Chapter VI

.), never getting any single advantage or profit out of them except the pain of shattered hopes, the loss of money, and the most contemptuous notices in the reviews.

We are in the year 1874. Apparently, Jefferies has had his chance, and has thrown it away. He is six-and-twenty years of age--it is youth, but this young man has only twelve more years of life, and none of his work has yet been done. Why--why did no one tear him away from his vain and futile efforts? See, he toils day after day, with an energy which nothing can repress--a resolution to succeed which sustains him through all his disappointments. He covers acres of paper, and all to no purpose; for no one has told him the simplest law of all--that Art is imitation. One must not close the shutters, light the lamp, and then paint a flower one has never seen, as the painter thinks it ought to have been. Yet this is what Jefferies was doing. The young country lad, who knew no other society than that of the farm and the country town, was wasting and spoiling his life in writing about people and things whom he imagined. He was painting the flower he had never seen as he thought it ought to be.

Well, the great success of the _Times_ letters seemed to have led to nothing. Yet it gave him a better position in his native place. His work was now so assured, and his income so much improved--though still slender enough--that in July, 1874, after a three years' engagement, he was married.

For the first six months of their marriage the young pair lived on at Coate. They then removed to a small house in Victoria Street, Swindon, where their first child was born. It is a happy thing to think that it was in the first year of his wedded life that Jefferies brushed away the cobwebs from his brain, left the old things behind him for ever, and stepped out upon the greensward, the hillside, the forest, and the meadows, where he was to walk henceforth until the end. It was time, indeed, to throw away his novels of society, to put away the unreal rubbish, to forget the foolish dreams, to let the puppets who could never have lived lie dust-covered in the limbo of false and conventional novels. Where is it, that limbo? Welcome, long-desired flowers of May! Welcome, fragrant breath of the breezy down!

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