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W. fl. HUDSON THE VISION OF EARTH W. H. HUDSON W. H. HUDSON THE VISION OF EARTH hy ROBERT HAMILTON KENNIKAT PRESS Port Washington, N. Y ./London W. H, HUDSON First published in I 946 Reissued ln 1970 by Kennikat Press Llbrary of Congress Catalog Card No: 76 ...1 13336 ISBN 0·8046·1019·3 Manufactured by Taylor Pu.bliehingC ompany Dallu, Teus He loved birds and green places, and the wind on the heath, and saw the brightness of the skirts of God. Epitaph on Hudson'sg rave. TO MY SONS GERVASE AND ADRIAN PREFACE THE study of personality is a:t ask supremely intererung and worth while, above all when it happens to be concerned with genius; for genius is the creator of new ideas and experiences, and the maker of history. But the task is never easy, particularly when the personality is subtle and elusive, as in the case of W. H. Hudson. To have written about him has been a labour of love, a continual enrich ment of the writer's mind which it is to be hoped the reader will share; but the wealth and diversity of his out look, and the discursiveness of his art, have presented many problems. It is impossible to regard him as a naturalist pure and simple,. or predominantly as an artist, or even, in the complete sense; a man of letters: he com bines within himself elements of all these gifts. Perhaps his own description of himself as a field naturalist 'who takes all life for his field' is the best. Whatever else he may have been, Hudson was a man of profound sensi bility. Chalmers Mitchell said that he was 'the most revealing naturalist who has ever lived.' But he was no prophet or proselytizer: the message that emerges from his work is, as one critic put it, 'oblique.' He rarely tells us direaly what he believes, hence in order to make his vision clear we must seek to unravel the imperfect concepts through which it is expressed. I have done what I can to create some sort of order in the pages that follow. First, in The Vision, I have con sidered the forces, religious, aesthetic, and scientific that influenced Hudson, and their effect upon his attitude to men and birds. I have followed this by a brief sketch of The Man, and of the circumstances that moulded him and gave rise to his vision. Finally, I have dealt with The Work in which the man and his vision were expressed. Hudson's work falls broadly into two sections which I vii viii W. H. HUDSON have called Romances and Essays. The Romances com prise a group of novels and short ftories, set, for the moft part, in South America; and the Essays include travel, nature, and bird books, the ~jority dealing with English wild life. On the whole, the Romances belong to the earlier period of Hudson's work. rhe Essays which are by far the greater part of his output-belong moftly to his middle and later periods. Hence, 4i taking the Romances firft and the Essays afterwards, I have followed a broadly chronological order. The. books in each group are treated chronologically, and the chrono logical order of the whole is preserved in the position of the two books I have selected for separate treatment the Autobiography, Far Awqy and Long .Ago, and A Hind in Rkhmond Park, both of which came at the end of his life, the latter being the laft book he ever wrote. Both represent him at the summit of his powers, and in form are somewhat apart from the reft of his work. The Autobiography gives the origins of his vision: the Hind is its moft complete and explicit expression. The queftions raised by the Hind bring the book to a conclusion on a return to certain queftions which I raised in the firft chapter. My aim will have been fulfilled if I have suc ceeded in revealing something of the nature and value of Hudson's vision, and the quality of his work as a whole. The §tatus of Hudson's work to-day is assured, and his reputation is high; but he is not a 'popular' author, and it is doubtful if he will ever be very widely read. His most appreciative readers are probably among naturalifts and men of letters; and some of the most extravagant praise of his work came from his fellow writers. Perhaps I can express it heft by saying that he has a following but not a public. He is not much read abroad, save in the United States and parts of South America, and, in spite of his achievement and the distincl:ion of his personality and style, he cannot be called a universal figure. But it is PREPA.CB ix enough that he was a very great English writer; nor does he lack appreciation in this country. Shortly after his death, the W. H. Hudson Memorial Committee dedi cated a noble monument to liis memory in the Hyde Park Bird Sancruary, with its symbolic sculpture of Rima (his best-known creation) by Epstein; and his publishers brought out a more practical monument in the complete edition of his works in twenty-four volumes. 'Few men have left a monument more permanent than Hudson left in his own books,' said Cunninghame Graham. Yet, in spite of his fame, very little has been written about him. The only full-length book is Motley Roberts's W. H. Hud son: a Portrait,w hich is more an intimate memoir than a criticism. I said, at the outset, that the man of genius is a maker of history; and undoubtedly, within a small field, Hudson changed the world into which he was born. Directly, his effea was not startling; but indirectly, through the spread of his ideals, he is responsible for a great change in the attitude of modern Englishmen. He has made us con scious of nature, and has enriched such consciousness as we already possessed. The remarkable growth of intere§t in nature books during the last fifty years is largely due to his influence. Yet, though much is read, little is done. The average man reads in order that he may escape for a few hours from .the intolerable aridity of industrial life. Nature is, for him, not a wife to be lived with and stead fastly loved, but a mistress, strange, wayward, and beautiful, to be visited from time to time. Always he returns to the partner of his choice-a hard-visaged woman, dirty, drab, and heartless, who grudgingly doles him out pocket-money in return for total servitude and uncreative labour. But it is not only the will that is lacking: anoth~r reason-perhaps itself the cause of insufficient will-is the impracticability of settling on the land under modern conditions, in Eng land, at any rate, Hence, what is needed, say the agri culturalists, is a change of social policy. And only where