Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1186 page)

1920; Aet. 79 — 80

‘January 19. Coming back from Talbothays by West Stafford Cross I saw Orion upside-down in a pool of water under an oak.’

On February 2 Hardy was invited to receive an honourary degree of Doctor of Letters during the time he was to be in Oxford at the performance of The Dynasts at the theatre, which he had promised to attend; and on the 9th he set out by train for Oxford with Mrs. Hardy, though the members of the O.U.D.S. had offered to send a car for him all the way. The day was unusually fine for February, and they were met at the station by enthusiastic representatives of the society, driven round Oxford, and conducted to the house of Sir Walter and Lady Raleigh, who were their hosts.

The next day, after lunching with friends, they went to the Sheldonian and the degree was received.

In presenting Hardy, the Public Orator, Mr. A. D. Godley, made one of the most felicitous of his many excellent speeches. He said:

‘Scilicet ut Virgilio nostro sic huic quoque “molle atque facetum adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae”. Hie est, qui divini gloriam ruris sicut nemo alius nostrorum idylliis suis intertexuit: hie est, qui agricolarum sensus et colloquia ita vivide verbis effinxit ut videre rusticos consessus, ut ipsos inter se sermocinantes, cum legimus, audire videamur. Obruit multos cita oblivio qui in rebus transitoriis versantur: qui insitos animorum sensus et naturae humanae irarau- tabilitatem exprimit, cuius scripta aeternam silvarum et camporum amoenitatem spirant, hunc diu vivum per ora virum volitaturum esse Praedicimus. Quid quod idem in poesi quoque eo evasit ut hoc solo scribendi genere, nisi fabularum narratio vel magis suum aliquid et proprium habeat, immortalem famam assequi possit?’1

1 ‘Surely as with Virgil, so with him, have the Muses that rejoice in the countryside approved his smoothness and elegance. This is he who has interwoven in his (pastoral) P°ems, as no other has done, the (heavenly) glory of the (heavenly) countryside: this is he who has portrayed in words the feelings and conversations of rustics so clearly that when we read of them we seem to picture their meetings and hear them discoursing one with another. Speedy forgetfulness overwhelms many who treat of life’s fleeting things, but of him who unfolds the inborn feelings of man’s soul and the unchangeable- ness of his nature, whose writings breathe the eternal charm of (the) woods and fields, we foretell that his living fame shall long hover on the lips of men.

‘Why now, is not the excellence of his poems such that, by this type of writing alone, he can achieve immortal fame, even if the narration of his stories has not something about them more peculiarly his own?’

And then, after a reference to the production that evening by the O.U.D.S. of The Dynasts — ‘opus eius tam scriptoris facundia quam rerum quae tractantur magnitudine insignitum’1 — he concluded:

‘Nunc ut homini si quis alius Musis et dis agrestibus amico titulum debitum dando, non tantum illi quantum nobis ipsis decus addatis, duco ad vos senem illustrem Thomam Hardy. . . .’2

His wife, Evelyn Gifford, and her sister were present among others. Evelyn, daughter of the late Archdeacon Gifford, was his bright and affectionate cousin by marriage, whom Hardy was never to see again. Had he known it when he was parting from her outside the Sheldonian in the rain that afternoon, his heart would have been heavier than it was.

In the afternoon he met the Poet-Laureate (Robert Bridges), Mr. Masefield, and many friends at the Raleighs’, and also at the theatre in the evening, from which they did not return till one o’clock — the whole day having been of a most romantic kind.

An Account of Thomas Hardy’s coming to Oxford in 1920 to witness a performance of The Dynasts by the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and of a later meeting with him in Dorchester when A Desperate Remedy was produced there: written in 1929, at Mrs. Hardy’s request, by Charles Morgan, who in 1920 was Manager for the O.U.D.S., in 1921 its President, and afterwards dramatic critic of The Times.

When the University reassembled after the war, the Oxford University Dramatic Society was in low water. The tradition was broken, the surviving membership was not more than half a dozen, and the treasury was empty. During 1919 new members joined and life began to flicker in the Society, but its future largely depended

1 ‘His work marked not only by the eloquence of the author, but by the magnitude of the events which he describes.’

2 ‘ Now that you may confer distinction, not so much on him as on our own selves, by granting a deserved tide to one who is a friend of the Muses and pastoral gods, I present to you the revered and renowned Thomas Hardy.’

upon the success or failure of the first annual play in the new series.

An undergraduate was instructed to consider, during the long vacation of 1919, what play should be performed and to report to the Committee. His choice was The Dynasts, and he had to defend it against those who objected that it was not Shakespearian and that Shakespeare was a tradition of the Society: and against those more dangerous critics who said that The Dynasts would be costly, and, pointing to the balance-sheet, asked whence the money would come. The financial objection was at last overcome by personal guarantees.

The Committee endorsed the choice, and the Vice-Chancellor, whose special consent was needed for the performance of so modern a work, allowed it. The arguments in its favour were, indeed, unanswerable.

The Dynasts was unique in literature, an epic-drama without predecessor in its own kind. Its writer was a living Englishman: its subject was closely linked with the tragedy in which nearly all the players had lately participated: and, except lor those who had seen Granville-Barker’s production, it would be a new theatrical experience.

One difficulty remained: the play was copyright, and it seemed to us very probable that Hardy would refuse permission to perform it. He is an old man, we said, and set fast in Dorset; he will not give a fig for what he will call amateur theatricals, nor will he be troubled with our affairs. It was the impression of us all that he would be forbidding and formidable, and he was approached with misgiving. He gave his play to us, not grudgingly nor with any air of patronage, but with so gracious a courtesy that we were made to feel that he was genuinely pleased to find young men eager to perform his work. I do not remember the text of his reply to the original request, but I remember well the impression made by it — an impression increased by his later correspondence. Long before he came to Oxford his individuality had become established among us. Without whittling away his legend by any of the affectations of modesty, he had, by his gentle plainness, banished our fear of it.

Even so, when we invited him and Mrs. Hardy to come to Oxford to see the play, we had little hope that he would accept, for our ideas had overestimated his age — or, rather, underestimated the vigour of it — and his withdrawal into Wessex was believed to be permanent. But he said he would come, and Sir Walter Raleigh invited him to be his guest. So soon as it was known that he would visit Oxford, everyone perceived what hitherto few had been able to perceive — that, in withholding her highest honour from the author of The Dynasts and The Return of the Native (perhaps, whispered Cambridge and the world, because he was also the author of Jude the Obscure), Christminster was making herself ridiculous. A D.C.L. was offered him. Authority must have sighed with relief when he did not refuse.

It fell to me to meet him at the station. I give my impression of him then and afterwards, not because it is of value as being mine, but for two reasons — first, that Mrs. Hardy has asked it; secondly, that I should dearly love to see some great writer of the past as a contemporary undergraduate saw him. In days to come, even so slight a record as this may have an interest that it cannot now possess.

Hardy made it easy for a young man to be his host — made it easy, not by any loose affability of manner or by a parade of that heartiness which, in too many celebrated men, is a form of patronage, but simply by making no attempt whatever to impress or to startle me. I had not expected cleverness or volubility in him; and his speech was, at first, slight and pleasantly conventional. He introduced me to Mrs. Hardy, asked how long the drive would be to Sir Walter’s, used, in brief, the small talk of encounter, giving me time to become accustomed to his presence and to break free of the thought: I must remember this; I shall remember and tell of it when I am an old man. He himself seemed to me prodigiously old, not because there was any failure in his powers — he was, on the contrary, sprightly, alert, bird-like — but because his head had an appearance of being much older than his body, his neck having the thinness and his brow the tightness of great age, and his eyes — so old that age itself seemed to have swung full circle within them — being the eyes of some still young man who had been keeping watch at sea since the beginning of time. I remember that, sitting opposite him in the cab, I began to think of the sea and to imagine his head appearing above the bridge- ladder of a warship. Then I thought of a bird again, a small bird with a great head. And I made another discovery that pleased me: in external things he was deeply old-fashioned, and, fearing perhaps some assertive, new-fangled conduct in an undergraduate, timid and a little suspicious. I knew at once that I had nothing to fear from an old gentleman who by no means wished to pretend that he was young, and would never embarrass me by forsaking those little formalities of ordinary behaviour to which I myself had been trained.

Thus, because he made no attempt to break it, the ice melted easily and naturally. He asked of the play, saying that it had not been intended for the stage and that he wondered at our having chosen it.

Then, breaking off from this and reminded, I think, by Mrs. Hardy, he said: ‘We thought we should like to make a little tour of Oxford before going out to the Raleighs’. I don’t know it well as it is to-day, and Mrs. Hardy knows it less.’ He knew it, however, well enough to have planned a route with precision. We drove slowly, stopping now and then when he commanded it, and of each place he spoke in a different tone as if some mood were connected with it. Jude was, of course, the inevitable thought of one who had read that book in a midshipman’s hammock when to him also Oxford was a beckoning dream. It seemed very strange to be driving solemnly down the High and up the Broad with the author of Jude. It seemed strange because, after all, it was so natural. Here was an old man taking a normal and reasonable interest in the place where he was — quietly ‘seeing the sights’ in the fashion of his own time and without the self-consciousness of ours.

But when we are undergraduates we expect writers to be literary men in all things; we cannot easily dissociate them from their works; and it seemed to me very odd that Thomas Hardy should bother about the Martyrs’ Memorial.

When the tour was over, we went forward towards our destination. Hardy began to ask me about the age of undergraduates, and what effect the war has had upon us. I told him that my own war service delivered me from one examination and from compulsory chapels. ‘ Compulsory chapels . . .’ said Hardy, and no more; then, opening a little case on the seat beside him and producing from it a handful of small volumes, he asked me if I knew what they were. ‘Poems’, he said, ‘written by young men. They very kindly send them to me.’ Very kindly — was there irony in that? But Hardy, reading my thought, dismissed it. He left no doubt that he was glad to have these volumes sent to him, seeing in them a tribute to himself as a poet, not a novelist — and he cared deeply for that. And from this there came to me an opportunity to ask a question that I had been afraid to ask: whether he would ever write another tale? ‘ No,’ he answered, ‘I gave it up long ago. I wanted to write poetry in the beginning; now I can. Besides, it is so long since I wrote a novel that novel readers must have forgotten me.’ And, when I had said something, he added: ‘ No. Much depends on the public expectation. If I wrote a story now, they would want it to be what the old ones were. Besides, my stories are written.’

I have no recollection of any conversation after that, nor any Picture of Hardy in my mind until, going to Dorchester in 1922 to see the Hardy Players perform a dramatization of Desperate Remedies, I was invited by him to Max Gate, where we sat round the fire after tea and he told me of his early days in London, and how he would go to Shakespearian plays with the text in his hands and, seated in the front rows, follow the dialogue by the stage light. He told me, too, that he had written a stage version of Tess, and something of its early history; how, after the success of the novel, the great ones of the earth had pressed him to dramatize it; how he had done so, and the play had been prepared for the stage; by what mischance the performance of it had been prevented. Where was it now?

In a drawer. Would he allow it to be performed? He smiled, gave no answer, and began at once to talk of criticism — first of dramatic criticism which, he said, in the few newspapers that took it seriously was better than literary criticism, the dramatic critics having less time ‘to rehearse their prejudices’; then of literary criticism itself — a subject on which he spoke with a bitterness that surprised me. The origin of this bitterness was in the past where, I believe, there was indeed good reason for it, but it was directed now against contemporary critics of his own work, and I could not understand what general reason he had to complain of them. He used no names; he spoke with studied reserve, sadly rather than querulously; but he was persuaded — and there is evidence of this persuasion in the preface to the posthumous volume of his verse — - that critics approached his work with an ignorant prejudice against his ‘pessimism’ which they allowed to stand in the way of fair reading and fair judgment.

This was a distortion of facts as I knew them. It was hard to believe that Hardy honestly thought that his genius was not recognized; harder to believe that he thought his work was not read. Such a belief indicated the only failure of balance, the only refusal to seek the truth, which I perceived in Hardy, and I was glad when the coming of a visitor, who was, I think, secretary of the Society of Dorset Men, led him away from criticism to plainer subjects. When the time came for me to go, seeing that he proposed to come out with me, I tried to restrain him, for the night was cold; but he was determined, and Mrs. Hardy followed her own wise course of matching her judgment with his vitality. So he came down among the trees to the dark road, and I saw the last of him standing outside his gate with a lantern swaying in his hand. I shall not know a greater man, nor have I ever known one who had, in the same degree, Hardy’s power of drawing reverence towards affection.