Chapter 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 [Picture: 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.