Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1181 page)

CHAPTER XXXII

REVISITINGS, SECOND MARRIAGE, AND WAR WRITINGS

1913-1914: Aet. 72 — ’74

Many poems were written by Hardy at the end of the previous year and the early part of this — more than he had ever written before in the same space of time — as can be seen by referring to their subjects, as well as to the dates attached to them. To adopt Walpole’s words concerning Gray, Hardy was ‘in flower’ in these days, and, like Gray’s, his flower was sad-coloured.

On March 6 — almost to a day, forty-three years after his first journey to Cornwall — he started for St. Juliot, putting up at Bos- castle, and visiting Pentargan Bay and Beeny Cliff, on which he had not once set foot in the long interval.

He found the Rectory and other scenes with which he had been so familiar changed a little, but not greatly, and returning by way of Plymouth arranged for a memorial tablet to Mrs. Hardy in the church with which she had been so closely associated as organist before her marriage, and in other ways. The tablet was afterwards erected to his own design, as was also the tomb in Stinsford Churchyard — in the preparation of which memorials he had to revive a species of work that he had been unaccustomed to since the years of his architectural pupillage.

In June he left for Cambridge to receive the honourary degree of Litt.D., and lunched with the Master of Magdalene (also Vice- Chancellor), Dr. Donaldson, and Lady Albinia Donaldson, meeting — some for the first and last time — the Master of Trinity and Mrs. Butler, John Sargent, Arthur Benson, Henry Jackson, Vice-Master of Trinity and the Regius Professor of Greek, Sir James Murray, and many others. The visit was full of interest for Hardy as the sequel to his long indirect connection with the University in several ways, partly through the many graduates who were his friends, his frequent visits to the place, and his intention in the eighteen-sixties to go up himself for a pass-degree, which was abandoned mainly owing to his discovery that he could not conscientiously carry out his idea of taking Orders. A few weeks later he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene, as will be seen.

In July he was in London once or twice, meeting Dr. Page, the American Ambassador, Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, and others here and there. A German translation of The Mayor of Casterbridge under the title of Der Btirgermeister was begun as a serial in Germany at this time, and in the same month the gift of the MS. of his poem on Swinburne’s death was acknowledged by the Newnes Librarian at Putney, an offer which had originated with Mr. Sydney Cockerell. In response to a request from the Secretary of the General Blind Association, he gave his permission to put some of his books in prose and verse into Braille type for the use of the blind, adding:

‘I cannot very well suggest which, as I do not know the length you require. . . . If a full-length novel, I would suggest The Trumpet- Major. If verse, the Battle of Trafalgar scenes or the Battle of Waterloo scenes from The Dynasts, or a selection from the Poems. ... I am assuming that you require scenes of action rather than those of reflection or analysis.’

In August he was at Blandford with Mr. John Lane searching about for facts and scenes that might illustrate the life of Alfred Stevens, the sculptor, whose best-known work is the Wellington monument in St. Paul’s, and who was born and grew up in this town. Hardy had suggested that it ought to be written before it was too late, and Mr. Lane had taken up the idea. The house of his birth was discovered, but not much material seems to have been gained. It was not till a year or two later that Hardy discovered that Stevens’s father painted the Ten Commandments in the church of Blandford St. Mary, his name being in the corner: ‘ G. Stevens, Blandford, 1825’.

‘September 15. Thoughts on the recent school of novel-writers. They forget in their insistence on life, and nothing but life, in a plain slice, that a story must be worth the telling, that a good deal of life is not worth any such thing, and that they must not occupy a reader’s time with what he can get at first hand anywhere around him.’

The autumn glided on with its trifling incidents. In the muddle of Hardy’s unmistressed housekeeping animal pets of his late wife died, strayed, or were killed, much to Hardy’s regret; short visits were paid by friends, including Mr. Frederic Harrison; and in November, while staying with the Master of his College, Hardy was admitted in chapel as Honorary Fellow. ‘The ceremony, which consists of a Latin formula of admission before the Altar, and the handing-in of the new Fellow into his stall, was not unimpressive’, said the Cambridge Review. Hardy had read the lessons in church in his young manhood, besides having had much to do with churches in other ways, and the experience may have recalled the old ecclesiastical times. In the evening he dined in Hall, where ‘the Master proposed the health of him who was no longer a guest, but one of the Society, and the day’s proceedings terminated happily’, continued the Cambridge Review. It was an agreeable evening for Hardy, Mr. A. E. Housman and Sir Clifford Allbutt being present as guests among others of his friends.

A good sketch-painting of him was made this autumn by Mr. Fuller Maitland for his friend Arthur Benson, to be hung with the other portraits in the hall of Magdalene College; and in the middle of November the Dorchester amateurs’ version of The Woodlanders, adapted by themselves, was performed on the Dorchester stage, but Hardy was not present on the occasion.

In the December of this year M. Anatole France was entertained at a dinner in London by a committee of men of letters and of affairs. Hardy was much disappointed at being unable to attend; and he wrote to express his regret, adding:

‘In these days when the literature of narrative and verse seems to be losing its qualities as an art, and to be assuming a structureless and conglomerate character, it is a privilege that we should have come into our midst a writer who is faithful to the principles that make for permanence, who never forgets the value of organic form and symmetry, the force of reserve, and the emphasis of understatement, even in his lighter works.’

In February of the year following (1914) the subject of this memoir married the present writer.

In the spring of the same year Hardy was at the dinner of the Royal Academy, and he and his wife saw several friends in London, afterwards proceeding to Cambridge, where they spent a pleasant week in visiting and meeting Mr. Arthur Benson, Professor and Mrs. Bury, Mr. and Mrs. Cockerell, Professor Quiller-Couch, the Master of Jesus, Dr. James, Provost of King’s, Dr. and Mrs. MacTaggart, and the oldest friend of Hardy’s in Cambridge, or for that matter anywhere, Mr. Charles Moule, President and formerly Tutor of Corpus, who had known him as a boy. A dinner at St. John’s — the ‘ Porte- Latin Feast’ — with the mellow radiance of the dark mahogany tables, curling tobacco smoke, and old red wine, charmed Hardy, in spite of his drinking very little, and not smoking at all. A visit to Girton and tea with Miss Jones and members of her staff ended the Cambridge week for them.

Although Hardy had no sort of anticipation of the restrictions that the war was so soon to bring on motoring, he went about in a car this early summer almost as if he foresaw what was coming, taking his wife to Exeter, Plymouth, and back across Dartmoor.

After serving as a Grand Juror at the Assizes he dined during June with the Royal Institute of British Architects, a body of which he had never lost sight on account of his early associations with the profession, though nearly all the members he had known — except his old acquaintance, the Vice-President, John Slater, and the Blom- fields — had passed away.

A communication from men of letters and art in Germany who thought of honouring the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche on the seventieth anniversary of his birth, was the occasion of Hardy’s writing at this date:

‘It is a question whether Nietzsche’s philosophy is sufficiently coherent to be of great ultimate value, and whether those views of his which seem so novel and striking appear thus only because they have been rejected for so many centuries as inadmissible under humane rule.

‘A continuity of consciousness through the human race would be the only justification of his proposed measures.

‘He assumes throughout the great worth intrinsically of human masterfulness. The universe is to him a perfect machine which only requires thorough handling to work wonders. He forgets that the universe is an imperfect machine, and that to do good with an ill- working instrument requires endless adjustments and compromises.’

There was nothing to tell of the convulsion of nations that was now imminent, and in Dorset they visited various friends and stayed a week-end with Sir Henry and Lady Hoare at Stourhead (where they met as their fellow-guests Mr. and Mrs. Charles Whibley, the former of whom Hardy had long known, though they had not met for years). To Hardy as to ordinary civilians the murder at Serajevo was a lurid and striking tragedy, but carried no indication that it would much affect English life. On July 28th they were at a quiet little garden-party near Dorchester, and still there was no sign of the coming storm: the next day they lunched about five miles off with friends at Ilsington, and paid a call or two — this being the day on which war was declared by Austria on Serbia. Hardy made a few entries just after this date:

‘August 4, 11 p.m. War declared with Germany.’

On this day they were lunching at Athelhampton Hall, six miles off, where a telegram came announcing the rumour to be fact. A discussion arose about food, and there was almost a panic at the table, nobody having any stock. But the full dimensions of what the English declaration meant were not quite realised at once. Their host disappeared to inquire into his stock of flour. The whole news and what it involved burst upon Hardy’s mind next morning, for though most people were saying the war would be over by Christmas he felt it might be a matter of years and untold disaster.

‘August 9-15. English Expeditionary Force crosses the Channel to assist France and Belgium.’

‘August onwards. War excitement. “Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi!’“ It was the quotation Hardy had made at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war forty-four years earlier, when he was quite a young man.

He had been completely at fault, as he often owned, on the coming so soon of such a convulsion as the war, though only three or four months before it broke out he had printed a prophetic poem in the Fortnightly entitled ‘Channel Firing’, whereof the theme,

All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder,

was, to say the least, a perception singularly coincident. However, as stated, that it would really burst, he doubted. When the noisy crew of music-hall Jingoes said exultingly, years earlier, that Germany was as anxious for war as they were themselves, he had felt convinced that they were wrong. He had thought that the play, An English- mans Home, which he witnessed by chance when it was produced, ought to have been suppressed as provocative, since it gave Germany, even if pacific in intention beforehand, a reason, or excuse, for directing her mind on a war with England. A long study of the European wars of a century earlier had made it r ppear to him that common sense had taken the place of bluster in men’s minds; and he felt this so strongly that in the very year before war burst on Europe he wrote some verse called ‘His Country’, bearing on the decline of antagonism between peoples; and as long before as 1901 he composed a poem called ‘The Sick Battle-God’, which assumed that zest for slaughter was dying out. It was seldom he had felt so heavy at heart as in seeing his old view of the gradual bettering of human nature, as expressed in these verses of 1901, completely shattered by the events of 1914 and onwards. War, he had supposed, had grown too coldly scientific to kindle again for long all the ardent romance which had characterized it down to Napoleonic times, when the most intense battles were over in a day, and the most exciting tactics and strategy led to the death of comparatively few combatants. Hence nobody was more amazed than he at the German incursion into Belgium, and the contemplation of it led him to despair of the world’s history thenceforward. He had not reckoned on the power still retained there by the governing castes whose interests were not the people’s. It was, however, no use to despair, and since Germany had not shown the rationality he had expected of her, he presently began to consider if there was anything he — an old man of seventy-four — could do in the critical circumstances. A slight opening seemed to offer when he received a letter from the Government asking his attendance at a private Conference in which eminent literary men and women who commanded confidence abroad ‘ should take steps to place the strength of the British case and the principles for which the British troops and their allies are fighting before the populations of neutral countries’. He went to London expressly to attend, as explained in the following memorandum:

‘September 2. To London in obedience to a summons by Mr. Masterman, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, at the instance of the Cabinet, for the organization of public statements of the strength of the British case and principles in the war by well-known men of letters.’

This meeting was at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, and in view of what the country was entering on has a historic significance. There was a medley of writers present, including, in addition to the Chairman, Mr. Masterman, among Hardy’s friends and acquaintance, Sir James Barrie, Sir Henry Newbolt, J. W. Mackail, Arthur and Monsignor Benson, John Galsworthy, Sir Owen Seaman, G. M. Trevelyan, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Masefield, Robert Bridges, Anthony Hope Hawkins, Gilbert Murray, and many others. Whatever the effect of the discussion, the scene was impressive to more than one of them there. In recalling it Hardy said that the yellow September sun shone in from the dusty street with a tragic cast upon them as they sat round the large blue table, full of misgivings, yet unforeseeing in all their completeness the tremendous events that were to follow. The same evening Hardy left London — ‘the streets hot and sad, and bustling with soldiers and recruits’