W. H. HUDSON 1841-1941
By E. L. WOODWARD IF one considers the vast amount. of " travel literature " in I English, it is remarkable how little has been written about the thousands of men and women who went out from Great Britain to settle abroad in the New World during the nine- teenth century. The travellers came home, and wrote their books. The settlers remained. They were not people who wrote books. In any case they had no time to write them. No publishers sought out these English-speaking settlers ; few men of letters ever bothered about them. Colonists, once they had ceased to fight Red Indians, were neither interesting nor rfashionable ; railway-building (which deserves an epic) was not as " romantic " as piracy, or as easy to write about as war.
It is therefore part of the chance of things that the best work of art—W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago—deal- ing with the ordinary life of English-speaking settlers in the middle years of last century should have been written about a family living outside the British Empire and in a country belonging, by cultural tradition, not co the English-speaking world but to Catholic Spain. It is also a curious chance that this book about the Argentine Republic was written during the last war, in a convent hospital at Brighton, by a man over 76 years old who had not seen South America for nearly half a century.
William Henry Hudson was born on August 4th, 1841, at Quilmes, near Buenos Aires. His grandfather came from Devonshire, where years later W. H. Hudson found himself " almost imprisoned " in the deep lanes. His father, Daniel Hudson, was born in the State of Massachusetts. His mother belonged to an English family long settled in Maine. Daniel Hudson went to South America because he was threatened by tuberculosis. He settled in the country, and his children grew up on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata. W. H. Hudson was taught book-learning, somewhat vaguely, by three succes- sive tutors, and taught himself, from the age of six, to observe living things by wandering on his pony anywhere he chose to go over the great plains. In his fifteenth year he nearly died of typhus, caught on a holiday at Buenos Aires, and followed by rheumatic fever. Hence he could take little part in the work of his family, and spent his time reading and watching. During the 186o's he moved about from place to place in South America, and, in 1869, came to England. He never went back to Argentina. For a long time he was too poor to travel ; later he did not want to go back because he feared that the growth of population in the Rio de la Plata region might have destroyed much of the wild life, especially the bird life, which he had known.
Hudson married in 1876. His marriage was not very happy, and he lived for a number of drab and confined years in West London boarding-houses. His early books on South America —The Purple Land that England Lost (1885) and An Argentine Ornithology, written in collaboration with Dr. P. L. Sclater (1887), did not bring him much fame or money. The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) was better known, and thence- forward Hudson found more readers for his writings on birds and wild life in England. Yet, as late as 1901, he was poor enough to be recommended for a Civil List pension. After this time he became increasingly popular (and, characteristically, gave up his pension). His books met a new demand created by the revival of interest in nature and natural life when bicycles, and then the motor-car, made the country more accessible from the towns. A large public, removed in most cases only by one or two generations from country life, but uninterested in hunting or shooting, had more leisure for the fields and woods, and—after thirty years of modem education —an intelligent curiosity about wild life for its own sake.
For these readers Hudson's writings were well suited. He never cared for literary fashions, and never studied literary effect. Sophisticated critics found him dull ; one of these slick persons said that Hudson " wrote like a peasant." It is more to the point that, although he wrote a good many stories, he was never enough interested in people to make full use of the novel-form ; his best work of this kind, Green Mansions, is, in the main, a nature-story. Furthermore, these romances were almost always based upon his recollections of South America, and, if they owed anything to conscious imitation, were influenced more by Spanish than by English models.
Grey, whose own love of birds gave him a like power of detachment, once described Hudson's gift for " pure observa- tion." Hudson watched the tidal flow of life in the visible world. He was content with what he saw, and recorded it without wishing to moralise, without pose, and without senti- mentality. There is a passage in Afoot in England which shows very well this detachment and sympathy. Hudson was staying at Silchester. He went to church on Easter Sunday morning. He wrote an account of this church-going. Nothing about the service, the sermon, or the building ; nothing about the congregation, except that, to his disgust, five women were wearing aigrettes of egret or bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats. But he records that during the service the sun came out for the first time after several days of rain. Thereupon three Red Admiral butterflies appeared from their hiding-places, and fluttered against the high glass windows, trying to reach the freedom of the outer world.
Or again, on Salisbury Plain. Hudson mentions the com- plaints that the military have " desecrated " the place, and that the " wild ancient charm " has gone. He says of himself, simply: " I am pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings." What troubled him was that the " new conditions " would mean, little by little, the destruction of nests and young birds ; not the " desecration " of the stones of the past, but the loss of living things in the present ; the encroachment of ignorance and carelessness upon the free play of light and grace and move- ment which Hudson had learned to know " far away and long ago " in the Rio de la Plata.
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