Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1178 page)

PART III - ‘TIME’S LAUGHINGSTOCKS’, ‘SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE’, AND ‘MOMENTS OF VISION’

CHAPTER XXIX

DEATHS OF SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH

1908-1909: Aet. 67-69

In March he finished preparing a book of selections from the poems of William Barnes, for the Clarendon Press, Oxford, with a critical preface and glossary.

In April Lady St. Helier and a party motored from beyond Newbury to Max Gate and back, arriving within five minutes of the time specified, although the distance each way was seventy-five miles. It was considered a good performance in those days. At the end of the month he dined at the Royal Academy, but was in Dorchester at a performance by the local Dramatic Society of some scenes from The Dynasts — the first attempt to put on the stage a dramatic epic that was not intended for staging at all. In May he sent his Presidential Address to the Society of Dorset Men in London, to be read by the Secretary, as he was always a victim to influenza and throat-trouble if he read or spoke in London himself; afterwards on request he sent the original manuscript. (By the way, the address never was read, so he might have saved himself the trouble of writing it. What became of the manuscript is unknown.)

The following letter to Mr. Robert Donald in May explains itself:

‘If I felt at all strongly, or indeed weakly, on the desirability of a memorial to Shakespeare in the shape of a theatre, I would join the Committee. But I do not think that Shakespeare appertains particularly to the theatrical world nowadays, if ever he did. His distinction as a minister to the theatre is infinitesimal beside his distinction as a poet, man of letters, and seer of life, and that his expression of himself was cast in the form of words for actors and not in the form of books to be read was an accident of his social circumstances that he himself despised. I would, besides, hazard the guess that he, of all poets of high rank whose works have taken a stage direction, will some day cease altogether to be acted, and be simply studied.

‘I therefore do not see the good of a memorial theatre, or for that matter any other material monument to him, and prefer not to join the Committee.

‘Nevertheless I sincerely thank you for letting me know how the movement is progressing, and for your appreciative thought that my joining the promoters would be an advantage.’

Hardy afterwards modified the latter part of the above opinion in favour of a colossal statue in some public place.

It appears that the Hardys did not take any house or flat in London this year, contenting themselves with short visits and hotel quarters, so that there is not much to mention. From letters it can be gathered that at a dinner his historic sense was appealed to by the Duchess of St. Albans taking a diamond pin from her neck and telling him it had been worn by Nell Gwynne; and in May or June he paid a few days’ visit to Lord Curzon at Hackwood Park, where many of the house- party went into the wood by moonlight to listen to the nightingale, but made such a babble of conversation that no nightingale ventured to open his bill.

In July Hardy was again in London with Mrs. Hardy, and was present at the unveiling by Lord Curzon of the memorial to ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Mrs. Craigie), at University College, where he had the pleasure of hearing his writings cried down by a speaker, nobody knowing him to be present. During some of these days he sat to Sir Hubert Herkomer for his portrait, kindly presented to him by the painter. He went on to Cambridge to the Milton Celebration, where at the house of his friend Sir Clifford Allbutt he met Mr. Robert Bridges, the Poet-Laureate, for the first time, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Peile, the Master of Christ’s College, Sir James (‘ Dictionary’) Murray, and others. Comus was played at the theatre, in which performance young Rupert Brooke appeared as the attendant Spirit, but Hardy did not speak to him, to his after regret.

The remainder of the month was spent in Dorset, where he met for the last time his friend Bosworth Smith, long a house-master at Harrow, who told him he was soon to undergo a severe surgical operation — under which indeed he sank and died three months after. This was the fourth of his friends and relations that had sunk under the surgeon’s knife in four years — leaving a blank that nothing could fill.

‘August 18. The Poet takes note of nothing that he cannot feel emotively.

‘If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!’

The autumn was filled by little journeys to cathedrals and a visit to his sister at Swanage, whither she had gone for change of air; and in December he attended a dinner at the Mansion House to commemorate Milton, from which he returned in company with his friend Mr. S. H. Butcher, walking up and down with him late that night in Russell Square, conversing on many matters as if they knew they would never meet again. Hardy had a great liking for him, and was drawn to him for the added reason that he and his family had been warm friends of Hardy’s dead friend Horace Moule.

In the following January (1909) the University of Virginia invited him to attend the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, and in writing his thanks for the invitation Hardy adds:

‘The University of Virginia does well to commemorate the birthday of this poet. Now that lapse of time has reduced the insignificant and petty details of his life to their true proportion beside the measure of his poetry, and softened the horror of the correct classes at his lack of respectability, that fantastic and romantic genius shows himself in all his rarity. His qualities, which would have been extraordinary anywhere, are much more extraordinary for the America of his date.

‘Why one who was in many ways disadvantageously circumstanced for the development of the art of poetry should have been the first to realise to the full the possibilities of the English language in rhyme and alliteration is not easily explicable.

‘It is a matter for curious conjecture whether his achievements in verse would have been the same if the five years of childhood spent in England had been extended to adult life. That “unmerciful disaster” hindered those achievements from being carried further must be an endless regret to lovers of poetry.’

At the beginning of this year Hardy was appointed by the Dorset Court of Quarter Sessions a Representative Governor of the Dorchester Grammar School, a position he filled till the end of 1925. He said he was not practical enough to make a good governor, but was influenced to accept the office by the fact that his namesake, Thomas Hardy of Melcombe Regis, who died in 1599, was the founder of the school. The latter has a monument in St. Peter’s Church, Dorchester,

and is believed to have been of the same stock as the Thomas Hardy of this memoir.

In March came the last letter he was ever to receive from George Meredith, in which the elder writes:

‘The French review herewith comes to my address and is, as you see by the superscription, intended for you.

‘I am reminded that you are among the kind souls who thought of me on my 80th [birthday] and have not been thanked for their testimony of it. . . . The book [The Dynasts] was welcome all the more as being a sign that this big work was off your mind. How it may have been received I cannot say, but any book on so large a scale has to suffer the fate of a Panorama, and must be visited again and again for a just impression of it to be taken. I saw that somewhere in your neighbourhood it was represented in action. That is the way to bring it more rapidly home to the mind. But the speaker of Josephine’s last words would have to be a choice one.’

The representation had been in Dorchester, and was limited to a few of the country scenes.

On the 10th April he heard of the death of Swinburne, which was the occasion of his writing the following letter:

‘Max Gate, April 13, 1909.

‘For several reasons I could not bring myself to write on Swinburne immediately I heard that, to use his own words, “Fate had undone the bondage of the gods” for him. . . .

‘No doubt the press will say some good words about him now he is dead and does not care whether it says them or no. Well, I remember what it said in 1866, when he did care, though you do not remember it, and how it made the blood of some of us young men boil.

‘Was there ever such a country — looking back at the life, work, and death of Swinburne — is there any other country in Europe whose attitude towards a deceased poet of his rank would have been so ignoring and almost contemptuous? I except The Times, which has the fairest estimate I have yet seen. But read the Academy and the Nation.

‘The kindly cowardice of many papers is overwhelming him with such toleration, such theological judgements, hypocritical sympathy, and misdirected eulogy that, to use his own words again, “it makes one sick in a corner” — or as we say down here in Wessex, “it is enough to make every little dog run to mixen”.

‘However, we are getting on in our appreciativeness of poets. One thinks of those other two lyricists, Burns and Shelley, at this time, for obvious reasons, and of how much harder it was with them. We know how Burns was treated at Dumfries, but by the time that Swinburne was a young man Burns had advanced so far as to be regarded as no worse than “the glory and the shame of literature” (in the words of a critic of that date). As for Shelley, he was not tolerated at all in his lifetime. But Swinburne has been tolerated — at any rate since he has not written anything to speak of. And a few months ago, when old and enfeebled, he was honoured by a rumour that he had been offered a complimentary degree at Oxford. And Shelley too, in these latter days of our memory, has been favoured so far as to be considered no lower than an ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings in vain. . . .

‘I was so late in getting my poetical barge under way, and he was so early with his flotilla — besides my being between three and four years younger, and being nominally an architect (an awful impostor at that, really) — that though I read him as he came out I did not personally know him till many years after the Poems and Ballads year. . . .

‘T. H.’

‘April 13. A genius for repartee is a gift for saying what a wise man thinks only.’

‘April 15. Day of Swinburne’s funeral. Find I cannot go with this rheumatism, though it is but slight, the journey being so roundabout.

‘Thought of some of Swinburne’s lines: e.g.,

‘On Shelley: “ O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were “.

‘On Newman and Carlyle: “With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate”.

‘On Time: “For time is as wind and as waves are we”.

‘On Man: “Save his own soul he hath no star”.’1

In May Hardy was in London, and walking along Dover Street on his way to the Academy saw on a poster the announcement of the death of Meredith. He went on to the Athenaeum and wrote some memorial lines on his friend, which were published a day or two later in The Times, and reprinted in Time’s Laughingstocks.

1 But Isaiah had said before him: ‘Mine own arm brought salvation unto me’.

On the 22nd he attended a memorial service to Meredith in Westminster Abbey — meeting there Maurice Hewlett, Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Alfred Austin, and other acquaintance — and returned to Dorchester the same afternoon.

In June he was asked to succeed Meredith as President of the Society of Authors; and wrote to Mr. Maurice Hewlett, who had brought the proposal before him:

‘I am moved more than I can say by learning that in the view of the Council I should be offered the succession to the Presidentship. But I must nevertheless perform the disagreeable duty of acting upon my own conviction of what is for the Society’s good, and tell you that I feel compelled to decline the honour. I have long had an opinion that although in the early years of the Society it may perhaps have been not unwise to have at its head men who took no part in its management — indeed the mere names of Tennyson and Meredith were in themselves of use to the institution — the time has now come when the President should be one who takes an active part in the Council’s deliberations, and if possible one who lives in or near London — briefly, that he should preside over its affairs. Now this I could never do. I will not go into the reasons why, as they are personal and unavoidable. . . .

‘I may perhaps add that if there should still be a preponderating opinion in the Council that an inactive President of the old kind is still desirable, the eminent name of Lord Morley suggests itself.’

However, the matter ended by the acceptance of the Presidency by Hardy on further representations by the Council. His first diffidence had, in fact, arisen, as he stated, out of consideration for the Society’s interests, for he remembered that the Society included people of all sorts of views, and that since Swinburne’s death there was no living English writer who had been so abused by sections of the press as he himself had been in previous years; ‘and who knows’, he would drily add,’ that I may not be again?’

But, as said above, his objections were overruled.

As usual his stay in London had given him influenza, and he could not go to Aldeburgh as he had intended. About this time he wrote to a lady of New York in answer to an inquiry she made:

‘The discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world collectively. Therefore the practice of vivisection, which might have been defended while the belief ruled that men and animals are essentially different, has been left by that discovery without any logical argument in its favour. And if the practice, to the extent merely of inflicting slight discomfort now and then, be defended [as I sometimes hold it may] on grounds of it being good policy for animals as well as men, it is nevertheless in strictness a wrong, and stands precisely in the same category as would stand its practice on men themselves.’