326 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



a man's experience in the open air. This was not done 

 without risks and some loss. He commented on many 

 matters of his day and country. His lonely, retiring, 

 and yet emphatic egoism made a hundred mistakes, 

 narrow, ill-considered, splenetic, fatuous. He was big 

 enough to take these risks, and he made his impression 

 by his sympathies, his creation, not by his antipathies. 

 He drew Nature and human life as he saw it, and he saw 

 it with an unusual eye for detail and with unusual wealth 

 of personality behind. And in all of his best writing he 

 turns from theme to theme, and his seriousness, his utter 

 frankness, the obvious importance of the matter to him- 

 self, give us confidence in following him ; and though the 

 abundance of what he saw will continue to attract many, 

 it is for his way of seeing, for his composition, his glowing 

 colours, his ideas, for the passionate music wrought out 

 of his life, that we must chiefly go to him. He is on the 

 side of health, of beauty, of strength, of truth, of im- 

 provement in life to be WTought by increasing honesty, 

 subtlety, tenderness, courage, and foresight. His own 

 character, and the characters of his men and women, 

 fortify us in our intention to live. Nature, as he thought 

 of it, and as his books present it, is a great flood of 

 physical and spiritual sanity, ' of pure ablution round 

 earth's human shores,' to which he bids us resort. Turn- 

 ing to England in particular, he makes us feel what a 

 heritage are its hills and waters ; he even went so far as 

 to hint that some of it should be national. It is he who, 

 above all other writers, has produced the largest, the 

 most abundant, and the most truthful pictures of Southern 

 English country, both wild and cultivated. 



Of the man himself we know, and apparently can know, 

 very little. He spent as much as possible of his short 

 life of thirty-eight years in the valleys and on the hills 

 of Wiltshire, Surrey, Kent, and Sussex. His reading was 

 wide, but of eccentric range. In habits he was always 

 simple, and he did nothing unusual except to look after 

 his own affairs. He made few friends ; his habit of taking 



