The Vagabond in Literature Part 12

He interests us both as an artist and as a thinker. It will be useful, therefore, to keep these points of view as separate as possible in studying his writings.

II

Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that strikes a reader is his power to convey sensuous impressions. He loved the Earth, not as some have done with the eye or ear only, but with every nerve of his body. His scenic pictures are more glowing, more ardent than those of Th.o.r.eau. There was more of the poet, less of the naturalist in Jefferies. Perhaps it would have been juster to call Th.o.r.eau a poetic naturalist, and reserved the term poet-naturalist for Jefferies. Be that as it may, no one can read Jefferies-especially such books as _Wild Life in a Southern County_, or _The Life of the Fields_, without realizing the keen sensibility of the man to the sensuous impressions of Nature.

Again and again in reading Jefferies one is reminded of the poet Keats.

There is the same physical frailty of const.i.tution and the same rare susceptibility to every manifestation of beauty. There is, moreover, the same intellectual devotion to beauty which made Keats declare Truth and Beauty to be one. And the likeness goes further still.

The reader who troubles to compare the sensuous imagery of the three great Nature poets-Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats, will realize an individual difference in apprehending the beauties of the natural world.

Wordsworth wors.h.i.+ps with his ear, Sh.e.l.ley with his eye, Keats with his sense of touch. Sound, colour, feeling-these things inform the poetry of these great poets, and give them their special individual charm.

Now, in Jefferies it is not so much the colour of life, or the sweet harmonies of the Earth, that he celebrates, though of course these things find a place in his prose songs. It is the "glory of the sum of things"

that diffuses itself and is felt by every nerve in his body.

Take, for instance, the opening to _Wild Life in a Southern County_:-

"The inner slope of the green fosse is inclined at an angle pleasant to recline on, with the head just below the edge, in the summer suns.h.i.+ne. A faint sound as of a sea heard in a dream-a sibilant "sish-sish"-pa.s.ses along outside, dying away and coming again as a fresh wave of the wind rushes through the bennets and the dry gra.s.s.

There is the happy hum of bees-who love the hills-as they speed by laden with their golden harvest, a drowsy warmth, and the delicious odour of wild thyme. Behind, the fosse sinks and the rampart rises high and steep-two b.u.t.terflies are wheeling in uncertain flight over the summit. It is only necessary to raise the head a little way, and the cod breeze refreshes the cheek-cool at this height, while the plains beneath glow under the heat."

This, too, from _The Life of the Fields_:-

"Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch, told the hour of the year, as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the hour of the day. 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; rushes have a separate scent of green, so, too, have ferns very different to that of gra.s.s or leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems, enlarged a little in the middle like cla.s.sical columns, and heavy with their sap and freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes-the common rushes-were full of beautiful summer."

Jefferies' writings are studies in tactile sensation. This is what brings him into affinity with Keats, and this is what differentiates him from Th.o.r.eau, with whom he had much in common. Of both Jefferies and Th.o.r.eau it might be said what Emerson said of his friend, that they "saw as with a microscope, heard as with an ear-trumpet." As lovers of the open air and of the life of the open air, every sense was preternaturally quickened. But though both observed acutely, Jefferies alone felt acutely.

"To me," he says, "colour is a sort of food; every spot of colour is a drop of wine to the spirit."

It took many years for him to realize where exactly his strength as a writer lay. In early and later life he again and again essayed the novel form, but, superior as were his later fictions-_Amaryllis at the Fair_, for instance, to such crude stuff as _The Scarlet Shawl_-it is as a prose Nature poet that he will be remembered.

He knew and loved the Earth; the atmosphere of the country brought into play all the faculties of his nature. Lacking in social gifts, reserved and shy to an extreme, he neither knew much about men and women, nor cared to know much. With a few exceptions-for the most part studies of his own kith and kin-the personages of his stories are shadow people; less vital realities than the trees, the flowers, the birds, of whom he has to speak.

But where he writes of what he has felt, what he has [Picture: Richard Jefferies] realized, then, like every fine artist, he transmits his enthusiasm to others. Sometimes, maybe, he is so full of his subject, so engrossed with the wonders of the Earth, that the words come forth in a torrent, impetuous, overwhelming. He writes like a man beside himself with sheer joy. _The Life of the Fields_ gives more than physical pleasure, more than an imaginative delight, it is a religion-the old religion of Paganism. He has, as Sir Walter Besant truly said, "communed so much with Nature, that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. He lies upon the turf, and feels the embrace of the great round world." {147}

Even apart from fiction, his earlier work varied greatly in quality.

With the publication of _The Game-keeper at Home_, it was clear that a new force had entered English literature. A man of temperamental sympathies with men like Borrow and Th.o.r.eau, nevertheless with a power and individuality of his own. But if increasing years brought comparative recognition, they brought also fresh physical infirmities.

The last few years of his life were one prolonged agony, and yet his finest work was done in them, and that splendid prose-poem, "The Pageant of Summer," was dictated in the direst possible pain. As the physical frame grew weaker the pa.s.sion for the Earth grew in intensity; and in his writing there is all that desperate longing for the great healing forces of Nature, that ecstasy in the glorious freedom of the open air, characteristic of the sick man.

At its best Jefferies' style is rich in sensuous charm, and remarkable no less for its eloquence of thought than for its wealth of observation.

III

One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the mystical quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of Nature. The power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like Keats and Sh.e.l.ley could not always command it successfully-and perhaps Blake, Coleridge, and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the highest degree. It is comparatively an easy matter to deal with the mysticism of the night. The possibilities of darkness readily impress the imagination. But the mysticism of the sunlight-the mysticism not of strange shapes, but of familiar things of every day, this, though felt by many, is the most difficult thing in the world to suggest in words.

The "visions" of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics.

The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the same sense of physical detachment from the body.

In that fascinating volume of autobiography _The Story of my Heart_, Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is one:-

"I looked at the hills, at the dewy gra.s.s, and then up through the elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me-the house, the people, the sound-seemed to disappear and to leave me alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly.

My thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very short time, only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning.

I was exalted."

One is reminded of Tennyson's verses:-

"Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-

"Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no knowledge may declare." {149}

"Ah!" says the medical man, with a wise shake of the head, "this mental condition is a common enough phenomenon, though only on rare occasions does it express itself in literature. It is simple hysteria."

The transcendentalist who has regarded this state of mind as a spiritual revelation, and looked upon its possessor as one endowed with special powers of intuition, is indignant with this physiological explanation.

He is more indignant when the medical man proceeds to explain the ecstatic trances of saints, those whom one may call professional mystics.

"Brutal materialism," says the transcendentalist.

Now although hysteria is commonly regarded as a foolish exhibition of weakness on the part of some excitable men and women, there is absolutely no scientific reason why any stigma should attach to this phenomenon.

Nor is there any reason why the explanation should be considered as derogatory and necessarily connected with a materialistic view of the Universe.

For what is hysteria? It is an abnormal condition of the nervous system giving rise to certain physiological and psychical manifestations. With the physiological ones we are not concerned, but the psychical manifestation should be of the greatest interest to all students of literature who are also presumably students of life. The artistic temperament is always a.s.sociated with a measure of nervous instability.

And where there is nervous instability there will always be a tendency to hysteria. This tendency may be kept in check by other faculties. But it is latent-ready to manifest itself in certain conditions of health or under special stress of excitement. It does not follow that every hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in literature and philosophy.

This psychical condition is far commoner in the East than in the West.

Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga.

{151a} The pa.s.sive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours this ecstatic condition.

"The science of the Sufis," says a Persian philosopher of the eleventh century, {151b} "aims at detaching the heart from all that is not G.o.d, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing a.n.a.logous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature?-what one can comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the objects with one's hand."

It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual formulae. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the reference to "touch" in the quotation just made will remind the reader of the important part played by the tactile sense in Jefferies' aesthetic appreciations.

We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations involved in these "trance conditions." All that concerns us is the remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained psychical condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces beyond our immediate ken which compel recognition from certain imaginative minds, how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or, in other words, how far these visions are objective realities, how far subjective, are questions that he beyond the scope of the present paper.

One thing, however, is indisputable; they have exercised a great fascination over men of sensitive, nervous temperaments, and are often remarkable for the wider significance they have given to our ideals of beauty.

The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as "the fruit of a degenerate brain." Such a criticism is at one with the linking of genius with insanity-an argument already broached in the paper dealing with Hazlitt.

Professor William James-who certainly holds no brief for the mystic-makes the interesting suggestion that "these mystical flights are inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative to which we as yet know nothing." {153a}

"As a rule," he says elsewhere, "mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness.

They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized."

The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with the writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson's mysticism is more speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a greater share in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite apart from, perhaps even transcending, their literary interest is the psychological significance of stories like _Markheim_ and _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.

A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones, {153b} has said, when speaking of his "ecstasies": "His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the visions of Kubla Khan; he saw 'no damsel with a dulcimer,' but thrilled with yearning unspeakable for the 'fuller soul,' and felt in every trembling fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality."