hrown his
plots and his rustic choruses to the four winds. May we not be thankful,
therefore, that Jefferies was no hand at elaborating a plot, and that in
"Amaryllis at the Fair," the scenes, the descriptions, the conversations
are spontaneous as life, and that Jefferies' commentary on them is like
Fielding's commentary, a medium by which he lives with his characters.
The author's imagination, memory, and instinctive perception are,
indeed, all working together; and so his picture of human life in
"Amaryllis" brings with it as convincing and as fresh a breath of life
as we find in Cobbett's, Waugh's and Barnes' country writings. When a
writer arrives at being perfectly natural in his atmosphere, his style
and his subject seem to become one. He moves easily and surely. Out of
the splintered mass of ideas and emotions, out of the sensations, the
observations and revelations of his youth, and the atmosphere familiar
to him through long feeling, he builds up a subtle and cunning picture
for us, a complete illusion of life more true than the reality. For what
prosaic people call the reality is merely the co-ordination in their own
minds of perhaps a thousandth part of aspects of the life around them;
and only this thousandth part they have noticed. But the creative mind
builds up a living picture out of the thousands of aspects most of us
are congenitally blind to. This is what Jefferies has done in "Amaryllis
at the Fair." The book is rich in the contradictory forces of life, in
its quick twists and turns: we feel in it there is nature working alike
in the leaves of grass outside the Idens' house, in the blustering winds
round the walls, and in the minds of the characters indoors; and the
style has the freshness of the April wind. Everything is growing,
changing, breathing in the book. But the accomplished critics do not
notice these trivial strengths. It is enough for them that Jefferies was
not a novelist! Indeed, Mr. Saintsbury apparently thinks that Jefferies
made a mistake in drawing his philosophy from an open-air study of
nature, for he writes: "Unfortunately for Jefferies his philosophic
background was not like Wordsworth's clear and cheerful, but wholly
vague and partly gloomy." It was neither vague nor gloomy, we may
remark, parenthetically, but we may admit that Jefferies saw too deeply
into nature's workings, and had too sensuous a joy in life to interpret
all Nature's doings, a la Wordsworth, and lend them a por