Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1185 page)

This ‘Poets’ Tribute’ had been arranged by his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who brought the gift and placed it in Hardy’s hand.

It had impressed him all the more as coming just after his reading quite by chance in an Australian paper a quotation from a recent English review of his verse — belittling one of the poems — that called ‘ On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’ — in a manner that showed the critic to be quite unaware of what was called ‘onomatopoeia’ in poetry, the principle on which the lines had been composed. They were intended to convey by their rhythm the impression of a clucking of ripples into riverside holes when blown upon by an up-stream wind; so that when his reviewer jested on the syllables of the verse sounding like milk in a cart he was simply stating that the author had succeeded in doing what he had tried to do — the sounds being similar. As the jest by the English review had come back to England from Australia, where it had been quoted to Hardy’s damage without the context, he took the trouble to explain the matter to the writer of the article, which he would probably have left undone if it had not so frequently happened that his intentions were shown up as blunders. But he did not get a more satisfactory reply than that the critics, like the writer, were sheep in wolves’ clothing, and meant no harm.

Hardy’s loyalty to his friends was shown by his devotion to the Moule family, members of which he had known intimately when he was a young man. The following is probably the last letter he wrote to one whom he could remember as a small boy:

‘29 June 1919.

‘My dear Bishop of Durham,

‘You may agree with me in thinking it a curious coincidence that the evening before your letter arrived, and when it probably was just posted, we were reading a chapter in Job, and on coming to the verse, “All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come”, I interrupted and said: “ That was the text of the Vicar of Fordington one Sunday evening about 1860”. And I can hear his voice repeating the text as the sermon went on — in the way they used to repeat it in those days — just as if it were yesterday. I wonder if you have ever preached from that text; I daresay you have. I should add that he delivered his discourse without note of any kind.

‘My warm thanks for your good feeling about my birthday. The thoughts of friends about one at these times take off some of the sadness they bring as one gets old.

‘The study of your father’s life (too short, really) has interested me much. I well remember the cholera years in Fordington; you might have added many details. For instance, every morning a man used to wheel the clothing and bed-linen of those who had died in the night out into the mead, where the Vicar had a large copper set. Some was boiled there, and some burnt. He also had large fires kindled in Mill Street to carry off infection. An excellent plan I should think.

‘Many thanks, too, for the volume of poems which duly came. ‘Apollo at Pherae’ seems to me remarkably well constructed in “plot”, and the verse facile: I don’t quite know how you could have acquired such readiness at such an early date, and the influence of Milton is not excessive — at least I think not.

‘I hope you will let us know when you come this way again.’

August. The Collected edition of Hardy’s poems was published about this time in two volumes, the first containing the shorter poems, and the second The Dynasts.

October. A curious question arose in Hardy’s mind at this date on whether a romancer was morally justified in going to extreme lengths of assurance — after the manner of Defoe — in respect of a tale he knew to be absolutely false. Thirty-seven years earlier, when much pressed to produce something of the nature of a fireside yarn, he had invented a picturesque account of a stealthy nocturnal visit to England by Napoleon in 1804, during the war, to spy out a good spot for invasion. Being struck with the extreme improbability of such a story, he added a circumstantial framework describing it as an old local tradition to blind the reader to the hoax. When it was published he was much surprised at people remarking to him: ‘I see you have made use of that well-known tradition of Napoleon’s landing’. He then supposed that, strange as it seemed, such a story must have been in existence without his knowledge, and that perhaps the event had happened. So the matter rested till the time at which we have arrived, when a friend who was interested made inquiries, and was assured by historians and annalists whom he consulted that such a visit would have been fatuous, and wellnigh impossible. Moreover, that there had never existed any such improbable tradition. Hence arose Hardy’s aforesaid case of conscience as to being too natural in the art he could practise so well. Had he not long discontinued the writing of romances he would, he said, have put at the beginning of each new one: ‘ Understand that however true this book may be in essence, in fact it is utterly untrue’.

Being interested in a dramatic case of piracy on the high seas, which might have happened a hundred or two hundred years before, Hardy and his wife went to the October assizes, on the invitation of Mr. Justice Darling, and sat through the case. Such sensational trials came to quiet Dorset whenever the port of landing was in the county, even if they happened a thousand miles off.

On October 30 the following was written at his request:

‘In reply to your letter I write for Mr. Hardy, who is in bed with a chill, to say that he cannot furnish you with any biographical details. ... To your inquiry if Jude the Obscure is autobiographical, I have to answer that there is not a scrap of personal detail in it, it having the least to do with his own life of all his books. The rumour, if it still persists, was started some years ago. Speaking generally, there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr. Hardy’s poetry than in all the novels.’

It is a tribute to Hardy’s powers of presentation that readers would not for many years believe that such incidents as Jude’s being smacked when bird-keeping, his driving a baker’s cart, his working as a journeyman mason, as also many situations described in verse, were not actual transcripts from the writer’s personal experience, although the briefest reference to biographical date-books would have shown the impossibility of anything of the sort.

Hardy had been asked this autumn if he would object to a representation of some of the scenes in The Dynasts by the Oxford University Dramatic Society in the following year, and on his making no objection some correspondence ensued with the President and Manager on certain details.

To Mr. Maurice Colbourne ‘November 11, 1919.

‘Your plan for showing the out-of-doors scenes is very ingenious and attractive — and more elabourate than I imagined, my idea having been just a backcloth coloured greyish-blue, and a floorcloth coloured greenish-grey — a purely conventional representation for all open- air scenes. . . . My feeling was the same as yours about the Strophe and Antistrophe — that they should be unseen, and, as it were, speaking from the sky. But it is, as you hint, doubtful if the two ladies will like to have their charms hidden. Would boys do instead, or ugly ladies with good voices? But I do not wish to influence largely your methods of presentation. It will be of the greatest interest to me, whether I can get to Oxford for the performance or not, to see how the questions that arise in doing the thing have been grappled with by younger brains than mine.’

‘November 18. To my father’s grave (he was born Nov. 18, 1811) with F. [Mrs. Hardy]. The funeral psalm formerly sung at the graveside to the tune of “St. Stephen” was the xc. in Tate and Brady’s version. Whether Dr. Watts’s version, beginning “ O God, our help in ages past” — said to be a favourite with Gladstone — was written before or after T. and B.’s (from Coverdale’s prose of the same psalm) I don’t know, but I think it inferior to the other, which contains some good and concise verse, e.g.,

‘T. and B.:

For in Thy sight a thousand years

Are like a day that’s past,

Or like a watch at dead of night

Whose hours unnumbered waste.

Thou sweep’st us off as with a flood,

We vanish hence like dreams. . . .

‘Watts (more diffusely):

A thousand ages in Thy sight

Are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night

Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.’

In December Sir George Douglas writes concerning a lecture he is going to give in Edinburgh on Hardy’s poems, and incidentally remarks: ‘Those Aeschylean poems in The Past and the Present . . .

how would Wordsworth have regarded them, I wonder, differing so markedly as they do from his view of Nature?’ His friend Sir Frederick Pollock also sent a letter containing an impromptu scene of a humorous kind: ‘ Overheard at the sign of the Mermaid in Elysium’, purporting to be a conversation between the shades of Shakespeare, Campion, and Heine, ‘ on a book newly received’ — (i.e. Hardy’s Collected Poems) — in which Shakespeare says:

‘Twas pretty wit, friend Thomas, that you spoke;

You take the measure of my Stratford folk,

the lines referring to Hardy’s poem ‘To Shakespeare after three hundred years’.

In December he opened a village war memorial in the form of a club-room in Bockhampton. It was close to his first school, erected, as has been told, by the manor lady of his early affections, and here he danced, for the last time in his life, with the then lady of the manor. The room was erected almost on the very spot where had stood Robert Reason’s shoe-making shop when Hardy was a boy, described in Under the Greenwood Tree as ‘Mr. Robert Penny’s’.

A speech made by Hardy at the opening of the Bockhampton Reading-room and Club on the 2nd December 1919 was not reported in any newspaper, but the following extracts from it may be of interest:

‘I feel it an honour — and an honour of a very interesting kind — to have been asked by your President to open this Club as a memorial to the gallant men of this parish who fought in the last great war — a parish I know so well, and which is only about a mile from my own door.

‘This room is, it seems, to be called “The Mellstock Club”. I fancy I have heard the name of “Mellstock” before. But we will let that pass. . . .

‘The village of Bockhampton has had various owners. In the time of the Conqueror it belonged to a Norman countess; later to a French Priory; and in the time of Queen Elizabeth to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, who at the beginning of the last century sold it to Mr. Morton Pitt, a cousin of Pitt the Premier. What a series of scenes does this bare list of owners bring back!

‘At one time Bockhampton had a water-mill. Where was that mill, I wonder? It had a wood. Where was that wood?

‘To come to my own recollections. From times immemorial the village contained several old Elizabethan houses, with mullioned windows and doors, of Ham Hill stone. They stood by the withy bed. I remember seeing some of them in process of being pulled down, but some were pulled down before I was born. To this attaches a story. Mr. Pitt, by whose orders it was done, came to look on, and asked one of the men several questions as to why he was doing it in such and such a way. Mr. Pitt was notorious for his shabby clothes, and the labourer, who did not know him, said at last, ‘Look here, old chap, don’t you ask so many questions, and just go on. Anybody would think the house was yours!” Mr. Pitt obeyed orders, and meekly went on, murmuring, “Well, ‘tis mine, after all!”

‘Then there were the Poor-houses, I remember — just at the corner turning down to the dairy. These were the homes of the parish paupers before workhouses were built. In one of them lived an old man who was found one day rolling on the floor, with a lot of pence and halfpence scattered round him. They asked him what was the matter, and he said he had heard of people rolling in money, and he thought that for once in his life he would do it, to see what it was like.

‘Then there used to be dancing parties at Christmas, and some weeks after. This kind of party was called a Jacob’s Join, in which every guest contributed a certain sum to pay the expenses of the entertainment — it was mostly half-a-crown in this village. They were very lively parties I believe. The curious thing is that the man who used to give the house-room for the dances lived in a cottage which stood exactly where this Club-house stands now — so that when you dance here you will be simply carrying on the tradition of the spot.

‘In conclusion, I have now merely to say I declare the Mellstock Club and reading-room to be open.’

To a correspondent, on December 30, Hardy writes:

‘I am sorry to say that your appeal for a poem that should be worthy of the event of the 8th August 1918 reaches me at too late a time of life to attempt it. . . . The outline of such a poem, which you very cleverly sketch, is striking, and ought to result at the hands of somebody or other who may undertake it, in a literary parallel to the “Battle of Prague” — a piece of music which ceased to be known long before your time, but was extraordinarily popular in its day — reproducing the crashing of guns nearer and nearer, the groans of the wounded, and the final fulfilment, with great fidelity.

‘The length of the late war exhausted me of all my impromptu poems dealing with that tragedy. ... I quite think that one of our young poets would rise to the occasion if you were to give him the opportunity.’

This year went out quietly with Hardy, as is shown by the brief entry: ‘ New Year’s Eve. Did not sit up.’

CHAPTER XXXVI

‘THE DYNASTS’ AT OXFORD; HON. DEGREE; A DEPUTATION; A CONTROVERSY