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.
"Dim woodlands made him wiser far
Than those who thresh their barren thought
With flails of knowledge dearly bought,
Till all his soul shone like a star
That flames at fringe of Heaven's bar,
There breaks the surf of space unseen
Against Hope's veil that lies between
Love's future and the woes that are.
His soul saw through the weary years--
Past war-bells' chimes and poor men's tears--
That day when Time shall bring to birth
(By many a heart whose hope seems vain,
And many a fight where Love slays Pain)
True Freedom, come to reign on earth."[1]
[1] These lines were communicated to me by the writer,
Mr. H.H. von Sturmer, of Cambridge.
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.'"
[2] Robert Louis Stevenson, "Men and Books: _Thoreau_."
Chatto and Windus, London.
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.
"In the watery places the sedges send up their dark flowers, dusted
with light yellow pollen, rising above the triangular stem with its
narrow, ribbed leaf. The reed-sparrow or bunting sits upon the
spray over the ditch with its carex grass and rushes; he is a
graceful bird, with a crown of glossy black. Hops climb the ash and
hang their clusters, which impart an aromatic scent to the hand
that plucks them; broad burdock leaves, which the mouchers put on
the top of their baskets to shield their freshly gathered
watercresses from the sunshine; creeping avens, with
buttercup-like flowers and long stems that straggle across the
ditch, and in autumn are tipped with a small ball of soft spines;
mints, strong-scented and unmistakable; yarrow, white and sometimes
a little lilac, whose flower is perhaps almost the last that the
bee visits. In the middle of October I have seen a wild bee on a
last stray yarrow."
Again we are in the forest, and again 'cataloguing':
"The beechnuts are already falling in the forest, and the swine are
beginning to search for them while yet the harvest lingers. The
nuts are formed by midsummer, and now, the husk opening, the brown
angular kernel drops out. Many of the husks fall, too; others
remain on the branches till next spring. Under the beeches the
ground is strewn with the mast, as hard almost to walk on as
pebbles. Rude and uncouth as swine are in themselves, somehow they
look different under trees. The brown leaves amid which they rout,
and the brown-tinted fern behind, lend something of their colour
and smooth away their ungainliness. Snorting as they work with very
eagerness of appetite, they are almost wild, approaching in a
measure to their ancestors, the savage boars. Under the trees the
imagination plays unchecked, and calls up the past as if yew bow
and broad arrow were still in the hunter's hands. So little is
changed since then. The deer are here still. Sit down on the root
of this oak (thinly covered with moss), and on that very spot it is
quite possible a knight fresh home from the Crusades may have
rested and feasted his eyes on the lovely green glades of his own
unsurpassed England. The oak was there then, young and strong; it
is here now, ancient, but sturdy. Rarely do you see an oak fall of
itself. It decays to the last stump; it does not fall. The sounds
are the same--the tap as a ripe acorn drops, the rustle of a leaf
which comes down slowly, the quick rushes of mice playing in the
fern. A movement at one side attracts the glance, and there is a
squirrel darting about. There is another at the very top of the
beech yonder, out on the boughs, nibbling the nuts. A brown spot a
long distance down the glade suddenly moves, and thereby shows
itself to be a rabbit. The bellowing sound that comes now and then
is from the stags, which are preparing to fight. The swine snort,
and the mast and leaves rustle as they thrust them aside. So little
is changed: these are the same sounds and the same movements, just
as in the olden time.
"The soft autumn sunshine, shorn of summer glare, lights up with
colour the fern, the fronds of which are yellow and brown, the
leaves, the gray grass, and hawthorn sprays already turned. It
seems as if the early morning's mists have the power of tinting
leaf and fern, for so soon as they commence the green hues begin to
disappear. There are swathes of fern yonder, cut down like grass or
corn, the harvest of the forest. It will be used for litter and for
thatching sheds. The yellow stalks--the stubble--will turn brown
and wither through the winter, till the strong spring shoot comes
up and the anemones flower. Though the sunbeams reach the ground
here, half the green glade is in shadow, and for one step that you
walk in sunlight ten are in shade. Thus, partly concealed in full
day, the forest always contains a mystery. The idea that there may
be something in the dim arches held up by the round columns of the
beeches lures the footsteps onwards. Something must have been
lately in the circle under the oak where the fern and bushes remain
at a distance and wall in a lawn of green. There is nothing on the
grass but the upheld leaves that have dropped, no mark of any
creature, but this is not decisive; if there are no physical signs,
there is a feeling that the shadow is not vacant. In the thickets,
perhaps--the shadowy thickets with front of thorn--it has taken
refuge and eluded us. Still onward the shadows lead us in vain but
pleasant chase."
Next let us rise with the rustic and follow him as he begins his day's
work:
"The pale beams of the waning moon still cast a shadow of the
cottage, when the labourer rises from his heavy sleep on a winter's
morning. Often he huddles on his things and slips his feet into his
thick 'water-tights'--which are stiff and hard, having been wet
over-night--by no other light than this. If the household is
comparatively well managed, however, he strikes a match, and his
'dip' shows at the window. But he generally prefers to save a
candle, and clatters down the narrow steep stairs in the
semi-darkness, takes a piece of bread and cheese, and steps forth
into the sharp air. The cabbages in the garden he notes are covered
with white frost, so is the grass in the fields, and the footpath
is hard under foot. In the furrows is a little ice--white because
the water has shrunk from beneath it, leaving it hollow--and on the
stile is a crust of rime, cold to the touch, which he brushes off
in getting over. Overhead the sky is clear--cloudless but pale--and
the stars, though not yet fading, have lost the brilliant glitter
of midnight. Then, in all their glory, the idea of their globular
shape is easily accepted; but in the morning, just as the dawn is
breaking, the absence of glitter conveys the impression of
flatness--circular rather than globular. But yonder, over the elms,
above the cowpens, the great morning star has risen, shining far
brighter, in proportion, than the moon; an intensely clear metallic
light--like incandescent silver.
"The shadows of the trees on the frosted ground are dull. As the
footpath winds by the hedge the noise of his footstep startles the
blackbird roosting in the bushes, and he bustles out and flies
across the field. There is more rime on the posts and rails around
the rickyard, and the thatch on the haystack is white with it in
places. He draws out the broad hay-knife--a vast blade, wide at the
handle, the edge gradually curving to a point--and then searches
for the rubber or whetstone, stuck somewhere in the side of the
rick. At the first sound of the stone upon the steel the cattle in
the adjoining yard and sheds utter a few low 'moos,' and there is a
stir among them. Mounting the ladder, he forces the knife with both
hands into the hay, making a square cut which bends outwards,
opening from the main mass till it appears on the point of parting
and letting him fall with it to the ground. But long practice has
taught him how to balance himself half on the ladder, half on the
hay. Presently, with a truss unbound and loose on his head, he
enters the yard, and passes from crib to crib, leaving a little
here and a little there. For if he fills one first there will be
quarrelling among the cows, and besides, if the crib is too
liberally filled, they will pull it out and tread it under foot."
Here is the portrait from his book of the Red Deer:
"There is no more beautiful creature than a stag in his pride of
antler, his coat of ruddy gold, his grace of form and motion. He
seems the natural owner of the ferny coombes, the oak woods, the
broad slopes of heather. They belong to him, and he steps upon the
sward in lordly mastership. The land is his, and the hills; the
sweet streams and rocky glens. He is infinitely more natural than
the cattle and sheep that have strayed into his domains. For some
inexplicable reason, although they, too, are in reality natural,
when he is present they look as if they had been put there, and
were kept there by artificial means. They do not, as painters say,
shade in with the colours and shape of the landscape. He is as
natural as an oak, or a fern, or a rock itself. He is earth-born,
autochthon, and holds possession by descent. Utterly scorning
control, the walls and hedges are nothing to him; he roams where he
chooses, as fancy leads, and gathers the food that pleases him.
Pillaging the crops, and claiming his dues from the orchards and
gardens, he exercises his ancient feudal rights, indifferent to the
laws of house-people. Disturb him in his wild stronghold of oakwood
or heather, and as he yields to force, still he stops and looks
back proudly. He is slain, but never conquered. He will not cross
with the tame park deer; proud as a Spanish noble, he disdains the
fallow deer, and breeds only with his own race. But it is chiefly
because of his singular adaptation and fitness to the places where
he is found that he obtains our sympathy. The branching antlers
accord so well with the deep, shadowy boughs and the broad fronds
of the brake; the golden red of his coat fits to the foxglove, the
purple heather, and later on to the orange and red of the beech;
his easy-bounding motion springs from the elastic sward; his limbs
climb the steep hill as if it were level; his speed covers the
distance, and he goes from place to place as the wind. He not only
lives in the wild, wild woods and moors, he grows out of them as
the oak grows from the ground. The noble stag, in his pride of
antler, is lord and monarch of all the creatures left in English
forests and on English hills."
What do we purblind mortals see when we walk through a wood in winter?
Listen to what Jefferies saw in January, when the woods are at their
very brownest, and all Nature seems wrapped in winter sleep:
"Some little green stays on the mounds where the rabbits creep and
nibble the grasses. Cinquefoil remains green though faded, and wild
parsley the freshest looking of all; plantain leaves are found
under shelter of brambles, and the dumb nettles, though the old
stalks are dead, have living leaves at the ground. Gray-veined ivy
trails along, here and there is a frond of hart's-tongue fern,
though withered at the tip, and greenish-gray lichen grows on the
exposed stumps of trees. These together give a green tint to the
mound, which is not so utterly devoid of colour as the season of
the year might indicate. Where they fail, brown brake fern fills
the spaces between the brambles; and in a moist spot the bunches of
rushes are composed half of dry stalks, and half of green. Stems of
willow-herb, four feet high, still stand, and tiny long-tailed tits
perch sideways on them. Above, on the bank, another species of
willow-herb has died down to a short stalk, from which springs a
living branch, and at its end is one pink flower. A dandelion is
opening on the same sheltered bank; farther on the gorse is
sprinkled with golden spots of bloom. A flock of greenfinches
starts from the bushes, and their colour shows against the ruddy
wands of the osier-bed over which they fly. The path winds round
the edge of the wood, where a waggon-track goes up the hill; it is
deeply grooved at the foot of the hill. These tracks wear deeply
into the chalk just where the ascent begins. The chalk adheres to
the shoes like mortar, and for some time after one has left it each
footstep leaves a white mark on the turf. On the ridge the low
trees and bushes have an outline like the flame of a candle in a
draught--the wind has blown them till they have grown fixed in that
shape. In an oak across the ploughed field a flock of wood-pigeons
have settled; on the furrows there are chaffinches, and larks rise
and float a few yards farther away. The snow has ceased, and though
there is no wind on the surface, the clouds high above have opened
somewhat, not sufficient for the sun to shine, but to prolong the
already closing afternoon a few minutes. If the sun shines
to-morrow morning the lark will soar and sing, though it is
January, and the quick note of the chaffinch will be heard as he
perches on the little branches projecting from the trunks of trees
below the great boughs. Thrushes sing every mild day in December
and January, entirely irrespective of the season, also before
rain."
Here is Cider-land:
"The Lower Path, after stile and hedge and elm, and grass that
glows with golden buttercups, quietly leaves the side of the double
mounds and goes straight through the orchards. There are fewer
flowers under the trees, and the grass grows so long and rank that
it has already fallen aslant of its own weight. It is choked, too,
by masses of clogweed, that springs up profusely over the sight of
old foundations; so that here ancient masonry may be hidden under
the earth. Indeed, these orchards are a survival from the days when
the monks laboured in vineyard and garden, and mayhap even of
earlier times. When once a locality has got into the habit of
growing a certain crop, it continues to produce it for century
after century; and thus there are villages famous for apple or pear
or cherry, while the district at large is not at all given to such
culture.
"The trunks of the trees succeed each other in endless ranks, like
columns that support the most beautiful roof of pink and white.
Here the bloom is rosy, there white prevails: the young green is
hidden under the petals that are far more numerous than leaves, or
even than leaves will be. Though the path really is in shadow as
the branches shut out the sun, yet it seems brighter here than in
the open, as if the place were illuminated by a million tiny lamps
shedding the softest lustre. The light is reflected and apparently
increased by the countless flowers overhead.
"The forest of bloom extends acre after acre, and only ceases where
hedges divide, to commence again beyond the boundary. A
wicket-gate, all green with a film of vegetation over the decaying
wood, opens under the very eaves of a cottage, and the path goes by
the door--across a narrow meadow where deep and broad trenches,
green now, show where ancient stews or fishponds existed, and then
through a farmyard into a lane. Tall poplars rise on either hand,
but there seem to be no houses; they stand in fact a field's
breadth back from the lane, and are approached by footpaths that
every few yards necessitate a stile in the hedge.
"When a low thatched farmhouse does abut upon the way, the blank
white wall of the rear part faces the road, and the front door
opens on precisely the other side. Hard by is a row of beehives.
Though the modern hives are at once more economical and humane,
they have not the old associations that cling about the straw domes
topped with broken earthenware to shoot off the heavy downfall of a
thunderstorm.
"Everywhere the apple-bloom; the hum of bees; children sitting on
the green beside the road, their laps full of flowers; the song of
finches; and the low murmur of water that glides over flint and
stone so shadowed by plants and grasses that the sunbeams cannot
reach and glisten on it. Thus the straggling flower-strewn village
stretches along beneath the hill and rises up the slope, and the
swallows wheel and twitter over the gables where are their
hereditary nesting-places. The lane ends on a broad dusty road,
and, opposite, a quiet thatched house of the larger sort stands,
endways to the street, with an open pitching before the windows.
There, too, the swallows' nests are crowded under the eaves,
flowers are trained against the wall, and in the garden stand the
same beautiful apple-trees."
Let us witness, with him, the dawn of a summer day:
"The star went on. In the meadows of the vale far away doubtless
there were sounds of the night. On the hills it was absolute
silence--profound rest. They slept peacefully, and the moon rose to
the meridian. The pale white glow on the northern horizon slipped
towards the east. After a while a change came over the night. The
hills and coombes became gray and more distinct, the sky lighter,
the stars faint, the moon that had been ruddy became yellow, and
then almost white.
"Yet a little while, and one by one the larks arose from the grass,
and first twittering and vibrating their brown wings just above the
hawthorn bushes, presently breasted the aerial ascent, and sang at
'Heaven's Gate.'
"Geoffrey awoke and leaned upon his arm; his first thought was of
Margaret, and he looked towards the copse. All was still; then in
the dawn the strangeness of that hoary relic of the past sheltering
so lovely a form came home to him. Next he gazed eastwards.
"There a great low bank, a black wall of cloud, was rising rapidly,
extending on either hand, growing momentarily broader, darker,
threatening to cover the sky. He watched it come up swiftly, and
saw that as it neared it became lighter in colour, first gray, then
white. It was the morning mist driven along before the breeze,
whose breath had not reached him yet. In a few minutes the wall of
vapour passed over him as the waters rolled over Pharaoh. A puff of
wind blew his hair back from his forehead, then another and
another; presently a steady breeze, cool and refreshing. The mist
drove rapidly along; after awhile gaps appeared overhead, and
through these he saw broad spaces of blue sky, the colour growing
and deepening. The gaps widened, the mist became thinner; then
this, the first wave of vapour, was gone, creeping up the hillside
behind him like the rearguard of an army.
"Out from the last fringe of mist shone a great white globe. Like
molten silver, glowing with a lusciousness of light, soft and yet
brilliant, so large and bright and seemingly so near--but just
above the ridge yonder--shining with heavenly splendour in the very
dayspring. He knew Eosphoros, the Light-Bringer, the morning star
of hope and joy and love, and his heart went out towards the beauty
and the glory of it. Under him the broad bosom of the earth seemed
to breathe instinct with life, bearing him up, and from the azure
ether came the wind, filling his chest with the vigour of the young
day.
"The azure ether--yes, and more than that! Who that has seen it can
forget the wondrous beauty of the summer morning's sky? It is
blue--it is sapphire--it is like the eye of a lovely woman. A rich
purple shines through it; no painter ever approached the colour of
it, no Titian or other, none from the beginning. Not even the
golden flesh of Rubens' women, through the veins in whose limbs a
sunlight pulses in lieu of blood shining behind the tissues, can
equal the hues that glow behind the blue.
"The East flamed out at last. Pencilled streaks of cloud high in
the dome shone red. An orange light rose up and spread about the
horizon, then turned crimson, and the upper edge of the sun's disk
lifted itself over the hill. A swift beam of light shot like an
arrow towards him, and the hawthorn bush obeyed with instant
shadow; it passed beyond him over the green plain, up the ridge and
away. The great orb, quivering with golden flames, looked forth
upon the world."
The finest of all the papers written by Jefferies--as I have already
said--is that called "The Pageant of Summer." It came out in _Longman's
Magazine_. I know nothing in the English language finer, whether for the
sustained style or for the elevation of thought which fills it. Herein
Jefferies surpassed himself as well as all other writers who have
written upon Nature. This is perhaps because he fills the "Pageant"
which he describes with human love and human regrets. Without the life
and presence of man, what is the beauty of Nature worth? I should like
to quote it all--nay, to those who have read it again and again, the
words live in the memory like the lines of Wordsworth's "Ode to
Immortality," and like them they fill the heart with tenderness and the
eyes with tears. It is published in the last but one of his books, "The
Life of the Fields," which everybody should make haste to possess, if
only for this one paper. It opens quietly--with the rushes:
"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. The white pollen of early grasses growing on the
edge was dusted from them each time the hawthorn boughs were shaken
by a thrush. These lower sprays came down in among the grass, and
leaves and grass-blades touched.
"It was between the May and the June roses. The may-bloom had
fallen, and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches
that would feed the redwings in autumn. High up the briars had
climbed, straight and towering while there was a thorn, or an ash
sapling, or a yellow-green willow to uphold them, and then curving
over towards the meadow. The buds were on them, but not yet open;
it was between the may and the rose.
"As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an
invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal
essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and
hedges--green waves and billows--became full of fine atoms of
summer. Swept from notched hawthorn-leaves, broad-topped
oak-leaves, narrow ash sprays and oval willows; from vast elm
cliffs and sharp-taloned brambles under; brushed from the waving
grasses and stiffening corn, the dust of the sunshine was borne
along and breathed. Steeped in flower and pollen to the music of
bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing.
It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The
strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed
thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width
and depth of the summer--to the broad horizon afar, down to the
minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow. Winter
shows us Matter in its dead form, like the primary rocks, like
granite and basalt--clear but cold and frozen crystal. Summer shows
us Matter changing into life, sap rising from the earth through a
million tubes, the alchemic power of light entering the solid oak;
and see! it bursts forth in countless leaves. Living things leap in
the grass, living things drift upon the air, living things are
coming forth to breathe in every hawthorn bush. No longer does the
immense weight of Matter--the dead, the crystallized--press
ponderously on the thinking mind. The whole office of Matter is to
feed life--to feed the green rushes, and the roses that are about
to be; to feed the swallows above, and us that wander beneath them.
So much greater is this green and common rush than all the Alps.
"Fanning so swiftly, the wasp's wings are but just visible as he
passes; did he pause, the light would be apparent through their
texture. On the wings of the dragon-fly as he hovers an instant
before he darts there is a prismatic gleam. These wing textures are
even more delicate than the minute filaments on a swallow's quill,
more delicate than the pollen of a flower. They are formed of
matter indeed, but how exquisitely it is resolved into the means
and organs of life! Though not often consciously recognised,
perhaps this is the great pleasure of summer, to watch the earth,
the dead particles, resolving themselves into the living case of
life, to see the seed-leaf push aside the clod and become by
degrees the perfumed flower. From the tiny mottled egg come the
wings that by-and-by shall pass the immense sea. It is in this
marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living
things that the joy and the hope of summer reside. Every blade of
grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription
speaking of hope. Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows,
the sweet blue butterfly--they are one and all a sign and token
showing before our eyes earth made into life. So that my hope
becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf,
sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower. There
is so much for us yet to come, so much to be gathered, and enjoyed.
Not for you or me, now, but for our race, who will ultimately use
this magical secret for their happiness. Earth holds secrets enough
to give them the life of the fabled Immortals. My heart is fixed
firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the
summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were,
interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their
beauty and enjoy their glory. Hence it is that a flower is to me so
much more than stalk and petals. When I look in the glass I see
that every line in my face means pessimism; but in spite of my
face--that is my experience--I remain an optimist. Time with an
unsteady hand has etched thin crooked lines, and, deepening the
hollows, has cast the original expression into shadow. Pain and
sorrow flow over us with little ceasing, as the sea-hoofs beat on
the beach. Let us not look at ourselves but onwards, and take
strength from the leaf and the signs of the field. He is indeed
despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to
do so is to deny our birthright of mind....
"It is the patient humble-bee that goes down into the forest of the
mowing-grass. If entangled, the humble-bee climbs up a sorrel stem
and takes wing, without any sign of annoyance. His broad back with
tawny bar buoyantly glides over the golden buttercups. He hums to
himself as he goes, so happy is he. He knows no skep, no cunning
work in glass receives his labour, no artificial saccharine aids
him when the beams of the sun are cold, there is no step to his
house that he may alight in comfort; the way is not made clear for
him that he may start straight for the flowers, nor are any sown
for him. He has no shelter if the storm descends suddenly; he has
no dome of twisted straw well thatched and tiled to retreat to. The
butcher-bird, with a beak like a crooked iron nail, drives him to
the ground, and leaves him pierced with a thorn; but no hail of
shot revenges his tortures. The grass stiffens at nightfall (in
autumn) and he must creep where he may, if possibly he may escape
the frost. No one cares for the humble-bee. But down to the
flowering nettle in the mossy-sided ditch, up into the tall elm,
winding in and out and round the branched buttercups, along the
banks of the brook, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders
and despises nothing. His nest is under the rough grasses and the
mosses of the mound, a mere tunnel beneath the fibres and matted
surface. The hawthorn overhangs it, the fern grows by, red mice
rustle past....
"All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass
stands up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk
arises, the pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush
past, and the resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings
them along. About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm, and
the fern-owls at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot
reduce their legions while they last. Yellow butterflies, and
white, broad red admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of
flowers which is theirs! Heavy moths burring at the edge of the
copse; green, and red, and gold flies: gnats, like smoke, around
the tree-tops; midges so thick over the brook, as if you could haul
a netful; tiny leaping creatures in the grass; bronze beetles
across the path; blue dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of
water-plantain. Blue jays flitting, a magpie drooping across from
elm to elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot
blundering up into the branches; missel thrushes leading their
fledglings, already strong on the wing, from field to field. An egg
here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red ladybird creeping,
tortoise-like, up a green fern frond. Finches undulating through
the air, shooting themselves with closed wings, and linnets happy
with their young....
"Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's
glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times!
When perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly
oaks were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in
the midst of their mighty branches. A glamour in the heart came
back to it again from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected
from them, so the feeling in the heart returned tenfold. To the
dreamy summer haze love gave a deep enchantment, the colours were
fairer, the blue more lovely in the lucid sky. Each leaf finer, and
the gross earth enamelled beneath the feet. A sweet breath on the
air, a soft warm hand in the touch of the sunshine, a glance in the
gleam of the rippled waters, a whisper in the dance of the shadows.
The ethereal haze lifted the heavy oaks and they were buoyant on
the mead, the rugged bark was chastened and no longer rough, each
slender flower beneath them again refined. There was a presence
everywhere though unseen, on the open hills, and not shut out under
the dark pines. Dear were the June roses then because for another
gathered. Yet even dearer now with so many years as it were upon
the petals; all the days that have been before, all the
heart-throbs, all our hopes lie in this opened bud. Let not the
eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold
itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as
we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we
could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of
the summer!
"I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of
the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very
air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine
gives and the south wind calls to being. The endless grass, the
endless leaves, the immense strength of the oak expanding, the
unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from all of them I receive a
little. Each gives me something of the pure joy they gather for
themselves. In the blackbird's melody one note is mine; in the
dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is for me, though the
motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces have collected
the kisses of the morning. Feeling with them, I receive some, at
least, of their fulness of life. Never could I have enough; never
stay long enough--whether here or whether lying on the shorter
sward under the sweeping and graceful birches, or on the
thyme-scented hills. Hour after hour, and still not enough. Or
walking the footpath was never long enough, or my strength
sufficient to endure till the mind was weary. The exceeding beauty
of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with
every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the
only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay
among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable
Time. Let the shadow advance upon the dial--I can watch it with
equanimity while it is there to be watched. It is only when the
shadow is _not_ there, when the clouds of winter cover it, that the
dial is terrible. The invisible shadow goes on and steals from us.
But now, while I can see the shadow of the tree and watch it
slowly gliding along the surface of the grass, it is mine. These
are the only hours that are not wasted--these hours that absorb the
soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is
illusion, or mere endurance. Does this reverie of flowers and
waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind? It
does; much the same ideal that Phidias sculptured of man and woman
filled with a godlike sense of the violet fields of Greece,
beautiful beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove before the lurid
lightning of the unknown. To be beautiful and to be calm, without
mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at
least I can think it."
May we not say indeed, that never any man has heretofore spoken of
Nature as this man speaks? He has given new colours to the field and
hedge; he has filled them with a beauty which we never thought to find
there; he has shown in them more riches, more variety, more fulness,
more wisdom, more Divine order than we common men ever looked for or
dreamed of. He has taught us to look around us with new eyes; he has
removed our blindness; it is a new world that he has given to us. What,
what shall we say--what can we say--to show our gratitude towards one
who has conferred these wonderful gifts upon his fellow-men?