps bears a character for eminent piety. There were doubtless churchwardens and sidesmen among those who, fifty years ago, used to send the little children of six to work for fourteen hours in the dark coal-pit. Jefferies had lived so little in towns and among men that he did not know any sophistry of trade custom, and when he heard of these customs his soul flamed up. It is not a side of his character which often comes into view; but it comes often enough to irritate many excellent people who live in great comfort by the exertions of other people, and plume themselves mightily upon their virtues, hereditary or otherwise. Jefferies could never have called himself a Socialist; but he sympathized with that part of Socialism which claims for every man the full profit of the labour of his hands.

In thinking of Jefferies and the country life, one is continually tempted to compare him with Thoreau. There are some points of resemblance. Neither Thoreau nor Jefferies had a scientific training. I do not gather from any page in the works of the latter that he was a scientific botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. Both were men of few wants and simple habits. Neither went to church, yet in the heart of each there was a profound sense of religion, which, in the case of Jefferies, took the form of a firm faith in the future destiny of the soul. Both men were impatient of authority and of imitation. Each desired to be self-sufficient. What Emerson says of Thoreau in respect of open air and exercise might have been written of Jefferies. "The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he could not write at all."

In both men there was to be observed a great strength of common-sense. And again, there was this other point common to both, that no college – I here imitate Emerson on Thoreau – ever offered either of them a diploma or a professor's chair: no academy made either man its corresponding secretary, its founder, or even its member. And the following passage, written by Emerson of Thoreau, might be equally well written, mutatis mutandis, of Jefferies:

"Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. Every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows; the huge nests of small fishes, one of which will sometimes overfill a cart; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal – were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so the ponds in this region."

Again, though Thoreau was short of stature and Jefferies tall, there is something similar in their faces: the lofty forehead; the full, serious eye; the large nose – these are features common to both. And to both was common – but Jefferies had, perhaps, the greater forbearance – a certain impatience with the common herd of mankind who know not, and care not for, Nature.

There is another passage on Thoreau by a younger writer,2 which might just as well have been written, word for word, of Jefferies:

"The quality which we should call mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly net. Hear him to a friend: 'Let me suggest a theme for you – to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.'"

It was not until Jefferies had thoroughly mastered this lesson, and saturated himself with its spirit, that he began to write well. No one would believe that the same hand which wrote "The Scarlet Shawl" also wrote "The Pageant of Summer." I firmly believe that it is not until a man obtains the great gift of beautiful thought that he can even begin to understand the beauty of style. To some such thoughts come early; to others, late. When Jefferies left men for the fields, and not till then, his mind became every day more and more charged with beauty of thought, and his style grew correspondingly day by day more charged with beauty. This beauty of thought grows in him out of the intense love, the passionate love, which he has for everything in Nature: it is the child of that love: it is Nature's reward for that love: he loves not only flowers and trees, but every flower, every tree; he is even contented to look upon the same trees, the same hedges filled with flowers every day:

"I do not want change," he says; "I want the same old and loved things, the same wildflowers, the same trees and soft ash-green; the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellow-hammer sing, sing, singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for such is the measure of his song: and I want them in the same place. Let me find them morning after morning, the starry-white petals radiating, striving upwards to their ideal. Let me see the idle shadows resting on the white dust; let me hear the humble-bees, and stay to look down on the rich dandelion disk. Let me see the very thistles opening their great crowns – I should miss the thistles; the reed-grasses hiding the moorhen; the bryony bine, at first crudely ambitious and lifted by force of youthful sap straight above the hedgerow to sink of its own weight presently and progress with crafty tendrils; swifts shot through the air with outstretched wings like crescent-headed shaftless arrows darted from the clouds; the chaffinch with a feather in her bill; all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer – let me watch the same succession year by year."

Therefore, and in return for this great love, Nature rewarded him. Jefferies began, as Thoreau recommends, by writing down everything that he saw: he presently arrived at an inconceivable power of minute observation. Pages might be quoted to show this wonderful closeness. It is indeed the first, but not the finest, characteristic of Jefferies. It was the point which most struck the critic in the "Gamekeeper at Home." But it is not the point which most strikes the reader in his later and more delicate work. Here the things which he loves speak to him: they reply to his questioning; they support and raise his soul. "So it has ever been to me," he says, "by day or by night, summer or winter: beneath trees the heart feels nearer to that depth of life which the far sky means. The rest of spirit found only in beauty, ideal and pure, comes there because the distance seems within touch of thought."

In Jefferies' later books the whole of the country life of the nineteenth century will be found displayed down to every detail. The life of the farmer is there; the life of the labourer; the life of the gamekeeper; the life of the women who work in the fields, and of those who work at home. If this were all, he would well deserve the gratitude of the English-speaking race, because in any generation to get so great a part of life described truthfully is an enormous boon. But it is far from being the most considerable part of his work. He revealed Nature in her works and ways; the flowers and the fields; the wild English creatures; the hedges and the streams; the wood and coppice. He told what may be seen everywhere by those who have eyes to see. He worked his way, as we have seen, to this point. And, again, if this were all, he would well deserve the gratitude which we willingly accord to a White of Selborne. But this is not all. For next he took the step – the vast step – across the chasm which separates the poetic from the vulgar mind, and began to clothe the real with the colours and glamour of the unreal; to write down the response of the soul to the phenomena of nature: to interpret the voice of Nature speaking to the soul. Unto his last. And then he died; his work, which might have gone on for ever, cut off almost at the commencement.

I desire in this chapter to show how Jefferies paints the country life; to show him in his minuteness and fidelity first, and in his higher flights afterwards. Even to those who know Jefferies there will be something new in reading these scenes again. To those who know him not, and yet can feel beauty and truth and simplicity – things so rare, so very rare – these scenes will be like the entrance to some unknown gallery filled with pictures exquisite, touching and tender.

I select, first, a specimen of his early style. He is speaking of the provision made by the oak for the creatures of the wood:

"It is curious to note the number of creatures to whom the oak furnishes food. The jays, for instance, are now visiting them for acorns; in the summer they fluttered round the then green branches for the chafers, and in the evenings the fern owls or goat-suckers wheeled about the verge for these and for moths. Rooks come to the oaks in crowds for the acorns; wood-pigeons are even more fond of them, and from their crops quite a handful may sometimes be taken when shot in the trees.

"They will carry off at once as many acorns as old-fashioned economical farmers used to walk about with in their pockets, 'chucking' them one, two, or three at a time to the pigs in the stye as a bonne bouche and an encouragement to fatten well. Never was there such a bird to eat as the wood-pigeon. Pheasants roam out from the preserves after the same fruit, and no arts can retain them at acorn time. Swine are let run out about the hedgerows to help themselves. Mice pick up the acorns that fall, and hide them for winter use, and squirrels select the best.

"If there is a decaying bough, or, more particularly, one that has been sawn off, it slowly decays into a hollow, and will remain in that state for years, the resort of endless woodlice, snapped up by insect-eating birds. Down from the branches in spring there descend long, slender threads, like gossamer, with a caterpillar at the end of each – the insect-eating birds decimate these. So that in various ways the oaks give more food to the birds than any other tree. Where there are oaks there are sure to be plenty of birds."

After reading this, turn to the following, in quite a different style, from the same volume. Could the same man, one asks, have written both these passages?

"The waves coming round the promontory before the west wind still give the idea of a flowing stream, as they did in Homer's days. Here beneath the cliff, standing where beach and sand meet, it is still; the wind passes six hundred feet overhead. But yonder, every larger wave rolling before the breeze breaks over the rocks; a white line of spray rushes along them, gleaming in the sunshine; for a moment the dark rock-wall disappears, till the spray sinks.

"The sea seems higher than the spot where I stand, its surface on a higher level – raised like a green mound – as if it could burst in and occupy the space up to the foot of the cliff in a moment. It will not do so, I know; but there is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered, it may overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and understood – something still to be discovered – a mystery.

"So the white spray rushes along the low broken wall of rocks, the sun gleams on the flying fragments of the wave, again it sinks, and the rhythmic motion holds the mind, as an invisible force holds back the tide. A faith of expectancy, a sense that something may drift up from the unknown, a large belief in the unseen resources of the endless space out yonder, soothes the mind with dreamy hope.

"The little rules and little experiences, all the petty ways of narrow life, are shut off behind by the ponderous and impassable cliff; as if we had dwelt in the dim light of a cave, but coming out at last to look at the sun, a great stone had fallen and closed the entrance, so that there was no return to the shadow. The impassable precipice shuts off our former selves of yesterday, forcing us to look out over the sea only, or up to the deeper heaven.

"These breadths draw out the soul; we feel that we have wider thoughts than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, all unaware of its own power, and now suddenly finds freedom in the sun and the sky. Straight, as if sawn down from turf to beach, the cliff shuts off the human world, for the sea knows no time and no era; you cannot tell what century it is from the face of the sea. A Roman trireme suddenly rounding the white edge-line of chalk, borne on wind and oar from the Isle of Wight towards the gray castle at Pevensey (already old in olden days), would not seem strange. What wonder could surprise us coming from the wonderful sea?"

Here, again, is a specimen of what has been called his "cataloguing." He describes a hedgerow. Cataloguing! Yes. But was ever observation more minute?

"A wild 'plum,' or bullace, grew in one place; the plum about twice the size of a sloe, with a bloom upon the skin like the cultivated fruit, but lacking its sweetness. Yet there was a distinct difference of taste: the 'plum' had not got the extreme harshness of the sloe. A quantity of dogwood occupied a corner; in summer it bore a pleasing flower; in the autumn, after the black berries appeared upon it, the leaves became a rich bronze colour, and some when the first frosts touched them, curled up at the edge and turned crimson. There were two or three guelder-rose bushes – the wild shrub – which were covered in June with white bloom; not in snowy balls like the garden variety, but flat and circular, the florets at the edge of the circle often whitest, and those in the centre greenish. In autumn the slender boughs were weighed down with heavy bunches of large purplish berries, so full of red juice as to appear on the point of bursting. As these soon disappeared they were doubtless eaten by birds.

"Besides the hawthorn and briar there were several species of willow – the snake-skin willow, so called because it sheds its bark; the 'snap-willow,' which is so brittle that every gale breaks off its feeble twigs, and pollards. One of these, hollow and old, had upon its top a crowd of parasites. A bramble had taken root there, and hung over the side; a small currant-bush grew freely – both, no doubt, unwittingly planted by birds – and finally the bines of the noxious bitter-sweet or nightshade, starting from the decayed wood, supported themselves among the willow-branches, and in autumn were bright with red berries. Ash-stoles, the buds on whose boughs in spring are hidden under black sheaths; nut-tree stoles, with ever-welcome nuts – always stolen here, but on the downs, where they are plentiful, staying till they fall; young oak growing up from the butt of a felled tree. On these oak-twigs sometimes, besides the ordinary round galls, there may be found another gall, larger, and formed, as it were, of green scales one above the other.

"Where shall we find in the artificial and, to my thinking, tasteless pleasure-grounds of modern houses so beautiful a shrubbery as this old hedgerow? Nor were evergreens wanting, for the ivy grew thickly, and there was one holly bush – not more, for the soil was not affected by holly. The tall cow-parsnip or 'gicks' rose up through the bushes; the great hollow stem of the angelica grew at the edge of the field, on the verge of the grass, but still sheltered by the brambles. Some reeds early in spring thrust up their slender green tubes, tipped with two spear-like leaves. The reed varies in height according to the position in which it grows. If the hedge has been cut it does not reach higher than four or five feet; when it springs from a deep, hollow corner, or with bushes to draw it up, you can hardly touch its tip with your walking-stick. The leaders of the black bryony, lifting themselves above the bushes, and having just there nothing to cling to, twist around each other, and two bines thus find mutual support where one alone would fall of its own weight.