ABSTRACT
I said that Egdon Heath would have been the right particular title for the novel, and he replied: ‘Perhaps it would, but the heath is implied in the title I gave it: a man returning to his native heath, you know’. When I told him that I had found the spot where Troy’s flowers had been washed away from Fanny’s grave by the downpour from the gargoyle, he laughed and said: ‘I came it rather strong that time, didn’t I?’ I said that I had been interested in seeing reddled sheep. ‘What did I call that reddleman I put in the Native?’ ‘Diggory Venn’. ‘Ah yes, Diggory Venn, thank you’. And again: ‘That novel with Dick Dewy and Fancy Day in it, you know’. ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. ‘Of course, The Greenwood Tree, thank you’. If he did not recall the names of his novels and characters as promptly as I did, it must be said that this was fourteen years after the publication of his last story, Jude the Obscure, and that in 1909, after the appearance of the third volume of The Dynasts, his novels were far behind him, and he was much more interested in the reception the public would accord to his poetry. ‘If my name lives at all in the history of English literature, and some critics seem to think it will, it will be as a poet and not as a novelist’. From this he went on to an appraisement of his work: he regarded his poetry as his most satisfactory achievement, his short stories next and his novels last of all. As to poetry, he thought his reputation would rest on The Dynasts. Of his stories, his favorite was An Imaginative Woman, ‘the best piece of prose fiction I ever wrote’. This story I had never read, or even heard of, but I found it afterward tucked into a later edition of Wessex Tales.1 In spite of its author’s predilection it seems to me not to be compared with the five masterpieces that originally composed that volume or to those in Life’s Little Ironies. He considered Jude to be the best of his novels, the one in which he had said all that he had to say. I mentioned Tess and its great success with the public. ‘Oh, there * Peirce, Walter, ‘A Visit to Max Gate’, Colby Library Quarterly, 2 (November 1949),
190-95. Walter Peirce, an American Hardy enthusiast, wrote to ask if he could visit Hardy, who invited him for tea on 10 August 1909. They began by discussing topographical details and The Return of the Native.
