by Thomas Hardy
There was general satisfaction when Hardy’s name appeared as a recipient of the Order of Merit in the Birthday List of Honours in June 1910. He received numerous and gratifying telegrams and letters of congratulation from both friends and strangers, and, though he accepted the award with characteristic quietude, it was evident that this sign of official approval of his work brought him pleasure.
At the flat — the last one they were to take, as it happened — they received their usual friends as in previous years, and there were more performances of the Tess opera; but in the middle of June they were compelled to cancel all engagements suddenly owing to Hardy’s illness, which was happily but brief. In July he was able to go out again, and on the 19th went to Marlborough House to be invested with the Order of Merit. The King received him pleasantly: ‘but afterwards I felt that I had failed in the accustomed formalities’.
Back in the country at the end of the month they entertained some visitors at Max Gate. A brief visit to Aldeburgh, where he met Professor Bury and Dr. (afterwards Sir James) Frazer, and a few cycle rides, diversified the close of this summer.
In September he sat to Mr. William Strang for a sketch-portrait, which was required for hanging at Windsor Castle among those of other recipients of the Order of Merit; and on November 16 came the interesting occasion of the presentation of the freedom of Dorchester to Hardy, which appealed to his sentiment more perhaps than did many of those recognitions of his literary achievements that had come from the uttermost parts of the earth at a much earlier time. Among the very few speeches or lectures that he ever delivered, the one he made on this occasion was perhaps the most felicitous and personal:
‘Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen of the Corporation — This is an occasion that speaks for itself, and so, happily, does not demand many remarks from me. In simply expressing my sincere thanks for the high compliment paid me by having my name enrolled with those of the Honorary Freemen of this historic town, I may be allowed to confess that the freedom of the Borough of Dorchester did seem to me at first something that I had possessed a long while, had helped myself to (to speak plainly), for when I consider the liberties I have taken with its ancient walls, streets, and precincts through the medium of the printing-press, I feel that I have treated its external features with the hand of freedom indeed. True, it might be urged that my Casterbridge (if I may mention seriously a name coined off-hand in a moment with no thought of its becoming established and localised) is not Dorchester — not even the Dorchester as it existed sixty years ago, but a dream-place that never was outside an irresponsible book. Nevertheless, when somebody said to me that “Casterbridge” is a sort of essence of the town as it used to be, “a place more Dorchester than Dorchester itself”, I could not absolutely contradict him, though I could not quite perceive it. At any rate, it is not a photograph in words, that inartistic species of literary produce, particularly in respect of personages. But let me say no more about my own doings. The chronicle of the town has vivid marks on it. Not to go back to events of national importance, lurid scenes have been enacted here within living memory, or not so many years beyond it, whippings in front of the town-pump, hangings on the gaol-roof. I myself saw a woman hanged not 100 yards from where we now stand, and I saw, too, a man in the stocks in the back part of this very building. Then, if one were to recount the election excitements, Free Trade riots, scenes of soldiers marching down the town to war, the proclamation of Sovereigns now crumbled to dust, it would be an interesting local story.
‘Miss Burney, in her diary, speaks of its aspect when she drove through with the rest of King George’s Court on her way to Weymouth. She says: “ The houses have the most ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to see.” This is not quite the case now, and though we may regret the disappearance of these old buildings, I cannot be blind to the difficulty of keeping a town in what may be called working order while retaining all its ancient features. Yet it must not be forgotten that these are its chief attractions for visitors, particularly American visitors. Old houses, in short, have a far larger commercial value than their owners always remember, and it is only when they have been destroyed, and tourists who have come to see them vow in their disappointment that they will never visit the spot again, that this is realised. An American gentleman came to me the other day in quite a bad temper, saying that he had diverged from his direct route from London to Liverpool to see ancient Dorchester, only to discover that he knew a hundred towns in the United States more ancient-looking than this (laughter). Well, we may be older than we look, like some ladies; but if, for instance, the original All-Saints and Trinity Churches, with their square towers, the castle, the fine mansion of the Trenchards at the corner of Shirehall Lane, the old Three Mariners Inn, the old Greyhound, the old Antelope, Lady Abingdon’s house at the corner of Durngate Street, and other mediaeval buildings were still in their places, more visitors of antiquarian tastes would probably haunt the town than haunt it now. Old All-Saints was, I believe, demolished because its buttresses projected too far into the pavement. What a reason for destroying a record of 500 years in stone! I knew the architect who did it; a milder-mannered man never scuttled a sacred edifice. Milton’s well-known observation in his Areopagitica — “Almost as well kill a man as kill a good book” — applies not a little to a good old building; which is not only a book but a unique manuscript that has no fellow. But corporations as such cannot help these removals; they can only be prevented by the education of their owners or temporary trustees, or, in the case of churches, by Government guardianship.
‘And when all has been said on the desirability of preserving as much as can be preserved, our power to preserve is largely an illusion. Where is the Dorchester of my early recollection — I mean the human Dorchester — the kernel — of which the houses were but the shell? Of the shops as I first recall them not a single owner remains; only in two or three instances does even the name remain. As a German author has said, “Nothing is permanent but change”. Here in Dorchester, as elsewhere, I see the streets and the turnings not far different from those of my schoolboy time; but the faces that used to be seen at the doors, the inhabitants, where are they? I turn up the Weymouth Road, cross the railway-bridge, enter an iron gate to “a slope of green access”, and there they are! There is the Dorchester that I knew best; there are names on white stones one after the other, names that recall the voices, cheerful and sad, anxious and indifferent, that are missing from the dwellings and pavements. Those who are old enough to have had that experience may feel that after all the permanence or otherwise of inanimate Dorchester concerns but the permanence of what is minor and accessory.
‘As to the future of the town, my impression is that its tendency is to become more and more a residential spot, and that the nature of its business will be mainly that of administering to the wants of “private residents” as they are called. There are several reasons for supposing this. The dryness of its atmosphere and subsoil is unexcelled. It has the great advantage of standing near the coast without being on it, thus escaping the objections some people make to a winter residence close to the sea; while the marine tincture in its breezes tempers the keenness which is felt in those of high and dry chalk slopes further inland. Dorchester’s future will not be like its past; we may be sure of that. Like all other provincial towns, it will lose its individuality — has lost much of it already. We have become almost a London suburb owing to the quickened locomotion, and, though some of us may regret this, it has to be.
‘I will detain you no longer from Mr. Evans’s comedy that is about to be played downstairs. Ruskin somewhere says that comedy is tragedy if you only look deep enough. Well, that is a thought to remember; but to-night, at any rate, we will all be young and not look too deeply.’
After the presentation — which was witnessed by Mrs. Hardy, by Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Newbolt, by the writer of this memoir, and by other friends, the Dorchester Dramatic Society gave for the first time, at the hands of
their own dramatist, an adaptation of Under the Greenwood Tree entitled The Mellstock Quire — the second title of the novel — Hardy himself doing no more than supply the original carols formerly sung by the Quire of the parish outshadowed by the name ‘Mellstock’ — the village of Stinsford, a mile from the town.
In December the American fleet paid a visit to Portland Roads, and though the weather was bad while they were lying there Hardy went on board the battleship Connecticut, where he met the captain, commander, and others; who, with several more officers, afterwards visited him and Mrs. Hardy at Max Gate. On the 29th they went on board the English Dreadnought, which was also lying there, and thence to a dance on board the United States flagship Louisiana, to which they were welcomed by Admiral Vreeland.
It was at the end of this year that Hardy published in the Fortnightly Review some verses entitled ‘God’s Funeral’. The alternative title he had submitted for the poem was ‘The Funeral of Jahveh’ — the subject being the gradual decline and extinction in the human race of a belief in an anthropomorphic god of the King of Dahomey type — a fact recognized by all bodies of theologians for many years. But the editor, thinking the longer title clumsy and obscure, chose the other, to which Hardy made no objection, supposing the meaning of his poem would be clear enough to readers.
CHAPTER XXXI
BEREAVEMENT
1911 — 1912: Aet. 70 — 72
In March (1911) Hardy received a letter from M. Emile Bergerat of Paris asking him to let his name appear as one of the Committee for honouring Theophile Gautier on his approaching centenary, to which Hardy readily agreed. In the same month he visited Bristol Cathedral and Bath Abbey, and in April attended the funeral of the Mayor of Dorchester, who had presented him with the freedom of the borough but a few months earlier. A sequence of verses by Hardy, entitled ‘Satires of Circumstance’, which were published in the Fortnightly Review at this juncture, met with much attention both here and in America.
In April he and his brother, in pursuance of a plan of seeing or re-seeing all the English cathedrals, visited Lichfield, Worcester, and Hereford.
He makes only one note this spring: ‘ View the matrices rather than the moulds’.
Hardy had been compelled to decline in February an invitation from the Earl-Marshal to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey in the coming June. That month found him on a tour with his brother in the Lake Country, including Carlisle Cathedral and Castle, where the dungeons were another reminder to him of how ‘evil men out of the evil treasure of their hearts have brought forth evil things’. However, the tour was agreeable enough despite the wet weather, and probably Hardy got more pleasure out of Coronation Day by spending it on Windermere than he would have done by spending it in a seat at the Abbey.
Of Grasmere Churchyard he says: ‘ Wordsworth’s headstone and grave are looking very trim and new. A group of tourists who have never read a line of him sit near, addressing and sending off picture postcards. . . . Wrote some verses.’ He visited Chester Cathedral coming homeward, called at Rugby, and went over the school and chapel; and returned to Dorchester through London.
After his return he signed, with many other well-known people, a protest against the use of aerial vessels in war; appealing to all governments ‘to foster by any means in their power an international understanding which shall preserve the world from warfare in the air’. A futile protest indeed!
In July Hardy took his sister Katherine on an excursion to North Somerset, stopping at Minehead, and going on by coach to Porlock and Lynmouth. Thence they went by steamer to Ilfracombe, intending to proceed through Exeter to South Devon. But the heat was so great that further travelling was abandoned, and after going over the cathedral they returned home.
In the preceding month, it may be remarked, had died Mr. W. J. Last, A.M.Inst. C.E., Director of the Science Museum, South Kensington, who was a son of Hardy’s old Dorchester schoolmaster, Isaac Glandfield Last. The obituary notices that appeared in The Times and other papers gave details of a life more successful than his father’s, though not of higher intellectual ability than that by which it had been Hardy’s good fortune to profit.
At the end of the month Mr. Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, called, mainly to inquire about Hardy’s old manuscripts, which was the occasion of his looking up those that he could find and handing them over to Mr. Cockerell to distribute as he thought fit among any museums that would care to possess one, Hardy himself preferring to have no voice in the matter. In the course of October this was done by Mr. Cockerell, the MSS. of The Dynasts and Tess of the d’Urbervilles being accepted by the British Museum, of Time’s Laughingstochs and Jude the Obscure by the Fitzwilliam, and of IVessex Poems, with illustrations by the author himself (the only volume he ever largely illustrated), by Birmingham. Others were distributed from time to time by Mr. Cockerell, to whom Hardy had sent all the MSS. for him to do what he liked with, having insisted that ‘it would not be becoming for a writer to send his own MSS. to a museum on his own judgement’.
It may be mentioned in passing that in these months Mr. F. Saxelby of Birmingham, having been attracted to Hardy’s works by finding in them a name which resembled his own, published ‘A Hardy Dictionary’, containing the names of persons and places in the author’s novels and poems. Hardy had offered no objection to its being issued but accepted no responsibility for its accuracy.
In November the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society gave another performance of plays from the Wessex novels. This time the selection was the short one-act piece that Hardy had dramatized himself many years before, from the story called The Three Strangers, entitled The Three Wayfarers; and a rendering by Mr. A. H. Evans of the tale of The Distracted Preacher. The Hardys’ friend, Mrs. Arthur Henniker, came all the way from London to see it, and went with his wife and himself.
The curator of the Dorset County Museum having expressed a wish for a MS. of Hardy’s, he sent this month the holograph of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Being interested at this time in the only Gothic style of architecture that can be called especially and exclusively English — the perpendicular style of the fifteenth century - — Hardy made a journey to Gloucester to investigate its origin in that cathedral, which he ascertained to be in the screen between the south aisle and the transept — a fact long known probably to other investigators, but only recently to him. He was so much impressed by the thought that the inventor’s name, like the names of the authors of so many noble songs and ballads, was unknown, that on his return he composed a poem thereon, called ‘The Abbey Mason’, which was published a little later in Harper s Magazine, and later still was included in a volume with other poems.
The illness of his elder sister Mary saddened the close of 1911; and it was during this year that his wife wrote the Reminiscences printed in the earlier pages of this book, as if she had premonitions that her end was not far off; though nobody else suspected it.
The year 1912, which was to advance and end in such gloom for Hardy, began serenely. In January he went to London for a day or two and witnessed the performance of Oedipus at Covent Garden. But in February he learnt of the death of his friend General Henniker, and in April occurred the disaster to the Titanic steamship, upon which he wrote the poem called ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ in aid of the fund for the sufferers.
On the 22nd April Hardy was correcting proofs for a new edition of his works, the Wessex Edition, concerning which he wrote to a friend:
“... I am now on to p. 140 of The Woodlanders (in copy I mean, not in proofs, of course). That is vol. vi. Some of the later ones will be shorter. I read ten hours yesterday — finishing the proofs of the Native (wh. I have thus got rid of)- I got to like the character of Clym before I had done with him. I think he is the nicest of all my heroes, and not a bit like me. On taking up The Woodlanders and reading it after many years I think I like it, as a story, the best of all. Perhaps that is owing to the locality and scenery of the
action, a part I am very fond of. It seems a more quaint and fresh story than the Native, and the characters are very distinctly drawn. . . . Seven o’clock p.m. It has come on to rain a little: a blackbird is singing outside. I have read on to p. 185 of The Woodlanders since the early part of my letter.’
The Hardys dined with a few friends in London this season, but did not take a house, putting up at a hotel with which Hardy had long been familiar, the West Central in Southampton Row.
On June 1 at Max Gate they had a pleasant week-end visit from Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats, who had been deputed by the Royal Society of Literature to present Hardy with the Society’s gold medal on his seventy-second birthday. The two eminent men of letters were the only people entertained at Max Gate for the occasion; but everything was done as methodically as if there had been a large audience. Hardy says: ‘ Newbolt wasted on the nearly empty room the best speech he ever made in his life, and Yeats wasted a very good one: mine in returning thanks was as usual a bad one, and the audience was quite properly limited’.
In the middle of June he was in London at Lady St. Helier’s, and went to the play of Bunty pulls the Strings with her. An amusing anticlimax to a story of the three-crow type occurred in connection with this or some other popular play of the date. It was currently reported and credited that Mr. Asquith had gone to see it eight times, and Mr. Balfour sixteen. Taking Miss Balfour in to dinner and discussing the play, Hardy told her of the report, and she informed him that her brother had been only once. How few the visits of Mr. Asquith were could not be ascertained. Possibly he had not gone at all.
