Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1194 page)

At two o’clock on Monday, January 16, there were three services in three different churches. In Westminster Abbey the poet’s wife and sister were the chief mourners, while in the presence of a great crowd, which included representatives of the King and other members of the Royal Family, and of many learned and other societies, the ashes of Thomas Hardy were buried with stately ceremonial in Poets’ Corner. The pall-bearers were the Prime Minister (Mr. Stanley Baldwin) and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, representing the Government and Parliament; Sir James Barrie, Mr. John Galsworthy, Sir Edmund Gosse, Professor A. E. Housman, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, representing literature; and the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge (Mr. A. S. Ramsey), and the Pro-Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford (Dr. E. M. Walker), representing the Colleges of which Hardy was an honourary Fellow. A spadeful of Dorset earth, sent by a Dorset farm labourer, Mr. Christopher Corbin, was sprinkled on the casket. In spite of the cold and wet the streets about the Abbey were full of people who had been unable to obtain admission to the service, but came as near as they might to taking part in it. At the same hour at Stinsford, where Hardy was baptized, and where as boy and man he had often worshipped, his brother,

Mr. Henry Hardy, was the chief mourner, while, in the presence of a rural population, the heart of this lover of rural Wessex was buried in the grave of his first wife among the Hardy tombs under the great yew-tree in the corner of the churchyard. And in Dorchester all business was suspended for an hour, while at St. Peter’s Church the Mayor and Corporation and many other dignitaries and societies attended a memorial service in which the whole neighbourhood joined.H. C.

APPENDIX II

Letters from Thomas Hardy to Dr. Caleb Saleeby I

Max Gate, Dorchester, Dec. 21, 1914.

Dear Sir,

I have read with much interest the lecture on The Longest Price of War that you kindly send: and its perusal does not diminish the gloom with which this ghastly business on the Continent fills me, as it fills so many. The argument would seem to favour Conscription, since the inert, if not the unhealthy, would be taken, I imagine.

Your visits to The Dynasts show that, as Granville-Barker foretold, thoughtful people would care about it. My own opinion when I saw it was that it was the only sort of thing likely to take persons of musing turn into a theatre at this time.

I have not read M. Bergson’s book, and if you should not find it troublesome to send your copy as you suggest, please do.

The theory of the Prime Force that I used in The Dynasts was published in Jan. 1904. The nature of the determination embraced in the theory is that of a collective will; so that there is a proportion of the total will in each part of the whole, and each part has therefore, in strictness, some freedom, which would, in fact, be operative as such whenever the remaining great mass of will in the universe should happen to be in equilibrium.

However, as the work is intended to be a poetic drama and not a philosophic treatise I did not feel bound to develop this.

The assumption of unconsciousness in the driving force is, of course, not new. But I think the view of the unconscious force as gradually becoming conscious: i.e. that consciousness is creeping further and further back towards th° origin of force, had never (so far as I know) been advanced before The Dynasts appeared. But being only a mere impressionist I must not pretend to be a philosopher in a letter, and ask you to believe me,

Sincerely yours,

Thomas Hardy.

Dr. Saleeby.

2

Max Gate, Dorchester, Feb. 2, 1915.

Dear Dr. Saleeby,

Your activities are unlimited. I should like to hear your address on ‘Our War for International Law’. Personally I feel rather disheartened when I think it probable that the war will end by sheer exhaustion of the combatants, and that things will be left much as they were before. But I hope not.

I have been now and then dipping into your Bergson, and shall be returning the volume soon. I suppose I may assume that you are more or less disciple, or fellow-philosopher, of his. Therefore you may be rather shocked by some views I hold about his teachings — if I may say I hold any views about anything whatever, which I hardly do.

His theories are certainly much more delightful than those they contest, and I for one would gladly believe them, but I cannot help feeling all the time that he is rather an imaginative and poetical writer than a reasoner, and that for his attractive assertions he does not adduce any proofs whatever. His use of the word ‘creation’ seems loose to me. Then, as to ‘conduct’. I fail to see how, if it is not mechanism, it can be other than Caprice, though he denies it (p. 50). And he says that Mechanism and Finalism (I agree with him as to Finalism) are only external views of our conduct.

‘Our conduct extends between them, and slips much further.’ Well, I hope it may, but he nowhere shows that it does. And again: ‘a mechanistic conception . . . treats the living as the inert. . . . Let us, on the contrary, trace a line of demarcation between the inert and the living (208).’ Well, let us, to our great pleasure, if we can see why we should introduce an inconsistent rupture of order into uniform and consistent laws of the same.

You will see how much I want to be a Bergsonian (indeed I have for many years). But I fear that his philosophy is, in the bulk, only our old friend Dualism in a new suit of clothes — an ingenious fancy without real foundation, and more complicated, and therefore less likely than the determinist fancy and others that he endeavours to overthrow.

You must not think me a hard-hearted rationalist for all this. Half my time (particularly when I write verse) I believe — in the modern use of the word — not only in things that Bergson does,

but in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, etc., etc.

But then, I do not believe in these in the old sense of belief any more for that; and in arguing against Bergsonism I have, of course, meant belief in its old sense when I aver myself incredulous.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas Hardy.1

1 A great part of this letter will be found in a slightly different form on pp. 369-70 of this volume. Both versions are printed in order to illustrate Hardy’s artistic inability to rest content with anything that he wrote until he had brought the expression as near to his thought as language would allow. He would, for instance, often go on revising his poems for his own satisfaction after their publication in book form. — F. E. H.

3

Max Gate, Dorchester, 16.3.1915.

Dear Dr. Saleeby,

My thanks for the revised form of The Longest Price of IVar, which I am reading.

I am returning, or shall be in a day or two, your volume of Bergson. It is most interesting reading, and one likes to give way to its views and assurances without criticizing them.

If, however, we ask for reasons and proof (which I don’t care to do) I am afraid we do not get them.

An ilan vital — by which I understand him to mean a sort of additional and spiritual force, beyond the merely unconscious push of life — the ‘will’ of other philosophers that propels growth and development — seems much less probable than single and simple determinism, or what he calls mechanism, because it is more complex: and where proof is impossible probability must be our guide. His partly mechanistic and partly creative theory seems to me clumsy and confused.

He speaks of ‘the enormous gap that separates even the lowest form of life from the inorganic world’. Here again it is more probable that organic and inorganic modulate into each other, one nature and law operating throughout. But the most fatal objection to his view of creation plus propulsion seems to me to lie in the existence of pain. If nature were creative she would have created painlessness, or be

in process of creating it — pain being the first thing we instinctively fly from. If on the other hand we cannot introduce into life what is not already there, and are bound to mere recombination of old materials, the persistence of pain is intelligible.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas Hardy.

APPENDIX III

Letters on ‘The Dynasts’

Max Gate, Dorchester, New Year’s Eve, 1907.

My dear Clodd,

I write a line to thank you for that nice little copy of Munro’s Lucretius, and to wish you a happy New Year. I am familiar with two translations of the poet, but not with this one, so the book is not wasted.

I have been thinking what a happy man you must be at this time of the year, in having to write your name 8000 times. Nobody wants me to write mine once!

In two or three days I shall have done with the proofs of Dynasts III. It is well that the business should be over, for I have been living in Wellington’s campaigns so much lately that, like George IV, I am almost positive that I took part in the battle of Waterloo, and have written of it from memory.

What new side of science are you writing about at present?

Yours sincerely,

Thomas Hardy.

Max Gate, 20:2:1908.

My dear Clodd,

I must send a line or two in answer to your letter. What you remind me of — the lyrical account of the fauna of Waterloo field on the eve of the battle is, curiously enough, the page (p. 282) that struck me, in looking back over the book, as being the most original in it. Though, of course, a thing may be original without being good. However, it does happen that (so far as I know) in the many treatments of Waterloo in literature, those particular personages who were present have never been alluded to before.

Yes: I left off on a note of hope. It was just as well that the Pities should have the last word, since, like Paradise Lost, The Dynasts proves nothing.

Always yours sincerely,

Thomas Hardy.

P.S. — The idea of the Unconscious Will becoming conscious with flux of time, is also new, I think, whatever it may be worth. At any rate I have never met with it anywhere. — T. H.

Max Gate, Dorchester, 28:8:1914.

My dear Clodd,

I fear we cannot take advantage of your kind invitation, and pay you a visit just now — much as in some respects we should like to. With the Germans (apparently) only a week from Paris, the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. We shall hope to come when things look brighter.

Trifling incidents here bring home to us the condition of affairs not far off — as I daresay they do to you still more — sentries with gleaming bayonets at unexpected places as we motor along, the steady flow of soldiers through here to Weymouth, and their disappearance across the Channel in the silence of night, and the 1000 prisoners whom we get glimpses of through chinks, mark these fine days. The prisoners, they say, have already mustered enough broken English to say ‘Shoot Kaiser!’ and oblige us by playing ‘God Save the King’ on their concertinas and fiddles. Whether this is ‘meant sarcastic’, as Artemus Ward used to say, I cannot tell.

I was pleased to know that you were so comfortable, when I was picturing you in your shirt sleeves with a lot of other robust Alde- burghers digging a huge trench from Aldeburgh church to the top of those steps we go down to your house, streaming with sweat, and drinking pots of beer between the shovellings (English beer of course).

Sincerely yours,

Thomas Hardy.

P.S. — Yes: everybody seems to be reading The Dynasts just now — at least, so a writer in the Daily News who called here this morning tells me. — T. H.

Hardy’s Wessex Map

To use your Kindle to
zoom
in, move the cursor down and click when you see the magnifying glass symbol.

Westminster Abbey.  Hardy had wished to be buried at Stinsford, close to his birthplace.  However, after his death, public outcry demanded that he should be buried in ‘Poets’ Corner’. Faced with this dilemma, his second wife Florence decided that his heart should be buried at Stinsford and his ashes interred at Westminster Abbey.