loo THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



' Socrates and Plato, Leonidas and Caesar — all the 

 heroes — the gods, too, walked with naked feet or in 

 sandals. They knew nothing of Day and Martin. Their 

 feet were open, free, unrestrained. Look at the feet of 

 the statues — how beautiful ! But the feet in those boots 

 — " cabined, cribbed, confined," distorted, somehow 

 there is something about those boots at which my 

 mind revolts. They are the very symbols of our dirty 

 macadamized times.'* This pla3^fulness is characteristic 

 of the later Jefferies, and occasionally reached a con- 

 siderable ironic charm. 



Landseer's paintings, says one of his characters, ' were 

 anything but well painted. . . . but the idea carried 

 away the mind '; he speaks of the ' magic charm of the 

 marvellous Dore — instinct with Mind, with Idea, with 

 Life.'t 



Sculptors he calls ' prophets of the body, the apostles 

 of matter ; and their prophecies are perhaps even farther 

 off from fulfilment than those of the prophets of the 

 soul. . . . While we pursue the beautiful so long it is 

 impossible for us to commit sin. 'J 



Three chapters — those describing the life and labours 

 of the Abbe in the prison on the French island — in Dumas' 

 * Monte Christo ' ought, he says, to be printed ' at the end 

 of the Apocrypha.' 



It should also be noticed as another early instance of 

 Jefferies' interest in telepathy that when Heloise is burnt 

 at an hotel, her brother-in-law hears her scream across 

 the roar of traffic, though he did not know before that she 

 was in London. 



With all its faults, the book marks a great advance in 

 ideas upon ' The Scarlet Shawl.' 



In ' World's End,' a novel published in 1877, there is 

 again abundant evidence of Jefferies' character ; he is 

 evidently coming more and more to regard his own 

 thoughts and adventures as possible|material for|his books. 

 It opens with a passage in which Jefferies' uncertain 



* Kes/less Human Hearts, f Ibid. f Ibid. 



