GREEN MANSIONS Letter Referring to “Green Mansions” from W

Born.on tRe, South American Pampas iHatusOrcQ. I846^ObiitLondor^ 1C)22 THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO 75O COPIES FOR SALE IN ENGLAND, IOO FOR SALE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND 35 PRESENTATION COPIES THE COLLECTED WORKS of W. H. HUDSON IN TWENTY-FOUR VOLUMES GREEN MANSIONS Letter referring to “Green Mansions” from W. H. Hudson, December 12, 1903. OREEN MANSIONS A ROMANCE OF THE TROPICAL FOREST BY W. H. HUDSON MCMXXIII LONDON fef TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS L.TD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. A ll righls reserved PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN A NOTE ON HUDSON’S ROMANCES Of Hudson’s four masterpieces of story-telling, The Purple Land, Green Mansions, Marta Riquelme, El Ombú, he himself had most affection for Marta Riquelme, perhaps partly because this tale received much less attention than the others from his friends and the reviewers. Each admircr naturally emphasised his preference, and while one friend in introducing Hudson’s work to new acquaintances would lay particular stress on The Story of a Piebald Horse, another always pointed to El Ombú. But Hudson laid special store by Marta Riquelme. Thus writingto me, February 20, 1920, he says: “ Just lately when the desire to work became too strong I set to do a small thing—a tragical story1 which has nothing to do with my own particular line. But I remember that I once wrote a story called Marta Riquelme. ...” A reason for his partiality for it was that whereas El Ombú, this exquisite flower of literature springing from the soil of the tragedy of a ruined house, was reconstructed from a narrative of an oíd gaucho, Marta Riquelme is Hudson’s own spiritual child, the very essence of his tender, mournful brooding. Simple in structure as is Father Sepulvida’s narration, its sombre intensity and sun- lessness create an effect as dominating as that which the savage desolation of the mountains of Yala left on the superstitious mind of the good priest. The fathcr’s intense absorp- tion in his story of Marta’s unexampled sufferings and of his despairing struggle with his own passion is, however, subtly relieved by the undertone of implicit irony, unheard by him. El Ombú, a masterpiece unique in English literature for its depth and breadth of emotion, is deep and brimming Dead Man’s Plack. vi GREEN MANSIONS like the unresting flow of a broad river. As the oíd gaucho Nicandro’s narrative advances, we feel the change of night and day, of wind and sun pervading its flowing current; we feel that character and destiny are one. And in this story of tragic passion and hate and suffering innocence, and of the sorrowful love that lives on, lingering like the scent of a withered flower, there is the deepest of all philosophies, the philosophy of oíd age that has seen all the lovely freshness of a generation’s youth, its passion and gay ardour, and all the evil that men do to one another covered alike by the dust of the tomb. There is a peculiar sweet tragic poignancy in this tale of memory, the tenderness and mournful wisdom of the very oíd distilled in the bitter chalice of sorrow, qualities that are felt in its sonorous cadenees. The tale is so far removed from the modern world’s complexity, and from the vortex of hurrying energies of our civilisation, that one doubts whether this elassie can ever be popular. It is too deep in its beauty and its purity of sorrow. I confess that I myself have a particular affection for El Otnbú, since my deep admira- tion for it when I read it first in MS. brought Hudson and me together. When published in “The Greenback Library” in 1902, the small edition sold so slowly that seven years later the remainder was rebound and reissued as South American Sketches. Few, very few, critics have remarked, or spoken of, the consummate style of El Ombú, and its position in con- temporary literature reminds me of that of an oak I once saw growing on the edge of a marsh in Hampshire, so screened from observation by the thicket and the lie of the land that few people ever approached it. Green Mansions on publication had a happier fortune than Hudson’s other romances. Declined by an eminent publisher because “it sent him to sleep,” so Hudson laughingly told me, the MS. was sent me at my request by Hudson, with the letter of December 12, 1903, now facsimiled for the present volume. Acting on my advice, Hudson cut out a long intro- ductory portion of the narrative. Published in 1904, the A NOTE ON HUDSON’S ROMANCES vü romance secured a select appreciative audience, but the second edition sold very slowly. Both in England and in America, when, twelve years later, Mr. Galsworthy’s en- thusiastic Introduction on Hudson’s work captured for the book a large circle of readers, perhaps the ethereal spirituality of this “ romance of the tropical forest” was less the factor determining its “success” than the poetic conception of the heroine, Rima, “the lustrous daughter of the Didi,” the last survivor of a mysterious, vanished race. In the figure of Rima Hudson has fused in magical fashion his passion for bird life and his feeling for woman’s beauty. Note especially the account of Rima’s bird-like melodious voice at the end of Chapter II., the description of the luminous colour of her eyes and hair in Chapter VI., and the passage on the humming- bird’s fairy-like loveliness in the chapter following. But the conception of this enchanting, mysterious girl would ha ve bordered too much on the marvellous had Hudson not exer- cised most subtle art in doubling her personality with that of the meek taciturn girl of the hut scene in Chapter VI., and in coupling her life with that of her “ grandfather,” the earthy oíd sinner, Nuflo. The poetic shadowiness and ethereal lightness of Rima’s figure—which is hard to sustain in certain passages of the narrative where shc speaks—is thus artfully set off against a background of prosaic fact, to which Hudson recalls us when our credence has been a little strained. With what art he intermingles these interlacing fibres of romance and reality may be seen from an examination of a few con- secutive chapters. Thus to the poetic imaginings and exposi- tion of Rima’s strange powers in Chapter VIII. succeeds the description of oíd Nuflo’s hiding-place and the gross meal on the rank flesh of the coatimundi; while Abel’s poetic love exaltation is followcd by his frolicsome outburst with oíd Cla-cla in Chapter X. In drawing so carefully the char- acters of the crafty oíd Nuflo, the grim taciturn savage, Runi, and his mother, Cla-cla, Hudson displays all his sardonio humour. Hudson’s genius possessed a doublc strain, and the viíi GREEN MANSIONS naturalist’s fidelity to the earth-life and the poet’s mystic sensitiveness to the illimitable beauty in nature find full scope in Green Mansions. Oíd Cla-cla is at one pole of Hud son’s interests and Rima at the other, while the wild arena of the tropical forest liberates his own instincts. The book reveáis what a range of mood and tone Hudson is master of. The section that contains Chapters XI.-XVIII. is perhaps the least conclusive in the book, but the interest never flags. After Abel’s inspired description of the vastness of Guyana, of the plains of the Orinoco and the stupendous chain of the Cordilleras and the unbroken Amazonian forest, follow the dramatic clash of wills between the angry Rima and the superstitious oíd sinner Nuflo, Abel’s outwitting of the Indians and the journey to Riolama, Rima’s final disillusion- ment, her death-like swoon, and her capricious, solitary return to Parahuari. With Abel’s own return, his discovery of Rima’s cruel death by fire at the Indians’ hands, his dissimulation of his rage and his killing of Kua-kó, Hudson’s tragic power now bursts bounds. In the animal fury of Abel’s blood-lust of revenge and the slaughter of Runi and his tribe, all the man’s higher perception and instincts are blotted out by darkness, like the sun’s eclipse. With the most penetrating skill Hudson now unravels all the intricate skein of human passion, and Abel’s fury and moral insanity pass into the blackness of spiritual exhaus- tion and bodily misery. His mental disintegration and his shuddering understanding of the dark woof of nature’s cruelty, his slow return to life, his pangs of tragic grief and the recurring visions of Rima in his troubled sleep—all this is traced with an unerring hand in passages of extreme beauty. Chapters XX.-XXII. are the flower of Hudson’s art, chapters where Abel’s spiritual anguish and haunted memory are embodied in imagery drawn from nature’s endless, fleeting drama in the tropical forest. And with what art is the wanderer Abel’s blurred sense of time, and of the haunting terrors and perils and shadowy gloom of his journey back to the coast, A NOTE ON HUDSON’S ROMANCES ix across the mountains, rivers, forests and plains, indicated! The essence of Hudson’s passionate genius is enshrined in this wonderful cióse which mingles mourning for “ all the mystic, unimaginable grace and loveliness and joy that had vanished” with returning love of life and the recurring sense of the everlasting freshness and beauty of nature.

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