Stevenson had many sides, but there were two especially that reappear again and again, and were the controlling forces in his nature. One was the Romantic element, the other the Artistic. It may be thought that these twain have much in common; but it is not so. In poetry the first gives us a Blake, a Shelley; the second a Keats, a Tennyson. Variety, fresh points of view, these are the breath of life to the Romantic. But for the Artist there is one constant, unchanging ideal. The Romantic ventures out of sheer love of the venture, the other out of sheer love for some definite end in view. It is not usual to find them coexisting as they did in Stevenson, and their dual existence gives an added piquancy and interest to his work. It is the Vagabond Romantic in him that leads him into so many byways and secret places, that sends him airily dancing over the wide fields of literature; ever on the move, making no tabernacle for himself in any one grove. And it is the Artist who gives that delicacy of finish, that exquisitive nicety of touch, to the veriest trifle that he essays. The matter may be beggarly, the manner is princely.
Mark the high ideal he sets before him: “The Artist works entirely upon honour. The Public knows littleor nothing of those merits in its quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires; these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the Artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil ‘like a miner buried in a landslip,’ for which day after day he recasts and revises and rejects, the gross mass of the Public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest point of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, that you fail by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought alone in his studio the Artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal.”[124a]
An exacting ideal, but one to which Stevenson was as faithful as a Calvinist to his theology. The question arises, however; is the fastidiousness, the patient care of the Artist, consistent with Vagabondage? Should one not say the greater the stylist, the lesser the Vagabond?
This may be admitted. And thus it is that in the letters alone do we find the Vagabond temperament of Stevenson fully asserting itself. Elsewhere ’tis held in check. As Mr. Sidney Colvin justly says:[124b]“In his letters—excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye—Stevenson, the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order, or logical sequence, or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most distinguished eloquence on one day, with simple good sense and good feeling on a second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most slashing, often ultra-colloquial vehemency on a fourth, or will vary through all these moods, and more, in one and the same letter.”
Fresh and spontaneous his letters invariably appear; with a touch of the invalid’s nervous haste, but never lacking in courage, and with nothing of the querulousness which we connect with chronic ill-health. Weak and ailing, shadowed by death for many years before the end, Stevenson showed a fine fortitude, which will remain in the memory of his friends as his most admirable character. With the consistency of Mark Tapley (and with less talk about it) he determined to be jolly in all possible circumstances. Right to the end his wonderful spirits, his courageous gaiety attended him; the frail body grew frailer, but the buoyant intellect never failed him, or if it did so the failure was momentary, and in a moment he was recovered.
No little of his popularity is due to the desperate valour with which he contested the ground with death, inch by inch, and died, as Buckle and John Richard Green had done, in the midst of the work that he wouldnot quit. Romance was by him to the last, gladdening his tired body with her presence; and if towards the end weariness and heart-sickness seized him for a spell, yet the mind soon resumed its mastery over weakness. In a prayer which he had written shortly before his death he had petitioned: “Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun lightens the world, so let our lovingkindness make bright this house of our habitation.” Assuredly in his case this characteristic petition had been realized; the prevalent sunniness of his disposition attended him to the last.
Of all our writers there has been none to whom the epithet “charming” has been more frequently applied. Of late the epithet has become a kind of adjectival maid-of-all-work, and has done service where a less emphatic term would have done far better. But in Stevenson’s case the epithet is fully justified. Of all the literary Vagabonds he is the most captivating. Not the most interesting; the most arresting, one may admit. There is greater power in Hazlitt; De Quincey is more unique; the “prophetic scream” of Whitman is more penetrating. But not one of them was endowed with such wayward graces of disposition as Stevenson. Whatever you read of his you think invariably of the man. Indeed the personal note in his work is frequently the most interesting thing about it. I mean that what attracts and holds us is often not any originality, any profundity, nothingspecially inherent in the matter of his speech, but a bewitchingly delightful manner.
Examine his attractive essays,Virginibus PuerisqueandFamiliar Studies of Men and Books, and this quality will manifest itself. There is no pleasanter essay than the one on “Walking Tours”; it dresses up wholesome truths with so pleasant and picturesque a wit; it is so whimsical, yet withal so finely suggestive, that the reader who cannot yield to its fascination should consult a mental specialist.
For instance:—
“It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humours—of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on or takes it off with more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the arrival. Whatever he does will be further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain.”
“It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humours—of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on or takes it off with more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the arrival. Whatever he does will be further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain.”
An admirable opening, full of the right relish. And the wit and relish are maintained down to the last sentence. But it cannot fail to awaken memories of the great departed in the reader of books. “Now tobe properly enjoyed,” counsels Stevenson, “a walking tour should be gone upon alone. . . . a walking tour should be gone upon alone because freedom is of the essence,” and so on in the same vein for twenty or thirty lines. One immediately recalls Hazlitt—“On Going a Journey”: “One of the pleasantest things is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. . . . The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.”
A suspicion seizes the mind of the reader, and he will smile darkly to himself. But Stevenson is quite ready for him. “A strong flavour of Hazlitt, you think?” he seems to say, then with the frank ingenuousness of one who has confessed to “playing the sedulous ape,” he throws in a quotation from this very essay of Hazlitt’s and later on gives us more Hazlitt. It is impossible to resent it; it is so openly done, there is such a charming effrontery about the whole thing. And yet, though much that he says is obviously inspired by Hazlitt, he will impart that flavour of his own less mordant personality to the discourse.
If you turn to another, the “Truth of Intercourse,” it is hard to feel that it would have thrived had not Elia given up his “Popular Fallacies.” There is an unmistakable echo in the opening paragraph: “Among sayings that have a currency, in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them, for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were!” Similarly inother essays the influence of Montaigne is strongly felt; and although Stevenson never fails to impart the flavour of his own individuality to his discourses—for he is certainly no mere copyist—one realizes the unwisdom of those enthusiastic admirers who have bracketed him with Lamb, Montaigne, and Hazlitt. These were men of the primary order; whereas Stevenson with all his grace and charm is assuredly of the secondary order. And no admiration for his attractive personality and captivating utterances should blind us to this fact.
As a critic of books his originality is perhaps more pronounced, but wise and large though many of his utterances are, here again it is the pleasant wayward Vagabond spirit that gives salt and flavour to them. There are many critics less brilliant, less attractive in their speech, in whose judgment I should place greater reliance. Sometimes, as in the essay on “Victor Hugo’s Romances,” his own temperament stands in the way; at other times, as in his “Thoreau” article, there is a vein of wilful capriciousness, even of impish malice, that distorts his judgment. Neither essays can be passed over; in each there is power and shrewd flashes of discernment, and both are extremely interesting. One cannot say they are satisfying. Stevenson does scant justice to the extraordinary passion, the Titanic strength, of Hugo; and in the case of Thoreau he dwells too harshly upon the less gracious aspects of the “poet-naturalist.”
It is only fair to say, however, that in the case of Thoreau he made generous amends in the preface to the Collected Essays. Both the reconsidered verdict andthe original essay are highly characteristic of the man. Other men have said equally harsh things of Thoreau. Stevenson alone had the fairness, the frank, childlike spirit to go back upon himself. These are the things that endear us to Stevenson, and make it impossible to be angry with any of his paradoxes and extravagant capers. Who but Stevenson would have written thus: “The most temperate of living critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, ‘This seems nonsense.’ It not only seemed, it was so. It was a private bravado of my own which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting it down as a contribution to the theory of life.”
Touched by this confidence, one reads Stevenson—especially the letters—with a more discerning eye, a more compassionate understanding; and if at times one feels the presence of the Ariel too strong, and longs for a more human, less elfin personality, then the thought that we are dealing with deliberate “bravado” may well check our impatience.
Men who suffer much are wont to keep up a brave front by an appearance of indifference.
To turn now to another side of Stevenson—Stevenson the Artist, the artificer of phrases, the limner of pictures. His power here is shown in a threefold manner—in deftand happy phrasing, in skilful characterization, in delicately suggestive scenic descriptions.
This, for instance, as an instance of the first:—
“The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated atmosphere, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equally forward over blood and ruin” (New Arabian Nights).
“The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated atmosphere, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equally forward over blood and ruin” (New Arabian Nights).
Or this:—
“Whitman, like a large, shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world, and baying at the moon” (Men and Books).
“Whitman, like a large, shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world, and baying at the moon” (Men and Books).
Or this:—
“To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else” (Virginibus Puerisque).
“To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters, and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else” (Virginibus Puerisque).
In his characterization he is at his best—like Scott and Borrow—when dealing with the picaresque elements in life. His rogues are depicted with infinite gusto and admirable art, and although even they, in common with most of his characters, lack occasionally in substance and objective reality, yet when he has to illustrate a characteristic he will do so with a sure touch.
Take, for instance, this sketch of Herrick inThe Ebb Tide—the weak, irresolute rascal, with just force enough to hate himself. He essays to end his ignominious career in the swift waters:—
. . . “Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming; there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?“And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he—at once within and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain, which a single manly thought would suffice to open—and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a revelation—there was no escape possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow—a merciful chance blow—or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his infamy.“There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who couldnot. His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself.”
. . . “Let him lie down with all races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say, easy to do. To stop swimming; there was no mystery in that, if he could do it. Could he?
“And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was instantly aware of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible, clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he—at once within and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve within the brain, which a single manly thought would suffice to open—and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable to gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him, and carries him whither he would not. It came even to Herrick with the authority of a revelation—there was no escape possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to the end with the pack of his responsibility and disgrace, until a cold, a blow—a merciful chance blow—or the more merciful hangman should dismiss him from his infamy.
“There were men who could commit suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who couldnot. His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself.”
Profoundly dissimilar in many ways, one psychological link binds together Dickens, Browning, and Stevenson—a love of the grotesque, a passion for the queer, phantastic sides of life. Each of them relished the tang of roughness, and in Browning’s case the relish imparts itself to his style. Not so with Stevenson. He will delve with the others for curious treasure; but not until it is fairly wrought and beaten into a thing of finished beauty will he allow you to get a glimpse of it.
This is different from Browning, who will fling his treasures at you with all the mud upon them. But I am not sure that Stevenson’s is always the better way. He may save you soiling your fingers; but the real attractiveness of certain things is inseparable from their uncouthness, their downright ugliness. Sometimes you feel that a plainer setting would have shown off the jewel to better advantage. Otherwise one has nothing but welcome for such memorable figures as John Silver, the Admiral inThe Story of a Lie, Master Francis Villon, and a goodly company beside.
It is impossible even in such a cursory estimate of Stevenson as this to pass over his vignettes of Nature. And it is the more necessary to emphasize these, inasmuch as the Vagabond’s passion for the Earth is clearly discernible in these pictures. They are no Nature sketches as imagined by a mere “ink-bottle feller”—to use a phrase of one of Mr. Hardy’s rustics. One of Stevenson’s happiest recollections was an “open air” experience when he slept on the earth. He loved thelargeness of the open air, and his intense joy in natural sights and sounds bespeaks the man of fine, even hectic sensibility, whose nerves quiver for the benison of the winds and sunshine.
Ever since the days of Mrs. Radcliffe, who used the stormier aspects of Nature with such effect in her stories, down to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose massive scenic effects are so remarkable, Nature has been regarded as a kind of “stage property” by the novelist.
To the great writers the Song of the Earth has proved an inspiration only second to the “Song of Songs,” and the lesser writer has imitated as best he could so effective a decoration. But there is no mistaking the genuine lover of the Earth. He does not—as Oscar Wilde wittily said of a certain popular novelist—“frighten the evening sky into violent chromo-lithographic effects”; he paints the sunrises and sunsets with a loving fidelity which there is no mistaking. Nor are all the times and seasons of equal interest in his eyes. If we look back at the masters of fiction (ay, and mistresses too) in the past age, we shall note how each one has his favourite aspect, how each responds more readily to one special mood of the ancient Earth.
Mention has been made of Mrs. Radcliffe. Extravagant and absurd as her stories are in many ways, she was a genuine lover of Nature, especially of its grand and sublime aspects. Her influence may be traced in Scott, still more in Byron. The mystic side of Nature finds its lovers chiefly in the poets, in Coleridge and in Shelley. But at a later date Nathaniel Hawthorne found in the mysticism of the Earth his finest inspiration; whilethroughout the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë wail the bleak winds of the North, and the grey storm-clouds are always hurrying past. Even in Dickens there is more snow than sunshine, and we hear more of “the winds that would be howling at all hours” than of the brooding peace and quiet of summer days. Charles Kingsley is less partial towards the seasons, and cares less about the mysticism than the physical influences of Nature.
In our own day Mr. George Meredith has reminded us of the big geniality of the Earth; and the close relationship of the Earth and her moods with those who live nearest to her has found a faithful observer in Mr. Hardy.
Stevenson differs from Meredith and Hardy in this. He looks at her primarily with the eye of the artist. They look at her primarily with the eye of the scientific philosopher.
Here is a twilight effect fromThe Return of the Native:—
“The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep, the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow. . . . Twilight combined with the sceneryof Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.”
“The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. . . . The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep, the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow. . . . Twilight combined with the sceneryof Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.”
Contrast with this a twilight piece from Stevenson:—
“The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars by innumerable millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries—a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hill and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark.”
“The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars by innumerable millions stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries—a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hill and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark.”
Each passage has a fresh beauty that removes it from the perfunctory tributes of the ordinary writer. But the difference between the Artist and the Philosopher is obvious. Not that Mr. Hardy has no claims as an artist. Different as their styles are, and although Stevenson has a more fastidious taste for words, the large, deliberate, massive art of Hardy is equally effective in its fashion. That, however, by the way. The point is that Mr. Hardy never restsasan artist—he is quite as concerned with the philosophic as with the pictorial aspects of the scene. Stevenson rejoices as a Romantic; admires like an Artist.
But if Stevenson does not care to philosophize over Nature—herein parting company with Thoreau as well as Hardy—he can moralize on occasion, and with infinite relish too.
“Something of the Shorter Catechist,” as his friend Henley so acutely said. There is the Moralist in his essays, in some of the short stories—Jekyll and Hydeis a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so isA Christmas Sermon.
Some of his admirers have deplored this tendency in Stevenson; have shaken their heads gloomily over his Scottish ancestry, and spoken as apologetically about the moralizing as if it had been kleptomania.
Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow’s big green gamp or De Quincey’s insularity. “What business has a Vagabond to moralize?” asks the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond (especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson gives an additional piquancy to his work. TheLay Moralsand theChristmas Sermonmay not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in theFables. And even if you do not care for Stevenson’s “Hamlet” and “Shorter Catechist” moods, is it wise, even from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament? Was it the absence of the “Shorter Catechist” in Edgar Allan Poe that sent him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring,grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And was it the “Shorter Catechist” in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of life’s possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder.
“Noises of river and of groveAnd moving things in field and stallAnd night birds’ whistle shall be allOf the world’s speech that we shall hear.”William Morris.“The poetry of earth is never dead.”Keats.
“Noises of river and of groveAnd moving things in field and stallAnd night birds’ whistle shall be allOf the world’s speech that we shall hear.”
William Morris.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
Keats.
The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come within its ken; the delight of a passionate soul in the riotous wealth of the Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid in the splendid sanity of the sunlight—these are the sentiments that well up from the writings of Richard Jefferies.
By comparison with him, Thoreau’s Earth-worship seems quite a stolid affair, and even Borrow’s frank enjoyment of the open air has a strangely apathetic touch about it.
No doubt he felt more keenly than did the Hermit of Walden, or the Norfolk giant, but it was not so much passionate intensity as nervous susceptibility. He had the sensitive quivering nerves of the neurotic which respond to the slightest stimulus. Of all the “Children of the Open Air” Jefferies was the most sensitive; but for all that I would not say that he felt more deeply than Thoreau, Borrow, or Stevenson.
Some people are especially susceptible by constitution to pain or pleasure, but it would be rash to assume hastily that on this account they have more deeplyemotional natures. That they express their feelings more readily is no guarantee that they feel more deeply.
In other words, there is a difference between susceptibility and passion.
Whether a man has passion—be it of love or hate—can be judged only by his general attitude towards his fellow-beings, and by the stability of the emotion.
Now Jefferies certainly had keener sympathies with humankind than Thoreau, and these sympathies intensified as the years rolled by. Few men have espoused more warmly the cause of the agricultural labourer. Perhaps Hodge has never experienced a kinder advocate than Jefferies. To accuse him of superficiality of emotion would be unfair; for he was a man with much natural tenderness in his disposition.
All that I wish to protest against is the assumption made by some that because he has written so feelingly about Hodge, because he has shown so quick a response to the beauties of the natural world, he was therefore gifted with a deep nature, as has been claimed for him by some of his admirers.
One of the characteristics that differentiates the Vagabond writer from his fellows is, I think, a lack of passion—always excepting a passion for the earth, a quality lacking human significance. In their human sympathies they vary: but in no case, not even with Whitman, as I hope to show in my next paper, is there apassionfor humankind. There may be curiosity about certain types, as with Borrow and Stevenson; a delight in simple natures, as with Thoreau; a broad, genial comradeshipwith all and sundry, as in the case of Whitman; but never do you find depth, intensity.
Jefferies then presents to my mind all the characteristics of the Vagabond, his many graces and charms, his notable deficiencies, especially the absence of emotional stability. This trait is, of course, more pronounced in some Vagabonds than in others; but it belongs to his inmost being. Eager, curious, adventurous; tasting this experience and that; his emotions share with his intellect in a chronic restless transition. More easily felt than defined is the lack of permanence in his nature; his emotions flame fitfully and in gusts, rather than with steady persistence. Finally, despite the tenderness and kindliness he can show, the egotistic elements absorb too much of his nature. A great egotist can never be a great lover.
This may seem a singularly ungracious prelude to a consideration of Richard Jefferies; but whatever it may seem it is quite consistent with a hearty admiration for his genius, and a warm appreciation of the man. Passion he had of a kind, but it was the rapt, self-centred passion of the mystic.
He interests us both as an artist and as a thinker. It will be useful, therefore, to keep these points of view as separate as possible in studying his writings.
Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that strikes a reader is his power to conveysensuous impressions. He loved the Earth, not as some have done with the eye or ear only, but with every nerve of his body. His scenic pictures are more glowing, more ardent than those of Thoreau. There was more of the poet, less of the naturalist in Jefferies. Perhaps it would have been juster to call Thoreau a poetic naturalist, and reserved the term poet-naturalist for Jefferies. Be that as it may, no one can read Jefferies—especially such books asWild Life in a Southern County, orThe Life of the Fields, without realizing the keen sensibility of the man to the sensuous impressions of Nature.
Again and again in reading Jefferies one is reminded of the poet Keats. There is the same physical frailty of constitution and the same rare susceptibility to every manifestation of beauty. There is, moreover, the same intellectual devotion to beauty which made Keats declare Truth and Beauty to be one. And the likeness goes further still.
The reader who troubles to compare the sensuous imagery of the three great Nature poets—Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, will realize an individual difference in apprehending the beauties of the natural world. Wordsworth worships with his ear, Shelley with his eye, Keats with his sense of touch. Sound, colour, feeling—these things inform the poetry of these great poets, and give them their special individual charm.
Now, in Jefferies it is not so much the colour of life, or the sweet harmonies of the Earth, that he celebrates, though of course these things find a place in his prose songs. It is the “glory of the sum of things” that diffuses itself and is felt by every nerve in his body.
Take, for instance, the opening toWild Life in a Southern County:—
“The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer sunshine. A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream—a sibilant “sish-sish”—passes along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of the wind rushes through the bennets and the dry grass. There is the happy hum of bees—who love the hills—as they speed by laden with their golden harvest, a drowsy warmth, and the delicious odour of wild thyme. Behind, the fosse sinks and the rampart rises high and steep—two butterflies are wheeling in uncertain flight over the summit. It is only necessary to raise the head a little way, and the cod breeze refreshes the cheek—cool at this height, while the plains beneath glow under the heat.”
“The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer sunshine. A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream—a sibilant “sish-sish”—passes along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of the wind rushes through the bennets and the dry grass. There is the happy hum of bees—who love the hills—as they speed by laden with their golden harvest, a drowsy warmth, and the delicious odour of wild thyme. Behind, the fosse sinks and the rampart rises high and steep—two butterflies are wheeling in uncertain flight over the summit. It is only necessary to raise the head a little way, and the cod breeze refreshes the cheek—cool at this height, while the plains beneath glow under the heat.”
This, too, fromThe Life of the Fields:—
“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 sweetnessof the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes—the common rushes—were full of beautiful summer.”
“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 sweetnessof 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 asThe 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 hasRichard Jefferiesrealized, 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 Fieldsgives 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 ofThe 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.
One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the mystical quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of Nature. The power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like Keats and Shelley could not always command it successfully—and perhaps Blake, Coleridge, and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the highest degree. It is comparatively an easy matter to deal with the mysticism of the night. The possibilities of darkness readily impress the imagination. But the mysticism of the sunlight—the mysticism not of strange shapes, but of familiar things of every day, this, though felt by many, is the most difficult thing in the world to suggest in words.
The “visions” of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics. The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the same sense of physical detachment from the body.
In that fascinating volume of autobiographyThe Story of my Heart, Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is one:—
“I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then upthrough the elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me—the house, the people, the sound—seemed to disappear and to leave me alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly. My thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very short time, only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning. I was exalted.”
“I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then upthrough the elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me—the house, the people, the sound—seemed to disappear and to leave me alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly. My thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very short time, only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning. I was exalted.”
One is reminded of Tennyson’s verses:—
“Moreover, something is or seems,That touches me with mystic gleams,Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—“Of something felt, like something here;Of something done, I know not where;Such as no knowledge may declare.”[149]
“Moreover, something is or seems,That touches me with mystic gleams,Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
“Of something felt, like something here;Of something done, I know not where;Such as no knowledge may declare.”[149]
“Ah!” says the medical man, with a wise shake of the head, “this mental condition is a common enough phenomenon, though only on rare occasions does it express itself in literature. It is simple hysteria.”
The transcendentalist who has regarded this state of mind as a spiritual revelation, and looked upon its possessor as one endowed with special powers of intuition, is indignant with this physiological explanation. He is more indignant when the medical man proceeds to explain the ecstatic trances of saints, those whom one may call professional mystics. “Brutal materialism,” says the transcendentalist.
Now although hysteria is commonly regarded as a foolish exhibition of weakness on the part of some excitable men and women, there is absolutely no scientific reason why any stigma should attach to this phenomenon. Nor is there any reason why the explanation should be considered as derogatory and necessarily connected with a materialistic view of the Universe.
For what is hysteria? It is an abnormal condition of the nervous system giving rise to certain physiological and psychical manifestations. With the physiological ones we are not concerned, but the psychical manifestation should be of the greatest interest to all students of literature who are also presumably students of life. The artistic temperament is always associated with a measure of nervous instability. And where there is nervous instability there will always be a tendency to hysteria. This tendency may be kept in check by other faculties. But it is latent—ready to manifest itself in certain conditions of health or under special stress of excitement. It does not follow that every hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in literature and philosophy.
This psychical condition is far commoner in the Eastthan in the West. Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga.[151a]The passive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours this ecstatic condition.
“The science of the Sufis,” says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh century,[151b]“aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature?—what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.”
“The science of the Sufis,” says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh century,[151b]“aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature?—what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one’s hand.”
It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mindis one of expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual formulæ. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the reference to “touch” in the quotation just made will remind the reader of the important part played by the tactile sense in Jefferies’ æsthetic appreciations.
We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations involved in these “trance conditions.” All that concerns us is the remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained psychical condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces beyond our immediate ken which compel recognition from certain imaginative minds, how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or, in other words, how far these visions are objective realities, how far subjective, are questions that he beyond the scope of the present paper. One thing, however, is indisputable; they have exercised a great fascination over men of sensitive, nervous temperaments, and are often remarkable for the wider significance they have given to our ideals of beauty.
The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as “the fruit of a degenerate brain.” Such a criticism is at one with the linking of genius with insanity—an argument already broached in the paper dealing with Hazlitt.
Professor William James—who certainly holds no brief for the mystic—makes the interesting suggestion that “these mystical flights are inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative to which we as yet know nothing.”[153a]
“As a rule,” he says elsewhere, “mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.”
“As a rule,” he says elsewhere, “mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized.”
The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with the writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson’s mysticism is more speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a greater share in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite apart from, perhaps even transcending, their literary interest is the psychological significance of stories likeMarkheimandThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones,[153b]has said, when speaking of his “ecstasies”: “His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the visions of Kubla Khan; he saw ‘no damsel with a dulcimer,’but thrilled with yearning unspeakable for the ‘fuller soul,’ and felt in every trembling fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality.”
This attempt to exalt Jefferies at the expense of De Quincey and Coleridge seems to me unfortunate. Enough has been said already in the remarks on De Quincey to show that the dreams of De Quincey were no mere opium dreams. De Quincey was a born dreamer, and from his earliest days had visions and ecstatic moods. The opium which he took (primarily at any rate to relieve pain, not, as Dr. Jones suggests, to excite sensuous imagery) undoubtedly intensified the dream faculty, but it did not produce it.
I confess that I do not know quite what the Doctor means by preferring the “purer delight” of the Jefferies exaltation to the vision that producedKubla Khan. If he implies that opium provoked the one and that “the pure breath of Nature” (to use his own phrase) inspired the other, and that the latter consequently is the purer delight, then I cannot follow his reasoning.
A vision is not the less “pure” because it has been occasioned by a drug. One of the sublimest spiritual experiences that ever happened to a man came to John Addington Symonds after a dose of chloroform. Nitrous oxide, ether, Indian hemp, opium, these things have been the means of arousing the most wonderful states of ecstatic feeling.
Then why shouldKubla Khanbe rated as a less “pure” delight than one of the experiences retailed inThe Story of my Heart? Is our imagination so restrictedthat it cannot enjoy both the subtleties of Coleridge and the fuller muse of Jefferies?
The healing power of Nature has never found happier expression than inThe Story of my Heart. In words of simple eloquence he tells us how he cured the weariness and bitterness of spirit by a journey to the seashore.
“The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force of the sea.”
“The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force of the sea.”
Those who know Jefferies only by his quieter passages of leisurely observation are surprised when they find such a swirl of passionate longing in his autobiography.
The points of affinity between Thoreau and Jefferies are sufficiently obvious; and yet no two writers who have loved the Earth, and found their greatest happiness in the life of the woods and fields, as did these two men, have expressed this feeling so variously. Thoreau, quiet, passive, self-contained, has seized upon the large tranquillity of Nature, the coolness and calm, “the central piece subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.” Interspersed with his freshly observed comments on the myriad life about him are moral reflections, shrewd criticism of men and things, quaint and curious illustrations from his scholarly knowledge. But although he may not always talk of the Earth, there is the flavour of the Earth, the sweetness and naturalness of the Earth, about his finest utterances.
Jefferies, feverish, excitable, passionate, alive to the glorious plenitude of the Earth, has seized upon the exceeding beauty, and the healing beauty of natural things. No scholar like Thoreau, he brings no system of thought, as did the American, for Nature to put into shape. Outside of Nature all is arid and profitless to him. He comes to her with empty hands, and seeks for what she may give him. To Thoreau the Earth was a kind and gracious sister; to Jefferies an all-sufficing mistress.
The reader who passes from Thoreau to Jefferies need have no fear that he will be wearied with the same point of view. On the contrary, he will realize withpleasure how differently two genuine lovers of the Earth can express their affection.
In Jefferies’ song of praise, his song of desire—praise and desire alternate continually in his writings—there are two aspects of the Earth upon which he dwells continually—the exceeding beauty of the Earth, and the exceeding plenitude of the Earth. Apostrophes to the beauty have been quoted already; let this serve as an illustration of the other aspect:—
“Everything,”[157a]he exclaims, “on a scale of splendid waste. Such noble broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold. Never was there such a lying proverb as ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’[157b]Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the waste the greater the enjoyment—the nearer the approach to real life. Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures abroad, puffs them with open lips along on every breeze; piles up lavish layers of them in the free, open air, packs countless numbers together in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped on everything she does.”
“Everything,”[157a]he exclaims, “on a scale of splendid waste. Such noble broadcast, open-armed waste is delicious to behold. Never was there such a lying proverb as ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’[157b]Give me the feast; give me squandered millions of seeds, luxurious carpets of petals, green mountains of oak leaves. The greater the waste the greater the enjoyment—the nearer the approach to real life. Casuistry is of no avail; the fact is obvious; Nature flings treasures abroad, puffs them with open lips along on every breeze; piles up lavish layers of them in the free, open air, packs countless numbers together in the needles of a fir tree. Prodigality and superfluity are stamped on everything she does.”
This is no chance passage, no casual thought. Again and again Jefferies returns to the richness and plenty of the Earth. And his style, suiting itself to the man’s temperament, is rich and overflowing, splendidly diffuse,riotously exulting, until at times there is the very incoherence of passion about it.
Thus, in looking at the man’s artistic work, its form of expression, its characteristic notes, something of the man’s way of thinking has impressed itself upon us.
It may be well to gather up the scattered impressions, and to look at the thought that underlies his fervid utterances. Beginning as merely an interested observer of Nature, his attitude becomes more enthusiastic, as knowledge grows of her ways, and what began in observation ends in aspiration. The old cry, “Return to Nature,” started by Rousseau, caught by the poets of the “Romantic Revival” in England, and echoed by the essayists of New England, fell into silence about the middle of last century. It had inspired a splendid group of Nature poets; and for a time it was felt some new gospel was needed. Scientific and philosophical problems took possession of men’s minds; the intellectual and emotional life of the nation centred more and more round the life of the city. For a time this was, perhaps, inevitable. For a time Nature regarded through the eyes of fresh scientific thought had lost her charm. Even the poets who once had been content to worship, now began to criticize. Tennyson qualified his homage with reproachings. Arnold carried his books of philosophy into her presence. But at last men tired of this questioning attitude. America produceda Whitman; and in England William Morris and Richard Jefferies—among others—cried out for a simpler, freer, more childlike attitude.
“All things seem possible,” declared Jefferies, “in the open air.” To live according to Nature was, he assured his countrymen, no poet’s fancy, but a creed of life. He spoke from his own experience; life in the open, tasting the wild sweetness of the Earth, had brought him his deepest happiness; and he cried aloud in his exultation, bidding others do likewise. “If you wish your children,” says he, “to think deep things, to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the meadows.” On the futility of bookish learning, the ugliness and sordidness of town life, he is always discoursing. His themes were not fresh ones; every reformer, every prophet of the age had preached from the same text. And none had put the case for Nature more forcibly than Wordsworth when he lamented—
“The world is too much with us.”
“The world is too much with us.”
But the plea for saner ways of living cannot be urged too often, and if Jefferies in his enthusiasm exaggerates the other side of the picture, pins his faith over much on solitudes and in self-communion, too little on the gregarious instincts of humankind, yet no reformer can make any impression on his fellows save by a splendid one-sidedness.
The defect of his Nature creed which calls for the most serious criticism is not the personal isolation on which he seems to insist. We herd together so much—some unhappily by necessity, some by choice, that it would be a refreshing thing, and a wholesome thing, for most of us to be alone, more often face to face with the primal forces of Nature.
The serious defect in his thought seems to me to lie in his attitude towards the animal creation. It is summed up in his remark: “There is nothing human in any living Animal. All Nature, the Universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human outside, and has no concern with man.” In this statement he shows how entirely he has failed to grasp the secret of the compelling power of the Earth—a secret into which Thoreau entered so fully.
Why should the elemental forces of Nature appeal so strongly to us? Why does the dweller in the open air feel that an unseen bond of sympathy binds him to the lowest forms of sentient life? Why is a St. Francis tender towards animals? Why does a Thoreau take a joy in the company of the birds, the squirrels, and feel a sense of companionship in the very flowers? Nay, more: what is it that gives a Jefferies this sense of communion? why, if the Earth has no “concern with man,” should it soothe with its benison, and fire his being with such ecstatic rapture? If this doctrine of a Universal Brotherhood is a sentimental figment, the foundation is swept away at once of Jefferies’ Nature creed. His sense of happiness, his delight in the Earth, may no doubt afford him consolation, but it is an irrational comfort, an agreeable delusion.
And yet no one can read a book of Jefferies without realizing that here is no sickly fancy—however sicknessmay have imparted a hectic colouring here and there—but that the instinct of the Artist is more reliable than the theory of the Thinker. Undoubtedly his Nature creed is less comprehensive than Thoreau’s. Jefferies regarded many animals as “good sport”; Thoreau as good friends. “Hares,” he says, “are almost formed on purpose to be good sport.” The remark speaks volumes. A man who could say that has but a poor philosophic defence to offer for his rapt communion with Nature.
How can you have communion with something “anti- or ultra-human”? The large utterance, “All things seem possible in the open air” dwindles down rather meanly when the speaker looks at animals from the sportsman’s point of view. Against his want of sympathy with the lower forms of creation one must put his warm-hearted plea for the agricultural poor. In his youth there was a certain harsh intolerance about his attitude towards his fellows, but he made ample amends inHodge and his Master, still more inThe Dewy Morn, for the narrow individualism of his earlier years.
One might criticize certain expressions as extravagant when he lashed out against the inequalities in society. But after all there is only a healthy Vagabond flavour about his fling at “modern civilization,” and the genuine humanitarian feeling is very welcome. Some of his unpublished “Notes on the Labour Question” (quoted by Mr. Salt in his able study of Jefferies) are worthy of Ruskin. This, for instance, is vigorously put:—
“‘But they are paid to do it,’ says Comfortable Respectability (which hates anything in the shape of a ‘question,’ glad to slur it over somehow). They are paid to do it. Go down into the pit yourself, Comfortable Respectability, and try it, as I have done, just one hour of a summer’s day, then you will know the preciousness of a vulgar pot of beer! Three and sixpence a day is the price of these brawny muscles, the price of the rascally sherry you parade before your guests in such pseudo-generous profusion. One guinea a week—that is one stall at the Opera. But why do they do it? Because Hunger and Thirst drive them. These are the fearful scourges, the whips worse than the knout, which lie at the back of Capital, and give it its power. Do you suppose these human beings, with minds, and souls, and feelings, would not otherwise repose on the sweet sward, and hearken to the song-birds as you may do on your lawn at Cedar Villa?”
“‘But they are paid to do it,’ says Comfortable Respectability (which hates anything in the shape of a ‘question,’ glad to slur it over somehow). They are paid to do it. Go down into the pit yourself, Comfortable Respectability, and try it, as I have done, just one hour of a summer’s day, then you will know the preciousness of a vulgar pot of beer! Three and sixpence a day is the price of these brawny muscles, the price of the rascally sherry you parade before your guests in such pseudo-generous profusion. One guinea a week—that is one stall at the Opera. But why do they do it? Because Hunger and Thirst drive them. These are the fearful scourges, the whips worse than the knout, which lie at the back of Capital, and give it its power. Do you suppose these human beings, with minds, and souls, and feelings, would not otherwise repose on the sweet sward, and hearken to the song-birds as you may do on your lawn at Cedar Villa?”
Really the passage might have come out ofFors Clavigera; it is Ruskinian not only in sentiment, but in turn of expression. Ruskin impressed Jefferies very considerably, one would gather, and did much to open up his mind and broaden his sympathies. Making allowance for certain inconsistencies of mood, hope for and faith in the future, and weary scepticism, there is a fine stoicism about the philosophy of Jefferies. His was not the temperament of which optimists are made. His own terrible ill-health rendered him keenly sensitive to the pain and misery of the world. His deliberate seclusion from his fellow-men—more complete in some ways than Thoreau’s, though not so ostensible—threwhim back upon his own thoughts, made him morbidly introspective.
Then the æsthetic Idealism which dominated him made for melancholy, as it invariably does. The Worshipper at the shrine of Beauty is always conscious that
“. . . . In the very temple of DelightVeiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”
“. . . . In the very temple of DelightVeiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”
He realizes the tragic ineffectuality of his aspiration—
“The desire of the moth for the star,”
“The desire of the moth for the star,”
as Shelley expresses it, and in this line of poetry the mood finds imperishable expression.
But the melancholy that visits the Idealist—the Worshipper of Beauty—is not by any means a mood of despair. The moth may not attain the star, but it feels there is a star to be attained. In other words, an intimate sense of the beauty of the world carries within it, however faintly, however overlaid with sick longing, a secret hope that some day things will shape themselves all right.
And thus it is that every Idealist, bleak and wintry as his mood may be, is conscious of the latency of spring. Every Idealist, like the man in the immortal allegory of Bunyan, has a key in his bosom called Promise. This it is that keeps from madness. And so while Jefferies will exclaim:—
“The whole and the worst the pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man.” He will also declare, “There lives on in me an impenetrable belief, thought burninglike the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.”
“The whole and the worst the pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man.” He will also declare, “There lives on in me an impenetrable belief, thought burninglike the sun, that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now.”
It is a mistake to attach much importance to Jefferies’ attempts to systematize his views on life. He lacked the power of co-ordinating his impressions, and is at his best when giving free play to the instinctive life within him. No Vagabond writer can excel him in the expression of feeling; and yet perhaps no writer is less able than he to account for, to give a rational explanation of his feelings. He is rarely satisfactory when he begins to explain. Thoreau’s lines about himself seem to me peculiarly applicable to Jefferies:—
“I am a parcel of vain strivings tiedBy a chance bond together,Dangling this way and that, their linksWere made so loose and wideMethinksFor milder weather.“A bunch of violets without their rootsAnd sorrel intermixed,Encircled by a wisp of strawOnce coiled about their shoots,The lawBy which I’m fixed.“Some tender buds were left upon my stemIn mimicry of life,But ah, the children will not knowTill Time has withered them,The woeWith which they’re rife.”
“I am a parcel of vain strivings tiedBy a chance bond together,Dangling this way and that, their linksWere made so loose and wideMethinksFor milder weather.
“A bunch of violets without their rootsAnd sorrel intermixed,Encircled by a wisp of strawOnce coiled about their shoots,The lawBy which I’m fixed.
“Some tender buds were left upon my stemIn mimicry of life,But ah, the children will not knowTill Time has withered them,The woeWith which they’re rife.”
Jefferies was a brave man, with a rare supply of resolution and patience. His life was one long struggleagainst overwhelming odds. “Three great giants,” as he puts it—“disease, despair, and poverty.” Not only was his physical health against him, but his very idiosyncrasies all conspired to hinder his success. His pride and reserve would not permit him to take help from his friends. He even shrank from their sympathy. His years of isolation, voluntary isolation, put him out of touch with human society. His socialistic tendencies never made him social. His was a kind of abstract humanitarianism. A man may feel tenderly, sympathize towards humanity, yet shrink from human beings. Misanthropy did not inspire him; he did not dislike his fellow-men; it was simply that they bewildered and puzzled him; he could not get on with them. So it will be seen that he had not the consolation some men take in the sympathy and co-operation of their fellows. After all, this is more a defect of temperament than a fault of character, and he had to pay the penalty. Realizing this, it is impossible to withhold admiration for the pluck and courage of the man. As a lover of Nature, and an artist in prose, he needs no encomium to-day. In his eloquent “Eulogy” Sir Walter Besant gave fitting expression to the debt of gratitude we owe this poet-naturalist—this passionate interpreter of English country life.
What Borrow achieved for the stirring life of the road, Jefferies has done for the brooding life of the fields. What Thoreau did for the woods at Maine and the waters of Merrimac, Jefferies did for the Wiltshire streams and the Sussex hedgerows. He has invested the familiar scenery of Southern England with a newglamour, a tenderer sanctity; has arrested our indifferent vision, our careless hearing, turned our languid appreciation into a comprehending affection.
Ardent, shy, impressionable, proud, stout-hearted pagan and wistful idealist; one of the most pathetic and most interesting figures in modern literature.