ABSTRACT
Augustus John Thomas Hardy had good reason to view with anxiety the demonstrations of some of his admirers. One of these, hailing from the USA., on the strength of a few minutes interview, produced a book entitled Thomas Hardy’s Universe,1 in which the poet was described as soliloquizing before the fire, while smoking a succession of cigarettes: ‘But’, said Hardy, with a gesture of despair, ‘I have never smoked a cigarette in my life!’ In the dining-room of Max Gate hung a portrait of a young woman with blonde hair hanging down; the work, it would seem, of the local photographer: this was the first Mrs Hardy. Her husband’s image, by an Academician,2 confronted her on the opposite wall. The walls of Hardy’s study, where I painted him, were piled to the ceiling with books, mostly of a philosophical nature and many of them French. Hardy said ‘lucidity’ had always been his aim. He disliked obscurity in others and tried to avoid it himself. We attended a performance of Tess at Dorchester:3 Hardy, hearing that I was present, sent word to invite me to meet him ‘behind’: I was thus able to watch the play from the wings. The title role was filled by a Mrs Bugler, a butcher’s wife from Bridport.4 Hardy greatly admired this extremely handsome young débutante, who, flushed with success, was dreaming of taking to the stage professionally; but Hardy, in spite of her ‘evident genius’, didn’t feel justified in encouraging her to take this step, ‘for we all know the hazards of the stage’, he said. When Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies, with a company from London, played Tess at Max Gate,5 Hardy was moved to tears: his only criticism was, ‘In Dorset, you know, we don’t drop our aitches’. During the hours spent with the poet, the respect in which I always held him had deepened to affection. On my leaving him for the last time he gave me a copy of Wessex Tales, inscribed (pp. 134-5). * John, Augustus, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (London: Cape, 1952).
