The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies Part 14

"My wearied and exhausted system constantly craves rest. My brain is always asking for rest. I never sleep. I have not slept now for five years properly, always waking, with broken bits of sleep, and restlessness, and in the morning I get up more weary than I went to bed. Rest, that is what I need. You thought naturally that it was work I needed; but I have been at work, and next time I will tell you all of it. It is not work, it is _rest_ for the brain and the nervous system. I have always had a suspicion that it was the ceaseless work that caused me to go wrong at first.

"It has taken me a long time to write this letter; it will take you but a few minutes to read it. Had you not sent me to the sea in the spring I do not think that I should have been alive to write it."

Was there ever a more miserable tale of slow torture? Parts of it--the parts relating to his operations--I have omitted. Enough remains.

Picture to yourself this tall, gaunt man reduced to a skeleton, not able to use his pen for more than a few minutes at a time, his spine broken down, spitting blood, lying back on the sofa, his mind full of splendid thoughts which he _cannot_ put upon paper, dictating sometimes when he was strong enough, resolved on making money so as to save himself the "disgrace" of applying to the Literary Fund, full of pain by day and night, growing daily weaker, but never losing heart or hope--is there in the whole calamitous history of authors a picture more full of sadness and of pity than this?

He writes again on January 10, 1887. He is no worse. The letter is about money matters--that is to say, he has no money.

On February 2 he writes again. He has been able to dictate a little.

"I hope to be able to do more work after a time; when the weather becomes sufficiently warm for me to sit out of doors. With me the power to write is almost entirely dependent upon being out of doors. Confined indoors, I have nothing to write, and I cannot express my ideas if they do occur to me so boldly. You have no idea what a difference it makes. A little air and movement seem to brighten up the mind and give it play. I am in hope, too, that as the warmth comes on the sea will help me more. Up to the present the winter has gone well."

The last letter to Mr. Scott was written on March 23. He is pleased and surprised to hear that the fund raised for him amounts to so much.

Perhaps it will enable him to go abroad presently. Meantime, he has had a relapse--an attack of haemorrhage--"and then so feeble that I have not been able to dictate. This loss of time worries me more than I can tell you."

And so with thanks to this good friend, Richard Jefferies lays down his pen for the last time. The busy hand which has written so much will write no more. He can no longer dictate. His very feebleness will soon be past, and he will be at rest, whether in the unconscious clay-cold rest of the dark grave, or in that better life of the Fuller Soul of which he had so great and glorious a Vision--who knoweth?

You have read the life of Richard Jefferies. You have seen how the country lad, ill-educated, slenderly provided with books or friends, formed in early life a resolution to succeed in letters. The resolution was formed when as yet he had no knowledge or thought of style. You have read how he fought long years against ill-success, against the ridicule and coldness of his friends, but still kept up his courage; how he did succeed at length, yet not at all in the way that at first he hoped.

That way would have taken him along the paths trodden by those who write romances and stories to beguile their brothers and sisters, and to cheat them into forgetfulness of their disappointments and anxieties; that way, by which he wished to go, would have led him quickly to the ease of fortune which at all times he ardently desired. It is foolish, and worse than foolish, to pretend that any man--even the best of men, even the most philosophic of men--desires poverty, which is dependence; therefore one does not blame this man for desiring fortune. The way, however, by which he succeeded was a far higher and a n.o.bler way, though he understood not that at first.

You have seen, also, not only 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 for 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 in his early life has been concealed. You have read his very words, where they could be recovered. They are in no way remarkable words; they are generally, in fact, commonplace. 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 photographs. 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 farmer, 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 struggles we witness while he is seeking to find himself. Presently he speaks. HE HAS FOUND HIMSELF; he has obtained the prayer of his heart; he has been blessed with the FULLER SOUL.

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 inhabited 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 this imperfect and fragmentary life to a fuller, happier life beyond the grave. He had no need of priest; he wanted no other a.s.surance 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 G.o.d'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 Fuller Soul, died listening with faith and love to the words contained in the Old Book.

What follows is written by his friend, Mr. J.W. North, who was with him during the last days.

"It was in the early summer, two or three months before his death, that I saw Jefferies for the last time alive. He had then been living at Goring for some short time, and this was my first visit to him there. I was pleased to find that his house was far pleasanter than the dreary and bleak cottage which he had rented at Crowborough. It had a view of the sea, a warm southern exposure, and a good and interesting garden: in one corner a quaint little arbour, with a pole and vane, and near the centre a genuine old-fas.h.i.+oned draw-well. Poor fellow! Painfully, with short breathing, and supported on one side by Mrs. Jefferies and on the other by myself, he walked round this enclosure, noticing and drawing our attention to all kinds of queer little natural objects and facts. Between the well and the arbour was a heap of rough, loose stones, overgrown by various creeping flowers. This was the home of a common snake, discovered there by Harold, and poor Jefferies stood, supported by us, a yard or so away and peered into every little cranny and under every leaf with eyes well used to such a search until some tiny gleam, some minute cold glint of light, betrayed the snake. Weakness and pain seemed forgotten for the moment--alas! only for the moment. Uneasily he sat in the little arbour telling me how his disease seemed still to puzzle the doctors; how he felt well able in mind to work, plenty of mental energy, but so weak, _so fearfully weak_, that he could no longer write with his own hand; that his wife was patient and good to help him. He had n.o.body to come and talk with him of the world of literature and art. Why couldn't I come and settle by? There was plenty to paint. Though Goring itself was one of the ugliest places in the world, there was Arundel, and its n.o.ble park, and river, and castle close by. I must go and see it the very next day, and see whether I could not work there, and come back every day and cheer him. I was the best doctor, after all.

"Poor fellow! I did not then know or believe that he was so utterly without sympathetic society except his devoted wife. It was so. I am one of the dullest companions in the world; but I had sympathy with his work, and knowledge, too, of his subjects. Well, nothing would do but that I must go to Arundel the next day, and Mrs.

Jefferies must show me the town. 'He would do well enough for one day. A good neighbour would come in, and with little Phyllis and the maid he would be safe.'

"Therefore we went to Arundel (a short journey by train), and on coming back found him standing against the door-post to welcome us.

"I have seldom been more touched than by my experience of that evening, finding, amongst other things, that he had partly planned and insisted on this Arundel trip to get us away so that he might, unrebuked, spend some of his latest hard earnings in a pint of 'Perrier Jouet' for my supper.

"Do you know Goring churchyard? It is one of those dreary, over-crowded, dark spots where the once-gravelled paths are green with slimy moss, and it was a horror to poor Jefferies. More than once he repeated the hope that he might not be laid there, and he chose the place where his widow at last left him--amongst the brighter gra.s.s and flowers at Broadwater.

"He died at Goring at half-past two on Sunday morning, August 14, 1887. His soul was released from a body wasted to a skeleton by six long weary years of illness. For nearly two years he had been too weak to write, and all his delightful work, during that period, was written by his wife from his dictation. Who can picture the torture of these long years to him, denied as he was the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would be left friendless and penniless. Thus died a man whose name will be first, perhaps for ever, in his own special work."

'Monday, Aug. 15,

"... I went yesterday, expecting once more to speak with him. I found him lying _dead, twelve hours dead_. I saw him with Mrs.

Jefferies and their little Phyllis. A pitiful sight to see them kiss the poor cold face! G.o.d help them! All through his last days his wife was with him _day and night_; a young country girl, who behaved n.o.bly all through, was her only help.... His long, long illness of six years (four years before at Eltham he looked near death)--this long, wearisome time had almost persuaded many who knew him not intimately that his illness was partly imaginary. He proved it otherwise. A soldier who in health, high spirits, and excitement, rides to what appears certain death is called a hero: glory and honours are heaped upon him; but what is that compared with years of fighting without cessation, and the _absolute certainty_ of defeat always present to the mind? I asked Mrs.

Jefferies if he had made a will. She said: 'No; surely it would have been useless, we have nothing. A woman singly, strong as I am, could rough it; but if something can be done for the children--.'

Something shall be done. I had to call at my framemaker's to put off an appointment. I told him roughly what had happened to me yesterday. He had never heard of Jefferies, and knew nothing of his work; but he said, 'I shall be glad if anything can be done if you will put us down for two guineas.' All those who are country born and bred, and have a heart inside their body, have always recognised and admired poor Jefferies' writing. Shall I say what I think and _know_, that in all our literature until now he has never had a rival, and that it is most likely he will never be equalled?

In a hundred years he will be only more truly appreciated than at present. The number of men who combine the love and the knowledge of literary work is more limited, perhaps, in this age than in any previous one. Few people, again, of intelligence and refinement of heart and mind live completely in the country, and much, very much of his work, will be always unintelligible to those who cannot exist in a country-house unless it is full of frequently-changing guests. I have been trying by a different art for thirty years--equal to almost the whole of his life on earth--to convey an idea to others of some such subjects, and I feel with shame that in the work of half a year I do not get so near the heart and truth of Nature as he in one paragraph. With strict charge that it should not leave my hands, Mrs. Jefferies lent me the proof of an article which appeared in _Longman's Magazine_ in spring, 1886. It was the very last copy he wrote with his own hand. Since then his wife wrote from his dictation. Read this quotation from it, which touched me greatly yesterday:

"'I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me; how they manage, bird and flower, without ME, to keep the calendar for them.

For I noted it so carefully and lovingly day by day.'

"And this:

"'They go on without me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet--flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more than the least of the empty sh.e.l.ls that strew the sward of the hill.'

"One thing I saw in one of his last note-books: 'Three great giants are against me--disease, despair, and poverty.'

"One thing more. His wife said that their time had been for long spent in prayer together and reading St. Luke.

"Almost his last intelligible words were, 'Yes, yes; that is so.

Help, Lord, for Jesus' sake. Darling, good-bye. G.o.d bless you and the children, and save you all from such great pain.'

"He was buried at Broadwater, by Worthing, Suss.e.x.

"In the gentlest, sweet, soft, sunny rain he was borne along the path to his grave in the gra.s.s, and when the last part of the service for the dead had been read, well and solemnly, and we turned away leaving him for ever on earth, the large tears from heaven fell thick and fast, and over and over again came to me the saying, 'Happy are the dead that the rain rains on.' The modest home-made wreath of wild wood-clematis and myrtle my wife had sent pleased me by happy symbolism--for as the myrtle is, so will his memory be, 'for ever green.'

"Mourn, little harebells, o'er the lea; Ye stately foxgloves fair to see; Ye woodbines hanging bonnilie In scented bowers; Ye roses on your th.o.r.n.y tree, The first o' flowers.

"Mourn, Spring, thou darling of the year; Ilk cowslip-cup shall kep a tear; Thou Summer, while each corny spear Shoots up its head, Thy gay, green, flowery tresses shear For him that's dead."

"J.W.N."

APPENDIX I.

LIST OF JEFFERIES' WORKS.

(_The Dates of the First Editions only are given._)

REPORTING, EDITING AND AUTHORs.h.i.+P. John Snow and Co., Ivy Lane; Alfred Bull, Victoria Street, Swindon, 1873. Handbook.

A MEMOIR OF THE G.o.dDARDS OF NORTH WILTS. Published by the author, Coate, Swindon, 1873.

JACK BRa.s.s, EMPEROR OF ENGLAND. T. Pett.i.t, and Co., 23, Frith Street, Soho, 1873. Pamphlet.

THE SCARLET SHAWL. Tinsley Bros., 1874. 1 vol. novel.