The Wiltshire lad
DAVID WILLIAMS
The Story of My Heart Richard Jefferies with an introduction by Elizabeth Jennings (Mac- millan 25s) Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of thirty-nine. And he'd been a sick man for many years before that. The Story of My Heart was first published in 1883. The hand of death lies on it just as inescapably as it lies on Orwell's 1984. Before anything else, the book is an anguished cry coming from a man passionately in love with life yet knowing surely that death is close and edging up on him. He bellows defiantly at the impossibility of it; he futilely drags out barriers to lay across the road and hamper its onward march towards him:
. . death is not inevitable to the ideal man. He is shaped for a species of physical immor- tality. . . . The truth is we die through our ancestors;- we are murdered by our ancestors. . . . This day those that die do not die in the sense of old age, they are slain. . . .' It isn't at all well put, of course; it's rough and very approximate ('those that die do not die in the sense of old age'), but the passion and the despair still throb in those words three quarters of a century after death pressed down its broad uncompassionate thumb and squashed the poor young chap.
Are Jefferies's passionate love of life and his loud boos at the ogre of extinction enough to keep this last book of his alive? Elizabeth Jennings, who admires The Story of My Heart
and here writes eloquently of itad It has, she thinks, 'an imryeffect. Reading it is rather likt
the sea or climbing a high moun . is a book which both excites the mind and makes the body tingle.'
I remain doubtful about Jefferies's ability to excite the mind. In The Story of My Heart he was breaking new ground. The close, absorbed particulariser of country sounds, smells and shapes which had been his character in the earlier books and articles isn't exactly sloughed off here—the lark's song is still for him a waterfall in the sky—but all the same he has changed, become more: portentous, a person devoting himself, however amateurishly, to the larger abstractions. He sets himself up as a sort of atheistical transcendentalist. No Omnipotence, no loving Father, he is con- vinced, is hanging about keeping a shepherd's eye on the human flock. Everything in this world happens by chance.
All the same, man, at any rate Jefferies's sort of man, is capable of quasi-religious experience: his awareness of union with the physical world—the sky, the sun, the grass he lies on, the wind that tousles his hair—is so intense as to constitute in 'itself a mystic communion, an ecstasy. Man, so Jefferies thinks or persuades himself, is destined to live eternally in order to enjoy this, and to enjoy all the physical pleasures of existence. For Jefferies, the ascetic's cell is a dead end; Carlyle's gospel of work is empty also. The true end of man is to be idle, to loaf around with all his five senses aquiver.
As a body of thought, in any respectable philosophical sense, none of this amounts to 4thing very much. Wordsworth's mind an4 imagination had already worked along similar lines and had ranged and probed far mole deeply; so somewhat later and with less illumination had Thoreau's. Jefferies simply hasn't the intellectual apparatus necessary for making anything four-square and convincing out of his schwarmerei.
But when Elizabeth Jennings says he makes her body tingle she is making a claim—an im- portant one, of course—which can be substan- tiated. Jefferies's close acquaintance with the minute and darting life of hedgerow and wood- land, his understanding and exact observation of the ways of animals and birds, the pure in- tensity of his enjoyment of the natural world and his mystical sense of kinship with it —these he memorably .conveys in his best writing.
It is always summer in his books: the eight months of tribulation the Englishman has to undergo in order to enjoy the golden days he mostly ignores. But not many writers have evoked the coloured counties of England, now being swiftly converted to a sad monochrome, more memorably than he does. His talent, un- schooled and rough at the edges, was worth reviving. It is certainly strongly in evidence in The Story of My Heart—even though to my mind it shines more strongly in shorter pieces such as The Pageant of Summer: • . rushes . . . 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. . . .' Summer again, you see. It intoxi- cated him. It is sad to think how few of them it was given him to enjoy.
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