298 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



man was going to become a reader ; but now, he says, 

 the books are by townsmen, the pictures are derived from 

 the stage. Nature herself is a good enough book. At 

 the end of an essay on ' Enghsh Cottage Ideas ' he says : 

 ' The best of us are pohshed cottagers.'* Of a chaffinch 

 — ' my chaffinch ' — he can write : 



' The loving soul, a-thrill in all his nerves, 

 A life immortal as a man's deserves.' t 



But let him return to sport, and his ' dear skylarks ' 

 and happy greenfinches seem to be quite forgotten. 

 ' Hares,' he writes, * are almost formed on purpose to 

 be good sport, and make a jolly good dish, a pleasant 

 addition to the ceaseless round of mutton and beef to 

 which the dead level of civilization reduces us. Coursing 

 is capital, the harriers first-rate. 'J His imagination had 

 bounds to it, and the hare which he saw as he lay alone 

 on the Downs had nothing to do with the one that cried 

 out before the hound or made ' a jolly good dish.' As he 

 says himself, speaking of things in general, ' character 

 runs upwards, not downwards. It is not the nature of 

 the aristocrat that permeates the cottager, but the nature 

 of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat. ... All 

 alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster visits 

 their persistence. It is Enghsh human nature.' § His 

 inconsistencies are true to Nature and to the country 

 mind. ' Man made the town,' and in the town man 

 builds up a new world of logic and ideas. But the 

 country meanwhile exists and absorbs. Jefferies is 

 fascinated by the gypsies, without a Deity, ' under 

 English oaks and beeches ' : 



' So old, they went through civihzation ten thousand 

 years since ; they have worn it all out, even hope in the 

 future ; they merely hve acquiescent to fate, hke the red 

 deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter 

 of the fern-owl, the red embers of the wood fire, the 



* ' Cottage Ideas,' Field and Hedgerow. \ ' My Chaffinch,' ibid. 

 X 'Walks in the Wheatfields,' ibid. § 'Cottage Ideas,' ibid. 



