ABSTRACT
Constance Smedley Thomas Hardy is the least personalised of all the story-book people I have ever met. For one thing, he lives in the heart of the Down country, and is so much a part of Wessex that although he and his wife come up to town for a few weeks of each London season, the public does not realise his presence, and his name is seen in few reports of literary and artistic functions. There are a remoteness and a dignity about him which remind one of the country he comes from. And yet when one visits him in his native town, he is as simple and friendly as the Downs to those who make their home therein. Only Hardy is lost outside them, and retreats into an invincible fastness from which his oldest friends find it difficult to extricate him.
