Time and Eternity in Jefferies’ Thought

Time and Eternity in Jefferies’ Thought

By Simon Coleman

"....the unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all.” Carl Jung.


The mystical writings of Richard Jefferies, which centre on his remarkable autobiography The Story of My Heart, make up a significant proportion of his output during the last five years of his life. Taken together, this is a body of work which, with eloquence and sincerity, articulates the wonder of his experience of the natural world and his passionate belief in an eternity and an ideal of life. This article explores Jefferies’ idea of eternity and how it relates to his, and consequently man’s, relationship with nature. It will examine parts of the first half of the autobiography, along with three of his most evocative ‘nature mysticism’ essays, ‘The Pageant of Summer’, 'St Guido'  and ‘Wildflowers’. It will seek to trace the development of his thought, beginning with pure soul seeking in the early chapters of the autobiography, before progressing to a deeper awareness of human life and experience through time in Chapter 6. In the three essays I will attempt to show that Jefferies juxtaposes nature and human reality to produce a more powerful expression of the ideal of life than is found in The Story of My Heart.

The Story of My Heart, despite perfectly understandable shortcomings, in my view quite successfully presents most of the important strands of Jefferies’ mystical and idealistic thought. Its ideas and speculations arise from his own experience of life, even if in places there are indications of the influence of Plato in his youth. Chapter 1 presents us with the awakening of his inner desire for a larger soul life which becomes the central theme of the book. Some of the most powerful passages demonstrate his ability to feel back into the past and sense the sunlight linking him with the life, the consciousness of the ages. The result is the experience of an enlarged consciousness in himself and the desire for a far greater expansion. The sun symbolises his inner consciousness and he desires the ‘soul equivalent’ of its brilliance. When compared to human years the sun suggests eternity, an idea perhaps most forcefully expressed in that wonderfully uplifting essay, ‘Nature and Eternity’. Jefferies’ most common metaphors for illustrating his desire for more soul life are drawn from his awareness of the sun’s presence: as it lights up each leaf and blade of grass, so would his soul, with greater powers, see into the real nature of the experienced world and grasp its subtle meaning. It is through this greater power of soul that the larger life can be realised.

Some commentators have thought that The Story rather loses its way after Chapter 1, but I think Chapter 2 very effectively sustains the energy of the ecstatic first chapter. It opens with Jefferies in the narrow valley grooved in prehistoric times, the only sound being the sparrows in the wheat above. Under the full glare of the eternal sun, he considers the magnitude of the passage of time down to his present: ‘How many, many years, how many cycles of years, how many bundles of cycles of years had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow?’ The hollow in the hills probably symbolises, for him, an opening out, an expansion of consciousness. The sides of the hollow seem to support the sky and serve to draw his thoughts upwards and outwards. He feels the flow of time down to that moment and he prays that he might have the intellectual part of it, the idea behind the passage of all the countless ages. This feeling into the depths of the past brings the present, the ‘now’, into sharper focus – a technique he uses frequently in the autobiography.

‘Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrous present. For the day – the very moment I breathed, that second of time then in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as all that had gone before… ‘Now, this moment give me all the thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in the cosmos around me.’

He talks of the ‘soul expressed in the cosmos’, suggesting a pantheistic outlook, but we learn later that he sees no soul in nature and the universe. I think in the early chapters he is trying to explain the development of his thoughts which emerged gradually during his early adulthood. He starts with an initial sense of oneness with the cosmos, then describes instants of experience which appear to be removed from time, before coming to his belief in the immortality of the soul and a ‘higher than deity’ in Chapters 3 and 4. The problem of interpreting Jefferies’ mysticism is complicated by the fact that he does not describe his experiences chronologically.

In Chapter 2 he sees his desire for more soul life expressed everywhere in nature, and most powerfully in the human form. The idea of nature being without design is also central to his thought. None of this, however, prepares the reader for the whirlwind climax to the chapter – his experience in the ancient castle at Pevensey. Although what happened there prompted him to write down the first notes towards the drafting of The Story of My Heart, the experience itself does not seem to have been discussed at much length by Jefferies’ biographers. The very powerful and intense prose seems to suggest that something of huge significance was revealed to him. He has led us through the winding way of his soul experiences and aspirations to an apparently more important moment of awakening. Looking at the stones of the Roman wall and feeling back through the ages,

‘The grey stones, the thin red bricks laid by those whose eyes had seen Caesar's Rome, lifted me out of the grasp of house-life, of modern civilisation, of those minutiae which occupy the moment. The grey stone made me feel as if I had existed from then till now, so strongly did I enter into and see my own life as if reflected. My own existence was focussed back on me; I saw its joy, its unhappiness, its birth, its death, its possibilities among the infinite, above all its yearning Question. Why? Seeing it thus clearly, and lifted out of the moment by the force of seventeen centuries, I recognised the full mystery and the depth of things in the roots of the dry grass on the wall, in the green sea flowing near. Is there anything I can do? The mystery and the possibilities are not in the roots of the grass, nor is the depth of things in the sea; they are in my existence, in my soul.’

The passage of the centuries and the feeling of his soul being separate from matter concentrate his mind on the reality of that moment of existence, and he now sees his life as if from outside it. His birth, death and what has happened in his life are, it appears, removed from time. They are in some sort of continuum. He sees them all as soul experiences; he sees his soul in them. At this point there is a decisive move away from any pantheistic beliefs which Jefferies might have suggested at some points in Chapters I and II. From now on his soul stands apart from nature. Soul is entirely natural to him while matter now seems mysterious, even alien to him – at one point he sees it as something ‘supernatural’.

The eternity theme in The Story of My Heart is really a development from the message communicated to Bevis in Wood Magic by the brook and the wind. In Chapter 3 of the autobiography, describing his thoughts by a tumulus on the downs, he conveys the idea in short, simple sentences which are very effective.

‘It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air…The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment.’

This is his supreme expression of his belief in an eternity which is real and can be experienced – it is here. He feels that an instant of time, when fully experienced, contains all time: the past and future are not separated from the present moment. The ‘now’ becomes the centre of a ‘cosmos’ of consciousness through which the immortal soul can travel. At times in the book he seems to hint at the possibility of soul communicating with some deeper reality, something which occurs elsewhere in his writing. In ‘Meadow Thoughts’ the sunlight and the water communicate to him the ‘silent mystery’, while in The Dewy Morn Felise is ‘led along by unknown impulses, as if voices issued from the woods calling her to enter’. Jefferies seems to perceive some dynamic interaction of consciousnesses in an infinite, timeless structure and when he feels into the life of the man interred in the tumulus the idea of the soul’s immortality becomes a natural one.

Chapter 6 made a huge impression on me when I first read it. In it Jefferies first describes the ceaseless bustle he witnessed in front of the Royal Exchange before going on to survey the superstitions and beliefs of the past and of his own time. This is a very significant chapter, because here Jefferies returns from his inner searching to stand face to face with the whirling tide of human life before him – human life as a whole is now examined in the light of his own experiences. He brilliantly captures the scene before him and the sheer energy of the prose is compelling. He conveys to us the shapeless struggle of human existence and then sweeps us back through the centuries, intellectually burning up (his metaphor) the creeds, superstitions and doctrines of the ages. While in the earlier chapters the realisation of the immensity of time stretching back to pre-human times brings to his own life a sense of a deeper meaning, now, by contemplation of human thought down the ages the scene before him is brought into sharper focus.

He sees that the people in the crowds, driven on by the press of their circumstances, require ‘Something real now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns’. He is so intensely aware of the human struggle – he knew all about it from his own experience – where people were ‘beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact.’ All the while he was watching the scene Jefferies is conscious of the sun and the mighty forces of the universe where the real mystery was to be found. When he writes about soul-life he conveys an ever-present sense of quest, of some truth to be sought, while labour is portrayed as ‘a weariness’, a waste of energy which prevents people appreciating beauty. The message is clear: once nailed down to a materialistic existence, life becomes soul-less. Nor is any help to be found in religions based on theistic ideas which looked to a future paradise – these are merely useless superstitions. In the autobiography he goes on to outline his ideas for a better human life at a physical and mental level which would lead to more soul life. In the ‘Pageant of Summer’, however, he looks directly to nature for expression of something that could be translated into both a physical and spiritual ideal for man. This ideal, although influenced by the Classical Greek model, grew directly out of the feelings he had when he wandered the meadows and the hills in his youth.

Nowhere does Jefferies weave time and eternity themes into direct experience of nature more effectively than in ‘The Pageant of Summer’, his finest piece of writing. I think that there are parallels between Jefferies’ approach to the problem of the man / nature dichotomy and some ideas found in Buddhist thought, though I do not wish to place too great an emphasis on this as Jefferies must be allowed to speak for himself. The eternity he felt has nothing to do with endless linear time nor, as S.J. Looker points out, does he ever seek a union with an ‘Absolute’. Time is a product of physical existence, of differentiation between one and many, subject and object, man and nature. In The Story of My Heart his soul can never be ‘dipped in time’ because he feels that it exists completely apart from the material world. In ‘The Pageant of Summer’ Jefferies adopts a different approach. He does not deny time, but he still senses that there is something beyond time and that the reality of existence involves both of these. He wants to experience as much of this infinitely unfolding and endless reality as he can – and do so now, not in a future paradise. He has long ago departed from dualistic religious thought with its antitheses of God and man, life and death, heaven and hell. In terms of the power of expression of ideas largely unfamiliar to western thought and the lyrical beauty into which they are woven, it is a remarkable piece of work for a man of his time to produce.

In the essay he draws on all his creative powers to depict a vivid summer scene of endless life where time and timelessness (perhaps ‘timelessness’ is a better word than ‘eternity’, as the latter is too closely associated with traditional religious beliefs) go on together. This is a work of pure expression – expression of nature, of the underlying mysteries of life and of the human ideal. The conceptual thinking that is necessarily present in The Story of My Heart is absent here. The descriptions of plant, animal and insect life come in no set order – they are strewn around, as lacking in design as nature herself. In The Story of My Heart he goes through nature and seeks an infinite soul life; in the ‘Pageant of Summer’ we have his soul and nature existing side by side but with the potential to find a point of meeting. Nature is here a source of hope for mankind:

‘Let us not look at ourselves but onwards, and take strength from the leaf and the signs of the field. He is indeed despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.’

This would appear to contradict The Story of My Heart which states that there is nothing for man in nature – indeed nature sometimes appears as something strange confronting him. In ‘The Pageant of Summer’ the deeper meaning to existence is more passively sought and we can either view this as a different strand to his mysticism or as a development from the autobiography. The active and passive approaches to his seeking could produce works of striking contrast and show that Jefferies was more than a writer of rapturous prose-poetry. In ‘The Pageant of Summer’ was he describing a truly religious experience, something which would set him apart from mystics seeking the ‘Absolute’ and experiences based on theistic beliefs? I think that in this essay he moves on from the condition of ‘soul being all’ which emerges after Chapter 1 of the autobiography to describe a state of being which involved the outer world as much as his inner self or soul.

The magic of the essay is partly due to the way it conveys the feeling of everything in nature living for itself, unconsciously, paying no attention to human time. Nature itself reflects or symbolises something eternal. While Jefferies enters into the wonders he sees and hears around him - his objective world - he simultaneously searches inwards into his own being. He encounters nature as something both familiar to him and yet apart from him. I suggest that he is trying to reach a point where unconscious nature and conscious man meet, a point of identity. This would appear to correspond to the point where subjectivity and objectivity are identical, before time and timelessness have become differentiated, a concept in some Buddhist thought referred to as the ‘beginningless beginning’.

The personal sadness associated with the passage of time is present in this work and becomes stronger in essays such as ‘Wildflowers’, ‘Hours of Spring’ and ‘My Old Village’. But the ‘Pageant of Summer’ is infused with an unquenchable optimism: we can gather beauty from nature; this beauty which exists for itself should give us hope. The idea of gathering beauty to expand the mind and spirit is even more evocatively conveyed in the final passage.

‘The invisible shadow goes on and steals from us. But now, while I can see the shadow of the tree and watch it slowly gliding along the surface of the grass, it is mine. These are the only hours that are not wasted – these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. Does this reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind? It does; much the same ideal that Phidias sculptured of man and woman filled with a godlike sense of the violet fields of Greece, beautiful beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove before the lurid lightning of the unknown. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.’

This is surely as powerful a statement of the total joy of living, of the reality of the world experienced by the senses, and the value of the resulting spiritual awakening that a human being could make. Jefferies points directly to the infinite beauty of nature to show the human possibilities which we can grasp. Nature shows us her perfection and we have to find our own, by ourselves. Time passes but if it is measured by the sun and not by clocks, then life can be lived real, both in body and soul, and time by itself will have no meaning as everything will be experience of beauty.

In his nature worship Jefferies is not merely seeking participation, but actual identity, absorption and assimilation. His finding of the June rose provides the essay with a more powerful underlying meaning that does not merely reflect his subjectivity. He has placed the scene in time – it was ‘between the may and the June roses’. He finds the rose unexpectedly early, perhaps implying that this particular one was seen for the first time. This is a point of awakening, when his unconscious feelings which, we can assume, have been guiding him along his ramble in the sun, are suddenly brought to consciousness: ‘Straight go the white petals to the heart’ and his mind instantly goes back to earlier pageants of summer, giving the sense of those summers being connected through his experience of that particular moment. This is one of those instants when he feels the existence of that larger reality and the language used is more evocative than in the moments of awakening in The Story of My Heart. There is also, I feel, the impression that Jefferies’ finding of the rose is not all: it also finds him.

In this work the human ideal is not just an aspiration but exists somewhere. The June rose may just be symbolic but Jefferies’ finding of it suggests a meeting of the human ideal and the ideal of nature. There is plenty of purely objective description of nature where time clearly exists – the may and the June rose have their own times. The June rose is not just there for Jefferies to discover, it is there for itself. W.J. Keith suggests that human reality only is presented in ‘The Pageant of Summer’ [11] but was not Jefferies trying to express something of the reality? The soul lives for itself and nature lives for herself, but in finding the true nature of one that of the other is discovered. Jefferies is consistent in making no reference to an ‘Absolute’ or any other such certainty, ensuring that the essay allows the fullest expression of the mystery of existence itself.

The beautiful essay ‘St Guido’ also provides useful insights into Jefferies’ idealistic view of man and nature. In the books Wood Magic and Bevis, especially the former, the eternity theme had a special significance for Jefferies when projected into childhood. In ‘St Guido’ it is from this perspective that he approaches the idea of human identity discovered in nature and his belief in ‘the now being all’. The undeveloped mind of a child, being incapable of conceptual thought, would naturally be receptive to nature’s message if that child were allowed to roam freely in the meadows. The boy Guido becomes completely immersed in nature where, as in Wood Magic, all living things can talk, and the wheat teaches him the philosophy of the ‘Pageant of Summer’. The wheat was unhappy at the thought of all the centuries that had passed, with all the flowers and the songs, while so many people, weighed down with labour have been unhappy. It is the classic Jefferies theme again: because of the incessant toil the magic of the moment is lost, the flowers are not gathered. The message is delivered more powerfully here than in The Story of My Heart, as nature herself delivers it. The wheat also says that it has thought so much more of itself since people came and cultivated it for their own benefit, another way of expressing the coming together of man and nature which makes the moment eternal. It is worth making comparisons with the passages in Wood Magic that convey similar sentiments. The completeness of the mental picture of living nature we are given in ‘St Guido’ and the effortlessness with which the philosophy emerges from it are strongly redolent of ‘The Pageant of Summer’. These two essays need to be viewed in the same context – that of the fullest development of Jefferies’ idealistic thought.

‘Wildflowers’ is another masterpiece, but a departure from the ‘Pageant of Summer’ and ‘St Guido’ in a number of ways. The work centres on his feelings when finding and gathering flowers in childhood and there is an underlying sense of sadness at the passage of the years from that magical period of life. As a boy he found ‘unconscious happiness in finding wild flowers - unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded.’ He then considers the idea of coming to nature as an adult without any previous memories:

‘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. So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass.'

This essay probably contains his most impassioned descriptions of this instant picture of experienced nature. But whereas the ‘Pageant of Summer’ sweeps on with relentless optimism towards the human ideal and Jefferies’ personal unhappiness vanishes into the stream of morally uplifting sentiments, ‘Wildflowers’ becomes much more subjective and tips over into sentimentality. The sense of the eternity reflected in nature disappears with the passages on boyhood and there follows an acute sense of separation from nature, magnificently illustrated by the passage describing the cows standing in the buttercups:

‘On their broad brows the year falls gently; their great beautiful eyes, which need but a tear or a smile to make them human - without these such eyes, so large and full seem above human life, the eyes of the immortals, enduring without passion – in these eyes, as a mirror, nature is reflected.’

In ‘My Old Village’, the theme of divorce from nature as known in childhood is even more painfully expressed: ‘The brook is dead, for when man goes nature ends.’

There are striking similarities between some of Jefferies’ beliefs and those of more recent writers and thinkers. Jefferies’ roughly-sketched world view finds echoes in the writings of Carl Jung and Jiddu Krishnamurti, and some of the ideas put forward by the ‘new physicists’ investigating consciousness. The fact that Jefferies was not at ease with the world of human affairs as, for example, Walt Whitman was, should in no way diminish his value as a thinker who stood face to face with the real world of nature and human life, having erased past dogmas from his mind. His thought develops from pure soul seeking in The Story of My Heart to a deeper affinity between the natural world and his inner being in ‘The Pageant of Summer’ and ‘St Guido’. He felt into something deeper than a purely physical world, a reality where eternity was now and not in the future, something which included physical and spiritual but extended infinitely beyond these. He sought truth in an entirely non-theistic way and realised that the creation of a whole new vocabulary would be required to express the language of the soul. In ‘Wildflowers’ and later essays he seems to turn in on himself and see his boyhood spent in the country as a magical world lost forever.

It was surely natural that a man whose thought was many years in advance of his time should have had faith in the future of mankind, at both a spiritual and a practical level. He predicted air travel with absolute confidence and foresaw the relentless advance of biological science, but he believed that scientific advances were useless unless to improve the physical and mental well-being of man. The ideal of human life would require a deeper understanding of man’s connection with, and separateness from, nature. Nature allows us to feel into the ‘total’ reality. It was outside ordinary human experience but, Jefferies believed, could be reached by deeper levels of the mind which we have yet to uncover. He was convinced that in the future we would make this leap and strive for the best possible life, physical and spiritual. The ideal was there to be found, some day.