‘A Marvellous Small Paradise’

Abstract

Walter de la Mare remarked that the sense of the supernatural in all things, ‘above all [else] … is the sign manual of all Hudson’s writings. All beauty — and in spite of the horrors of life, in spite of the fleetingness of happiness, man has made this supreme discovery-all beauty appeals to our delight in mystery and wonder’.⁵⁶ Hudson’s writing conveys what de la Mare refers to as those ‘ecstatic moments’ where ‘the mere words momentarily illumine [the “alien life” of nature], as may the flame of a singularly clear candle the objects in a dark and beautiful room’.⁵⁷ De la Mare also says that: ‘… anyone of his treasured books transitorily illumines and revivifies for us a world to which we are habitually strangers. We all but recover a foregone and secret understanding’.⁵⁸ That understanding is of a nature imbued with supernatural mystery — rather than the alienated nature of objectified data. Illumination and recovery: we could harlY hope to find better concepts for characterising this aspect of Hudson’s writing. But what sort of world is it that Hudson’s writing illumines, and hence recovers for us? It is, de laMare tells us aptly, ‘a marvellous small paradise as was [given to] the First Man before Eve was taken out of his side’.⁵⁹ The smallness of the natural paradise — or rather its intimacy, the fact that the epiphanic vision, the disclosure of the supernatural in or through the natural, is mainly concentrated upon small particulars (a tree or even a leaf) — is also very much of the essence here.