* AFTER LONDON ' 261 



voyage, and especially the landing among the shepherds ; 

 it has the charm of the serene and the remote ; it is a 

 pastoral fluting with a grave undertone. Of the incidents, 

 the journey through the forest, with the dread of Bush- 

 men, is perfectly reahzed. It is pastoral, but it is the 

 unforced, half-allegorical significance in the adventures of 

 this new and sensitive mind in a strange world that holds 

 the book together. It must have been a curious joy to 

 Jefferies to set himself afloat in the canoe on that crystal 

 water, bpld, yet self-torturing, soaring, independent, yet 

 crude and dogmatic ; to plunge at last into the ancient 

 wood and gain Aurora or perish. But it is also a bitter 

 book. The Fate of his other books is terribly exalted to 

 permit so mean a world, full of corruption, slavery, sus- 

 picion, uncertainty, instead of a hearty barbarism, after 

 the troublesome destruction of a whole civilization ; and it 

 is excusable to wonder that the relapse should have been 

 to a state so far below what not he alone dreamed of as 

 the lot of the man in the tumulus on the Downs. That it 

 is not a Utopia is redeemed by the happy thought that 

 just as Coate Reservoir was made to cover the marshy 

 fields below Burderop in order that the httle Richard 

 Jefferies might sail and fish there, so the civilization of 

 England has been buried under an inland sea, that Felix 

 may sail on it alone and find adventures. Having created 

 a new world, Jefferies seems to have been so smitten with 

 the sight of wood and water that he himself ran down to it 

 and enjoyed and suffered there in earnest — laying great 

 schemes, making a ship, sailing her, exercising woodcraft, 

 killing gipsy after gipsy with his inevitable arrows, dream- 

 ing of a castle by the lake where he could take Aurora as 

 he dreamed of a hut on the island at Coate — and so doing 

 found it not different from the old world. It is a piece of 

 delightful self-indulgence that makes him describe the 

 playing of the ' Antigone,' chosen by Aurora, another of 

 his admirable women, fair, noble, sweet, but most shadowy 

 of them all. ' " Antigone " was her favourite, and she 

 wished Felix to see it. In some indefinable manner the 



