‘Do You Tell Them Your Ideas?’

A.L. Rowse I remembered a reminiscence of Desmond MacCarthy, who had met the little old man at a big country-house party, crowded with the important and the distinguished. Hardy, who was shy and diffident, seeing another literary man, made for him like a battered boat in a storm making port at last. He found all that impressive and formidable, but he felt out of it. They were all so clever and talked so much. ‘All the same’, said he to his fellow writer, with a countryman’s shrewdness, ‘do you tell them your ideas? Because I don’t’ (p. 54).