William H Hudson

Tales of the Pampas William H Hudson

THOSE who have become interested in the work of W. H. Hudson will open this volume with a keen curiosity. They will wish to know whether the atmospheric charm and the sincere nature-worship of "Green Mansions" have been continued here with anything like the same artistry. They will demand whether the rising vogue of Hudson amounts to a genuine literary revival or whether it depends simply on a happy accident followed by a publishers' boom. These tales are partly republicans, partly new versions of old material. But in either case they belong to past generations both by their themes and by their treatment. The place is South America, especially the Argentine, of nearly a century ago; the individual manner is equally aloof from present-day considerations. "El Ombii," the first nouvelle, concerns a series of fatalities befalling a house-one is reminded of the importance attached to the House in "The Crystal Age"-and it attempts to combine several distinct stories with various irrelevant episodes. The result gives the keynote of Mr. Hudson's manner. As plot, his story-telling is decidedly scrappy, leisurely, naive. Such unity as he gets is a unity of temperament and atmosphere, sustained in this case through the narrative medium of an old Spaniard, whose style and psychology are admirably rendered. William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. William Henry Hudson was an author, naturalist and ornithologist. He was born in the Quilmes Partido in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, where he is considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms.