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The Cornhill Magazine

February 1929

MY VISIT TO THOMAS HARDY.

A MEMORABLE DAY AT 'MAX GATE.'

BY W. M. PARKER.

IT was the month of September 1920. Far and wide the heaths, the downs, and the vales of the Wessex country offered an aspect of continual flux. They were undergoing that subtle transformation from the first, faint tones of autumn to the stage when the season becomes conspicuous by its rich panoply of russet. Days of dull weather had made way for those of sunshine splendour; and reminiscence of summer yet lingered in the warm air that accompanied their advent. A walking tour through the Hardy country had been my objective in coming down to Dorchester, which I had made my headquarters. From that centre one could set out north, south, east, and west, and reach, within reasonable distance and time, most of the landmarks associated with the Wessex novels.

In the evening of a certain day, during which I had been tramping from early morning till late evening over hills and fields to Poxwell, and had returned across the entire ridge of Bincombe and White Horse Downs, I arrived back at the 'Antelope' Hotel. There I found awaiting me a note from Mrs. Hardy, inviting me to call and partake of afternoon tea at 'Max Gate.' I had but to write an acceptance, and within two days I should be in the presence of the greatest imaginative genius of modern times. It seemed incredible! But there, indeed, lay the definite passport to the literary shrine at which I most longed to pay reverent homage.

On the appointed afternoon I set out on the momentous expedition. The day was warm, but a light wind tempered the atmosphere. 'Max Gate,' situated in Alington Avenue, on the Wareham road, stood about a mile out of Dorchester. I had left the hotel at four o'clock, and I found myself at the gate of the house a quarter of an hour before the arranged time, half-past four. I walked up and down the Wareham road, observing the remarkable seclusion of the house, surrounded by high walls and thick trees on every side; and, though but a mile from Dorchester town, it was, in truth, 'far from the madding crowd.' It looked an ideal retreat for a man of letters of hermitical disposition. The house had been

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erected upon a spot, underneath which lies the dust of many Roman legions. With the pride of a keen antiquarian and archaeologist, Hardy himself used to refer to the unearthing of several noteworthy specimens of Roman relics in these grounds. Near by there is the site of an old Roman villa as well as of an old toll-house, for 'Max Gate' had been a turnpike in the good old days. On the opposite side of the road lay what is said to be the largest meadow in England —some three thousand acres in extent.

When the time was up, I at last surmounted my hesitancy, passed through the large, white, swing-to gate, and walked up a sombre little pathway, bordered by box hedges and lofty trees on either side. Presently the entrance porch came into view. The perfect quietness that seemed to brood all around was suddenly disturbed by the barking of a dog. Now the entire house-front greeted my gaze. A red brick building of austere formalism, it appealed to me as an appropriate expression of the austere genius it housed. Then I suddenly remembered that Hardy had had the house built according to his own design.

A rap of the knocker on the door brought the housemaid. Mr. Hardy was at home. I was ushered into the drawing-room. As I passed in, Mrs. Hardy, who was alone in the room, rose from a chair at one side of a tea-table. She came forward and greeted me.

After general remarks, she told me not to ask Mr. Hardy for his autograph; he was so pestered by autograph hunters. It was an unnecessary warning, as I had no idea of such an objective, and, in any case, would not have utilised this privileged visit as a means of obtaining a specimen of his handwriting, however greatly that would have been cherished.

My attention was suddenly but quietly arrested by the entry of the great man. He seemed to come tripping into the room like an elf; as if he had just forsaken converse with ethereal woodland creatures and returned to the everyday world. He gave me a warm handshake. His magnetic personality began to make itself felt moment by moment. The atmosphere was as if charged with the aura of personality.

Perhaps the first aspect of Hardy's appearance to strike the observer was his very domed head; in the majority of cases a sure sign of great imagination. Sparse hair, accentuating the bald cranium, grew to comparative thickness behind the ears. From back to front it was a decidedly long-shaped head; and I could not rid me of the impression how much it resembled Wagner's, as

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depicted in profile photographs of the great musician. It sat upon a thinnish neck which connected with sloping shoulders and a small body. The chief feature of his wonderful face was the remarkably aquiline shape of nose, drawn up tight at the top of the bridge and broadening towards the nostrils. But the object of surpassing interest was the face itself. Sad, intensely sad, and deeply wrinkled, it possessed a certain likeness to a large withered walnut. There came to my mind his lines :

'I look into my glass
And view my wasting skin.'

The face seemed to betoken a weathering of infinite experiences, of communion with ghostly images of thought and imagination; as if it had looked out rather upon setting suns than towards the horizons of morning, and found in sombre night a temperamental affinity denied it by garish day.

'I have lived with Shades so long,
So long have talked to them,'

as he sung in one of those masterly reflective poems. It was a visage replete with subtle suggestions. An ineffable dreaminess stole into the expression of the little beady eyes occasionally, as if they were accustomed to endless reverie. Then they would suddenly light up and sparkle, and the haunting stanza of that unique lyric of his kept invading my memory :

'When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!'

'Rare and fathomless'—no words could more exactly describe the effect of his expressive eyes. A small mouth was barely perceptible beneath a straggling moustache. The whole countenance was rounded off by a beautifully indented chin, perfect in formation. Hardy's head was, indeed, a worthy subject for the artist. Innumerable variations of line and curve, well-defined projection and depression of this or that lineament, the play of light and shadow in delicate nuances, and the pure classic outline of the whole, presented infinite possibilities for artistic treatment. Of his numerous

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portraits in paint, line, and sculpture, the most successful presentation has been achieved by his old friend, William Strang, in the etching which adorns, as frontispiece, the first volume of the Mellstock edition of the Wessex novels.

He was dressed in a very dark blue suit and a black and white waistcoat, showing above it a thin rim of white linen collar. His small feet were encased in black shoes. He sat with one leg thrown over the other. An acute sensitiveness was at once apparent. His small, rather stumpy, hands would twitch from time to time in nervous movement. Characteristic little mannerisms were exhibited in the play of his left hand, the thumb and forefinger of which he would stretch across the ridge of the left crossed leg, or he would deposit the thumb only inside the left trouser pocket. An impression of one or another of these mannerisms has been seized in certain photographic reproductions.

His approachable manner was the essence of grace and modesty. There was no patronising gesture, no pose whatsoever; though one could readily visualise a conscious and confident knowledge of power behind the modesty. He possessed a soft-cadenced voice with just a faint suggestion of rough rustic flavour in it—an English voice, but not of the mincing, or high-pitched, order. His speech came clear and liquid, and his conversation was free and easy. When humour became uppermost (and I discovered that Hardy the man appeared a much happier entity than Hardy the creator as revealed in his works), he gave way to subdued laughter accompanied by a merry twinkle in the eyes.

Though I had determined not to speak too much about his own work, thinking he might be sensitive on the point, and was prepared to steer an adroit course if, by chance, I should make allusion to it, of his own accord, and greatly to my delight, he brought the theme into conversation.

At that time, and indeed from the last years of the nineteenth century onwards, Hardy's interest had almost entirely deserted fiction and centred on poetry. He told me he had never anticipated his novels would become so popular as they eventually turned out to be. To learn style, he thought the reading and writing of poetry were more serviceable than the reading and writing of prose. Poetry was a more concentrated form of art. You could gain more from reading one or two lines of poetry than from several pages of fiction. Before the Great War, when certain persons imagined the public had stopped taking any interest in poetry,

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that poetry, indeed, was a dead thing, the creator of 'The Dynasts' had declared it was not dead, but would flourish.

As the conversation turned to the topic of 'Tess,' he showed interest when I informed him I had relations whose name was Turberville. The Dorset Turbervilles, he told me, had ceased to live in their native county. Then he referred to the legend of the coach introduced into Chapter LI of 'Tess.' The story had been told to him by an old woman. The Turberville, or D'Urberville, manor house at Wool ('Wellbridge' in the novel), to which the blood-stained coach, it is said, draws up every Christmas eve, had been since its partial demolition a farmhouse, uninhabited save by a caretaker. The place had been allowed, much to Hardy's regret, to get into a shameful condition of neglect and disorder. When I had visited it three days before, I discovered a number of fowls strutting in and around the rooms.

When Hardy was a young man Morley advised him on no account to go in for journalism—it was apt to land a writer in a rut. 'But,' he said, turning to me with a twinkle in his eyes, 'Morley himself stuck to journalism for a long time, and was very far into it indeed.' He viewed with disfavour the conscience of a publisher's reader, as that personage had constantly to be on the look-out for what would be a commercial success, and often had to turn down really good literary matter. He cited the case of James Payn, reader for Smith, Elder, who turned down Shorthouse's 'John Inglesant.' Then Macmillan, who had first refused it, took it up after Mr. Gladstone's eulogistic review, and the novel became a gigantic success. But Hardy could not understand this, as he had always considered 'John Inglesant' very dull—'like,' he added, a with merrier twinkle, 'so many "goody" books.'

I think it was at this stage, when he applied the word 'goody' to Shorthouse's book, that the theme of pessimism became prominent. He was very illuminating on the subject. The attacks levelled at his so-called pessimistic views had been like barbed arrows to his sensitive temperament. Latterly these instruments of attack had been directed more particularly at his poetry; and from certain quarters they came thick and fast when his Collected Poems appeared in 1919. His old friend, Frederic Harrison, the Positivist, had just recently passed severe judgment on what he considered their unrelieved pessimism in an essay in his 'Novissima Verba' (1920.)

After a brief pause, Hardy threw back his head. 'All this

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talk about my pessimism!' he exclaimed, in a rather disgusted tone. 'What does it matter what an author's view of life is? If he finally succeeds in conveying a completely satisfying artistic expression, that is what counts.' He asked me if I had read the poems—adding, 'they got collected somehow.' Harrison had complained of their uniform sadness. 'Now,' Hardy continued, 'there are all kinds in that volume—some as bright as you could wish, others sad, and yet others neutral.' What more could anyone want? 'Besides,' he went on, 'if I have my own view of life, then I must be truthful, and not simply follow the conventional, sentimental illusions.' He considered Harrison's view extraordinary for a man of his experience.

Again, the Provost (I think it was) of Eton College had also criticised him severely for the gloom of his poems. Hardy asked him if he had read Gray's 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.' If so, did he not think there was gloom and to spare in that poem? His critic replied that indeed there was, and that was why he disliked the poem! Perhaps there is no better summary of Hardy's philosophy of life than his own description of the character, Robert Trewe, the poet, in the Wessex tale, 'An Imaginative Woman' . . . 'he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition.'

By now we had finished tea, and Mrs. Hardy rose and went to open a French window that gave on to a spacious garden. She led in a noble dog. And I observed that a share of the repast had been prepared for this dumb friend. Later I learned that the dog's name was 'Wessex.'

With reference to revision of literary work after it has been published, Hardy held decided views against a man of letters tampering too much with his creations. He was of the opinion that they lost their freshness and spontaneity in the process. He instanced the fastidious retouching in which Meredith and Henry James habitually indulged. He became particularly entertaining when speaking of James's fondness for emendation. Hardy had asked him if he ever saw his work finished, completed. No, James had replied, it was never finished because he was never satisfied with it, and he believed in constant revision. Hardy looked upon that as a sort of 'eternal proof reading.' When it had been necessary for the Wessex novelist to go over his works for new editions, he had only corrected obvious errors, and had retouched very little indeed.

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The new methods of novel writing and the so-called realism of the younger generation made very little appeal to Hardy. In discussing realism, he recounted that a friend had told him how much he had enjoyed Richard Jefferies's 'Amaryllis at the Fair,' because everything happened in that novel just as it happens at a farm. Hardy, be it remembered, was born and bred among rustics. He had not only understood the English peasant through and through, but had given to the world's imaginative literature the most artistic and living representations of rustic character ever created. When, therefore, he pronounced the opinion that he had never heard farm folk talk in the manner they were made to do in Jefferies's book, he spoke with the voice of authority.

His chief points of criticism against the younger novelists of the period were with reference to their want of plot and lack of romance. Romance must always be an essential element, no matter how many other qualities it contain, in a novel addressed to a wide novel-reading public. He felt out of sympathy with these methods of the younger men, methods which, he thought, they owed largely to Mr. Arnold Bennett. The kind of fiction being read at that time by the public was, to him, appalling.

From fiction our talk drifted to criticism. He did not think we had a great critic in this country, and certainly there were none in America. There was lacking a great critic who, instead of following the lead, would think for himself. Saintsbury had read too much, and he did not possess sufficient insight. Indeed a man in order to be a great critic must be born with quick critical insight for what is of permanent literary value. According to Hardy, such a man had not at that stage entered the arena of modern literary criticism.

During the course of talk it was delightful to hear the references to the various literary celebrities he had known as fast friends—George Meredith, Henry James, William Black, James Payn, Viscount Morley, Frederic Harrison, Sir J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and a host of others.

A gleam of real pleasure and genuine pride came into his face when we began to talk about his beloved countryside, which I had been haunting with steadily increasing affection for the past few days. Naturally every nook and corner of 'Dorset Dear' were as familiar to Hardy as if they had been his own private possessions. Did not these villages and hamlets, these heaths and meadows and vales, owe an unaccountable debt to the interpreter, who had not only made known their characteristics and

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peculiarities, but had invested these landmarks with significant romance for the lasting delight of the entire reading world? Like Meredith, Hardy was a lover of the open road. In former days he used to think nothing of walking from Dorchester to Bridport and back, a distance of about thirty miles. When younger he was a keen cyclist, and enjoyed that method of getting about the country.¹

I gave him an account of my jaunts to Maiden Castle, Bockhampton, Bindon Abbey, Wareham, Bere Regis, Corfe Castle, and Poxwell. It would not have surprised me had he paid little attention to these trifling explorations, however great an effect their revelation had exercised upon me; but, to be frank, it was apparent he must have been sufficiently interested, for, after my recital, the subject, instead of being dropped, was allowed to open out to alluring vistas of suggested regions yet to be discovered during the remainder of my sojourn.

While I was taking my leave of Mrs. Hardy, the great man went out to the hall and tapped the barometer. He returned to tell me the weather would keep fair. On the doorstep he inquired where I would be going the following day, and strongly urged me, if I had not made plans, to go either to Weymouth or to Sherborne, the latter containing the most impressive ecclesiastical fane in Dorset—Sherborne Abbey. He then walked with me down part of the sombre pathway towards the gate, telling me of places I should not fail to include in my itinerary, and showing all the time the liveliest and kindest interest. He walked along the trim-bordered path with his domed head exposed to the late afternoon air—the great little Wizard of the South. I took a last look at his countenance. He seemed so alert and vital that little did I imagine that this man of over eighty was going to live only another seven years, and that his venerable appearance, which the searching light of out-of-doors made more plainly visible, would be withdrawn from this countryside he loved so well. And that sad, wistful, withered face, replete with subtle suggestions, full of infinite pity—how often and how clearly it has visited my imagination to this day!

But, in spite of all the external strata of age, Hardy's eighty years sat lightly upon him. That afternoon he was in the best of health, cheerful and brisk. An unquenchable spirit of youth

¹ The present writer possesses a post card, written in the famous novelist's neat handwriting, sent by Hardy to the late Sir Sidney Colvin in July 1913, inviting him to lunch at 'Max Gate.' He writes: 'I am sorry that Lady Colvin suffers from road sickness. I did for years, but bicycling cured it.'

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showed unmistakably in his eager and vigorous interest regarding the events of the day. His intellect was as keen as ever in tackling modern problems and in viewing the condition of things from a universal and all-embracing standpoint. If his great age denied him the activities in which he formerly indulged, market day in Dorchester often found him among the farmers, talking with all sorts of country folk, by whom he was respected and beloved, and who regarded him as a figure of which they might well be proud.

His firm hand-clasp and cheering words of farewell terminated the inspiring visit to 'Max Gate.' I found myself outside the large white swing-to gate of the sanctuary; and the little elfin figure had retreated beyond the turning of the sombre pathway. As I sauntered along the Wareham road towards Dorchester in the late afternoon light, I began to realise I had attained some of the greatest moments of my life; moments I should never forget as long as I lived; moments it had been worth while being born into the world to experience.

Ever since that memorable red-letter day these moments have been treasured as a living and loving memory; the remembrance of having met and conversed with the greatest literary giant of the modern world.