THOMAS HARDY'S 70th BIRTHDAY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 20, 23 July 1910, Page 10

THOMAS HARDY'S 70th BIRTHDAY.

■» SECLUSION IN A LONDON uxaT. WORLD-WIDE GREETINGS. In the quiet that only a rigorouslyguarded front door can ensur^ where the hero of the occasion is a world-famous novelist and the scene a Maida-vale flat, Mr. Thomas Hardy celebrated on 2nd June his 70th birthday. From every part of the world congratulations reached him by post and telegram in this little eyrie in the heart of a 'London that he knows and loves a good deal better than some Wessex worshippers imagine. But Mr. Hardy spent the day in characteristic seclusion. Just recovered from an attack of influenza, he had an added reason for shrinking from ever-intrusive public embassies. So, while pilgrims and journalists, Cockney and American, were trampling the path that leads to Max Gate, Mr. Hardy's country home in his own Dorsetshire, he himself was calmly sitting at_ his London tea-table with his devotea wife, listening to the distant and not unmusical roar of the laden motor-buses tearing their way to London's northern "dormitories." To those who know Thomas Hardy well nothing could seem more appropriate than this peaceful celebration. For Mr. Hardy does not live by the almanack. He is not the kind of man to challenge each little twist of the calendar with noisy platitudes. Ever brooding, ever pondering thosp impersonal mysteries compared to which individual human life seems so pathetically unimportant, the greatest novelist of our time might well wish to be pardoned some of the trivialities that publicity forces upon wellknown folk at times like these. "From this point of view," -writes a Daily Chronicle correspondent who has seen a good deal of Mr. Hardy during the last few years, "I might recall a little incident that gives perhaps a better portrait of Mr. Hardy in his old age than any word-painting could do. "I happened to be strolling out from Dorchester to Max Gate in the early twilight of a winter afternoon, and on nearing the house I saw Mr. Hardy himself standing at his own gate, and looking straight from his tree-embowered garden out over the grey sweep of down opposite— cultivated in the hollow, with the bare brow of the hill dotted with sheep folds. Away to the right the homely lights of Dorchester were beginning to gleam cosily. But above the hill opposite came the night-wrack, rising vast and impenetrable over the unpeopled fields. LITERARY MIRACLE. "This, to bo sure, is just the final twilight picture of Mr. Hardy. The Wessex novelist — with his amazing insight into the hearts and humours and passions of his fellow-countryfolk themselves — leads up to it. Here again one must know Mr. Hardy in his Dorchester home to understand fully his relation to the country people. "Anybody going to Dorset for the first time is amazed at finding how they seem to take 'Tom Hardy' for granted. 'Well, to think of that! And they count him a great writer up in London, do they?' Again and again one comes across these expressions of wonder over the greatness of the quiet neighbour of Max Gate. "The reason is partly because Mr. Hardy is an almost solitary literary miracle in a wholly unliterary world. Indeed it is the glorious unconsciousness ( of Wessex that has helped Mr. Hardy' enormously to make it a subject for supreme art. The Wessex people have lived and grown around him, as naturally as the landscape with which their whole being is interpenetrated, and the accident of Mr. Hardy's genius has made the people and the place grow together in those wonderful books as well. "Partly, of course, it is because Mr. Hardy has grown there himself as naturally as they, and is, in half his personality, as unselfconscious a Wessex man as any. It is an astonishing contrast to talk of life and death with this profound, deeply-cultured poet in his home, and then to go out with him into the town and find him a comparatively humble, but always welcome guest, in parlour or behind the shop, talking of this or that good gossip with as much purely personal interest as the folk themselves. '"This js the reason, perhaps, why, as poet, philosopher, and seer, Mr. Hardy seems too great to bo fastened down to Wessex, and' yet from another point of view Wessex is a good deal greater than its famous son — a point upon which both he and Wessex are agreed. "Altogether it is a strange tangle of existences — the frit, i-ich self-contained country-side, the brooding, sensitive I artist using it for the evolving of worldtragedies and world-comedies; simply because nature planted him there ; and the great reading public clapping the tvo together and talking about 'Hardy's Wessex,' and putting in their visiting cards at Max Gate door !" Mr. Hardy, we may add, is In fah!y gjood health, but the members of his family and his nearest friends declare that for a mnn of his advancing years ne works too hard.