William Henry Hudson. Life, Literature and Science.

William Henry Hudson.
Life, Literature and Science.

Felipe Arocena


(The following text is part of the Introduction to my book published by McFarland, Jefferson, USA, 2003)



Dare to know! Dare to feel! These two slogans can serve to characterize the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Romanticism of the first half of the 19th respectively. Although both were currents of ideas and ways of conceiving the world of great complexity and variety of nuance, we can identify some important points of reference which express the differences, and sometimes even the opposition, between the two. This can be seen quite clearly, for example, when analyzing the contrasting representations of nature, of the individual, of religious phenomena and of progress, which were formulated in each.
In a short but penetrating paragraph, Kant synthesized his idea of the Enlightenment, “Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his culpable incapacity. Incapacity means the impossibility of using his intelligence without being led by others. This incapacity is culpable because its cause does not lie in a lack of intelligence but in a lack of decision and courage to use it himself without the guidance of others. Dare to know! (sapere aude) Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the slogan of Enlightenment.”
While the emphasis in the Enlightenment was on the capacity of rational knowledge to discover the universal structures and laws which govern the world of things, of nature and of man (to which Kant also tried to put limits), Romanticism, dialectically, strove to emphasize what could not be discovered and known. This is why “...the accent moved towards authenticity of the emotions expressed, and consequently towards the sincerity and the integrity of the artist. Thus spontaneity, individuality and ‘inner truth’ were adopted as the correct criteria for judging any work of literary or musical art, in any time or country...Dare to feel! Have the courage to follow your own intuition! This was the rallying cry of the Romantics.”
This provocative opposition between daring to know and daring to feel can, in spite of its simplicity, serve as an introduction which reflects the difference in emphasis of the two historical ages. This tension, which was already evident at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, an epoch which is frequently called modern times, is what has driven most of the successive counter-cultural movements since, like the aesthetic vanguard between the wars, the hippies in the sixties or the ecologists in the eighties. A lot of the debates which these movements provoked are easily traceable to roots in the dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Sociology originated in this ebb and flow between the Enlightened and the Romantic schools of thought, as Robert Nisbet so clearly shows, and it was nourished by the impact of the two revolutions, the industrial and the political, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was always wavering on the equilibrium between the lost community and the mass society which was beginning to take shape, between the natural authority of people and the impersonal power of institutions, between individual status and the emergence of social classes, between the secularization of science and the need for transcendence and for myth, and between confidence in progress and alienation from the new world which was looming. The attempt to understand and to grasp these changes gave birth to intense philosophical, epistemological and ontological debate, which finally solidified into different political perspectives. The conservatives were suspicious of the new order which was taking over from the old ways, the radicals looked more and more to new utopias, and the liberals adopted as their main banner an emphasis on the virtues of emerging liberal capitalism to solve our problems.
A third facet of this study which particularly interests me and which, from a complementary point of view, represents this dialectic between Enlightenment and Romanticism, has to do with the different kinds of theories used to represent the new social reality. Literature and science are two alternative models of knowledge, and there is a kind of demarcation dispute about which is more suitable for understanding the new situation. Sociology in particular moves between the inspiration which comes from a model of literary narrative and the influence which the concept of truth in the natural sciences exerts. Wolf Lepenies shows quite convincingly how sociology came to be formed in this space between literature and science. It alternates between the language of the natural sciences and that of literary narrative, between rationality of method and the understanding of feelings and of culture, so it is here that sociology begins to stake out its territory as a discipline. From Buffon to Durkheim, from Balzac to Marx, from Coleridge to Bentham, or from Thomas Mann to Weber, the antinomy between the capacity of the writer in his various genres to communicate the problems of the time, and that of the specialized technician, run through the history of social thought. For most of the 20th century, sociology also seems to have evolved in this confrontation between the two domains. Writers and social scientists are like two irreconcilably hostile species watching each other with mutual suspicion; the writer turns his back on the systematic, structural and excessively self sufficient archetype of the social scientist as technician, while the scientist rejects literature or social commentary because it is subjective and unverifiable speculation with unacceptable pretensions to truth.
The work of William Henry Hudson, and indeed his life, developed and was nourished by the opposition between Romanticism and Enlightenment. It passed through the theoretical conflicts which Nisbet brilliantly describes, expressing this wavering between literature and science as the melting pot from which sociology emerges, and which Lepenies analyzed in the cases of the Germans, the French and the English. Mentally, Hudson was a throwback to the Romantics, but also he systematically practiced the natural sciences of botany and ornithology, and he wrote specialized essays for scientific journals. He was constantly reflecting on the new industrial world of the big city which was taking over from the agrarian world of the small community, and above all he was a writer with an extremely individual style, which is evident in all the different genres he worked in. This was certainly the key to the recognition he achieved as one of the best English writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The trinity of feeling, knowledge and clear-sightedness, – this mixture of naturalist, artist and seer, - reigns throughout Hudson’s work, and is one of the reasons why he was eventually accepted during his lifetime as a great writer and commentator. He rejected the prevailing definitions of art, of science and of field observation, he avoided propaganda and all specialized activities…because none of these ready-made definitions fitted him. He broke the mould; he was everything at once, not one thing after the other.”
W. H. Hudson was considered the greatest prose writer of his time by Rabindranath Tagore, he was a personal friend of Bernard Shaw, Henry James, George Gissing, and Joseph Conrad, who described him as the only man able to write how the grass grows, he was admired by Jorge Luis Borges and by Ernest Hemingway, he was compared to Cervantes by Miguel de Unamuno, he was hailed as the most important writer of the early 20th century by John Galsworthy, he was recognized as an author of genius by two of the leading British critics of the time, Edward Garnett and Ford Madox Ford, he was praised by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the father of the theory of the origin of species that Charles Darwin later popularized, and also by Darwin himself in his famous book, he was rated as highly as Tolstoy by Martínez Estrada, and he is known in the River Plate region as the best exponent of life on the pampas in the 19th century; but in spite of all this, his work receives scant attention today and his name is little known. He enjoys a certain prestige in intellectual circles, but critical appraisal of his work is so scarce as to be almost non-existent. In Argentina, as in Uruguay, the other country where he lived for a while, some of his classic books are re-published from time to time, but most of the twenty-four volumes which make up his complete works are ignored. He is virtually unknown in the rest of Latin America, apart from the publication of two of his books by Biblioteca Ayacucho. He has also been almost forgotten in the history of Anglo-Saxon literature, he receives only a small mention in literary text books, although a critical study or some new edition of his books does still come out occasionally.
His parents emigrated from the United States to Argentina in 1833, and there they raised six children; four boys and two girls. William Henry Hudson was the fourth child, the third son; he was born on 4 August 1841, eight years after their arrival. When he was still an adolescent he caught rheumatic fever, and he suffered cardiac trouble after a cattle drive that went on all day in torrential rain. Because of these health problems he was unable to do heavy work, and this paved the way for the development of the main passion and main virtue in his life, the observation and contemplation of nature. A neighbor commented to a peasant, “Look what a lazybones that kid is!” when they saw him stretched out on the grass staring at the sky. Hudson lived at home until he was eighteen, and then he began his wanderings in Argentina (he describes the north of that country in Marta Riquelme, and he shows us the south in Idle Days in Patagonia) and in Uruguay (which he describes in The Purple Land). Later on he accidentally shot himself in the leg while on a journey in Patagonia, and he became a self-confessed idler. He did his military service, and in 1866, the year after war with Paraguay broke out, he was called up as a soldier and sent to the frontier of the Rio Azul. In 1874, four months short of his thirty-third birthday, he set out for England, and he remained there for the rest of his life.
In England he continued to travel compulsively. Instead of going on horseback he walked, and later on he took to a bicycle, but he found it hard to get used to gliding along smoothly on two wheels, and the more miles he covered the more he remembered his first mount, a mustang he had bought with money from his father. He relates how one time in London he was on a bus and it was traveling so slowly that he was going to be late for an appointment, so he instinctively started slapping it on the side with his umbrella to hurry it up; he was never quite able to leave Argentina behind. Not long after arriving in England he got married to the landlady of one of the boarding houses where he stayed, a woman who was eleven years older than him. The year after she died, he passed away in his sleep from a heart attack, on the night of 17 August 1922. He was eighty-two years old. He left no children.
Hudson wrote his books in English and he took British nationality, but he never lost the traits that were wrought on the plains of Argentina, the ascetic personality, the studied way of speaking and the very correct accent, and his close friends said that this made him a strange figure in England. He wrote his recollections of his early life on the plains of South America with precise fidelity, for, as he himself said, memories came to him with abundant ease. He could remember events, feelings and people from when he was three years old. Past time for him was easy to recall, it was never lost.
He wrote tirelessly, but he only gained recognition when he was in his fifties. One of his best-known books is The Purple Land, but in the beginning he couldn’t find a publisher and it lay for ten years in a cold, damp drawer in the boarding house where he lived, and when it did eventually get published it was a complete failure. Hudson always sought simplicity in his writing, and he avoided language that was overly academic. His raw material par excellence, in his observations of nature and of man, were those things which apparently held no interest, those details which passed unnoticed by everyone else. In his writing he showed the Argentines what their land was really like, the birds, the light, the smells, the animals, the climate, the men, the houses; he brought out things that had up to then gone unnoticed. Hernández wrote as if he were a gaucho and focused on gaucho psychology, but the real gaucho was not interested in such things because he simply lived them, he did not abstract them, and Hudson was able to include this psychology in universal knowledge, transcending it without falsifying it. As Massingham so rightly says, he was ‘the great primitive’. In his novels he was interested in mule drivers, peasants, shepherds and villagers, many of whom led more harmonious lives than those of urban men, but he did not interpret these people naively, he was too intelligent for that. However, it has to be said that he was frequently prone to romanticizing them.
The Argentinian Martínez Estrada admits he is interested in Hudson’s work because it presents a unique picture of Argentina, with the plains and the cattle, the trees, the flowers, the animals, the clouds, the lakes, the men, the homes, the children and the customs, “His achievement is that he discovered a world that had already been discovered, and then buried, like the ruins of some city under earth or lava, by the insensitivity of industrial western man...In this achievement of reconstructing the world of a wild life - not the picturesque, but that of living things in themselves - he also recreates a faculty that has been lost, that of entering into communion with other beings in a healthy and comprehensive way…(he is capable) of restoring to us faculties which we had resigned ourselves to consider definitively atrophied.” Hudson speaks like no one else about the landscape of the plains, about the wind, about the light, about the ostrich, the sparrow, the armadillo, the viscacha and the guanaco, about the horses, the snakes and the dogs, about the inhabitants of a particular place, and about their legends. But he also meditates at length on the senses of eyesight, touch, smell, hearing and taste, and how they applied to a world he was in the process of discovering. He reveals what urban man has already lost, and he does so through real things that he experienced; writing with the precision of a naturalist, and telling stories magnificently. He continued in the same vein when he went to England; this had been the land of his dreams since childhood, and it was the land where he chose to live his life. He produced nearly a dozen books about natural history in Britain, competing bravely and boldly with the great English naturalists. He wrote about the small villages and their inhabitants, about London and about women’s fashions, he fought hard to save species of birds which were in danger of extinction, he criticized the Victorian age in which he was living, and he founded an extremely original line of ecological thought which is still completely valid in our world today.
Why did he leave the River Plate at the age of thirty-three, never to return? Why did he spend his life writing about what he had left behind, whistling the birdsong of the southern lands in a boarding house or on his interminable walks, recalling the freedom of his childhood, yearning for the horses which carried him while he slept, or waking from a nightmare he had in the shade of an ombú tree? Why did he never go back to the land of his birth, not even for a short visit? The reason is that if he had returned he would have stayed. And he knew that he preferred this kind of self-imposed exile far from his native land to internal exile in a world which was rapidly losing its essence. There is a kind of parallel with Horacio Quiroga here, the one escapes to the suffocating heat of the jungle and embraces rivers and snakes instead of people, and the other hides in the Anglo-Saxon fog and tells his memories to the birds. They were both men who simply did not know how to adapt.
The aim of this book is to show that the originality of Hudson’s work is largely due to the intersection of different cultures in his life and in his ways of thinking, or, as the title suggests, to the fact that he lived on cultural frontiers. There are a lot of academic books as well as novels which deal with the peculiarities of life on various kinds of frontiers. Real de Azúa, for example, emphasizes the importance of the frontier in the history of Uruguay, and describes the old Banda Oriental as “…an area of ill-defined jurisdictions, with intense horizontal mobility which is usually clandestine or semi-clandestine, generally facilitated by the confused, unstable and sometimes contradictory property laws.” There was also a widespread mixing of races in the country, with large groups of settlers of different nationalities and with different languages living side by side. All these meeting points come together so that, from a cultural point of view, the heterogeneous nature of this area produces particularly fertile ground. Three other paradigm examples of frontiers are the United States, where the conquest of the Wild West became the paramount national myth; fifteenth century Spain, which was poised on the fault line between Africa and the West; and Brazil with its mixture of Portuguese, Indians and blacks. Sometimes the same sort of thing can occur in individuals, people who do not necessarily come from places like that but who seem to recreate the same phenomenon in the living of their lives; people like Conrad, who was Anglo-Polish for example, or Quiroga, or Kipling, and of course Hudson himself. He was so many things, naturalist, essayist, sociologist, anthropologist, storyteller, novelist, Argentine, Englishman, gaucho, citizen, romantic, and enlightened man. The words of Real de Azúa describe his work perfectly, it’s limits are ill-defined, it jumps unpredictably from one discipline to another, it surprises the reader with a passage on natural science directly after a poetic description of an English valley, or with some philosophical reflection following on from a detailed analysis of the Patagonian Indians’ powers of sight. The fact is that Hudson did not believe that established disciplines had any fixed jurisdiction, and he took whatever he wanted, simultaneously and indiscriminately, from all the ones he cultivated.
Hudson’s life cut across at least five frontiers. The first was the most obvious and perhaps the most influential; he was born in Argentina and he lived there until he was fully an adult, but his family spoke English, they kept to Anglo-Saxon traditions, they cooked with British recipes, they maintained a library of English books, and they had English friends. His English culture was intermingled with the local customs he learned while growing up on a provincial farm at the time of the Rosas government. The second frontier in Hudson’s life was the one that divides the white man from the Indian. Not only did he spend his formative years near to territory that was controlled by the Indians until the 1880s, but he experienced army life in the forts on the Rio Azul where there were frequent skirmishes with the natives. This was where he developed his lifelong interest in contrasting the faculties of primitive man with those of western, civilized man, and this would later lead him to create a kind of double track anthropology. Hudson’s third frontier was the contrast between the countryside and the city. Although he grew up in a rural world, his family had strong links to the capital, Buenos Aires, and he went there many times and has left us a memorable chronicle of life in that city. Hudson’s fourth frontier was the interface between the natural world and culture, and this was of critical importance in his life and work. One of the most long-lasting and intense of his quests was the search for a way to get inside nature so that he would be able to understand it, feel it, and communicate it to others. This is where the field naturalist and the writer merge into one. And finally there was Hudson’s fifth frontier, the area where science meets literature, or, to put it another way, the borderland between academic knowledge and the personal experience of a self-taught man. He felt a strong aversion for the laboratory scientists that he worked with during his early years in England, and also for over-abstract thought when it parted company with concrete life (“I am a better observer than a thinker,” he would say ironically). He devoted a lot of time to reading, he was familiar with and admired the whole tradition of English poetry, but he educated himself alone and did not follow any school. He even went so far as to argue with the eminent Charles Darwin, making corrections to the ideas and observations of the dominant figure of the age. Hudson distrusted art and science, he was suspicious of any kind of specialization in whatever field because when the world is seen from the narrow perspective of a specific discipline the results seemed deplorable. This is why Ezra Pound refers to Hudson as the “poet strayed into science”. All of Hudson’s frontiers can be fused together in the figure of the outsider, the foreigner who is able to take advantage of his peculiar condition to construct an original viewpoint which is different to the conventional one. All his life he was a foreigner, on the pampas he was the gringo gaucho, and in England he was the barbarian that the most civilized of men were able to learn from.
Before finishing this introduction and coming to grips with the subject, I should say a little more about this dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Montesquieu compared nature to a virgin, who, after stoutly defending her virginity, suddenly surrenders it in an flash, in a moment of passion. This metaphor embodies the Enlightenment belief that nature was going to be deflowered and her secrets revealed. After centuries of mystery, the laws which govern events might finally become known in their entirety. As the poet said, “Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night / God said: Let Newton be and all was light.” Galileo and Kepler conceived the idea of natural law in all its fullness, but they could only prove that it applied to some isolated phenomena like the fall of bodies in space or the movement of the planets. With Newton, these laws acquired universal dimensions; his great achievement was to show that the laws that existed for some parts of the universe held for the universe as a whole, and that therefore the totality might one day be revealed. In the 18th century, under this influence, knowledge was generally considered in terms of the model of nature. This is why a lot of the great thinkers of the age moved into the natural sciences: Voltaire penned an apology for Newton, Rousseau wrote a book on chemistry, and Montesquieu produced works in physics and physiology. Nature was conceived of principally as laws, as regularity, and it was thought to exist in a way that was amenable to discovery by reason. If nature astonished the people who studied it, this astonishment was due to the supposed order which reigned there, an order that was rational and universal. This was the Enlightenment view, but the Romantic emphasis was different. Montesquieu’s metaphor of the deflowered virgin no longer represented a discovery of nature, she did not reveal her secrets after centuries of keeping them hidden, she continued to be mysterious, tempestuous and unpredictable. Now it was not the laws of nature which captivated people but her power; a tempest, a blizzard, or a storm on the high seas. The Romantics were not attracted by order, but by the incomprehensible beauty of great landscapes or indomitable jungles, and they were moved to a contemplative and melancholic attitude rather than to a practical or instrumental one. The cult of the Romantics was nature herself, they worshipped her, not her deflowering. This is what emerges in the following extract from a poem by Wordsworth in 1798: “The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colors and their forms, were then to me /An appetite: a feeling and a love, / That had no need of a remoted charm, / By thought supplied, or any interest / Unborrowed from the eye...”
The 18th century stands out as an extremely anti-religious age, and to radical materialists such as D'Holbach or Lamartine, religion was nothing but an impediment to the discovery of natural, social, moral or aesthetic laws by the use of reason. However, this anti-clerical attitude, fused with the rankest rationalism and mechanism which we find in some of the typical and less interesting philosophes, was not shared by commanding figures like Rousseau, Voltaire or Montesquieu. These were men who exhibited great religious tolerance, and the recognized the diverse ways in which faith could be accommodated. What irritated them most was not so much religious faith but a dogmatism which refused to question what it believed. This is why there was a change in the relationship between religion and reason; while previously it had been reason that bowed to the dictates of theology, now it was theology that had to accept the rule of reason. The Enlightenment broadened the ways in which religious phenomena could become manifest, and recognized that non-western cults, such as eastern religions and the myths of so-called primitive societies, could be authentic and valid. The true way to live and to express our relationship with the divine was no longer monopolized by Christianity, quite the contrary, one ought to be tolerant and recognize different ways of experiencing the sacred. Diderot exhorted us to “Widen the idea of God, see Him everywhere that he is.” Some critics of the Enlightenment saw this tolerance as an expression of indifference to religious phenomena, but Cassirer maintained that it flowed from skepticism and not from religious indifference. But for the Romantics, even this skepticism which led to tolerance was a sign of the frivolity with which the sacred was lived and experienced. Enlightened tolerance came to consider other creeds, customs and societies not as aberrations but as alternatives, but the Romantics reproached it for its lack of empathy, and for its incapacity to identify itself with them. The rise of Romanticism went hand in hand with the greatest religious revival since the 16th century, and any kind of external criteria for judging faith was rejected. This is why the intensity and the integrity of faith came to predominate over creeds and churches. The external forms of cults and the church were separated from faith, and they could even be considered opposed to faith because they denied it as an authentic experience. “This is why the Romantics did not only reject what they considered to be the superficial skepticism of the 18th century, but also this tepid faith in whatever creed that the faithful happened to believe in, this ‘reli-gion of the Philistines’ which, in the words of Novalis, ‘acts purely as opium’ (this is the probable origin of Marx’s more famous aphorism).“
It is generally agreed that the Renaissance can be seen as the start of the modern age. One of the many reasons for this is that it was a period in which the individual began to acquire notable importance in history. Probably in all ages certain individuals stand out in their respective communities, but in the impulse of the Renaissance what stood out is the value of all individuals and not just of some exceptional people. The bonds of the medieval community were loosening, and self-definition as a member of this or that group began to shift towards personal qualities. One symptom of this individualistic impulse, one typical example, was the great proliferation of self-portraits in the painting of the time. But unlike the later individualistic impulse of Romanticism, the individual in the Renaissance based his uniqueness more on visible and conspicuous personal qualities like his external appearance, his clothing, his manners and his language, and not on more internal characteristics like spirit, feeling, nature or sensibility. And both differed from the model of the individual of the century of light. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was the idea that all men were equal in the eyes of the law, and in that period this sometimes seemed to stretch beyond the legal sphere to an affirmation that all men were equal in an absolute sense. This equality was supported by the idea that all men were born equal, and it was society and its institutions that imposed artificial differences. Once those social barriers were eliminated inequalities would disappear and the universality of human nature would be manifest. This reasoning was linked to at least two suppositions. The first was that there was a minimum level of reason in all sane men; this was a criteria for accepting the generalized equality of man, because everyone would have sufficient rationality to play their part and function in society. Apparent differences like religion, wealth, and the division of labor would be no more than deformations of this natural equality of all men. The main obstacle to the universality of reason, to the universality of natural equality, was the artificiality of social conventions and institutions. Rousseau presented the idea of the noble savage as a being who was not yet corrupted by society, although he himself conceded that a to return to a natural condition was impossible, and hence the necessity of submitting to the general will and to the social contract. The second supposition was that, since equality was basically defined as a sufficient capacity for reason in all sane men, then if all obstacles were removed, the normal trajectory of each individual would not have to be different. Once the conception of the individual who was everywhere the same was established, and there was a model of a universal subject based on the possibility of symmetrical substitution, or putting oneself in another’s place when the time came to make a decision, which was one of the trademarks of the 18th century, then the 19th century individual wanted to live out his individuality. Romanticism reacted against the Enlightenment’s pretensions to universalization, and the individual was conceived of in terms of his uniqueness and his unrepeatable characteristics. Each person was seen as being absolutely different, since what was now taken into account was one’s life experience. The Romantic individual had to focus his attention on his inner life, he had to be true to his feelings and emotions, he had to listen to his inner voice and pursue his vocation in spite of everything. This inner voice was not a divine command as the Protestants had it, it was a call of nature and it had a religious character. Each person had different experiences and was uniquely subjective, and Romanticism strove to exalt those internal characteristics which distinguished one person from another. One example of this was the Romantic myth of the artist who, because he had to be genuine and follow his own instincts, ceased to be understood by the masses. He was isolated in his cultivated solitude, he suffered for his sincerity, which others judged to be extravagance, he became the misunderstood genius, passionate, and at peace with his inner nature.
In 1819 Gericault did a painting called The Raft of the Medusa. It shows a raft drifting on the sea with the survivors of a shipwreck who are nearly at their last gasp. Among the exhausted and wretched castaways there are a few who still have a last vestige of strength, and they are waving with white rags to a ship which does not see them and is moving away. The desperation of the survivors is intensified when they lose this last hope of salvation. Their euphoria at the chance to be rescued changes to the deepest despair when that chance disappears. This painting served as a political allegory for France at that time, but it might also be a fair representation of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s exaggerated faith in progress, a faith which also criticized and devalued the past, or ignored it altogether, and took the present as the starting point of the time of hope, which was the future. “It is as if the past had never existed. We must start from the time that we are at now, and from the point that the nations have reached.” In contrast to this, many of the Romantics looked back with melancholy to an irretrievable past in which reality still went hand in hand with fantasy and had not yet been dissected by the scientific spirit. If Weber talked of the ‘disenchantment of the world’ at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Schiller a century before talked of ‘taking God out of nature’, and he exalted the past life of the adult, his childhood, because children ‘are who we were’ and ‘what we should be again’. Now the past was no longer the opposite of an ideal future, but the realm of at least some images of a time of perfection when there had been more naturalness, more emotion, more contemplation, a closer identification between the individual and the cosmos, and more adventure. In the specific field of politics this nostalgia for the past was also manifest, “In France, not long after 1815, men of all political tendencies found themselves melancholically remembering the past which was so recent but which seemed irretrievably lost: the aristocrats, the anciene régime with its elegance, opulence, security and privileges (one of them said that the abuses were the best thing about it), the republicans, the dawning of liberty which clouded over so quickly, the Bonapartists, the glory years.” When all hope is vested in the future and time does not fulfill these expectations, then, like for Gericault’s castaways, the future seems more uncertain than ever. Something like this is what happened in Romanticism.
Hudson takes up a frontier position on all these themes. He develops a kind of mysticism mixed with natural animism, but he was a radical skeptic on matters of religious faith, so much so in fact that he managed to convince a novice, who was looking after him in hospital when he was suffering from pleurisy, that she should abandon her vows and ‘not waste her life’. In nature he found the spark which ignited his deepest emotions, he fought for unspoiled natural areas and for the conservation and protection of species in danger of extinction, although he did not observe nature through the microscope of the naturalist or the specialist but always from a comprehensive perspective. He went through all the vicissitudes of the Romantic artist, the bohemian life, the poverty and radicalism in his struggle not to compromise his work in the face of the economic necessities of the marketplace, but he always thought of human beings in terms of the species, as a link in the chain of evolution. Besides, he was so skeptical of the idea of progress that the entire body of his work can be seen as an attempt to convince us of the need and of the possibility of re-establishing the faculties which people who live in big cities are losing. But at the same time he was attracted by, and he used, the new inventions which technological progress had brought. Again, there is a parallel here with Horacio Quiroga, who managed to marry his admiration for cinema, for the speed of a motorcycle, or for perfection in the design of a machine, with a personal realization which he could only find living in the jungle.
One last point is that nowadays there seems to be a preoccupation which is shared by social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, essayist and citizens who do not cultivate any of these arts in particular, to reconcile these alternatives which have been too long in opposition. The hermeneutic impulse which social science has had, the development of so-called cultural studies, and also the evolution of scientific epistemology itself, admitting the limits of certainty and the increasingly hazy frontiers of specialized disciplines, have re-opened the way to deal more freely with a lot of subjects which require an attitude which is complementary between the technical and the speculative. Perhaps this is simply the consequence of a moment of uncertainty when confronted with a world which keeps on changing more rapidly than we can understand. But it might also contribute in some way to a renewal of social thought, and attract the interest of a wider public, whose worries seem to have been neglected by sociology. This book aims to adopt a position on the frontiers of this discipline, and it seems to me to be necessary to widen again the spectrum of this field of knowledge, which is in fact how some of the classic founding fathers proceeded. This might go against academic interests and complicate even more the question which does not have one simple answer: What is a sociologist and what does he do? It is clear that Hudson was not a sociologist, but it is also clear that, among other things, he did practice sociology. It is true that this was usually only implicit in his work, but on occasions it came out most explicitly, like when he did his penetrating investigation of the death throes of the Luddite movement in the peasants’ uprising in England in 1830. More important than this rather narrow discussion, however, is that in analyzing the whole body of his work, which was inseparable from his life, we understand the society in which we live a little better, and, I believe, we can learn to live a little better in the world which, through destiny or by chance, it is our lot to inhabit.