BOOKS AND WRITERS.
THIRTY years ago I knew Hudson personally, and devoured nearly all his books with the voracity of a larval ichneumon fly. Followed a long interval when I scarcely read him at all. And this is succeeded by another phase when, under the stimulus of three volumes in Dent's New Uniform Edition,* I have once more read almost everything he wrote, first in a mood partly of curiosity and partly of memorial piety, but then with irresistible absorption. It is inevitable that the latest approach, being in per- spective, should differ from the first fine careless responses to which propinquity and the freshness of discovery had given wings.
I think I sec now, as I failed to do in the past, what Hudson was not. First, he was not what he persistently called himself, just a field-naturalist, though the orbit was complete "from the ant to man." He possessed, of course, a corpus of knowledge in natural history covering an intimacy with the flora and fauna of the temperate regions of South America in which no British naturalist could hope to compete with him. But the scientific method of the modern biologist, ornithologist, zoologist was totally alien to his genius ; the wine that was Hudson would burst the scientific bottle to fragments. Speculation he loved, but it was always trespassing over the frontiers of scientific enquiry and observation, just as he rarely if ever used the portmanteau verbalisms of science. He accepted evolution, but not Darwin's chance variations. But his most crucial divergence from science was threefold: he always insisted upon the emotional response to nature ; he fixed his piercing eye upon the natural world not from without but within ; and he wrote: "To specialise is to lose your soul."
No man of letters in our century, again, was so entire a stranger to the civilisation in which he lived and almost starved for so many years, far more so than even Gissing or Jefferies. Except at the close of The Purple Land and in his bird-preservation cam- paigns, he hardly ever attacked it ; he was not concerned with it like Morris and Ruskin, but simply turned his back on it. Our world was never his, and his work uncompromisingly denies the modern theory that the artist must in some measure reflect his age. It is equally a mistaken view that Hudson was the inspired chronicler of the English countryside, since it ignores what he left out. He left out a good deal. An ecologist (before the word was known) in his passionate love for the living creature in its natural environment, he has almost nothing to say ,about the co-operative and symbiotic relations between man and nature in agriculture and village life. Individual cottagers were dear to him, but he turned a blind eye to the topographical, historical, geological and architectural characters of the rural scene. What a contrast here to the Stour paintings of Constable, in which the busy intec, course between human labour and the natural landscape is -all-important! It is no exception to such indifference that in Nature in Downland. A- Shepherd's Life and An Old Thorn he wrote with incomparable sympathy, knowledge and insight about shepherds. The shepherd was a solitary, the familiar of an " incult " nature and so of a naturalised kinship with the stone curlew, the Milkwort and the untenanted downs. The blossoming wilderness "made the thought of our trim, pretty, artificial gardens a weari- ness "—and of a nature domesticated by man, whether ploughman, gamekeeper, craftsman or gardener.
But the touchstone is what he was. For myself, I should say that he was one of the supreme story-tellers in our whole literature, and I refer not only to the rich and glowing narratives of South America, human and natural, romance and autobiography, but to the whole body of his work, a truly marvellous repository of tales. Clutton-Brock passed the myopic criticism that his South American background made him a provincial. But, quite apart from the enchantment of a far country that makes his facts read like fables and his fables like facts, he used that background with the utmost dexterity and aptitude to illustrate and contrast with his English experiences. He was gifted with the mentality of the born teller -4-'
The Purple Land (first edition, 1885), 7.c. 64. Nature in Downland (first edition, 1900). 73. 6d. .4 Hind in Richmond Park (first edition, 1922), Is. 64. All by W. H. Hudson
of tales, so that his work appears like a throw-back to mediaeval, Chaucerian and balladist literature, expressed with so harmonious and pictorial a wealth of detail that he is a kind of modern Taliesin, making music, speaking poetry and telling tales all in one.
It is astonishing that his first book, The Purple Land. felVOn deaf ears, for it is not only one of the most entertaining books II& the picaresque genre ever written, but of a sly and sprightly hiunoui. rare in his later work. This tale-teeming faculty in him was gm*, enriched by an animistic, anthropomorphic and mythopoeic temper welling up out of the primitive cast of his mind. Not even Hudson • could have drawn from so inexhaustible a buried treasure but for a prodigious and indeed almost uncanny power of memory. It will be remembered that he wrote of his early South American years in Far Away and Long Ago when he was ill and an old man. The complete record flashed upon his mind to its minutest particularities.
But we may well ask whether these phenomena were merely a miracle of memory. Hudson possessed what appear to be mysterious powers in the acuity of his instincts and physical senses (the subject-matter of his last book, A Hind in Richmond Park) and in the extreme delicacy of his sensibility. They were perhaps derived from the instantaneous reactions of primitive man to his wild surroundings superadded to a personal refinement of spirit, so that there was no lacuna between his exile in London anll the wild freedom of the pampas. "As unhuman and uncivilised," he wrote, "as I am and would wish to be "—not inhuman, for the reader may pick out numerous examples of the tenderness of his humanity in the broader sense. What undoubtedly gives so unique a flavour to his pictures of wild life is not only such sensitivity but his extraordinary power of self-projection into the life of wild natu?e and the simpler qualities of unsophisticated man.
How free his earth-life was from the tiresome convolutions and tensions of D. H. Lawrence! It was certainly, I think, this capacity for feeling and even becoming what he saw (" the eye is the window of the soul ") that gathered into a unity a whole series of what seem on the surface incompatibles—the primitive with the man in advance of his time, the artist with the naturalist, the observer with the dreamer, the personal with the objective, the romantic with the realist, memory with spontaneity, fact with fantasy, self-expression with self-forgetfulness, the physical with the spiritual, the animist with the visionary and, what is perhaps the most striking of all, the boy with the man. Hudson could ne%er have written Far Away and Long Ago and Idle Days in Patagonia had there not been in him a perfect continuity between youth and age.
Yet, to whatever extent we pry and peer at and round and through him, the analysis of Hudson is in the long run a baffling quest. There are overtones from him of the strange and the enigmatic that elude all enquiry. Was it really the spirit.of Elfrida that told him the story of Dead Man's Flack T What was his religion, for he escapes all the definitions of pantheism ? Why was "the beautiful desolation 'S of the grey Patagonian waste more to him than all the fairest and richest scenes of earth ? What dogs he mean by his aspiration fdr a something above the arts that will satisfy the creative powers, for he does not mean Jefferies's foolish longing for an existence "infinitely higher than deity " ? These and other questions go beyond a touch of the fantastic in him.
Equally inexplicable is his seemingly unpremeditated style as a writer. Conrad said he wrote "as the grass grows." But that does not explain how his luminous, easy, musing manner of writing, sometimes flat and humdrum and never very decorative nor abundant in vocabulary nor copious in imagery, should contain the inward resources for quickening and bursting into such sudden glories of flight and exaltation as Hudson achieves, not here and there, but in hundreds of passages and without a sign of effort or mutation. But, though I doubt whether he has many more readers now than he had thirty years ago, it is certain that his name is imperishable, and that he has contributed to our native achievement an essence, a spirit and a vision complete in themselves and without a parallel
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