Some of the villagers in Ham, where I lived during the first decade after the World War, possessed copies of an old romantic novel with most of its scenes laid on the coast and country of North Devon. Someone lent me a copy, and I read first the descriptions of those places in the district I knew. They were accurate, and yet somehow they were insufficient, unsatisfying. It was not the style, which was no better and no worse than that of a hundred other novels of its period. The descriptions were somehow so bare, so colourless, although the fields were green, the sea was blue, the sands yellow, and so on. The book was pallid, un-sunned. In my youthful intolerance I scorned the book; until I learned that the author had been blind from birth.
All writing of the first class comes from exceptional sight and hearing: and insight arises from stored physical impressions of sight and sound. Those who observe quickly and vividly hold us with their detail, which is fresh and vivid; and they hold our attention because, being quick and vivid, their stories or pages have a flow which carries the reader. Now the rare first-class writer has, in addition to keen sight and hearing (it may be because of them) feelings or emotions which are equally keen. He has the keenness of a wild animal. He is natural. He is an authentic animation of the sun.
And because he is wild, natural, it is probable that he will be repressed and thwarted and made miserable in helpless childhood. This may cause him to be an ineffectual rebel, a liar, a bit of a thief, deceitful – if he has parents or mentors who, themselves victims of a repressive and unnatural upbringing, are without true or natural understanding and sympathy. Part of his natural integrity will thus be maimed; and that part will grow inwards, and perhaps mortify, and be the source of desperately sad resurrectional poetry and dream and vision later in life. This is what happened to Shelley, to Byron, to Francis Thompson, to Shakespeare (who outgrew his Hamlet), to Jefferies, to D.H. Lawrence, among many others in our literature.
It can be said of all of them, facilely, superficially, that they have a dual or multiple personality; but the truth, or cause, is as written above. Jefferies has two distinct styles. One of them is straightforward and concrete: the style of a natural man. The other is a candent, often incandescent, flow of words driven from him, as he wrote, by his dæmon (in Shelleyan language): the dæmon being his repressed or mortified self. It is this part of a man that strives to reach to God: the death, or mortification, in him striving to overcome his life.
Because of these two distinct styles, both of them authentic, Jefferies has two kinds of reading public. The one appreciates his straightforward descriptions of country scenes and characters, such as are to be found in The Amateur Poacher, Wildlife in a Southern County, and Hodge and his Masters; and this kind of reader does not like The Story of my Heart and the later essays wherein he wrote about himself and his own feelings. And there is the second kind of reader, who is pathologically akin to Jefferies, who prefers his introspective, sensuous writings to his matter-of-fact chapters.
It is always dangerous for a writer to write about himself and his own feelings; but when there is an intensity and power behind them, he produces a flow, a blend of sensuous records with emotion; and this is called poetry.
If circumstances or fate permit the metaphysical poet to outgrow the effects of his earlier mortifications, and through natural love accompanied by hard physical work (the natural life) to reassert himself to himself, he will become one of the rare first class, like Shakespeare, who, by virtue of his own experiences, real and imagined, understood all human actions and characters with clarity and the sweetness of truth. The rare first-class writer is then a universal representative of humanity, having attained wisdom by trial and error, by discarding parts of his earlier self through struggle and self-searching, and, above all, by self-criticism. So he achieves natural harmony: and thenceforward will have no regard for his writings – as a butterfly has no regard for the caterpillar – but wish only to live happily; and if he writes at all, will write only for money. Jefferies had just become a writer of the rare first class when the struggle broke him.
Such men are born leaders of men; but early circumstance drives them within themselves, and out of that inner mortification, from their own slain image, they strive to recreate the world. A visionary poet is a frustrated man of action. The natural poet, a very rare thing, is joyous and therefore the friend of all, the born leader, the truly civilised man. The visionary poet, the philosopher striving that future men shall not suffer in childhood as he suffered, the little brother of Jesus (the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief) writes, out of his enlarged and maimed senses, that children of the future shall be happy: that the sun shall shine on all men equably.
Richard Jefferies, the Wiltshire farmer’s son, perceived this; and formulated much of it into words half a century before the World War, by whose glare and shock men began to perceive, beyond the faults of their past lives and education and upbringing and conventions and limitations, the idea of a new world, a natural world, a world wherein men would be happy because of the new wideness of thought arising, phœnix-like, from the mortifying battlefields. Of this world there have been many prophets, whose thought arises into life from faraway centuries and civilisations; and the greatest of them is Jesus of Nazareth. This was the realisation of Richard Jefferies during the last days of his life: the attar of his wisdom.
Thus for the mind of Jefferies.
And of the dying man himself, what can be said? He wrote in his last year, ‘Three giants are against me – disease, despair, and poverty.’
My wearied and exhausted system constantly craves rest. My brain is always asking for rest. I never sleep. I have not slept now for five years properly, always waking, with broken bits of sleep, and restlessness, and in the morning I get up more weary than when I went to bed. Rest, that is what I need. You thought naturally that it was work I needed; but I have been at work, and next time I will tell you all of it. It is not work, it is rest for the brain and the nervous system. I have always had a suspicion that it was the ceaseless work that caused me to go wrong at first.
It has taken me a long time to write this letter; it will take you but a few minutes to read it. Had you not sent me to the sea in the spring I do not think that I should have been alive to write it.
An artist friend has described his physical end in words that can hardly be read, by those who love Jefferies’ work, without tears.
It was in the early summer, two or three months before his death, that I saw Jefferies for the last time alive. He had then been living at Goring for some short time, and this was my first visit to him there. I was pleased to find that his house was far pleasanter than the dreary and bleak cottage which he had rented at Crowborough. It had a view of the sea, a warm southern exposure, and a good and interesting garden: in one corner a quaint little arbour, with a pole and vane, and near this centre a genuine old-fashioned draw-well. Poor fellow! Painfully, with short breathing, and supported on one side by Mrs. Jefferies and on the other by myself, he walked round this enclosure, noticing and drawing to our attention all kinds of queer little natural objects and facts. Between the well and the arbour was a heap of rough, loose stones, overgrown by various creeping flowers. This was the home of a common snake, discovered there by Harold, and poor Jefferies stood, supported by us, a yard or so away and peered into every little cranny and under every leaf with eyes well used to such a search until some tiny gleam, some minute cold glint of light, betrayed the snake. Weakness and pain seemed forgotten for the moment – alas! only for the moment. Uneasily he sat in the little arbour telling me how his disease seemed still to puzzle the doctors; how he felt well able in mind to work, plenty of mental energy, but so weak, so fearfully weak, that he could no longer write with his own hand; that his wife was patient and good to help him. He had nobody to come and talk with him of the world of literature and art. Why couldn’t I come and settle by? There was plenty to paint. Though Goring itself was one of the ugliest places in the world, there was Arundel, and
its noble park, and river, and castle close by. I must go and see it the very next day, and see whether I could not work there, and come back every day and cheer him. I was the best doctor, after all.
Poor fellow! I did not then know or believe that he was so utterly without sympathetic society except his devoted wife. It was so. I am one of the dullest companions in the world; but I had sympathy with his work, and knowledge, too, of his subjects. Well, nothing would do but that I must go to Arundel the next day, and Mrs. Jefferies must show me the town. ‘He would do well enough for one day. A good neighbour would come in, and with little Phyllis and the maid he would be safe.’
Therefore we went to Arundel (a short journey by train), and on coming back found him standing against the door-post to welcome us.
I have seldom been more touched than by my experience of that evening, finding, amongst other things, that he had partly planned and insisted on this Arundel trip to get us away so that he might, unrebuked, spend some of his latest hard earnings in a pint of ‘Perrier Jouë’ for my supper.
Do you know Goring churchyard? It is one of those dreary, over-crowded, dark spots where the once-gravelled paths are green with slimy moss, and it was a horror to poor Jefferies. More than once he repeated the hope that he might not be laid there, and he chose the place where his widow at last left him – amongst the brighter grass and flowers of Broadwater.
He died at Goring at half-past two on Sunday morning, August 14, 1887. His soul was released from a body wasted to a skeleton by six long weary years of illness. For nearly two years he had been too weak to write, and all his delightful work, during that period, was written by his wife from his dictation. Who can picture the torture of these long years to him, denied as he was the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would be left friendless and penniless. Thus died a man whose name will be first, perhaps for ever, in his own special work.
Foreword to Richard Jefferies: Selections of his Work, with details of his Life and Circumstance, his Death and Immortality, edited by Henry Williamson
Faber & Faber, 1937
A First Adventure with Francis Thompson
Those who are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, usually have traits of personality in common. Superficially, similar experiences link us with others; but such links seldom hold beyond the limits of shared common experience. Such, for example, is war-time comradeship, when it exists only within the limits of that comradeship. One has only to attend a regimental dinner, when the war is over, to find oneself essentially alone. Faces have changed. We have become sedate, other-worldly, when before we were spontaneous and free. A face may light up at the stir of memory; but like an old film seen again, it has lost something of its pristine impact. Such comings and goings can indeed be nullifying on occasion; anti-climax. That which lives in each memory cannot be shared, save in a moment of time. Then recognition lights the eye, renewing the flow of life: the poetry, or essence, is reshared. Otherwise, behind each changed face a different problem of living keeps us apart.
I ‘discovered’ the poetry of Francis Thompson in 1917, when I was twenty-one years old. The words stood out from the printed page, making instant impact. They were of the real, or secret world of the spirit of truth behind the outward world of terror and comradeship in which I had my strange and as it were secret existence. It was a world lived for the moment only, against a background of life and death.
I know now, nearly fifty years on – a few tickings of a clock, the passing of days and seasons until, suddenly, all seems to have passed away, while yet it is the same moment in eternity, the same solar orbit round the sun, the same roll of summer stars and, with the coming of the Autumn, Orion glittering low on the southern horizon – I know now that what drew me to Thompson was that we shared the same sense of sight, which with reflection becomes insight; that we were both temperamentally withdrawn from the ‘ordinary life’ in childhood, sharing the same isolation from our fathers, receiving the same criticism which was the reverse of reassurance (both fathers fearing that their sons would be failures, and suffering disappointment thereby).
This hiatus in father-affection, accepted, by my unknowing self, as part of ordinary living, caused an imbalance with the mother-image. The condition tended to resistance to maternal love, and to a retreat or secrecy of life in the woods and fields outside my home and giving my love to wild birds and animals.
And then, suddenly, it seemed that the secret life was gone forever, that all had changed in a world of dereliction extending all along the Western Front, from the North Sea to the peaks of the Alps.
This was the only world one knew; and thus, when one first read the verse of Thompson, one’s world was identical with that of the poet, who had known the same dereliction, though in the streets of London. There he, too, dreamed of love, which appeared always but to elude him. The lost mother-image – lost because he was no longer a child – was never replaced by the shared love of a woman.
Freud has written that all psychical troubles arise, like poisonous vapour, from repressions of the sexual instinct; and William Blake wrote, a century before, that beauty came from the genitals. Both statements are true symbolically. A balanced life is an harmonious life; we owe both life and harmony to the Creator.
Francis Thompson had deep psychological knowledge, which came from self-knowledge:
And I deem well why life unshared
Was ordainèd me of yore.
In pairing-time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
And the tender
Voice is tenderest in its throat:
Were its love, for ever nigh it,
Never by it,
It might keep a vernal note,
The crocean and amethystine
In their pristine
Lustre linger on its coat.
Therefore must my song-bower lone be,
That my tone be
Fresh with dewy pain alway.
So beset, [the poet wrote in his Shelley essay] the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the drawbridge. He threw out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of others into the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in which Hogg encountered it; then, bursting at once from its cyst and the university, it swam into a world not illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the gods. It was, of course, only the completeness and duration of this seclusion – lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of youth – which was peculiar to Shelley. Most poets, probably, like most saints, are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation, as the seed is buried to germinate: before they can utter the oracle of poetry, they must first be divided from the body of men. It is the severed head that makes the seraph . . . And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellent no less than his amiable weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made its goal its starting-point, and firmly expected spiritual rest from each new divinity, though it had found none from the divinities antecedent. For we are clear that this was no mere straying of a sensual appetite, but a straying, strange and deplorable, of the spirit; that (contrary to what Coventry Patmore has said) he left a woman not because he was tired of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul. When he found Mary Shelley wanting, he seems to have fallen into the mistake of Wordsworth, who complained in a charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife’s love, which had been a fountain, was now only a well:
Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.
Wordsworth probably learned, what Shelley was incapable of learning, that love can never permanently be a fountain
. A living poet, in an article which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should flutter some of the frail pastel-like bloom, has said this thing: ‘Love itself has tidal moments, lapses and flows due to the metrical rule of the interior heart.’ Elementary reason should proclaim this true. Love is an affection, its display is an emotion: love is in the air, its display is the wind. An affection may be constant; an emotion can be no more constant than the wind can constantly blow. All, therefore, that a man can reasonably ask of his wife is that her love should be indeed a well. A well; but a Bethesda-well, into which from time to time the angel of tenderness descends to trouble the waters for the healing of the beloved. Such a love Shelley’s second wife appears unquestionably to have given him. Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true; she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his aspirations, and yet – yet, even at the date of Epipsychidion, the foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia Viviani’s sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain, irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society. Yet, few poets were so mated before, and no poet was so mated afterwards, until Browning stooped and picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears . . .
If, as has chanced to others – as chanced, for example, to Mangan – outcast from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an anchorite without detachment, and self-cloistered without self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays, and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed against the dews of love, an exile banned and proscribed even from the innocent arms of childhood – he were burning helpless at the stake of his unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and harkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was Shelley’s as that of his own contemporaries – Keats, half-chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; De Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they dully mumbled for the major portion of his life. Shelley had competence, poetry, love; yet he wailed that he could lie down like a tired child and weep away his life of care! Is it ever so with you, sad brother? is it ever so with me? and is there no drinking of pearls except they be dissolved in biting tears? ‘Which of us has his desire, or having it, is satisfied?’
Indian Summer Notebook Page 5