by Thomas Hardy
‘On the other hand, that the sentiment of Foreignness — if the sense of a contrast be really rhetorically necessary — attach only to other planets and their inhabitants, if any.
‘I may add that I have been writing in advocacy of those views for the last twenty years.’
To Dr. L. Litwinski ‘March 7, 1917.
‘Dear Sir,
‘I feel much honoured by your request that I should be a member of the Committee for commemorating two such writers of distinction as Verhaeren and Sienkiewicz. But for reasons of increasing years and my living so far from London I have latterly been compelled to give up membership with several associations; and I am therefore sorry to say that I must refrain from joining any new committee in which I should be unable actively to support the cause, even when so worthy as the present one.’
In this March also a sonnet by him named ‘A Call to National Service’ was printed in the newspapers. An article in the April Fortnightly by Mr. Courtney, the editor, on Hardy’s writings, especially The Dynasts, interested him not only by its appreciativeness, but also by the aspect some features of the drama assumed in the reviewer’s mind:
‘Like so many critics, Mr. Courtney treats my works of art as if they were a scientific system of philosophy, although I have repeatedly stated in prefaces and elsewhere that the views in them are seemings, provisional impressions only, used for artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age, and are plausible, till somebody produces better theories of the universe.
‘As to his winding up about a God of Mercy, etc. — if I wished to make a smart retort, which I really should hate doing, I might say that the Good-God theory having, after some thousands of years of trial, produced the present infamous and disgraceful state of Europe — that most Christian Continent! — a theory of a Goodless-and-Badless God (as in The Dynasts) might perhaps be given a trial with advantage.
‘Much confusion has arisen and much nonsense has been talked latterly in connection with the word “atheist”. I have never understood how anybody can be one except in the sense of disbelieving in a tribal god, man-shaped, fiery-faced and tyrannous, who flies into a rage on the slightest provocation; or as (according to Horace Walpole) Sir Francis Dashwood defined the Providence believed in by the Lord Shrewsbury of that date to be — a figure like an old angry man in a blue cloak. . . . Fifty meanings attach to the word “God” nowadays, the only reasonable meaning being the Cause of Things, whatever that cause may be.1 Thus no modern thinker can be an atheist in the modern sense, while all modern thinkers are atheists in the ancient and exploded sense.’
In this connection he said once — perhaps oftener — that although invidious critics had cast slurs upon him as Nonconformist, Agnostic, Atheist, Infidel, Immoralist, Heretic, Pessimist, or something else equally opprobrious in their eyes, they had never thought of calling him what they might have called him much more plausibly — churchy; not in an intellectual sense, but in so far as instincts and emotions ruled. As a child, to be a parson had been his dream; moreover, he had had several clerical relatives who held livings; while his grandfather, father, uncle, brother, wife, cousin, and two sisters had been musicians in various churches over a period covering altogether more than a hundred years. He himself had frequently read the church lessons, and had at one time as a young man begun reading for Cambridge with a view to taking Orders.
His vision had often been that of so many people brought up under Church of England influences, a giving of liturgical form to modern ideas, and expressing them in the same old buildings that had already seen previous reforms successfully carried out. He would say to his friends, the Warden of Keble, Arthur Benson, and others, that if the bishops only had a little courage, and would modify the liturgy by dropping preternatural assumptions out of it, few churchgoers would object to the change for long, and congregations would be trebled in a brief time. The idea was clearly expressed in the ‘Apology’ prefixed to Late Lyrics and Earlier.
‘June 9. It is now the time of long days, when the sun seems reluctant to take leave of the trees at evening — - the shine climbing 1 In another place he says ‘ Cause’ means really but the ‘ invariable antecedent up the trunks, reappearing higher, and still fondly grasping the tree- tops till long after.’
Later in the month his friend J. M. Barrie suggested that Hardy should go with him to France, to which proposal Hardy replied:
‘Max Gate, Dorchester, ‘23 June 1917.
‘My dear Barrie,
‘It was so kind of you to concoct that scheme for my accompanying you to the Front — or Back — in France. I thought it over carefully, as it was an attractive idea. But I have had to come to the conclusion that old men cannot be young men, and that I must content myself with the past battles of our country if I want to feel military. If I had been ten years younger I would have gone.
‘I hope you will have a pleasant, or rather, impressive, time, and the good company you will be in will be helpful all round. I am living in hope of seeing you on the date my wife has fixed and of renewing acquaintance with my old friend Adelphi Terrace.
‘Always sincerely yours,
‘Thomas Hardy.’
In July his poem ‘Then and Now’ was printed in The Times, and in the latter half of the month he and his wife paid a visit of two days to J. M. Barrie at Adelphi Terrace — a spot with which Hardy had had years of familiarity when their entertainer was still a child, and which was attractive to him on that account. Here they had some interesting meetings with other writers. Upon one memorable evening they sat in a large empty room, which was afterwards to be Sir James’s study but was then being altered and decorated. From the windows they had a fine view over the Thames, and searchlights wheeled across the sky. The only illumination within the room was from candles placed on the floor to avoid breaking war regulations, which forbade too bright lighting.
He came back to pack up in August his MS. of Moments of Vision and send to the Messrs. Macmillan.
In October he went with Mrs. Hardy to Plymouth, calling for a day or two upon Mr. and Mrs. Eden Phillpotts at Torquay on their way. But the weather being wet at Plymouth they abandoned their stay there and came home.
‘I hold that the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions. Wordsworth in his later writings fell into the error of recording the latter. So also did Tennyson, and so do many poets when they grow old. Absit omen!
‘I fear I have always been considered the Dark Horse of contemporary English literature.
‘I was quick to bloom; late to ripen.
‘I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred. For instance, the poem entitled “ The Breaking of Nations” contains a feeling that moved me in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, when I chanced to be looking at such an agricultural incident in Cornwall. But I did not write the verses till during the war with Germany of 1914, and onwards. Query: where was that sentiment hiding itself during more than forty years?’
Hardy’s mind seems to have been running on himself at this time to a degree quite unusual with him, who often said — and his actions showed it — that he took no interest in himself as a personage.
‘November 13. I was a child till I was 16; a youth till I was 25; a young man till I was 40 or 50.’
The above note on his being considered a Dark Horse was apt enough, when it is known that none of the society men who met him suspected from his simple manner the potentialities of observation that were in him. This unassertive air, unconsciously worn, served him as an invisible coat almost to uncanniness. At houses and clubs where he encountered other writers and critics and world-practised readers of character, whose bearing towards him was often as towards one who did not reach their altitudes, he was seeing through them as though they were glass. He set down some cutting and satirical not
es on their qualities and compass, but destroyed all of them, not wishing to leave behind him anything which could be deemed a gratuitous belittling of others.
This month Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses was published, and it may have been his occupation with the proofs that had set him thinking of himself; and also caused him to make the following entry: ‘ I do not expect much notice will be taken of these poems: they mortify the human sense of self-importance by showing, or suggesting, that human beings are of no matter or appreciable value in this nonchalant universe.’ He subjoined the Dedication of Sordello, where the author remarks: ‘My own faults of expression are many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either?’
It was in this mood that he read such reviews of the book as were sent him.
‘December 31. New Year’s Eve. Went to bed at eleven. East wind. No bells heard. Slept in the New Year, as did also those “out there”.’
This refers to the poem called ‘Looking Across’ published in the new volume, Stinsford Churchyard lying across the mead from Max Gate.
PART IV - LIFE’S DECLINE
CHAPTER XXXIV
REFLECTIONS ON POETRY
1918: Aet. 77-78
On January 2 Hardy attended a performance of the women land- workers in the Corn Exchange. ‘Met there Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Lady Shaftesbury, and other supporters of the movement. The girls looked most picturesque in their raiment of emancipation, which they evidently enjoyed wearing.’
Meanwhile the shadows lengthened. In the second week of the month he lost his warm-hearted neighbour, Mrs. A. Brinsley Sheridan, nee Motley, of Frampton Court. ‘An old friend of thirty-two years’ standing. She was, I believe, the first to call when we entered this house at Max Gate, and she remained staunch to the end of her days.’
‘January 16. As to reviewing. Apart from a few brilliant exceptions, poetry is not at bottom criticized as such, that is, as a particular man’s artistic interpretation of life, but with a secret eye on its theological and political propriety. Swinburne used to say to me that so it would be two thousand years hence; but I doubt it.
‘As to pessimism. My motto is, first correctly diagnose the complaint — in this case human ills — and ascertain the cause: then set about finding a remedy if one exists. The motto or practice of the optimists is: Blind the eyes to the real malady, and use empirical panaceas to suppress the symptoms.
‘Browning said (in a line cited against me so often):
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