Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1180 page)

It was at the end of this year that Hardy published in the Fortnightly Review some verses entitled ‘God’s Funeral’. The alternative title he had submitted for the poem was ‘The Funeral of Jahveh’ — the subject being the gradual decline and extinction in the human race of a belief in an anthropomorphic god of the King of Dahomey type — a fact recognized by all bodies of theologians for many years. But the editor, thinking the longer title clumsy and obscure, chose the other, to which Hardy made no objection, supposing the meaning of his poem would be clear enough to readers.

CHAPTER XXXI

BEREAVEMENT

1911 — 1912: Aet. 70 — 72

In March (1911) Hardy received a letter from M. Emile Bergerat of Paris asking him to let his name appear as one of the Committee for honouring Theophile Gautier on his approaching centenary, to which Hardy readily agreed. In the same month he visited Bristol Cathedral and Bath Abbey, and in April attended the funeral of the Mayor of Dorchester, who had presented him with the freedom of the borough but a few months earlier. A sequence of verses by Hardy, entitled ‘Satires of Circumstance’, which were published in the Fortnightly Review at this juncture, met with much attention both here and in America.

In April he and his brother, in pursuance of a plan of seeing or re-seeing all the English cathedrals, visited Lichfield, Worcester, and Hereford.

He makes only one note this spring: ‘ View the matrices rather than the moulds’.

Hardy had been compelled to decline in February an invitation from the Earl-Marshal to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey in the coming June. That month found him on a tour with his brother in the Lake Country, including Carlisle Cathedral and Castle, where the dungeons were another reminder to him of how ‘evil men out of the evil treasure of their hearts have brought forth evil things’. However, the tour was agreeable enough despite the wet weather, and probably Hardy got more pleasure out of Coronation Day by spending it on Windermere than he would have done by spending it in a seat at the Abbey.

Of Grasmere Churchyard he says: ‘ Wordsworth’s headstone and grave are looking very trim and new. A group of tourists who have never read a line of him sit near, addressing and sending off picture postcards. . . . Wrote some verses.’ He visited Chester Cathedral coming homeward, called at Rugby, and went over the school and chapel; and returned to Dorchester through London.

After his return he signed, with many other well-known people, a protest against the use of aerial vessels in war; appealing to all governments ‘to foster by any means in their power an international understanding which shall preserve the world from warfare in the air’. A futile protest indeed!

In July Hardy took his sister Katherine on an excursion to North Somerset, stopping at Minehead, and going on by coach to Porlock and Lynmouth. Thence they went by steamer to Ilfracombe, intending to proceed through Exeter to South Devon. But the heat was so great that further travelling was abandoned, and after going over the cathedral they returned home.

In the preceding month, it may be remarked, had died Mr. W. J. Last, A.M.Inst. C.E., Director of the Science Museum, South Kensington, who was a son of Hardy’s old Dorchester schoolmaster, Isaac Glandfield Last. The obituary notices that appeared in The Times and other papers gave details of a life more successful than his father’s, though not of higher intellectual ability than that by which it had been Hardy’s good fortune to profit.

At the end of the month Mr. Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, called, mainly to inquire about Hardy’s old manuscripts, which was the occasion of his looking up those that he could find and handing them over to Mr. Cockerell to distribute as he thought fit among any museums that would care to possess one, Hardy himself preferring to have no voice in the matter. In the course of October this was done by Mr. Cockerell, the MSS. of The Dynasts and Tess of the d’Urbervilles being accepted by the British Museum, of Time’s Laughingstochs and Jude the Obscure by the Fitzwilliam, and of IVessex Poems, with illustrations by the author himself (the only volume he ever largely illustrated), by Birmingham. Others were distributed from time to time by Mr. Cockerell, to whom Hardy had sent all the MSS. for him to do what he liked with, having insisted that ‘it would not be becoming for a writer to send his own MSS. to a museum on his own judgement’.

It may be mentioned in passing that in these months Mr. F. Saxelby of Birmingham, having been attracted to Hardy’s works by finding in them a name which resembled his own, published ‘A Hardy Dictionary’, containing the names of persons and places in the author’s novels and poems. Hardy had offered no objection to its being issued but accepted no responsibility for its accuracy.

In November the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society gave another performance of plays from the Wessex novels. This time the selection was the short one-act piece that Hardy had dramatized himself many years before, from the story called The Three Strangers, entitled The Three Wayfarers; and a rendering by Mr. A. H. Evans of the tale of The Distracted Preacher. The Hardys’ friend, Mrs. Arthur Henniker, came all the way from London to see it, and went with his wife and himself.

The curator of the Dorset County Museum having expressed a wish for a MS. of Hardy’s, he sent this month the holograph of The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Being interested at this time in the only Gothic style of architecture that can be called especially and exclusively English — the perpendicular style of the fifteenth century - — Hardy made a journey to Gloucester to investigate its origin in that cathedral, which he ascertained to be in the screen between the south aisle and the transept — a fact long known probably to other investigators, but only recently to him. He was so much impressed by the thought that the inventor’s name, like the names of the authors of so many noble songs and ballads, was unknown, that on his return he composed a poem thereon, called ‘The Abbey Mason’, which was published a little later in Harper s Magazine, and later still was included in a volume with other poems.

The illness of his elder sister Mary saddened the close of 1911; and it was during this year that his wife wrote the Reminiscences printed in the earlier pages of this book, as if she had premonitions that her end was not far off; though nobody else suspected it.

The year 1912, which was to advance and end in such gloom for Hardy, began serenely. In January he went to London for a day or two and witnessed the performance of Oedipus at Covent Garden. But in February he learnt of the death of his friend General Henniker, and in April occurred the disaster to the Titanic steamship, upon which he wrote the poem called ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ in aid of the fund for the sufferers.

On the 22nd April Hardy was correcting proofs for a new edition of his works, the Wessex Edition, concerning which he wrote to a friend:

“... I am now on to p. 140 of The Woodlanders (in copy I mean, not in proofs, of course). That is vol. vi. Some of the later ones will be shorter. I read ten hours yesterday — finishing the proofs of the Native (wh. I have thus got rid of)- I got to like the character of Clym before I had done with him. I think he is the nicest of all my heroes, and not a bit like me. On taking up The Woodlanders and reading it after many years I think I like it, as a story, the best of all. Perhaps that is owing to the locality and scenery of the action, a part I am very fond of. It seems a more quaint and fresh story than the Native, and the characters are very distinctly drawn. . . . Seven o’clock p.m. It has come on to rain a little: a blackbird is singing outside. I have read on to p. 185 of The Woodlanders since the early part of my letter.’

The Hardys dined with a few friends in London this season, but did not take a house, putting up at a hotel with which Hardy had long been familiar, the West Central in Southampton Row.

On June 1 at Max Gate they had a pleasant week-end visit from Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats, who had been deputed by the Royal Society of Literature to present Hardy with the Society’s gold medal on his seventy-second birthday. The two eminent men of letters were the only people entertained at Max Gate for the occasion; but everything was done as methodically as if there had been a large audience. Hardy says: ‘ Newbolt wasted on the nearly empty room the best speech he ever made in his life, and Yeats wasted a very good one: mine in returning thanks was as usual a bad one, and the audience was quite properly limited’.

In the middle of June he was in London at Lady St. Helier’s, and went to the play of Bunty pulls the Strings with her. An amusing anticlimax to a story of the three-crow type occurred in connection with this or some other popular play of the date. It was currently reported and credited that Mr. Asquith had gone to see it eight times, and Mr. Balfour sixteen. Taking Miss Balfour in to dinner and discussing the play, Hardy told her of the report, and she informed him that her brother had been only once. How few the visits of Mr. Asquith were could not be ascertained. Possibly he had not gone at all.

Later on in the autumn a letter was addressed to him on a gross abuse which was said to have occurred — that of publishing details of a lately deceased man’s life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers. In the course of his reply he said:

‘What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact,

and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.’

‘June. Here is a sentence from the Edinburgh Review of a short time back which I might have written myself: “ The division [of poems] into separate groups [ballad, lyrical, narrative, &c.] is frequently a question of the preponderance, not of the exclusive possession, of certain aesthetic elements.”‘

Meanwhile in July he had returned to Max Gate just in time to be at a garden-party on July 16 — the last his wife ever gave — which it would have much grieved him afterwards to have missed. The afternoon was sunny and the guests numerous on this final one of many occasions of such a gathering on the lawn there, and nobody foresaw the shadow that was so soon to fall on the house, Mrs. Hardy being then, apparently, in her customary health and vigour. In the following month, August, she was at Weymouth for the last time; and Hardy took her and her niece to see the performance of Bunty at the Pavilion Theatre. It was her last play.

However, she was noticed to be weaker later on in the autumn, though not ill, and complained of her heart at times. Strangely enough, she one day suddenly sat down to the piano and played a long series of her favourite old tunes, saying at the end she would never play any more. The poem called ‘The Last Performance’ approximately describes this incident.

She went out up to the 22nd November, when, though it was a damp, dark afternoon, she motored to pay a visit six miles off. The next day she was distinctly unwell, and the day after that was her birthday, when she seemed depressed. On the 25 th two ladies called; and though she consulted with her husband whether or not to go downstairs to see them, and he suggested that she should not in her weak state, she did go down. The strain obliged her to retire immediately they had left. She never went downstairs again.

The next day she agreed to see a doctor, who did not think her seriously ill, but weak from want of nourishment through indigestion. In the evening she assented quite willingly to Hardy’s suggestion that he should go to a rehearsal in Dorchester of a play made by the local company, that he had promised to attend. When he got back at eleven o’clock all the house was in bed and he did not disturb her.

The next morning the maid told him in answer to his inquiry that when she had as usual entered Mrs. Hardy’s room a little earlier she had said she was better, and would probably get up later on;

but that she now seemed worse. Hastening to her he was shocked to find her much worse, lying with her eyes closed and unconscious. The doctor came quite quickly, but before he arrived her breathing softened and ceased.

It was the day fixed for the performance of The Trumpet-Major in Dorchester, and it being found impossible to put off the play at such short notice, so many people having come from a distance for it, it was produced, an announcement of Mrs. Hardy’s unexpected death being made from the stage.

Many years earlier she had fancied that she would like to be buried at Plymouth, her native place; but on going there to the funeral of her father she found that during a ‘restoration’ the family vault in Charles Churchyard, though it was not full, had been broken into, if not removed altogether, either to alter the entrance to the church, or to erect steps; and on coming back she told her husband that this had quite destroyed her wish to be taken there, since she could not lie near her parents.

There was one nook, indeed, which in some respects was preeminently the place where she might have lain — the graveyard of St. Juliot, Cornwall — whose dilapidated old church had been the cause of their meeting, and in whose precincts the early scenes of their romance had a brief being. But circumstances ordered otherwise. Hardy did not favour the thought of her being carried to that lonely coast unless he could be carried thither likewise in due time; and on this point all was uncertain. The funeral was accordingly at Stinsford, a mile from Dorchester and Max Gate, where the Hardys had buried for many years.

She had not mentioned to her husband, or to anybody else so far as he could discover, that she had any anticipations of death before it occurred so suddenly. Yet on his discovery of the manuscript of her ‘Recollections’, written only a year earlier, it seemed as if some kind of presentiment must have crossed her mind that she was not to be much longer in the world, and that if her brief memories were to be written it were best to write them quickly. This is, however, but conjecture.