Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1192 page)

THE FAMOUS

DOG WESSEX

August 1913-27 Dec. 1926

Faithful. Unflinching.

There were those among Hardy’s friends who thought that his life was definitely saddened by the loss of Wessex, the dog having been the companion of himself and his wife during twelve years of married life. Upon summer evenings or winter afternoons Wessex would walk with them up the grassy slope in the field in front of their house, to the stile that led into Came Plantation, and while Hardy rested on the stile the dog would sit on the ground and survey the view as his master was doing. On Frome Hill when his companions sat on the green bank by the roadside, or on the barrow that crowns the hill, he would lie in the grass at their feet and gaze at the landscape,’ as if’, to quote Hardy’s oft-repeated comment on this,’ it were the right thing to do’.

Those were happy innocent hours. A poem written after the dog’s death, ‘ Dead “ Wessex “, the dog to the household’, well illustrates Hardy’s sense of loss. Two of its verses are:

Do you look for me at times,

Wistful ones?

Do you look for me at times

Strained and still?

Do you look for me at times,

When the hour for walking chimes,

On that grassy path that climbs

Up the hill?

You may hear a jump or trot,

Wistful ones,

You may hear a jump or trot —

Mine, as ‘twere —

You may hear a jump or trot

On the stair or path or plot;

But I shall cause it not,

Be not there.

On December 29 Hardy wrote to his friends Mr. and Mrs. Granville-Barker from Max Gate:

‘. . . This is intended to be a New Year’s letter, but I don’t know if I have made a good shot at it. How kind of you to think of sending me Raymond Guyot’s Napoleon. I have only glanced at it, at the text that is, as yet, but what an interesting collection of records bearing on the life of the man who finished the Revolution with “a whiff of grapeshot”, and so crushed not only its final horrors but all the worthy aspirations of its earlier time, made them as if they had never been, and threw back human altruism scores, perhaps hundreds of years.’

‘31 December. New Year’s Eve. Did not sit up.’

In January 1927 ‘A Philosophical Fantasy’ appeared in the Fortnightly Review. Hardy liked the year to open with a poem of this type from him in some leading review or newspaper. The quotation at the heading, ‘Milton . . . made God argue’, gives the keynote, and the philosophy is much as he had set forth before, but still a ray of hope is shown for the future of mankind.

Aye, to human tribes nor kindlessness

Nor love I’ve given, but mindlessness,

Which state, though far from ending,

May nevertheless be mending.

Weeks passed through a cold spring and Hardy’s eighty-seventh birthday was reached. This year, instead of remaining at Max Gate, he motored with his wife to Netherton Hall in Devonshire, to spend a part of the day with friends, Helen and Harley Granville-Barker. In a letter written some months later, Mrs. Granville-Barker describes this visit.

“... There were no guests, just the peaceful routine of everyday life, for that last birthday here. Mr. Hardy said to you afterwards, you told me, that he thought it might be the last, but at the time he was not in any way sad or unlike himself. He noticed, as always, and unlike most old people, the smallest things. At luncheon, I remember, one of the lace doilies at his place got awry in an ugly way, showing the mat underneath, and I saw him, quietly and with the most delicate accuracy, setting it straight again — all the time taking his part in the talk.

‘Wasn’t it that day he said, speaking of Augustus John’s portrait of him:

‘“I don’t know whether that is how I look or not — but that is how I feel”?

‘In the afternoon we left him alone in the library because we thought he wanted to rest a little. It was cold, for June, and a wood fire was lighted.

‘Once we peeped in at him through the garden window. He was not asleep but sitting, walled in with books, staring into the fire with that deep look of his. The cat had established itself on his knees and he was stroking it gently, but half-unconsciously.

‘It was a wonderful picture of him. I shall not forget it. Nor shall I forget the gay and startlingly youthful gesture with which he flourished his hat towards us as, once in the motor-car, later that afternoon, he drove away from us.’

At the end of the day he seemed in a sad mood, and his wife sought to amuse him by a forecast of small festivities she had planned for his ninetieth birthday, which she assured him would be a great occasion. With a flash of gaiety he replied that he intended to spend that day in bed.

Once again the Balliol Players appeared at Max Gate, this year on July 6. As before, their visit gave Hardy considerable pleasure, and after their performance on the lawn of Iphigenia in Aulis he talked with them freely, appreciating their boyish ardour and their modesty.

A few days later he received visits from his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Mr. and Mrs. John Masefield, and on July 21 he laid the foundation-stone of the new building of the Dorchester Grammar School, which was to be seen clearly from the front gate of his house, looking towards the Hardy Monument, a noticeable object on the sky-line, to the south-west. It was Hardy’s custom nearly every fine morning after breakfast in the summer to walk down to the gate to see what the weather was likely to be by observing this tower in the distance.

The day chosen for the stone-laying was cold and windy, by no means a suitable day for a man of Hardy’s advanced years to stand in the open air bareheaded. Nevertheless he performed his task with great vigour, and gave the following address in a clear resonant voice that could be heard on the outskirts of the crowd that collected to hear him:

‘I have been asked to execute the formal part of to-day’s function, which has now been done, and it is not really necessary that I should add anything to the few words that are accustomed to be used at the laying of foundation or dedication stones. But as the circumstances of the present case are somewhat peculiar, I will just enlarge upon them for a minute or two. What I have to say is mainly concerning the Elizabethan philanthropist, Thomas Hardy, who, with some encouragement from the burgesses, endowed and rebuilt this ancient school after its first humble shape — him whose namesake I have the honour to be, and whose monument stands in the church of St. Peter, visible from this spot. The well-known epitaph inscribed upon his tablet, unlike many epitaphs, does not, I am inclined to think, exaggerate his virtues, since it was written, not by his relatives or dependents, but by the free burgesses of Dorchester in gratitude for his good action towards the town. This good deed was accomplished in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and the substantial stone building in which it merged eventually still stands to dignify South Street, as we all know, and hope it may remain there.

‘But what we know very little about is the personality of this first recorded Thomas Hardy of the Froome Valley here at our back, though his work abides. He was without doubt of the family of the Hardys who landed in this county from Jersey in the fifteenth century, acquired small estates along the river upwards towards its source, and whose descendants have mostly remained hereabouts ever since, the Christian name of Thomas having been especially affected by them. He died in 1599, and it is curious to think that though he must have had a modern love of learning not common in a remote county in those days, Shakespeare’s name could hardly have been known to him, or at the most vaguely as that of a certain ingenious Mr. Shakespeare who amused the London playgoers; and that he died before Milton was born.

‘In Carlylean phraseology, what manner of man he was when he walked this earth, we can but guess, or what he looked like, what he said and did in his lighter moments, and at what age he died. But we may shrewdly conceive that he was a far-sighted man, and would not be much surprised, if he were to revisit the daylight, to find that his building had been outgrown, and no longer supplied the needs of the present inhabitants for the due education of their sons. His next feeling might be to rejoice in the development of what was possibly an original design of his own, and to wish the reconstruction every success.

‘We living ones all do that, and nobody more than I, my retirement from the Governing body having been necessitated by old age only. Certainly everything promises well. The site can hardly be surpassed in England for health, with its open surroundings, elevated and bracing situation, and dry subsoil, while it is near enough to the sea to get very distinct whiffs of marine air. Moreover, it is not so far from the centre of the borough as to be beyond the walking powers of the smallest boy. It has a capable headmaster, holding every modern idea on education within the limits of good judgement, and assistant masters well equipped for their labours, which are not sinecures in these days.

‘I will conclude by thanking the Governors and other friends for their kind thought in asking me to undertake this formal initiation pf the new building, which marks such an interesting stage in the history of the Dorchester Grammar School.’

After the ceremony, having spoken to a few friends, Hardy went away without waiting for the social gathering that followed. He was very tired, and when he reached home he said that he had made his last public appearance.

There seemed no ill after-effects, however, and on August 9 Hardy drove with Gustav Hoist to ‘Egdon Heath’, just then purple with heather. They then went on to Puddletown and entered the fine old church, and both climbed up into the gallery, where probably some of Hardy’s ancestors had sat in the choir, more than a century earlier.

On August 8 he wrote to Mr. J. B. Priestley:

‘. . . I send my sincere thanks for your kind gift of the “ George Meredith” book, and should have done so before if I had not fallen into the sere, and weak eyesight did not trouble me. I have read your essay, or rather have had it read to me, and have been much interested in the bright writing of one in whom I had already fancied I discerned a coming force in letters.

‘I am not at all a critic, especially of a critic, and when the author he reviews is a man who was, off and on, a friend of mine for forty years; but it seems to me that you hold the scales very fairly. Meredith was, as you recognize, and might have insisted on even more strongly, and I always felt, in the direct succession of Congreve and the artificial comedians of the Restoration, and in getting his brilliancy we must put up with the fact that he would not, or could not — at any rate did not — when aiming to represent the “Comic Spirit”, let himself discover the tragedy that always underlies Comedy if you only scratch it deeply enough.’

During the same month Hardy and his wife motored to Bath and back. On the way they had lunch sitting on a grassy bank, as they had done in former years, to Hardy’s pleasure. But now a curious sadness brooded over them; lunching in the open air had lost its charm, and they did not attempt another picnic of this kind.

In Bath Hardy walked about and looked long and silently at various places that seemed to have an interest for him. He seemed like a ghost revisiting scenes of a long-dead past. After a considerable rest in the Pump Room they returned home. Hardy did not seem tired by this drive.

Some weeks later they motored to Ilminster, a little country town that Hardy had long desired to visit. He was interested in the church, and also in the tomb of the founder of Wadham College therein. By his wish, on their return, they drove past the quarries where Ham Hill stone was cut.

Stopping at Yeovil they had tea in a restaurant, where a band of some three musicians were playing. One of Hardy’s most attractive characteristics was his ability to be interested in simple things, and before leaving he stood and listened appreciatively to the music, saying afterwards what a delightful episode that had been.

On September 6, an exceedingly wet day, Mr. and Mrs. John Galsworthy called on their way to London. During the visit Hardy told them the story of a murder that had happened eighty years before. Mr. Galsworthy seemed struck by these memories of Hardy’s early childhood, and asked whether he had always remembered those days so vividly, or only lately. Hardy replied that he had always remembered clearly. He could recall what his mother had said about the Rush murder when he was about the age of six: ‘ The governess hanged him’. He was puzzled, and wondered how a governess could hang a man. Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy thought that Hardy seemed better than when they saw him last, better, in fact, than they had ever seen him.

September 7 being a gloriously fine day, Hardy with his wife walked across the fields opposite Max Gate to see the building of the new Grammar School, then in progress.

During September Hardy was revising and rearranging the Selected Poems in the Golden Treasury Series in readiness for a new edition. The last entry but one in his notebook refers to the sending of the copy to the publishers, and finally, on the 19th of September, he notes that Mr. Weld of Lulworth Castle called with some friends. After this no more is written, but a few notes were made by his wife for the remaining weeks of 1927.

About the 21st of September they drove to Lulworth Castle to lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Weld and a house-party, and Hardy was much interested in all that he was shown in the Castle and in the adjoining church. A few weeks later he and his wife lunched at Charborough Park, the scene of Two on a Tower, the first time he had entered this house.

NOTES BY F. E. H.