"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.