Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists; and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so writes of birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings and indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were.
Many people, even “lovers of Nature,” would be inclined to look for small beer in a book with the title of “Adventures among Birds.” If they are ignorant of Mr. Hudson’s writings, they are not to blame, since bird books are, as a rule, small beer. Most writers condescend to birds or have not the genius to keep them alive in print, whether or not they have the eternal desire “to convey to others,” as Mr. Hudson says, “some faint sense or suggestion of the wonder and delight which may be found in Nature.” He does not condescend to birds, “these loveliest of our fellow-beings,” as he calls them, “these which give greatest beauty and lustre to the world.” He travels “from county to county viewing many towns and villages, conversing with persons of all ages and conditions,” and when these persons are his theme he writes like a master, like an old master perhaps, as everybody knows, who has read his “Green Mansions,” “The Purple Land,” and “South American Sketches.” It might, therefore, be taken for granted that such an artist would not be likely to handle birds unless he could do so with the same reality and vitality as men. And this is what he does.
His chief pleasure from his childhood on the Pampas has been in wild birds; he has delighted in their voices above all sounds. “Relations,” he calls the birds, “with knowing, emotional, and thinking brains like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only brighter. Their beauty and grace so much beyond ours, and their faculty of flight which enables them to return to us each year from such remote, outlandish places, their winged, swift souls in winged bodies, do not make them uncanny, but only fairy-like.”
Only the book itself can persuade the reader of the extraordinary love and knowledge of birds which have thus been nourished. If I were to quote the passage where he speaks of his old desire to pursue wild birds over many lands, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, to be and to know much until I became a name for always wandering with a hungry heart;” or where he declares that the golden oriole’s clear whistle was more to him “than the sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and cathedrals, and more than adventures among the people;” or where he calls being “present, in a sense invisible”—with the aid of silence and binoculars—“in the midst of the domestic circle of beings of a different order, another world than ours,” nearly every one would probably pronounce him an extravagant sentimentalist, a fanatic, or, worst of all, an exaggerator. He is none of these. When he writes of his first and only pet bird and its escapes, there is no pettiness or mere prettiness: it is not on the human scale, yet it is equal to a story of gods or men. He is an artist, with a singular power of sympathizing with wild life, especially that of birds. Their slender or full throated songs, the “great chorus of wild, ringing, jubilant cries,” when “the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound” assembles, the South American crested screamers counting the hours “when at intervals during the night they all burst out singing like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the incalculable multitude produce an effect as of tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the listener is shaken by the tempest of sound, and the earth itself appears to tremble beneath him;” the colouring of birds, brilliant or delicate, their soaring or manœuvring or straight purposed flight, their games and battles, all their joyous, or fierce, passionate, and agitated cries and motions, delight him at least as much as music delights its most sensitive and experienced lovers. At sight of the pheasant he cannot help loving it, much as he hates the havoc of which it is the cause.
There is a very large variety in his enjoyment. It is exquisite and it is vigorous; it is tender and at times almost superhuman in grimness. It is a satisfaction of his senses, of his curious intelligence, and of his highest nature. The green eggs of the little bittern thrill him “like some shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.” He is cheerful when his binoculars are bringing him close to birds “at their little games”—a kestrel being turned off by starlings, a heron alighting on another heron’s back, a band of starlings detaching themselves from their flock to join some wild geese going at right angles to their course; for “the playful spirit is universal among them.” The songs of blackbird, nightingale, thrush, and marsh warbler delight him, and yet at other times the loss of the soaring species, eagles and kites, oppresses him, and he speaks contemptuously of “miles on miles of wood, millions of ancient noble trees, a haunt of little dicky birds and tame pheasants.” His vision of the Somerset of the lake-dwellers, of “the paradise of birds in its reedy inland sea, its lake of Athelney,” makes a feast for the eyes and ears. Moreover, he is never a mere bird man, and the result of this variety of interest and pleasure on the part of a man of Mr. Hudson’s imagination, culture, and experience, is that while his birds are intensely alive in many different ways, and always intensely birdlike, presenting a loveliness beyond that of idealized or supernaturalized women and children, yet at the same time their humanity was never before so apparent. The skylark is to him both bird and spirit, and one proof of the intense reality of his love is his ease in passing, as he does in several places, out of this world into a mythic, visionary, or very ancient world. This also is a proof of the powers of his style. At first sight, at least to the novice who is beginning to distinguish between styles without discriminating, Mr. Hudson’s is merely a rather exceptionally unstudied English, perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is, in fact, a combination, as curious as it is ripe and profound, of the eloquent and the colloquial, now the one, now the other, predominating in a variety of shades which make it wonderfully expressive for purposes of narrative and of every species of description—precise, humorous, rapturous, and sublime. And not the least reason of its power is that it never paints a bird without showing the hand and the heart that paints it. It reveals the author in the presence of birds just as much as birds in the presence, visible or invisible, of the author. The series of his books is now a long one, not enough, certainly, yet a feast, and the last is among the three or four which we shall remember and re-read most often.
I left Wells by a road passing the South-Western Railway station, and admired the grass island parting the roads to the passengers’ and the goods’ entrances. The curved edge of the turf was as clean as that of the most select lawn; the grass looked as if it had never been trodden. I now rode close to Hay Hill on my right—a dull, isolated heave of earth, striped downwards by hedges so as to resemble a country umbrella and its ribs. Motor cars overtook me. At Coxley Pound I overtook a peat-seller’s cart. The air was perfumed with something like willow-plait which I did not identify. The wind was light, but blew from behind me, and was strong enough to strip the dead ivy leaves from an ash tree, but not to stop the tortoiseshell butterfly sauntering against it.
GLASTONBURY TOR.
“For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedge Moor drained by straight sedgy water-courses along which grow lines of elm, willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me like a huge tumulus—almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s Tower.”