ries would have
done well to leave Hodge and Hodge's masters alone and keep to his beasts
and birds and fishes.

The General.

Is it not plain as the nose on your face that his admirers admire him
injudiciously? It is true, for instance, that he is in a sense, 'too
full' (the phrase is Mr. Besant's) for the generality of readers. But it
is also true that he is not nearly full enough: that they look for
conclusions while he is bent upon giving them only details: that they
clamour for a breath of inspiration while he is bent upon emptying his
note-book in decent English; that they persist in demanding a motive, a
leading idea, a justification, while he with knowledge crammed is fixed
in his resolve to tell them no more than that there are milestones on the
Dover Road, or that there are so many nails of so many shapes and so many
colours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer 'their
geraniums in the conservatory.' They refuse, in any case, to call a
'picture' that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. They
are naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long and
speaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline to
recognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of an
artist. The artist is he who knows how to select and to inspire the
results of his selection. Jefferies could do neither. He was a reporter
of genius; and he never got beyond reporting. To the average reader he
is wanting in the great essentials of excitement: he is prodigal of
facts, and he contrives to set none down so as to make one believe in it
for longer than the instant of perusal. From his work the passionate
human quality is not less absent than the capacity of selection and the
gift of inspiration, and all the enthusiasm of all the enthusiasts of an
enthusiastic age will not make him and his work acceptable to the
aforesaid average reader. In letters he is as the ideal British water-
colourist in paint: the care of both is not art but facts, and again
facts, and facts ever. You consider their work; you cannot see the wood
for the trees; and you are fain to conclude that themselves were so much
interested in the trees they did not even know the wood was there.

Last Words.

To come to an end with the man:--his range was very limited, and within
that range his activity was excessive; yet the consequences of his
enormous effort were--and are--a trifle disap