Open Air

by Richard Jefferies

Essays on life in Rural England in the 19th. Century.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1885

About the author

(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London, while he also has some reputation as a mystic worthy of serious study. Since his death his books have enjoyed intermittent spells of popularity, but today he is unknown to the greater part of the reading public. Jefferies, however, has been an inspiration to a number of more prominent writers and W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson and John Fowles are among those who have acknowledged their debt to him. In my view his greatest achievement lies in his expression, aesthetically and spiritually, of the human encounter with the natural world – something that became almost an obsession for him in his last years.

He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.

A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“You do not care for nature now? Well! all I can say is, you will have to go to nature one day —when you die: you will find nature very real then. I rede you to recognise the sunlight and the sea, the flowers and woods now.”

“Somehow I identify myself with it; I live again as I see it. Year by year it is the same, and when I see it I feel that I have once more entered on a new life. And I think the spring, with its green corn, its violets, and hawthorn-leaves, and increasing song, grows yearly dearer and more dear to this our ancient earth.”

As with the last Jefferies I read, I come away shaking my head at some of the more odd works, so I did include a couple passages at the end that are from barely readable essays or short stories I skipped through that were not about his experience in nature which is very powerful and prescient and really stuns with their beautiful prose and metaphors. I imagine he was trying to capture what it was like to be alive in that time and place, but they were truly awful.

The nature essays are like songs, and I feel them even today, a distance of 100-150 years. ‘The heart feels nearer to that depth of life the far sky means’ is that very mystical connection between our mind, bodies and the earth and I love it. “Too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away. I think he saw the landscape and flora clearly and felt them and is a spiritual progenitor of Annie Dillard: “To see so clearly is to value so highly and to feel too deeply.” I imagine some of it seems like romantic nonsense, but for me, there is a line between that corniness and true experience of the divine and sublime in nature, and he gets it and expressed it beautifully.

The sunlight under their faces made them beautiful. The summer light had been absorbed by the skin and now shone forth from it again; as certain substances exposed to the day absorb light and emit a phosphorescent gleam in the darkness of night, so the sunlight had been drank up by the surface of the skin, and emanated from it. The heated air undulates over the field in waves which are visible at a distance; near at hand they are not seen, but roll in endless ripples through the shadows of the trees, bringing with them the actinic power of the sun. Not actinic—alchemic—some intangible mysterious power which cannot be supplied in any other form but the sun's rays. It reddens the cherry, it gilds the apple, it colours the rose, it ripens the wheat, it touches a woman's face with the golden-brown of ripe life—ripe as a plum. There is no other hue so beautiful as this human sunshine tint.

So it has ever been to me, by day or by night, summer or winter, beneath trees the heart feels nearer to that depth of life the far sky means. The rest of spirit found only in beauty, ideal and pure, comes there because the distance seems within touch of thought. To the heaven thought can reach lifted by the strong arms of the oak, carried up by the ascent of the flame-shaped fir. Round the spruce top the blue was deepened, concentrated by the fixed point; the memory of that spot, as it were, of the sky is still fresh—I can see it distinctly— still beautiful and full of meaning.

If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or
woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away.

Who can care alone for his or her petty trifles of existence, that has once entered amongst the wild flowers? How shall I shut out the sun? Shall I deny the constellations of the night? They are there; the Mystery is for ever about us—the question, the hope, the aspiration cannot be put out. To see so clearly is to value so highly and to feel too deeply.

For of all things there is none so sweet as sweet air—one great flower it is, drawn round about, over, and enclosing, like Aphrodite's arms; as if the dome of the sky were a bell- flower drooping down over us, and the magical essence of it filling all the room of the earth. Sweetest of all things is wild-flower air. Full of their ideal the starry flowers strained upwards on the bank, striving to keep above the rude grasses that pushed by them; genius has ever had such a struggle

The wind coming up the cliff seems to bring with it whole armfuls of sunshine,
and to throw the warmth and light against you as you linger. The walls and glass
reflect the light and push back the wind in puffs and eddies; the awning flutters;
light and wind spring upwards from the pavement; the sky is richly blue against
the parapets overhead; there are houses on one side, but on the other open space
and sea, and dim clouds in the extreme distance. The atmosphere is full of light,
and gives a sense of liveliness! every atom of it is in motion.

To me, while on the beach among the boats, the value of these clouds lies in their slowness of movement, and consequent effect in soothing the mind. Outside the hurry and drive of life a rest comes through the calm of nature. As the swell of the sea carries up the pebbles, and arranges the largest farthest inland, where they accumulate and stay unmoved, so the drifting of the clouds, and the touch of the wind, the sound of the surge, arrange the molecules of the mind in still layers. It is then that a dream fills it, and a dream is sometimes better than the best reality.

The swallows bring us the sunbeams on their wings from Africa to fill the fields
with flowers. From the time of the arrival of the first swallow the flowers take
heart; the few and scanty plants that had braved the earlier cold are succeeded by
a constantly enlarging list, till the banks and lanes are full of them. The chimney-
swallow is usually the forerunner of the three house-swallows; and perhaps no
fact in natural history has been so much studied as the migration of these tender
birds. The commonest things are always the most interesting. In summer there is
no bird so common everywhere as the swallow, and for that reason many
overlook it, though they rush to see a "white elephant." But the deepest thinkers
have spent hours and hours in considering the problem of the swallow—its
migrations, its flight, its habits; great poets have loved it; great artists and art-
writers have curiously studied it.

The wind passes, and it bends—let the wind, too, pass over the spirit. From the
cloud-shadow it emerges to the sunshine—let the heart come out from the
shadow of roofs to the open glow of the sky. High above, the songs of the larks
fall as rain—receive it with open hands. Pure is the colour of the green flags, the
slender-pointed blades—let the thought be pure as the light that shines through
that colour. Broad are the downs and open the aspect—gather the breadth and
largeness of view. Never can that view be wide enough and large enough, there
will always be room to aim higher. As the air of the hills enriches the blood, so
let the presence of these beautiful things enrich the inner sense.

But the mass of the tall grass crowds together, every leaf painted yellow by the autumn, a thick cover at the pit-side. This tall grass always awakes my fancy, its shape partly, partly its thickness, perhaps; and yet these feelings are not to be analysed. I like to look at it; I like to stand or move among it on the bank of a brook, to feel it touch and rustle against me. A sense of wildness comes with its touch, and I feel a little as I might feel if there was a vast forest round about. As a few strokes from a loving hand will soothe a weary forehead, so the gentle pressure of the wild grass soothes and strokes away the nervous tension born of civilised life.

Dearly as I love the open air, I cannot regret the mediaeval days. I do not wish
them back again, I would sooner fight in the foremost ranks of Time. Nor do we
need them, for the spirit of nature stays, and will always be here, no matter to
how high a pinnacle of thought the human mind may attain; still the sweet air, and
the hills, and the sea, and the sun, will always be with us.

Oddities

What is a general or a famous orator compared to a man always in the same attitude? Simply nobody, nobody knows him, everybody knows the mono-attitude man. Some people make their mark by invariably wearing the same short pilot coat. Doubtless it has been many times renewed, still it is the same coat. In winter it is thick, in summer thin, but identical in cut and colour. Some people sit at the same window of the reading-room at the same hour every day, all the year round. This is the way to become marked and famous; winning a battle is nothing to it.

The mouth is the centre of woman's beauty. To the lips the glance is attracted the
moment she approaches, and their shape remains in the memory longest. Curve,
colour, and substance are the three essentials of the lips, but these are nothing
without mobility, the soul of the mouth. If neither sculpture, nor the palette with
its varied resources, can convey the spell of perfect lips, how can it be done in
black letters of ink only? Nothing is so difficult, nothing so beautiful.

Pure colour almost always gives the idea of fire, or rather it is perhaps as if a
light shone through as well as colour itself. The fresh green blade of corn is like
this, so pellucid, so clear and pure in its green as to seem to shine with colour. It
is not brilliant—not a surface gleam or an enamel,—it is stained through…Force cannot make it; it must grow— an easy word to speak or write, in fact full of potency. It is this mystery of growth and life, of beauty, and sweetness, and colour, starting forth from the clods that gives the corn its power over me.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories. I found them to be a mixed bag really. Some of them are excellent with beautiful, lyrical prose, but I found some of them rather dull.