Richard Jefferies,
son of a small farmer, was born at Coate Farm, in Wiltshire, on
November 6, 1848. He remained in the district for the first thirty
years of his life, studying, writing, working on provincial
newspapers. His first books were novels, but they had no success.
It was not until he had moved to London, in 1877, after a
successful contribution to The Times, that he turned to the
interpretation of country life as a proper theme for his
work.
He never returned to
Wiltshire, but the best of his books were all based on the exact
and detailed knowledge of country life which he had gained there in
his early years. His first success was The Gamekeeper at
Home, which was published in 1878. He had then only nine years
to live; yet he contrived in that short time (and despite continual
illness) to write fifteen books to the permanent enrichment of the
literature of English country life. He died in 1887 and was buried
in Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing. Omitting the early novels, some
pamphlets and books of local history, and certain unpublished MSS.,
the following is a list of Jefferies' most important
works:
The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878;
Wild Life in a Southern County: The Amateur
Poacher: Greene Feme Farm, 1879;
Hodge and his Masters: Round about a Great
Estate,1880;
Wood Magic, 1881;
Bevis, 1882;
Nature near London: The Story of My
Heart,1883;
Red Deer: The Life of the Fields:
The Dewy Morn, 1884;
After London or Wild England: The Open
Air,1885;
Amaryllis at the Fair, 1886;
Field and Hedgerow, 1889;
The Toilers of the Field, 1892.
Jefferies is one of
several British naturalists whose contribution has been literary
rather than of original research. Their influence has been great on
the aesthetic and ethical attitude of people towards wild life.
Richard Jefferies had a remarkable power of vividly setting down
what his eyes saw. His was no great mind, but one unusually
receptive of the natural scene. Born a farmer's son he began
valuing wildlife through the barrel of a gun, which he ultimately
lays it down for the pen. The Gamekeeper at Home,1878,
faithfully records this period of the gun when, intensely enjoying
the wholeness of nature, he was indifferent to the creatures he
shot. The Amateur Poacher, 1879, holds this passage,
portraying the change which worked within him:
"My finger felt the trigger, and the least
increase of pressure would have been fatal; but in the act I
hesitated, dropped the barrel and watched the beautiful
bird.
"That watching so often stayed the shot that
at last it grew to be a habit; the mere simple pleasure of seeing
birds and animals when they were quite unconscious that they were
being observed being too great to be spoiled by the
discharge."
The writings of the
last years of Jefferies' short life show the length of his
spiritual journey from the hunter to the mystically-minded
interpreter of nature.
The Open
Airhas always been one of the most popular of the works of
Richard Jefferies. "Nowhere else," says Mr. C. Henry Warren, "can
you renew in quite the same degree a near, almost personal contact
with a man whom to know is emphatically to love." In it his gifts
are displayed in their fullest maturity–it was published in
1885, just before the onset of his last illness. Its contents range
from those scrupulous observations of nature on which his
reputation has chiefly rested, to brilliant if sometimes uneven
reporting of the scene and social life of the country round London
and the South Coast watering places, and those realistic studies of
the English countryman of which Warren says, "I believe the time is
coming when Jefferies, the interpreter of the countryman, will even
be preferred to Jefferies, the interpreter of the
countryside".
The following
extract was taken at random.
How fond Nature is of spot-markings!–the
wings of butterflies, the feathers of birds, the surface of eggs,
the leaves and petals of plants are constantly spotted; so, too,
fish–as trout. From the wing of the butterfly I looked
involuntarily at the foxglove I had just gathered; inside, the
bells were thickly spotted–dots and dustings that might have
been transferred to a butterfly's wing. The spotted meadow-orchis ;
the brown dots on the cowslips; brown, black, greenish, reddish
dots and spots and dustings on the eggs of the finches, the
whitethroats, and so many others–some of the spots seem as if
they had been splashed on and had run into short streaks, some
mottled, some gathered together at the end; all spots, dots,
dustings of minute specks, mottlings, and irregular markings. The
histories, the stories, the library of knowledge contained in those
signs! It was thought a wonderful thing when at last the strange
inscriptions of Assyria were read, made of nail- headed characters
whose sound was lost; it was thought a triumph when the yet older
hieroglyphics of Egypt were compelled to give up their messages,
and the world hoped that we should know the secrets of life. That
hope was disappointed; there was nothing in the records but
superstition and useless ritual.
But here we go back to the beginning; the
antiquity of Egypt is nothing to the age of these signs–they
date from unfathomable time. In them the sun has written his
commands, and the wind inscribed deep thought. They were before
superstition began; they were composed in the old, old world, when
the Immortals walked on earth. They have been handed down thousands
upon thousands of years to tell us that to-day we are still in the
presence of the heavenly visitants, if only we will give up the
soul to these pure influences. The language in which they are
written has no alphabet, and cannot be reduced to order. It can
only be understood by the heart and spirit. Look down into this
foxglove bell and you will know that; look long and lovingly at
this blue butterfly's underwing, and a feeling will rise to your
consciousness.
