Narture in Downland

In a letter to me, of December 10, 1916, Hudson, speaking of the
appreciative reviews of the American edition of Green Mansions, adds,
"Not a gleam of the critical faculty in anything!" And, on turning
over the few critical obituary notices that appeared after Hudson's
death, one felt a certain disappointment. Excluding the papers written
by Mr. H. J. Massingham [Footnote: _The Nation_, August 26, 1922.]
and Mr. John Galsworthy [Footnote: _The Evening Post_, New York,
September 16, 1922.] there was nothing said in point of insight that
approached the sharp felicity of Mr. Conrad's tribute: "You can't tell
how this fellow gets his effects. He writes as the grass grows." Our
professional literary guides spoke in terms eulogistically vague or
magisterial. Mr. J. C. Squire's estimate of Hudson's creative
achievement [Footnote: _The Observer_, August 20, 1922.] certainly had
a judicial ring. But, without the taste for Hudson's quality, a
critical appraisement suggests a game of blind man's buff. Let me
quote a passage:

For Mr. Hudson's English very seldom failed. The style being the man,
the style had limitations. The man's love for nature burned with a
steady and equable radiance; he drank, if you like, perpetually from
that fountain, but never to intoxication. He seldom felt like
rhapsodising: he never came near swooning with sesthetic delight nor
was taken up in religious exaltation. Spirit and sense were always
awake in him, but temperate in their enjoyments. Add his general lack
of humour and his proclivity towards retrospection and regret, and you
get naturally something like a dead-level of writing. For a man who
wrote so much and so well he produced very few "memorable pages." The
anthologists who hunt for purple passages of prose will find that he
constantly baffles them; one page is so like another, and when they
like two sentences they will not want the third, which will very
likely change the subject. He had the defects of his qualities and the
qualities of his defects. He wrote carefully; his constructions are
clear and his epithets accurate. Beyond that the deliberate artificer
did not often go. He was preoccupied with his matter; he wrote about
certain things in a certain mood, and took no pains to play upon the
eyes and ears of his readers. One looks through his style as through
glass--slightly-tinted glass--at the objects behind it; and his
loveliest passages as a rule are simply those in which the loveliest
objects are mentioned.


The tone here is of magisterial finality, but these restricted
encomiums do not seem to have got the range either of Hudson's spirit,
or of his masterpieces, or of his literary art. They cannot be
stretched to apply, on the one hand, to _Idle Days in Patagonia,
Nature in Downland, Hampshire Days, A Shepherd's

Life_, or, on the other, to _The Purple Land, El Ombu, Green
Mansions_. Mr. A. Glutton Brock, in his moving tribute to Hudson,
[Footnote: _Times Literary Supplement_, August 24, 1922.] comprehends,
indeed, what Mr. Squire failed to grasp, the passionate depth of
Hudson's nature, the breadth of his outlook and its spiritual beauty,
as when he writes: "He seemed to be of no particular age and of no
sex, but rather a wonderful experiencing spirit, at once impartial and
passionate, giving out beauty like the sea under a sunset and
heightening it by deep and calm reflection." But when he discusses
Hudson's style Mr. Brock has nothing to say but the following: