by Thomas Hardy
1918-1919: Aet. 78-79
‘Sunday, June 2. Seventy-eighth birthday. Several letters.’ Among others was an interesting one from a lady who informed him that some years earlier she had been made the happiest woman in the world by accidentally meeting for the first time, by the ‘ Druid Stone’ on his lawn, at the late Mrs. Hardy’s last garden-party, the man who was now her husband. And a little later came one he much valued, from a man he lor.g had known — Mr. Charles Moule, Senior Fellow and President of Corpus, Cambridge, enclosing a charming poem to Hardy as his ‘almost lifelong friend . . . Too seldom seen since far-off times’ — times when the two had visited mediaeval buildings together, and dived from a boat on summer mornings into the green water of Weymouth Bay.
In September 1918 he received a circular letter asking him to assist in bringing home to people certain facts relating to the future with a view to finding a remedy, and stating that, ‘It is agreed by all students of modern military methods that this war, horrible as it seems to us, is merciful in comparison with what future wars must be. Scientific munition-making is only in its infancy. The next world-war, if there is another, will find the nations provided not with thousands, but with hundreds of thousands of submarines, and all these as far surpassing the present types in power and destructiveness as they surpass the feeble beginnings of ten years ago. . . .’
In his reply he remarked:
‘If it be all true that the letter prophesies, I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving. Better let Western “civilization” perish, and the black and yellow races have a chance.
‘However, as a meliorist (not a pessimist as they say) I think better of the world.’
‘December 31. New Year’s Eve. Did not sit up.’
At the beginning of the year 1919 Hardy received a letter and volume of verses from Miss Amy Lowell, the American poetess, who reminded him of her call at the beginning of the war — ‘ two bedraggled ladies’, herself and her friend. Hardy did remember, and their consternation lest they should not be able to get back to their own country.
In February he signed a declaration of sympathy with the Jews in support of a movement for ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish People’, and during the spring he received letters from Quiller-Couch, Crichton-Browne, and other friends on near and dear relatives they had lost in the war; about the same time there appeared a relevant poem by Hardy in the Athenxum which was much liked, entitled in words from the Burial Service, ‘According to the Mighty Working’.
In May Edmund Gosse wrote that he was very curious to know who drew the rather unusual illustration on the cover of the first edition of The Trumpet-Major. Hardy was blank on the matter for a time, until, finding a copy, he remembered that he drew it himself.
Being in London for a few days the same month he went to the dinner of the Royal Academy — the first held since the war — with his friend J. M. Barrie, with whom he was then staying, and was saddened to find how many of the guests and Academicians that he had been formerly accustomed to meet there had disappeared from the scene. He felt that he did not wish to go again, and, indeed, he never did. Among the incidents of this visit was a meeting at Lady St. Helier’s with Dr. Bernard, Archbishop of Dublin, and a discussion with him on Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms, and the inferiority of the Latin Vulgate in certain passages of them, with which Dr. Bernard agreed, sending him afterwards the two versions in parallel readings.
On his birthday in June he did what he had long intended to do — took his wife and sister to Salisbury by the old road which had been travelled by his and their forefathers in their journeys to London — via Blandford, Woodyates Inn, and Harnham Hill, whence Constable had painted his famous view of the cathedral, and where the track was still accessible to wheels. Woodyates Inn — now no longer such, to the surprise of everybody since the revival of road traffic — still retained its genial hostelry appearance, and reminded Hardy of the entry in the diary of one of the daughters of George the Third after she and the rest of the family had halted there: ‘At Woodyates Inn . . . had a beastly breakfast’. It is said that Browning’s great-grandfather was once the landlord of this famous inn.
In a reply to a letter of this date concerning a new literary periodical started in Canada, he adds, after some commendatory remarks:
‘But why does the paper stultify its earlier articles by advertising “The Best Sellers”? Of all marks of the un-literary journal this is the clearest. If the Canadian Bookman were to take a new line and advertise eulogistically the worst sellers, it might do something towards its object.’
Replying to a birthday letter from Mrs. Arthur Henniker, Hardy writes:
‘Max Gate, 5 June 1919.
‘Sincere thanks for your good wishes, my dear friend, which I echo back towards you. I should care more for my birthdays if at each succeeding one I could see any sign of real improvement in the world — as at one time I fondly hoped there was; but I fear that what appears much more evident is that it is getting worse and worse. All development is of a material and scientific kind — and scarcely any addition to our knowledge is applied to objects philanthropic and ameliorative. I almost think that people were less pitiless towards their fellow-creatures — human and animal — under the Roman Empire than they are now; so why does not Christianity throw up the sponge and say, I am beaten, and let another religion take its place?
‘I suddenly remember that we had a call from our Bishop and his wife two or three days ago, so that perhaps it is rather shabby of me to write as above. By a curious coincidence we had motored to Salisbury that very day, and were in his cathedral when he was at our house.
‘Do you mean to go to London for any length of time this summer? We are not going again till I don’t know when. We squeezed a good deal into the four days we were there, and I got a bad throat as usual, but it has gone off. At Lady St. Helier’s we met the Archbishop of Dublin (English Church), and found him a pleasant man. We also met several young poets at Barrie’s, where we were staying.
‘We do hope you are well — in “rude health” as they call it. Florence sends her love, and I am,
‘Ever affectionately,
‘Th. H.’
Shortly after his birthday he received a charming volume of holograph poems, beautifully bound, from some forty or fifty living poets. The mark of recognition so appealed to him that he determined to answer every one of the contributors by letter, and ultimately did so, though it took him a long while; saying that if they could take the trouble to write the poems he could certainly take the trouble to write the letters. It was almost his first awakening to the consciousness that an opinion had silently grown up as it were in the night, that he was no mean power in the contemporary world of poetry.
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 wri
ter, 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!”