Amaryllis at the Fair - Richard Jefferies

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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, à la Wordsworth, and lend them a portentously moral significance.

      The one charge that may with truth be brought against "Amaryllis at the Fair" is that its digressions damage the artistic illusion of the whole. The book shows the carelessness, the haste, the roughness of a sketch, a sketch, moreover, which Jefferies was not destined to carry to the end he had planned, but we repeat, let us be thankful that its artistic weaknesses are those of a sketch direct from nature, rather than those of an ambitious studio picture. And these digressions are an integral part of the book's character, just as the face of a man has its own blemishes: they are one with the spirit of the whole, and so, if they break somewhat the illusion of the scenes, they do not damage its spiritual unity. It is this spiritual unity on which we must insist, because "Amaryllis" is indeed Jefferies' last and complete testament on human life. He wrote it, or rather dictated it to his wife, as he lay in pain, slowly dying, and he has put into it the frankness of a dying man. How real, how solid, how deliciously sweet seemed those simple earthly joys, those human appetites of healthy, vigorous men to him! how intense is his passion and spiritual hunger for the beauty of earth! Like a flame shooting up from the log it is consuming, so this passion for the green earth, for the earth in wind and rain and sunshine, consumes the wasted, consumptive body of the dying man. The reality, the solidity of the homely farmhouse life he describes spring from the intensity with which he clings to all he loves, the cold March wind buffeting the face, the mating cries of the birds in the hot spring sunshine. Life is so terribly strong, so deliciously real, so full of man's unsatisfied hungry ache for happiness; and sweet is the craving, bitter the knowledge of the unfulfilment. So, inspiring and vivifying the whole, in every line of "Amaryllis" is Jefferies' philosophy of life. Jefferies "did not understand human nature," say the accomplished critics. Did he not? "Amaryllis at the Fair" is one of the truest criticisms of human life, oh reader, you are likely to meet with. The mixedness of things, the old, old human muddle, the meanness and stupidity and shortsightedness of humanity, the good salty taste of life in the healthy mouth, the spirituality of love, the strong earthy roots of appetite, man's lust of life, with circumstances awry, and the sharp wind blowing alike on the just and the unjust—all is there on the printed page of "Amaryllis at the Fair." The song of the wind and the roar of London unite and mingle therein for those who do not bring the exacting eye of superiority to this most human book.

      Edward Garnett.

      FOOTNOTE:

       Table of Contents

      [1] Reprinted in part from "The Academy" of April 4th, 1903.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      MARYLLIS found the first daffodil flowering by the damask rose, and immediately ran to call her father to come and see it.

      There are no damask roses now, like there used to be in summer at Coombe Oaks. I have never seen one since I last gathered one from that very bush. There are many grand roses, but no fragrance—the fragrance is gone out of life. Instinctively as I pass gardens in summer I look under the shade of the trees for the old roses, but they are not to be found. The dreary nurseries of evergreens and laurels—cemeteries they should be called, cemeteries in appearance and cemeteries of taste—are innocent of such roses. They show you an acre of what they call roses growing out of dirty straw, spindly things with a knob on the top, which even dew can hardly sweeten. "No call for damask roses—wouldn't pay to grow they. Single they was, I thinks. No good. These be cut every morning and fetched by the flower-girls for gents' button-holes and ladies' jackets. You won't get no damask roses; they be died out."

      I think in despite of the nurseryman, or cemetery-keeper, that with patience I could get a damask rose even now by inquiring about from farmhouse to farmhouse. In time some old farmer, with a good old taste for old roses and pinks, would send me one; I have half a mind to try. But, alas! it is no use, I have nowhere to put it; I rent a house which is built in first-rate modern style, though small, of course, and there is a "garden" to it, but no place to put a damask rose. No place, because it is not "home," and I cannot plant except round "home." The plot or "patch" the landlord calls "the garden"—it is about as wide as the border round a patch, old style—is quite vacant, bare, and contains nothing but mould. It is nothing to me, and I cannot plant it.

      Not only are there no damask roses, but there is no place for them now-a-days, no "home," only villas and rented houses. Anything rented in a town can never be "home."

      Farms that were practically taken on a hundred and twenty, or fifty, or perhaps two hundred years' leases were "homes." Consequently they had damask roses, bees, and birds about them.

      There had been daffodils in that spot at least a century, opening every March to the dry winds that shrivel up the brown dead leaves of winter, and carry them out from the bushes under the trees, sending them across the meadow—fleeing like a routed army before the bayonets of the East. Every spring for a century at least the daffodils had bloomed there.

      Amaryllis did not stay to think of the century, but ran round the corner of the house, and came face to face with the east

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