Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  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.

  ‘Title “self-slaughter”; “divided against ourselves”.

  ‘Now these 3 (or 3000) whirling through space at the rate of 40 miles a second — (God’s view). “Some of our family who” (the we of one nation speaking of the “we” of another).

  ‘A battle. Army as somnambulists — not knowing what it is for.

  ‘We were called “Artillery” etc. “We were so under the spell of habit that” (drill).

  ‘It is now necessary to call the reader’s attention to those of us who were harnessed and collared in blue and brass. . . .

  ‘Poem — the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. (Stated as by a god to the gods — i.e. as God’s story.)

  ‘Poem — I — First Cause, omniscient, not omnipotent — limitations, difficulties, etc., from being only able to work by Law (His only failing is lack of foresight).

  ‘We will now ask the reader to look eastward with us ... at what the contingent of us out that way were doing.

  ‘Poem. A spectral force seen acting in a man (e.g. Napoleon) and he acting under it — a pathetic sight — this compulsion.

  ‘Patriotism, if aggressive and at the expense of other countries, is a vice; if in sympathy with them, a virtue.’

  From these notes it will be seen how The Dynasts had been slowly developing in his mind. Unfortunately they are not dated, but there is in existence a notebook filled with details of the Napoleonic wars, and reflection upon them, having been written at the time he was gathering material for The Trumpet-Major, which was first published in 1880.

  During July Hardy had visits from many friends. Florence Henniker came early in the month, and went for a delightful drive with him and his wife in Blackmore Vale, and to Sherborne, the scene of The Wood.land.ers. Later Siegfried Sassoon arrived with Edmund Blunden, and then E. M. Forster, who accompanied him to an amateur performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the lawn of Trinity Rectory.

  In August he was well enough to cycle (no small feat for a man of eighty-two) with his wife to Talbothays to visit his brother and his sister.

  On August 11 he writes in his notebook:

  ‘Motored to Sturminster Newton, and back by Dogbury Gate. Walked to top of High Stoy with Flower (probably for the last time), thence back home. A beautiful drive.’

  ‘October 12. Walked across Boucher’s Close to Ewelease Stile.’ [Boucher’s Close is a green-wooded meadow next to Stinsford Vicarage, and the Ewelease Stile is the one whereon, more than fifty years before this date, he had sat and read the review of Desperate Remedies in the Spectator.]

  On the same day Hardy wrote to J. H. Morgan as follows:

  ‘Dear General Morgan,

  ‘I had already begun to reply to your interesting letter from Berlin, which opened up so many points that had engaged me 20 years ago, but had rather faded in my memory. Now that you are at home I will write it in a more succinct form, for it is not likely that amid the many details you have to attend to after your absence you will want to think much about Napoleonic times.

  ‘I cannot for my life recall where I obtained the idea of N’s entry into Berlin by the Potsdamer-strasse, though I don’t think I should have written it without authority. However, you have to remember that the events generally in The Dynasts had to be pulled together into dramatic scenes, to show themselves to the mental eye of the reader as a picture viewed from one point; and hence it was sometimes necessary to see round corners, down crooked streets, and to shift buildings nearer each other than in reality (as Turner did in his landscapes); and it may possibly happen that I gave “A Public Place” in Berlin these convenient facilities without much ceremony.

  ‘You allude to Leipzig. That battle bothered me much more than Jena or Ulm (to which you also allude) — in fact more than any other battle I had to handle. I defy any human being to synchronize with any certainty its episodes from descriptions by historians. My time-table was, I believe, as probable a one as can be drawn up at this date. But I will go no further with these stale conjectures, now you are in London.

  ‘I have quite recently been reading a yellow old letter written from Berlin in June, 1815, by a Dorset man whose daughter is a friend of ours, and who lately sent it to me. The writer says what is oddly in keeping with your remarks on the arrogance of Prussian officers. “ Buonaparte has rendered Germany completely military; at the inns and post-houses a private Gentleman exacts not half the respect exacted by a soldier. This contempt for those who wear no swords displays itself in no very pleasant shape to travellers. About 3 weeks ago I might have died of damp sheets if my German servant had not taken upon him to assure a brute of a Post-master that I was an English General travelling for my health. ... I have since girded on a sabre, got a military cap, and let my moustache grow: soldiers now present arms as we pass.”

  ‘It would be strange to find that Napoleon was really the prime cause of German militarism! What a Nemesis for the French nation!

  ‘Well, I have gone back to Boney again after all: but no more of him. I hope you find the change to London agreeable, and keep well in your vicissitudes.

  ‘Sincerely yours,

  ‘Thomas Hardy.’

  Early in November he was visited by Mrs. Henry Allhusen, his friend from her girlhood, when she was Miss Dorothy Stanley, daughter of Lady Jeune, afterwards Lady St. Helier. With Mrs. Allhusen and her daughter Elizabeth he motored to Dogbury Gate and other beautiful parts of Dorset. Elizabeth Allhusen, a charming girl, died soon after, to Hardy’s grief.

  A few days later came a letter from the Pro-Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, to say that it had been decided to elect him to an Honorary Fellowship, which he accepted, an announcement to that effect being made in The Times on the 20th of the month.

  Another entry in his notebook:

  ‘November 27. E’s death-day, ten years ago. Went with F. and tidied her tomb and carried flowers for her and the other two tombs.’

  ‘New Year’s Eve. Henry and Kate came to 1 o’clock dinner, stayed to tea, left 5.30. Did not sit up.’

  Early in January 1923 Hardy was appointed Governor of the Dorchester Grammar School for three years.

  ‘February 26. A story (rather than a poem) might be written in the first person, in which “I” am supposed to live through the centuries in my ancestors, in one person, the particular line of descent chosen being that in which qualities are most continuous.’ (From an old note.)

  A few days after this entry is the following:

  ‘April 5. In to-day’s Times:

  “Henniker. — on the 4th April 1923, of heart failure, the Honourable Mrs. Arthur Henniker. R.I.P.”

  ‘After a friendship of 30 years!’

  ‘April 10. F. Henniker buried to-day at 1 o’clock at Thornham Magna, Eye, Suffolk.’

  During the month of April Hardy finished the rough draft of his poetical play The Queen of Cornwall, and in May he made, with infinite care, his last drawing, an imagin
ary view of Tintagel Castle. This is delicately drawn, an amazing feat for a man in his eighty-third year, and it indicates his architectural tastes and early training. It was used as an illustration when The Queen of Cornwall was published.

  In April, replying to a letter from Mr. John Galsworthy, he writes:

  ‘. . . The exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world: and though I was decidedly premature when I wrote at the beginning of the South African War that I hoped to see patriotism not confined to realms, but circling the earth, I still maintain that such sentiments ought to prevail.

  ‘Whether they will do so before the year 10,000 is of course what sceptics may doubt.’

  Towards the end of May Mr. and Mrs. Walter de la Mare stayed at Max Gate for two nights, and early in June, the day after Hardy’s birthday, Mr. and Mrs. Granville-Barker came to see him, bringing with them friends he had not seen for many years, Mr. and Mrs. Max Beerbohm.

  ‘June 10. Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g. Emma, Mother and Father are living still in the past).’

  ‘June 21. Went with F. on board the Queen Elizabeth on a visit to Sir John de Robeck, Lady de Robeck, and Admiral W. W. Fisher.’ More than once, upon the invitation of Admiral Fisher, he had had a pleasant time on board a battleship off Portland.

  On June 25 Hardy and his wife went to Oxford by road to stay at Queen’s College for two nights. This was the last long journey that Hardy was to make, and the last time that he was to sleep away from Max Gate. It was a delightful drive, by way of Salisbury,

  Hungerford, and Wantage. At Salisbury they stopped for a little while to look at the Cathedral, as Hardy always loved doing, and at various old buildings, including the Training College which he had visited more than fifty years before when his two sisters were students there, and which is faithfully described in Jude the Obscure.