THOMAS HARDY’S BIRTHPLACE

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25537, 3 July 1948, Page 3

THOMAS HARDY’S BIRTHPLACE

[A leading article in the “Manchester Guardian,” June 4.]

There will be general satisfaction that the house at Higher Bockhampton where Thomas Hardy was born is to become the property of the National Trust. Not often in English letters can one find like evidence of the place so shaping a man and patterning his moods, his style, and content. Dorset made Thomas Hardy, and soon Hardy was bringing back to Dorset a lustre-almost without comparison in the story of the English countryside. In “The Return of the Native” he described “the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste.” There was no limit to his feeling for his home pastures or his understanding of their magic. It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it well an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this .... Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. Fair prospects, he noted, wed happily with fair times, but then (as indeed now) times were not always fair.

Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings over sadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of called charming and fair. The delicate child born in the sevenroomed house at Higher Rockhampton on June 2, 1840, confounded the doctors. He grew up on that lovely and silent spot between woodland and heathland, and took it and the six counties around it into his heart and into literature. Nothing distressed him more towards the end of his life than the fear that his birthplace might Become shabby and overgrown. Now that need never happen. RELIGION They Shine Like Stars. By the Kev. Desmond Morse-Boycott. Skeffingtons. 380 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. The Threefold Cord. By Maude Royden. Gollancz. 125 pp. The Bible and Modern Scholarship. By Sir Frederic Kenyon. John Murray. 53 pp. [Reviewed by L.G.W.]

In this book the author begins his story of the Tracfhrian Movement and its Anglo-Catholic aftermath with the familiar recital of the record of late eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglicanism, with its quiet worldliness varied by the grossest scandals. With the coming of Keble, Pusey, and Newman the ary bones come to life. In chapters with such suggestive titles as “Jesuitical Fifth-Columnism,” “The Woman in White and the Man in Black,” we can follow the history of Newman’s succession to Rome and the rise of the Anglican sisterhoods and monastic orders. All sorts of minor characters pass before the reader of Mr Boycott’s book; and many churchmen will value it for the interesting account it gives of a number of obscure, hard-working priests and laymen who spent their lives in restoring what they believed to be England’s Catholic heritage. There are 16 appendices which contain an account of "Irvingism,” and many entertaining stories, e.g.. the toffee-making of John Keble, the mystery of Father Dominic, the choir schools. Dr. Pusey’s lamb, the revival of Walsingham, and the desecration of Mazarion Church. These stories have the merit of being true. LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

It is perhaps not generally known that the famous woman preacher we call Miss Royden is a married woman. Her book consists of a few chapters of autobiography, most concerned with the period when she first knew her future husband and with their subsequent married life. She did not marry the Rev. Hudson Shaw until he was quite an old man. a widower, whose first wife had been a friend of Miss Royden for many years. The title, “The Threefold Cord," is derived from the fact that these three people. Miss Royden and Mr and Mrs Slpw, were friends for 40 years and more, and had the deepest affection for one another. Readers who know and admire Miss Royden will find her story one of great interest. It may strike others as'a little too sentimental. BIBLICAL CRITICISM

Sir Frederic Kenyon’s book is based on a lecture delivered before the University of London in 1947. As a summary account of biblical criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is excellent. One chapter deals with the views put forward by Dr. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham, in his “Rise of Christianity.” Sir Frederic is quite successful in showing that the Bishop is no authority on biblical archaeology and that his treatment of the New Testament is arbitrary and his knowledge of its palaeography inadequate. In spite of his great learning, Sir Frederic would be regarded by many scholars, more competent in biblical studies than Dr. Barnes, as unduly conservative. We still have inadequate information, for example, on which to defend the traditional ascription of the Fourth Gospel to St. John. MINUTE SCOT FIRMLY VINDICATES ABILITY TO APPRECIATE JOKE AT HIS OWN EXPENSE (6d). The heterogeneous composition of human nature was remarkably exemplified in Johnson. His liberality in giving his money to persons in distress was extraordinary. Yet there lurked about him a propensity to paltry saving. . . . He has now and then borrowed a shilling of me; and. when I asked him for it again, seemed to be rather out of humour. A droll little circumstance once occurred: As if he meant to reprimand my minute exactness as a creditor, he thus addressed me; “Boswell, lend me sixpence—not. to be repaid.’’ —JAMES BOSWELL: “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. ’