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RICHARD JEFFERIES, AND THE OPEN AIR

It is a curious contradiction that while the public never appreciated the works of Richard Jefferies when he lived, and we are confronted again by the melancholy spectacle-a spectacle unfortunately familiar to the experience of literature and art-of a man of genius dying in poverty and distress; his death has awakened our intellectual sense and gratitude for the great part which Richard Jefferies has performed in expressing the many subtle and exquisite pleasures which, to the pure and simple-minded lovers of nature, are ever around and among us.

The poetry of country life and of the simple and purer natures of the country poor has been expressed in painting by the French artist Millet. With him, as with Richard Jefferies, the genius of his work was never fully appreciated during his life. He died, not in poverty, but certainly a poor and neglected artist. It is the sympathy of after years that has realised the genius of his work, and the almost sublime pathos which speaks to us in his picture of the "Angelus." I do not know why work like that of Jefferies or of Millet, its counterpart in painting, should have excited so little enthusiasm during the lifetime of its authors. Experience at least teaches us that, when first-rate work of this kind has been done, posterity has accorded it almost a fancy value. I venture to express a hope that this may be so in regard to Richard Jefferies. As I am writing there lies on my library table Izaac Walton's own copy of the Reliquia Wottoniana

Blest silent groves, O may ye be

For ever mirth's best nursery.

May pure contents

For ever pitch their tents

Upon these downs, these rocks, these mountains,

And peace still slumber by these purling fountains

Which we may every year

Find when we come a fishing here.

Yes, it was probably amid the sunny meadows of May and June, when the streams are fresh and full of insect life, that the sweet and dignified intercourse of Sir Henry Wotton and Izaac Walton first ripened into friendship.

There is hardly a book which to-day fetches more money at a sale or in a bookseller's catalogue-if haply it is still to be found

there—than an original edition of Walton's works. Years have, perhaps, given a mellowness and additional charm to the Compleat Angler; but the motive of its interest and delights is implanted deep in an Englishman's nature. The excitement of sport, spent amid the incomparable charms of English scenery and English sunshine is as delicious to-day as in the days of Merry England. Richard Jefferies had just the same love of sport, and sport enjoyed in the open air, as a medium for the study of nature and natural life as had Izaac Walton. Can anything be more delightful than his humorous sketches of, and initiation into, the craft and mysteries of poaching? In the Amateur Poacher he tells us that game is started more by scent than by sight, and mentions how the breath and odour of sheep or cows have enabled him to approach rabbits or pheasants feeding. Again, if we turn to a delightful book—one of his later ones, called Red Deer, which is, perhaps, not so well known as The Gamekeeper at Home, or Wild Life in a Southern County he gives us a most picturesque and truthful description of the wild sport of stag-hunting amid those glorious wildernesses of oak-coppice and heather which compose Red Deer Land.

Nor has Richard Jefferies failed to realise the charm of character which belongs to those who live in remote parts of the country. "Men," he says, "are not so sharply defined in isolation as in localities nearer civilization: they do not stand aloof in villaseclusion close by, and yet divided for a lifetime. Here, they acknowledge each other's existence; they approach and lend a helping hand in stress of work. The common bond of sport has much to do in preserving this spirit. Everyone takes the deepest interest in the deer, and in sport generally; it is a topic certain to come up, and thus a community of feeling causes a pleasantness of manner. With the red deer of the old world time of England, survives courtesy and hospitality and the old world friendliness."

There is in Richard Jefferies as there is in Izaac Walton a spirit of warm and affectionate good-fellowship. Nature and life are not to him a scientific study whereof to evolve systems or creeds. "I will not," says Richard Jefferies, "permit myself to be taken captive by observing physical phenomena, as many evidently are. The intense concentration of the mind on mechanical effects appears often to render it incapable of perceiving anything that is not mechanical, or of supposing that action can only occur in set ways. I do not think that because crystals are precipitated with fixed angles, therefore the whole universe is necessarily mechanical. I think there are things exempt from mechanical rules. The restriction of thought to purely mechanical grooves blocks progress in the same way as the restrictions of medieval superstition. Let the mind think, dream, imagine, let it have perfect freedom. To shut out the soul is to put us back more than twelve thousand

years." I do not know whether he was an accomplished sportsman in practice, but he would have spmpathized with Sir Henry Wotton, who, Izaac Walton tells us, never forgot his pleasure in angling, which he would call "his idle time, not idly spent." To Jefferies the study of human nature was an innate and passionate pleasure, vivid and keen to every sense he possessed. It is curious to note also how the activity of this natural sense excites the larger feelings of human kindness, and seems, as it were, to take the place of that mental activity which finds its vent in many minds in controversies concerning our place in the world which is beyond the senses. As a rule, the students of natureIzaac Walton, Evelyn, of later times Frank Buckland-seem to have relished life exceedingly. Evelyn was one of the first to flavour English society and English country life with a taste for woods and gardens. Custom and superstition have, alas! in his case neglected the expressed wishes of a man whose heart and life were in the temples not made by human hands, for in the Fourth Book of his Sylva Evelyn discourses on the sacredness of standing groves, and expresses the opinion that, as our Saviour's sepulchre. was in a garden, so tombs in fields, mountains, highways, and gardens are preferable to the proudest mausoleums; and he adds: "The late elegant and accomplished Sir W. Temple, though he laid not his whole body in his garden, deposited the better part of it his heart, there; and if my executors will gratify me in what I have desired, I wish my corpse may be interred as I have bespoken them, not at all out of singularity, but for other reasons not here necessary to trouble the reader with, what I have said in general being sufficient. However, let them order it as they think fit, so it be not in the church or chancel."

The passionate love of nature and of sunshine which belonged to the man, and which was reflected in the brightness and vivacity of his disposition, seemed to shrink from circumscribing or localising the temple of religion. To him-as to Sir Henry Wotton, who, we are told by Izaac Walton, while a great lover and bountiful entertainer of his neighbours, was a great enemy to wrangling disputes of religion—there breathed a spirit of religion and a sense of devotion in all those dreams of loveliness which nature is ever affording in the sunrise over down or coppice, or in the twilight of dim and glittering avenues.

Happy art thou whom God does bless
With the full choice of thine own happiness,
And happier yet because thou 'rt blest
With prudence how to choose the best;

In books and gardens thou hast plac'd aright

Things which thou well dost understand,
And both dost make with thy laborious hand
Thy noble innocent delight.

Just as Evelyn first taught our countrymen how to plant, and enriched our orchards and our gardens, so has Richard Jefferies first brought home to us-and to many of limited means this is a great practical boon-the pleasures and delights of the home and southern counties, which cluster around the metropolis.

There are many, alas! the children of Gibeon, on whose faded and weary faces there has never played the breath or sunshine of the country; but among this class of the very poor in London who are being strangled out of a livelihood by the demon of cheap competition, in the shape of foreign pauper immigration, cheap labour, and foreign manufactures-many now enjoy visions of country life. By the help of Mrs. Jewne's funds and other agencies many London children are being boarded out in country cottages to taste of country air and country life. But town nurselings pitched into the country for a few weeks' health cannot acquire the country knowledge of which Mr. Jefferies writes, and which, like much of the old folk-lore, seems to linger among the old men who still crawl among us.

Many of my friends will remember the raciness of some speech of an illiterate Hodge, stuffed by experience with the knowledge of country matters rather than with the learning of the modern board-school, at some village meeting in a county contest, when he has at last been got to deliver his views. In the same sense what can be more picturesque or graphic than the old local words.

In this village the word twilight is almost unknown. It is the "dimmets" that describes the evening hour. Amid the decay of this old world language and knowledge the attention of statesmen has been called to the gradual depletion, not only in the form but in the numbers and material of village life. Year by year we notice the steady and growing influx of the smartest lads into the large towns. In one sense this is the salvation of the physical type of the Londoner, but on the other hand it increases the congestion and intensifies the competition there, while it denudes the country side, not only of labour, but of the best and most vigorous types of village society. Of the villagers of to-day it cannot be said that

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray.

Since the days of the Elegy, country life has in many senses been raised and purified. The labouring poor live in better cottages; are better fed. They are more independent themselves, and education will enable their children to be even more so; but their lot and position, although it has been carved into greater consonance with modern ideas, is not one of contentment. To-day there exists a sort of superstition that all that glitters is gold, and that in the land of gin-shops, and crowded thoroughfares, employment and

fortune is to be found. None except the many failures know the loneliness of London. I need not dwell upon how sad and bitter is the disappointment, and how unsatisfactory the career of many of these trustful and simple-minded country emigrants.

Some gentlemen are interesting themselves about the creation of village communities, but the commercial life as we find it to-day in Switzerland would, I believe, be unsuited to the social character of English country life; nor do I anticipate that under our present fiscal arrangements much success would accrue from the revival of village industries.

It is in the agricultural parts of England, remote from coal and from large towns, to the prosperity of the farmer, that the labourer must look for employment. He possesses in the Labourer's Union a perfectly legitimate and valuable means for protecting the value of his labour. It is not so much the price of wagesalthough that is bound to fall if the present agricultural depression continues-as the want of employment that is and will continuously increase, to drive the agricultural poor away from their homes to drift hopelessly and helplessly over the face of the country. And, alas! an element of despair enters into this matter. No answer has as yet been vouchsafed to show us how this deplorable tendency of the country population to augment the congestion in the towns will not proportionately increase as foreign importation continues to depreciate the value of cereal crops in England, and to necessitate farms becoming derelict, or their conversion from arable into pasture, which, whatever there may be in the argument of certain kinds of land being more naturally suited for cereals than grass, means a certain saving in the labour and the tradesmen's bills.

To turn to a very different but more satisfactory side of the general question. We have evidence on all sides of a healthy and increasing appreciation of the aesthetic side of natural scenery. The appraised commercial value of aesthetics would in itself furnish material for an article. It would be most interesting to note how, while the values of purely commercial properties have deteriorated during the last few years, while the landowners and manufacturers have been out at elbow, amid falling prices in land and houses, fancy prices can still be got for a fine print or picture, or, in the case of real property, for an old house, or for a genuine untouched old bit of woodland and chase as a site for the house of some Midas.

This sense, expressed in the desire for his daughter to marry an English deer park, reaches the soul of the most unimaginative of American millionaires. No one cares for the dull acres with the improved farm buildings, and the only temptation to connect capital with the land, and that still remains to the acquisition

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