ABSTRACT
George Gissing Last week I accepted an invitation to go down to Dorchester, and stay for a couple of days with Thomas Hardy. Now Hardy is a man of far less intellectual vigour and distinction than Meredith. Born a peasant, he yet retains much of the peasant’s views of life. He evidently does not read very much, and I grieve to find that he is drawn into merely fashionable society, talks of lords and ladies more than of ordinary people. Most unfortunately he has a very foolish wife – a woman of higher birth than his own, who looks down upon him, and is utterly discontented. They have no children, and they travel about a good deal, but not to much purpose. I admire Hardy’s best work very highly, but in the man himself I feel disappointed. To my great surprise, I found that he did not know the names of flowers in his own fields! A strange unsettlement appears in him; probably the result of his long association with such a paltry woman. Essentially, he is good, gentle, and poetically minded. But he sadly needs a larger outlook upon life – a wider culture (pp. 205-6).
