Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1184 page)

Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong would triumph.

‘Well, that was a lucky dreamlessness for Browning. It kept him comfortably unaware of those millions who cry with the Chorus in Hellas-. “Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, Salutes the rising sun!”1 — or with Hyllus in the Trachiniae: “Mark the vast injustice of the gods!”‘2

‘January 24. It is the unwilling mind that stultifies the contemporary criticism of poetry.’

1 Shelley’s Hellas, line 940.2 Sophocles’ Trachiniae, 1266.

‘January 25. The reviewer so often supposes that where Art is not visible it is unknown to the poet under criticism. Why does he not think of the art of concealing art? There is a good reason why.’

‘January 30. English writers who endeavour to appraise poets, and discriminate the sheep from the goats, are apt to consider that all true poets must be of one pattern in their lives and developments. But the glory of poetry lies in its largeness, admitting among its creators men of infinite variety. They must all be impractical in the conduct of their affairs; nay, they must almost, like Shelley or Marlowe, be drowned or done to death, or like Keats, die of consumption. They forgot that in the ancient world no such necessity was recognized; that Homer sang as a blind old man, that Aeschylus wrote his best up to his death at nearly seventy, that the best of Sophocles appeared between his fifty-fifth and ninetieth years, that Euripides wrote up to seventy.

‘Among those who accomplished late, the poetic spark must always have been latent; but its outspringing may have been frozen and delayed for half a lifetime.’

‘January 31. Performance of The Mellstock Quire at the Corn Exchange, Dorchester, by the local Company for Hospital purposes. Arranged for the admission of the present “Mellstock” Quire to see the resuscitated ghosts of their predecessors.’

The romantic name of ‘Little Hintock’ in The Woodlanders was advanced to a practical application in the February of this year by a request from Mr. Dampier Whetham, once Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge, whose hobby when in his Dorset home was dairy farming, to be allowed to define as the ‘Hintock’ herd, the fine breed of pedigree cattle he was establishing in the district which Hardy had described under that fictitious name.

In a United States periodical for March it was stated that’ Thomas Hardy is a realistic novelist who . . . has a grim determination to go down to posterity wearing the laurels of a poet’. This writer was a glaring illustration of the danger of reading motives into actions. Of course there was no ‘grim determination’, no thought of’laurels’. Thomas Hardy was always a person with an unconscious, or rather unreasoning, tendency, and the poetic tendency had been his from the earliest. He would tell that it used to be said to him at Sir Arthur Blomfield’s: ‘ Hardy, there can hardly have been anybody in the world with less ambition than you.’ At this time the real state of his mind was, in his own words, that ‘A sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me. At the risk of ruining all my worldly prospects I dabbled in it . . . was forced out of it. . . . It came back upon me. . . . All was of the nature of being led by a mood, without foresight, or regard to whither it led.’

To Professor D. A. Robertson, University of Chicago ‘February 7th, 1918.

‘In reply to your inquiry if I am likely to visit the United States after the war, I am sorry to say that such an event is highly improbable. . . .

‘The opinion you quote from Lord Bryce to the effect that Americans do not think internationally, leads one to ask, Does any country think internationally? I should say, none. But there can be no doubt that some countries think thus more nearly than others; and in my opinion the people of America far more than the people of England.’

In April there was sold at Christie’s Red Cross Sale the manuscript of Far from the Madding Crowd. The interest of the latter — at least to Hardy himself — lay in the fact of it being a revenant — that for forty years he had had no other idea but that the manuscript had been ‘pulped’ after its use in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874, since it had completely disappeared, not having been sent back with the proofs. Hardy’s rather whimsical regret was that he had not written it on better paper, unforeseeing the preservation. It afterwards came to his knowledge that after the sale it went to America, and ultimately was bought off a New York dealer for the collection of Mr. A. E. Newton of Pennsylvania.

‘Aj>ril 30. By the will of God some men are born poetical. Of these some make themselves practical poets, others are made poets by lapse of time who were hardly recognized as such. Particularly has this been the case with the translators of the Bible. They translated into the language of their age; then the years began to corrupt that language as spoken, and to add grey lichen to the translation; until the moderns who use the corrupted tongue marvel at the poetry of the old words. When new they were not more than half so poetical. So that Coverdale, Tyndale, and the rest of them are as ghosts what they never were in the flesh.’

‘May 8. A letter from Sir George Douglas carries me back to Wimborne and the time when his brother Frank lived opposite us there in the Avenue:

They are great trees, no doubt, by now,

That were so thin in bough —

That row of limes —

When we housed there;

I’m loth to reckon when;

The world has turned so many times,

So many, since then!’

Whether any more of this poem was written is not known.

Two days later Hardy was seized with a violent cough and cold which confined him for a week. However, he was well enough by the 23rd to adjudicate at the Police Court on several food-profiteering cases, undertaken as being ‘the only war-work I was capable of’, and to receive some old friends, including Sydney Cockerell, John Powys, Lady Ilchester, and her mother, Lady Londonderry, of whom he says: ‘ Never saw her again: I had known her for more than twenty- five years’. A little later came Mrs. Henry Allhusen, whom he had known from her childhood, Sir Frederick Treves, and Mr. H. M. and Mrs. Rosalind Hyndman (a charming woman), who were staying at Dorchester for the benefit of the air.

Some sense of the neglect of poetry by the modern English may have led him to write at this time:

‘The poet is like one who enters and mounts a platform to give an address as announced. He opens his page, looks around, and finds the hall — empty.’

A little later he says:

‘It bridges over the years to think that Gray might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle, and Wordsworth might have seen me in mine.’

Some days later:

‘The people in Shakespeare act as if they were not quite closely thinking of what they are doing, but were great philosophers giving the main of their mind to the general human situation.

‘I agree with Tennyson, who said he could form no idea how Shakespeare came to write his plays.

‘My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.’

CHAPTER XXXV

POETICAL QUESTIONS: AND MELLSTOCK CLUB-ROOM

1918-1919: Aet. 78-79

‘Sunday, June 2. Seventy-eighth birthday. Several letters.’ Among others was an interesting one from a lady who informed him that some years earlier she had been made the happiest woman in the world by accidentally meeting for the first time, by the ‘ Druid Stone’ on his lawn, at the late Mrs. Hardy’s last garden-party, the man who was now her husband. And a little later came one he much valued, from a man he lor.g had known — Mr. Charles Moule, Senior Fellow and President of Corpus, Cambridge, enclosing a charming poem to Hardy as his ‘almost lifelong friend . . . Too seldom seen since far-off times’ — times when the two had visited mediaeval buildings together, and dived from a boat on summer mornings into the green water of Weymouth Bay.

In September 1918 he received a circular letter asking him to assist in bringing home to people certain facts relating to the future with a view to finding a remedy, and stating that, ‘It is agreed by all students of modern military methods that this war, horrible as it seems to us, is merciful in comparison with what future wars must be. Scientific munition-making is only in its infancy. The next world-war, if there is another, will find the nations provided not with thousands, but with hundreds of thousands of submarines, and all these as far surpassing the present types in power and destructiveness as they surpass the feeble beginnings of ten years ago. . . .’

In his reply he remarked:

‘If it be all true that the letter prophesies, I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving. Better let Western “civilization” perish, and the black and yellow races have a chance.

‘However, as a meliorist (not a pessimist as they say) I think better of the world.’

‘December 31. New Year’s Eve. Did not sit up.’

At the beginning of the year 1919 Hardy received a letter and volume of verses from Miss Amy Lowell, the American poetess, who reminded him of her call at the beginning of the war — ‘ two bedraggled ladies’, herself and her friend. Hardy did remember, and their consternation lest they should not be able to get back to their own country.

In February he signed a declaration of sympathy with the Jews in support of a movement for ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish People’, and during the spring he received letters from Quiller-Couch, Crichton-Browne, and other friends on near and dear relatives they had lost in the war; about the same time there appeared a relevant poem by Hardy in the Athenxum which was much liked, entitled in words from the Burial Service, ‘According to the Mighty Working’.

In May Edmund Gosse wrote that he was very curious to know who drew the rather unusual illustration on the cover of the first edition of The Trumpet-Major. Hardy was blank on the matter for a time, until, finding a copy, he remembered that he drew it himself.

Being in London for a few days the same month he went to the dinner of the Royal Academy — the first held since the war — with his friend J. M. Barrie, with whom he was then staying, and was saddened to find how many of the guests and Academicians that he had been formerly accustomed to meet there had disappeared from the scene. He felt that he did not wish to go again, and, indeed, he never did. Among the incidents of this visit was a meeting at Lady St. Helier’s with Dr. Bernard, Archbishop of Dublin, and a discussion with him on Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms, and the inferiority of the Latin Vulgate in certain passages of them, with which Dr. Bernard agreed, sending him afterwards the two versions in parallel readings.

On his birthday in June he did what he had long intended to do — took his wife and sister to Salisbury by the old road which had been travelled by his and their forefathers in their journeys to London — via Blandford, Woodyates Inn, and Harnham Hill, whence Constable had painted his famous view of the cathedral, and where the track was still accessible to wheels. Woodyates Inn — now no longer such, to the surprise of everybody since the revival of road traffic — still retained its genial hostelry appearance, and reminded Hardy of the entry in the diary of one of the daughters of George the Third after she and the rest of the family had halted there: ‘At Woodyates Inn . . . had a beastly breakfast’. It is said that Browning’s great-grandfather was once the landlord of this famous inn.

In a reply to a letter of this date concerning a new literary periodical started in Canada, he adds, after some commendatory remarks:

‘But why does the paper stultify its earlier articles by advertising “The Best Sellers”? Of all marks of the un-literary journal this is the clearest. If the Canadian Bookman were to take a new line and advertise eulogistically the worst sellers, it might do something towards its object.’

Replying to a birthday letter from Mrs. Arthur Henniker, Hardy writes:

‘Max Gate, 5 June 1919.

‘Sincere thanks for your good wishes, my dear friend, which I echo back towards you. I should care more for my birthdays if at each succeeding one I could see any sign of real improvement in the world — as at one time I fondly hoped there was; but I fear that what appears much more evident is that it is getting worse and worse. All development is of a material and scientific kind — and scarcely any addition to our knowledge is applied to objects philanthropic and ameliorative. I almost think that people were less pitiless towards their fellow-creatures — human and animal — under the Roman Empire than they are now; so why does not Christianity throw up the sponge and say, I am beaten, and let another religion take its place?

‘I suddenly remember that we had a call from our Bishop and his wife two or three days ago, so that perhaps it is rather shabby of me to write as above. By a curious coincidence we had motored to Salisbury that very day, and were in his cathedral when he was at our house.

‘Do you mean to go to London for any length of time this summer? We are not going again till I don’t know when. We squeezed a good deal into the four days we were there, and I got a bad throat as usual, but it has gone off. At Lady St. Helier’s we met the Archbishop of Dublin (English Church), and found him a pleasant man. We also met several young poets at Barrie’s, where we were staying.

‘We do hope you are well — in “rude health” as they call it. Florence sends her love, and I am,

‘Ever affectionately,

‘Th. H.’

Shortly after his birthday he received a charming volume of holograph poems, beautifully bound, from some forty or fifty living poets. The mark of recognition so appealed to him that he determined to answer every one of the contributors by letter, and ultimately did so, though it took him a long while; saying that if they could take the trouble to write the poems he could certainly take the trouble to write the letters. It was almost his first awakening to the consciousness that an opinion had silently grown up as it were in the night, that he was no mean power in the contemporary world of poetry.