# The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 10

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CHAPTER X
Janus (1925)
IT remains to record a few late facts.
In 1914 Hardy married his second wife, Florence Emily Dugdale, a professional writer of occasional pieces for various periodicals and newspapers and the author of a few delightful children's books. She shares the honors that have been enfolding her husband thickly in his declining years.
Upon the death of George Meredith in 1909, Hardy fell heir to the Order of Merit. He has also received an honorary Litt. D. from Cambridge, and is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College in that University. Aberdeen and Oxford have both made him a Doctor of Laws, the latter in spite of the not too complimentary picture of "Christminster" which figured in Jude. He holds the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, membership in the Council of Justice to Animals and in the Athenæum Club, and the office of Justice of the Peace for his native district. He bears these burdens very lightly, as is fitting.
For years, however, his many admirers have been raising an annual outcry—for Hardy has never been awarded the sweetest plum of all, the Nobel Prize in literature. There can, of course, be little doubt that The Dynasts was the most imposing and important poetic ​work of the first decade of our century, and may possibly be ranked ultimately with the greatest pieces in the English language. Yet the Nobel committee, having been forced to defend itself again and again for ignoring Hardy, still feels it necessary to assert its independence of outside suggestion by finding other worthy recipients of its honors. The Queen of Cornwall, had it been written by a younger or more obscure poet, might well have been chosen for distinction—but, no; Hardy is still just the Victorian novelist, and little better than a memory. For most people, indeed, his name would mean no more and no less if he had died thirty years ago.
For the past ten years he has been indulging in the luxury of imagining his end to be near; yet he lives on, and, what is more, manages to keep undiminished and untarnished the brightness of his poetic muse. It is still too early to say that his work is over; that was already said in 1895, in 1908, in 1914, in 1922.
Occasionally, however, his figure is illuminated by a sudden and transitory burst of public interest. Such an occasion was afforded during the Prince of Wales's visit to Dorchester on July 19, 1923. This event was recorded as follows, by the special correspondent of the London Times:
The meeting of the Prince of Wales and Mr. Thomas Hardy dwarfed every other circumstance of the third and last day of the Prince's western tour. It seemed to have struck the general imagination, so much was it talked of, so thoroughly did it per​meate to-day's programme. This was natural in Dorchester, where the position of Mr. Hardy belies the proverb about a prophet and his own country. But Dorchester was only the culmination of the meeting with Mr. Hardy.
All day long the Prince's motor-car sped through Mr. Hardy's world; not only through the very country which the great writer has transfigured for so many of us by the shifting lights of his genius, but the country he has peopled with characters that do not die like mortal men and women. Here are houses, farms, cottages, beautiful with the time-worn loveliness of Wessex; but their beauty is overlaid by their poetical interest, for in them live the spirits of Bathsheba Everdene, Gabriel Oak, Eustacia Vye, and Tess. Such habitations are familiar, though we may never have seen them before, since Mr. Hardy has the secret of giving his eyes to his readers. And with his eyes they look also at the barrows and downs that stretch along the horizon in hues of green and purple, brown and gold.
The Prince's route need not be related to Mr. Hardy's books by such links as the literary investigator loves to forge. But the veritable Hardy air is breathed forth by names like Warminster, Mere, Shaftesbury, Fordington, Poundbury Farm, Maiden Castle, and Upwey. Through some of the places they connote the Prince passed; at some he stayed to meet Duchy tenants, or for other of the various objects of his tour. Then, at last, Dorchester gave him a welcome which might have been a chapter out of an unpublished Wessex novel. That chapter would describe how a son of the Wessex soil, having lifted himself to greatness, joined in his town's greeting of a Prince, who afterwards delighted to honour him, and be honoured by him, in his own home.
The road into Dorchester cuts deeply between high, wooded banks. The banks were filled by children in simple, pretty dresses; while the road was kept by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, who showed once or twice, when there was a mild rush, the mingled tact and determination of London policemen. A blazing sun from a quite blue sky brought out the colour wherever it ​showed among the rich green of the trees or in the heat of the beflagged and bannered road. The children's sweet, trained voices rang out in the chorus from The Dynasts, specially set to music:
At the top of the road the Prince was received by the Mayor and Corporation in a covered stand, where Mr. Hardy had a place. His Royal Highness was then conducted, through lines of the Dorsetshire Regiment, to a new Territorial drill-hall, which he declared open in a short speech. Those who had lived through the long years of the war, he said, would never wish to repeat the experience; but, at the same time, he was certain there was no finer training for young men than that they got in the Territorials, and he hoped the boys of Dorchester and the county would add, if need were, to the splendid record of the Dorsetshire Regiment.
Mr. Hardy was present at this ceremony. Prom the Drill Hall he drove with the Prince, amid the cheers of people pleased to see the young face and the old side by side, to Max Gate. As for Mr. Hardy, he may be 80-odd, but his lined countenance bore a very alert and cheerful expression, and, if it spoke truly, he enjoyed to the full the bustle and colour of the streets, and shared to the full in the joy of his fellow-townsmen.
I have already referred to the prevalent interest in the luncheon at Max Gate. It expressed itself in a desire, which in this case was wistful rather than vulgar, to overhear the conversation at that very private and informal little gathering. People spoke as though they would not have spied if they could; they only wondered what the talk of a young Prince and an aged ​poet might be like. Of course, they can never know. This must be numbered among the fascinating secrets which will not be told. The house at Max Gate stands secluded among the closely growing trees that overshadow it. There was no mob at the gates. The privacy of Mr. Hardy and his guest was respected in intention no less than fact. The photograph taken after luncheon on the lawn will be the sole record of an occasion that, judging from one's experience to-day in Dorchester and on the road through Wessex, charms alike the fancy of the Hardy student and of the man who could not tell how Tess came of the D'Urbervilles.
In all future dealings with the figure and influence of Hardy it will probably be found necessary to keep Hardy the writer and philosopher distinct from Hardy the man and personality. From reading most of his books the natural impulse is to imagine their author as a morose, grim and cynical being. This is a delusion. His surface-personality seems to be reflected only in the pure and gentle vein of humor which animates the humbler country-figures in the novels.
Hardy always regarded himself, as a writer, as a kind of æolian harp, blown upon by all the winds of the heavens, wild and gentle, good and bad, cheerful and sorrowful, sentimental and ironical, frivolous and sober. But to all this variety the harp gave but one response; ​it was attuned permanently to a single chord, in a harmonious, but minor, mode. His was a nature that felt all emotions, but reacted in literature to only a few. His spirit became vocal only when stirred by tragedy. But this does not mean that he failed to perceive, understand and feel deeply the untragic amenities of existence.
In his Hand of Ethelberta, it is of interest to note, no less than four of the principal personages make statements which have a single bearing on the matter of the distinction to be drawn between the inner life of a writer and his imaginative works. Christopher Julian says, "People who print very warm words have sometimes very cold manners." By reversing the sense of this statement, without destroying its validity, it can be made to apply very nicely to Hardy's cold words and warm manners. Again, Ladywell says to Neigh, while discussing the common object of their admiration, "Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent virtue, in anybody's writing is the one thing you are safest from in personal dealings with the writer." On the following page Neigh says substantially the same thing: "It is as risky to calculate people's ways of living from their writings as their incomes from their ways of living." The fascinating Ethelberta herself, when upbraided by Lady Petherwin for the ribaldry of her verses, defends herself as follows: "It would be difficult to show that because I have written so-called tender and gay verse, I feel tender and gay. It is too often assumed that a person's fancy is a person's real mind. I believe that in the majority of cases one is fond of imagining the direct opposite of one's principles in sheer effort ​after something fresh and free; at any rate, some of the lightest of those rhymes were composed between the deepest fits of dismals I have known."
Mrs. Lonise Chandler Moulton, who was very well acquainted with Hardy in the nineties, was once asked whether he was as cynical a misogynist as was implied by the pictures of the women in his Group of Noble Dames. She replied, “But he doesn't think he is cynical. He thinks he is photographic. I know no man who likes women better, and there is nothing that a woman could possibly do that would seem wrong to him." This, it must be remembered, was the impression given by the creator of Bathsheba, whose vanity and folly, and of Arabella, whose sensuality and calculating covetousness, are the chief agents of a malignant destiny in the stories in which they enact their unenviable rôles. It was a remarkable impression, even if it be discounted by the inevitable sentimentality of its fair recorder.
Another acquaintance thus described the man in 1892: "Mr. Hardy is in himself a gentle and singularly pleasing personality. Of middle height, with a very thoughtful face and rather melancholy eyes, he is nevertheless an interesting and amusing companion. He is regarded by the public at large as a hermit ever brooding in the far-off seclusion of a west-country village. A fond delusion, which is disproved by the fact that he is almost more frequently to be seen in a London drawing-room, or a Continental hotel, than in the quiet old-world lanes of rural Dorchester."
One aspect of Hardy's temperament seems to have retarded somewhat a popular and universal recognition of ​its pleasant qualities. This is his notorious distaste for the society of the professional interviewer, the curious tourist and the idle sight-seer. Here is Samuel G. Blythe's report of an attempted interview for the Saturday Evening Post:
"It cannot be said, in verity, that Thomas Hardy expressed any passionate eagerness to greet me at his Wessex home, but it came about, none the less. How keenly I recall the grizzled author of Tess and Jude as he stood that morning on his terrace, and his words—the words of the master!
"'Mr. Hardy, I have traveled three thousand miles to see you.' This reverently.
"'Really?' This politely, but with a certain disinterestedness that was depressing.
"'Yes, I have traveled three thousand miles to see you.' This with less reverence and more emphasis.
"'Really?' This with an intonation that expressed, with sufficient clarity, the thought: 'Well, you've seen me; what else do you want?'
"Imagine an earnest pilgrim at a literary shrine able to dig out but two cold and clammy 'Reallys' as a starter! The situation was precarious, and needed the tonic of instant diversion into other channels.
"'You have a lot of crows on your place.' This with an appropriate sweep of the arm that included an immense flock of black and busy birds on the lawn.
"'My word! Those are not crows; those are rooks!' And the author of Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd proceeded along the terrace by himself—if you can picture the scene that morning with ​the bright Wessex sunshine flooding the landscape—alone, indubitably alone."
Hardy's well-known impatience with besiegers of this sort, although too often and too grossly exaggerated, as above, has served to propagate the impression that he is an incurable recluse who has foresworn the society of his fellow-beings.
This is far from being true, however. He receives casual visitors. He is not shy. The one common ground upon which the personality and the works of the man meet is that of a universal sympathy for the sufferings of humanity, which may even, on suitable occasions, include the sufferings of journalists. This is the one dominant Hardy-theme, and to it he long ago dedicated both himself and his artistic work. His life and works are one great protest against man-made and god-made misery—against man's inhumanity to man, to woman, and even to the lower animals.
Just as the figure of Thomas Hardy should be recognized as possessing the two distinct and sometimes quite contradictory aspects of the personality and the writer, so Hardy the writer in himself sometimes has presented to the careful reader two quite distinct faces. The realistic and the naïve writer will frequently have to be sharply differentiated from the philosophic and symbolic writer. The fundamental and unconscious dilemmas and contradictions underlying his later philosophy can usually be traced back to this instinctive ability of his to divide him​self, as it were, into quite distinct Hardys, strangers to each other.
When Hardy wrote in his intensest moods, however—whenever, that is to say, he assumed the mantle that is destined to clothe his name for posterity—he discovered his inmost relief and satisfaction to lie in the particular experience which he expressed in his motto to The Return of the Native:
THE END