' THE STORY OF MY HEART ' 207 



as he usually did, cautious in proposing definite measures 

 of reform. But only the readers over head and ears in 

 love with things as they are could suppose that the co- 

 operation with posterity which he suggests is accessible 

 through party cries, or by a method open to our hap- 

 hazard modern tyrannies. In ' Nature and Eternity ' he 

 says : ' It is necessary that some far-seeing master-mind, 

 some giant intellect, should arise and sketch out in bold, 

 unmistakable outlines the grand and noble future which 

 the human race should labour for.'* This dream of a 

 master-mind and his regret over the death of Julius 

 CiEsar and Augustus recall the words : ' This man of the 

 future who will redeem us from the old ideal ... as also 

 from what had to grow out of this ideal ; . . . this bell of 

 noonday and the great decision which restores freedom 

 to the will, which restores to the earth its goal and to 

 man his hope ... he must come some day.'f But 

 Jefferies would not have made the mistake of so admiring 

 the unfettered great man's prowess as not to see the 

 beauty of the conquered and all the other forms of life 

 which the powerful would destroy if they might. He is 

 rather with Whitman, who eagerly embraces all life, not ' 

 because it is all equally good, but because we may spoil 

 all if we hastily condemn or destroy what has in it the 

 goodness of fresh life ; only the slothful and the imitative 

 are bad. To the end he is divinely discontented with this 

 goodly world, and inexpressibly sad it is to see one come 

 from such long draughts of beauty sorrowfully away ; yet 

 is it wholly a joyous book save to one who knows not how 

 to live. 



When in his heat Jefferies desires that his soul might be 

 ' more than the cosmos of life,' he must either be read in 

 heat or condemned ; only in the almost lyric sweep of the 

 whole is it passed. Yet such passages, weak in them- 

 selves, do but strengthen the force of the whole by their 

 testimony for the writer's honesty. A clever man would 

 have erased them ; but, then, a clever man would have 



* Longman's Magazine, 1895. f Nietzsche. 



