Barrie on Hardy

The large-headed little gnome whose name is Sir James Matthew Barrie (Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton) stood in Dorchester last week with a string in his hand. He gave the string a tug. some drapery dropped and there, in bronze, sat the late great Author Thomas Hardy. Dorchester was "Casterbridge" in Hardy's Wessex novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native. He died near there three years ago (TIME, Jan. 23, 1928). When the monument--designed by Eric Henri Kennington and paid for by the writer's admirers all over the world --was unveiled, Sir James made known an obscure fact about Hardy's life.

"When the child Hardy was born," said he, "the doctor thought him dead and dropped him in a basket. That was an anxious moment for this country. But a woman stepped forward to make sure, and found he was alive. A statue to this woman--Kennington could have done worse than to give us that!

"What interests me still more is this: was Hardy shamming in the basket? If so, it was the only time in his life he ever shammed. Yet, knowing what we do of him now, we may think that at his first sight of life he liked it so little he lay very still. There was never any more faltering. An undaunted mind--that was Hardy. He was a great man. That was his hard fate." P: Last week from England's Lake District came another literary incident. A Mrs. Jane Jefferson of Youngstown, Ohio, went to Cockermouth to see the birthplace of Poet William Wordsworth. She looked all over town, finally got some one to point out the unmarked house, now a doctor's office. "Young man," cried she, "if William Wordsworth had been born in Youngstown we would have shouted it out to the world and made it impossible for visitors to miss seeing his birthplace!"

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