ABSTRACT
Eden Phillpotts When he was staying with me I once took him to a little limestone bluff situated not a mile from my home – an uplifted spot surmounting a woodland region lifted above Torbay and reserved as a public pleasure-ground. On the summit a small plateau spread and here still stood the stout, roofless walls of a ruined building that dated from ancient days. It had given a name to the spot, which is known as Chapel Hill. Hardy enjoyed the fine sweep of the Bay extending between Torquay and Berry Head, and was interested in the sturdy little ruin surmounting it. He inspected this and learned what I could tell him concerning its history. Then some connecting links, furnished by the sea and the dismantled place of worship on the hill, awakened recollection and turned his thoughts to another church and another sea that still shone for him through the murk of intervening years. He spoke of Cornwall and the days when, as a young architect, he had gone to work at the fane of St Juliot nigh Boscastle, to supervise its restoration and enter upon the supreme adventure of his own young life. There he had met his fate and lost his heart; and now, half a century later, those days of bygone happiness could still warm his soul and bring a glimmer of contentment through the grey ambience of old age. Not * Phillpotts, Eden, ‘Thomas Hardy and Schopenhauer’, From the Angle of 88 (London:
Hutchinson, 1951), pp. 68-76. Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960), playwright and novelist. Hardy’s account of choosing
between literature and architecture, which Phillpotts records here, is corroborated by the Life, where Hardy describes how he wrote to Emma in autumn 1871, ‘declaring that he had banished novel-writing for ever, and was going on with architecture henceforward. But she, with no great opportunity of reasoning on the matter, yet, as Hardy used to think and say – truly or not – with that rapid instinct which serves women in such good stead, and may almost be called preternatural vision, wrote back instantly her desire that he should adhere to authorship, which she felt sure would be his true vocation. From the very fact that she wished thus, and set herself aside altogether – architecture being obviously the quick way to an income for marrying on – he was impelled to consider her interests more than his own’ (p. 89). This was, of course, only one of several occasions before their marriage when the choice of profession had to be faced, and Emma was always entirely supportive of Hardy’s literary ambitions.
