Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 29.djvu/272

 ever widening circles until the whole rural life of the district, animal and human, and all the local features of inanimate nature, and the new world created by the interfusion of the two, are depicted in an exquisitely tinted and infinitely varied landscape with figures, provided by the unity of its plan with a definite and appropriate frame. This coherence renders ‘Wild Life’ greatly superior to his later works of the same description, such as ‘Round about a Great Estate,’ ‘The Life of the Fields,’ ‘The Open Air,’ &c. With the exception of ‘Red Deer,’ 1884, a description of Exmoor, where unity of locality again conduces to unity of interest, these are too desultory, although the individual descriptions are as beautiful and accurate as ever. Fortunately he felt a call to combine the novelist with the naturalist, and, compressed in the mould of fiction, the profusion of his observations and imagination acquired something like artistic unity. ‘Bevis’ (1882) is the idealisation of his own childhood. It is a beautiful book, but is greatly surpassed in creative originality by its predecessor, ‘Wood Magic’ (1881), which is founded on the idea of a world of animals speaking and reasoning, displaying in their ways and works all the passions of mankind, among whom a boy, the sole human personage, moves somewhat like the chorus of a Greek tragedy. The last chapter, the ‘Dialogue of Bevis and the Wind,’ is one of the finest prose poems in the language. The conception of ‘After London’ (1885) is no less striking. England, forsaken by most of her inhabitants, has in great measure relapsed into a primitive wilderness. London is a poisonous swamp; the Thames a vast lake; forests, infested by wild beasts and a malign and dwarfish race, overspread most of the country; the remnants of the ancient people, though practising the virtues of hunters and warriors, yet dwell in ignorance and fear; and amid all this darkness new light dawns by the inspiration of a youth of genius. As ‘Bevis’ idealises the scenes and incidents of Jefferies' infancy, so ‘The Story of my Heart’ (1883) idealises the feelings and yearnings of his youth; it is hardly what the lad really thought, but embodies all he was to think when he should have intellectually come to man's estate. The one fixed point in it is its intense pantheism. These four books, with ‘Wild Life,’ give Jefferies his abiding place in English literature. The novels of country life which he produced during the same period, ‘Greene Ferne Farm’ (1880), ‘Amaryllis at the Fair’ (1887), though full of admirable descriptions and shrewd observation, are deficient in character and construction.

In 1881 Jefferies was attacked by a painful malady, necessitating four operations within the twelvemonth. Unable to write during the whole of this time, and compelled to maintain his family and defray medical expenses out of his savings, he found himself on his recovery almost reduced to destitution. Scarcely did his circumstances appear to be improving, when he became the victim of a wasting and painful disease. An overstrained feeling of independence prevented his resorting to the Literary Fund, and he was compelled to maintain his family by incessant writing, chiefly on the scenes and pleasures of country life, for, though he declared that he knew London quite as well and cared for it quite as much, this work paid best and was the intellectual capital readiest to his hand. For the last two years he was unable to hold the pen, and his productions were dictated to his wife. He died at Goring in Sussex, where he had fixed himself after short residences at Brighton and Crowborough, on 14 Aug. 1887. The sympathy aroused when the circumstances of his death became known found expression in the bestowal of a pension upon his wife, and in the erection of a monument to his memory in Salisbury Cathedral. A bust was also placed in the Shire-hall, Taunton. Like George Borrow, with whom he has much in common, Jefferies is a writer of a perfectly original type, and at the same time intensely English. Much of his best work may be rivalled or surpassed, but he is unparalleled, unless by Shelley, for the fusion of the utmost intensity of passion with its utmost purity, and for the eloquent expression of the mere rapture of living, of the joy of existence in fresh air and clear light amid lovely landscape. His reasoning power was not great, and he shows at times traces of the wilfulness and narrowness of the merely self-educated man. While in good health he was a man of splendid presence, with something of the gamekeeper and the poet combined. His reserve and the fewness of his personal intimacies are to be attributed partly to a taint of distrustfulness inherited from his peasant ancestors, partly to his constant preoccupation with his own thoughts and his tenacious struggle for existence. 

JEFFERSON, SAMUEL (1809–1846), topographer, was born at Basingstoke, Hampshire, on 8 Nov. 1809. After residing for many years at Carlisle, first as a bookseller's