choose to exhibit his originality by sanity, comparison with their own. playing at Robinson Crusoe in an "I may resent this," he says, “but I island desert only by courtesy of his cannot deny that the argument is very own conceit. You will never find an-black against me, and I begin to think other nature like that so often but so that my senses have deceived mc. unhappily likened to Thoreau's which No one else seems to have seen the charmed us in the dreamer of Coate sparkle on the brook or heard the Farm. music at the hatch, or to have felt back through the centuries; and when I try to describe these things to them, they look at me with stolid incredulity. No one seems to understand how I got food from the clouds, nor what there was in the night nor why it is not so good to look at it from the window. They turn their faces away from me, so that perhaps after all I was mistaken and there never was any such place or any such meadows, and I was never there." It is this total want of sympathy that bars Richard Jefferies' way to popularity. In the vast majority of people there is no answering string to cry out at the touch of his hands; he pipes to them, but they cannot dance.

People seem to read Jefferies, when they read him at all, with a peculiar variety of emotions. Some read him with bewilderment, some with boredom, some with amazement, some with reprobation, some with contempt; some, and they are fewest, with a never fading delight. Few people have a reputation at once so limited and so wide. When his bust was unveiled in Salisbury Cathedral not long ago, there was enough stir in the papers to make one imagine his celebrity to be wider than it really is. One has only to read how he lived in penury through his latter troublous days, because his books would not sell, to get a truer insight into the extent of his popularity; and even now, when he is better known Nor are they much more discerning and appreciated than ever before, those who do read Jefferies with a certain to whom he is but the shadow of a pleasure and then blandly put him in name are sufficiently numerous to the same category with others, between make all mention of him as a celebrity whom and himself there is a great gulf savor of irony. It is, in fact, with the fixed. Without wishing to detract few and not with the many that Jef- from the merits of other writers one feries must be content to hold the place may roundly assert, indeed it is half that he deserves; to those to whom the present writer's object to assert, he appeals he is of such value, that that there is no one in this particular were reputation judged by depth of field of literature to approach him. admiration rather than by number of Thoreau, often quoted as a kindred admirers, he were famous beyond spirit, has missed that poetical dreamimeasure already. But those who were ness which casts so rare a glamour over born blind and live habitually "dark, Jefferies' work; while among later dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon" writers neither Mr. Warde Fowler nor can hardly be expected to go into rap-"A Son of the Marshes," neither the tures at his descriptions, for he tells of author of "Mid Leafy Ways," nor discoveries in a world where they go groping all their days, but find nothing. They cannot see these things as he sees them and their half incredulity as to the truth of his observations is only overcome at last to be succeeded by complete boredom when their accuracy has been vindicated. His facts do not interest; his reflections seem foolish to them; his whole nature totally inexplicable by that touchstone and test of

Mr. Robinson seems to compete very successfully with the author of "The Open Air." Against their work one has nothing whatever to say; it is usually accurate and often entertaining; some of the writings of most of them deserve high praise. What it seems necessary to insist upon is that theirs is one class of essay and Jefferies' is another; that not all of them together could have written "The Pageant of

Summer," or
"Wild Flowers," or
"Meadow Thoughts," or "Winds
Heaven," or "Swallow Time."

of

66

blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things going on under our very noses, but we saw them not." With all apologies to Mr. Besant, one may venture to think that most of Jefferies' admirers saw them and see them very well. The trouble is, that they cannot speak them; the charm of Jefferies is that he can. His claim upon them is not that he shows them what they never saw before and never could have seen without his aid, it is that he can sing what they see aloud; and that so deeply and sweetly that they, stutterers as they are, are well content to be silent.

gratefully and exclaim, "Thank you, so much!" Half the charm of all literature is the relief of vicarious speech. And to any one who meditates upon This one cannot help thinking is a the reasons of Jefferies' pre-eminence, truer explanation of Jefferies' success why it is of all the writers upon similar than that which Mr. Besant seems to subjects he alone can offer us just what favor in his sympathetic eulogy. our hearts desire, it becomes more and" Why," he says, we must have been more evident that it is because he alone among them has the gift of articulate speech. The great majority of men are inarticulate, full of thoughts they cannot utter, plagued with longings that they struggle in vain to express; for it is as natural to average human nature to cry out, to utter something of itself when it is moved, as it is for a dumb animal to cry out if in pain. Many will remember a humorous sketch in Punch a year or two ago, representing a furious old gentleman and an inwardly exasperated young lady who had happened to meet upon the platform of a railway station, and had just missed the same train; the last carriage was fading away round the curve. The old gentleman, purple in the face, was indulging in the luxury of a good swear; but the lady, though inwardly quite as annoyed, was naturally debarred from that form of relief. When, however, the old gentleman had concluded, she turned to him gratefully and said, "Thank you, so much!"

For it is Jefferies' distinction that he alone of all his class has caught the spirit of earth. He can put the breath of the morning on paper that others may read and breathe; and the sunlight of the meadow, the chequered shadows of the deep woods, the grey mist of evening - he has found their equivalents in words. Nothing so small that it can escape his notice, nothing so subtle as to elude his powers of description, his birds sing among the leaves of summer; and his catalogues of flowers are no catalogues after all, because, ungathered, they grow upon the banks among the grasses.

This delicious incident, whether true or imaginary, affords an excellent illustration of a need that is far from being limited to occasions of annoyance; it is but an example of an almost universal desire to express one's emotions, either personally or vicariously, when- But if his power of articulation is ever they reach a certain intensity. the immediate cause of Jefferies' preAnd so it is in literature, when we find eminence, the cause of that power has some writer who expresses our feelings in turn to be sought for. The fact that better than we could do it ourselves; some men have a natural faculty of whose thoughts we seem to recognize expression, are born fluent of writing as our own as soon as they are uttered; as some are born fluent of speech, will who, in reality, puts into form truths by no means suffice to account for Jefand feelings that floated only like feries' pre-eminence. Nothing could misty, troublous shapes before our un- be more certain than that he did not aided eyes, and articulates in plain exemplify one's idea of a ready writer. words, comforting to read, what we His power of expression is not conourselves should never have grasped nected with an easy and polished literfully enough to state. We turn to himary style. His constructions are often

loose and his sentences bald and unfin- | as Jefferies moved us. For nature ished. The more one reads his essays, cannot be described in prose; wood the more obvious it becomes that he could write only because he could feel, because earth was his passion; and one is tempted to think that this passion, which was the cause of his unique power of delineating her features, was due in turn to an acute sensitiveness of perception, a certain intense aestheticism that is visible in all his work.

and field, hill and dale and sea, nay, the veriest weed-grown ditch beneath the open sky, has something in it to which prose can never do justice, and whether it be optimistic, as in the passage quoted, or as in Chaucer, or as in Shakespeare's stray pastoral lyrics, where it breathes a spirit of the purest joyousness; or pessimistic, tinged, as in Jefferies, with the melancholy of these latter days, the magic touch of deep, poetic feeling must cast its spell

It is in fact, not in their subjects but in the men themselves that the difference between Jefferies and his rivals lies. Wood and field are with us al-upon the writer before he can hope to ways, and always the same, for a man cast any sort of spell upon others. to make what he can of them. In Mat- This deep feeling doubtless lies at the thew Arnold's words root of Jefferies' distinctive art. Any man may, if he has his eyes about hin and if he know their names, catalogue and minutely describe every flower and grass in the most luxuriant hedgerow in the world. And when he has done, we shall know their names and some

Nature is nothing, her power
Lives in our eyes which can paint,
Lives in our hearts which can feel,

and leaving for the present the ques-
tion how far his deep feeling for nature
was due to his æstheticism, or how far
the two reacted upon each other, one
may say that it is hard to recall any
other writer whose very mode of ex-
pression throbs with such a depth of
emotion upon a similar subject, unless
it be the writer of the Song of Solomon,
or who exhibits such an acute sensi-

A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

thing of the appearance of each individual plant; we shall not see the hedgerow. We shall not be led by any other, through those dreamy ways of thought and poetical musings that are the characteristic of Richard Jefferies; that are so tender, so fanciful, and so suggestive that we feel him to be more tiveness to the subtler earth-phenom-poet than naturalist after all. He does ena, unless it be Mr. Thomas Hardy. not moralize : "For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land." When we read this we can afford to put down most of the later writers, we can stretch out our hands across the centuries, having found something nearer to us; we recognize him, the truer earth-lover, down the dim ages of the past. For this is poetry, and strikes a note that cannot be heard in any of the modern magazine articles, save those of Richard Jefferies; a note that, nevertheless, must be struck before we can be moved

You may

But there have been few, not even
the poet Wordsworth, more deeply
moved by it. Jefferies drew no les-
sons from his hedgerow flowers, only
wonderings and dreams.
catch Thoreau moralizing like a Dr.
Watts. He makes his creatures sub-
serve his moral purposes and reads at
times like a glorified copy-book. Jef-
feries makes them satisfy his æsthetic
cravings, and reads like poetry that
might move a man to tears.

There is, however, a twofold difficulty to be overcome by any defender of Richard Jefferies' memory. It is in the first place the necessity of adducing quotations in support of remarks

that must otherwise bear the semblance | exact description. But while observaof mere assertion; and it is in the tion and accurate delineation of detail second the impossibility of quoting, in may be allowed to belong to many, contrast, the writings of the less in- Jefferies included, it is in most cases spired. the writer's sole stock in trade; only Richard Jefferies can unite by details into a living whole, can by mere art of

place and the armchair to the woods of April or the chill October downs.

Where the author under consideration deals in a certain class of subject, where, for instance, he is a logician phraseology make his pictures live, whose lucidity is to be illustrated, his winds blow, his birds sing, his where he is an historian whose power flowers bloom; only he can cast that of dramatic realization is in dispute, or glamour over his painted woods and where he is a maker of shrewd sayings | fields that, defying all actual material whose epigrammatic faculty is to be surroundings, can transport us more displayed, quotations are the easiest completely, line by line, from the fireand the most conclusive of all evidence that may be brought. But when in the writing under consideration there is But even Jefferies cannot do this in nothing intended to be proved, nothing a few lines. His mood, too, varies, dramatic described, nothing that could being sometimes purely descriptive, conceivably lend itself to epigrammatic sometimes purely meditative, oftener expression, quotation is apt to fail as with a happy combination of the two. evidence of any sort and to become Quotations, to do him justice, should at once a necessity and a difficulty. show him in all moods; they should It is in fact impossible to do justice display his observant eye for detail and to Richard Jefferies in any quotation his delicate perception of atmospheric short of the length of an entire mag- and terrestrial phenomena. They azine article, which would preclude the should exemplify his passion for possibility of any introductory or con- beauty and his dreamy meditations, cluding remarks. For his descriptions the underlying infinitely tender melangrow upon you as you read, just as the choly that is its only natural fruit. beauty of his subject, whatever it may How to do all this in a few pages is an chance to be-a spring morning, a unsatisfactory problem, because it cansummer night, an autumn afternoon not be completely solved, and because grows upon you in reality as you wait to leave it incompletely solved is to fail alone in the open air to feel it. It is at in one's aim and object. Consider, once the chief difficulty of his reviewer however, the following extract from an and the best proof of the truth of his essay called "Wheatfields.” It is no art. ordinary work, though almost purely Upon the other hand a quotation descriptive. It is the result of an intifrom one competitor is a poor starting mate acquaintance with the living ground for a comparison; yet to pillory | earth; the work of a man who had an extract from the less inspired would lingered many and many a time over be an invidious and ungracious task, the same scenes before he ever thought too ungracious to be permissible. It is of speaking at all; and even this is open to all who desire to make the sufficient to make it live a little longer comparison to purchase one of Jef- than some others. feries' books (except the more purely "How swiftly the much-desired sumpractical and agricultural volumes, for mer comes upon us. Even with the Jefferies had a practical side to his na-reapers at work before one it is difficult. ture) and to consider it with reference to one of anybody else's. Much that is in Jefferies will be found equalled by others, but that which is equalled is not Jefferies' best. The peculiar charm of the latter is so subtle that it evades

to realize that it has not only come, but will soon be passing away. Sweet summer is but just long enough for the happy loves of the larks. It seems but yesterday (it is really five months since) that, leaning against the gate there,

...

I watched a lark and his affianced on | hear the cool refreshing rain come the ground among the grey stubble of softly down; the green wheat drinks it last year still standing. His crest was as it falls, so that hardly a drop reaches high and his form upright, he ran a the ground, and to-morrow it will be as little way and then sang, went on again dry as ever. It is midsummer, and and sang again to his love moving midsummer, like a bride, is decked in parallel with him. Then passing from white. On the high-reaching briars the old dead stubble to fresh-turned white June roses; white flowers on furrows, still they went, side by side, the lowly brambles; broad, white umnow down in the valley between the bels of elder in the corner, and white clods, now mounting the ridges, but cornels blooming under the elm; honeyalways together, always with song and suckle hanging creamy white coronals joy, till I lost them across the brown round the ash boughs; white meadowearth. But even then from time to sweet flowering on the shore of the time came the sweet voice full of hope ditch; white clover, too, beside the in the coming of summer. gateway.... Thus the coming out of "The day declined, and from the the wheat into ear is marked and welcold, clear sky of March the moon comed with the purest color. . . . The looked down, gleaming on the smooth elm has a fresh green it has put plain furrow where the plough had forth its second or midsummer shoot; passed.... The evenings became the young leaves of the aspen are dark, still he rose above the shadows white, and the tree as the wind touches and the dusky earth, and his song fell from the bosom of the night. With the full, untiring choir the joyous host heralded the birth of the corn; the slender, forceless seed leaves, which came quietly up until they had risen above the proud crests of the lovers.

it seems to turn grey. The furrows run to the ditch under the reeds, the ditch declines to a little streamlet which winds all hidden by willow-herb, and rush, and flag, a mere trickle of water under brooklime, away at the feet of the corn. In the shadow, deep down beneath the crumbling bank, which is only held up by the roots of the grasses, is a forget-me-not, with a tiny circlet of yellow in the centre of its petals.

Yellow charlock shot up faster and shone bright above the corn; the oaks showered down their green flowers like moss upon the ground, the tree pipits sang on the branches and descended to the wheat. The rusty "The coming of the ears of wheat chain harrow lying inside the gate, all forms an era and a date, a fixed point tangled together, was concealed with in the story of the summer. At grasses. Yonder the magpies fluttered noonday, as the light breeze comes over the beans among which they are over, the wheat rustles the more bealways searching in spring. .. Time cause the stalks are stiffening and advanced again, and afar on the slope swing from side to side from the root bright yellow mustard flowered, a hill instead of yielding up the stem. Stay of yellow behind the elms. The luxu- now at every gateway and lean over riant purple trifolium, acres of rich while the midsummer hum sounds color, glowed in the sunlight. There above. It is a peculiar sound, not like was a scent of flowering beans, the the querulous buzz of the honey, nor vetches were in flower, and the peas the drone of the bumble bee, but a which clung together for support the sharp ringing resonance like that of a stalk of the pea goes through the leaf tuning fork. Here the barley has as a painter thrusts his thumb through taken a different tiut now the beard is his palette. Under the edge of the out; here the oats are struggling forth footpath through the wheat a wild from their sheath; here a pungent odor pansy blooms. Standing in the gate- of mustard in flower comes in the air; way beneath the shelter of the elm, as there a poppy pants with broad petals the clouds come over, it is pleasant to flung back and drooping, unable to up