Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1176 page)

In this June, too, he paid a promised visit to Swinburne, and had a long talk with him; also with Mr. Watts-Dunton. ‘ Swinburne’s grey eyes are extraordinarily bright still — the brightness of stars that do not twinkle — planets namely. In spite of the nervous twitching of his feet he looked remarkably boyish and well, and rather impish. He told me he could walk twenty miles a day, and was only an old man in his hearing, his sight being as good as ever. He spoke with amusement of a paragraph he had seen in a Scottish paper: “ Swinburne planteth, Hardy watereth, and Satan giveth the increase.” He has had no honours offered him. Said that when he was nearly drowned his thought was, “My Both-well will never be finished!” That the secret reason for Lady Byron’s dismissal of Lord Byron was undoubtedly his liaison with Augusta. His (Swinburne’s) mother [Lady Jane, nie Ashburnham] used to say that it was the talk of London at the time. That the last time he visited his friend Landor the latter said plaintively that as he wrote only in a dead language (Latin), and a dying language (English), he would soon be forgotten. Talking of poets, he said that once Mrs. Procter told him that Leigh Hunt on a visit to her father one day brought an unknown youth in his train and introduced him casually as Mr. John Keats. (I think, by the way, that she also told me of the incident.) We laughed and condoled with each other on having been the two most abused of living writers; he for Poems and Ballads, I for Jude the Obscure.’

Later on in June he went to Mr. Walter Tyndale’s exhibition of Wessex pictures, some of which Hardy had suggested, and during the remainder of their stay in London they did little more than entertain a few friends at Hyde Park Mansions, and dine and lunch with others.

‘June 26, 1905. To the Hon. Sec. of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee:

‘I fear that I shall have to leave town before the meeting of the Committee takes place.

‘All I would say on the form of the Memorial is that one which embodies the calling of an important street or square after Shakespeare would seem to be as effectual a means as any of keeping his name on the tongues of citizens, and his personality in their minds.’

In July they went back to Dorset. Here, in the same month, a Nelson-and-Hardy exhibition was opened in Dorchester, the relics shown being mainly those of the Captain of the Victory, who had been born and lived near, and belonged to a branch of the Dorset Hardys, the subject of this memoir belonging to another.

On September 1 Hardy received a visit from 200 members of the Institute of Journalists at their own suggestion, as they had arranged a driving tour through his part of the country. There was an understanding that no interviews should be printed, and to this they honourably adhered. Their idea had been a call on him only, but they were entertained at tea, for which purpose a tent 150 feet long had to be erected on Max Gate lawn. ‘ The interior with the sun shining through formed a pretty scene when they were sitting down at the little tables’, Mrs. Hardy remarks in a diary. ‘They all drove off in four-in-hand brakes and other vehicles to Bockhampton, Puddletown, Bere Regis, and Wool.’ After they had gone it came on to rain, and Hardy, returning from Dorchester at ten o’clock, met the vehicles coming back in a procession, empty; ‘ the horses tired and steaming after their journey of thirty miles, and their coats and harness shining with rain and perspiration in the light of the lamps’.

In pursuance of the above allusion to interviewing, it may be stated that there are interviewers and interviewers. It once happened that an interviewer came specially from London to Hardy to get his opinions for a popular morning paper. Hardy said positively that he would not be interviewed on any subject. ‘ Very well’, said the interviewer, ‘then back I go, my day and my expenses all wasted.’ Hardy felt sorry, his visitor seeming to be a gentlemanly and educated man, and said he did not see why he should hurry off, if he would give his word not to write anything. This was promised, and the interviewer stayed, and had lunch, and a pleasant couple of hours’ conversation on all sorts of subjects that would have suited him admirably. Yet he honourably kept his promise, and not a word of his visit appeared anywhere in the pages of the paper.

In the middle of this month the 150th anniversary of the birth of the poet Crabbe at Aldeburgh in Suffolk was celebrated in that town, and Hardy accepted the invitation of Mr. Edward Clodd to be present. There were some very good tableaux vivants of scenes from the poems exhibited in the Jubilee Hall, some good lectures on the poet, and a sermon also in the parish church on his life and work, all of which Hardy attended, honouring Crabbe as an apostle of realism who practised it in English literature three-quarters of a century before the French realistic school had been heard of.

Returning to Max Gate he finished the second part of The Dynasts — that second part which the New York Tribune and other papers had been positive would never be heard of, so ridiculous was the first — and sent off the MS. to the Messrs. Macmillan in the middle of October.

‘First week in November. The order in which the leaves fall this year is: Chestnuts; Sycamores; Limes; Hornbeams; Elm; Birch; Beech.’

A letter written November 5 of this year:

‘All I know about my family history is that it is indubitably one of the several branches of the Dorset Hardys — having been hereabouts for centuries. But when or how it was connected with the branch to which Nelson’s Hardy’s people belonged — who have also been hereabouts for centuries — I cannot positively say.1 The branches are always asserted locally to be connected, and no doubt are, and there is a strong family likeness. I have never investigated the matter, though my great-uncle knew the ramifications. The Admiral left no descendant in the male line, as you may know.

‘As to your interesting remarks on honours for men of letters, I have always thought that any writer who has expressed unpalatable or possibly subversive views on society, religious dogma, current morals, and any other features of the existing order of things, and who wishes to be free and to express more if they occur to him, must feel hampered by accepting honours from any government — which are different from academic honours offered for past attainments merely.’

1 Since writing the above I have received from a correspondent what seems to me indubitable proof of the connection of these two branches of the Hardy family. — F. E. H.

To Mr. Israel Zangwill on November 10:

‘It would be altogether presumptuous in me — so entirely outside Jewish life — to express any positive opinion on the scheme embodied in the pamphlet you send to me. I can only say a word or two of the nature of a fancy. To found an autonomous Jewish state or colony, under British suzerainty or not, wears the look of a good practical idea, and it is possibly all the better for having no retrospective sentiment about it. But I cannot help saying that this retrospective sentiment among Jews is precisely the one I can best enter into.

‘So that if I were a Jew I should be a rabid Zionist no doubt. I feel that the idea of ultimately getting to Palestine is the particular idea to make the imaginative among your people enthusiastic — “like unto them that dream” — as one of you said in a lyric which is among the finest in any tongue, to judge from its power in a translation. You, I suppose, read it in the original; I wish I could. (This is a digression.)

‘The only plan that seems to me to reconcile the traditional feeling with the practical is that of regarding the proposed Jewish state on virgin soil as a stepping-stone to Palestine. A Jewish colony united and strong and grown wealthy in, say, East Africa, could make a bid for Palestine (as a sort of annexe) — say 100 years hence — with far greater effect than the race as scattered all over the globe can ever do; and who knows if by that time altruism may not have made such progress that the then ruler or rulers of Palestine, whoever they may be, may even hand it over to the expectant race, and gladly assist them, or part of them, to establish themselves there.

‘This expectation, nursed throughout the formation and development of the new territory, would at any rate be serviceable as an ultimate ideal to stimulate action. With such an idea lying behind the immediate one, perhaps the Zionists would reunite and co-operate with the New Territorialists.

‘I have written, as I said, only a fancy. But, as I think you know, nobody outside Jewry can take a deeper interest than I do in a people of such extraordinary character and history; who brought forth, moreover, a young reformer who, though only in the humblest-walk of life, became the most famous personage the world has ever known.’

At the end of 1905 a letter reached him from a correspondent in the Philippine Islands telling him that to its writer he was ‘ like some terrible old prophet crying in the wilderness’.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE REMAINDER OF ‘THE DYNASTS’

1906-1908: Aet. 65-67

The Dynasts, Part II, was not published till the first week in February 1906, and its reception by the reviews was much more congratulatory than their reception of the first part, an American critical paper going so far as to say, ‘ Who knows that this work may not turn out to be a masterpiece?’

This year they reoccupied the flat in Hyde Park Mansions that had been let to them by Lady Thompson the year before, and paid the customary visits to private views, concerts, and plays that are usually paid to such by people full of vigour from the country. Of the Wagner concerts he says:

‘I prefer late Wagner, as I prefer late Turner, to early (which I suppose is all wrong in taste), the idiosyncrasies of each master being more strongly shown in these strains. When a man not contented with the grounds of his success goes on and on, and tries to achieve the impossible, then he gets profoundly interesting to me. To-day it was early Wagner for the most part: fine music, but not so particularly his — no spectacle of the inside of a brain at work like the inside of a hive.’

An attack of influenza, which he usually got while sojourning in London, passed off, and they entertained many friends at the flat as usual, and went out to various meetings and dinners, though he does not write them down in detail as when he thought he must. They included one at Vernon Lushington’s, where Hardy was interested in the portrait of his host’s father, the Lushington of the Lady Byron mystery, who kept his secret honourably; also a luncheon in a historic room weighted with its antiquity, the vaulted dining-room of the house in Dean’s Yard then occupied by Dr. Wilberforce as Archdeacon of Westminster. It was this year that Hardy met Dr. Grieg, the composer, and his wife, and when, discussing Wagner music, he said to Grieg that the wind and rain through trees, iron railings, and keyholes fairly suggested Wagner music; to which the rival composer responded severely that he himself would sooner have the wind and rain.

On the 21 st May the following letter, in which Hardy gives a glimpse of himself as a young man in London, appeared in The Times:

‘Sir,

‘This being the 100th anniversary of J. Stuart Mill’s birth, and as writers like Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, and others have held that anything, however imperfect, which affords an idea of a human personage in his actual form and flesh, is of value in respect of him, the few following words on how one of the profoundest thinkers of the last century appeared forty years ago to the man in the street may be worth recording as a footnote to Mr. Morley’s admirable estimate of Mill’s life and philosophy in your impression of Friday.

‘It was a day in 1865, about three in the afternoon, during Mill’s candidature for Westminster. The hustings had been erected in Covent Garden, near the front of St. Paul’s Church; and when I — a young man living in London — drew near to the spot, Mill was speaking. The appearance of the author of the treatise On Liberty (which we students of that date knew almost by heart) was so different from the look of persons who usually address crowds in the open air that it held the attention of people for whom such a gathering in itself had little interest. Yet it was, primarily, that of a man out of place. The religious sincerity of his speech was jarred on by his environment — a group on the hustings who, with few exceptions, did not care to understand him fully, and a crowd below who could not. He stood bareheaded, and his vast pale brow, so thin-skinned as to show the blue veins, sloped back like a stretching upland, and conveyed to the observer a curious sense of perilous exposure. The picture of him as personified earnestness surrounded for the most part by careless curiosity derived an added piquancy — if it can be called such — from the fact that the cameo clearness of his face chanced to be in relief against the blue shadow of a church which, on its transcendental side, his doctrines antagonized. But it would not be right to say that the throng was absolutely unimpressed by his words; it felt that they were weighty, though it did not quite know why.

‘Your obedient servant,

‘Thomas Hardy.

‘Hyde Park Mansions, ‘May 20.’

The same month Mrs. Hardy makes the following note: ‘May 30. Returned to Max Gate for a day or two. I gardened a little, and had the first strange fainting-fit [I had known]. My heart seemed to stop; I fell, and after a while a servant came to me.’ (Mrs. Hardy died of heart-failure six years after.)

During the summer in London M. Jacques Blanche, the well- known French painter, who had a studio in Knightsbridge, painted Hardy’s portrait in oils. And a paper called ‘Memories of Church Restoration’, which he had written, was read in his enforced absence by Colonel Eustace Balfour at the annual meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

At the end of the lecture great satisfaction was expressed by speakers that Hardy had laid special emphasis on the value of the human associations of ancient buildings, for instance, the pews of churches, since they were generally slighted in paying regard to artistic and architectural points only.

As the June month drew on Hardy seems to have been at the British Museum Library verifying some remaining details for The Dynasts, Part Third; also incidentally going to see the Daily Telegraph printed, and to meet a group of German editors on a visit to England. He returned with his wife to Dorset towards the latter part of July.