A Crystal Age/A Foreword
A FOREWORD
This is not an old book. It is recorded, indeed, that it made its first appearance some thirty years ago. Then, twenty years after, a few additional copies were printed. Now it is again venturing forth from the sylvan solitude of its dreams—and this time the world, that has learned, during the last half decade, of the marvelous genius of the author of A Crystal Age, is ready for it.
Some books are, in a sense, old before they are born. They bring nothing new with them; they reflect, more or less, the prevailing thought, or literary fashion, of the chronological period to which they belong; hence they achieve an immediate popularity. In those excellent volumes of literary criticism, for instance, Hazlitt's English Poets and The Spirit of the Age, we read much of the author's great contemporaries of a hundred years ago—Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a score of others whose fame has long since passed away. How strangely obscured was Hazlitt's vision by the clouds of his own day! For he gives only a passing reference to Keats; of Shelley there is no mention. The omission seems inconceivable at first, in view of the fact that this glorious star of English poetry had its rise and its setting before The Spirit of the Age was published. It is not to be wondered at, however, when one realizes how far in advance Shelley was of his day. For all practical purposes of literature this matchless singer of a golden age, without whom the great poets of the last half century could scarcely have found their own worlds of song, first came into existence on that memorable morning in London when a youth, Robert Browning by name, picked up a priceless volume of his poetry from an old bookstall, and was himself kindled to immortal utterance by the divine fire that flashed upon him from its pages. After that the world was ready; Shelley's poetry was really published—just as the world is at last ready for the books of W. H. Hudson.
Few names in literature come together more appropriately than Shelley's and Hudson's, and this appropriateness is emphasized in the case of a book like A Crystal Age. The kinship is not due merely to the tardiness with which recognition has been accorded both men. It is inherent in the delicacy of imagination, the profound love of nature, the unswerving loyalty to truth, the eagle vision glimpsing salvation on mountain peaks rising above the reek of human suffering, that characterizes their work. Mr. Hudson, it is true, does not choose poetry for his medium. But, even in the matter of literary style, there is a limpidity in his periods, a grace, an utter simplicity that reminds one of the pure harmonies of the Shelleyan muse. Mr. Galsworthy, than whom no one is better fitted to speak on such a subject, says: "As a stylist, Hudson has few, if any, living equals. . . . To use words so true and simple, that they oppose no obstacle to the flow of thought and feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition of word-sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or gratification—this is the essence of style; and Hudson's writing has pre-eminently this double quality." The gift is rare in any form of writing; its presence in a narrative of the fairy-like quality possessed by A Crystal Age is a source of never-ending delight to the reader. Here, thought is perfectly wedded to sound. The tale is one of simple, primal things, of men and women adorably ignorant of the dust and surge, the trivialities and complexities of cities; and it is uttered in the clear-flowing syllables that poets capture from brooks, rain-kissed trees, the rustle of wind-swept grasses.
It has been said that A Crystal Age renders a perfect picture of a Socialist state. If it does, I doubt very much that it was planned to do so by its author. Mr. Hudson is too profoundly an artist, too intrinsically the teller of a story for the story's sake, to shape his narrative to dogmatic ends. He himself tells us that A Crystal Age is "a dream and a picture of the human race in its forest period." It belongs to the rare type of fiction that has given us Gulliver and Erewhon. But it is more joyously free from satirical purpose than either of these. The story itself is a delicious revel of fancy, unmarred by the doctrinal digressions that usually obtrude upon these fictional peeps into an ideal future. It gives, unquestionably, the poet-naturalist's view of things as they should be—as they may be, when cruelty, prejudice, and ignorance are banished from the earth; and just because it gives a poet-naturalist's view, it is big and free enough to discard the shackles of the mere doctrinaire.
If one were looking for the secret of Hudson's unique power as a novelist, the quality that differentiates him from all other writers in this field of literature, it would be found in his delicate apprehension of the life that seethes beneath apparently inanimate things. His nature essays are the very best of their kind, not because they are richer than others in minute, painstaking observation of facts in natural history, but because they are interpretive of the human element in nature. He sees the birds, the trees, the flowers, the most harmless and the most ferocious of animals, in terms of life. There is nothing either above or below his interest. His book, A Shepherd's Life, for instance, is not only a storehouse of quaint and varied information, given with the inimitable "artless art" peculiar to its author; it is a reconstruction of an entire countryside. Whoever is fortunate enough to read it will retain in his memory a vivid world of primitive living, symmetrical, complete in all its parts. Not even Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree leaves so definite, finished a picture of life in a placid, rural community as this. The reason is that Hudson lives his books before he writes them. For him, a barren moor is anything but barren. Put him in the dullest of surroundings that one can find in nature, and he still has the creative vision that belongs to seership. It is this faculty in Hudson for sensing the psychology in the inanimate that attracted the late Professor William James, who quotes at length, from Idle Days in Patagonia, in his Talks to Students. The extract is worth giving, not only for its intrinsic beauty, but as an illustration of Hudson’s method, the mood out of which he creates the vision of an ideal state sparkling and real as that contained in A Crystal Age.
"The intense interest that life can assume," says Professor James, "when brought down to the non-thinking level, the love of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who can write,—Mr. W. H. Hudson,—in his volume, Idle Days in Patagonia.
I spent the greater part of one winter, (says this admirable author), at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea. . . .
It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns. . . . Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,—no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot,—the shooting was all left behind in the valley. . . . Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb. . . . At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer, or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill, differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.
It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noonday pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self,—to thinking, and the old insipid existence.
I had undoubtedly gone back; and that state of intense watchfulness, or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his mere sensory perceptions. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him.
"For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself."
Unlike Hudson's other essays in fiction, A Crystal Age is without a local habitation. In outward form it is a dream, a fairy story, if you will. But it has the same poignant human interest that glows in The Purple Land and Green Mansions. Apparently, even when he plans to entertain us with the whimsicalities, antics, and adventures of ideal creatures, Hudson cannot help endowing them, phantoms though they are, with the flesh and blood of humanity. It is the patriarchal form of government that he portrays here, something absolutely different, however, from dream or theory suggested by sociologist or poet. It is the epic of forest life, and the rich and varied colors that compose the picture could be found only on Hudson's palette. And what a mingling of the humorous, the simple, and the heroic there is on this canvas that presents the magic House of Coradine! Yoletta, Edra, Isarte, Chastel—the haunting loveliness of these women is like the breath from some dew-spangled garden of wildflowers, inspiriting, unforgettable. The story in which they play their part has a sinuous grace, a subtlety of emotion that places it in a realm of its own in the world of romance. Not even Meredith's women are so appealing, so utterly beautiful as Hudson's. Here, too, there is a picture of motherhood such as no poet ever before attempted; an analysis of passion that illuminates certain hidden penetralia of the human mind; suggestions of a new music, a new art, tantalizing with the rich possibilities that they offer. And the wonder of it is that this fairyland of gracious beings, this narrative of marvels that could never be, save in the poet's mind, is made absolutely real. It lives and becomes a part of the reader's own life. But after all, the vitality of The Crystal Age, the realism, the humor, the pathos of it, is not to be wondered at. It is a dream, a fairy thing, indeed—but it is a dream of one of the master-writers of the age, a man whose slightest creations are so steeped in the truth and beauty of Nature that his place in the forefront of imaginative literature is assured, and is even now being accorded him.
Clifford Smyth.
New York, August 10, 1916.