BOOKS.

RICHARD JEFFERIES.* To all who have embraced, or intend to embrace, the calling of literature, this touching memoir will appeal with painful interest. To find a parallel for the case of Richard Jefferies, of unrecognised genius battling with three great giants—to use his own words—disease, despair, and poverty, we must turn to the annals of music, and there in the life of Schubert we are confronted with the same piteous spectacle. The analogy is, indeed, striking. Both came of an honourable country stock, and were, in the main, self-taught. Vogrs happy description of Schubert's songs as utterances of musical clairvoyance is wonderfully applicable, with the necessary modifications, to the writings of Jefferies. The book of Nature lay open to him as the soul of music lay bare to Schubert. The only trouble with each was the mechanical process of putting down the thoughts which rushed into their minds. "To me," wrote Jefferies a couple of years before his death,—

" It seems as if I wrote nothing, for my mind teems with ideas, and my difficulty is to know what to do with them. I not only sketch out the general plan of a book almost instantaneously, but I can see every little detail of it from the first page to the last. The mere writing—the handwriting—is the only trouble ; it is very wearying. At this moment I have several volumes quite com- plete in my mind. Scarce a day goes by but I put down a fresh thought. I have twelve notebooks crammed full of ideas, plots, sketches of papers, and so on."

Besides this extraordinary mental activity, Jefferies had another quality in common with Schubert, an innate joyous- ness of heart which no suffering could entirely abate. Both suffered from terrible accesses of despondency, and the accents of gloom and despair are to be heard in the works of each. But at times their souls seemed to escape from the deadly grip of the three giants, and soar aloft into a region of divine beauty and untroubled calm. It was in such an Elysium that Schubert wrote the second movement of his " Unfinished " Symphony, and Jefferies his "Pageant of Summer." This marvellous paper, Mr. Besant truly observes,

4' reads as if it were the work of a man revelling in the warmth .of the quivering air ; of a man in perfect healtl and strength,

body and mind at ease, surrendered wholly to the influence of the flowers and the sunshine, at peace, save for the natural sadness of one who communes much with himself on change, decay, and death. And yet The Pageant of Summer' was written while he was in deadly pain and torture while in dire straits of poverty." To continue the parallel still further, both were diffuse writers, whose longer works would have gained from condensation, and both wasted a great deal of their splendid powers on impracticable projects,--Jefferies on novel-writing, and Schubert on the setting to music of absurd librettos. Even in the matter of religion there is a strong resemblance. In neither can we discover any traces of a formal or dogmatic creed. But Schubert's poems to the "Spirit of the World," and to the "Mighty Father "— whom he implores to pour upon him the everlasting beams of His love, and even though He kill him, to preserve him for a purer and more vigorous existence—are very closely allied to those aspirations after an increased fullness of soul which Jefferies recorded in "The Story of my Heart."

"For one who loved solitude and wanderings among the hills," as Mr. Besant remarks, "there could be hardly any part of England more delightful" than the country of the Downs in which Jefferies was born and bred :—

" On the slopes of these green hills he has measured the ram- parts of the ancient fortress : lying on the turf, he has watched the hawk in the air : among these fields he has sat for hours motionless and patient, until the creatures thought him a statue, and played their pranks before him without fear. In these hedges he has peered and searched and watched : in these woods and in these fields and on these hillsides, he has seen in a single evening's walk more things of wonder and beauty than one of us poor purblind city creatures can discern in the whole six weeks which we yearly give up to Nature and to fresh air."

As a boy, Jefferies was sensitive, impulsive, but extremely

reserved, not excelling in sports, but intrepid in the quest of adventure. He read everything he could lay his hands on, and soon began to write for the provincial newspapers. Above all, it was his ambition to be a novelist, and the greater part of his short life presents the sad spectacle of genius astray.

The Eldon of Richard Searles. By Walter Besant. London: Matto and Windua.

He kept himself alive by newspaper reporting, and devoted all his leisure to covering reams of paper with unreadable romances,—unreadable because he had no knowledge of that which he sought to portray. His ignorance of the world was simply pathetic. Well may his biographer speak of the pity and interest of which this recital is full. He wrote to Disraeli describing a work he had recently completed, and asking his opinion, and when the great man courteously acknowledged his letter, and expressed himself confident that the author's treat- ment of the subject would prove interesting, Jefferies was trans- ported to the seventh heaven of delight. "A recognition like this," he writes, "from so great an intellectual leader is a richer reward to one's self than the applause of hundreds, or than any money can possibly be. And it is a guarantee of success in a money sense: for what publisher would not grasp at a work com- mended by Disraeli? This is a day of triumph for me my success is assured." Again, when one of the best pub- lishing houses in London had promised to consider his new novel carefully, he writes,—" I cannot help thinking that their full consideration' is a very promising phrase." But his strokes of good fortune were not all of this shadowy kind. In 1872, when he was twenty-four, his letter on "The Wiltshire Labourer," in the Times, attracted general attention, and had he followed up this success, might have secured him permanent employment. But no ; he preferred to go on rolling the stone of Sisyphus for several years longer, publishing novels at his own expense, and "never getting any advantage or profit out of them except the pain of shattered hopes, the loss of money, and the most contemptuous notices in the reviews." There was never any one at hand to advise him. His reserve, his lack of friends, doubtless proved a terrible drawback, though even when he had realised in what direction his strength lay, he would never write to order, however con- genial the order might be. He had splendid chances, but he threw them away, "not deliberately, but from ignorance and want of aptitude in business." It was only gradually, and after much painful groping, that Jefferies made his escape out of the limbo of artificial romance into the fields and the open air. He wrote a paper on "The Future of Farming" for Fraser's Magazine in December, 1873, which was singled out in these columns as the best of all the papers for the month. He contributed other articles on labourers and tenants to Fraser and the New Quarterly, and mapped out a great work on the agricultural question, which he began but never finished. His paper on "Field-Faring Women," in the Graphic, Mr. Besant pronounces to be "the very first specimen of his later and better style," a judgment which the extracts he quotes fully bear out. He began to alternate the practical and the poetic, writing papers like those on "Village Churches" and "Marlborough Forest," between more solid articles for the Fortnightly and Mark Lane Express. Mr. Besant quotes freely from both the papers we have named, and hits the mark admirably when he says, ci propos of the latter :—" Even for those who have never wandered in this great and wonderful forest, the paper is wholly charming, while to those who know the place, it is full of memories and regrets that one has seen so little of all that this man saw."

Jefferies went on writing novels almost to the end; but his later efforts were wholly rural, whether we regard the dramatis person.x or their surroundings. In fact, as Mr. Besant says, "they are not novels at all, although he chooses to call them novels : they are a set of pictures, some of beauty and finish incomparable, strung together by some sort of thread of human interest which nobody cares to follow."

In a passage of rare beauty, Mr. Beaant thus sums up the story of Jefferies's life :— " You have seen that his early life was that of an

obscure reporter for a little country paper, but that his first ambition was altogether for the making of money, rather than the production of good work. The love of good work, as such, grew gradually in him. At first it is not apparent at all. At first we have nothing but a commonplace lad, poor, and therefore eager to make money, and fondly thinking that it can be made by writing

worthless and commonplace stories Nothing except a steady and consistent belief in his own future, the nature of which he does not even suspect, reveals the power latent in his mind. There is nothing at all in these early utterances to show the depths of poetry in his soul. Nay, I think there were none of these depths in him at first. So long as he worked among men, and contemplated their ways, he felt no touch of poetry, he saw no gleam of light. Mankind seemed to him sordid and creeping : either oppressor or oppressed. Away from men, upon the breezy down and among the woods, he is filled with

thoughts which, at first, vanish like the photographs of scenery upon the eye. Presently he finds out the way to fix those photo- graphs. Then he is transformed, but not suddenly : no, not suddenly. When he discovers the Gamekeeper at Home, he begins to be articulate; with every page that follows he becomes more articulate. At first he draws a faithful picture of the cottager, the fanner, the gamekeeper, the poacher; the pictures are set in appropriate scenery : by degrees the figures vanish and the setting remains. But it is no longer the same : it is now infused with the very soul of the painter. The woods speak to us, through him; the very flowers speak and touch our hearts through him. The last seven years of his life were full, indeed, of pain and bodily torture; but they were glorified and hallowed by the work which he was enabled to do. Nay, they even glorify and hallow all the life that went before. We no longer see the commonplace young country reporter who tries to write commonplace and impossible stories—we watch the future poet of the 'Pageant of Summer' whose early straggles we witness while he is seeking to find himself. Presently he speaks. Ha HAS FOUND HIMSELF; he has obtained the prayer of his heart; he has been blessed with the ruLLEB sour,. At the last, during the long communings of the night when he lay sleepless, happy to be free, if only for a few moments, from pain, the simple old faith came back to him. He had arrived long before, as we have seen, at the grand discovery : that the perfect soul wants the perfect body, and that the perfect body must be in- habited by the perfect soul. To this conclusion, you have seen, he was led by Nature herself. Now he beheld clearly—perhaps more clearly than ever—the way from the imperfect and frag- mentary life to a fuller, happier life beyond the grave. He had no need of priest ; he wanted no other assurance than the voice and words of Him who swept away all priests. The man who wrote the Story of my Heart;' the man who was filled to overflowing with the beauty and order of God's handiwork : the man who felt so deeply the shortness, and imperfections, and disappointments of life that he was fain to cry aloud that all happens by chance ; the man who had the vision of the Puller Soul, died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book."

We owe, many of us, a deep debt to the author of Dorothy Forster, as to one who has refreshed us in weariness, and whose kindly pen has caused the swift passage of many delightful hours. But we doubt if any of his novels will appeal to his readers with such force and charm as the pages, overflowing with love and admiration, in which he has told the life of Richard Jefferies, the great prose-poet of the Wiltshire downs.