52 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



concerning a squire's wife who advocates ' tea and toast as 

 a cure for all evils,' and so loses all her servants except 

 one, who can get at the brandy. It is jaunty and mock- 

 heroic, probably with local allusions. ' Traits of the 

 Olden Time,'* belonging to the same year, is sensible and 

 genuine, though sententious. It touches on rural sim- 

 plicity, ignorance, brutal hospitality, medicines, Anglo- 

 Saxon forms of speech. ' The conversation of the lower 

 class of agriculturists,' he says, ' sounds like a dialogue of 

 the Heptarchy.' But though he tells us that ' the milker 

 sings at his pail even when his breath is frozen upon his 

 chin,' he mentions but one song, and that ' The Leathern 

 Bottel.' All through the instances are too few and the 

 generalizations too facile. Had this article been singled 

 out and praised by someone of credit, the writer might 

 have developed more directly towards descriptions of the 

 country and country life. But insincerity is not dis- 

 ingenuousness, and that facile, expressionless fiction, 

 useless as it is to us, was, in part, an indulgence to his 

 not yet understood yearnings which they might otherwise 

 have lacked. It was good for him to consider the lan- 

 guage of emotion, even if he failed to utter his own ; just 

 as, later on, it was good for him to indulge in ' The Scarlet 

 Shawl,' because it satisfied and kept alive for the time 

 being the spiritual something in his nature as competent 

 articles on agriculture could not do. Even so may it be 

 when one who has fallen in love polishes his boots to a 

 particular brightness, though they never meet his mis- 

 tress's eye. It is quite possible that, had there been 

 no ' Henrique Beaumont ' and ' Who will Win ?' there 

 would have been no ' Dewy Morn,' no ' Amaryllis,' no 

 ' Story of My Heart.' Right through the early period 

 of Jefferies' life these two elements, the observing and 

 informing, and the emotional and spiritual, remained 

 side by side, usually distinct, but slowly gathering good- 

 ness from each other, until at last the boundary vanished 

 in perfectly aesthetic expression. His handwriting as a 



* North Wilts Herald. 



