6 November: Boreham on Richard Jefferies

A Prince of Naturalists
The birthday of Richard Jeffries, which we mark today, will appeal to lovers of the open air the wide world over. No man was ever more deeply enamoured of life than was Jefferies. He simply revelled in it. The advent of Spring was to him the year's high festival. With the most microscopic precision he joyously noted each successive item in the superb programme of the vernal season. He tells us the exact date on which we may expect the first buds on the blackthorn; he knows to a nicety when to look for the first swallows skimming over the mill dam; he can predict almost the hour at which the first butterfly will flutter across his garden, the first cuckoo be heard in the primrosed woods, the first nightingale call from the copse. But although he writes of the season with such punctilious and scientific accuracy, it is easy to see that it is not, strictly speaking, the season itself that interests him.

Jefferies loved the Spring, not so much for its own sake as for the sake of the life that the Spring so abundantly reveals. Life was his passion; it fascinated and hypnotised him. The lissom bound of the hare, the playful leap of the rabbit, the song that the thrush and the finch cannot help singing, the soft cooing of the dove in the hawthorn, the blackbird ruffling out her feathers on the rail—all this was the light of his eyes and the breath of his nostrils. He so luxuriated in every fresh vision of life, and so revolted from the chilly spectre of death that his finger often refused to press the trigger of his rifle. Many a time, he assures us, he raised his gun, hesitated, and then, lost in admiration of the beautiful creature before him, he would let the partridge scurry back into the fern, or allow the hare to bound off unharmed over the furrow.

Living Close To Nature's Heart
Even as a boy, Jefferies was different from other boys. He could see no sense in cricket. It kept you too long in one place. Fielding in the covers, he would allow the ball, hot from the bat, to go whizzing past his head to the boundary; and, on being asked why he made no attempt to catch it, would explain that he was at that moment studying the gyrations of a skylark or observing the antics of a squirrel in a neighbouring oak. He often had to confess, on reaching school, that he did not know his lessons. All unsuspected by his teachers, he was becoming deeply versed in a thousand things of which they themselves were sublimely ignorant. The gawky lad knew the habits and the ways of all the foxes, hares, stoats, moles, and hedgehogs in the neighbourhood. He knew exactly the direction in which, at certain times, the rooks and the wild geese would fly, and he boasted that, if he could not draw any of the maps in the school atlas, he could at least draw a map of the fields round Choate Farm, showing the routes and the resorts of all the birds and beasts that lived there.

He was the despair of his father, who pointed with disgust at "our Dick poking about in them there hedges," whilst the men of the district derided him as always "looking for summat," but never by any chance tackling any kind of work. Imagine the amazement of these censorious seniors of his when, at the age of 17, Jefferies was able to exchange, for coin of the realm, the notes that he made in the course of his rambles. It soon occurred to him that if his boyish crudities were worth a little money, the same sort of thing, expressed with artistry and polish, would be worth much more. He studied the classics to see how the great masters did their work, and, in the process acquired a sense of the music of language and the beauty of words. With unaffected simplicity and crystal clarity he began to set down in black and white the wonders that had captivated him. And so he penned those delightful causeries, since published in hundreds of thousands, all of them redolent of the fragrance of the English fields and vibrant with the song of the English birds.

Tracing The Stream To Its Source
At the age of 30, Jefferies experienced for the first time the thrill of real success. His essays, published in London, soon caught the popular fancy. They struck a new note. Just at first, men scarcely knew what to make of them. But they soon felt their charm; and then, for five years, an eager and appreciative public clamoured for more and yet more of his work. But at 35, he fell a victim to a pain that was, he says, like a rat gnawing at a beam or like the burning of corrosive sublimate. Even then, his insatiable craving for new revelations of life persisted. A few weeks before the end, his hungry eye came to rest upon a Bible on a shelf opposite his chair. It flashed upon him that the volume represented an aspect of life that he had never explored, a realm of which he had always been a trifle suspicious. He asked his wife to read it to him. She selected the third of the four gospels—the work that, written by a physician, tells with special care of all the wonders of healing wrought in those Galilean days. It was to Jefferies a vision of life triumphing over frailty, infirmity, disease, and even over death itself.

In those last days Jefferies became enamoured of the radiant Figure at the centre of the graceful story that his wife was so sympathetically reading to him. He recognised in Him the life that he so passionately loved, in its most attractive and most exalted form. It was like turning from the stream to the fountainhead. He expressed poignant and pathetic regret that, in his tireless quest of life, he had somehow overlooked this sublime source and spring. "These are true words and good ones," he murmured as his wife rendered the melodious cadences that have enchanted the ears of twenty centuries, "these are good words: I have been wrong in neglecting them!" He discovered that, although Nature had taught him much, she had failed to teach him the things that he most needed to know, and he revelled in this ampler vision of life that came to him at the last. He died at 37, his eyes resting sadly on a dozen notebooks crammed with ideas for the books that he had fondly dreamed of writing.

F W Boreham

Image: Richard Jefferies