28o THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



chatterers suddenly still ; and as he groans, Amaryllis 

 thinks him more monstrous than ever, remembering 

 the crack in her mother's boot. As a great treat he 

 takes her over the Pamments' manor-house, but, sick of 

 him and of the young Pamment's eye for her, she breaks 

 away and runs home, and the quarrel is reinforced by a 

 letter about the neglect of her education. Everything 

 in the book is as natural as that. It is that plain, coarse, 

 bitter, occasionally merry life, with no developing story 

 to lure us on, stated with mordant ease, which is of all 

 things the most rarely achieved. The labourers and Luce, 

 the maid, work and eat and drink ; there is no mystery ; 

 no one loves above him in rank ; but they appear and 

 reappear with a truth which hardly any English writer 

 has given to agricultural labourers. Jefferies does not 

 go far with them ; he has no occasion ; they are only 

 clattering about the yard : but his handling is absolutely 

 sympathetic and understanding. Mr. Hardy is far more 

 dramatic, far more psychological, and also far cleverer in 

 effects, but he is seldom so right. Barnes has the same 

 homeliness and close observation, but with an idyllic 

 colouring or suppression. 



Jefferies' friendly intimacy with his characters is 

 nowhere so hearty as with Alere Flamma. He is in 

 many ways different from his creator or reviver, but it 

 gave Jefferies great pleasure to think about him. He 

 is far from the ideal man such as Jefferies might have 

 created at the time of ' The Story of My Heart,' but in 

 the real world of the remaining actual years Alere was 

 after his own heart. Jefferies enters so much into the 

 spirit of his devil-may-care generosity, tenderness, inde- 

 pendence and mirth that he does not trouble to put 

 speeches into Alere's mouth, and in places the two are 

 indivisible. The Flamma family, says Jefferies, was 

 mercurial, revolutionary, hot republican, a ' nervous, 

 excitable, passionate, fidgety, tipsy, idle, good-for- 

 nothing lot . . . almost all flecked with talent like white 

 foam on a black horse, a spot or two of genius, and the 



