Serene Autumn

Mits. HARDY has done her work with such modesty and self- effacement that heroics from a reviewer would be out of place.

She sets the key of her narrative thus : " the subject of this memoir married the present writer . . " We recognize this

manner of speaking. The detachment may be a personal characteristic, but it is surely one much fostered by many years spent with a being who was addicted to this oblique method of self-expression. This habit in Hardy was significant of much more than mere modesty of manner. It was the signal of his religious and ethical code, and so betrayed the fact that in these important matters he was fundamentally orthodox in temper, if not in creed. Although the nineteenth century showed in this country the growth of political indi- vidualism ; the code of a civilized Englishman, which was accepted without question, was that which found its fullest expression in the Public Schools. Reticence was the hall- mark of a gentleman, a reticence of manner founded on a social and Christian humility. One did not shout either with pain or bravado. Vulgarity was a cardinal sin.

These conventions were not only accepted by Hardy ; he profoundly believed in them, as concomitants of a deep sensitiveness in the matter of human relationships and the formalized social duties springing from them. One of the most conspicuous qualities in the character presented so faith- fully .by. Mrs.. Hardy is his courtesy to friend and stranger, and his abnormal sense of duty towards them. Friendship to him was a long organism through the years that one would no more think of disturbing than one would tear up the mossy headstones from Stinsford Churchyard, or deface the quaint architectural . oddities of the revered pile which housed the most intimate history of a thousand years of the beloved community of which, he was one devout member.

His consciousness of this continuity of relationship between the generations of man amounted to a genius for the reality of history, and without it we could not have had the machinery of the Dynasts, whose rustic structure enables us to pry into Napoleonic Europe with an intimacy and tenderness that no urbane historian has succeeded in kindling in our_ minds. In what is such a deep sense of social duty- seated ? We cannot evade the answer, no matter how -much prejudiced we may be by our par- ticular creed or orthodoxy. Mr. Chesterton, for instance, may still think of Hardy as " the village atheist " .(a cruel mis- judgment from so great a critic) ; but he must -know that man's humanity to man is not a natural order ; that it must, there- fore, spring from some ulterior compulsion not of this material world ; a compulsion urged from a belief in 4leeper responsi- bilities, by which the spiritual man must anSwertd-some- Force that makes no account of self-interest or mundane expediency.

Hardy refused to rationalize this Force into a myth or creed; beyond calling it " the invariable antecedent," which was -a, sufficient delineation for him- to establish it is his monitor in his search for moral duty. That he obeyed it with a remarkable austerity and dignity ire-know by the record of his .:Conduct. To-day we see this same spirit informing his wdrIC ; giving gentleness;' reminiscence, a continuity 'ofloVe aid:neighbourliness, to the people in his books. How strange it IS. to us now to think that.he was reviled as a blasphemer ;

that a Scottish paper could say, " Swinburne planteth, Hardy ; wiiMt.aniaiatan-Sixeth the increase," or that the Bishop of Wakefield could write threatening letters to the circulating libraries about the menace of " Jude the Obscure." In his innocence, and simplicity Hardy was surprised and wounded by these attacks from a world of noisy officials ; so much so that he gave up writing fiction for verse, in the belief that the greater inaccessibility of the latter would make the expression of his faith almost a private affair. In effect, he retired with Gissing's words on his tongue :—

" Every day the world grows noisier : I, for one, will have. no part in that increasing clamour, and were it 'onlk by my silence, 1 confer a boon on all."

He was, in other words, pure artist ; shy of attaching himSelf to any creed. This habit had no particular bias against the religion of the day, for we find him refusing to join the Ra- tionalist Press Association on the grounds that

" though I am interested in the Society I feel it to be one which would naturally compose itself rather of writers on philosophy, science, and history, than of writers of imaginative works, whale effects depend largely on detachment. By belonging, to a philosophic association imaginative writers place themselves in this difficulty, that they are misread as propagandist when they mean to be simply artistic and delineative.

That was his temperament ; always to be the quiet onlooker, and never the violent advocate. It produced in him a certain evasiveness, a denigration of personality, qualities which put a mask even over his physical features so far as we can judge from portraits. They made him as unpronounced as a great man could be, and determined the tone of his work, giving it, in spite of his bursts of Grecian glory, almost a monotone of sere-green melancholy.

In spite of my resolution, I have slipped into discussion of

the deeper phases of this rare artist. I should like to go on to

discuss the absorbingly interesting revelations by Mrs. Hardy of his experiments with the technique of fiction and poetry. But it might bore the general reader, who is not perhaps interested in the close relationship between the character- of the artist and the method by which he works. One may not

always agree with Hardy's theories on the art. His deliberate identification of fancy and imagination, for instance, by which he contradicted one of the principles of Wordsworth's aesthetic,

I think had a damaging effect on his work. It led him to giVe unduly serious stress to whim or even rhetorical conceit, and to load a mood of prettiness or charm with a philosophic silk

nificance too heavy for it, so that both were unconvincing. He touched bed-rock, however, when he stated his belief that " poet should express the emotion of all ages, and the thought or his own." That purpose implies a discipline of spirit and intellect, a dual labour to which he never: failed to apply himself with an obedience so simple and unquestioning as to

be truly saintlike.

Mrs. Hardy, by her careful laying together of extracts from

his journals, notes and letters, and by her revealing com- mentary, has made him live for us. We see him in all his gen- tleness and courtesy, with the strange hint of haunted solitude and horror occasionally glinting in his shy eyes. For some reason which I cannot explain, I find the picture poignantly sad, and I close the book feeling overcome with a sense of heartache and loneliness. It may be because loved his work so much. There will be millions of hearts who will share my

feelings as generation after generation of readers come to the work of this man, the last great rustic, or Homer " of a little clan." The conditions that could produce him and his kind have already vanished. Ricamtri _