THOMAS HARDY DEAD

Evening Star, Issue 19763, 13 January 1928, Page 7

THOMAS HARDY DEAD

POET AND NOVELIST NOTABLE FIGURE PASSES Frees Association—By Telegraph—Copyright. LONDON, January 11. The death is announced of Thomas Hardy, the novelist; aged eighty-seven. He died in his Dorchester home. He was in good health almost to the last, and was able to read and take an interest in the day’s news. He caught a chill in the late severe weather. The burial will take place in the family vault in the village of Stinsford, near Dorchester, immortalised as Mellstock in the novel ‘Under the Greenwood Tree.’ His last poem appeared in ‘ The Times’ on Christmas Eve.—‘The Times.’

MY TRIBUTES TO DEAD WRITER

(British Official News.) Press Association—By Wireless-Copyright RUGBY, January 12. (Received January 15, at noon.) It is understood that a question is being considered of offering burial in Westminster Abbey for the of Mr Thomas Hardy. The late novelist, however, had always expressed a desire to bo interred at Stinsford, near Dorchester, which, under the name of Mellstock, is the scene of his great Essex novels. Scores of telegrams from celebrities in English and European literature have been received to-day at Max Gate, Mr Hardy’s homo at Dorchester, ex-

pressing admiration of the dead writer’s genius and condolence with Mrs Hardy. One of the first was addressed by the King to Mrs Hardy, and' ran: The Queen and I are grieved to hear of the sad doss you have sustained by the death of your distinguished husband, a loss that will be shared by all his countrymen, in whose literature his name will live permanently. We offer yon our deep sympathy in your sorrow. HIS LIFE’S WORK. Thomas Hardy was born at Dorchester on June 2, 1840. Ho was educated at local schools and King’s College, London. He began life as an architect, but forsook that profession for literature. He received the much prized O.M. in 1910, as well as honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, and St. Andrew’s Universities. He held the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. The following is a list of his publications:—Pros©: ‘ Desperate Remedies,’ 1871; ‘ Under the Greenwood Tree or the Mellstock Quire,’ 1872; ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ 1872-73; ‘ Far From the Madding Crowd,’ 1874; ‘Hand of Ethelberta,’ 1876; ‘Return of the Native’ (with map), 1878; ‘ The Trum-pet-major,’ 1879; ‘A .Laodicean,’ 1880-81; ‘Two on a Tower,’ 1882; ‘The liife and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge,’ 1884-85; ‘The Woodlanders,’ 1886-87; ‘Wessex Tales’ (collected), 1888; ‘A Group of Noble Dames,’ 1891; ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ 1891; ‘Life’s Little Ironies’ (collected), 1894; ‘Jude the Obscure,’ 1895; ‘The Pursuit of the Well-be-loved ’ (serially), 1892, revised and rewritten as ‘The Well-beloved,’ 1897; • A Changed Man,’ etc. (collected), 1913. Verse: ‘ Wessex Poems ’ (written 1865 onwards), . 1898; ‘ Rooms of the Past and the Present,’ 1901; ‘The Dynasts’ (epic drama), Part 1., 1903, Part 11., 1906, Part 111., 1908;/Select Rooms of William Barnes,’ with preface, 1908; ‘Time’s Laughing Stocks and Other Verses,’ _ 1909; ‘ Satires of Circumstance ’ (serially), 1911 (with lyrics and reveries), 1914; ‘ Selected Poems,’ 1916; ‘Moments of Vision,’ 1917; ‘Late Lyrics,’ 1922; ‘Queen of Cornwall ’ (play), 1923; ‘ Human Shows,’ 1925; definite Wessex edition of works in prose and verse with new prefaces and notes, 1912 onwards; complete poetical works, two volumes, 1919; limited Mellstock edition of works, 1920. TRIBUTES TO THE MAN AND HIS WORK. “ Mr Hardy has never courted popiilarity, and by remaining faithful to his Wessex as the habitation for himself as well as for his novels he has avoided the contact of tho cliques and the temptation that the clique creates to divorce literature from tho fabric of life itself and to entangle it in dangerous liaisons with isms and ologies and theories of this and that.” said the ‘Manchester Guardian.’ “In all that Mr Hardy has written he has carried forward this tradition of the realistic approach to the institutions which man has moulded so powerfully that they arc only too capable of moulding him. Be the object under view a dynast or a dynamo, Mr Hardy will be thinking in terms of human happiness and human suffering about ‘ the pale, pathetic peoples ’ whom that object will affect. “No facile rhetoric about, progress or the marvels of science or the bounty ol Providence will stir him from his compassionate contemplation of the victims. To people whose mood is given over to a flimsy optimism this kind of utilitarian attack is insufferable. When their catchwords are probed and found >to be either empty bladders or vessels of destructive venom they can always retort with another, and so Mr Hardy has had the word ‘ pessimist ’ flung at him until one’s mind sickened at the meaningless, monotonous charge. In a preface to some of his later poems Mr Hardy has, with a quiet gravity, put this kind of criticism in its place. He has defined his own attitude by asserting that ‘ if a way to the better there be it demands a full look at the worse.’ If this be pessimism', then the sooner we are all pessimists the better for the state of the world. The work of his life has been the sensitive expression of relentless scrutiny, and a good companion to all to-day’s wishes for his long and happy life might be tho ambition to share both Mr Hardy’s pity for an anguished world and his long unwillingness to cease from mental strife.’’ The following is from ‘ Portraits of the Nineties,’ by E. T. Raymond:— “ It is no exaggeration to say thaMgr

many people the publication of ‘Teas of the D’UrWvilles ’ was the most important event of the nineties. There are two tests which a work of the imagination must pass before it can be called successful in the highest and best sense. It must satisfy the critical. It must appeal to the uncritical. The thing which the connoisseur alone can appfeciate is often fine art: it is seldom truly great art. The thing which may momentarily capture the crowd may be pure rubbish. It is only just to say that most of the crowd are well enough aware that it is nothing more; having an appetite for anything readable, they accept it on the countryman’s principle that some beer is better than other beer, but that there is no bad beer. But when the connoisseur can find no great flaw, and the crowd feels a compelling charm, we are most surely in the region of the greatest. Sometimes, as in the case of the Bible, of ‘ Gulliver,’ and of ‘ Hamlet,’ the crowd and the critics make their discoveries simultaneously; sometimes, as in the case of ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ a book is prized by blacksmiths and cowmen long before its genius is recognised by the refined. ‘ Tess of the D’Urbervilles ’ was an instance in the former kind. All but a few critics at once declared that it was the best achievement so far of a very line writer; the crowd agreed (and signified the same in the usual manner) that it was a very capital story, only spoiled (from their point of view) by the extreme dismalness of its philosophy. “ In the Wessex novels the most casual reader is struck with the continuity of the inspiration. There is, of course, a change from the vernal freshness of ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ to the autumnal gloom of the pure tragedies; but the change is like that of the natural seasons—we have only different aspects of the same climatic scheme. There* is an increasing sense of mastery over material as the pen grows in dexterity, but the material chosen and disposed on principles as clearly indicated in the first of the series as in the last. It is as if Mr Hardy had conceived his literary life much as Haussman conceived a great Paris thoroughfare—as if he bad seen before him in the early seventies a long avenue of lofty and level achievement, rising to a lordly eminence fit to display the masterpieces of his maturity. It is hard to think pt another example in English of consistency so complete; in fact, it is hard to think of Hardy as of the true fellowship of English writers, though his themes are so emphatically of the English soil. He is, at bottom, more an old Greek than a modern Briton.” THE POET. Four years ago, when the Prince of Wales paid a visit to Mr Hardy, and took lunch wdth him at his Dorchester home —a visit by which, it was said, each conferred an honor upon the other —‘ The Times 1 wrote: “ When Thomas Hardy was born, in a village near Dorchester, the Prince’s great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, had not been quite four years on the throne. Sixty years later the poet, on. the night of her death, was to celebrate her in a ‘ Reverie,’ in which, piercing, as his way is, through the obvious, be saw that beyond the purposed life, ‘serene, sagacious, free,’ which had made her ‘ the norm of every Royal-reckoned attribute,’ there might yet be some deed of bers that, lying hid from her own age, would be most bright in eyes to be. Two decades and more have passed, and the poet, on this side of the Great War, having sung of the men who marched away, of the women who stayed at home, of the great silence that fell with the armistice, is still an active force, a poet in being, whose new work is read with fully as much admiration by the youngest lovers of poetry as it is by their elders. There is no equal instance in our literature, nor perhaps in any other, of such long vitality of the poetic fire. ‘The Dynasts ’ has been called the_ greatest poem of its age. A frequent judgment of later years has been that Mr Hardy’s poems may last longer than his novels.”