visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to his
memory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed
from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary
interest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his
Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary.
He wrote to me:--
"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the
early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable asset
to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and
force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without
Satow. Aston was another very strong man."
These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of
_Veluvana_, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this
direction proved to be too slight for publication. He met with some
expressions of extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and
to which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It
began to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which great
concentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not
to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he
was not content, and no one could have wished him to be willing, to
break abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of
the National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still
occupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did
not abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary that
he should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure
for the inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his
deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties
which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life.
He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the
Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless
decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any
useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen
and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably
good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed
with the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):--
"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part
any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country
Mouse--even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the
cellars of the great--would still be out of all communion with the
mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town
Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know."
He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "I
hate the autumn," he said, "for it means the death of the year, but I
try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among his
plants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered
rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no
longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies,
his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes,
the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit
of such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by
the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become
almost impenetrable to sound.
Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental
force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and
curiosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He
wrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):--
"I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of
Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of the _Purgatorio_.
It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W.W.
Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or
two has appeared Hoare's Italian Dictionary, published by the
Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previous
dictionaries were practically useless except for courier's work.
How splendid Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators,
Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them! They won't
let the poet say that the sun shone or the night was dark without
seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always seem to
_chercher midi a quatorze heures_, and irritate me beyond measure.
There is invention enough in Dante without all their embroidery.
But this grubbing and grouting seems to be infectious among Dante
scholars--they all catch the disease."
He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomed
ardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship,
the Honourable W.W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted,
and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:--
"This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course, I knew
the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before attempted to read
him. The difficulty scared me."
Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked away
for hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the _Purgatorio_ without
flagging, but he broke down early in the _Paradiso_. He had no sympathy
whatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely bored
by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I confess I took
advantage of this to recall his attention to _Veluvana_, for which it
was no longer possible to hope that the author would collect any
material out of Dante.
An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history during
the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russian
chapters of his _Memories_, but it was another distraction. It took his
thoughts away from _Veluvana_, although he protested to me that he
could prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal his
fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for
he wrote (March 17th, 1916):--
"You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my
troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part
in society, the Three R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those
only two--for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days
when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual
panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I
am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time."
He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. About
this time he wrote:--
"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford--not the
Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible--but the unhappy
hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been
most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in
Paris--all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even
hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look
upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to
be told that he had many admirable points."
At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very
remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified
by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more
lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back,
the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external
symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure and
delighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with
life, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not
to give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that
visible determination to be strong. But the features of his character
had none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esprit," which
Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless
of the old man's self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His
curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in
spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was
his memory of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was
like a lad.
There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was
manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London
exhausted him. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was
distracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and
destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses,
which he called "the pride of my old age." But, after a gesture of
despair, he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in
his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out
on May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a
beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was
particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood he
flung himself at full length upon a bank of wet grass. He was not
allowed to remain there long, but the mischief was done, and in a few
hours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might not
have been serious had it not been that in a few days' time he was due to
fulfil certain engagements in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more
than not to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on
being punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his plans by
staying at home.
Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to transact some business,
and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal Society of
Literature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting took place in
the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which greeted him
with great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright eyes and
heard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would see him
again no more. His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making a
superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he went down to
Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he never rose
again. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease,
which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long
time his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him and
filled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mind to
the very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued to
correspond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and even
about Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptoms
of improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and final
relapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale's interest and curiosity were
sustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only
one week before his death, he wrote:--
"Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published, _Les auteurs de
la guerre de_ 1914? Bismarck is the subject of the first volume;
the second will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; and
the third with _leurs complices_. I know E.D., he is a brother of
Alphonse, and is a competent historian. His book is most
illuminating. Of course there are exaggerations, but he is always
well _documente_, and there is much in his work that is new. I
don't admire his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad
enough, but what can be said in favour of the historic future with
which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on edge."
But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he passed into an
unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon on August 17th, 1916. He was
saved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude.
THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY
When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's admirers, who were
expecting from him a new novel, received instead a thick volume of
verse, there was mingled with their sympathy and respect a little
disappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were not
rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, reminded
one another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling with
the Muses. Thackeray had published _Ballads_, and George Eliot had
expatiated in a _Legend of Jubal_. No one thought the worse of
_Coningsby_ because its author had produced a _Revolutionary Epic_. It
took some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the new
_Wessex Poems_ did not fall into this accidental category, and still,
after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr.
Hardy, abundant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary and
ornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary to insist on
the complete independence of his career as a poet, and to point out that
if he had never published a page of prose he would deserve to rank high
among the writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes of
his verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet, that I
propose to speak of him to-day.
It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was over fifty when he
published his first secular verses, but Mr. Hardy was approaching his
sixtieth year when he sent _Wessex Poems_ to the press. Such
self-restraint--"none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with
more unwearied spirit none shall"--has always fascinated the genuine
artist, but few have practised it with so much tenacity. When the work
of Mr. Hardy is completed, nothing, it is probable, will more strike
posterity than its unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarce
any other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of resolve. His
novels formed an unbroken series from the _Desperate Remedies_ of 1871
to _The Well-Beloved_ of 1897. In the fulness of his success, and
unseduced by all temptation, he closed that chapter of his career, and
has kept it closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and
periodically, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for reasons
best left to his own judgment, to defer the exhibition of his verse
until he had completed his work in prose, ought not to prejudice
criticism in its analysis of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic
panorama. Mr. Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided
attention.
It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of Mr. Hardy's
delay. From such information as lies scattered before us, we gather that
it was from 1865 to 1867 that he originally took poetry to be his
vocation. The dated pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an idea
of the original character of his utterance. On the whole it was very
much what it remains in the pieces composed after a lapse of half a
century. Already, as a very young man, Mr. Hardy possessed his
extraordinary insight into the movements of human character, and his
eloquence in translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain of
rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely to heart the
admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous Preface to the 1800 edition of
_Lyrical Ballads_ to seek for inspiration in that condition where "the
passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature."
But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems would have been
received in the mid-Victorian age with favour, or even have been
comprehended. Fifty years ahead of his time, he was asking in 1866 for
novelty of ideas, and he must have been conscious that his questioning
would seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, and he left
the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, a very unrelated
force, that of the _Poems and Ballads_ of the same year. But Swinburne
succeeded in his revolution, and although he approached the art from an
opposite direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation of
Mr. Hardy.
We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his silence of forty
years, as a poet who laboured, like Swinburne, at a revolution against
the optimism and superficial sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is
true, tended to accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy
drew verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does not
affect their common attitude, and the sympathy of these great artists
for one another's work has already been revealed, and will be still more
clearly exposed. But they were unknown to each other in 1866, when to
both of them the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering
femininity of the "jewelled line," the intense respect for Mrs. Grundy
in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, and to be trampled
upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest verse no echo of the passionate
belief in personal immortality which was professed by Ruskin and
Browning. He opposed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; the
Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. He rejected the
idea of the sympathy and goodness of Nature, and was in revolt against
the self-centredness of the Romantics. We may conjecture that he
combined a great reverence for _The Book of Job_ with a considerable
contempt for _In Memoriam_.
This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off; it was something
inherent that remained, and gives to-day their peculiar character to Mr.
Hardy's latest lyrics. But before we examine the features of this
personal mode of interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what
little light we can on the historic development of it. In the pieces
dated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of almost everything which
has since characterised the poet. In "Amabel" the ruinous passage of
years, which has continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already
crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives of small
scenes--"your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, and a pond edged
with grayish leaves" ("Neutral Times")--which had not existed in English
verse since the days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a
sense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of chance--In
"Hap" the author would positively welcome a certainty of divine hatred
as a relief from the strain of depending upon "crass casualty." Here and
there in these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is
remarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained afterwards in
the expression of his most strange images and fantastic revelations. We
read in "At a Bridal":--
"Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree,
And each thus found apart, of false desire
A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire
As had fired ours could ever have mingled we!"
This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think out, and at a
hasty glance seems muffled up in obscurity beyond the darkness of Donne;
moreover, it is scarcely worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardy
was presently to become. Perhaps of the poems certainly attributable to
this earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets called "She to Him"
gives clearest promise of what was coming. The sentiment is that of
Ronsard's famous "Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la
chandelle," but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man to
the woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as where the latter
says that as her temperament dies down the habit of loving will remain,
and she be
"Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came,"
which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society knew nothing
of.
On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing that whatever the
cause, the definite dedication to verse was now postponed. Meanwhile,
the writing of novels had become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, and
ten years go by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it is
interesting to find that when the great success of _Far from the Madding
Crowd_ had introduced him to a circle of the best readers, there
followed an effect which again disturbed his ambition for the moment.
Mr. Hardy was once more tempted to change the form of his work. He
wished "to get back to verse," but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen, who
induced him to start writing _The Return of the Native_ instead. On
March 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore, then a complete stranger, wrote to
express his regret that "such almost unequalled beauty and power as
appeared in the novels should not have assured themselves the
immortality which would have been conferred upon them by the form of
verse." This was just at the moment when we find Mr. Hardy's
conversations with "long Leslie Stephen in the velveteen coat"
obstinately turning upon "theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of
things, the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time." To this
period belongs also the earliest conception of _The Dynasts_, an old
note-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestion
that the author should attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815."
To this time also seems to belong the execution of what has proved the
most attractive section of Mr. Hardy's poetry, the narratives, or short
Wessex ballads. The method in which these came into the world is very
curious. Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a
stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. For
instance, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first published by Lionel
Johnson in 1894, had been begun as early as 1867, and was finished ten
years later. The long ballad of "Leipzig" and the savage "San
Sebastian," both highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few
lines of each noted down long before their completion. "Valenciennes,"
however, belongs to 1878, and the "Dance at the Phoenix," of which the
stanza beginning "'Twas Christmas" alone had been written years before,
seems to have been finished about the same time. What evidence is before
us goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy became a complete
master of the art of verse, and that his poetic style was by this time
fixed. He still kept poetry out of public sight, but he wrote during the
next twenty years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his
novels, the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 1898. If
no other collection of his lyrical verse existed, we should miss a
multitude of fine things, but our general conception of his genius would
be little modified.
We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequent
volumes as mere repetitions of the original _Wessex Poems_. They present
interesting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on the
features which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. _Poems
of the Past and Present_, which came out in the first days of 1902,
could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as it
paralleled its three years' product with that of the thirty years of
_Wessex Poems_. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious that
in 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used to be
called his "portfolio" those specimens which he thought to be most
attractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite the
case. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his
preoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song:--
"Must I pipe a palinody,
Or be silent thereupon?"
He decides that silence has become impossible:--
"Nay; I'll sing 'The Bridge of Lodi'--
That long-loved, romantic thing,
Though none show by smile or nod, he
Guesses why and what I sing!"