ABSTRACT
H.J. Massingham One shining day was when we went together to see Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, though my father was not at his best with him, and there was no real correspondence of spirit between them. I said little or nothing on this famous occasion, nor am I able to recollect the drift of the talk. I am utterly ashamed of my memory, I, too, who regard Hardy’s rustics as only inferior to Shakespeare’s in humour and much superior to those of all other writers in quality and livingness! I who think of Hardy as a great poet! What I do retain of that visit is my sense of his Englishness: none of our great writers was more English, more provincial, less foreign. And he looked exactly what he was, an English countryman, stockish, reserved, individual, wise and with a face like an English pippin. A face with endurance in it, born of patience out of experience. A man slow, deep-rooted, full of treasure within but hidden from the prying eye. A man who might have been mistaken for a country doctor, old-style, with humour in the mouth and tragedy in the eyes, but neither revealed except by that close scrutiny that awe and manners forbade. A kind host, a gentle manner of speaking, a low voice, an attentive listener with head slightly cocked on one side, like a bird’s. No glitter whatever in the talk which (on his side) was reminiscent, as all true country things are. He made my father seem more townified than I had ever seen him, and this made me feel uncomfortable. An interior like Victorian Casterbridge, not twentieth century Dorchester. That is all I remember (p. 45).
