FIRST NOVELS 105 



behind the tissues, can equal the hues that glow behind 

 the blue. , , .'* 



It must be put to the credit of the form of fiction that 

 Jcfferies here and in the other novels has a depth and 

 humanity in his feeling for Nature which are absent from 

 all his early country books like ' The Gamekeeper at 

 Home.' His attempts, however vain, to describe human 

 action and passion led him to search deeps of his own 

 nature that might otherwise have been unsounded ; and, 

 almost without value as a whole, his novels were thus 

 an e.xercise which he could ill have done without, and of 

 considerable use as autobiography. In * Greene Feme 

 Farm ' there are several things worth pausing over : the 

 Wiltshire dialogue always, and especially where the 

 mower talks of the old-fashioned scythes ' made of dree 

 sarts of wood '; the picture of Old Andrew Fisher in his 

 beehive chair, sitting there in the sun-heat of his ninetieth 

 summer — the hard old man who kept three old men at 

 work on the threshing-floor, ' not for charity, but because 

 he liked to listen to the knock-knock of the flails,' and 

 threw his blackthorn at the parson who wanted his grand- 

 daughter (' Drow this veller out ! Douse un in th' hog- 

 vault ! Thee nimity-pimity odd-me-dod ! I warn thee'd 

 like m}^ money ! Drot thee and thee wench !') ; Augus- 

 tus, the drunken bailiff's portrait, with his ' A man's 

 made just like a pig inside '; and the death-scene of 

 Andrew, where the gaunt, wrinkled, weary gleaners, going 

 homeward, curtsey with hateful hearts as they pass near 

 the chair where he sits cold and stiff. Jefferies' sad 

 humour comes out again in the walk through Kingsbury 

 (Swindon) back-streets : 



' Down in the back-streets they found that Melting-Pot, 

 the pewter tankard, in fuU operation. Men and women 

 were busy keeping it full, while their children, with naked 

 feet, played in the gutter among the refuse of the dust- 

 heap, decayed cabbage, mangy curs, and filth. The 

 ancient alchemists travailed to transmute the baser 



* Greene Feme Farm. 



