Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1188 page)

‘In my fancies, or poems of the imagination, I have of course called this Power all sorts of names — never supposing they would be taken for more than fancies. I have even in prefaces warned readers to take them as such — as mere impressions of the moment, exclamations in fact. But it has always been my misfortune to presuppose a too intelligent reading public, and no doubt people will go on thinking that I really believe the Prime Mover to be a malignant old gentleman, a sort of King of Dahomey — an idea which, so far from my holding it, is to me irresistibly comic. “What a fool one must have been to write for such a public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.

‘The lines you allude to, “A Young Man’s Epigram”, dated 1866, I remember finding in a drawer, and printed them merely as an amusing instance of early cynicism. The words “Time’s Laughingstocks” are legitimate imagery all of a piece with such expressions as “Life, Time’s fool”, and thousands in poetry and I am amazed that you should see any belief in them. The other verses you mention, “New Year’s Eve”, “His Education”, are the same fanciful impressions of the moment. The poem called “He abjures Love”, ending with “And then the curtain”, is a love-poem, and lovers are chartered irrespon- sibles. A poem often quoted against me, and apparently in your mind in the lecture, is the one called “Nature’s Questioning”, containing the words, “some Vast Imbecility”, etc. — as if these definitions were my creed. But they are merely enumerated in the poem as fanciful alternatives to several others, having nothing to do with my own opinion. As for “The Unborn”, to which you allude, though the form of it is imaginary, the sentiment is one which I should think, especially since the war, is not uncommon or unreasonable.

‘This week I have had sent me a review which quotes a poem entitled “To my Father’s Violin”, containing a Virgilian reminiscence of mine of Acheron and the Shades. The writer comments: “Truly this pessimism is insupportable. . . . One marvels that Hardy is not in a madhouse”. Such is English criticism, and I repeat, why did I ever write a line! And perhaps if the young ladies to whom you lectured really knew that, so far from being the wicked personage they doubtless think me at present to be, I am a harmless old character much like their own grandfathers, they would consider me far less romantic and attractive.’

Mr. Noyes in a further interesting letter, after reassuring Hardy that he would correct any errors, gave his own views, one of which was that he had ‘ never been able to conceive a Cause of Things that could be less in any respect than the things caused’. To which Hardy replied:

‘Many thanks for your letter. The Scheme of Things is, indeed, incomprehensible; and there I suppose we must leave it — perhaps for the best. Knowledge might be terrible.’

To the ‘New York World’

‘December 23, 1920.

‘Yes I approve of international disarmament, on the lines indicated by the New York World:

The following letter, written to someone about December 1920, obviously refers to his correspondence with Mr. Noyes:

‘A friend of mine writes objecting to what he calls my “philosophy” (though I have no philosophy — merely what I have often explained to be only a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show). He says he has never been able to conceive a Cause of Things that could be less in any respect than the things caused. This apparent impossibility to him, and to so many, is very likely owing to his running his head against a Single Cause, and perceiving no possible other. But if he would discern that what we call the first Cause should be called First Causes, his difficulty would be lessened. Assume a thousand unconscious causes — lumped together in poetry as one Cause, or God — and bear in mind that a coloured liquid can be produced by the mixture of colourless ones, a noise by the juxtaposition of silences, etc., etc., and you see that the assumption that intelligent beings arise from the combined action of unintelligent forces is sufficiently probable for imaginative writing, and I have never attempted scientific. It is my misfortune that people will treat all my mood-dictated writing as a single scientific theory.’

About Christmas the song entitled ‘When I set out for Lyon- nesse’ was published as set to music by Mr. Charles A. Speyer. It was one of his own poems that Hardy happened to like, and he was agreeably surprised that it should be liked by anybody else, his experience being that an author’s preference for particular verses of his own was usually based on the circumstances that gave rise to them, and not on their success as art.

On Christmas night the carol singers and mummers came to Max Gate as they had promised, the latter performing the Play of Saint George, just as he had seen it performed in his childhood. On the last day of the old year a poem by Hardy called ‘At the Entering of the New Year’ appeared in the Athenceum.

CHAPTER XXXVII

SOME FAREWELLS

1921-1925: Aet. 80-85

The New Year found Hardy sitting up to hear the bells, which he had not done for some time.

Early in January he was searching through registers of Stinsford for records of a family named Knight, connected with his own. Many generations of this family are buried in nameless graves in Stinsford Churchyard.

J. M. Barrie paid him a brief visit on May 11, staying at Max Gate for one night, and visiting Hardy’s birthplace at Bockhampton on the morning of-May 12. The same day Hardy learned of the death of a friend, an elder brother of the confidant and guide of his youth and early manhood. In his note-book he writes:

‘May 11. Charles Moule died. He is the last of “the seven brethren”.’

On June 2 he notes that his birthday was remembered by the newspapers, and that he received an address from younger writers. Accompanying this was a fine copy of the first edition of ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella’, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, and other poems by John Keats, in the original boards with the half-title and eight pages of advertisements.

The idea had originated with Mr. St. John Ervine, who summoned a committee to consider the nature of the tribute. The address was signed by a hundred and six younger writers, and ran as follows:

‘Dear Mr. Hardy,

‘We, who are your younger comrades in the craft of letters, wish on this your eighty-first birthday to do honour to ourselves by praising your work, and to thank you for the example of high endeavour and achievement which you have set before us. In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of life which is informed by your knowledge of character and relieved by the charity of your humour, and sweetened by your sympathy with human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it. . . . In all that you have written you have shown the spirit of man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting through defeat.

‘You have inspired us both by your work and by the manner in which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have observed so closely as you have the Host’s instruction in the Canterbury Tales:

‘Your termes, your colours, and your figures,

Keep them in store, till so be ye indite

High style, as when that men to kinges write.

‘From your first book to your last, you have written in the “high style, as when that men to kinges write”, and you have crowned a great prose with a noble poetry.

‘We thank you, Sir, for all that you have written . . . but most of all, perhaps, for The Dynasts.

‘We beg that you will accept the copy of the first edition of Lamia by John Keats which accompanies this letter, and with it, accept also our grateful homage.’

A few days later, on June 9, he motored to Sturminster Newton with his wife and Mr. Cecil Hanbury to see a performance of The Mellstock Quire by the Hardy Players in the Castle ruins. Afterwards he went to Riverside, the house where he had written The Return of the Native, and where the Players were then having tea.

On June 16 Mr. de la Mare arrived for a visit of two nights. The following day he walked to Stinsford with Hardy and was much interested in hearing about the various graves, and in reading a poem that Hardy had just lately written, ‘Voices from Things growing in a Country Churchyard’. The first verse of the poem runs thus:

These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd,

Sir or Madam, A little girl here sepultured.

Once I flit-fluttered like a bird

Above the grass, as now I wave In daisy shapes above my grave,

All day cheerily,

All night eerily!

Fanny Hurd’s real name was Fanny Hurden, and Hardy remembered her as a delicate child who went to school with him. She died when she was about eighteen, and her grave and a head-stone with her name are to be seen in Stinsford Churchyard. The others mentioned in this poem were known to him by name and repute.

Early in July a company of film actors arrived in Dorchester for the purpose of preparing a film of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy met them outside The King’s Arms, the hotel associated with the novel. Although the actors had their faces coloured yellow and were dressed in the fashion of some eighty years earlier, Hardy observed, to his surprise, that the townsfolk passed by on their ordinary affairs and seemed not to notice the strange spectacle, nor did any interest seem aroused when Hardy drove through the town with the actors to Maiden Castle, that ancient earthwork which formed the background to one part of the film.

About this time he went to St. Peter’s Church, to a morning service, for the purpose of hearing sung by the choir the morning hymn, ‘Awake, my Soul’, to Barthelemon’s setting. This had been arranged for him by Dr. Niven, the Rector of St. Peter’s. Church music, as has been shown, had appealed strongly to Hardy from his earliest years. On July 23 a sonnet, ‘Barthelemon at Vauxhall’, appeared in The Times. He had often imagined the weary musician, returning from his nightly occupation of making music for a riotous throng, lingering on Westminster Bridge to see the rising sun and being thence inspired to the composition of music to be heard hereafter in places very different from Vauxhall.

In the same month he opened a bazaar in aid of the Dorset County Hospital, and in the evening of that day he was driven into Dorchester again to see some dancing in the Borough Gardens. Of this he writes:

‘Saw “The Lancers” danced (for probably the last time) at my request. Home at 10: outside our gate full moon over cottage: band still heard playing.’

At the beginning of September Hardy stood sponsor at the christening of the infant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Hanbury of Kingston Maurward. His gift to his little godchild was the manuscript of a short poem contained in a silver box. This appeared afterwards in Human Shows under the title ‘To C. F. H.’.

Three days later he was again at Stinsford Church, attending the evening service. In his notebook he records: ‘ A beautiful evening. Evening Hymn Tallis.’

During the latter half of September Hardy was sitting to his friend Mr. Ouless for his portrait, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. On October 14 he received a visit from Mr. and Mrs. John Masefield, who brought with them a gift: a full-rigged ship made by John Masefield himself. This ship had been named by its maker The Triumph, and was much valued by Hardy, who showed it with pride to callers at Max Gate, with the story of how it arrived. Four days later Hardy writes:

‘October 18. In afternoon to Stinsford with F. A matchless October: sunshine, mist and turning leaves.’

The first month of 1922 found him writing an energetic preface to a volume of poems entitled Late Lyrics and Earlier, the MS. of which he forwarded to the publishers on January 23. Some of his friends regretted this preface, thinking that it betrayed an oversensi- tiveness to criticism which it were better the world should not know. But sensitiveness was one of Hardy’s chief characteristics, and without it his poems would never have been written, nor, indeed, the greatest of his novels. He used to say thaf it was not so much the force of the blow that counted, as the nature of the material that received the blow.

An interesting point in this preface was his attitude towards religion. Through the years 1920 to 1925 Hardy was interested in conjectures on rationalising the English Church. There had been rumours for some years of a revised Liturgy, and his hopes were accordingly raised by the thought of making the Established Church comprehensive enough to include the majority of thinkers of the previous hundred years who had lost all belief in the supernatural.

When the new Prayer Book appeared, however, his hopes were doomed to disappointment, and he found that the revision had not been in a rationalistic direction, and from that time he lost all expectation of seeing the Church representative of modern thinking minds.

In April J. M. Barrie stayed at Max Gate for one night. The 23rd May saw the publication of Late Lyrics and Earlier, and on the following day Hardy motored to Sturminster Newton to call at the house where he had spent some of the early years of his first marriage, and where he wrote The Return of the Native. Two days later he notes: ‘Visited Stinsford and Higher Bockhampton. House at the latter shabby, and garden. Just went through into heath, and up plantation to top of garden.’ It was becoming increasingly painful to Hardy to visit this old home of his, and often when he left he said that he would go there no more.

On May 29 he copied some old notes made before he had contemplated writing The Dynasts.

‘We — the people — Humanity, a collective personality — (Thus “we” could be engaged in the battle of Hohenlinden, say, and in the battle of Waterloo) — dwell with genial humour on “our” getting into a rage for we knew not what.

‘The intelligence of this collective personality Humanity is pervasive, ubiquitous, like that of God. Hence e.g. on the one hand we could hear the roar of the cannon, discern the rush of the battalions, on the other hear the voice of a man protesting, etc.