Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated), page 921
to set about some contribution to the various forms of manifesto that had been discussed.
In Dorset the Hardys kept up between-whiles their motoring through September, visiting Broadwindsor, Axminster, the summit called ‘Cross-in-hand’, from which both the Bristol and English Channels are visible, and on which many years earlier Hardy had written a traditional poem, ‘The Lost Pyx’; also Bridport, Abbots- bury, Portisham, including the old residence of Admiral Hardy’s father, still intact with its dial in the garden, dated 1767.
In the same month he published in The Times the soldiers’ war- song called ‘Men who March Away’, which won an enormous popularity; and in October wrote ‘England to Germany’, a sonnet ‘On the Belgian Expatriation’ for King Albert’s Book, and in the papers a letter on the destruction of Reims Cathedral. This month, too, he brought out another volume of verses entitled Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries — the book being made up of the ‘ Satires in Fifteen Glimpses’, published in a periodical in 1911, and other poems of a very different kind with which the satires ill harmonized — the latter filling but fifteen pages in a volume of 230 pages. These were caustically humorous productions which had been issued with a light heart before the war. So much shadow, domestic and public, had passed over his head since he had written the satires that he was in no mood now to publish humour or irony, and hence he would readily have suppressed them if they had not already gained such currency from magazine publication that he could not do it. The ‘ Lyrics and Reveries’, which filled the far greater part of the volume, contained some of the tenderest and least satirical verse that ever came from his pen.
In November he and his wife went to London to a rehearsal of a portion of The Dynasts, which Mr. Granville-Barker was then preparing for the stage at the Kingsway Theatre, and which was produced there on the 25 th November, though the author had never dreamt of a single scene of it being staged. Owing to a cold Hardy was unable to be present on the first representation, but he went up two or three weeks later.
Hardy’s idea had been that the performance should be called what it really was, namely, ‘Scenes from The Dynasts’ — as being less liable to misconception than the book-title unmodified, since people might suppose the whole epic-drama was to be presented, which was quite an impossibility. However, as the scheme of the production was Mr. Granville-Barker’s own, as he had himself selected all the scenes, Hardy did not interfere, either with this or any other detail. The one feature he could particularly have wished altered was that of retaining indoor architecture for outdoor scenes, it being difficult for the spectator to realise — say in the Battle of Waterloo — that an open field was represented when pillars and architraves hemmed it in. He thought that for the open scenes a perfectly plain green floorcloth and blue backcloth would have suited better. But the theatre’s resources of space were very limited. However, the production was artistically successful.
More verses on the war were written by Hardy in December, including ‘An Appeal to America’. A sad vigil, during which no bells were heard at Max Gate, brought in the first New Year of this unprecedented ‘breaking of nations’.
It may be added here that the war destroyed all Hardy’s belief in the gradual ennoblement of man, a belief he had held for many years, as is shown by poems like ‘The Sick Battle-God’, and others. He said he would probably not have ended The Dynasts as he did end it if he could have foreseen what was going to happen within a few years.
Moreover, the war gave the coup de grace to any conception he may have nourished of a fundamental ultimate Wisdom at the back of things. With his views on necessitation, or at most a very limited free will, events seemed to show him that a fancy he had often held and expressed, that the never-ending push of the Universe was an unpurposive and irresponsible groping in the direction of the least resistance, might possibly be the real truth. ‘Whether or no’, he would say,
‘Desine fata Deum fiecti sperare precando.’
CHAPTER XXXIII
WAR EFFORTS, DEATHS OF RELATIVES, AND ‘MOMENTS OF VISION’
1915-1917: Aet. 74-77
He seems to have been studying the Principia Ethica of Dr. G. E. Moore early this year; and also the philosophy of Bergson. Writing on the latter in answer to a letter from Dr. C. W. Saleeby on the subject, he states:
‘I suppose I may think that you are more or less a disciple of his, or fellow-philosopher with him. Therefore you may be rather shocked at some views I hold about his teaching — or did hold, anyhow. His theories are much pleasanter ones than those they contest, and I for one would gladly believe them; but I cannot help feeling all the time that his is rather an imaginative and poetical mind than a reasoner’s, and that for his charming and attractive assertions he does not adduce any proofs whatever. His use of the word “ creation” seems to me loose and vague. Then as to conduct: I fail to see how, if it is not mechanism, it can be other than caprice, though he denies it. Yet I quite agree with him in regarding finalism as an erroneous doctrine. He says, however, that mechanism and finalism are only external views of our conduct — ” Our conduct extends between them, and slips much further”. Well, it may, but he nowhere shows that it does.
‘Then again: “A mechanistic conception . . . treats the living as the inert. . . . Let us, on the contrary, trace a line of demarcation between the inert and the living.” Well, let us, to our great pleasure, if we can see why we should introduce an inconsistent rupture of Order into a uniform and consistent Law of the same.
‘You will see how much I want to have the pleasure of being a Bergsonian. But I fear his theory is, in the bulk, only our old friend Dualism in a new suit of clothes — an ingenious fancy without real foundation, and more complicated than the fancies he endeavours to overthrow.
‘You must not think me a hard-headed rationalist for all this.
Half my time — particularly when writing verse — I “believe” (in the modern sense of the word) not only in the things Bergson believes in, but in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, etc., etc. But I do not believe in them in the old sense of the word any more for that. . . .
‘By the way, how do you explain the following from the Cambridge Magazine, by a writer whom I imagine to be of a school of thinkers akin to your own, concerning Herbert Spencer’s doctrine of the Unknowable?
‘“We doubt if there is a single philosopher alive to-day who would subscribe to it. Even men of science are gradually discarding it in favour of Realism and Pragmatism.”
‘I am utterly bewildered to understand how the doctrine that, beyond the knowable, there must always be an unknown, can be displaced.’
In April a distant cousin of promising ability — a lieutenant in the 5 th Batt. Dorset Regiment — came to see him before going abroad, never to be seen by him again; and in the following month he sat to Mr. [Sir Hamo] Thornycroft for a model of a head which the sculptor wished to make. At home he heard that two single-page songs in manuscript which he had sent to the Red Cross Sale at Christie’s had fetched £48 — ‘Men who March Away’ and ‘The Night of Trafalgar’.
‘May 14. Have been reading a review of Henry James. It is remarkable that a writer who has no grain of poetry, or humour, or spontaneity in his productions, can yet be a good novelist. Meredith has some poetry, and yet I can read James when I cannot look at Meredith.’
‘May 27. “Georgian Poets”. It is a pity that these promising young writers adopted such a title. The use of it lacks the modesty of true genius, as it confuses the poetic chronology, and implies that the hitherto recognized original Georgians — Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, etc., are negligible; or at any rate says that they do not care whether it implies such or no.’
‘June 10. Motored with F. to Bridport, Lyme, Exeter, and Torquay. Called on Mr. and Mrs. Eden Phillpotts. Saw their garden and beautiful flowers. Then back to Teignmouth, Dawlish, and Exeter, putting up at the “Clarence” opposite the Cathedral.’
‘June ix. To Cathedral — then home via Honiton, Chard, Crewkerne.’
In July they were in London on a visit to Lady St. Helier, and paid a long-promised call on Sir Frederick and Lady Treves in Richmond Park. Later on in the month he was at the funeral at Stinsford of a suddenly lost friend, Mr. Douglas Thornton the banker, and received visits from Sir Henry Hoare, who motored over from Stour- head, and Professor Flinders Petrie, whom he had known but not seen for many years.
In August he learnt of the loss of his second cousin’s son, Lieutenant George, who had been killed that month in Gallipoli during a brave advance. Hardy makes this note of him:
‘Frank George, though so remotely related, is the first one of my family to be killed in battle for the last hundred years, so far as I know. He might say Militavi non sine gloria — short as his career has been.’
In the autumn Hardy sometimes, and his wife continually, assisted in the evenings at the soldiers’ tea-room established in the Dorchester Corn Exchange; they visited the Australian Camp near Weymouth, and spent two or three days at Melbury House. On returning he learnt that his elder sister was again seriously ill. She died the same week, at his brother’s house at Talbothays. The two poems, ‘Logs on the Hearth’ and ‘ In the Garden’, in Moments of Vision, evidently refer to her, as also the Fourth person in ‘Looking Across’, in the same volume.
The hobby of her life had been portrait-painting, and she had shown her aptitude in catching a likeness, particularly of her relations, her picture of her mother in oils bearing a striking resemblance to the striking original. But she had been doomed to school-teaching, and organ-playing in this or that village church during all her active years, and hence was unable to devote sufficient time to pictorial art till leisure was too late to be effective. Her character was a somewhat unusual one, being remarkably unassertive, even when she was in the right, and could easily have proved it; so that the point of the following remark about her is manifest:
‘November 29. Buried her under the yew-tree where the rest of us lie. As Mr. Cowley read the words of the psalm “Dixi Custo- diam” they reminded me strongly of her nature, particularly when she was young: “ I held my tongue and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words.” That was my poor Mary exactly. She never defended herself; and that not from timidity, but indifference to opinion.’
The funeral day had been cold and wet, and Hardy was laid up l.t.h.2 b till the end of the year with a violent bronchitis and racking cough. Nevertheless, during December, in response to a request from Winchester House for a contribution to a ‘Pro-Ally Film’ of paragraphs in facsimile from authors’ writings, which was ‘to be exhibited throughout the world and make its appeal particularly to the neutral nations’, he was able to send the following passages from Pitt’s actual speech in the House of Commons a hundred years earlier, as closely paraphrased in The Dynasts:
ENGLAND AT BAY
The strange fatality that haunts the times
Wherein our lot is cast, has no example;
Times are they fraught with peril, trouble, gloom;
We have to mark their lourings and to face them.
ENGLAND RESOLUTE
Unprecedented and magnificent
As were our strivings in the previous wars,
Our efforts in the present shall transcend them,
As men will learn.
In January of the next year (1916) a war ballad of some weirdness, called ‘The Dead and the Living One’, which had been written several months before, was published in the Sphere and the New York World, and later reprinted in Moments of Vision.
In February he was again confined to his room with a cold, the previous one never having quite gone off. But he managed to send to the Red Cross Sale for this year, not any work of his own, but ‘A Sheaf of Victorian Letters’, written to T. H. by many other writers, nearly all deceased, and of a very interesting kind. Mrs. Hardy also sent to the same sale three short MSS. of his: ‘ The Oxen’, ‘The Breaking of Nations’, and a fragment of a story — the whole fetching £72: 10s.
A Book of Homage to Shakespeare was printed in April, for which Hardy had written a piece entitled ‘ To Shakespeare after three hundred years’, afterwards included in the volume called Moments of Vision.
In June he served again as Grand Juror at the Assizes, and was at a rehearsal in Dorchester of Wessex Scenes from The Dynasts. This, made by ‘The Hardy Players’, was quite a different selection from that of Mr. Granville-Barker, embracing scenes of a local character only, from which could be gathered in echoes of drum and trumpet and alarming rumours, the great events going on elsewhere Though more limited in scope than the former, it was picturesque and. effective as performed by the local actors at the Weymouth Pavilion a fortnight later, and was well appreciated by the London press.
In the same month of June he paid a visit with his wife and remaining sister to a house he had never entered for forty years. This was Riverside Villa, Sturminster Newton — the first he had furnished after his first marriage, and in which he had written The Return of the Native. He found it much as it had been in the former years; and it was possibly this visit which suggested the poems about Sturminster that were published in Moments of Vision. Motorings to Melbury again, to Swanage, and again to Bridport, passed the midsummer days.
‘July 27. Times Literary Supplement on “What is Militarism?” The article suggests a term to express the cause of the present war, “hypochondria” (in the Prussians). I should rather have said “apprehensiveness”. The term would fit some of the facts like a glove.’
In September they set out by train for Cornwall, breaking the journey at Launceston. Thence they went on to Camelford, Bos- castle, and St. Juliot, to see if Hardy’s design and inscription for the tablet in the church had been properly carried out and erected. At Tintagel they met quite by accident Hardy’s friends the Stuart- Wortleys, which made their sojourn at that romantic spot a very pleasant one.
‘September 10. Sunday. To Tintagel Church. We sat down in a seat bordering the passage to the transept, but the vicar appalled us by coming to us in his surplice and saying we were in the way of the choir, who would have to pass there. He banished us to the back of the transept. However, when he began his sermon we walked out. He thought it was done to be even with him, and looked his indignation; but it was really because we could not see the nave lengthwise, which my wife, Emma, had sketched in watercolours when she was a young woman before it was “ restored”, so that I was interested in noting the changes, as also was F., who was familiar with the sketch. It was saddening enough, though doubtless only a chance, that we were inhospitably received in a church so much visited and appreciated by one we both had known so well. The matter was somewhat mended, however, by their singing the beautiful 34th Psalm to Smart’s fine tune, “Wiltshire”. By the by, that the most poetical verse of that psalm is omitted from it in Hymns Ancient and Modern shows the usual ineptness of hymn selectors. We always sang it at Stinsford. But then, we sang there in the good old High-and-Dry Church way — straight from the New Version.’
Multifarious matters filled up the autumn — among others a visit to the large camp of some 5000 German prisoners in Dorchester; also visits to the English wounded in hospital, which conjunction led him to say:
‘At the German prisoners’ camp, including the hospital, operating- room, etc., were many sufferers. One Prussian, in much pain, died whilst I was with him — to my great relief, and his own. Men lie helpless here from wounds: in the hospital a hundred yards off other men, English, lie helpless from wounds — each scene of suffering caused by the other!
‘These German prisoners seem to think that we are fighting to exterminate Germany, and though it has been said that, so far from it, we are fighting to save what is best in Germany, Cabinet ministers do not in my opinion speak this out clearly enough.’
In October the Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy were published in Macmillan’s Golden Treasury Series, a little book that received some very good reviews; and in December the JVessex Scenes from The Dynasts, which had been produced earlier at Weymouth, were performed at Dorchester. Some of Hardy’s friends, including Sir James Barrie and Mr. Sydney Cockerell, came to see the piece, but Hardy could not accompany them, being kept in bed by another cold. The performances were for Red Cross Societies.
‘January 1, 1917. Am scarcely conscious of New Year’s Day.’
‘January 6. I find I wrote in 1888 that “Art is concerned with seemings only”, which is true:’
To the Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature ‘February 8, 1917.
‘Dear Sir,
‘I regret that as I live in a remote part of the country I cannot attend the meeting of the Entente Committee.
‘In respect of the Memorandum proposing certain basic principles of international education for promoting ethical ideals that shall conduce to a League of Peace, I am in hearty agreement with the proposition.
‘I would say in considering a modus operandi:
‘That nothing effectual will be accomplished in the cause of Peace till the sentiment of Patriotism be freed from the narrow meaning attaching to it in the past (still upheld by Junkers and Jingo- ists) and be extended to the whole globe.
