The appearance of "World's End" marks the conclusion of one period of his life. Henceforth Jefferies abandons his ill-starred attempts to paint manners which he never saw, a society to which he never belonged, and the life of people concerning whom he knew nothing. He has at last made the discovery that this kind of work is absolutely futile. Yet he does not actually realize the fact until he has made many failures, and wasted a great deal of time, and is nearly thirty years of age. Henceforth his tales, if we are to call them tales, his papers, sketches, and finished pictures, will be wholly rural. He has written "The Dewy Morn," and apparently the work has been refused; there was little in his previous attempts to tempt a publisher any farther. He will now write "Greene Ferne Farm," "Bevis," "After London," and "Amaryllis at the Fair." They are not novels at all, though he chooses to call them novels; they are a series of pictures, some of beauty and finish incomparable, strung together by some sort of thread of human interest which nobody cares to follow.
CHAPTER VII.
IN FULL CAREER.
Never, certainly, did any man have a better chance of success in literature than Jefferies about the year 1876. He had made himself, to begin with, an authority on the most interesting of all subjects; he knew more about farming—that is to say, farming in his own part of the country—than any other man who could wield a pen; he had written papers full of the most brilliant suggestions, as well as knowledge, as to the future of agriculture and its possible developments; he had written things which made people ask if there had truly arisen an agricultural prophet in the land. And he was as yet only twenty-eight. Of all young authors, he seems to have been the man most to be envied. Everything that he had so long desired seemed now lying at his feet ready to be picked up. To use the old parlance, the trumpet of fame was already resounding in the heavens for him, and the crown of honour was already being woven for his brows.
Some men would have made of this splendid commencement a golden ladder of fortune. They would have come to town—the first step, whether one is to become a millionnaire or a Laureate; they would have joined clubs; they would have gone continually in and out among their fellow-men, and especially those of their own craft or mystery; they would have been seen as much as possible in society; they would have stood up to speak on platforms; they would have sought to be mentioned in the papers; they would have courted popularity in the ways very well known to all, and commonly practised without concealment. Such a man as Jefferies might have made himself, without much trouble, a great power in London.
Well, Jefferies did not become a power in London at all. He could not; everything was against him, except the main fact that the way was open to him. First, the air of the town choked and suffocated him; he panted for the breath of the fields. Next, he had no knowledge or experience of men; he never belonged to society at all, not even to the quiet society of a London suburb; he had none of the conversation which belongs to clubs and to club life; he never associated with literary men or London journalists; he knew nobody. Thirdly, there was the reserve which clung round him like a cloak which cannot be removed. He did not want to know anybody; he was not only reserved, but he was self-contained. Therefore, the success which he achieved did not mean to him what it should have meant had he been a man of the world. On the other hand, it must be conceded that no mere man of the world could write the things which Jefferies subsequently wrote. Let us, therefore, content ourselves with the reflection that his success proved in the end to be of a far higher kind than a mere worldly success. This knowledge, if such things follow beyond the grave, should be enough to make him happy.
He was himself contented—he was even happy—and desired nothing more than to go on finding a ready market for his wares, a sufficient income for the daily wants of his household, and that praise which means to authors far more than it means to any other class of men. Nobody praises the physician or the barrister: they go on their own way quite careless of the world's praise. But an author wants it; I think that all authors need praise. To work day after day, year after year, without recognition, thanks, or appreciation, must in the end become destructive to the highest genius. Praise makes a man write better. Praise gives him that happy self-confidence which permits the flow, and helps the expression, of his thoughts. Praise gives him audacity, a most useful quality for an author. Jefferies could never have written his best things but for the praise which he received. The chief reason, I verily believe, why his work went on improving was that every year that he lived after the appearance of the "Gamekeeper at Home" he received an ever increasing share of praise, appreciation and encouragement.
It was somewhere about the year 1876 that I myself first fell upon some of his work. I remember the delight with which I drank, as a bright and refreshing draught from a clear spring-head, the story of the country life as set forth by him, this writer, the like of whom I had never before read. Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not. Nay, after reading all the books and all the papers—every one—that Jefferies wrote between the years 1876 and 1887, after learning from him all that he had to teach, I cannot yet see these things. I see a hedge; I see wild rose, honeysuckle, black briony—herbe aux femmes battues, the French poetically call it—blackberry, hawthorn, and elder. I see on the banks sweet wildflowers whose names I learn from year to year, and straightway forget because they grow not in the streets. I know very well, because Jefferies has told me so much, what I should be able to see in the hedge and on the bank besides these simple things; but yet I cannot see them, for all his teaching. Mine—alas!—are eyes which have looked into shop windows and across crowded streets for half a century, save for certain intervals every year; they are also eyes which need glasses; they are slow to see things unexpected, ignorant of what should be expected; they are helpless eyes when they are turned from men and women to flowers, ferns, weeds, and grasses; they are, in fact, like unto the eyes of those men with whom I mostly consort. None of us—poor street-struck creatures!—can see the things we ought to see.