Prophetic Landscapes: Hardy and Jefferies

Abstract

The messianic or prophetic voice is characteristically muffled, undeclared or ambivalent in the period of modernity. According to Walter Benjamin, before ‘prophecy or warning has been mediated by word or image it has lost its vitality’. Benjamin goes on, in terms peculiarly applicable to the thought of Richard Jefferies, ‘To turn the threatening future into a fulfilled now…is a work of bodily presence of mind’.¹ The allegorical gaze, in Benjaminian terminology, reveals both nature and history as a devastated terrain subject to inexorable decay, and this imaginative formation marks the powerful trope of landscape representation in Hardy and Jefferies. In this structure of feeling we may diagnose capitalism itself, in Benjamin’s phraseology, as ‘a phenomenon of nature whereby Europe once again fell asleep and began dreaming’ in a process which, he claims, ‘brings about ‘a reactivation of mythic forces’.² The prophetic revelation of sacred texts is replaced, in the secularity of late-Victorian England, by the more limited non-doctrinal revelation of the literary text, and specifically by the idiomatic intensity of landscape evocation. In a context marked by the ‘disappearance of God‘, Hardy and Jefferies seek, in places, to frame a concept of spiritual renovation. Such textual effects possess not truth value but aesthetic richness in a spiritually impoverished world.

Poor flourishing earth, meek-smiling slave,

If sometime the swamps return and the heavy forest, black beech and oak-roots

Break up the paving of London streets;

And only, as long before, on the lifted ridge-ways

Few people shivering by little fires

Watch the night of the forest cover the land

And shiver to hear the wild dogs howling where cities were,

Would you be glad to be free?

Robinson Jeffers, ‘Subjected Earth’