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Show THE CITIZEN 8 liiiuilljg THINGS BOOKISH s E iE I iiiinmiimiiiiiHimiiiiHiinHmminuMiiitiiHiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiMUiiiiHiiiiHmuimmMiiHiiwiMHiiMiiHiHiiiiuuiiuiiiiiiiiiin Edited By WILLIAM C. WINDER, Jr. At a time when his life was entering the winter of its years, Mr. Hudson wrote in his Far Away and Long Ago. When I hear people say they have not found the world and life so agreeable or interesting as to be in love with it, or that they look with equanimity to its end, I am apt to think they have never been properly alive nor seen with clear vision the world they think so meanly of, or anything in it not a blade of grass. His had been a rich, full life, too, and not without its sorrow and tragedy. Yet he was a nature lover and not a mystic; this was the life he desired, the life his heart could conceive, and no pain or sickness that he had known could mak him desirous of that other great adventure of which he knew nothing. He had gone to nature herself for his lessons and had found them good. While never a fighter and rebel, he was one of the great to life of our day. Mr. W. H. Hudson lived an almost completely detached life, lived almost within himself, in so far as the aspirations, ambitions, failures of his contemporary fellows were concerned. When one realizes the state of his mind, that his one greatest joy was in attuning himself to the voice of nature, it is not difficult to understand the impossibility of his serving both the world in its natural state and its deadliest enemy, civilized man. I remember very well reading an article on Hudson, shortly after his death, by Mr. Frank Harris, wherein he was severely taken to task for this very detachment from the battle of every-da- y life and its petty strife and worry. With such a judgment I certainly can not agree. While I have the greatest admiration for Harris on account of his continuous warfare against the dullness and insincerity of men in general, yet I acknowledge in Hudson an equally great indebtedness in the beauty of his artistry in turning mens eyes toward the wonders of life existing, usually unnoticed, on our every yea-saye- rs side. To bring to mind the name of Hudson is first of all to visualize the vast sweep of the South American pampas. Here he spent his childhood and much of his earlier manhood, and the magic of its lure is never absent from ' . . his tales and essays. It was not until middle life that he started to write at all, but he was one of those men who have been so rarely fortunate as to carry into manhood much of childhoods awe and wonder. His mind was always impressionable, and those impressions once made were almost indelible. As a remarkable example of this,' wre learn in his Birds and Man, that of .the two hundred and twenty-si- x species of the birds he had observed in his youth, he could visualize, twenty- - six years afterwards, two hundred and fifteen. And of the one South Amerhundred and ninety-twican species, whose cries, calls and o songs he had heard, he could recall the language of one hundred and fifty-fou- r. Nor is this simply a feat performed by a pedantic ornithologist out for a record, but rather a natural result of a charmed interest in that wonderful bird life, which men in all parts of the world are so ruthlessly forcing into extinction. When we consider with what emotional fascination this youth watched and investigated, and also what a superior heart and intelligence he brought to the task, it is not to wonder that he makes live for us those vast plains which he so intimately knew in his younger days. We can see as though they were here before Ombu trees us now the twenty-fiv- e surrounding the home where Hudson himself was born; we can hear again the music of those vast choirs of birds that stopped for a few days to rest on their way north In winter and south at the approach of summer; we can see those wildly riding gauchos, willing either for a game or a fight. And for a description which evokes the land as it was then, I had rather give the words of Hudson himself: We see all around us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty blue color wherein the crystal-blu- e dome of the sky rests on the level green world. Green in late autumn, winter, and spring, or say from April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field; there were smooth areas where sheep pastured, but the surface varied greatly and was mostly more or less rough. In places the land as far as one could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild artichokes, of a bluish or grey-gree- n color, while in other places the giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white leaves, and standing when in flower six to ten feet high. But while the wide pampas held Hudsons love to the very last, it was which claimed his keenthe bird-lif- e est adoration. Even in his childhood, as he so wonderfully recalled it in his autobiography, Far Away and Long Ago he tells. of his games with the gaucho boys, but also that of these he soon tired and returned to the rich pleasures of his bird worship, for such it really was. His interest lay only in the living birds, mainly as rarely beautiful1 manifestations of life. For the stuffed glass-eye- d specimens of the collectors, he had only the feelings of sorrow and disgust. To him it was the life which spoke from the alert eye, the song which issued spontaneously from th dainty throat, the haughty 'graceful pdse, the glint of sunshine on. a backOTwlng of rich, : re:plumk$e: these wete the pictures to' Store away in Whlcji to see birds at their meirpryj V an individual image befSij.fi carry down in memory, instead of just a mental picture of any member of a 'species; onc must study them emo -- ;.fished And . - tionally, must feel a kinship in the life which they manifest so beautifully. So many readers have learned of the g magic of the writings of Hudson, that it is no doubt quite unnecessary to remark that he has written of people. as well as of birds and trees, of flowers and grass and insects. However, his writing of human beings is quite along the same line as his writing of the other forms of life. He was never influenced by Jung or Freud, and we are grateful for it. He does ont attempt to analyze and explain every thought and feeling of his human dolls as fate tosses them hither and thither; he is content to quietly unfold his tale of their comings and : goings and what they say and what they do. The problems of sex he ver touches, yet his people are certainly neither sterile nor sexless. With him it is not the topic of life as it is with Mr. D. H. Lawrence and many other contemporary writers. To me it is rather a relief to read a magically beautiful tale like Green Mansions or a poignantRalph Herne ly human one like without being able on every page to discern the shadow of Freud. Green Mansions, then, is simply a tale and therein lies its elusive charm. In it Hudson postulates no problems, nor does he offer a panacea for all the ills of a weary world. He tells the story of the beautiful Rima, of a deep though unrequited love for her, of her tragic ending as she was burned from her high perch in the trees by the superstitious Indians, to whom she spelled bad luck. But it is more, so much more, than a mere skeleton tale of these things. In those descriptions he works a veritable witchery of words. Through those words, too, the waterfall tells of the rainbows which play through its mist; the birds speak in a language that we as well as Rima can understand, and even the spiders show good cause for their existence. Every tree and plant in that dense forest and underbrush, every bird and insect, every manifastation of life, no matter how low the form, join hands in this tale to say that they are alive, are akin to man, possess whatever of life that he possesses, are all brothers in the great scheme if there be one, but at all events are of his kind for better or worse. Whether another would get the same message from this tale is immaterial to me and quite beside the point. Green Mansions is, however, one of the great books of the last decade, and one which a lover of beautiful expression cannot afford to miss. Of Ralph Herne, the tale which Knopf put out recently in a beautiful limited edition, and which has not been published before, I shall write at a later date. I have read it too recently, and am still too much under its tragic influence, to attempt a cool criticism of it. It is a tale of the terrible plague of yellow fever which decimated the Argentine in 1871, and is different to the other books of Hudson in that it deals with human beings alone and not with other forms of nadeep-flowin- all-absorbi- ng wood-nymp- h of the high points in the thought and work of this great man, and as such he can be truly classed. He found life, the little things of life, so interesting, so enchanting, that he wished it might all go on forever. Death called and he answered, though luctantly. It is a real tragedy for us all that such a man, the spokesman of the speechless forms of life, should go thus suddenly in the glory of his influence. We sit wistfully thinking of the wonderful flowers of that mind which were never permitted to bloom, but why then brood over that which might have been? It is rather to be grateful for the beautiful books, a goodly number, too, which he has left us, and inhale that lingering fragrance which bespeaks life in nature !- "So on her account you gave up smoking? Yes, sir. And you dont drink now because she doesnt like you drinking? Yes, sir. And for the same reason you no longer swear? Thats it, sir. And you no longer go to dances or play billiards or bet? Because she didnt like me to. Then why on earth dicn'i you marry her? "Because I was so reformed that I - saw do better. 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