Death of Hardy

In a small room in an English country house, famed Author Thomas Hardy lay sick in bed. Frail, 87, a little querulous in his talk, he still seemed unaccustomed to this invalid ease, the result of a chill he lad caught a month before. His hands, as thin and brown as claws, played nervously with the edge of his quilt. James Barrie came to talk to him; Hardy's peaked mournful face was turned sideways on its pillow, his voice seemed shrill and tired as he spoke to the writer who, with himself, shares the honor of being most respected by the British public. For a few days Thomas Hardy grew stronger. Then one early evening last week after signing a check and reading some of Walter de la Mare's poems, Thomas Hardy died.

After this there was a clamor about the most fitting burial place for so great an author. It was decided that the ashes of the man who had written, in the last paragraph of one of his greatest novels, "'Justice was done' . . . and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess. . . ." should be taken to Westminster Abbey, burial place of famed Englishmen, preserved in a vault. His heart, removed from his body before cremation, was buried in the earth at Dorchester.

To explain Hardy's position in English letters, it is necessary to push the story back to the middle of the 19th century, when Thackeray was writing his voluminously graceful fictions, when Gladstone was hobbling inelegantly through London, when Queen Victoria was swishing around her palace in long dresses. Hardy was then a small boy who took special pleasure in walking through Wessex fields, dawdling to talk with old men as they drove their cattle along the roads. The moors stretched out around the village of Upper Hampton where he lived; at night the wind blew a mist across them, muffling soft sounds, making a dog's voice, searching along some far hedgerow, an obscure dangerous signal, a portent of sorrow. The quiet tides of the country, the slow changes of the land and its people, were a solemn whisper always ringing in his ears like the sea's slow music echoing in a shell. It is easy to believe the legends of Hardy which picture him as he grew up writing love letters for illiterate or ineloquent country ladies; sitting in thatched cottages hearing farmers tell the stories about old battles that had once stirred their brief clamor in the endless quiet. When he was 16, Thomas Hardy was articled to a Dorchester architect.

Not until eleven years later, after he had given promise of success in this profession, did Thomas Hardy write his first novel, The Poor Man and The Lady. This fell into the hands of an intelligent publisher's reader, the later famed George Meredith, who returned it promptly because it lacked plot. Desperate Remedies desperately remedied this defect, but supplanted it with many others. Under the Greenwood Tree attracted more favorable notice, and in 1874 the Cornhill Magazine published anonymously Far from the Madding Crowd. Its enormous success was in part due to the fact that many painfully unobservant readers attributed it to famed George Eliot, whose works it resembled in certain details. In 1891, before literary England had properly heard of George Bernard Shaw, before Oscar Wilde was a bad name, before ten final absurd years had burned up in a bright sputter for the end of a smoldering century, Thomas Hardy had written Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the most famous of all his fine, austere, tempestuous novels. Four years later he had written Jude the Obscure, the saddest, the last.*

Like many another man who has written fiction, Thomas Hardy had first fashioned verses. Done with prose before he was 60, he returned to poetry, but not with the weak dilettantism of a used-up writer who wished to knot up the last frayed edges of his thought. In his verse/- he states more succinctly, more bitterly the angry, scornful, rebellion with which he regarded the dismal riddle of existence. The terse wrinkled lines of his poetry are like those of his small face in their expression of quiet pessimism, of a thoughtful, stoic sorrow. His "Epitaph on a Pessimist'' is a flippant quatrain:
I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,
I've lived without a dame
From youth-time on; and would to God
My dad had done the same.

A consensus of critical opinions, had it been taken a month ago, would probably have given Author Thomas Hardy the first place among modern English prose writers, perhaps the same position among English poets. There have, on the other hand, always been those critics who inveigh against the less graceful than sturdy power of Author Hardy's fictions. Famed Author George Moore found Hardy's writing almost without merit.

Despite the faults which captious critics have discovered in his writings, the fame of Author Hardy has never wavered or grown thin. While other authors have been hailed, forgotten, rediscovered, his honor has had a steady, splendid growth. Perhaps there is a rocky artifice in his style, a misfit melodrama in the way he arranges a thunderstorm to enlarge the climax of every tragedy, a false fatality in the coincidence that so often generates his plots. But these faults are rooted in deeper virtues: an intense sincerity, unconcerned with merely literary effects, a profound, pitying pessimism, a relentless humanism that condemns the disorderly dieties who make men's lives sterile and without joy. There is also the scope, the inclusiveness that permits him to deal with large effects, to call, in the sweeping vigorous lines of The Dynasts, for Napoleon's army to appear upon the stage.

His face, as he grew older, became more hawklike, sorrowful and astute. Not in feature but in its remote, speculative expression it resembled the face of a man who has worked in country fields, who has grown wise in bringing, to life out of darkness, many harvests of bitter, golden grain.

* In the U. S., Harpers has published Author Hardy's prose works: of these, Far from the Madding Crowd is the one most often recommended to people who have never read Hardy; The Return of the Native has a hard power that, in some opinions, places it above Jude the Obscure. A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Mayor of Casterbridge, both fine novels, are not quite up to the level of Hardy's greatest work.

/- The U. S. publisher of Author Hardy's verse is Macmillan.