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The source of the deepest gratification to me is the fact that the Censorship Committee of the United Circulating Libraries should have allowed this noble, daring, and masterly work to pass freely over their counters.  What a change from January of this year, when Mary Gaunt’s “The Uncounted Cost,” which didn’t show the ghost of a rape, could not even be advertised in the organ of The Times Book Club!  After this, who can complain against a Library Censorship?  It is true that while passing “His Hour,” the same censorship puts its ban absolute upon Mr. John Trevena’s new novel “Bracken.”  It is true that quite a number of people had considered Mr. Trevena to be a serious and dignified artist of rather considerable talent.  It is true that “Bracken” probably contains nothing that for sheer brave sexuality can be compared with a score of passages in “His Hour.”  What then?  The Censorship Committee must justify its existence somehow.  Mr. Trevena ought to have dedicated his wretched provincial novel to the Queen of Montenegro.  He painfully lacks savoir-vivre.  In the early part of this year certain mysterious meetings took place, apropos of the Censorship, between a sub-committee of the Society of Authors and a sub-committee of the Publishers’ Association.  But nothing was done.  I am told that the Authors’ Society is now about to take the matter up again.  But why?

W.H.  HUDSON

[24 Nov. ’10]

I suppose that there are few writers less “literary” than Mr. W.H.  Hudson, and few among the living more likely to be regarded, a hundred years hence, as having produced “literature.”  He is so unassuming, so mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him.  His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), “A Shepherd’s Life:  Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs” (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with his long and deliberate career.  A large volume, yet one arrives at the end of it with surprising quickness, because the pages seem to slip over of themselves.  Everything connected with the Wiltshire downs is in it, together with a good deal not immediately therewith connected.  For example, Mr. Hudson’s views on primary education, which are not as mature as his views about shepherds and wild beasts of the downs.  He seldom omits to describe the individualities of the wild beasts of his acquaintance.  For him a mole is not any mole, but a particular mole.  He will tell you about a mole that did not dig like other moles but had a method of its own, and he will give you the reason why this singular mole lived to a great age.  As a rule, he remarks with a certain sadness, wild animals die prematurely, their existence being exciting