i5o THE EULOGY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES. 



half- formed characters, clouds of bewildering 

 colours, and imagines that he has fixed these 

 floating splendours in immortal verse. When 

 lie has forgotten what was in his mind while 

 he was writing that verse, he will be able to 

 understand how feeble are his rhymes, but not 

 till then. I offer this as some explanation of 

 these early novels. 



Consider, again. He never was a novelist; 

 he never could be one. To begin with, he 

 knew nothing cf society, nothing of men and 

 women, except the people of a small country 

 town. There are, truly, materials for dramatic 

 fiction in plenty upon a farm and in a village; 

 but Jefferies was not the man to perceive 

 them and to use them. His strength lay 

 elsewhere, and as yet he had not found his 

 strength. 



Another reason why he could never be a 

 novelist was that he wholly lacked the dramatic 

 faculty. He could draw splendid landscapes, 

 but he could not connect them together by the 

 thread of human interest. Nature in his books 

 is always first, and humanity always second. 

 Two figures are in the foreground, but one 



