RECAPITULATION 319 



him. His point of view was that which the small farmer 

 would naturally take, but the sense and force of the 

 writing was worthy of the best journalism, and had he 

 continued to work in this way he might have made a 

 good middle-class income in London. But he was 

 becoming master of an instrument on which he wanted 

 to play other tunes. Instead of short stories, he now 

 wrote novels, which are nearly always absurd where they 

 concern well-dressed people who tip in gold, but are 

 charming and true wherever the life of the country and 

 of quiet country people is touched. By fiction he hoped 

 in vain to make a large sum of money for himself and the 

 wife whom he married in his twenty-sixth year ; but he 

 did succeed in acquiring, partly by means of it, a more 

 emotional and profound means of expression than he 

 was likely to have done by his sensible and practical 

 articles on agriculture and country society. He lost 

 money by his fiction, and wrote fewer magazine articles 

 than he might have done had he given himself exclusively 

 up to them, according to the posthumous advice of a 

 biographer. Meantime his intimacy with Nature was 

 ripening. He was becoming a richly experienced observer 

 of wild life in the South of England under all conditions ; 

 and his passionate moments of oneness with Nature were 

 becoming clearer, more intelligible to himself, and more 

 capable of articulate expression. Thus, he was at the 

 same time developing along parallel paths his faculties 

 as a watcher of birds and animals, of colour and form in 

 earth and sky, as critic of social conditions, as student of 

 human life, and as mystic. During this period of various 

 and often wasteful production, nearly the whole of the 

 third decade of his life, his health was fairly good, and 

 when he was almost thirty he moved to Surbiton, near 

 London, in order to be closer to editors and publishers 

 and the British Museum. 



He had already begun to write short sketches of the 

 country, of the men, the wild life, and the landscape ; 

 but it was only after reaching Surbiton that he began to 



