October 24, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 6y J. C Squire 
Childhood in Retrospect 
MR. W. H. HUDSON is known to many— 
though not to as many as he should be — 
as one of the closest and most affectionate 
■living students of birds and beasts, and at 
the same time as the possessor of a simple 
and excellent English style. A Shepherd's Life and the 
studies of wild life at the Land's End and in La Plata hjive 
frequently been described as the nearest things we ha,ve to 
the work of Richard Jefferies, and the description is justified. 
Mr. Hudson has now, in a book boldly entitled Far Away 
and Long Ago (Dent, 7s. 6d. net), written a history of his 
earl}' years. A succession of old scenes came back to him 
very clearly during a convalescence, and he wrote them 
down while they were fresh. He has made with them his 
b^st book. • 
« * * * * * 
For a book of the kind, it is a ver>' diversified book. The 
tone is not varied, the writing glides smoothly on, and his 
details, whatever their nature, are harmonised and made 
coherent by that golden atmosphere, that even transparent 
gla.^e rather, that gives kinship to all things remembered 
from childhood. But in its material surroundings his was 
no ordinary English childhood, and he was not an ordinary 
child. He was bom, in the middle of the last century, on the 
pampas, where his amiable and cultivated parents raised 
sheep amidst very rough surroundings. The young reimblic 
was dominated by the Dictator Rosas, "the Nero of South 
America" ; the Hudsons' servants and most of their neigh- 
bours were wild gauchos, reckless and cruel, whose festive 
evenings commonlj^ended in fights with knives. At an early 
age he saw a beaten army straggle past his house and hiurdcr 
was a word soon familiar to him. He gives many sketches 
of the men and women of that day, some of them noble, 
others utterly vile, but all picturesque in raiment and indivi- 
dual in action ; and the strangeness of the natives is height- 
ened by their contrast with the few early English or Scotch 
settlers" still clinging to their native conventions. Into that 
strange community, living in low estancias scattered over 
the almost treeless plain still full of birds and beasts, strange 
vagrants wandered, always on horseback. "One was an 
English schoolmaster who would stay at a place for months, 
and then lose his temper and his job, mount his horse, and 
head for the horizon. Another was the most remarkable 
beggar in literature : 
He wore a pair of gigantic shoes, about a foot broad at 
the toes, made out of thick cowhide, with the hair on ; 
and on his head was a tall rimless cowhide hat shaped 
like an inverted fiower-pot. His bodily covering was, 
however, the most extraordinary : the outer garment, if 
garment it can be called, resembled a very large mattress 
in size and shape, with the ticking made of innumerable 
pieces of raw hide sewn together. It was about a foot'in 
thickness and stuffed with sticks, stones, hard lumps of 
clay, rams' horns, bleached bones, and other hard, heavy 
objects ; it was fastened round him with straps of hide, 
and reached nearly to the ground. 
This freak does not seem so singular in his surroundings ss 
out of them. And there are many others, including a lady 
who, when St. Antony did not send her fine weather, let 
his image down a well to discover how he liked the wet. 
They pass over the pages in sequence, come and go ; none 
staj', but the family, who linger in the background, a dim 
but friendly group. 
****** 
Mr. Hudson's, passion for nature, nourished by his mother, 
developed early. The naturalist who was to spend years 
watching Enghsh rooks and starlings, began by staring in 
fasf:ination at scissor-tail tyrant-birds, ostriches, and ilam- 
ingoes. At an age when his literary contemporaries were, 
at most, ferreting for rabbits, he was trying to catch an 
armadillo by the tail — the beast, which escaped by burrowing, 
threatening to drag him into an early tomb if he did not 
let go. He has none of those astounding stories with which 
he has sometimes tested one's capacity for belief — such as 
that, told five or six years ago, about the swan which was 
in love with a trout, followed it daily all over the lake, and 
finaHy attacked the angler who caught it. But he saw a 
dog which dived and caught fish ; and he came upon two 
deer, a ring of does around them, fighting with horns which 
locked, and never unlocked when they died. |He would lie 
awake in the darkness listening to the snakes sliding and 
whispering under the floor : snakes fascinated him,' with 
their menacing movements and their rich lines. There were 
green and grey snakes, green and velvet-black snakes, snakes 
with bellies barred bright blue and crimson ; and he found, 
and several times tracked down, an unknown velvet-black 
snake, six feet long, which once drew its heavy length right 
over his foot as he stood looking into a tree. But it is of the 
birds and the flowers, and the few and precious groves of 
trees, that he writes most.' Of birds, he must mention hun- 
dreds ; and the most beautiful of all, he says, were the 
flamingoes. He describes, with emotion but without laboured 
effort, how, as a child of six, he walked over a league of 
meadow, and came suddenly to a wide water where multi- 
tudes of birds- — wild duck, swans, ibises, herons, and spoon- 
bills—waded or swam; and nearest "three immensely tall 
white and rose-coloured birds, wadirg solemnly in a row 
a yard or so apart from one another . . . My delight was 
intensified when the leading bird stood still and, raising h.is 
head and long neck aloft, opened and shook his wings. For 
the wings, when open, were of a glorious crimson colour, 
and the bird was to me the most angel-like creature on 
earth." He describes later sights of flamingoes, standing 
reflected in a still river at sunM, flying low over blue water 
in a long crimson line ; . but the most beautiful picture he 
paints is not here, but when he describes a decorltive effect 
which, in its way, not all nature could excel. There was 
an orchard of great old peach-trees, with black trunks, stand- 
ing on a carpet of grass, covered with mounds of rosy-pink 
blossoms. In these trees thousands of little yellow birds 
often sat and sang ; and one day a flock of small parrr.kets 
came and sat on them, amid the blossom. Such a picture is 
fragrant in the memory for a lifetime. 
The setting of Mr. Hudson's tale is exotic ; yet the history 
is familiar ; for, where obstinate calamities have been 
avoided, it is only in inessentials that men's early memories 
differ. The country of which Mr. Hudson writes is not 
Argentina ; it is the country of childhood, a farther and 
more beautiful place ; and there all men have lived, though 
not in all men are its impressions equally deep or its influences 
equally living, and few make a habit of revisiting it in imagina- 
tion. A village street, a church, elms, farmyards and great 
hollow barns, a blacksinith's forge, meadows with cows, a 
reedy stream ; a fishing-harbour, where, nets are dried on 
the hill and the gulls forage the mud for offsd at low tide ; 
a rusty industrial suburb, builders' yards, geraniums, a 
black canal, and green and red signa-ls in the night : they are 
all the substantial provinces of that unsubstantial land ; the 
air of them, the speech, the manners, are the same. There 
were birds, animals, bearded old men, and a slight reticent 
little girl with pale complexion and flying hair. Aksakoff 
on the steppes beyond the Volga, Goethe remembering the 
gabled streets and berobed councillors of Imperial Frankfort, 
they are looking back on the same world : a world extra- 
ordinarily vivid and picturesque, where the strong were 
more strong, the sweet more angelic, the quaint more odd ; 
where the young newcomer first learned to know in others 
brutality and love, in himself curiosity, and silence, fear, 
cunning, sympathy, ambition, courage, and cowardice, the 
desiife and dread of danger, resentment, fierce grief, ajid 
despair; where scents were acute to the nostrils, where 
bright colours were first seen, and the wonders of the elements 
first learned, the sun, the moon clouds, sky, ard stars, 
trees, flowers and water in its various forms, the wide 
whiteness of snow, the terror of thunder at night, the 
steel}' persistence of heavy rains. Time was long there, 
before we bothered to count or needed to use the 
minutes, and under the shadow of powerful authority we 
enjoyed a liberty like no other liberty ; new things came 
unendingly and adventure was all around. We did not 
know then that we lived there, and our elders usually forgot 
it; but we know thirty years afterwards. The knowledge 
makes the contemplative sort of artist, in whom the mood 
of retrospection often becomes dominant, desire to set it 
down before he dies and one reporter has-been lost. From 
this cause many beautiful books have come ; and the book 
that has not yet been written will be the loveliest and saddest 
in the world. 
