A Centenary This year is the centenary of Richard Jefferies
; and though opinions differ abruptly on his merit as a writer there is no doubt that he started a school of thought almost in the Wordsworth manner. By way of celebration the Westaway organisation is reissuing Amaryllis at the Fair. Even those hard-bitten critcs who dismiss The Story of My Heart as "mystic moonshine," and those formalists who insist on a novel having a plot, must surely acknowledge the merits of Amaryllis. The story occupies only five days—how is that for obedience to Aristotle's unities?—and gives us as good a picture of the Victorian farmer and labourer as, say, Mr. Street (also of Wiltshire) in Farmers' Glory ; and the fictional narrative has a host of virtues that escape the straight autobiography. They are virtues, too, that escape most of the rustics of Thomas Hardy. The Wiltshire folk are certainly truer to life than the Dorset, however superior the genius of Hardy to Jefferies! I would put farmer Iden in the same company as Gabriel Oak ; and even Oak would have hardly consented to a mutual relation with Iden's Coombe Oak home.
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