Page:A Crystal Age - Hudson - 1922.djvu/16

xii women adorably ignorant of the dust and surge, the trivialities and complexities of cities; and it is uttered in the clear-flowing syllables that poets capture from brooks, rain-kissed trees, the rustle of wind-swept grasses.

It has been said that A Crystal Age renders a perfect picture of a Socialist state. If it does, I doubt very much that it was planned to do so by its author. Mr. Hudson is too profoundly an artist, too intrinsically the teller of a story for the story's sake, to shape his narrative to dogmatic ends. He himself tells us that A Crystal Age is "a dream and a picture of the human race in its forest period." It belongs to the rare type of fiction that has given us Gulliver and Erewhon. But it is more joyously free from satirical purpose than either of these. The story itself is a delicious revel of fancy, unmarred by the doctrinal digressions that usually obtrude upon these fictional peeps into an ideal future. It gives, unquestionably, the poet-naturalist's view of things as they should be—as they may be, when cruelty, prejudice, and ignorance are banished from the earth; and just because it gives a poet-naturalist's view, it is big and free enough to discard the shackles of the mere doctrinaire.