288 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



not twisted inextricably into the strands of his nature ; 

 it was often invisible, and let us be thankful for it that 

 yet another man of genius has been denied this heaven- 

 descended monkey as a lifelong inseparable compajiion. 

 Yet humour he had, if humour can be intermittent. It 

 takes several forms. It perceives the minor inci insistencies 

 of life, and can become jocularity. The commonest form 

 is archness, a quiet dryness, with a twist in the phrasing 

 peculiar to him — something so personal as to suggest a 

 trick of speech or facial expression. Thus, he describes 

 the way in which the speU of the low publican draws* 

 ' logs of timber and faggots half across the parish, which 

 will pull pheasants off their perch, extract trout from the 

 deep, and stay the swift hare in midst of her career.' 

 And ' who,' he asks,t ' would suspect an oyster of deceit ?' 

 and tells of an old gentleman who insisted on having his 

 oysters opened, not at the shop, but at his door. * He 

 feared the craft and subtility of the wicked oyster.' So, 

 again, in the passage on the pewter tankard in ' Greene 

 Feme Farm.' Facetiousness is never far away, as in 

 ' Fish somehow slip through ordinary rules, being slimy 

 of surface.' It can descend to a mere one-man drollery, 

 or to an elephantine jeer, or a snarling chuckle, as at 

 charity, thrift, hygiene, etc. It can rise also to a sar- 

 castic extravagance, as when he asked why the otter is 

 killed in the Thames. J ' Has he ravaged the fields ? 

 Does he threaten the homesteads ? Is he at Temple 

 Bar ? Are we to run, as the old song says, from the 

 Dragon ?' To be described as dryly amusing, perhaps, 

 are such passages as where he speaks of that * marvel of 

 our civilization ' — ' The Thames is swearing-free. . . . 

 You may begin at the mouth, off the Nore, and curse your 

 way up to Cricklade. A hundred miles for swearing is a fine 

 preserve.' Sometimes it lends him an admirable metaphor. 

 But in ' Amaryllis ' it makes its nearest approach to 

 true irony, and perhaps is such, in spite of a certain 



* Hodge and His Masters. t The Dewy Morn. 



X The Open Air. 



