"You have made me pretty miserable. I have just read the otter chapter, and I can see it all so plainly—the rocks and the rush of water, and the oaks of June above. Have you ever seen the Exe and Barle? It is a land of Paradise. So you have made me miserable enough, being on all-fours; literally not able to go even on three, as the Sphynx said, but on four, crawling upstairs on hands and knees, and nailed to the uneasy chair."
He offers more work from Crowborough (May 1, 1884 or 1885, uncertain). There is a new novel of which he speaks, called "A Bit of Human Nature," which never appeared, and was probably never written. The rest of the letters belong to the last few months of his life, and must be reserved for the last chapter.
Enough has been quoted from these letters to show the extraordinary mental activity of the man. He is continually planning new work. He sees a whole book spread out before him complete in all its details. To make a book—that is to say, to imagine a book already made,—is nothing; what troubles him is the writing it. This temperament, however, is fatal to novel-writing, because characters cannot be seen at once; they must be studied, they require time to grow in the brain. But Jefferies cannot write enough. It seems to his fertile brain, fevered with long sickness, as if he did nothing.
CHAPTER IX.
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: