Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1177 page)

At the end of July he wrote to Pittsburgh, U.S.A.:<

‘The handsome invitation of the Trustees of the Pittsburgh Institute that I should attend the dedication with wife or daughter, free of expense to us from the time we leave home till we return again, is a highly honouring and tempting one. But I am compelled to think of many contingent matters that would stand in the way of my paying such a visit, and have concluded that I cannot undertake it.

‘Please convey my thanks to Mr. Carnegie and the trustees.’

‘August 15. Have just read of the death of Mrs. Craigie in the papers. . . . Her description of the artistic temperament is clever; as being that which “thinks more than there is to think, feels more than there is to feel, sees more than there is to see”. ... It reveals a bitterness of heart that was not shown on the surface by that brilliant woman.’

On August 17 he started with his brother on a tour to some English cathedrals, which included Lincoln, Ely, the Cambridge Colleges, and Canterbury; and finished out the summer with bicycling in Dorset and Somerset. He must have been working at the third part of The Dynasts at intervals this year, though there is apparently no record of his doing so.

1907

The poem entitled ‘New Year’s Eve’, written in 1906, was issued in the January number of the Fortnightly Review, 1907 (afterwards reprinted in the volume called Time’s Laughingstocks). Some time in the same month he made the following notes on kindred subjects:

‘An ephemeral article which might be written: “The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious. By Sinceritas.”

‘Synopsis. Many millions of the most thoughtful people in England are prevented entering any church or chapel from year’s end to year’s end.

‘The days of creeds are as dead and done with as days of Pterodactyls.

‘Required: services at which there are no affirmations and no supplications.

‘Rationalists err as far in one direction as Revelationists or Mystics in the other; as far in the direction of logicality as their opponents away from it.

‘Religious, religion, is to be used in the article in its modern sense entirely, as being expressive of nobler feelings towards humanity and emotional goodness and greatness, the old meaning of the word — ceremony, or ritual — having perished, or nearly.

‘We enter church, and we have to say, “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep”, when what we want to say is, “Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep?” Then we have to sing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord”, when what we want to sing is, “O that my soul could find some Lord that it could magnify! Till it can, let us magnify good works, and develop all means of easing mortals’ progress through a world not worthy of them.”

‘Still, being present, we say the established words full of the historic sentiment only, mentally adding, “ How happy our ancestors were in repeating in all sincerity these articles of faith!” But we perceive that none of the congregation recognizes that we repeat the words from an antiquarian interest in them, and in a historic sense, and solely in order to keep a church of some sort afoot — a thing indispensable; so that we are pretending what is not true: that we are believers. This must not be; we must leave. And if we do, we reluctantly go to the door, and creep out as it creaks complainingly behind us.’

Hardy, however, was not a controversialist in religion or anything else, and it should be added here that he sometimes took a more nebulous view, that may be called transmutative, as in a passage that he wrote some time later:

‘Christianity nowadays as expounded by Christian apologists has an entirely different meaning from that which it bore when I was a boy. If I understand, it now limits itself to the religion of emotional morality and altruism that was taught by Jesus Christ, or nearly so limits itself. But this teaching does not appertain especially to Christianity: other moral religions within whose sphere the name of Christ has never been heard, teach the same thing! Perhaps this is a mere question of terminology, and does not much matter. That the dogmatic superstitions read every Sunday are merely a commemorative recitation of old articles of faith held by our grandfathers, may not much matter either, as long as this is well understood. Still, it would be more honest to make these points clearer, by recasting the liturgy, for their real meaning is often misapprehended. But there seems to be no sign of such a clearing up, and I fear that, since the “Apology” [in Late Lyrics], in which I expressed as much some years ago, no advance whatever has been shown; rather, indeed, a childish back- current towards a belief in magic rites.’

‘February 8. E. goes to London to walk in thl suffragist procession to-morrow.’

In March occurred the death of a friend — the Rev. T. Perkins, rector of Turnworth, Dorset — with whom Hardy was in sympathy for his humane and disinterested views, and staunch support of the principle of justice for animals, in whose cause he made noble sacrifices, and spent time and money that he could ill afford. On the 29th of the month Hardy enters a memorandum:

‘Eve of Good Friday. 11.30 p.m. Finished draft of Part III. of The Dynasts’ He had probably been so far influenced by the reception of the first two parts as not to expect the change of view which was about to give to the third part, and the whole production, a warm verdict of success, or he would not have followed the entry by the addendum:

‘Critics can never be made to understand that the failure may be greater than the success. It is their particular duty to point this out; but the public points it out to them. To have strength to roll a stone weighing a hundredweight to the top of the mount is a success, and to have the strength to roll a stone of ten hundredweight only halfway up that mount is a failure. But the latter is two or three times as strong a deed.’

They again took the flat in Hyde Park Mansions for the spring and summer, and moved thither the third week in April, whence they made their usual descent on friends and acquaintances, picture- galleries, and concert-rooms. It was this year that they met Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw — it is believed for the first time. They also received at the flat their customary old friends, including Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Barrie, M. and Madame Jacques Blanche, and many others.

In May he was present at an informal but most interesting dinner at the house of his friend Dr. Hagberg Wright, where he met M. and Mme. Maxim Gorky, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Richard Whiteing, and others. A disconcerting but amusing accident was the difficulty of finding Dr. Wright’s flat, on account of which the guests arrived at intervals and had their dinners in succession, the Gorkys coming last after driving two hours about London, including the purlieus of Whitechapel, which he had mistaken for ‘Westminster’. Naturally it was a late hour when the party broke up.

June 2. Hardy’s birthday, which he kept by dining at Lady St. Helier’s.

On the same day he wrote to Mr. Edward Wright:

‘Your interesting letter on the philosophy of The Dynasts has reached me here. I will try to answer some of your inquiries.

‘I quite agree with you in holding that the word “Will” does not perfectly fit the idea to be conveyed — a vague thrusting or urging internal force in no predetermined direction. But it has become accepted in philosophy for want of a better, and is hardly likely to be supplanted by another, unless a highly appropriate one could be found, which I doubt. The word that you suggest — Impulse — seems to me to imply a driving power behind it; also a spasmodic movement unlike that of, say, the tendency of an ape to become a man and other such processes.

‘In a dramatic epic — which I may perhaps assume The Dynasts to be — some philosophy of life was necessary, and I went on using that which I had denoted in my previous volumes of verse (and to some extent prose) as being a generalised form of what the thinking world had gradually come to adopt, myself included. That the Unconscious Will of the Universe is growing aware of Itself I believe I may claim as my own idea solely — at which I arrived by reflecting that what has already taken place in a fraction of the whole (i.e. so much of the world as has become conscious) is likely to take place in the mass; and there being no Will outside the mass — that is, the Universe — the whole Will becomes conscious thereby: and ultimately, it is to be hoped, sympathetic.

‘I believe, too, that the Prime Cause, this Will, has never before been called “It” in any poetical literature, English or foreign.

‘This theory, too, seems to me to settle the question of Free-will v. Necessity. The will of a man is, according to it, neither wholly free nor wholly unfree. When swayed by the Universal Will (which he mostly must be as a subservient part of it) he is not individually free; but whenever it happens that all the rest of the Great Will is in equilibrium the minute portion called one person’s will is free, just as a performer’s fingers are free to go on playing the pianoforte of themselves when he talks or thinks of something else and the head does not rule them.

‘In the first edition of a drama of the extent of The Dynasts there may be, of course, accidental discrepancies and oversights which seem not quite to harmonize with these principles; but I hope they are not many.

‘The third part will probably not be ready till the end of this or the beginning of next year; so that I have no proofs as yet. I do not think, however, that they would help you much in your proposed article. The first and second parts already published, and some of the poems in Poems of the Past and the Present, exhibit fairly enough the whole philosophy.’

Concerning Hardy’s remark in this letter on the Unconscious Will being an idea already current, though that its growing aware of Itself might be newer, and that there might be discrepancies in the Spirits’ philosophy, it may be stated that he had felt such questions of priority and discrepancy to be immaterial where the work was offered as a poem and not as a system of thought.

On the 22nd of June they were guests at King Edward’s Garden Party at Windsor Castle, and a few days later at Mr. Reginald Smith’s met Sir Theodore Martin, then nearly ninety-one. Hardy remembering when as a young man he had frequented the pit of Drury Lane to see Lady Martin — then Miss Helen Faucit — in Shakespeare characters. His term at Hyde Park Mansions came to an end in the latter part of July, and they returned to Max Gate, though Hardy attended a dinner a week later given by the Medico-Psychological Society, where he had scientific discussions with Sir James Crichton- Browne and Sir Clifford Allbutt, and where one of the speakers interested Hardy by saying that all great things were done by men ‘who were not at ease’.

That autumn Sir Frederick and Lady Treves took a house near Max Gate, and Hardy frequently discussed with the Serjeant-surgeon a question which had drawn their attention for a long time, both being Dorset men; that of the ‘poor whites’ in Barbados, a degenerate, decadent race, descendants of the Dorset and Somerset ‘rebels’ who were banished there by Judge Jeffreys, and one of whom had been a collateral ancestor of Hardy’s on the maternal side.

He was now reaching a time of life when shadows were continually falling. His friend Pretor, Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, wrote to tell him he was dying, and asked him for an epitaph. Hardy thought of an old one:

If a madness ‘tis to weepe

For a man that’s fall’n asleepe,

How much more for that we call

Death — the sweetest sleepe of all!

They still kept up a little bicycling this autumn, but he did some writing, finishing the third part of The Dynasts in September, and posting the MS. to the publishers shortly after.

In November he complied with a request from the Dorsetshire Regiment in India, which had asked him for a marching tune with the required local affinity for the use of the fifes and drums, and sent out an old tune of his grandfather’s called ‘The Dorchester Hornpipe’, which he himself had fiddled at dances as a boy. He wound up the year by sending to the Wessex Society of Manchester, also at their request, a motto for the Society:

While new tongues call, and novel scenes unfold,

Meet may it be to bear in mind the old. . . .

Vain dreams, indeed, are thoughts of heretofore;

What then? Your instant lives are nothing more.

About the same time he forwarded ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’ to the English Review as wished, where it appeared shortly after; and also in fulfilment of a promise, sent the following old-fashioned psalm tunes associated with Dorsetshire to the Society of Dorset Men in London of which he was President-elect for the ensuing year:

Frome; Wareham; Blandford; New Poole; Bridport; Lul- worth; Rockborne; Mercy; Bridehead; Charmouth.

The concluding part of The Dynasts was published about six weeks later and was the cause of his receiving many enthusiastic letters from friends and strangers, among which the following from the far west of Australia may be given as a specimen:

‘My thanks for your tremendous new statement in The Dynasts of the world-old problem of Freewill versus Necessity. You have carried me on to the mountain with Jesus of Nazareth, and, viewing with Him the great conflict below, one chooses with Him to side with the Spirit of the Pities, in the belief that they will ultimately triumph; and even if they do not we at least will do our little to add to the joy rather than to the woe of the world. . . . The Spirit of the Pities is indeed young in comparison with The Years, and so we must be patient. . . . Your conception of the Immanent Will — irresponsible, blind, but possibly growing into self-consciousness, was of great significance to me, from my knowledge of Dr. Bucke’s theory of the Cosmic Consciousness.’

In connection with this subject it may be here recalled, in answer to writers who now and later were fond of charging Hardy with postulating a malignant and fiendish God, that he never held any views of the sort, merely surmising an indifferent and unconscious force at the back of things ‘that neither good nor evil knows’. His view is shown, in fact, to approximate to Spinoza’s — and later Einstein’s — that neither Chance nor Purpose governs the universe, but Necessity.