The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies Part 13

I think that I have never read, in all the sad chronicles of hapless authors, anything more pitiful than the history of the last years of this life so short, yet so rich in its sheaves of golden grain and piles of purple fruit. Everything possible of long-continued torture, necessity of work, poverty, anxiety, and hope of recovery continually deferred, are crammed into the miserable record which closes this volume.

Jefferies fell ill in December, 1881, five years and a half before the end. He was attacked by a disease for which an operation of a very severe and painful nature is the only cure. It is, however, one which, in the hands of a skilful surgeon, is generally successful. Horrible to relate, in his case, the operation proved unsuccessful, and had to be repeated again and again. Four times in twelve months the dreadful surgeon's knife was used upon this poor sufferer. For a whole year he could do no work at all. The modest savings of the preceding years were spent upon the physicians and the surgeons, and in the maintenance of his household, while the pen of the breadwinner was perforce resting.

Before he was able to take pen in hand again, he was reduced to something approaching dest.i.tution. You shall read directly how, when he recovered, hope immediately returned, and he was once more happy in the thought that now he could again work, though it was to begin the world once more. Alas! the interval of hope was brief indeed. Another, and a more mysterious disease attacked him. He felt an internal pain constantly gnawing him; he could not eat without pain; he grew daily weaker; he was at last no longer able to walk; he could only crawl.

Henceforth his days and nights were a long struggle against suffering, with a determination, however, to go on with his work. Nothing more wonderful than the courage and resolution of this man. As in youth he had resolved to succeed somehow, though as yet ignorant of the better way, so now he _would_ not be beaten by pain. His very best work, the work which will cause him to live, the work which places him among the writers of his country, to be remembered and to be read long after the men of his generation are dead and forgotten, was actually done while he was in this suffering. The "Pageant of Summer," for example: well, the "Pageant of Summer" reads as if it were the work of a man revelling in the warmth of the quivering air; of a man in perfect health and strength, body and mind at ease, surrendered wholly to the influence of the flowers and the sunshine, at peace, save for the natural sadness of one who communes much with himself on change, decay, and death. And yet the "Pageant of Summer" was written while he was in deadly pain and torture. Again, between 1883 and 1886 he published those collections of papers called "Life in the Fields" and "The Open Air." He also wrote "Red Deer," "Amaryllis," and a quant.i.ty of papers which have yet to be collected and published. If, even for a moment, he had an interval of strength, his busy pen began again to race over the paper, hasting to set down the thoughts that filled his brain.

His disease was discovered, after a period of intense suffering, to be an ulceration of the small intestine. It was weakness induced by this disease, which caused other complications, under which he gradually sank.

I suppose that Jefferies could never be considered a strong man. As a boy, tall, active, nervous, he was muscularly weaker than his younger brother. At the age of eighteen he showed symptoms which caused fear of a decline. Perhaps his intense love of the open air indicated the kind of medicine which he most needed. When he could no longer go into the open air he died. Perhaps, too, the consciousness of physical weakness, the sense of impending early death, caused him to yearn with so much longing after physical perfection and the fuller life which he clearly saw was possible. Those who are doomed to die young--as has been often observed--have the deepest sense and the keenest enjoyment of life.

Still, though not a strong man, he was apparently a healthy man. He lived at all times a simple and a healthy life; there was nothing to show that he was going to be struck down by so cruel an illness.

The period of greatest suffering seems to have been in the year 1884.

The weakness following it set in some time during the year 1885.

He writes to Mr. Charles Longman in May of the latter year:

"Your suggestion"--that he should write a year-book of Nature--"of a diary out of doors would no doubt make a good book, and I shall give serious thought to it. My great difficulty is the physical difficulty of writing. Since the spine gave way, there is no position in which I can lie or sit so as to use a pen without distress. Even a short letter like this is painful. Consequently, a vast ma.s.s of ideas go into s.p.a.ce, for I cannot write them down."

In August he returns to the subject:

"Many thanks for your kind letter and interest in my weakness. I sometimes rather need moral support of this sort, for after so long the spirits show signs of flagging, and the way seems endless. Such sympathy, therefore, helps me very much.... I should have liked to have written the book you proposed. I made several attempts, but it never satisfied me. I am glad, at all events, that you have forgiven my unintentional nonfulfilment of the promise. Even yet, perhaps, I may do something in that direction. Professor Gamgee, under whom I have been lately, says that complete recovery would follow a few weeks' basking in South Africa, or, failing that, Southern Europe. There is plenty of energy in me still. I sometimes dream of using the rifle--a dream, indeed, to a man who can with difficulty drag himself across a field."

In June he writes to his friend, Mr. C.P. Scott, of the _Manchester Guardian_:

"Since I last wrote to you I have been very seriously ill. The starvation went on and on, and no one could relieve it, till I had to stay in the bedroom, and finally went to bed, fainting nearly all day and night, and yet craving for food, half delirious, and in the most dreadful state. How I endured I cannot tell. At last I had Dr. Kidd down from London, and in forty-eight hours his treatment checked the disease. I got downstairs, next, out of doors in a Bath-chair, and now I can walk two hundred yards. But I am still the veriest shadow of a man--my nerves are gone to pieces--and he warns me that it will take months to effect a cure. Of that, however, he is certain. Under his advice I have left Eltham, and am staying here (Rotherfield, Suss.e.x) till a cottage can be found for me near Tunbridge Wells.... My last piece of MS. appears in _Longman_ this month, and I have now no more left, having exhausted all I wrote when able. At least, there remains but one piece--'Nature in the Louvre.' It is about a beautiful statue that interested me greatly, and which seems to have escaped notice in England. I think you would like the ideas expressed in it."

At this time it was suggested that he should make an application to the Royal Literary Fund. He writes both to Mr. Longman and to Mr. Scott in the strongest terms upon the subject. I do not, for my own part, in the least agree with Jefferies in his wholesale condemnation of that useful society, and therefore have the less hesitation in printing what he says of it:

'August 18, 1885.

"You have put before me a very great temptation. It is impossible for you to know how great, for there can be no doubt that it is the winter that is my enemy. Last winter I was indoors six months--in fact, it was eight before I really got out of doors, most of this time helpless, sitting in an easy chair before the fire, my feet on a pillow, and legs wrapped up in a railway-rug, up and down stairs on hands and knees, and unable even to dress myself. Even now it tears me to pieces even to walk a short distance. So that to pa.s.s next winter in warmth seems almost like life, besides the great possibility of complete recovery. There would be also the pleasure of the sights and scenes of Algiers or South Africa. In short, it has been a very great temptation, and I am sure it was most kind of you to think of me. But the Royal Literary Fund is a thing to accept aid from which humiliates the recipient past all bounds; it is worse than the workhouse. If long illness ultimately drove me to the workhouse, I should feel no disgrace, having done my utmost to fight with difficulties. Everyone has a right to that last relief.

If this fund were maintained by pressmen, authors, journalists, editors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, and so on, that would be quite another matter. There would be no humiliation--rather the contrary--and in time one might subscribe some day and help someone else. It is no such thing. It is kept up by dukes and marquises, lords and t.i.tled people, with a Prince at their head, and a vast quant.i.ty of trumpet-blowing, in order that these people may say they are patrons of literature! Patrons of literature! Was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable! I dare say if I were a town-born man I should not think so, but to me it wears an aspect of standing insult.

"No doubt we ought to combine--all who have ever touched a pen--then we could a.s.sist each other in a straightforward and manly way.

"The temptation to me is very great indeed, because there is no question that I have been slowly sinking for years for want of some such travel or stimulus working through the nervous system. But I have made up my mind to say no. I would rather run the risk of quitting this world altogether next winter than degrade myself in that way.

"I am trying all I can to move altogether to the neighbourhood of the sea. Possibly, even Dorset or Devon might answer; or, failing that, I may try to pay a short visit to Schwalbach, and see if the natural iron medicine of a mineral spring may do what compound physic cannot. But I fancy the sea residence would be preferable.

"Change is the only thing that as yet has affected me, which seems to point conclusively to an exhausted system rather than to disease."

To Mr. Scott he writes in a similar strain. It galls him to think of being "patronized," and, indeed, if that were the view taken by the council of the Royal Literary Fund, I, for one, should be the first to agree with him. But it is not. Jefferies was wrong about the supporters of the Fund which is, in fact, a.s.sisted by everybody who ever makes any success in literature, and by every writer of any distinction either in letters or in other fields. He adds, however, a paragraph in which I cordially agree, and to the carrying out of the suggestion contained in it some of us have, during the last three years, devoted a great deal of time and effort.

"We ought, of course, to have a real Literary a.s.sociation, to which subscription should be almost semi-compulsory. We ought to have some organization. Literature is young yet--scarce fifty years old. The legal and medical professions have had a start of a thousand years. Our profession is young yet, but will be the first of all in the time to come."

He goes on to speak of his health:

"Ever since Christmas I have been trying to move to the sea-coast, but I cannot effect it. I cannot stick to work long enough to produce any result, the extreme weakness will not let me, so that I cannot do anything. Whatever I wish to do, it seems as if a voice said, 'No, you shall not do it. Feebleness forbids.' I think I should like a good walk. No. I think I should like to write. No. I think I should like to rest. No. Always No to everything. Even writing this letter has made the spine ache almost past endurance.

I cannot convey to you how miserable it is to be impotent; to feel yourself full of ideas and work, and to be unable to effect anything; to sit and waste the hours. It is absolutely maddening."

In November he writes again. He is at Crowborough, where the fine air at first seemed to be restoring him. He could walk about in the field at the back of the house.

"Suddenly I went down as if I had been shot. All the improvement was lost, and now I have been indoors three months, steadily becoming weaker and more emaciated every day. It is, in fact, starvation. They cannot feed me, try what they will. No one would believe what misery it is, and what extreme debility it produces.

The worst of all is the helplessness. Often I am compelled to sit or lie for days and think, think, till I feel as if I should become insane, for my mind seems as clear as ever, and the anxiety and eager desire to do something is as strong as in my best days. There is an ancient story of a living man tied to a dead one, and that is like me; mind alive and body dead. I fear that my old friends will give me up in time, because I cannot travel the path of friendship now, and the Cymric proverb says that it soon grows covered with briars."

A letter, dated June 19, 1886, is too sad to be quoted. His dependence on others, even for the putting on of his clothes, his longing for the sea-coast, which he thinks is certain to do him good, his lament over the poverty which, through no fault of his own, has fallen upon him, fill up this melancholy letter. Day and night there is no cessation of pain.

Help of all kinds was forthcoming from friends whom one must not name: money, the offer of a house on the sea-coast; but there was the difficulty of travelling. How was he to be moved? This difficulty was got over, and he went to Bexhill for a time, returning to Crowborough in September. The sea had done him good. On the night of his return, he enjoyed a tranquil sleep for some hours, and awoke without pain.

Among the letters sent to me by Mr. Scott is one from a well-known physician who had been consulted on the case.

"There is no doubt," he says, "that there is some tuberculous affection of his lungs, though, so far as I have been able to make out, this does not seem to be at all in an active state.

"The serious complaints which make his life a misery to him I believe to be purely functional. He strikes me as being a very marked example of hysteria in man, though in his case, as in many among women, the commoner phenomena of hysteria are absent. I am surprised to hear that he spoke warmly of my treatment, for he would not admit to his ordinary attendant, nor to me, that his symptoms had undergone any palliation whatever. He is prejudiced against any treatment, and the result, according to him, always agrees with his prediction."

Evidently an extremely difficult and nervous patient to treat. But that might be expected. In October of 1886, Mr. Scott proposed to raise a fund among the friends and admirers of his works which should be devoted to sending him to a warmer climate. He consented, though with pain and bitterness of soul. "I have written," he says, "fourteen books." He enumerates them. "Scarcely anyone living has done so much." Yet he forgets to consider for how small and select an audience he has written.

"All of them have been praised by the reviews. I cannot help feeling it hard, after so much work, to come to such disgrace." It was hard, it was cruelly hard. While the pensions of the Civil List--a breach of trust if ever there was one--are bestowed upon daughters of distinguished officers and widows of civil servants, such a man as Jefferies, for whose a.s.sistance the grant is yearly asked and voted, is left to starve.

It is indeed cruelly hard on literature that the rulers of the country should be so blind, so deaf, so pitiless--so dishonest. They made Burns a gauger. Well: that was something. Could they not have made Jefferies a police-constable, for instance? They gave him nothing: it would have been useless to ask any Government to give anything: they wanted all the money for persons for whom it was never intended. There never has been--there is not now--not even at a time when Prime Ministers and ex-Cabinet Ministers write articles for monthly magazines, any Government which has had the least concern for, knowledge of, or touch with, literature, or its makers. Authors must develop and increase their own Society, and then they will not have to ask the Government for any Civil Pension list at all, and ministers may go on asking for the grant for the support of science and letters, and giving it all to their own creatures, and to the daughters, widows, and sisters of officers. It is hard, it is cruelly hard, as Jefferies said: it is a hardship and a disgrace to all of us that such a man as Jefferies should "come to such disgrace."

Well, the fund was raised, quietly, among the private friends of its promoters. But it came too late for the Algerian or South African expedition. The sick man was sent, however, to the seaside; to a house at Goring, on the Suss.e.x coast. From this place he wrote to Mr. Scott a little history of his illness, the nature of which I have already sketched. The description by a highly-sensitive man, then in a most nervous condition, of the horrible pain which he had been enduring is most terrible to read, and is altogether too terrible to be quoted. I dare not quote the whole of this dreadful story of long-continued agony. Take, however, the end of it. At last his wounds were somehow made to heal.

"Now imagine my joy. The wounds were well at last. I was free. I could walk and sit--actually sit down. I could work. I was very faint and ill, but fresh air would soon set that right. All these expenses had swallowed up a large share of my savings, and I had practically to begin life again. But I did not mind that. I went to work joyously.

"Now judge again of my disappointment. Within two months--in February--I was seized with a mysterious wasting disease, accompanied by much pain. I gradually wasted away to mere bones. By degrees this pain increased till it became almost insupportable. I can compare it to nothing but the flame of a small spirit lamp continually burning within me. Sometimes it seemed like a rat always gnaw, gnaw, night and day. I had no sleep. Everything I ate or drank seemed to add fuel to the flame. The local doctors could do nothing, so I went to London again, and in the course of the two years and more that it lasted I was under five of the leading London physicians. Altogether I had some forty prescriptions, and took something like sixty drugs, besides being put on diet. It was not the slightest use, and it became evident that they had no idea what was really the matter with me. The pain went on, burn, burn, burn. If I wrote a volume I could not describe it to you, this terrible scorching pain, night and day. There is nothing in medical books like it, except the pain that follows corrosive sublimate which burns the tissues. It was at times so maddening that I dreaded to go a few miles alone by rail lest I should throw myself out of the window of the carriage. I worked and wrote all this time, and some of my best work was done in this intense agony. I received letters from New Zealand, from the United States, even from the islands of the Pacific, from people who had read my writings. It seemed so strange that I should read these letters, and yet all the time, to be writhing in agony.

"At last, in April, 1885, nature gave way, and I broke down utterly, and could only lie on the sofa in a fainting condition. In a few days I became so helpless and weak that there appeared little chance of my living. Someone suggested that Dr. Kidd should be sent for. He came on Sunday morning, and found me nearly ended. I was fainting during the examination. He discovered that it was ulceration of the intestines. You know how painful an ulcer is anywhere--say on your lip--now for over two years this ulceration had been burning its way in the intestines.

"He put me on milk diet, malt bread, malt extract, malted food, meat shredded and pounded in a mortar, raw beef, and so on. In forty-eight hours the pain was better. For three weeks I improved and hoped. I think that had the diet been then altered to the ordinary food, I might have made a recovery; instead of which it was kept up for nine weeks, at the end of which I had lost all the improvement, and was so weak that I could but just crawl up and down stairs. I attribute my subsequent exhaustion to the continued use of milk, which has the effect of destroying nervous energy."

'Oct. 22, 1886.

"I have been obliged to set all aside from extreme feebleness.

During the last four weeks, indeed, the weakness and emaciation have become very great, so much so that I almost fancy the bones waste. But what I feel most is the loss of fresh air from inability to go out. The last two days have been dry, so that I have been able to get up and down by the house a little.

"Still, I should have managed somehow to write to you were it not for the great dislike I feel to this begging business. You must not take offence at this, though you may think me very foolish. I keep putting it off and putting it off, till now I suppose I must do it, or stay the winter indoors in helplessness. To-day I have written to obtain the information necessary to fill up the form you sent.

"In September, 1885, my spine seemed suddenly to snap. It happened in ten minutes--quite suddenly. It felt as if one of the vertebrae had been taken away. It was no doubt a form of paralysis. I had to take to the sofa again, and was confined to the house for over seven months, quite helpless. I could not undress myself. At Christmas, other troubles set in; the local doctor gave me up. He told my wife that nothing could be done for me, and that the only hope was in my keeping in good spirits. The misery of that dreadful winter will never be forgotten. At length nature seemed to revive a little, and I got downstairs, and soon after Miss Scott came to see me, and you sent me to the sea. On returning from the sea I slowly lost ground again. In the summer I had an attack of vomiting blood--of itself enough to alarm most people. By October I was confined indoors again. At last I got down here.

"Besides all these sufferings I had another trial--a loss by death--one that I cannot dwell upon;"--it was the death of his youngest child--"but it broke me down very much.

"Of the loss of all my savings I need not say much. But it is difficult to begin the world afresh"--alas! he was just about to end the world--"even with good health.

"With truth I think I may say that there are few, very few, perhaps none, living who have gone through such a series of diseases. There are many dead--many who have killed themselves for a tenth part of the pain--there are few living.