The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Letters from W. H. Hudson to Edward Garnett
LETTERS FROM W. H. HUDSON
TO EDWARD GARNETT[1]
Martin
by Salisbury,
17th. [April 1903]
Dear Garnett
There will be another Tuesday when I shall not see you as I don't think of returning just yet. The loneliness of this little downland village suits my nerves. We are 3 miles from a telegraph office, 7 miles from a butcher, a doctor and a newspaper, and there is no public house so it is all dark and still after 8 o'clock and everyone goes to bed. The only light is from the stars and the only sound the faint far off tinkle of sheep-bells. It is a land of great open downs, sheep-walks, and with no sheep on them yet, as it is early in the year and the weather cold, and the sheep are still kept down in the valleys feeding on "turmots" and such things. Peewits, magpies, rabbits and such creatures are the only people I meet in my long rambles on the hills. In spite of the cold winds and frosts by night the furze is now in full bloom—a chaos of shining yellow blossoms, and the mossy turf below blue with dog violets. Before coming this way I was at Salisbury and almost lived in the Cathedral for two or three days because it was the only comfortable sheltered place I could find. One warm day we had, and that was on Good Friday, and that day I spent in the prehistoric Cathedral-
- ↑ These seven letters are selected from a correspondence stretching over twenty years: 1901-1922.—E. G.
Note: We print the letters exactly as W. H. Hudson wrote them, although the spelling and punctuation occasionally do not conform to our usage.
—Stonehenge. I was one night at Fordingbridge and paid a visit to a farmer I know in that neighbourhood, and then came up into this lonely place. When I enquired for a place to stay in people stared at me and smiled at so preposterous a request. But looking about I found a Carter and his wife who took me in. The carter's wages is 12/—a week so you wouldn't think it a very luxurious lodging but you would be mistaken. His "cottage" is an ancient farm-house—timbered and thatched with large rambling rooms, brick floors, big fireplaces, the biggest room, the one I am in, with a wooden ceiling. Besides the old house they have a big old barn, 20 old apple trees, and 6 acres of meadow-land. They keep pigs and 50 or 60 fowls, and the house is beautifully clean inside, linen like snow, and the woman an excellent cook. The reason of it all is that she was in service several years in a great house when being pretty quick and willing to learn she found out how to do things and keep her place nice. Rents here are almost nominal and the landlord who owns the village is very generous. The book-case is over my head, where I am sitting by a big wood fire: It has two very small shelves, and the following works are all it contains: Pilgrim's Progress: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," East Lynne, The Wide Wide World—which I read once and that was enough—Science for Boys and Girls (edited by Kingsley), Our Village, Waterton's Wanderings and Marianne North's "Recollections of a Happy Life"—a curious work to find in such a place! Altogether a wonderful little collection of "Best Books"—far better than Lubbock's I imagine.
And now I am on books—did you see last week's Academy, and did you read the review of Traherne's poems which Dobell has unearthed and published? And if you did do you agree with the reviewer? I read it at Salisbury and sent it on to Mrs. Hubbard and this is what she writes to me:—"thanks for the Academy, which I have been reading with more interest than agreement. . . . In bracketing Vaughan with Herbert I should put H. decidedly first. As far as the idea of childhood goes with the three, though Vaughan may get nearer the heart of it than Herbert, yet with both the main point is to use childhood as a luminous background for the black derelictions of after life. Whereas Traherne takes the glory of it, as Blake does, on its own account, with no ulterior motives. He does not utilize it, but triumphs in it. Andrew Marvell had something of that joy and wonder in living, &c." I quite agree with her: I think that first poem in the book—The Salutation—one of the most wonderful things ever written.
18th. I was interrupted and couldn't finish last evening, so another day has gone by during which I sat down in a wood and gazed on a splendid red fox, then had a talk with a gamekeeper, who is eaten up with magpies. Then I spent an hour in the grand old church of Cranborne, full of monuments to persons of importance in their day and in their parish: and finally I got to a strange out-of-the-world little village called Edmunsham—pronounced Ed-sham. There is a well on a wide green place there and half the women and all the children were congregated at it, the women with big white sun-bonnets, with great old brown earthenware pitchers to get their water. They were like Ancient Britons and made such a hubbub and gave me so many directions when I asked my way to Damerham—called Dam-ron, that I failed to understand, and went how I could over miles of furzy common and by lanes until I found Dam-ron, and then on to Martin.
I shall stay here till Tuesday next and then get back to Salisbury, and visit villages on the Wylie river before returning next week.
With love to all.
W. H. Hudson
Dear Garnett,
So much time have I spent in these parts I fear I shall not see Dorset this time. Up till now I have not been about my own business, but running after County Councillors, and they are elusive birds and hard I find it to put salt on their flying tails. I am now going to Salisbury—in fact I'll post this letter there before 10 this evening so that you will not know where it was written in spite of the address being there plain enough. I have had some days at Marlborough, not a bad place, a small old red brick town with a High Street a hundred feet wide. I was in the forest two or three times and a few of the villages near. At Grafton I went to see a nice woman of 55, who was born blind and has a curious history. Her father was an illegitimate son blind from birth, but a fine handsome man, remarkably clever, who built a business in the village and married a nice woman and had 9 children. But all were born blind. They all grew up and lived until about 30 or 35 and then one by one died, except this one—Miss M. Miss M's mother, they say, was a woman of a very beautiful character and very religious. When her children were growing up and the family were all happy and healthy and prosperous in spite of so much blindness, an old friend of the wife told her a secret which she had kept in her breast for many years: it was that she—Mrs. M. and her husband were children of the same father, this so affected the poor woman's mind that she lost her reason and died in an asylum. Do you know Melksham? I found it a little town of stone instead of brick like the others, and was reminded that it is near Bath in a stone-producing district. Not far from Melksham is Trowbridge, another nice little old town where I have been twice lately in search of a person I wanted to see. One day while waiting I went to pass an idle hour in the church and when idly gazing at a marble mural tablet on which a dying priest with a Roman nose, surrounded by his sorrowing friends, is sculptured the name of George Crabbe under it arrested my attention. Yes, it was the poet's monument: he was vicar of Trowbridge 18 years until 1832 when he died. The old verger then told me this story—has it ever been printed? During some repairs in this part of the building one of the workmen broke open Crabbe's grave and carried off the skull, which he sold to a publican in the town for half a crown. He had it for some time, then a Mr. Foley, a wealthy man of the town, hearing about it, got the head and had it reburied, but not with the body. It was placed in a casket made specially for it and buried by itself within the wall just under the tablet. If you will send me a line addressed to Post Office, Martin, Salisbury.
With kindest regards,
W. H. Hudson
Salisbury.
June 11. [1903]
My dear Garnett
I'm here till Tuesday next but shall not be in London soon enough to see you next week. Many thanks for writing: I shall be curious to see your paper in the H. Review[1] and only fear you have been too generous—that there will be honey on the rim of the cup but not any bitter taste in the liquor. I have a letter from Graham in which he speaks of the Academy's review of my book, and says that "Garnett" probably wrote it. I have written to say that I have not seen it, as I do not get any reviews sent but that you did not write it.
Talking of Life-histories—in the neighbourhood of the village where I visited the blind woman one very hot day I went over a vast down to the village of Oare, and on the hill top got off and sat in the shade to rest not far from a small lonely cottage. A very old grey woman and a very small boy came out and took a long look at me, and by and by the small boy came and presented me with a spray of Southern-wood, and began to prattle telling me incidentally his little life history. He appeared to be one of those whose origin is "wrop in mystery." A more beautiful little boy I have not seen: he was 6 years old and that old bent woman, he said, was his mother! His father was "a very old man," a farm labourer, at Mr. Young's Farm. They kept no pig but they had a yellow cat—only it was lost now. He went to school at Oare—all down hill, and then all up hill to come back. The other small boys plagued him but he always hit back so hard that they were beginning to leave him alone. His sister Susan had 3 children, and Fanny two. And he had a brother—a great fat man, who lived in London, but they knew nothing about him. Mother knew, but she wouldn’t tell. His father's name was "Mr. Kent." "And what's your name?" I asked. He drew himself up, took a very deep breath and said, "My name is Henry Jasper George Hicks Hallam." It was a fine name, I said, but why was he Hallam and his father Kent? "I have two fathers," he said "—Mr. Kent and Mr. Hallam."
On Sunday evening I had to go to Lyndhurst—some 24 miles from Martin—and did not return until Tuesday afternoon. A funny business took me to that unbeloved place—something to do—odd to say—with a review of my book: but the subject is not worth going into just now. On my way back I crossed that wild lonely street of pine and heath between Cadnam and Godshill where you see no house for a distance of about 7 miles, and where I encountered but two souls. One was a black cock—the first bird of the kind I have seen in Hampshire. He rose before me from the heath at the road side and fled away in proud style. The other was a very tall fine looking old man sitting by the roadside smoking his peaceful pipe in the wilderness. I sat down and had a long talk with him. He was born close by, he told me, at a small village near Fordingbridge. In the sixties he went out to America and listed and went through the war; then got land on the upper Mississippi, and married and worked hard for many years cultivating his land. It was flat marshy land and he worked too hard and [?] ague and had bad health generally. Then he lost his wife and 2 children, and fell himself into consumption. One of his lungs was completely gone. Then he came home to end his days in his old native place among his kindred; but after 2 years more of suffering began to mend, and finally got perfectly well and strong. Now he works as a Road-mender and roams up and down the roads that cross the heath on an old tricycle with his spade and pick and other tools.
To judge from Blunt's own work—from this "New Pilgrimage," the series of sonnets telling of his own varied life and occupation, or rather amusements, you are perfectly right in what you say of him. He has had "too good a time."
The Daily News is the paper I have oftenest seen in the country, and Belloc and Chesterton have been in it a good deal. I am so free from the—vice of cleverness myself that I am not very tolerant of it in others. Perhaps here I—
Compound for sins I am inclined to
By damning those I have no mind to.
B. amuses me, but irritates as well, and when I read C. I am inclined to exclaim with the young fellow after witnessing the old man's feat of balancing an eel on his nose—"What made you so wonderfully clever?" Perhaps he writes too much—perhaps a reputation for cleverness and paradox is bad for a man—a sort of "heritage of woe" as Law said.
Pardon this long screed—my excuse must be that it is raining. Poor little David!—but we have all had that sad experience in some degree—to lose our own selves; but to boys sent far from home to public schools for instance, it must sometimes be terrible. Tell him, to console him, that by and by or in some future time he will find it again—that it will seem all the more precious and beautiful then.
With kindest regards to Mrs. Garnett,
W. H. Hudson
3 Mansfield Cottage
Hunstanton
Norfolk.
17 Aug. [1904]
Dear Garnett
How, I wonder, are you and yours? I hope Mrs. Garett has been benefited, and I suppose David has been thoroughly Russianized. I ought to have written to you before—when I came here—for then I could have expected a line from you by now. We came here a week ago and arrived on a pouring wet day and were told that there was not a room to be had in the place. We tried the hotels and they were full up, but after trudging about in the rain and wind for some hours we "happened" on this cottage, a small old house built of yellow-brown c———stone, and luckily the people they had had had just left. (3 hads). The landlady is a poor tall pale gaunt woman with a large nose, very sad looking, with one boy of ten her only family. Her furniture was rather poor, and her terms low, so we only took it by the day. But this poor soul is a most interesting human being and we shall stay here all the time. She is the daughter of a farmer near Lyne, and twelve years ago married a mold man who took her to his town and was a drunkard and bad fellow in all ways; so she took her boy and left him and came back to her own country to make her living and her boys. She is in spite of her ungainly outside a most worthy and even lovable person, and her boy a curiously interesting little fellow, very grave and serious, passionately fond of reading—history adventure—and geology. He possesses Hugh Millar's works, and when his mother takes a days holiday the two with their dinner in a basket go miles away along the coast and spend the day together on the sands hunting for fossils at that point where there is an old submerged forest, where branches and bits of amber and bones and shells are washed up on the beach. The weather has been very bad since we came, only yesterday we had half a day of calm and sunshine. Monday we spent at Lyne, one of the most charming old towns I have ever seen—one would like to live in it and forget the very name of Progress and be at peace. It is altogether an interesting country, but the Norfolk people are not attractive—they are to my mind the most ungraceful unprepossessing people in England. Here, at Hunstanton, at the height of its short season, the people that fill the place are from Leicester, Bedford, Lincoln and several Midland towns: very few Londoners. They are very nice looking people of Saxon type: the children wonderfully fine-looking, with very light hair, and many of the women large and fine, placid and cow-like for all their blue eyes. They are of course the well-to-do people of the towns they come from, Hunstanton being an expensive place to stay at. You are, I am afraid, more interested in humans than in birds. 'Tis the other way about with me; but I am not well enough to go the long distances one needs to walk to see the shore birds properly. A few days ago there were a few small flocks of sandpipers, at different points along the beach where we were walking—knots, dunlins, dotterell (dotterel) and [?]. We stood some time watching one small flock at a distance of forty yards. I remarked to my wife that they were always very tame when they arrived at this season on the British coast, on their way back from the arctic regions: "If you want to see their wingmarkings you must make them fly." So she walked to them and got to within eight yards before they rose up and flew a few yards off and alighted again. There is no shooting yet here, and one would think that man and birds had made peace.
I'm rather ashamed to send you this long screed about nothing. I daresay we shall be a week longer here. I've had no proofs yet.
Kindest regards to Mrs. Garnett and David.
W. H. Hudson
Jan. 6.'14.
Dear Garnett
The Book you sent, Major's Early-Sussex has an appetising look but I hav'nt been able to look at it yet (except the preface) so must lie on the table until I can take it up or until you want it back to lend to someone in a hurry. The Mrs. Wharton[2] I've also put down after a few chapters—for the present. You didn't say enough in your review: you damned the people described in the book—the social state that can produce such creatures—and they certainly are detestable, or would be if one could believe that Mrs. Wharton is a true seer. Nothing in any of them to love or reverence or pity or forgive; no beauty, sweetness, pathos; but they are all like people made of zinc with their characters painted in big black letters on their surfaces so that there shall be no mistake. To read her book is like coming into a drawingroom, such as are common nowadays, overlighted with dozens of electric lights—all a hard blinding glare with no faintest spot of shade anywhere. I was going to say the only writer in England she could be likened to is Frank Danby. But it would be an insult to Mrs. Frankau: detestable as most of her people are they are human, and even Dr. Phillips of Maida Vale, the worst of the lot who poisons his invalid wife for the sake of his mistress, moves one's compassion as any real human being does. However I can't suppose you had any motive in sparing her notwithstanding her dog-like fidelity (if that is the right word) to the master Henry James. To go back to the subject I started with: I’ve had too many books tumbled upon me the last few days, including Frazer's last two vols—Balder the Beautiful. (You may want to read it some day.) But I've neglected them all to read a 3 penny book I picked up on a cheap stall a few days ago—Leigh Hunt's autobiography. Oddly enough I've known L. H. since I was fourteen or fifteen, when owing to being struck down with a fever which made me a prisoner for a couple of months, I first began to look at books. Some of his books were on the shelves. But I never knew till now that he had written his own life. As an autobiography it has serious faults but it charms and disarms me especially the early chapters and most of all those about his mother. What a marvellously beautiful picture he gives of her! Well, she was an American and must have been strangely like my mother, who was also American, and Hunt's mother's people were loyalists while my mother's forbears were furiously anti-English from the very beginning of the discontent which ended in the Revolution. The Hunts were very poor when he was a small boy, and he relates that one night he was with his mother somewhere in the vicinity of Blackfriars' bridge when a wretched woman begged of them. His mother had no money to give but she told the woman to follow her and going into a small dark side street divested herself of the flannel petticoat and gave it to her. It was bitterly cold and rheumatism and long illness followed as a result of her action. Well, my mother did very many things far far greater than that. I remember after her death going into a native ranche one day, and the old woman of the house over eighty, got up from the stool where she sat over the fire and said, with the tears running from her eyes, "She always called me Mother when she came to see me, but she was my mother and the mother of us all and what shall we do now she has gone?" How many men—tens and hundreds of thousands of men—could say as much as you and I and Leigh Hunt of a mother whose memory they worship: but all this has no existence in the world of certain fictionists whose fictions are invariably hailed by the reviewers as the "real thing," as "true to life" and all that.
Well, this is a long enough screed. As for what you say about criticising one's friends of course I don't take it seriously: it is just your fun—an attempt to draw me out. If I were to take it seriously how if I were to ask you by way of retort—what would you say of the man on the bench who allowed his judgments to be swayed by his personal likes and dislikes? I take it that morally the reviewer of books is in the position of the man on the bench, that his brain and not his heart must decide and he has only to judge justly—and "damn the consequences."
W. H. Hudson
23 North Parade
Penzance.
May 29. [1920]
Dear Garnett
I am now sending you the story[3] which you see is the old historical one of Edgar and Elfrida, a subject most unsuitable for me, which was forced on me so to speak, and so I should not be surprised to hear that I am out [?] of it here and that it is no good. Well, you will tell me, and all I can say is I will not rewrite it as I've now finished with it and very glad too, as I should have preferred one of my own natural history subjects—the book I had half written before I came down in fact. But when I came down I put some old envelopes, each containing some notes I had made on some subjects which had interested me at one time. I thought it best to bring them down and look over them to destroy most of them as now useless when I turned out and looked at the Edgar and E. note I had made years ago. I thought I might just try to make a little thing of three or four thousand words and get rid of it in that way instead of destroying it. But the confounded subject would not let me go until I had made this long short story which runs to over 21,000 words. And now I'm fairly sick of it and can do nothing beyond mending any glaringly wrong passage. But you will tell me about that. I want it back in a few days if you can look at it soon, as it is just possible that I may be able to go up pretty soon. I haven't got much benefit from being here, though the London winter would perhaps have carried me off before now if I hadn't got away in November. I haven't been over to St. Ives yet, nor to the Land's End, nor anywhere outside of Penzance as I haven't felt well enough for anything.
What I feel about this thing is that I haven't succeeded in producing the effect aimed at in the character of the woman as the whole and sole interest is in that—the woman who was capable of a horrible crime and who was yet essentially noble in spirit. But as to its being a story of a thousand years ago, that doesn't matter at all seeing that human passions then were what they are today and always, and all the archaeology stuff is left out. You must say Use it or Burn it and I'll obey.
W. H. Hudson
23 North Parade
Penzance.
June 2. '20.
Dear Garnett
Very many thanks for your helpful letter. I had seen when correcting the MS. that a lot of sentences and phrases ought to come out—and that Fisher allusion and things like that. But about style—the moment it looks artificial it revolts me. I have never conquered my dislike of Morris because of his Saxon words. You did not notice, I dare say, as I don't use quotation marks, that the concluding words of my Preamble are a quote from him. "Without external aid or compulsion, I say I could not make shadows breathe, restore the dead and know what silent mouths once said." Well, why didn't he stick to his own principle and make the last line: And know what mouths now dumb once said?
I suppose it was because his own diction without a Latin word thrown in here and there was too distressing even to himself. If you have ever succeeded in wading through the five huge volumes of the Earthly Paradise you must have had a sickness of that kind of writing. I'm glad you like the passages I like and think [best]. I sent a copy to Morley Roberts at the same time and he says those are the wrong passages—that Elfrida's monologues must all be cut short to make the story better.
I hope to go up next week and you will perhaps be able to come somewhere and lunch with me. Today I went to Godolphin to visit the Rector there, who last year when I was here was a poor curate with not enough to live on at St. Erths. As he is a queer unconventional fellow I wanted to congratulate him. He told me of a strange man who had spent thirty-two years in Patagonia, living near Godolphin, and as I wished to see him we went off and paid him a visit. He had lived in Tierra del Fuego and on the Straits of Magellan and among the Andes, and also at the Rio Negre and knew all my old friends there. I asked him why he didn't write his adventures. He said he would get out pen and paper and start writing them right away as soon as I left! But poor man, he is past it, I fear, at seventy-eight after spending twenty years in Cornwall since he came home.
W. H. Hudson
P. S. Ethelbold is one of about twenty varients of the name: I chose Athelwold as it was Humes choice in his history and is most familiar.
Tasked Jenner—the old Brit. Museum man who lives down here, the meaning of Plack but he couldn't say and was disturbed in mind as he professes to know every English and Saxon word. Nor had he ever heard of the tradition of Athelwold's death in Hampshire.
I tell plainly enough where it is—Wherwell, a village on the Test, and the Forest of Harewood is close by, on the Andover side. About 2,000 acres of the original Forest remain till now, and the owner, the lord of the manor is Iremonger, and it was one of that family who put up the cross some 80 or 90 years ago at Dead Man's Plack. Probably it means Dead man's place. Elfrida built her monastery at the village where Athelwold's castle had stood, and it continued down to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. But it was once partly destroyed during the horrible wars of Stephen and Maud. But the stone walls remained intact I suppose after it was burnt, as it continued as a nunnery after the wars. And it exists still—or partly exists and is the dwelling house of the Earls of Lovelace :—the present man is Byron's great grandson I fancy. It is in the histories that Elfrida took the veil there and died there. And some say it is still haunted by her ghost.
I was going to put that in a note at the end—but it would be actionable as you are not allowed to say such things. But it was rather an impressive ghost.
- ↑ The Nature Books of W. H. Hudson. Humane Review. June 1903.—E. G.
- ↑ The Custom of the Country. By Edith Wharton.—E. G.
- ↑ Dead Man's Plack.—E. G.