W. H. HUDSON.

Far Away and Long Ago. Idle Days in Patagonia. A Traveller in Little Things. Hampshire Days. Nature in Downland. The Land's End. The Book of a Naturalist. Moot in England. Birds in London. By W. H. Hudson. (Dent. Os. net each. ) HUDSON is generally supposed to have been a great writer and a great man. He deserves, therefore, to have the full rigour of criticism applied to his work. But critical standards vary, and no personal opinion can decide whether he was really great. It is necessary to have some quite unoriginal scheme of tests which any man can apply for -himself. We cannot hope by this means to fix Hudson's place in literature beyond argument ; but we can raise the discussion of his merits to a higher level ; we can set ourselves seriously to overcome our prejudices ; and- we can stabilize our reactions into a careful and reasonable judgment. If we cannot see literature under the aspect of eternity, we can- take into consideration a good

• stretch of time.

Here, then, is an old and orthodox canon of the qualities of - literature., We must judge a work by the degree in which it possesses form, continuity, passion, personality, tone, idea, and organicity. It is so old (having been formulated in India some three thousand years ago) that the terms need explana- tion.- Perform we usually substitute style, a word which would do well enough if so many heretical theories of style had not confused us: If we • remember that style and matter are inseparable, that fastidiousness in grammar and rhythm, ability to imitate our ;betters, and hypnotic effects with vowels and consonants are no part of style, then we can allow our- selves to use the word. Dostoievsky was a good stylist, Turgeniev in comparison was poor. Dickens was a good stylist, and Stevenson a wretched one. Style is the ability in a writer to shape his expression to fulfil his impulse. Contin- uity is piogress, accumulation, growth in a work of art. It is the ability in a writer to pour himself out freshly and without stint, to heighten interest, to awaken us step by step into aesthetic emotion. It is debased to plot in fiction: it is the foundation for the theory of the dramatic unities. Passion we can gloss by ecstasy. It is the full activity of sensation. It is the ability in a writer to let himself go, to " speak out." Personality is the possession of an individual focus of conscious- ness. We call it originality ; but this word again is dangerous. In a great writer's work we feel that we are in an alien country, that we are inereasing our experience by realizing a wholly different atmosphere. In a sense originality can be achieved by anyone who takes pains to be eccentric. Personality only comes to a man who thoroughly knows himself ; who confines himself to doing what his will drives him to do, who can exhibit without distraction his own central fire, his own uniqueness, of being. Tone is the most difficult of all to expand. It is, theologically, spirit, and philosophically, value. It is lucidity and humanity of nature. It is the quality of seraphs. It discriminates among great men. In this test- Whitman and Goethe fall short. It is honour and nobility of character. Coarsely interpreted, it becomes the foundation for the moral theory of aesthetics. Idea is wisdom, the apocalypse of insight. Organicity is completeness of inspiration.

It should be obvious that this is using pretty heavy artillery against Hudson. Unless he possesses all these qualities, he ' is not a great man ; but at the same time, if he possesses one of them in a marked degree, he is a notable man. There are very few writers who can claim greatness, and Hudson is not among them. We are still given an opportunity for discussing how far he is exceptional in any one quality.

He is most praised for his style ; and it is true that, apart from flippancies (of which he was fond, for he had no humour) and a few exasperating mock-archaisms, he writes with a delightful straightforwardness and simplicity. He has not the good, downright, undeviating style of Charles Darwin, which is so fitting and artless that no one troubles to draw attention to its honest effectiveness ; but in his descriptions of wild nature, of snakes basking in the sun or of a stoat's timidity in crossing a road, he is economical and direct, and therefore vivid and stimulating. Much higher praise is given him : we arc often told that his simplicity is most affecting when he rises above narration to the expression of his own feeling. It would be unfair to quote from his works a passage chosen to refute this praise ; and so I shall quote

a passage which Mr. Jolm Galsworthy employed to justify it. In Hampshire Days Hudson gave a statement of that emotion

of animism and unity with nature which, he declared, was always with him :—

" The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, the rain and stars, are never strange to me ; for I am in, and of, and am one with, them ; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the tempests and my passions are one. I feel the ' strangeness ' only with regard to my fellow-men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them."

• How could Mr. Galsworthy fail to see the frigidity and artifice of the piece ? It begins in the rhythm of Borrow, not so flamboyant, perhaps, but equally mannered. And the deplorable trail of the last sentence I No, the truth is that

for anything but plain statement or narration Hudson's style was clumsy. The inadequacy of his expression in such a volume as The Old Thorn has almost the charm of a baby's halting sentences ; but it is a charm of quaintness : it has no connexion with beauty.

In the lower reaches of continuity—interest and readable.. ness—Hudson was capable ; and here, I think, lies his main virtue. It would be a sombre man who could lose interest in a story of Hudson's, or even in an article. His mind was continually fresh, and he never husbanded facts and obser- vations, they streamed from him perpetually and were never

exhausted. He had no art in this, it was natural to him ; and he was so much the more remarkable, so much a bigger man. In Green Mansions and A Crystal Age, however, he

ended his tale with the easy inconclusiveness which destroys climax and prevents satisfaction in a great deal of the most , promising modern fiction.

No one would claim for him ecstasy or self-abandonment, Before we consider whether he could claim the possession

of person,we can gather some detail from Mr. Morley Roberts's memoir of his Mend. Mr. Roberts was too much in awe of Hudson, and too egotistically sensitive to Hudson's manner

and address, to have written a very sensible book. But fortunately he has set down many interesting conversations and remembered many illuminating incidents ; for this reason the book is invaluable. The most frequently exhibited characteristic in Hudson was his reserve and isolation, a deliberate refusal of intimacy which amounted at times to rudeness. " I always felt," Mr. Roberts says, " there was a wall between him and a score of his friends. He put his arms on it and talked to them over it, and probably they never

-saw the wall. He was so difficult : he asked, without a word, so much, and none knew what it was and he never told

them, and it was only those who had the ` something,' how- ever small it might be, who knew they held the golden key that opened his heart, though he never acknowledged affection, or so rarely that one doubted when he did whether he really meant it. ' We've known one another over forty years and there's never been a cloud,' said I one day. He grunted, ' Hasn't there ? ' and that was all, as if he would throw doubt on it and have me know he would be damned if he acknowledged we had never come to words or blows. That was Hudson with men." He was hungry for fame and he affected not to care what anyone thought of his work. He was terrified of death. And all of this was evidence of his unsureness of himself, his lack of a strong personality. Another sign of his weakness was his theorizing upon religion. He " professed contempt for churches and orthodoxy, and he invented superstitions for himself. His pantheism, his belief in ghosts, his thoughtless mysticism were none of them deep-rooted, none of them worth communication. His romances are fantastic, without sufficient ground in seriousness to approach imagination.

We have much more material when we apply the criterion of tone to his life and his work. His enthusiasm for birds, his abhorrence of women who wear egrets or feathers, his devotion to the Plumage Bill, seem to place him among the saints. Contrast with these a fragment of conversation :-

" HUDSON. Why, I know a lot of people who would feel just as if a knife went through them if they saw a boy pulling a fly's legs off.'

ROBERTS. Isn't that natural ? '

HUDSON. No, it's absurd.'

ROBERTS. ' Why, I'd like to have the boy whipped, and whipped hard, if I saw him doing it.'

HUDSON. Such a feeling is ridiculous and morbid.' "

Contrast with them his enthusiasm for war, and his defence of fox-hunting as the sport that gave us the cavalry that

won the War. Or his treatment of his wife, who worked for him devotedly and whom he neglected without afterthought.

Or this anecdote :-

" It was before this that Hudson called on Gould, the rather pretentious and unscientific ornithologist, who dealt with the Trochilidae or Humming Birds. Gould had some internal trouble which afflicted him with pains he cared not to hide. A satiric sketch of the meeting he had with Gould was published much later • by Hudson . . . Gould was sketched under another name as a naturalist, particularly interested in monkeys, and his habit of breaking off conversation to Worm, and perhaps to roll on the carpet; was, I think, brilliantly, if somewhat brutally, taken off."

Of idea and of inspiration there are no traces.

Because adulation has raised him so high, Hudson must be

examined with severity. And I have given those who have read his work the opportunity of judging whether I have misapplied the tests I advocated, and of making

use of them for their own judgment. If I had set a lower standard, I would have been compelled to confess that I . have read all that he wrote with interest, and to quote for the pleasure of readers from the bright, vigorous, simple narratives that crowd his books. If it were necessary to range him in the hierarchy of letters I should place him between . Richard Jefferies and Izaak Walton as a recorder of nature

and, to tell the truth, between Mr. C. G. D. Roberts and Mr. E. M. Forster as a novelist ; or at best call him a minor

William Morris. Hudson conceived himself to be an elemental, a non-moral, non-human, natural sprite, more akin to animals, birds, and trees, even, than to men ; and though often he was merely a grudging old man with a lively habit of obser- vation, at his best he displays the soul-less brightness and vitality of such a being. All his more endearing and attractive characteristics can be read in Mr. Morley's account of their friendship. There are those who think Far Away and Long

Ago the most affecting recreation of childhood in the English language : Hudson is certainly most at home in his own past, and most human as a child. Seriously, though, if an attempt is made to dignify him beyond his worth, a judicious

criticism will always sound harsh. ALAN PORTER.