84 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



In 1875 ' Women in the Field ' appeared in the Graphic, 

 ' Village Organization ' in the New Quarterly, ' The Cost 

 of Agricultural Labour ' in the Standard ; in 1876 ' The 

 Power of the Farmers ' in the Fortnightly ; in 1877 

 ' Unequal Agriculture ' in Fraser's, ' The Future of 

 County Society ' in the New Quarterly. In 1878 he 

 planned books that were never printed — ' The Prole- 

 tariate, the Power of the Future,' and ' A History of the 

 English Squire ' ; and published ' A Great Agricultural 

 Problem ' in Fraser's. 



Some of these articles are known to the public through 

 ' Toilers of the Field,' a posthumous book in which they 

 were reprinted ; others were republished from the Stan ard 

 in 1880, as ' Hodge and His Masters.' In the main, though 

 some show a promise of different things, they belong to the 

 same order as the letters of 1872, and to the history of 

 agriculture and agricultural criticism rather than to the 

 history of literature. As the knowledge of these matters 

 came to Jefferies largely through his business as a provincial 

 journalist, so, as it happens, it is seldom or never brought 

 into such contact with his whole character and thought 

 that it reflects the man. Other writers have exceeded 

 him in minuteness and in breadth of view ; Cobbett is 

 better to read. The contemporary service rendered by 

 Jefferies' lucidity, honesty, and force in detail and 

 generalization can only be fairly estimated by a specialist. 

 But this work hardly falls to be considered here, because 

 it is not creative, its utmost vividness being well within 

 the compass of the journalist as such, and outside that 

 of the artist ; and because its weight of opinion, though 

 respectable, neither made any serious and lasting im- 

 pression on the age, nor deserved to do so, and was such 

 that its power is now practically spent. Some of the 

 ideas set forth may, however, be mentioned here, as 

 helping to give a view of Jefferies' intelligence, pure and 

 simple, while he was a young man, applying itself to 

 contemporary things. 



In the articles published in 1874, '^^^ now grouped as 



