RICHARD JEFFERIES

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22521, 1 October 1938, Page 20

RICHARD JEFFERIES

Wiltshire

(STECIALuV WRITTEN ?OB THE PRESS.) [By R. G. C. McNAB.]

Blake, Wordsworth, and Richard Jefferies are the three English writers who applied themselves most, and tried hardest to stir their fel-low-men. .to a spiritual consideration of the flesh. All three _can be regarded as "nature” writers, delighting to observe and record the smallest and greatest signs of natural beauty, power, and economy; all three believed that man is healthiest and happiest when he lives in and tries to understand unspoilt fields and woods; all three were mysticallymoved by birds and animals and plants. Jefferies was. of the three, he who found completest satisfaction for body. mind, and spirit in Nature. He was not preoccupied at times, as Blake was. by thoughts of sc.rits and divine agencies in his air. nor was he driven, as Wordsworth was, to find links in Nature between* some previous and subsequent forms of being. Despite stories of his deathbed acceptance of orthodox religion, he teems to have died, as he lived, an agnostic, but absorbed in Nature so intense!v that his feeling was adoration His attitude passed beyond a reverence for the mental and physical healing he found in his world, great though his belief in such power. “All this fervour and building of temples and rattling of the Salvation Army drum and loud demands for the New/ Jerusalem, and not ?. single effort for physical wellbeing and mental training.” He cried to the winds with Shelley “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest"’ and "Be thou me.” For him tne five fine susceptible senses were rot enough: to these was added the ecstasy that Shelley longed for and that Jefferies experienced more often than he wrote about it. He wrote about it in "The Story of My Heart”

Novelist and Essayist of

and told how, lying on the grass, he felt the earth’s firmness, how he thought of the wandering, pure air, how he saw the mystery and glory of the sea.

Then I addressed the sun. desiring the soul equivalent of his light and bi'i lance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it tested, for pure colour is rest of heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to the feeling, but I know no other.

Such emotion is in some degree shared by those who read Thoreau and Hudson and Gilbert White and Jefferies; these writers have not the achievement of a Linnaeus or.a Darwin—though the scientists sometimes catch the amateurs’ excitement —for causes and relations seem not tc puzzle such men. Beauty to be worshipped is enough, and Jefferies and the others needed only to see and admire the marks on the eggs ol birds, the purple that at sunset touched a golden wheatfield, the triangular darts of a water-fly, the strength and symmetry of a bone,, or a red leaf bobbing in an eddy.

Wiltshire Days Richard Jefferies had a straitened and short life. He was born in a hamlet of North Wiltshire m 1848 and from his boyhood and youth stored the inexhaustible memories of that countryside that were to nil scores of magazine articles and many books. The centre and focus of these memories was Coate Farm, his birthplace, and that spot and the relatives and farm-workers he knew became known to thousands of men and women who never knew its name but could describe its thatch and trees and birds and flowers better than their own homes and gardens Yet Jefferies was never a farmer. His parents considered him indolent. His stock was healthy and well-es-tablished, showing now and then a man or woman of great sensitiveness or of rare talent in craftsmanship and untutored art. Richard Jefferies summed up these qualities of his ancestors. His education was adequate but no more; his reading, wide and whimsical. He began writing as an agricultural apologist and could, it seems likely, have reached a competence as an occasional or regular journalist, He chose, however—and the preference was irresistible —to pour forth the impressions and memories that his remarkably observant mind had received. In solitude this “sensitive egoist,” as Edward Thomas called him, subjected himself to Nature, arid whatever his moodiness, his exaltation or depression, the process of observing was unbroken. Even, in his London days, and he believed that God had made only the country, he lived as he had done in Wiltshire, watching the street birds, gazing at the river, walking' far to see an exiled tree, or to find a plot of grass in a suburb. Disease came to sharpen the misery of poverty; -and he usually looked backwards for happiness. He remained, in distress, a force at one with what is good, seeking and finding wisdom, beauty, happiness. His sufferings and longings and achievements were like those of W. N. P. Barbellion. He was 39 when he died, and for years had been often helpless, unable to dress himself, crawling, when he could move, on hands and knees, and, lying or moving, never rid of pain,. To this pain were added the worst deprivations of poverty and the self-tortures of pride. He had refused help from the Royal Literary Fund because he believed the fund was maintained by aristocrats, not writers. This knowledge and memory remained true to him. No other writer had had such experience of farmers, poachers, peasants, of streams and fields and forests, and of the creatures who live there; and he had the advantage of seeing men and creatures and the world together. As he lay dying, he was dictating an introduction to “The Natural History of Selborne.” In this he regretted that Gilbert White had scarcely mentioned the human life of his parish, Jefferies cannot be so reproached. However passionately he writes of sun and moon and day and night, these wonders are always part of man’s world However fully he describes a leaf or a feather, however fresh his information about a process or a growth, he is perceived to be dealing with the affairs of human beings.

Two Autobiographical Books When his health and circumstances were worst, he write his two best books. Those who know Jefferies only by such essays as are in "Meadow Thoughts” will know enough to praise him. Those who live by the land will speak- for “The Gamekeeper” and its companion books of country lore. But greater than these, because wider, more humane, more passionate, are “The Story of My Heart” and “Bevis, The Story of a Boy.” Both are autobiographical. the first directly so “The Story of My Heart,” says Edward Thomas, flows like a piece of music, and no one who reads will wish a word removed or added. It is painful reading in its sincerity and

loneliness; but it is noble,, even when readers fall below understanding Jefferies has shown how one man has grown emotionally and spiritually The man grown is a sad spectacle, for there are gaps and coldnesses that many lesser men have not to regret. This in spite of Jefferies’s intense delight in many sensuous things; good food, good ale, the sleek strength of a horse, the smooth curve of a woman’s arm, and delight in his own five senses responding to their impulses. “Bevis” and its companion, “Wood Magic,” are for all children and for the men and women who can catch the folk-story view of creatures and wood-magic. The creatures of “Wood Magic,” Kapchak. the magpie, Clocktaw, the jackdaw, and the others, are not mischievous or resigned or philosophical human beings dressed in feather or fur or nothing at all. Perhaps because Jefferies knew their haunts so well they cannot be imagined as living in houses, working at trades, or deliberately preaching sermons. They say and do wise or foolish things because that is their nature. Bevis is. of course. Jefferies the child, wandering about Coate Farm, and in “Bevis. The Story of a Boy” he does all the wonderful things that a child of imagination tries to do. There is no better episode of boyhood than the account of the voyage that Bevis and his friend make on a raft of packing-case on the Longpond. when they discover the New Sea. In this tale are joy and excitement and beauty. Here is a snatch of the boys’ setting out:

“But we shall not be back to dinner,” said Mark.

“As if travellers ever thought of dinner! Of course, we shall take our provisions with us. and I must make a map; wait a minute. We ought to have a medicine chest; the savages will worry us for physic; and very likely we shall develop fevers.” “We ought to keep a diary,” said Mark.

“When we go to sleep, who shall watch first, you or I?” “We’ll light a fire.” said Bevis. “That will frighten the lions; they will glare at us, but they can’t stand fire. You hit them on the head with a burning stick,”

So they went and loaded their pockets with huge double slices of bread and butter done up in paper, apples, and the leg of a roast duck from the pantry.

And, finally, part of the world in which these two boys moved, a world from which Jefferies's tenderness and truthfulness and memory were never absent:

The hazel bushes seemed quite vacant; only one bird passed while they were there, and that was a robin, come to see what they were doing, and if there was anything for him. In the butchery of the Wars of the Roses, that such flowers should be stained with such memories! It is certain that the murderers watched • the robin perched hard by. He listened to the voice of fair Rosamond; he was at the tryst when Amy Robsart met her lover. Nothing happens in the fields and woods without a robin.

CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY The Church and the World. By Cyril E. Hudson. M.A., and Maurice B. Reekett, M.A. Allen and Unwin. 309 pp. (8/6 net)

The age-old struggle between spiritual authority and secular power has acutely revived with unfortunate consequences in the contemporary world. This book is timely. It aims to provide the general reader with “material for a historical study of Christian sociology.” It is a sound introduction, for the authors give the observations of the best qualified contemporary authorities together with their own commentary, and provide an outline of the past which enables the problems of the sociological issues of to-day to be seen in better perspective. The first part of the book deals with the social implications of the teaching of the Law and the Prophets (including Jesus of Nazareth) and gives the reactions of the early Church to societv from its beginning to its establishment in the Roman Empire. The second part opens with the rise of the Carolingian Empire and ends with the death of Dante. The inevitable clashes of Papacy and Empire with the economic philosophy of Christendom are excellently reviewed. Chapters on property in medieval theory, the just price, and the restraint of usury are well done. - The present volutpe is to be succeeded by another, also in two parts, carrying the study to the present day.