THE LETTERS OF W. H. HUDSON A GREAT deal has
been said lately about W. H. Hudson. Statesmen have turned aside for a moment from the insoluble problems of politics to offer a few words of tribute to the memory of this most unpolitical and tmpublic of men. What was there about his character, that it should command the attention of people who might have been living on another planet, so different were their paths from those which he trod ?
He possessed simplicity, obstinacy, and spiritual enthusiasm. These are qualities rarer than we are ready to believe them to be. They are qualities much talked about ; but in our world of crowded hours and constant bread-winning we find ourselves more in contact with the spirit of uncertainty, of self-interested ingenuity, of discreet compromise. Hudson, therefore, was unique. He refused to put himself into a position that would entail any surrender of his freedom of mind or body. What could he be, then, but a social misfit ; a sort of primeval figure, a symbol of elemental things, thrown into our tearing, jangling machine of civilization ? Our readers will think of such another character, the rare poet W. H. Davies, also a swift-eyed companion of birds, born for freedom, never for compromise ; yet possessing a woodland shrewdness that is more than sufficient weapon in his solitary fight against the everlasting bewilderment' which we call human society.
Such was the fundamental character upon which Hudson built up his knowledge of nature Lnd of man. What he knew, he knew as a discovery. The established sciences meant little to him ; for they demanded a fettering of oneself to the complications of textbook and lecture room. He preferred to come to a book as he came to a flower ; quite self-sufficient, not too much concerned in its anatomy, but interested more in its conduct, its actual immediate and concrete existence.
If this habit gave him an aloofness, it also gave him dignity. This dignity reflected on the life he saw, and everywhere he found his world sustained in a pride and independence which very few of us more involved mortals can ever perceive. It hurt him, as though he shared in the insulting act, to see even a stuffed bird. It hurt him, too, with a most rare intensity, to see men humiliated by the ignoble tasks which this callous society of mankind imposes on so many of its members. No English writer, not even Wordsworth, has more sense of the dignity of man.
There is a scene in A Shepherd's Life, where an old shepherd, after working for sixty years for 7s. a week, comes home one night and tells his wife that he has done work. She looks at him in astonishment, and says that she will make him a pot of tea. He sits on a stool at her feet and drinks it : then puts his head in her lap, and dies. Hudson's telling of the story makes it rank with the tragedy of Lear.
Such is the man, then, whom we see in these letters written to his friend, Mr. Morley Roberts. But here is often the reverse side too of the quiet, dignified, simple character. We find certain querulousness, a perversity, almost a spiritual hypo- chondria, which so often are ingredients of those souls whose elemental simplicity and austerity amount to genius.
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