Jefferies, for his part, has no agonies of soul to chronicle, nor does he watch for and set down the stages of unbelief, nor does he tell us of any arguments with friends. The local curate is never considered or consulted; friends are neglected; and he is not in the least degree angry with those who remain loyal to their old religion.

In point of fact, this remarkable book never mentions the old religion at all. This is a very singular--even an unique--method of treatment.

There is no question of the common lines of research: not one of them is followed. The author begins, and he goes on, with the a.s.sumption that there is no religion at all which need be considered. On the broad downs the only bell ever heard is the distant sheep-bell, the only hymn of praise is the song of the lark. He has wandered among these lonely hills until he has forgotten the village church and all that he was taught there. Everything has clean escaped his memory. It is not that the old teaching no longer guides his conduct; the old teaching no longer lives at all in his mind.

He has communed so much with Nature that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. Nothing else seems worth thinking of. He lies upon the turf and feels the embrace of the great round world.

"I used to lie down in solitary corners at full length on my back, so as to feel the embrace of the earth. The gra.s.s stood high above me, and the shadows of the tree-branches danced on my face. I looked up at the sky, with half-closed eyes to bear the dazzling light. Bees buzzed over, sometimes a b.u.t.terfly pa.s.sed, there was a hum in the air, greenfinches sang in the hedge. Gradually entering into the intense life of the summer days--a life which burned around as if every gra.s.s-blade and leaf were a torch--I came to feel the long-drawn life of the earth back into the dimmest past, while the sun of the moment was warm on me.... This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness."

Again, he says that, wandering alone, he spoke in his soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight:

"I thought of the earth's firmness--I felt it bear me up; through the gra.s.sy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air--its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea, though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory."

Everything is so full of life, everything around him, the gra.s.s-blades, the flowers, the leaves, the gra.s.shoppers, the birds; all the air is so full of life that he himself seems to live more largely only by being conscious of this mult.i.tudinous life. And at length he prays. He prays for a deeper and a fuller soul, that he may take from all something of their grandeur, beauty, and energy, and gather it to himself. In answer--let us think--to this prayer there was granted unto him a Vision. To every man who truly meditates and prays, there comes in the end a Vision--a Vision of a Flying Roll; a Vision of Four Chariots; a Vision of a Basket of Summer Fruit. To this man came the Vision, rarely granted, of the infinite possibilities in man. He saw how much greater and grander he might become, how his senses might be intensified, how his frame might be perfected, how his soul might become fuller. Morning, noon, and night he sees this Vision, and he prays continually for that increased fulness of soul which is the chief splendour of his Vision.

"Sometimes I went to a deep, narrow valley in the hills, silent and solitary. The sky crossed from side to side, like a roof supported on two walls of green. Sparrows chirped in the wheat at the verge above, their calls falling like the twittering of swallows from the air. There was no other sound. The short gra.s.s was dried gray as it grew by the heat; the sun hung over the narrow vale as if it had been put there by hand. Burning, burning, the sun glowed on the sward at the foot of the slope where these thoughts burned into me.

How many, many years, how many cycles of years, how many bundles of cycles of years, had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow? Since it was formed how long? Since it was worn and shaped, groove-like, in the flanks of the hills by mighty forces which had ebbed. Alone with the sun which glowed on the work when it was done, I saw back through s.p.a.ce to the old time of tree-ferns, of the lizard flying through the air, the lizard-dragon wallowing in sea foam, the mountainous creatures, twice elephantine, feeding on land; all the crooked sequence of life. The dragon-fly which pa.s.sed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked on stone in those days. The immense time lifted me like a wave rolling under a boat; my mind seemed to raise itself as the swell of the cycles came; it felt strong with the power of the ages. With all that time and power I prayed: that I might have in my soul the intellectual part of it; the idea, the thought. Like a shuttle the mind shot to and fro the past and the present, in an instant."

"Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrous present. For the day--the very moment I breathed, that second of time then in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as all that had gone before. Now, this moment, was the wonder and the glory.

Now, this moment, was exceedingly wonderful. Now, this moment, give me all the thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in the cosmos around me. Give me still more, for the interminable universe, past and present, is but earth; give me the unknown soul, wholly apart from it, the soul of which I know only that when I touch the ground, when the sunlight touches my hand, it is not there. Therefore the heart looks into s.p.a.ce to be away from earth.

With all the cycles, and the sunlight streaming through them, with all that is meant by the present, I thought in the deep vale and prayed."

Presently, the vague yearning--this pa.s.sionate prayer for the realization of a splendid Vision--takes a more definite shape:

"First, I desired that I might do or find something to exalt the soul, something to enable it to live its own life, a more powerful existence now. Secondly, I desired to be able to do something for the flesh, to make a discovery or perfect a method by which the fleshly body might enjoy more pleasure, longer life, and suffer less pain. Thirdly, to construct a more flexible engine with which to carry into execution the design of the will."

As for the soul, his prayer was for the life beyond this.

"Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death did not seem to me to affect the personality. In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not immediately become inaccessible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable distance. Look at another person while living; the soul is not visible, only the body which it animates.

Therefore, merely because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it does not still live. The condition of being unseen is the same condition which occurs while the body is living, so that intrinsically there is nothing exceptional, or supernatural, in the life of the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural, as natural and simple as the gra.s.s waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the larks' songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like earth.

Listening to the sighing of the gra.s.s I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning."

Three things, he says, were found twelve thousand years ago by prehistoric man: the existence of the soul, immortality, the Deity.

Since then, nothing further has been found. Well, he would find something more. What is it he would find? It can only be discovered by one who has that fulness of the soul for which he prays.

"As I write these words, in the very moment, I feel that the whole air, the sunshine out yonder lighting up the ploughed earth, the distant sky, the circ.u.mambient ether, and that far s.p.a.ce, is full of soul-secrets, soul-life, things outside the experience of all the ages. The fact of my own existence as I write, as I exist at this second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like, strange, and supernatural to me, that I unhesitatingly conclude I am always on the margin of life illimitable, and that there are higher conditions than existence. Everything around is supernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning."

It is only by the soul that one lives. As for Nature, everything in her is anti-human. Nothing in Nature cares for man. The earth would let him perish, and would not trouble, for his sake, to bring forth food or water. The sun would scorch and burn him. He cannot drink the sea. The wild creatures would mangle and slay him. Diseases would rack him. The very things which most he loves live for themselves, and not for him. If all mankind were to die to-morrow, Nature would still go on, careless of his fate. There is no spirit, no intelligence in Nature. And in the events of human life, everything, he says, happens by pure chance. No prudence in conduct, no wisdom or foresight, can effect anything. The most trivial circ.u.mstance--the smallest accident is sufficient to upset the deepest plan of the wisest mind. All things happen by chance. This, then, is the melancholy outcome of all his pa.s.sionate love of Nature. It is to this conclusion that he has been brought by his solitary communion with Nature. Man is quite alone, he says, without help and without hope of guidance. The Deity--but, then, what does he mean by a Deity? He means, I think, only the popular and vulgar conception--suffers everything to take place by chance. Yet there is, there must be, because he feels it and sees it, something higher and beyond. "For want of words I write soul."

The book is full of this Vision of the Life beyond the present; he tries, but sometimes in vain, to clothe his Vision with words. It never leaves him. It is with him in the heart of London, where the tides of life converge to the broad area before the Royal Exchange. If he goes to see the pictures in the National Gallery, it is with him. If he looks at the old sculpture in the Museum, it is still with him. Always the dream of the perfect man superior to death and to change; perfect in physical beauty, perfect in mind.

"I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves--my soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea's might. 'Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things, give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea.'

"Then I rested, sitting by the wheat; the bank of beach was between me and the sea, but the waves beat against it; the sea was there, the sea was present and at hand. By the dry wheat I rested; I did not think; I was inhaling the richness of the sea; all the strength and depth of meaning of the sea and earth came to me again. I rubbed out some of the wheat in my hands, I took up a piece of clod and crumbled it in my fingers--it was a joy to touch it--I held my hand so that I could see the sunlight gleam on the slightly moist surface of the skin. The earth and sun were to me like my flesh and blood, and the air of the sea life.

"With all the greater existence I drew from them I prayed for a bodily life equal to it, for a soul-life beyond my thought, for my inexpressible desire of more than I could shape even into idea.

There was something higher than idea, invisible to thought as air to the eye; give me bodily life equal in fulness to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched it, and said farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was a real pilgrimage."

There is much more--a great deal more--in this remarkable book; but what follows is mostly an amplification of what has gone before. He dwells upon the striving after physical perfection, the sacred duty of every man and woman to enrich and strengthen their physical life, by care, exercise, and in every possible way.

"I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy--blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship--to see a perfect human body unveiled causes a sense of worship. The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended by increase of soul beauty. The soul is the higher even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly perfect."

Do not misunderstand him. This intense craving after physical perfection, this yearning after beauty, is not a sensual craving. It is not the Greek's love of perfect form, though Jefferies had this love, as well. It is far more than this; it means, in the mind of this man, that without perfection of the body there can be no perfect life of the soul.

In that letter where the Apostle Paul speaks at length of Death and the Resurrection, he concludes with the a.s.surance--he writes for his own consolation, I think, as well as that of his disciples--that the body, as well as the soul, shall live again; but the body glorified, made perfect and beautiful beyond human power of thought, to be wedded to the soul purified beyond human power of understanding. Is it not strange that this solitary questioner, longing and praying for a deeper and fuller understanding--a fuller soul--should also have arrived at the perception of the wonderful truth that the perfect soul demands the perfect body? In his mind there are no echoes ringing of Paul's great Vision--the whole of his old creed, all of it, has fallen from him and is lost: it is his own Vision granted to himself. How? After long and solitary meditation on the hillside, as in the old times great Visions came to those who fasted in their lonely cells and solitary caves. Great thoughts come not to those who seek them not. The mind which would receive them must be first prepared. The example of Jefferies, whose great thoughts only came to him after long years of meditation apart from man, may make us understand the Visions which used to reward the monk, the fakir, the hermit of the lonely laura.

Then he goes back to his theory that everything happens by chance. So long as men believe that everything is done for them, progress is impossible. Once grasp the truth that nothing is done for man, and that he has everything to do for himself, and all is possible. Still, this is not a proof that chance rules the world. And, again, the fact that man, alone of created beings, is able to grasp this, or any other truth, is not that gift everything in itself?

"Nothing whatsoever is done for us. We are born naked, and not even protected by a s.h.a.ggy covering. Nothing is done for us. The first and strongest command (using the word to convey the idea only) that nature, the universe, our own bodies give is to do everything for ourselves. The sea does not make boats for us, nor the earth of her own will build us hospitals. The injured lie bleeding, and no invisible power lifts them up. The maidens were scorched in the midst of their devotions, and their remains make a mound hundreds of yards long. The infants perished in the snow, and the ravens tore their limbs. Those in the theatre crushed each other to the death-agony. For how long, for how many thousand years, must the earth and the sea, and the fire and the air, utter these things and force them upon us before they are admitted in their full significance?

"These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose body has been racked by pain, from every human being who has suffered from accident or disease, from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, there goes up a continually-increasing cry louder than the thunder. An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listen to, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superst.i.tion, and the wax of criminal selfishness:--These miseries are your doing, because you have mind and thought, and could have prevented them.

You can prevent them in the future. You do not even try.

"It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception are preventible, or if not so, that they can be so weakened as to do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents are preventible; there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die but of old age, and that if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged far beyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible that at the present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one single person ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is no such thing as a natural cause of death. They die of disease or weakness which is the result of disease, either in themselves or in their ancestors.

No such thing as old age is known to us. We do not even know what old age would be like, because no one ever lives to it."

This remarkable book is a record almost, if not quite, unique. The writer is not a man of science; he has not been trained in logic and dialectics, he is not a scholar, though he has read much. But he can think for himself, and he has the gift of carrying on the same line of thought unwearied, persistent, like a bloodhound on the scent, year after year. And as a record it is absolutely true; there are no concealments in it, no affectations; it is all true. He has gone to Nature--the Nature he loves so well--for an answer to the problems that vex his soul. Nature replies with a stony stare; she has no answer. What is man? She cares nothing for man. Everything, so far as she knows, and so far as man is concerned, takes place by chance. Then he gets his Vision of the Perfect Soul, and it fills his heart and makes him happy, and seems to satisfy all his longings. And the old Christian teaching, the prayer to the Father, the village church and its services, the quiet churchyard--where are they? Out on the wild downs you do not see or hear of them at all. They are not in the whisper of the air, or in the rustle of the gra.s.s-blades; they are not in the sunshine; they are not in the cloud; they are not in the depths of the azure sky.

And so he concludes:

"I have only just commenced to realize the immensity of thought which lies outside the knowledge of the senses. Still, on the hills and by the sea-sh.o.r.e, I seek and pray deeper than ever. The sun burns southwards over the sea and before the wave runs its shadow, constantly slipping on the advancing slope till it curls and covers its dark image at the sh.o.r.e. Over the rim of the horizon waves are flowing as high and wide as those that break upon the beach. These that come to me and beat the trembling sh.o.r.e are like the thoughts that have been known so long; like the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts that have broken on the strand of mind for thousands of years. Beyond and over the horizon I feel that there are other waves of ideas unknown to me, flowing as the stream of ocean flows. Knowledge of facts is limitless, they lie at my feet innumerable like the countless pebbles; knowledge of thought so circ.u.mscribed! Ever the same thoughts come that have been written down centuries and centuries.

"Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the br.i.m.m.i.n.g ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the sh.o.r.e where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green-gray wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loath to leave the lashed stone.

Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through the gla.s.s into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder: the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.

"Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the wash swells and circles about my feet, I lave my hands in it, I lift a little in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beats upon the sh.o.r.e, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sun burns brightly;--the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.

"Leaving the sh.o.r.e, I walk among the trees; a cloud pa.s.ses, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches.

Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long gra.s.s foam-flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea.

Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than Deity. The great sun burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble--all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part--the psyche--were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life."

CHAPTER XI.

THE CHILD WANDERS IN THE WOOD.

There is a very delightful old story which used to be given to children, though I have not seen it for a long time in the hands of any children.

It was called "The Story without an End." A child wandered among the flowers, who talked to him. That is the whole story. There were coloured pictures in it. The story began without a beginning, and it came to a sudden stop without an ending.

It is perhaps upon a reminiscence of this old story that Jefferies has based nearly all his own. They are very delightful, especially the shorter stories; but they seldom have any end. There is sometimes, but not often, a story; there is generally only a succession of scenes--some delightful, all beautiful, and all original in the sense that n.o.body except Jefferies could possibly have written any of them.

The child wanders. That is all. Some day, when the worth of this writer is universally recognised, these scenes and stories will be detached from the papers with which they are published, and issued in separate form, as beautifully ill.u.s.trated as the art of the next generation--this will not take place for another generation--will allow.

For instance, Guido--they called him Guido because they thought that in childhood Guido the painter must have greatly resembled this boy--runs along the gra.s.sy lane at the top of a bank between the fir-trees till he comes to a wheat-field. Then he climbs down into this field, and sees the most wonderful things: lovely azure corn-flowers--"curious flowers with k.n.o.bs surrounded with little blue flowers, like a lady's bonnet.

They were a beautiful blue, not like any other blue, not like the violets in the garden, or the sky over the trees, or the geranium in the gra.s.s, or the bird's-eyes by the path." Then he wanders on, starting a rabbit, scaring a hawk, and listening to the birds. Presently he sits down on the branch of an oak, with his feet dangling over a streamlet.

Then he remembers--children do remember things in the strangest way--that if he wants to hear a story, or to talk with the gra.s.s, he really must not try to catch the b.u.t.terflies. So he touches the rushes with his foot, and says, "Rush, rush, tell them I am here." Immediately there follows a little wind, and the wheat swings to and fro, the oak-leaves rustle, the rushes bow, and the shadows slip forwards and back again. After this, of course, the nearest wheat-ear begins to talk.