CONCERNING “A LITTLE BOY LOST”
A Letter from W. H. Hudson[[19]]
Dear Mr. Knopf:
Your request for a Foreword to insert in the American reprint of the little book worries me. A critic on this side has said that my Prefaces to reprints of my earlier works are of the nature of parting kicks, and I have no desire just now to kick this poor innocent. That evil-tempered old woman, Mother Nature, in one of her worst tantrums, has been inflicting so many cuffs and blows on me that she has left me no energy or disposition to kick anything—even myself.
The trouble is that I know so little about it. Did I write this book? What then made me do it?
In reading a volume of Fors Clavigera I once came upon a passage which sounded well but left me in a mist, and it relieved me to find a footnote to it in which the author says: “This passage was written many years ago and what I was thinking about at the time has quite escaped my memory. At all events, though I let it stand, I can find no meaning in it now.”
Little men may admire but must not try to imitate these gestures of the giants. And as a result of a little quiet thinking it over I seem able to recover the idea I had in my mind when I composed this child’s story and found a title for it in Blake. Something too of the semi-wild spirit of the child hero in the lines:
“Naught loves another as itself ...
And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little birds
That pick up crumbs about the door.”
There nature is, after picking up the crumbs to fly away.
A long time ago I formed a small collection of children’s books of the early years of the nineteenth century; and looking through them, wishing that some of them had fallen into my hands when I was a child I recalled the books I had read at that time—especially two or three. Like any normal child I delighted in such stories as the Swiss Family Robinson, but they were not the books I prized most; they omitted the very quality I liked best—the little thrills that nature itself gave me, which half frightened and fascinated at the same time, the wonder and mystery of it all. Once in a while I got a book with something of this rare element in it, contained perhaps in some perfectly absurd narrative of animals taking human shape or using human speech, with such like transformations and vagaries; they could never be too extravagant, fantastic and incredible, so long as they expressed anything of the feeling I myself experienced when out of sight and sound of my fellow beings, whether out on the great level plain, with a glitter of illusory water all round me, or among the shadowy trees with their bird and insect sounds, or by the waterside and bed of tall dark bull-rushes murmuring in the wind.
These ancient memories put it in my mind to write a book which, I imagined, would have suited my peculiar taste of that early period, the impossible story to be founded on my own childish impressions and adventures, with a few dreams and fancies thrown in and two or three native legends and myths, such as the one of the Lady of the Hills, the incarnate spirit of the rocky Sierras on the great plains, about which I heard from my gaucho comrades when on the spot—the strange woman seldom viewed by human eye who is jealous of man’s presence and is able to create sudden violent tempests to frighten them from her sacred haunts.
That’s the story of my story, and to the question in your publisher’s practical mind, I’m sorry to have to say I don’t know. I have no way of finding out, since children are not accustomed to write to authors to tell them what they think of their books. And after all these excuses it just occurs to me that children do not read forewords and introductions; they have to be addressed to adults who do not read children’s books, so that in any case it would be thrown away. Still if a foreword you must have, and from me, I think you will have to get it out of this letter.
I remain,
Yours cordially,
W. H. Hudson.
November 14, 1917.
ANCIENT MUSIC[[20]]
By Ezra Pound
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ‘tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
Note.—This is not folk music, but Dr. Ker writes that the tune is to be found under the Latin words of a very ancient canon.
FIRE AND THE HEART OF MAN[[21]]
By J. C. Squire
It was eleven o’clock at night. I was preparing to write an essay. I was going to write it about a book. The book was a good and a beautiful book; it filled me with the noblest thoughts, made me a better man and fit for the most heroic actions. It was full of sagacity, of sound reasoning, of imagination checked by sense, of reflection shot through with vision. It was not only a good book, but a large and solid book, a book to be chewed like the cud, remembered and returned to, a virtuous and courageous book, a book of mettle, a book of weight. Unfortunately, or fortunately, just as I had finished reading the book and was biting the end of my fountain-pen, wondering how in God’s name I was to do it justice, I looked out of my attic window. The trees stood dark across the road; the river lay dark beyond the trees; but the light of the stars was not the only light. On the horizon, behind some trees and a house, glowing, reddening, rolling, there was a Fire.
There may be people who, when they see Fire in the distance, say, “Oh, what a pity! I hope the Insurance Company will not suffer heavily”; or “What a waste of material.” There may be people who say, “There is a Fire”—and then go to bed. There may even be people who say, “Well, what if there is a Fire?”—and turn grumpily to resume their discussion about the Ethics of Palaeontology or the Finances of a Co-operative Kitchen. If such people exist, I am not among them. When I saw this Fire I ran downstairs as hard as I could pelt and knocked up a neighbour. I said to him, “There is a Fire. Look!” He answered, “By Jove! so there is.” I said, “It may be twenty miles away or two miles away. The farther the bigger. If it is a long walk the compensation is proportionate.” He said, “Wait a minute till I put on my boots.” I said, “All right; but buck up or the Fire may die down.” He hurried; and we started walking. We did not know whither we were walking. All we knew was, and this thought slightly depressed us, that the direction of the Fire put out of the question any hope that it was the Albert Memorial or the Queen Victoria Memorial that was in process of combustion.
We walked along the river, past the terrace and the cocoa-butter factory, and the nuns’ school, and the creek, and the boathouses. The glare increased steadily as we went. When we reached the bridge it was in full view. An enormous factory was blazing away on the edge of the river below the bridge; the great span cut dark across the flames and the glow. As we climbed to the bridge we saw that there was a thin row of silent people leaning over the ironwork—looking at the Fire. The stars were above them and the velvet dark sky; the river flowed below them; a few hundred yards away great flames and intervolved clouds of smoke poured out of a huge building, the top windows of which were almost intolerably bright. The roof had gone and the pillars of stonework between the windows looked like the pillars of some ruined Greek temple against a magnificent gold sunset. It was all gold and blue; the moving gold and the still, all-embracing blue; and the crowd said nothing at all. There was no sound except when a great stretch of masonry fell in, and then there was a swelling sigh like that which greets the ascent of a rocket at a firework display. There was a wind, and it was chill; we passed on over the bridge and descended to the tow-path on the opposite bank. Along that path we went until we were opposite the Fire. About eight people, very indistinct in the gloom, were scattered amongst the waterside bushes. In front of us a fire-boat took up its position. Below and around the Fire little lights flashed; there were lights above the river (which was at low tide); voices shouted terrifically from the other bank; voices, addressed to ‘Arry, answered from the boat, and made reference to a line. An engine began working; hoses could be seen sending rising and falling sprays of water against a blaze that seemed capable of defying all the water in all the seas.
There we stood, watching. Only one sentence did we hear from our awed neighbours. There was a man who in the darkness looked portly and moustached. He took his pipe out of his mouth and said, optimistically, “Nice breeze; it ought to fan it along.” “Along” meant an enormous oil warehouse and wharf. Overhearing that remark, I told myself the truth. The moral man in me, the citizen, the patriot, were all fighting hard for supremacy. I was trying to say to myself: “This may mean ruin to somebody; you ought to pray that it should be got under at once”; and “How can you bear to see so much painfully-won material wastefully consumed!” and “This stuff would probably be useful at the Front; it has employed labour; its loss may be serious; its replacement may be difficult; Germany, Germany, Germany, Germany....” But all that company of virtuous selves fought a losing battle. Aloud or in quietness I (or they) could say all this and much more; but the still, small voice kept on repeating, “Don’t you be a humbug. It’s too good. You want this Fire to spread. You want to forget what it all means. You will be disappointed if the firemen got it under. You would like to see the next place catch fire, and the next place, and the next place, for it would be a devil of a great display.” Peccavi; that was certainly so.
They got it under. They cornered it. Flames gave way to a great smoke; the smoke grew and grew; the path and the bushes faded from red into the indistinct hue of the starlit night. The mental glow died down; we felt cold, and moved, and walked towards home. And as we walked I meditated on the glory of Fire, fit subject for a poet, refreshment for the human spirit and exaltation for the soul. My emotions, when looking at it, had not been entirely base; I had felt, not merely a sensuous pleasure in the glories of that golden eruption under the blue roof of night, but wonder at the energies we keep under, their perpetuity and their source, and the grandeur of man, living amid so much vastness and power, valiantly struggling to cope with things greater than himself, save that they have no souls. And I thought that in the perfect and hygienic State where the firemen would find water, water everywhere, where the Super-Hose would be in use, where everything would be built of fireproof materials, and where extinguishers of a capacity not conceived by us would be available as a last resort, the wise sovereign would set apart beautiful large buildings, all made of timber, filled with oil, tar and sugar, surrounded with waste land and fronted by a wide reflecting river, which would periodically be set on fire for the consolation and the uplifting of men. I don’t want a big Fire made impossible.
And I wondered why it was that fire on a huge scale had never yet adequately inspired a poet. And then I thought that poets had, after all, done as yet very little, considering the materials that are daily displayed before them; and then I found great comfort and courage in the thought that the commonplace things, the things we all see and know, live by and live with, have so far merely been skirted, and that the provinces which remain to be explored and described and celebrated by imaginative writers are endless, and that only corners have as yet been spied into.
PREFACE TO “DELIVERANCE”[[22]]
By E. L. Grant Watson
When I had completed my first book, I had a desire to write a preface, but was so strongly advised to let the book carry its own message that I refrained: with the result that only one reviewer saw what I was driving at. Later when the book was published in America, I was asked by my American publisher to write the preface which at first I had desired to write. Eighty per cent. of the American reviewers were not only sympathetic, but intelligent. Having been given the key, they read the book in the mood in which it was written. It seems to me permissible to provide such a key.
In writing this my third book, I have tried to portray a process of spiritual emancipation, of a freedom which is not content to find itself by any premature or artificial way of denial. Emancipation of this kind is difficult enough even for men; and for women, whose lives are, by nature of their biological functions, more closely interwoven in the material process, it is almost impossible. Yet sometimes it is achieved; perhaps most frequently through long or intense suffering. Yet all suffering ultimately entails joy; and so, also, through joy. Such a form of deliverance from the difficult complex of material things is not incompatible with the acceptance of life. Indeed the mistake has too often been made, that through any haphazard form of renunciation the spirit could find a short cut to its own freedom. Only through the acceptance of life can be attained a confidence strong enough for the happiness and that deliverance.
In this story I have chosen a woman so sensitive to the beauty of existence as to be conscious, through all her youth and adolescence, of that veiled terror that lurks at the very heart of beauty. Through fear she learns first humility, then courage and at last attains the spiritual power that raises its possessor above accident. And at each step her love for the increasing light of her own spirit grows stronger. It becomes more precious than even the unique love of woman for man. It becomes the arbiter of life, determining with a confidence unshaken by pity or desire the material limitations through which it can best find expression.
[4]. From “Punch: The Immortal Liar.” To be published May, 1921.
[5]. See [Bibliography].
[6]. See [Bibliography].
[7]. From “October.” See [Bibliography].
[9]. See Couperus’ novel “Een Stille Kracht.”
[10]. “Door Duisternis tot Licht”—title under which Kartini’s Letters were first published in Holland.
[11]. From “Collected Poems of W. H. Davies.” See [Bibliography].
[12]. A PAGE FROM THE THREE MULLA-MULGARS, BY WALTER DE LA MARE, ILLUSTRATED BY DOROTHY P. LATHROP.
See [Bibliography] and page [136].
[13]. From “Poems of T. S. Eliot.” See [Bibliography].
[14]. See [Bibliography] and page [142].
[15]. See [Bibliography].
[16]. From “The Forerunner.” See [Bibliography].
[17]. From “Country Sentiment.” See [Bibliography].
[18]. This and the following two sketches are from Mr. Howe’s “The Anthology of Another Town.” See page [139].
[19]. When I arranged with Mr. Hudson for the publication of an American Edition of “A Little Boy Lost” (see page [136]), I asked him to write a special foreword to his American readers. He replied with this characteristic letter.
[20]. From “Lustra and Earlier Poems.” See [Bibliography].
[21]. From “Books in General: Second Series.” See [Bibliography].
[22]. See [Bibliography].