The Purple Land, an Excerpt, William Henry Hudson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
In W. H. Hudson's novel The Purple Land, being the
narrative of one Richard Lamb's adventures in the Banda Oriental
in South America, as told by himself, published in nineteen
o four, An Englishman wandering on horseback through nineteenth century
Uruguay finds adventure and romance in that war ravaged country.

(00:23):
The end of chapter eighteen contains this excerpt, summing up
Hudson's opinions on the effects of British colonization. It is
not an exclusively British characteristic to regard the people of
other nationalities with a certain amount of contempt. But with us,
perhaps the feeling is stronger than with others, or else

(00:45):
expressed with less reserve. Let me now at last rid
myself of this error, which is harmless and perhaps even
commendable in those who stay at home, and also very natural,
since it is a part of our own reasonable nature
to distrust and dislike the things that are far removed
and unfamiliar. Let me at last divest myself of these

(01:09):
old English spectacles, framed in oak and with lenses of horn,
to bury them forever in this mountain for which half
a century and upwards, has looked down on the struggles
of a young and feeble people against foreign aggression and
domestic foes. And where a few months ago I sang
the praises of British civilization, lamenting that it had been

(01:33):
planted here and abundantly watered with blood, only to be
plucked up again and cast into the sea. After my
rambles in the interior, where I carried about in me,
only a fading remnant of that old time honored superstition
to prevent the most perfect sympathy between me and the
natives I mixed with. I cannot say that I am

(01:55):
of that opinion now. I cannot believe that if this
country had been conquered and recolonized by England, and all
that is crooked in it made straight according to our notions,
my intercourse with the people would have had this wild,
delightful flavor I have found in it. And if that
distinctive flavor cannot be had along with the material prosperity

(02:17):
resulting from Anglo Saxon energy, I must breathe the wish
that this land may never know such prosperity. I do
not wish to be murdered. No man does Yet rather
than see the ostrich and deer chased beyond the horizon,
the flamenco and black necked swan slain on the Blue lakes,
and the herdsman sent to twang his romantic guitar in

(02:40):
hades as a preliminary to security of person, I would
prefer to go about prepared at any moment to defend
my life against the sudden assaults of the assassin. We
do not live by bread alone, and British occupation does
not give to the heart all the things for which
it craves. Blessings may even become curses when the gigantic

(03:03):
power that bestows them on us scares from our midst
the shy spirits of beauty and of poesy. Nor is
it solely because it appeals to the poetic feeling in
us that this country endears itself to my heart. It
is the perfect republic. The sense of emancipation experienced in
it by the wanderer from the old world is indescribably

(03:26):
sweet and novel. Even in our ultra civilized condition at home,
we do periodically escape back to nature and breathing the
fresh mountain air and gazing over vast expanses of ocean
and land, we find that she is still very much
to us. It is something more than these bodily sensations

(03:46):
we experience when first mingling with our fellow creatures, where
all men are absolutely free and equal, as here I
fancy I hear some wise person exclaiming, no, no, no,
in name only is your purple land a republic? Its
constitution is a piece of waste paper, Its government and
oligarchy tempered by assassination and revolution. True, But the knot

(04:13):
of ambitious rulers, all striving to pluck each other down,
have no power to make the people miserable. The unwritten constitution,
mightier than the written one, is in the heart of
every man, to make him still a republican and free,
with a freedom it would be hard to match anywhere
else on the globe. The Bedouin himself is not so free,

(04:36):
since he accords an almost superstitious reverence and implicit obedience
to his sheikh. Here, the lord of many leagues of
land and of herds, unnumbered, sits down to talk with
the hired shepherd, a poor, barefooted fellow in his smoky rancho,
and no class or cast difference divides them, no consciousness

(04:57):
of their widely different positions chills the warm current of
sympathy between two human hearts. How refreshing it is to
meet with this perfect freedom of intercourse, tempered only by
that innate curiosity and native grace of manner peculiar to
Spanish Americans. What a change to a person coming from

(05:19):
lands with higher and lower classes, each with its innumerable
hateful subdivisions, to one who aspires not to mingle with
the class above him, yet who shudders at the slodging
carriage and abject demeanor of the class beneath him. If
this absolute equality is inconsistent with perfect political order, are

(05:41):
for one should grieve to see such order established. Moreover,
it is by no means true that the communities which
oftenest startle us with crimes of disorder and violence are
morally worse than others. A community in which there are
not many crimes cannot be morally healthy. There were practically

(06:01):
no crimes in Peru under the Inca dynasty. It was
a marvelous thing for a person to commit an offense
in that empire, And the reason for this most unnatural
state of things was this. The Inca system of government
was founded on that most iniquitous and disastrous doctrine that
the individual bears the same relation to the state as

(06:24):
a child to its parents, that its life from the
cradle to the grave, must be regulated for it by
a power it is taught to regard as omniscient, a
power practically omnipresent and almighty. In such a state that
there could be no individual will, no healthy play of passions,
and consequently no crime. What wonder that a system so

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unspeakably repugnant to a being who feels that his will
is a divinity working within him, fell to pieces at
the first touch of foreign invasion, or that it left
no vestige of its pernicious existence on the continent it
had ruled. For the whole state was, so to speak,
putrid even before dissolution, and when it fell, it mingled

(07:10):
with the dust and was forgotten. Poland, before its conquest
by Russia, a country ill governed and disorderly as the
Banda Orientale, did not mingle with dust like that when
it fell. The implacable despotism of the Tsar was unable
to crush its fierce spirit. Its will still survived to

(07:31):
gild dreary oppression with hallowed dreams to make it clutch
with a fearful joy, the dagger concealed in its bosom.
But I had no need to go away from this
green continent to illustrate the truth of what I have said.
People who talk and write about the disorderly South American
republics are fond of pointing to Brazil, that great, peaceful,

(07:54):
progressive empire, as setting an example to be followed. An
orderly country. Yes, and the people in it steeped to
their lips in every abominable vice. Compared with these emasculated
children of the Equator, the Orientals, or Nature's noblemen, I
can very well imagine some over righteous person saying, alas

(08:17):
poor deluded soul, how little importance can be attached to
your specious apologies of a people's lawlessness, when your own
personal narrative shows that the moral atmosphere you have been
breathing has quite corrupted. You go back over your own record,
and you will find that you have, according to our notions,

(08:37):
offended in various ways and on diverse occasions, and that
you are even without the grace to repent of all
the evil things you have thought, said and done. I
have not read many books of philosophy, because when I
tried to be a philosopher, happiness was always breaking in
as someone says, also because I have loved to study

(09:00):
men rather than books. And in the little I have read,
there occurs a passage I remember well, and this I
shall quote as my answer to any one who may
call me an immoral person, because my passions have not
always remained in a quiescent state, like hounds. To quote
as simile of a South American poet slumbering at the

(09:21):
feet of the huntsmen resting against a rock at noon.
We should regard the perturbations of the mind, says Spinoza,
not in the light of vices of human nature, but
as properties just as pertinent to it, as are heat, storms, thunder,
and the like, to the nature of the atmosphere, which phenomena,

(09:41):
though inconvenient, are yet necessary and have fixed causes by
means of which we endeavor to understand their nature. And
the mind has just as much pleasure in seeing them
aright as in knowing such things as flatter the senses.
Let me have the phenomenon which are inconvenient, as well

(10:01):
as the things which flatter the senses, and the chances
are that my life will be a healthier and happier
one than that of the person who spends his time
on a cloud, blushing at nature's naughtiness. It is often
said that an ideal state, a utopia where there is
no folly, crime, or sorrow, has a singular fascination for

(10:23):
the mind. Now, when I meet with a falsehood, I
care not who the great persons who proclaim it may be.
I do not try to like it, or believe it,
or mimic the fashionable prattle of the world about it.
I hate all dreams of perpetual peace, all wonderful cities
of the sun, where people consume their joyful, monotonous years

(10:44):
in mystic contemplations, or find their delight like Buddhist monks,
in gazing on the ashes of dead generations of devotees.
The state is one a natural, unspeakably repugnant. The dreamless
sleep of the grave is more to the act of
healthy mind than such an existence. If Senor Gaardenshio de Lucha,

(11:07):
still keeping himself alive by means of his marvelous knowledge
of the secrets of nature, were to appear before me
now on this mountain to inform me that the sacred
community he resided with in Central Africa was no mere dream,
and should offer to conduct me to it. I should
decline to go with him. I should prefer to remain
in the Banda Orientale, even though by doing so I

(11:29):
should grow at last to be as bad as any
person in it, and ready to wade through slaughter to
the presidential chair. For even in my own country of England,
which is not so perfect as Old Peru or the
Paphart's country in Central Africa, I have been long divided
from Nature, and now in this oriental country, whose political

(11:52):
misdeeds are a scandal alike to pure England and in
pure Brazil, I have been reunited to her. For this
reason I love her with all her faults. Here, like
Santa Coloma, I will kneel down and kiss this stone
as an infant might kiss the breast that feeds it. Here,
fearless of dirt, like John Carrick Fergus, I will thrust

(12:16):
my hands into the loose brown soil to clasp the hands,
as it were, of dear mother Nature. After our long separation, Farewell,
beautiful land of sunshine and storm, of virtue and of crime.
May the invaders of the future fair on your soil
like those of the past, and leave you in the

(12:36):
end to your own devices. May the chivalrous instinct of
Santa Coloma, the passion of Dolores, the loving kindness of Candelaria,
still live in your children, to brighten their lives with
romance and beauty. May the blight of our superior civilization
never fall on your wild flowers, or the yoke of
our progress be lain on your herdsman, careless, graceful music,

(13:01):
loving as the birds, to make him like the sullen,
abject peasant of the old world. End of excerpt from
The Purple Land by W. H. Hudson