instinctively right. As a simple narrator he is well-nigh
unsurpassed; as a stylist he has few, if any, living equals. And
in all his work there is an indefinable freedom from any thought
of after-benefit--even from the desire that we should read him.
He puts down what he sees and feels, out of sheer love of the
thing seen, and the emotion felt; the smell of the lamp has not
touched a single page that he ever wrote. That alone is a marvel
to us who know that to write well, even to write clearly, is a
wound business, long to learn, hard to learn, and no gift of the
angels. Style should not obtrude between a writer and his
reader; it should be servant, not master. To use words so true
and simple that they oppose no obstacle to the flow of thought
and feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition of
word-sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or
gratification--this is the essence of style; and Hudson's writing
has pre-eminently this double quality. From almost any page of
his books an example might be taken. Here is one no better than
a thousand others, a description of two little girls on a beach:
"They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set
off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like
black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black
mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads
fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun
glass--hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame
its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they
seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit, with such grace
and fleetness, one does not look for in human beings, but only in
birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal--a squirrel or a
spider-monkey of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the
desolate mountain slopes; the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most