ABSTRACT
Some of us are old enough to remember the violence of the attacks on Hardy and his morality when his last novels appeared. And beneath his immorality he made plain his vulgarity; his taste was liable to deplorable lapses. But though that reception of his later novels helped to decide him against writing any more prose for us, yet when I met him first, and this was referred to, he was reluctant to look back at it, though presently, when he saw I could recall the controversies in some detail, he did begin to gossip of that phase of his past, but in so low and tolerant a voice that you might have thought he never had any feeling about it. Once I began to move uneasily at his recital of the course of one outrageous attack, but Hardy’s face did not lose its good humour, nor his voice its gentleness. He was only talking of criticism in the abstract, and this was part of the evidence. I should doubt that Hardy was ever made angry, except by cruelty to the lowly and unimportant. He was a great man, if a sign of that is simplicity and modesty so surprising that they might be childish innocence. It was a shock to talented visitors to find, when they met him, that the man who wrote The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native seemed not so clever as they. A meeting with Hardy was comforting to self-esteem. He was venerable, he was indeed already a legend; his great epic which placed him next to Shakespeare was published over twenty years ago;1 yet that seemed rather odd, too, because the little old man himself, as he entertained us, might have been the youngest and most innocent of us all. He appeared content to talk of the habits
* Tomlinson, H M., Out of Soundings (London: Heinemann, 1931). This is a reprint of
Tomlinson’s ‘Thomas Hardy at Max Gate’, Saturday Review of Literature, 11 February 1928. Henry Major Tomlinson (1873-1958), writer; see Letters, VII, 24-5 for Hardy’s high opinion of him. Here, Tomlinson is recalling meetings with Hardy in the 1920s, especially a visit to Max Gate on Saturday, 10 December 1927. Florence Hardy despised Tomlinson’s article, as her letter to Siegfried Sassoon six weeks after Hardy’s death makes clear: obviously believing that the Tomlinsons’ visit had contributed to his death, she told Sassoon on 24 February that ‘I’ve been trying to get into the mood to write to Mr Tomlinson & say I am sorry I wrote, & most likely I was mistaken about T.H.’s illness, but I cannot do it yet – something boils up within me when I think of what I could say. Those eyes that observed, the pen that noted down the evidences of old age – & then calmly cabled them off to America, for money, while he was lying dead here – as a result of that visit so cold-bloodedly described’ (LEFH, p. 272).
