Some Diversions Of A Man Of Letters Part 11

he said, "by encouraging me to write." What might prove the scheme of a very pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to the fiery and impatient author, who had by this time retired for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of essays dealing with things in general, but bound together by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden of bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The author was to suppose himself seated with a friend on the terrace at the top of the garden, and to let the idea of the bamboo run through the whole tissue of reflections and reminiscences like an emerald thread. Lord Redesdale was enchanted, and the idea took fire at once. He replied:--

"You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and stones! I shall work all my conceits into your plan, and am now proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it. I will try to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo-garden which was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin to arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may come into my crazy brain."

In this way was started the book, of which, alas! only such fragments were composed as form the earlier part of the volume published after his death. It is, however, right to point out that for the too-brief remainder of his life Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a hint has just been given. The _Veluvana_ was to be the crowning production of his literary life, and it was to sum up the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the West. He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. "That will do to go into _Veluvana_," was his cry when he met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on September 15th, 1915, he wrote to me:--

"To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that plants, having many human qualities, may also in some degree have human motives--that they are not altogether mere automata--and as I thought, I began to imagine that I could detect something resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them that at any rate the idea calls attention to the movements themselves, some of which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the scheme of _Veluvana_."

The monasteries of twelfth-century j.a.panese Buddhism, which he had visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to his memory, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary interest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his j.a.panese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary.

He wrote to me:--

"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the early days of our intercourse with j.a.pan. He was a valuable a.s.set to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another very strong man."

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of _Veluvana_, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this direction proved to be too slight for publication. He met with some expressions of extremely modern j.a.panese opinion which annoyed him, and to which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he was not content, and no one could have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did not abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary that he should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure for the inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucesters.h.i.+re his deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life.

He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):--

"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country Mouse--even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars of the great--would still be out of all communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know."

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "I hate the autumn," he said, "for it means the death of the year, but I try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among his plants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes, the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become almost impenetrable to sound.

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and curiosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He wrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):--

"I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of the _Purgatorio_.

It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W.W.

Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or two has appeared h.o.a.re's Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries were practically useless except for courier's work.

How splendid Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them! They won't let the poet say that the sun shone or the night was dark without seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always seem to _chercher midi a quatorze heures_, and irritate me beyond measure.

There is invention enough in Dante without all their embroidery.

But this grubbing and grouting seems to be infectious among Dante scholars--they all catch the disease."

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholars.h.i.+p, the Honourable W.W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the pa.s.sage just quoted, and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:--

"This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before attempted to read him. The difficulty scared me."

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked away for hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the _Purgatorio_ without flagging, but he broke down early in the _Paradiso_. He had no sympathy whatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I confess I took advantage of this to recall his attention to _Veluvana_, for which it was no longer possible to hope that the author would collect any material out of Dante.

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history during the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russian chapters of his _Memories_, but it was another distraction. It took his thoughts away from _Veluvana_, although he protested to me that he could prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal his fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for he wrote (March 17th, 1916):--

"You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part in society, the Three R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those only two--for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time."

He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. About this time he wrote:--

"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford--not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible--but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris--all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points."

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure and delighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with life, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that visible determination to be strong. But the features of his character had none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esprit," which Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old man's self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was his memory of pa.s.sing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad.

There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London exhausted him. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was distracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses, which he called "the pride of my old age." But, after a gesture of despair, he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful village on his Oxfords.h.i.+re property, of which he was particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon a bank of wet gra.s.s. He was not allowed to remain there long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might not have been serious had it not been that in a few days' time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on being punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his plans by staying at home.

Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to transact some business, and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting took place in the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded a.s.sembly, which greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright eyes and heard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would see him again no more. His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making a superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he never rose again. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long time his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him and filled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mind to the very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued to correspond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and even about Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale's interest and curiosity were sustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one week before his death, he wrote:--

"Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published, _Les auteurs de la guerre de_ 1914? Bismarck is the subject of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; and the third with _leurs complices_. I know E.D., he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course there are exaggerations, but he is always well _doc.u.mente_, and there is much in his work that is new. I don't admire his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough, but what can be said in favour of the historic future with which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on edge."

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he pa.s.sed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon on August 17th, 1916. He was saved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude.

THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY

When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's admirers, who were expecting from him a new novel, received instead a thick volume of verse, there was mingled with their sympathy and respect a little disappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, reminded one another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. Thackeray had published _Ballads_, and George Eliot had expatiated in a _Legend of Jubal_. No one thought the worse of _Coningsby_ because its author had produced a _Revolutionary Epic_. It took some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the new _Wess.e.x Poems_ did not fall into this accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr.

Hardy, abundant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary and ornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary to insist on the complete independence of his career as a poet, and to point out that if he had never published a page of prose he would deserve to rank high among the writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes of his verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet, that I propose to speak of him to-day.

It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was over fifty when he published his first secular verses, but Mr. Hardy was approaching his sixtieth year when he sent _Wess.e.x Poems_ to the press. Such self-restraint--"none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall"--has always fascinated the genuine artist, but few have practised it with so much tenacity. When the work of Mr. Hardy is completed, nothing, it is probable, will more strike posterity than its unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarce any other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of resolve. His novels formed an unbroken series from the _Desperate Remedies_ of 1871 to _The Well-Beloved_ of 1897. In the fulness of his success, and unseduced by all temptation, he closed that chapter of his career, and has kept it closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and periodically, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for reasons best left to his own judgment, to defer the exhibition of his verse until he had completed his work in prose, ought not to prejudice criticism in its a.n.a.lysis of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic panorama. Mr. Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided attention.

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of Mr. Hardy's delay. From such information as lies scattered before us, we gather that it was from 1865 to 1867 that he originally took poetry to be his vocation. The dated pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an idea of the original character of his utterance. On the whole it was very much what it remains in the pieces composed after a lapse of half a century. Already, as a very young man, Mr. Hardy possessed his extraordinary insight into the movements of human character, and his eloquence in translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain of rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely to heart the admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous Preface to the 1800 edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ to seek for inspiration in that condition where "the pa.s.sions of men are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature."

But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems would have been received in the mid-Victorian age with favour, or even have been comprehended. Fifty years ahead of his time, he was asking in 1866 for novelty of ideas, and he must have been conscious that his questioning would seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, and he left the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, a very unrelated force, that of the _Poems and Ballads_ of the same year. But Swinburne succeeded in his revolution, and although he approached the art from an opposite direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation of Mr. Hardy.

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his silence of forty years, as a poet who laboured, like Swinburne, at a revolution against the optimism and superficial sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is true, tended to accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy drew verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does not affect their common att.i.tude, and the sympathy of these great artists for one another's work has already been revealed, and will be still more clearly exposed. But they were unknown to each other in 1866, when to both of them the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering femininity of the "jewelled line," the intense respect for Mrs. Grundy in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, and to be trampled upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest verse no echo of the pa.s.sionate belief in personal immortality which was professed by Ruskin and Browning. He opposed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; the Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. He rejected the idea of the sympathy and goodness of Nature, and was in revolt against the self-centredness of the Romantics. We may conjecture that he combined a great reverence for _The Book of Job_ with a considerable contempt for _In Memoriam_.

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which pa.s.sed off; it was something inherent that remained, and gives to-day their peculiar character to Mr.

Hardy's latest lyrics. But before we examine the features of this personal mode of interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what little light we can on the historic development of it. In the pieces dated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of almost everything which has since characterised the poet. In "Amabel" the ruinous pa.s.sage of years, which has continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives of small scenes--"your face, and the G.o.d-curst sun, and a tree, and a pond edged with grayish leaves" ("Neutral Times")--which had not existed in English verse since the days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a sense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of chance--In "Hap" the author would positively welcome a certainty of divine hatred as a relief from the strain of depending upon "cra.s.s casualty." Here and there in these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is remarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained afterwards in the expression of his most strange images and fantastic revelations. We read in "At a Bridal":--

"Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree, And each thus found apart, of false desire A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire As had fired ours could ever have mingled we!"

This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think out, and at a hasty glance seems m.u.f.fled up in obscurity beyond the darkness of Donne; moreover, it is scarcely worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardy was presently to become. Perhaps of the poems certainly attributable to this earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets called "She to Him"

gives clearest promise of what was coming. The sentiment is that of Ronsard's famous "Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la chandelle," but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man to the woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as where the latter says that as her temperament dies down the habit of loving will remain, and she be

"Numb as a vane that cankers on its point, True to the wind that kissed ere canker came,"

which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society knew nothing of.

On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing that whatever the cause, the definite dedication to verse was now postponed. Meanwhile, the writing of novels had become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, and ten years go by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it is interesting to find that when the great success of _Far from the Madding Crowd_ had introduced him to a circle of the best readers, there followed an effect which again disturbed his ambition for the moment.

Mr. Hardy was once more tempted to change the form of his work. He wished "to get back to verse," but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen, who induced him to start writing _The Return of the Native_ instead. On March 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore, then a complete stranger, wrote to express his regret that "such almost unequalled beauty and power as appeared in the novels should not have a.s.sured themselves the immortality which would have been conferred upon them by the form of verse." This was just at the moment when we find Mr. Hardy's conversations with "long Leslie Stephen in the velveteen coat"

obstinately turning upon "theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the const.i.tution of matter, and the unreality of time." To this period belongs also the earliest conception of _The Dynasts_, an old note-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestion that the author should attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815."

To this time also seems to belong the execution of what has proved the most attractive section of Mr. Hardy's poetry, the narratives, or short Wess.e.x ballads. The method in which these came into the world is very curious. Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. For instance, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first published by Lionel Johnson in 1894, had been begun as early as 1867, and was finished ten years later. The long ballad of "Leipzig" and the savage "San Sebastian," both highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few lines of each noted down long before their completion. "Valenciennes,"

however, belongs to 1878, and the "Dance at the Phnix," of which the stanza beginning "'Twas Christmas" alone had been written years before, seems to have been finished about the same time. What evidence is before us goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy became a complete master of the art of verse, and that his poetic style was by this time fixed. He still kept poetry out of public sight, but he wrote during the next twenty years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his novels, the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 1898. If no other collection of his lyrical verse existed, we should miss a mult.i.tude of fine things, but our general conception of his genius would be little modified.

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequent volumes as mere repet.i.tions of the original _Wess.e.x Poems_. They present interesting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on the features which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. _Poems of the Past and Present_, which came out in the first days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as it paralleled its three years' product with that of the thirty years of _Wess.e.x Poems_. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious that in 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used to be called his "portfolio" those specimens which he thought to be most attractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite the case. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his preoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song:--

"Must I pipe a palinody, Or be silent thereupon?"

He decides that silence has become impossible:--

"Nay; I'll sing 'The Bridge of Lodi'-- That long-loved, romantic thing, Though none show by smile or nod, he Guesses why and what I sing!"

Here is the germ of _The Dynasts_. But in the meantime the crisis of the Boer War had cut across the poet's dream of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of the Dorsets.h.i.+re elements of the British army at the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been suspected there--a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Another set of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wess.e.x.

Another section of _Poems of the Past and Present_ is severely, almost didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that G.o.d Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On a Fine Morning":--

"Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being; Not from noting Life's conditions, Not from heeding Time's monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing on the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem."