Part 9

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 and the 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.

V

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 deft and 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_).

Or this:--

"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_).

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 in _The 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 could not. 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 in _The 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 the largeness 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; while throughout the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte 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 from _The 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 scenery of 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."

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 rests _as_ an 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.

VI

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 Hyde_ is a morality in disguise, and unblushingly so is _A 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. The _Lay Morals_ and the _Christmas Sermon_ may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in the _Fables_. 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.

VI RICHARD JEFFERIES

"Noises of river and of grove And moving things in field and stall And night birds' whistle shall be all Of the world's speech that we shall hear."

WILLIAM MORRIS.

"The poetry of earth is never dead."

KEATS.

I

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 deeply emotional 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 a _passion_ for humankind. There may be curiosity about certain types, as with Borrow and Stevenson; a delight in simple natures, as with Thoreau; a broad, genial comradeship with 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.

II

Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that strikes a reader is his power to convey sensuous 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 as _Wild Life in a Southern County_, or _The 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 to _Wild 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."

This, too, from _The 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 sweetness of 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 as _The 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 has [Picture: Richard Jefferies] realized, 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 Fields_ gives 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}