The Fortnightly Review
March 1928

THOMAS HARDY: SOME PERSONAL
RECOLLECTIONS

BY S. M. ELLIS

THE long-dreaded blow has fallen at last, and the sad
words "Hardy is dead" have been said with poignant
regret. Each time I saw him during the last years I could
not escape the painful thought, "Perhaps this is the last
time." Yet the years went by and he still remained as
active in mind as of old, still composed poetry, still walked
daily in the fields adjacent to Max Gate and often in the
heathy tracts of Egdon, till at last the happy hope grew
that he would, now in the anchorage of a peaceful old age,
reach to an extreme antiquity. But it was not to be.
Hardy attained a great age—eighty-seven; but a century
would have been unique, I fancy, in the records of
intensely imaginative novelists, for these have drawn too
lavishly on their vitality. Walter Scott, when the end
came at sixty-one, was a physical wreck, as was Meredith
at eighty-one. Thackeray was only fifty-two and Dickens
fifty-eight when, in both cases, a stroke obliterated for ever
their powerful but over-used brains. But Hardy's passing
had none of these painful aspects. His was just the quiet
end to a quiet life, a sinking to sleep—"The day being so
far spent, so low the sun."

The nature of these slight recollections of a great man
compels me to claim indulgence for a personal intrusion
at times. It was my privilege, my great privilege, to know
Mr. Hardy for fourteen years, and throughout that period
my first impressions of him suffered no change. As on the
first occasion, so to the end, I was ever impressed by his
modesty concerning his genius and his immense achieve-
ment, his gentle courtesy and kindness, his love for
animals, his extreme simplicity. In conversation it was
difficult to realise that here was the unchallenged head of
literature in England, here a man who had the world at his
feet in homage.

I first met Thomas Hardy in 1913, when I was living at
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Southwold, in Suffolk. A near neighbour there at that time was Mrs. Arthur Henniker, the daughter of Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), herself a writer, and a very valued friend of Hardy, who addressed to her a long series of letters wherein, I understand, he gave free vent to the whimsical humour which was one of his characteristics, a trait quite unknown to the world outside his intimate circle, the world which, quite wrongly, believed him to be a melancholy pessimist. In April, 1913, then, Hardy, accompanied by Miss Florence Dugdale (who became his wife ten months later), paid a visit of a week or so to Florence Henniker at Southwold House. My mother and I were invited to meet them at luncheon. There were no other guests, as Mrs. Henniker most kindly desired that I, as a young writer with then but one book to his name, should have the opportunity for a prolonged conversation with Mr. Hardy. I remember it was a very long lunch, lasting from two until four o'clock, based on the generous pro- fusion of a vanished Victorian menu. Which reminds me that Hardy was indifferent to food, and quite unaware of what kind of wine he might be drinking. In later years Mrs. Hardy told me how on one occasion when her hus- band was ill a friend sent him a case of fine champagne, and in jest she asked: "How do you like this brand of cyder?" To which he replied: "It's very nice, but rather drier than what we usually have."

At the conclusion of Mrs. Henniker's luncheon I, no doubt rather presumptuously, invited Mr. Hardy to come over and see me on the following morning. He accepted, duly arrived, and stayed for over two hours. My old home, Hill House, possessed something which interested him very much. It was a house built and added on to at various dates, one wing having been the ancient Custom House of Southwold; and here, in the cellars, were two small prison cells which had been used in the late eighteenth century for the detention of smugglers after arrest, pending their removal to the gaols of Yarmouth or Ipswich. This little link with the period ever nearest to Hardy's heart, the years of England's great conflict with Napoleon, to the episodes of which he had given such

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magnificent expression in *The Dynasts* a few years earlier,
led him to speak much of the dramatic picturesqueness of
life in our grandfathers' era as seen from our retrospective
angle of vision—for I doubt if either the incarcerated
Suffolk smugglers or the soldiers of the Peninsular War
had any conception that they were formative figures of
romance: rather did they only curse at their ill-luck and
hardships. Our conversation naturally passed on to
historical romance in the form of fiction, and I was
delighted to find that he had a great admiration for that
best of historical romancers, William Harrison Ainsworth,
whose biography was the one and only book I had at that
date written. Mr. Hardy said that Ainsworth was the most
powerful literary influence of his boyhood, and *Old St.
Paul's* his favourite romance, so much so that when he
paid his first visit to London as a boy of nine, in 1849, he
procured a map of the City, marked out all the streets,
lanes, and purlieus described by Ainsworth, and then made
a personal tour, first going to Wood Street, thence follow-
ing the movements of Leonard Holt as depicted in the
story. In later years Hardy liked Ainsworth's *Windsor
Castle* very much, and he said the unexplained mystery
of Herne the Hunter was most artistically treated. I had
the pleasure, shortly after, of sending to Mr. Hardy a copy
of *Windsor Castle*, and here is his reply :—

Max Gate,
Dorchester.
4th May, 1913.

Dear Mr. Ellis:

I am much obliged for the illustrated *Windsor Castle* of Ainsworth. In
looking over it I am carried back to the days of my boyhood.

The passage concerning Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy's lodgings at
Meredith's¹ occurs in a letter from the former to his brother Joseph,
quoted in Broadley's and Bartelot's *Nelson's Hardy* (John Murray, 1909),
page 202 :—

" Portsmouth,

" Sept. 7th, 1827.

"... I can give you a Bed. I am at Meradith's (sic) the Tailor, 73, High Street, opposite the Parade Coffee House ..."

(1) An allusion to my grand-uncle, Augustus Meredith, the original of *Evan Harrington*, by his son, George Meredith. Augustus's father, Melchizedek Meredith, "The Great Mel.," had died in 1814.

P*2

396

THOMAS HARDY:

The reference to Turpin in *Far from the Madding Crowd* occurs in Chapter 50, pages 401-2, in the three-and-sixpenny and the pocket editions.

Sincerely yours,
Thomas Hardy.

Rather curiously, in view of his liking for the romances of Ainsworth and G. P. R. James, Hardy did not much care for those of Walter Scott and R. L. Stevenson. In fact, for the latter he had no inclination at all. He considered Stevenson overrated, and could no more finish a story of his than he could *The Egoist* of George Meredith. *Old Mortality* was also a story he found it difficult to get through, and he thought Scott was at his best in the novels with English settings, such as *Kenilworth* and *Peveril of the Peak*. It cannot be that Hardy disliked Scotch romances, for he had greatly enjoyed in his youth the now almost forgotten James Grant, particularly *The Scottish Cavalier*, with its artistic presentation of the sadly fickle Annie Laurie. Mr. Hardy said this was also one of the books which had influenced his imagination in boyhood; and when I told him that James Grant was living at No. 25, Tavistock Road, Westbourne Park, at the time he himself was near by at Porchester Road in 1872 and 1874, Mr. Hardy said he wished he had known, so that he might have seen Grant and expressed his admiration in person. Hardy added that he was in London in December, 1863, at the time of Thackeray's death. Later he lived at No. 16, Westbourne Park Villas until 1867, and it was here many of his early poems were written during the years he was still a student of Gothic architecture under Sir Arthur Blomfield. In February, 1880, Hardy was at No. 1, Arundel Terrace, Trinity Road, Upper Tooting, which sounds a most unsuitable, even if temporary, address for the author of rural tragedies.

Some of Mr. Hardy's later opinions concerning contemporary writers that I remember include his intense admiration for A. E. Housman's *Shropshire Lad*, and his dislike for Mr. Garnett's *Lady into Fox*, which he thought stupid. The works of Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith—described by some of her admirers as “The Hardy of Sussex”—he

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 397

considered clever, and her descriptions of peasant life imaginative, but not based on personal acquaintance with the subject. He laughed about one of her farmers dressed in a smock. He said such a thing hardly was to be seen even in his own youth: labourers, of course, wore smocks, but not their master-farmers.

On one occasion I asked him what kind of wife he imagined Fancy Day, in *Under the Greenwood Tree*, would turn out in the future. He replied: "I don't quite know. We had better draw a veil over her; and yet I have known women of her type turn out all right, some of those early examples of independent schoolmistresses included." I also asked him about the old superstition of the Key and the Bible mentioned in *Far from the Madding Crowd*, and he said the girl's garter was tied about the key, and both were placed hard against the text chosen; and if impress from the Bible type was made upon the light garter it was presumed to be an omen that the suitor was the right man and that he should be accepted.

In view of Hardy's pronounced interest in the supernatural and in what, for want of a better term, I must describe as "ghosts," it is surprising that the subject did not receive more attention in his novels: in his poems there is often a breath from the unseen land—"I saw much less of the quick than I saw of the dead." In some of the short stories, in particular *The Withered Arm*, Hardy showed how powerfully he could interpret and convey the authentic thrill from the Unknown. It was at our first meeting that he told me *The Withered Arm* was founded on fact, and he agreed with me that a story dealing with the supernatural should never be explained away in the unfortunate manner of Mrs. Radcliffe. Mr. Hardy added that Leslie Stephen wrote to him protesting that the mystery in this story should have been dispersed by a normal solution, which the author regarded as a dull and unimaginative example of gratuitous criticism.

There is a passage in one of the Life's Little Ironies that, for me, presents, as in a miniature, Hardy's preoccupation with the supernatural, his introspection and meditation at "mothy curfew-tide" upon the hills and in

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THOMAS HARDY:

the little churchyards of his loved Wessex. It is in that saddest of all stories, *The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion*, an episode of about 1804, when England feared invasion by Napoleon, and the coast of Dorset was guarded by soldiers encamped on the Downs:—

Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp; here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the cavalry, and spots where the midden-heaps lay are still to be observed. At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and thistles, the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters; to help seeing rows of spectral tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery.

The incident on which the story is based was related by an old woman to Hardy in 1855, when he was a boy of fifteen. The scene, he told me, was Bincombe. I visited the spot *en route* to a later visit to Max Gate. Bincombe is a remote little hamlet, off the highway from Weymouth to Dorchester, and approached by gated lanes, nestling under a great steep down, which rises almost perpendicularly above the few cottages and the tiny church, where in an unmarked grave by the churchyard wall lie the two young hussars of King George's German Legion, Matthäus Tuia and Christoph Bless, who are immortalised in *The Melancholy Hussar*. The same theme of the threatened invasion of the Dorset coast by Napoleon occurs in *A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four*, and Mr. Hardy told me how as a boy he had delighted in hearing from his father and aged people, such as "Solomon Selby," stories of the war times when troops were encamped on the downs above Weymouth, a theme which reached its fullest expression in *The Trumpet Major*. The "Overcombe" of this book, the author said, was partly Sutton Poyntz and partly Upway. A sad story also is *The Trumpet Major*, and those rolling downs between Dorchester and Weymouth always bring to my mind's eye the figure of the unlucky hero and how at the close he "marches into the night":—

The candle held by his father shed its waving light upon John's face and uniform as with a farewell smile he turned on the door-stone, backed by the black night; and in another moment he had plunged into the dark-

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 399

ness, the ring of his smart step dying away upon the bridge as he joined
his companions-in-arms, and went off to blow his trumpet till silenced for
ever upon one of the bloody battlefields of Spain.

The pathos of the final, sudden antithesis in this picture
is worthy, I submit, to stand beside that famous passage
of Thackeray's in *Vanity Fair*:

No more firing was heard at Brussels—the pursuit rolled miles away.
Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for
George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

In one of the remarkable illustrations drawn by Hardy
for his *Wessex Poems*—the one accompanying *The
Alarm* (1803)—he shows the lonely figure of a soldier
standing on the high Ridgeway and gazing across the
wide stretch of country to the sea and the ships off Port-
land, the ship that may take him to death. Like his
friend, Mr. A. E. Housman, Hardy was ever deeply
moved by the poignancy of the soldier's life, the strange
fate that urges a young, vigorous man to early death and
decay.

> Yet saw he something in the lives
> Of those who'd ceased to live,
> That sphered them with a majesty
> Which living failed to give.

In a later poem, concerning the South African War,
*The Dead Drummer*, Hardy writes of a Wessex boy killed
and buried on the veldt:

> Yet portion of that unknown plain
> Will Hodge for ever be;
> His homely Northern breast and brain
> Grow up a Southern tree,
> And strange-eyed constellations reign
> His stars eternally.

I do not think it has been pointed out hitherto that here
is the same thought that in after years found expression
in *The Soldier*, by Rupert Brooke:

> If I should die, think only this of me:
> That there's some corner of a foreign field
> That is for ever England. There shall be
> In that rich earth a richer dust concealed...

I have strayed from my first meeting with Hardy. Upon
leaving my house he warmly invited me to visit him at
Max Gate whenever I was in Dorset. The opportunity

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THOMAS HARDY:

occurred during the same year, August, 1913, when I had
the pleasure of seeing Mr. Hardy in his own delightful
home, a privilege that was to recur on three subsequent
occasions. Many pens will describe the house, and I
shall only mention one detail which may be of interest to
future pilgrims. The author's study was originally in the
front (over the drawing-room), the room he later used
as his bedroom, and it was here he wrote *Tess of the
D'Urbervilles*. His study some time afterwards was a
room at the back of the house, facing north-east, with the
prospect rather obscured by trees, and here he composed
the tragedy of *Jude the Obscure*. From the garden at the
back Mr. Hardy pointed out to me the wide prospect
stretching to his Egdon Heath and the dairy lands of
Tess. In front, his view ranged over the spreading fields
to the downs of *The Trumpet Major*—the fields¹ in which
he delighted to walk, for they were off the highways and
spared him from meeting staring strangers—an ordeal he
abominated. Rather than meet a stranger, in his last years,
he would turn back at the approach of one and retrace his
steps. Hardy always pointed out to me the beacon erected
on distant Blackdown to the memory of Admiral Sir
Thomas Hardy—Nelson's Hardy—who figures in *The
Trumpet Major*. It is a conspicuous monument entirely
in keeping with the lonely, wide landscape. And here I
would warmly support Mr. Sydney Cockerell's plea that
Hardy's memorial in Dorset should be a somewhat similar
column, lofty and plain, reared on the Mai-Don or Rain-
barrow or other of his hilltops, for I can vouch for the
appeal that solitary monument to his naval namesake had
for the author of *The Return of the Native*, whose
imagination ever scaled the heights. And what could be
more fitting than a column on Rainbarrow, the pivot of that
wonderful book, that most wonderful interpretation of the
Spirit of Place: —

A high hill cutting against the still light sky . . . a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. . . . It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.

(1) The aspects of these fields can also be seen in the author's illustrations for *Wessex Poems*.

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THOMAS HARDY:

"all the wrongs endured by Earth's poor patient kind."
Even a poor starving cat out in the snow has a place in
this noble man's gentle benevolence:

The steps are a blanched slope
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

It was the small, sad things of life that so often touched
his muse to song, the memories aroused by some insentient
thing of a day of long-vanished joy. Thus it is in *The
Garden Seat, The Little Old Table, The Best Times,
The Last Time, At the Piano, Old Excursions, Every-
thing Comes, The Last Performance, The Strange
House, At a Fashionable Dinner, In a London Flat, The
Selfsame Song*. Many of these sad little lyrics look
back to his first wife and her sudden death on the very
day of the production of *The Trumpet Major* by the
Dorchester Players in November, 1912.

Then do you remember
That sad November
When you left me never to see me more
And looked quite other than theretofore,
As if it could not be you?

When Mr. Hardy showed me the portrait of his first
wife, with her long, fair hair hanging down over the
shoulders, he said she was the prototype in many respects
of Elfride in *A Pair of Blue Eyes*, particularly in her
physical attributes. According to the accounts of people
who met this Mrs. Hardy in her later life she
was a formidable person, though, no doubt, a typical
lady of a Victorian parsonage, for she was the niece of
an Archdeacon, the Ven. E. H. Gifford, and sister-in-law
of the Rev. C. Holder, Rector of St. Juliot, near Bos-
castle, in Cornwall, with whom Miss Emma Lavinia
Gifford lived at the rectory during the years 1868-1873.
It was to this place that Thomas Hardy came in 1870 as a
young architect to superintend the restoration of the
church, and he married Miss Gifford four years later.
Hardy's own love story is not only reflected in his Cornish

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 403

novel¹ but in many of his poems, pre-eminently in the
lovely *Beeny Cliff* (March, 1870-March, 1913) :—

O! the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free.
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say.
As we laughed aloft light-heartedly on that clear sunned March day.

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

And again in *On a Discovered Curl of Hair* :—

When your soft welcomings were said,
This curl was waving on your head,
And when we walked where breakers dinned
It sported in the sun and wind,
And when I had won your words of grace
It brushed and clung about my face.
Then to abate the misery
Of absentness, you gave it me.

Where are its fellows now? Ah, they
For brightest brown have donned a gray,
And gone into a caverned ark,
Ever unopened, always dark!

However much the passing years and ill-health may
have changed the lady, it must always be remembered that
she was once in her far youth Hardy's bright star of love,
and that on the wild coast of Cornwall romance dawned
for one of the greatest artists of the erotic theme.

Mr. Hardy was singularly fortunate in his second wife,

(1) *A Pair of Blue Eyes* was published in 1873, and it found an early and
perceptive admirer in young Reginald Brooks (son of Shirley Brooks,
editor of *Punch*), for in his manuscript diary, which I chance to possess,
he notes on January 18th, 1874: "Rained all day without a break. Very
dull. Read a novel, *Pair of Blue Eyes*, very good indeed: worth all other
new novels I have read for a long while."

Mr. Hardy told me *A Pair of Blue Eyes* was the favourite of Tennyson
and also of Coventry Patmore. The manuscript was sold for £1,500 in
1926.