ousehold,
but Jefferies has accomplished an artistic feat also in drawing the
relations of the Idens, father, mother, and daughter. How true, how
unerringly true to human nature is this picture of the Iden household;
how delicately felt and rendered to a hair is his picture of the
father's sluggish, masculine will, pricked ineffectually by the waspish
tongue of feminine criticism. Further, we not only have the family's
idiosyncrasies, their habits, mental atmosphere, and domestic story
brought before us in a hundred pages, easily and instinctively by the
hand of the artist, but we have the whole book steeped in the breath of
English spring, the restless ache of spring that thrills through the
nerves, and stirs the sluggish winter blood; we have the spring feeling
breaking from the March heavens and the March earth in copse, meadow,
and ploughland, as it has scarcely been rendered before by English
novelist. The description of Amaryllis running out into the March wind
to call her father from his potato planting to see the daffodil; the
picture of Iden pretending to sleep in his chair that he may watch the
mice; the description of the girl Amaryllis watching the crowd of plain,
ugly men of the countryside flocking along the road to the fair; the
description of Amadis the invalid, in the old farm kitchen among the
stalwart country folk--all these pictures and a dozen others in the book
are painted with a masterly hand. Pictures! the critical reader may
complain. Yes, pictures of living men and women. What does it matter
whether a revelation of human life is conveyed to us by pictures or by
action so long as it is conveyed? Mr. Saintsbury classes Jefferies with
Gray, presumably because both writers have written of the English
landscape. With Gray! Jefferies in his work as a naturalist and observer
of wild life may be classed merely for convenience with Gilbert White.
But this classification only applies to one half of Jefferies' books. By
his "Wild Life in a Southern County" he stands beside Gilbert White; by
his "Story of My Heart" he stands by himself, a little apart from the
poets, and by "Amaryllis at the Fair" he stands among the half-dozen
country writers of the century whose work is racy of the English soil
and of rural English human nature. We will name three of these writers,
Barnes, Cobbett, Waugh, and our attentive readers can name the other
three.

To come back to "Amaryllis at the Fair," why is it so masterly,