Page:A Crystal Age - Hudson - 1922.djvu/17

Rh If one were looking for the secret of Hudson's unique power as a novelist, the quality that differentiates him from all other writers in this field of literature, it would be found in his delicate apprehension of the life that seethes beneath apparently inanimate things. His nature essays are the very best of their kind, not because they are richer than others in minute, painstaking observation of facts in natural history, but because they are interpretive of the human element in nature. He sees the birds, the trees, the flowers, the most harmless and the most ferocious of animals, in terms of life. There is nothing either above or below his interest. His book, A Shepherd's Life, for instance, is not only a storehouse of quaint and varied information, given with the inimitable "artless art" peculiar to its author; it is a reconstruction of an entire countryside. Whoever is fortunate enough to read it will retain in his memory a vivid world of primitive living, symmetrical, complete in all its parts. Not even Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree leaves so definite, finished a picture of life in a placid, rural community as this. The reason is that Hudson lives his books before he writes them. For him, a barren moor is anything but barren. Put him