Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1179 page)

In July the influenza had nearly passed off, and he fulfilled his engagement to go to Aldeburgh — the air of which he always sought if possible after that malady, having found it a quicker restorative than that of any other place he knew.

In the second week of this month he was at rehearsals of Baron F. d’Erlanger’s opera Tess at Covent Garden, and on the 14th was present with Mrs. Hardy at the first performance. Though Italianized to such an extent that Hardy scarcely recognized it as his novel, it was a great success in a crowded house, Queen Alexandra being among the distinguished audience. Destinn’s voice suited the title-character admirably; her appearance less so.

In response to an invitation by Dr. Max Dessoir, a professor at the University of Berlin, who wished to have an epitome of the culture and thought of the time — the ‘Weltanschauung’ of a few representative men in England and Germany — Hardy wrote the following during August this year:

‘We call our age an age of Freedom. Yet Freedom, under her incubus of armaments, territorial ambitions smugly disguised as patriotism, superstitions, conventions of every sort, is of such stunted proportions in this her so-called time, that the human race is likely to be extinct before Freedom arrives at maturity.’

In the meantime he had been putting together poems written between-whiles, some of them already printed in periodicals — and in addition hunting up quite old ones dating from 1865, and overlooked in his earlier volumes, out of which he made a volume called Time’s Laughingstocks, and sent off the MS. to his publishers the first week in September.

In continuance of the visits to cathedrals he went this autumn to Chichester, York, Edinburgh, and Durham; and on returning to Dorchester was at a rehearsal of a play by Mr. A. H. Evans, the dramatist of the local Debating and Dramatic Society, based on Far from the Madding Crowd, which was performed there in the Corn Exchange, and a few days later before the Society of Dorset Men in London. Hardy had nothing to do with the adaptation, but thought it a neater achievement than the London version of 1882 by Mr. Comyns Carr.

In December Time’s Laughingstocks was published, and Hardy was in London, coming back as usual with a choking sore throat which confined him to his bed till the New Year, on the eve of which at twelve o’clock he crouched by the fire and heard in the silence of the night the ringing of the muffled peal down the chimney of his bedroom from the neighbouring church of St. George.

CHAPTER XXX

THE FREEDOM OF THE BOROUGH

1910: Aet. 69-70

In March, being at Ventnor, Hardy visited Swinburne’s grave at Bonchurch, and composed the poem entitled ‘A Singer Asleep’. It is remembered by a friend who accompanied him on this expedition how that windy March day had a poetry of its own, how primroses clustered in the hedges, and noisy rooks wheeled in the air over the little churchyard. Hardy gathered a spray of ivy and laid it on the grave of that brother-poet of whom he never spoke save in words of admiration and affection.

‘To the Secretary of the Humanitarian League ‘The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.’

‘10 th April 1910.

‘Sir:

‘I am glad to think that the Humanitarian League has attained the handsome age of twenty years — the Animals Defence Department particularly.

‘Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far- reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called “ The Golden Rule “ beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not wholly perceive it, though he alluded to it While man was deemed to be a creation apart from all other creations, a secondary or tertiary morality was considered good enough towards the “inferior” races; but no person who reasons nowadays can escape the trying conclusion that this is not maintainable. And though I myself do not at present see how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in its entirety, I recognize that the League is grappling with the question.’

It will be seen that in substance this agrees with a letter written earlier, and no doubt the subject was much in his mind just now.

About this time Hardy was asked by the editor of Harper s Maga- line to publish his reminiscences in the pages of that periodical month by month. He replied:

‘I could not appear in a better place. But it is absolutely unlikely that I shall ever change my present intention not to produce my reminiscences to the world.’

In the same month of April he was looking for a flat again in London, and found one at Blomfield Court, Maida Vale, which he and his wife and servants entered in May. Looking out of the window while at breakfast on the morning after their arrival, they beheld placarded in the street an announcement of the death of King Edward.

Hardy saw from the Athenaeum the procession of the removal of the King’s body to Westminster, and the procession of the funeral from Westminster three days later. On account of the suggestive- ness of such events it must have been in these days that he wrote ‘A King’s Soliloquy on the Night of his Funeral’. His own seventieth birthday a fortnight later reminded him that he was a year older than the monarch who had just died.

There was general satisfaction when Hardy’s name appeared as a recipient of the Order of Merit in the Birthday List of Honours in June 1910. He received numerous and gratifying telegrams and letters of congratulation from both friends and strangers, and, though he accepted the award with characteristic quietude, it was evident that this sign of official approval of his work brought him pleasure.

At the flat — the last one they were to take, as it happened — they received their usual friends as in previous years, and there were more performances of the Tess opera; but in the middle of June they were compelled to cancel all engagements suddenly owing to Hardy’s illness, which was happily but brief. In July he was able to go out again, and on the 19th went to Marlborough House to be invested with the Order of Merit. The King received him pleasantly: ‘but afterwards I felt that I had failed in the accustomed formalities’.

Back in the country at the end of the month they entertained some visitors at Max Gate. A brief visit to Aldeburgh, where he met Professor Bury and Dr. (afterwards Sir James) Frazer, and a few cycle rides, diversified the close of this summer.

In September he sat to Mr. William Strang for a sketch-portrait, which was required for hanging at Windsor Castle among those of other recipients of the Order of Merit; and on November 16 came the interesting occasion of the presentation of the freedom of Dorchester to Hardy, which appealed to his sentiment more perhaps than did many of those recognitions of his literary achievements that had come from the uttermost parts of the earth at a much earlier time. Among the very few speeches or lectures that he ever delivered, the one he made on this occasion was perhaps the most felicitous and personal:

‘Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen of the Corporation — This is an occasion that speaks for itself, and so, happily, does not demand many remarks from me. In simply expressing my sincere thanks for the high compliment paid me by having my name enrolled with those of the Honorary Freemen of this historic town, I may be allowed to confess that the freedom of the Borough of Dorchester did seem to me at first something that I had possessed a long while, had helped myself to (to speak plainly), for when I consider the liberties I have taken with its ancient walls, streets, and precincts through the medium of the printing-press, I feel that I have treated its external features with the hand of freedom indeed. True, it might be urged that my Casterbridge (if I may mention seriously a name coined off-hand in a moment with no thought of its becoming established and localised) is not Dorchester — not even the Dorchester as it existed sixty years ago, but a dream-place that never was outside an irresponsible book. Nevertheless, when somebody said to me that “Casterbridge” is a sort of essence of the town as it used to be, “a place more Dorchester than Dorchester itself”, I could not absolutely contradict him, though I could not quite perceive it. At any rate, it is not a photograph in words, that inartistic species of literary produce, particularly in respect of personages. But let me say no more about my own doings. The chronicle of the town has vivid marks on it. Not to go back to events of national importance, lurid scenes have been enacted here within living memory, or not so many years beyond it, whippings in front of the town-pump, hangings on the gaol-roof. I myself saw a woman hanged not 100 yards from where we now stand, and I saw, too, a man in the stocks in the back part of this very building. Then, if one were to recount the election excitements, Free Trade riots, scenes of soldiers marching down the town to war, the proclamation of Sovereigns now crumbled to dust, it would be an interesting local story.

‘Miss Burney, in her diary, speaks of its aspect when she drove through with the rest of King George’s Court on her way to Weymouth. She says: “ The houses have the most ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to see.” This is not quite the case now, and though we may regret the disappearance of these old buildings, I cannot be blind to the difficulty of keeping a town in what may be called working order while retaining all its ancient features. Yet it must not be forgotten that these are its chief attractions for visitors, particularly American visitors. Old houses, in short, have a far larger commercial value than their owners always remember, and it is only when they have been destroyed, and tourists who have come to see them vow in their disappointment that they will never visit the spot again, that this is realised. An American gentleman came to me the other day in quite a bad temper, saying that he had diverged from his direct route from London to Liverpool to see ancient Dorchester, only to discover that he knew a hundred towns in the United States more ancient-looking than this (laughter). Well, we may be older than we look, like some ladies; but if, for instance, the original All-Saints and Trinity Churches, with their square towers, the castle, the fine mansion of the Trenchards at the corner of Shirehall Lane, the old Three Mariners Inn, the old Greyhound, the old Antelope, Lady Abingdon’s house at the corner of Durngate Street, and other mediaeval buildings were still in their places, more visitors of antiquarian tastes would probably haunt the town than haunt it now. Old All-Saints was, I believe, demolished because its buttresses projected too far into the pavement. What a reason for destroying a record of 500 years in stone! I knew the architect who did it; a milder-mannered man never scuttled a sacred edifice. Milton’s well-known observation in his Areopagitica — “Almost as well kill a man as kill a good book” — applies not a little to a good old building; which is not only a book but a unique manuscript that has no fellow. But corporations as such cannot help these removals; they can only be prevented by the education of their owners or temporary trustees, or, in the case of churches, by Government guardianship.

‘And when all has been said on the desirability of preserving as much as can be preserved, our power to preserve is largely an illusion. Where is the Dorchester of my early recollection — I mean the human Dorchester — the kernel — of which the houses were but the shell? Of the shops as I first recall them not a single owner remains; only in two or three instances does even the name remain. As a German author has said, “Nothing is permanent but change”. Here in Dorchester, as elsewhere, I see the streets and the turnings not far different from those of my schoolboy time; but the faces that used to be seen at the doors, the inhabitants, where are they? I turn up the Weymouth Road, cross the railway-bridge, enter an iron gate to “a slope of green access”, and there they are! There is the Dorchester that I knew best; there are names on white stones one after the other, names that recall the voices, cheerful and sad, anxious and indifferent, that are missing from the dwellings and pavements. Those who are old enough to have had that experience may feel that after all the permanence or otherwise of inanimate Dorchester concerns but the permanence of what is minor and accessory.

‘As to the future of the town, my impression is that its tendency is to become more and more a residential spot, and that the nature of its business will be mainly that of administering to the wants of “private residents” as they are called. There are several reasons for supposing this. The dryness of its atmosphere and subsoil is unexcelled. It has the great advantage of standing near the coast without being on it, thus escaping the objections some people make to a winter residence close to the sea; while the marine tincture in its breezes tempers the keenness which is felt in those of high and dry chalk slopes further inland. Dorchester’s future will not be like its past; we may be sure of that. Like all other provincial towns, it will lose its individuality — has lost much of it already. We have become almost a London suburb owing to the quickened locomotion, and, though some of us may regret this, it has to be.

‘I will detain you no longer from Mr. Evans’s comedy that is about to be played downstairs. Ruskin somewhere says that comedy is tragedy if you only look deep enough. Well, that is a thought to remember; but to-night, at any rate, we will all be young and not look too deeply.’

After the presentation — which was witnessed by Mrs. Hardy, by Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Newbolt, by the writer of this memoir, and by other friends, the Dorchester Dramatic Society gave for the first time, at the hands of their own dramatist, an adaptation of Under the Greenwood Tree entitled The Mellstock Quire — the second title of the novel — Hardy himself doing no more than supply the original carols formerly sung by the Quire of the parish outshadowed by the name ‘Mellstock’ — the village of Stinsford, a mile from the town.

In December the American fleet paid a visit to Portland Roads, and though the weather was bad while they were lying there Hardy went on board the battleship Connecticut, where he met the captain, commander, and others; who, with several more officers, afterwards visited him and Mrs. Hardy at Max Gate. On the 29th they went on board the English Dreadnought, which was also lying there, and thence to a dance on board the United States flagship Louisiana, to which they were welcomed by Admiral Vreeland.