THOMAS HARDY
THE last letter I had from Hardy—who arrived at the age of eighty on June the second—reached me in the Isle of Wight, a letter which showed how tenaciously he is alive.
11th May, 1910.
Max Gate, Dorchester.
Dear Symons:
I am sorry to say that I was in London only four or five days, so that now your visit to Ventnor ends I am settled down here again, and unable to meet you as you kindly propose. A chance may arise later on.
London was not attractive, the crowds in the streets and trains being wearisome to one no longer young.
Thomas Hardy.
Reading his letter recalled to me the wonderful week I spent with him at Max Gate, Dorchester. He took me all over the wild and ancient and unspoiled Egdon Heath that comes with solemn and tragic splendour into The Return of the Native. And as he read me, at night, his verses, there was in his voice something brooding, obscure, tremulous, half-inarticulate, that of one who meditates over man, nature and destiny; and also, in the man and in the way he spoke, that quality which saves his face, in which you see the brain always working, from being painful by a humourous sense of external things which becomes also a kind of intellectual criticism. One of his poems curiously impressed me: An August Midnight, crabbed, subtle, and strangely dramatic.
Hardy was always very generous in his praise of my verses. In one of his letters in regard to The Dynasts what I shall quote gives a curious insight into his vivid intelligence. "Your theory that verse should be confined to emotional expression is what I used
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