Landmarks (21 page)

‘Unseen’ is a word that recurs discreetly in his writing: the
‘bluebells
in th[e] hedge’ that are ‘unseen, except by the rabbits’; the plump trout that wavers gently in the current, holding its place in the shadow under the bridge – ‘unseen’ save by Jefferies. His use of the word anticipates that of the artist Paul Nash, who in 1938 wrote of the ‘unseen landscapes’ of England.
‘The landscapes I have in mind
,’ said Nash:

are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived; only in that way can they be regarded as invisible.

Unseen people preoccupied Jefferies, as well as unseen landscapes. Throughout his writing he was drawn to those who worked the land as well as those who watched it. Out in the Surrey edgelands, he found and wrote about hedgers and ditchers, hay-tyers, mouchers, drovers, shepherds with
‘pastoral crooks
’, Irish harvesters, tinkers, tramps, gravel-dredgers toiling with hand-scoops, carters, reapers and others. These people – the rural poor – never speak to Jefferies and seem hardly to notice him (Jefferies himself being another of the ‘unseen’ presences in the book), but he observes them sympathetically rather than voyeuristically, recording the ‘hard hand-play’ and ‘ceaseless toil’ of their labour. ‘The few [workers] that wear bright colours are seen,’ he remarks, ‘the many who do not are unnoticed.’

Optics and perception fascinated Jefferies, and
Nature near London
– like his late essay collection
The Life of the Fields
(1884) – contains some premonitory investigations not just into what we see, but how we see. As Richard Mabey has pointed out, Jefferies was decades ahead of his time as an ethologist, intuiting his way to an understanding of animal instinct that pre-dated the breakthroughs of Darling and Lorenz in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also pioneering as a philosopher of vision: his work foresaw the discoveries of phenomenology in the twentieth century concerning intersubjectivity. Thus it is that landscape, in Jefferies, often refuses to act as a flat frieze that yields its content stably to the viewer. Rather, it is volatile and unruly – dynamically disobedient to the eye. Often Jefferies wobbles our sense of reliable vision, showing the impossibility of achieving a privileged position of perception:
‘Even trees which have some semblance
of balance in form are not really so, and as you walk round them so their outline changes.’ If you
‘walk all round [a] meadow
… still no vantage point can be found where the herbage groups itself, whence a scheme of colour is perceivable’. Repeatedly, phenomena refuse to resolve into order: a wind blowing across water makes
‘wavelets
’ that ‘form no design; watch the sheeny maze as long as one will, the eye cannot get at the clue, and so unwind the pattern’.

The cumulative result of these seemingly idle adventures into optics is radical: they demonstrate a decentred eye and a centreless nature. Walking becomes a means to a certain kind of knowledge – one of the constituents of which is an awareness of ignorance.
Moments such as these recall Shepherd’s brilliant observations about observation in
The Living Mountain
:

This changing of focus
in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear … Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker.

Jefferies, too, aspires to catch things ‘in the very act of becoming’; thus the present participles that gang and roister in his prose:
‘the leaves are enlarging
, and the sap rising, and the hard trunks of the trees swelling with its flow; the grass blades pushing upwards; the seeds completing their shape; the tinted petals uncurling’.

Jefferies was alarmed by scarcity and exhilarated by excess. Nature’s surplus – its gratuity of gift – often thrillingly exceeds his ability to record it:
‘a thousand thousand buds
and leaves and flowers and blades of grass, things to note day by day, increasing so rapidly that no pencil can put them down and no book hold them, not even to number them’. Just beyond the city fringe, he finds a profusion of life:
‘Sparrows crowd every hedge
and field, their numbers are incredible; chaffinches are not to be counted; of greenfinches there must be thousands.’ During his first spring in Surbiton, he is
‘astonished and delighted
’ to discover the bird life which proclaimed itself everywhere:

The bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens which came to the thickets in the furze, the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush, every tree, almost every clod, for the larks were so many, seemed to have its songster. As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most secluded country.

What a stark, sad contrast this teeming bird life makes with the contemporary countryside. Over the past half-century, Britain has lost more than 44 million breeding birds, including an average of more than fifty house sparrows every hour for those fifty years. Over the past twenty years, farmland bird populations in particular have plummeted: the turtle dove has suffered a 95 per cent decline in numbers, the cuckoo population has halved, lapwings have lost 41 per cent of their numbers. Jefferies would hardly recognize London’s edgelands today: they would look and sound so very different.

Jefferies’ eye for flowers was at least as sharp as his eye for birds. He wandered the verges of Surbiton’s suburban lanes, finding them to be ruderal idylls of astonishing diversity.
‘There are about sixty wild flowers
,’ he writes wonderfully of one road, ‘which grow freely along [it], namely’:

yellow agrimony, amphibious persicaria, arum, avens, bindweed, bird’s foot lotus, bittersweet, blackberry, black and white bryony, brooklime, burdock, buttercups, wild camomile, wild carrot, celandine (the great and lesser), cinquefoil, cleavers, corn buttercup, corn mint, corn sowthistle, and spurrey, cowslip, cow-parsnip, wild parsley, daisy, dandelion, dead nettle, and white dog rose, and trailing rose, violets (the sweet and the scentless), figwort, veronica, ground ivy, willowherb (two sorts), herb Robert, honeysuckle, lady’s smock, purple loosestrife, mallow, meadow-orchis, meadow-sweet, yarrow, moon daisy, St John’s wort, pimpernel, water plantain, poppy, rattles, scabious, self-heal, silverweed, sowthistle, stitchwort, teazles, tormentil, vetches, and yellow vetch.

What riches in a single verge! Echoes here of MacDiarmid on the intricacies of heather, and Finlay and Anne teasing such variety out of the peat-lands of Lewis. Jefferies’ list celebrates profusion, but it should also be heard as an elegy-in-waiting. He saw
Nature near London
, like much of his late writing, as fulfilling an archival function. It was clear to him that London would keep spreading, and that the countryside would be engulfed by the city’s mobile margins. The image of the archive occurs explicitly in Jefferies’ chapter on Kew Gardens, where he praises the
‘great green book
’ that grows there. The garden ‘restores the ancient knowledge of the monks and the witches’, he writes approvingly; it prompts him also to regret that modernity has led to ‘the lore of herbs [being] in great measure decayed and … lost’. ‘The names of many of the commonest herbs,’ he notes sadly, ‘are quite forgotten.’ He elected himself a recording angel for landscape and knowledge that was to be lost, and he wrote in the certainty of its future destruction – rather as Eugène Atget set out to photograph old Paris in the 1890s, aware that its abolition approached, or as Baker tasked himself with evoking the Essex peregrines and their territory:
‘Before it is too late
, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in … It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’

~

‘The heart
from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful,’ declares Jefferies in a late essay, ‘Hours of Spring’.
At his most movingly and innocently optimistic, he saw nature as a redeeming force, and his writing worked as what might now be called a consciousness-raising exercise – an attempt to bring urbanites and suburbanites to a fresh awareness of natural beauty, and thereby to a heightened sense of ‘joy in life’ and the collective nature of identity:

[T]he goldfinches
and the tiny caterpillars, the brilliant sun, if looked at lovingly and thoughtfully, will lift the soul out of the smaller life of human care that is of selfish aims … into the greater, the limitless life which has been going on over universal space from endless ages past, which is going on now, and which will for ever and for ever, in one form or another, continue to proceed.

It is true that at times, when striving to evoke the joy he felt in nature, Jefferies can sound too much like Molesworth’s sissyish classmate, Basil Fotherington-Thomas, who wanders round the grounds of St Custard’s school in a late-Romantic rapture, trilling his greetings to the world. But Jefferies’ cries of wonder are ballasted by his cries of despair. Often he writes of his sense of the material world’s terrible indifference to human presence.
‘The earth is all in all to me
,’ he says bleakly in ‘Hours of Spring’, ‘but I am nothing to the earth: it is bitter to know this before you are dead.’ He acknowledges as an ‘old, old error’ the proposition that ‘I love the earth, therefore the earth loves me – I am her child – I am Man, the favoured of all creatures.’ And he writes blackly of the lack of the world’s answer to his calls: ‘Dull-surfaced matter, like a polished mirror, reflects back thought to thought’s self within.’ A similar veering between hope and hopelessness would characterize Edward Thomas’s relations with nature.
‘I am not a part of nature
,’ wrote Thomas desperately in 1913. ‘I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.’

Sunlight was the substance Jefferies associated most with life; dust the substance that most often triggered his dismayed materialism and his thoughts of death. Sunlight prompts him to his famous deliquescence in the opening pages of his autobiography,
The Story of My Heart
(1883), and sunlight falls through many pages of
Nature near London
. But dust – comminuted matter, collateral of ruin – settles upon them too: ripped handfuls of
‘delicate grasses
’ and ‘dandelion stalks’ that lie ‘sprinkled with dust’ on a roadside verge, the ‘passing feet’ that crush ‘silverweed … into the dust’. The source of this morbid dust is almost always London. Dust is the metropolis’s scurf. Like the
‘white granular powder’
that gathers lethally upon a thriving landscape in the opening pages of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
(1962), Jefferies’ dust contaminates both body and soul:

The dust of London
fills the eyes and blurs the vision; but it penetrates deeper than that. There is a dust that chokes the spirit, and it is this that makes the streets so long, the stones so stony, the desk so wooden; the very rustiness of the iron railings about the offices sets the teeth on edge, the sooty blackened walls (yet without shadow) thrust back the sympathies which are ever trying to cling to the inanimate things around us.

At some point, probably in the late 1860s, Jefferies had contracted tuberculosis and he came increasingly to blame London for his affliction, which he figured as a kind of
‘dust
’ that ‘settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge’. Repeatedly in
Nature near London
, the
‘immense City’
is the source of poison and pollution. On one hot July day, Jefferies writes,
‘the atmosphere of London
… came bodily and undiluted out into the cornfields’ – a toxic miasma that shifts and shimmers in the air. Elsewhere he conjures a vision of London as a city with its own
Götterdämmerung
building above it:

the aurora of dark vapour
, streamers extending from the thicker masses, slowly moves and yet does not go away; it is just such a sky as a painter might give to some tremendous historical event, a sky big with presage, gloom, tragedy.

In another late essay, written when he was severely ill, even nature will not serve as salve: he wonders aloud if all of existence has been a dream, and whether
‘in course of time I shall find out
also, when I pass away, physically, that as a matter of fact there never was any earth’.

~

If the suburbs, as J. G. Ballard observed, are places where the future waits to happen, then the edgelands might be where the future is already underway. In 1884, a year after the publication of
Nature near London
, John Ruskin delivered two minatory lectures under the title ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. Since the early 1870s Ruskin had become anxious that the weather in Britain had
‘decisively worsened
’, becoming ‘darker and stormier, possessed of an animate threat’. His ‘Storm-Cloud’ lectures explicitly connected this deteriorating climate with physical and moral pollution, and they are rife with images of airborne toxicity, plague-winds, pollution and moral ‘gloom’. The year following Ruskin’s lectures, Jefferies published a counterfactual novella entitled
After London; Or, Wild England
, which realized in hypothetical form both his and Ruskin’s
senses of impending ‘tragedy’.
After London
is set in a post-apocalyptic southern England in which, as a result of an unspecified catastrophe, the landscape has been dramatically re-wilded. Its opening paragraph assumes the matter-of-fact tone of a chronicle: