The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies

by Walter Besant

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."