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THE book is not a novel is a phrase often in the mouth of critics, who on second thoughts might, perhaps, add with less emphasis,
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It does not conform to the common type of novel. Fortified, however, with that sense of rectitude that dictates conformity to our neighbours and a safe acquiescence in the mysterious movements of public taste, the critics have exclaimed with touching unanimity--
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What a pity Jefferies tried to write novels! Why didn't he stick to essays in natural history!
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Amaryllis at the Fair, and
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After London !--this opinion has been propagated with such fervency that it seems almost a pity to disturb it by inquiring into the nature of these his achievements. Certainly the critics, and their critical echoes, are united.
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He wrote some later novels of indifferent merit, says a critic in
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Chambers' Encyclopædia.
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Has anyone ever been able to write with free and genuine appreciation of even the later novels? asks or echoes a lady, Miss Grace Toplis, writing on Jefferies.
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In brief, he was an essayist and not a novelist at all, says Mr. Henry Salt.
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It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stands Gilbert White and Gray, says Mr. George Saintsbury.
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He was a reporter of genius, and he never got beyond reporting. Mr. Besant has the vitalising imagination which Jefferies lacked, says Mr. Henley in his review of Walter Besant's
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Eulogy of Richard Jefferies ; and again,
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They are not novels as he (Walter Besant) admits, they are a series of pictures. . . . That is the way he takes Jefferies at Jefferies' worst. Yes, it is very touching this unanimity, and it is therefore a pleasure for this critic to say that in his judgment
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Amaryllis at the Fair is one of the very few later-day novels of English country life that are worth putting on one's shelf, and that to make room for it he would turn out certain highly-praised novels by Hardy which do not ring quite true, novels which the critics and the public, again with touching unanimity, have voted to be of high rank. But what is a novel? the reader may ask. A novel, says the learned Charles Annandale, is
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Well,
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Amaryllis at the Fair is a fictitious prose narrative professing to give a picture of real life, and involving a plot of little intricacy. Certainly it exhibits the passions and sentiments in a state of great activity. But Mr. Henry Salt, whose little book on Jefferies is the best yet published, further remarks:
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Jefferies was quite unable to give any vivid dramatic life to his stories . . . his instinct was that of the naturalist who observes and moralizes rather than that of the novelist who penetrates and interprets; and consequently his rustic characters, though strongly and clearly drawn, do not live, as, for example, those of Thomas Hardy live. . . . Men and animals are alike mere figures in his landscapes.
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it is inferred by most that something is wrong with
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Amaryllis the Fair, and the book has been passed over in silence. But we do not judge every novel by the same test. We do not judge
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Tristram Shandy, for example, by its intricate plot, or by its
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we judge it simply as an artistic revelation of human life and by its humorous insight into human character. And judged by the same simple test
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Amaryllis at the Fair, we contend, is a living picture of life, a creative work of imagination of a high order. Iden, the unsuccessful farmer who
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is a masterly piece of character drawing. But Iden is a personal portrait, the reader may object, Well, what about Uncle Toby? From what void did he spring? Iden, to our mind, is almost as masterly a conception, as broadly human a figure as Uncle Toby. And Mrs. Iden, where will you find this type of nervous, irritable wife, full of spiteful disillusioned love for her dilatory husband better painted than by Jefferies? But Mrs. Iden is a type, not an individual, the reader may say. Excellent reader! and what about the Widow Wadman? She is no less and no more of an individual than is Mrs. Iden. It was a great feat of Sterne to create so cunningly the atmosphere of the Shandy household, 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
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Wild Life in a Southern County he stands beside Gilbert White; by his
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Story of My Heart he stands by himself, a little apart from the poets, and by
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Amaryllis at the Fair