SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. “Hardy and the Warriors.” New Criterion 21, no. 1 (September 2002): 34-40.

[In the following essay, Meyers discusses Hardy's influence on post-World War I poets.]

The Great War in Europe devastated towns and villages, obliterated irreplaceable architecture, and destroyed an entire generation of young men. The survivors were conscious of living in a shattered civilization, and felt a collective lack of confidence and direction. In “Signs of the Times,” written in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence described how young men under thirty, sick of war and materialism, have

a certain instinctive contempt
for old values and old people:
a certain warlessness even moneylessness,
a waiting for the proper touch, not for
          any word or deed.

The aged Thomas Hardy had “the proper touch.” His bleak but unflinchingly realistic vision profoundly appealed to traumatized war poets. Prominent survivors—including Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and T. E. Lawrence—made pilgrimages to the author at his home, Max Gate, near Dorchester. Drawn to him for personal and poetic reasons, they hero-worshipped the Old Master. He responded by encouraging them, praising their work, and accepting them, at the beginning of their careers, as colleagues. Hardy's complex and often moving relations with these writers reveal his great reputation and influence between the wars.¹ He helped them repair their ruined lives, gave them a living link to the tradition of English poetry, and restored their faith in cultural continuity.

At the turn of the century Hardy, father-figure to the Georgians, was the most controversial poet in England, and his reputation has continued to rise throughout the modern age. Ford Madox Ford maintained that he had founded the English Review in 1908 when no other journal would publish Hardy's “A Sunday Morning Tragedy.” Robert Frost, who lived in England just before the war, exclaimed “Hardy's my man,” called him an excellent poet, and praised him as “one of the most earthly wise of our time.” Frost's friend and disciple Edward Thomas published an essay on Hardy in the January 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama. D. H. Lawrence composed his brilliantly idiosyncratic “Study of Thomas Hardy” the following year, and Lascelles Abercrombie brought out a book on Hardy in 1919.

In the “Study,” Lawrence acknowledged Hardy as his master and wrote about his novels with admiration and affectionate understanding. Lawrence observed that there is in Hardy's novels, as Sassoon recognized when he read them in the trenches, “a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. … Upon the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp, is drawn the little, pathetic pattern of man's moral life and struggle.” In October 1916 Lawrence called Hardy “our last great writer.” The following month he placed him above the greatest masters of the novel: “They are all—Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Flaubert—so very obvious and coarse, beside the lovely mature and sensitive art of … Hardy.”

In Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972), Donald Davie noted that “Hardy steered Lawrence, as for good or ill he steered Sassoon and Blunden, away from Eliot's and Pound's poetry of the ironical persona.” But Pound consistently praised Hardy's poetry and in 1992 thought Hardy “woke one to the extent of his absorption in subject as contrasted with the aesthetes' pre-occupation with ‘treatment.’” Though Eliot, Joyce, and Ford were still alive in 1934, Pound claimed that “nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died.” In 1937 he wrote that in Hardy's Collected Poems “there is a clarity. There is the harvest of having written 20 novels first.”

In his “Apology” to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Hardy warned readers that his poems contained some “grave, positive, stark delineations,” and he quoted his credo in “In Tenebris”: “If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.” The man who'd feared in 1914 that English literature might be wiped out by the Germans, now maintained that we “seem threatened by a new Dark Age” and (like the survivors of the war) wondered “whether the human and kindred animal races [will] survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe.” In May 1917 he wrote Sassoon that he did not know how he could bear “the suspense of this evil time if it were not for the sustaining power of poetry.”

Davie mentioned Hardy's “elegiac and indignant celebration of pre-industrial values,” so cherished by the war poets, “which industrial technology had doomed.” David Perkins described his natural world, “composed of grays, bleakness, emptiness, chilling winds and rain, yellowing leaves, and mutely suffering creatures, with signs everywhere of dreariness, ominous threat, and blight”—the climate of suffering, relieved by his compassion and understanding.

Hardy responded deeply to the experience of war—the overwhelming event in the lives of Graves, Sassoon, and T. E. Lawrence. As Samuel Hynes observed, it “offered him a supreme dramatic example of the meaningless destruction which he found throughout existence.” Hardy wrote many fine poems, including “Channel Firing” and “In the Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’” which first prophesied and later described the horrors of the Great War. His finest work in this genre—“‘And There Was a Great Calm’ (On the Signing of the Armistice, Nov. 11, 1918)”—played on the phrase “dead calm” and expressed the qualities that most strongly appealed to the war poets: colloquial diction, sharp irony, cunning technique, complexity of theme, and clarity of vision as well as his characteristic sympathy and wisdom. The title comes from Matthew 8:26. During a storm at sea, when the men of little faith trembled, Christ “arose and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm”—which, in the poem, signals the end of the meaningless war. Instead of celebrating the conclusion of hostilities, Hardy suggested that peace now seems strangely unnatural and rather bitterly questioned why the war ever took place. Instead of offering a comforting answer, he rejected the Sinister Spirit's conclusion and merely repeated the unanswerable question at the end of the poem:

Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in
          the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

In a perceptive summary, Irving Howe explained why Hardy's poetry profoundly appealed to the shell-shocked Graves, who'd been severely wounded and reported dead; to Sassoon, who'd won the Military Cross and then been sent to a sanatorium (instead of being shot) for opposing the war; and to T. E. Lawrence, who'd been captured and raped by a Turkish officer: “Hardy's ultimate concern is not with any immediate emotion, but with the consequences of emotion, survival beyond emotion: how a man lives through what it seems he cannot, and how he learns not to tamper with his grief and not even to seek forgiveness in his own eyes.”

In October 1919, Sassoon had brought Hardy the “Poets' Tribute,” an attractively bound book in which more than forty poets—including Graves, Sassoon, and D. H. Lawrence—“had each inscribed in Hardy's honour a copy of one of his own poems.” Hardy was not (like many writers) a great egoist. Always loyal to his friends, he had the uncanny ability to respond to the younger generation. He, too, was a survivor, gratified that his work was still highly regarded by the postwar poets and pleased that he himself was admired by war heroes. The “Tribute,” Hardy wrote using the third person, “was almost his first awakening to the consciousness that an opinion had silently grown up as it were in the night that he was no mean power in the contemporary world of poetry.”

Augustus John's great portrait of 1923 vividly captures the physical presence of the eighty-three-year-old Hardy. In three-quarter view, seated in front of a crowded bookcase, with bald dome, raised antenna-like eyebrows, beaky red nose, drooping mustache, and quizzical expression, Hardy grasps the lapels of his thick gray suit and stares clear-sightedly ahead, ruminating on the sad fate of mankind and on his own approaching death. The last of the great Victorian writers, Hardy was the only one to span the Edwardian and Georgian periods and take an active role in postwar literature—a modern without being a modernist. He'd attacked conventional religion and sexual morality, and after the fierce controversy aroused by Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure had stopped writing novels in 1895. But he was still subversive and startling, and published two volumes of poetry after The Waste Land had appeared: Human Shows (1925) and, at the age of eighty-eight, Winter Words (1928). Robert Graves later remarked that it was rare “to find a case like Hardy, who stopped writing poems for several decades then picked it up again in his sixties and went on to the eighties.” In Contemporary Techniques of Poetry (1925), Graves rejected most of his contemporaries and firmly aligned himself with the themes and style of Hardy and Robert Frost.

Graves first met Hardy when the older poet was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford in February 1920. That August Graves bicycled from Oxford to Dorchester to pay homage to the master, and later recorded his impressions in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929). Hardy heartened Graves by emphasizing inspiration rather than revision: “I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.” And he encouraged Graves's natural inclination to reject technical experiment and write in traditional forms: “In his opinion, vers libre could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’”

Hardy also struck a sympathetic chord by expressing respect for military officers and compassion for ordinary men. When Graves responded to Hardy's query and said he no longer used his army rank, Hardy insisted: “But you have a right to it; I should certainly keep my rank if I had one, and feel very proud to be called Captain Hardy.” Referring to his own war work, he said that serving on the committee to prevent war-profiteering “was a hundred times better than sitting on a Military Tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.” A few days after the visit, Graves told Edmund Blunden, another great admirer, who would write a book on Hardy in 1942, that Hardy had “exceeded the most extreme expectations. Marvellous man!”

Three years later, in September 1923, T. E. Lawrence, another Hardy-worshipper, told Graves (then writing Lawrence's biography) an anecdote that Graves adapted to his own purposes. Lawrence, who would later translate the Odyssey, “said something a little reflecting on Homer: and he took me up at once, saying that it was not to be despised: that it was very kin to Marmion.” Lawrence emphasized Hardy's self-assurance and was impressed by the “man to whom Homer and Scott are companions: who feels easy in such presences.” Reporting the incident to Siegfried Sassoon in 1925, Graves subtly changed the emphasis to make Hardy's judgment seem somewhat absurd: “Lawrence and the Hardies are inseparable now it appears. It was to Lawrence that T. H. made his magnificently Hardyish remark. Lawrence had said something a trifle disrespectful of Homer and T. H. replied rather warmly: ‘Really, I have a far higher opinion [of it] than of the Iliad. It reminds me at times of Marmion.’” This favorite and now familiar anecdote resurfaced in Goodbye to All That with a pointed comment that again seemed to denigrate Hardy: “when Lawrence ventured to say something disparaging about Homer's Iliad, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire it greatly. Why, it's in the Marmion class!’ Lawrence at first thought that Hardy was having a little joke.”

Sassoon, who knew Hardy much better than Graves did, sprang to his defense and strongly objected to what he considered Graves's intrusive and egoistic account.

Your article on Max Gate made things worse. As you ought to know, T. H. was an essentially private character. And the spectacle of the self-advertising antics of literary men exploiting their acquaintance with T. H. maddened me; and your article made me feel that you were making fun of him. There was too much about yourself and too little about his greatness. (The picture of him in your book is misleading, because it shows his simplicity without his impressiveness. Also you have got the Marmion anecdote wrong.)

Though Hardy's precise meaning remains obscure, he was far too shrewd to equate Scott with Homer. Most probably, he was reminding Lawrence, who admired his judgment, that Scott's long poem on the sixteenth-century battle of Flodden Field had once been held in very high esteem. Hardy himself had called it “the most Homeric poem in the English language.” By changing Hardy's words from “very kin to Marmion” to “It reminds me at times of Marmion” to “it's in the Marmion class!,” Graves enlivened the story but distorted the truth.

Sassoon's uncle, the sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft, was a friend of Hardy and had introduced his nephew to the poet. Hardy's fictional vision of rural England had consoled Sassoon at the battlefront, and his Satires of Circumstance influenced the bitterly satirical war poems that established Sassoon's reputation in 1920. In 1917 Hardy had accepted the dedication of Sassoon's Old Huntsman. Christie's 1975 catalogue of The Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon lists seven presentation copies of Hardy's books; fourteen postcards and letters from Sassoon to Hardy; a holograph reproduction of “Catafalque,” his uncollected elegy on Hardy; and numerous references to Hardy in his correspondence with Graves, Lawrence, Edmund Gosse, and Sir Sydney Cockerell.

Sassoon's postwar Diaries contain many descriptions of his visits to Max Gate. On November 7, 1918—four days before the Armistice and two years before Graves turned up—Sassoon found Hardy “Frail and rather gnome-like in the candle-shine and dim room, with his large round head, vast brow, beaky nose and pendulous grey mustache.” He believed in the nourishing power of art and told Sassoon that he “feared (in 1914) more than anything else that English literature might be wiped out by the Germans.”

In February 1921 the thirty-three-year-old Sassoon was tremendously impressed by Hardy's physical agility and intellectual liveliness, and by an old age that made him seem rooted in the earth: “He is no age at all. … With the rural antiquity of an old tree or house but … eager and interested like a young man—and yet so wise, for all his simplicity.” In the early 1920s, Sassoon noted that Hardy was chirpy, talkative, and responsive to jokes. “Still full of curiosity about the world” and with a remarkable interest in current affairs, he had “the face of one who has suffered intensely, a face of almost unearthly wisdom.” Hardy took him back to the past (while Sassoon kept him in touch with the present) and seeing him, Sassoon felt, was “no doubt one of the precious experiences of my life.”

In September 1925 Sassoon recorded that the sprightly Hardy “once again amazed me by his vigour of mind and body.” Two years later, in a letter to Edmund Gosse, he described Hardy's most characteristic attitude—less formal and more relaxed than in the portrait by Augustus John:

“Perched on the least easy chair, supporting his head with one hand, & gazing downward with a gentle & rather wistful expression.” I noticed this evening—when the half-lit room was dealing gently with his face—the great beauty of his expression. There were some indications of an increasing weariness—“I think I've had enough of Napoleon!” he confessed to Sassoon [alluding to The Dynasts] on that same occasion—but no obvious slackening either of creative activity or of literary caretaking.

Sassoon's attitude to Hardy in his autobiography, Siegfried's Journey, 1916-1920, provides an adoring complement to Graves's more critical Goodbye to All That:

[His] modesty was instinctive and quite unaffected. … He was, in fact, a wise and unworldly man who had discarded intellectual and personal vanity. … The door of his mind always remained open to the ideas and speculations of the young. … I still looked on him as such an eminent and almost legendary figure that it was puzzling to imagine oneself with him in any ordinary human relationship … and I could only approach him agape with veneration.

Since Hardy was secure in his own achievement and had no need to play the great man, he was surprisingly approachable and convivial—“the nearest thing to Shakespeare I should ever go for a walk with.” (Graves noted that Hardy, a true countryman, could urinate on the march.) Hardy had no children of his own and fully reciprocated the friendship. He told John Masefield that he found Sassoon “a wonderful pleasure and delight” and “loved [him] like a son.”

Picking up the word “wizard” from his Diary, Sassoon also paid tribute to Hardy in “Max Gate,” a deceptively simple poem written after Hardy's death. In the first stanza, “Mr. Hardy,” the tranquil public man, accompanied by his faithful dog “Wessex,” is contrasted to the poet and wizard, whom he carefully suppresses when visitors arrive:

Old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair,
Courteous to visiting acquaintance chatted
With unaloof alertness while he patted
The sheep dog whose society he preferred.
He wore an air of never having heard
That there was much that needed putting
          right.
Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn't there.
Good care was taken to keep him out of
          sight.

In the second stanza—which alludes to Hardy's “When I set out for Lyonesse,” “Nor did the wisest wizard guess / What would bechance at Lyonesse / While I should sojourn there”—the reflective, private, poet-wizard-seer (plain “Hardy”) suddenly surfaces when he's alone with Sassoon and mysteriously replaces the apparently ordinary man:

Head propped on hand, he sat with me alone,
Silent, the log fire flickering on his face.
Here was the seer whose words the world
          had known.
Someone had taken Mr. Hardy's place.

As he explained in Siegfried's Journey: “When he gazed down at ‘Wessie’ he ceased to be Merlin. The face of the wizard became suffused with gentle compassion for all living creatures whom he longed to defend against the chanceful injustice and calamity of earthly existence.”

A potentially disruptive homosexual undercurrent swirled beneath the surface, but did not rise to disturb the tranquility of their friendship. Sassoon and T. E. Lawrence, as well as D. H. Lawrence (who did not know Hardy personally but wrote perceptively about him) were all struggling with a repressed homosexuality. Sassoon noted that the Hardys would be “horrified if they knew of it.” Blunden's biographer described the curious interaction of these characters in 1923: “Hardy holding forth on literature and war; Sassoon with his gaze fixed on Lawrence; Lawrence fascinated by Edmund; Edmund transfixed by Hardy.” Each of the warriors competed to be the well-beloved.

In the first stanza of the apparently unpublished “Catafalque,” Sassoon satirized the exploitation of Hardy's death by the press and by the ecclesiastics who buried the great skeptic in Westminster Abbey:

Thomas Hardy is dead.
Panegyrics have been piled upon his head.
“The Last Great Victorian”—
Fleet Street re-echoed, unctuous and
          stentorian
“In the Abbey let him rest.”
(His wishes were well known, but we know
          best.)
This has been done
To the satisfaction of almost everyone.

T. E. Lawrence, writing to the artist William Rothenstein from an RAF base near Karachi, agreed with Sassoon about the pompous and ludicrously inappropriate ceremony:

I regret Hardy's funeral service. Mrs. [Bernard] Shaw sent me a copy. So little of it suited the old man's nature. He would have smiled, tolerantly, at it all: but I grow indignant for him, knowing that these sleek Deans and Canons were acting a lie behind his name. Hardy was too great to be suffered as an enemy of their faith: so he must be redeemed.

Lawrence, who recalled that Hardy was twelve when the Duke of Wellington died, was a careful student of the Napoleonic Wars and a great admirer of The Dynasts. He included five works by Hardy in his anthology of favorite short poems, Minorities. Lawrence had been introduced to Hardy by Graves when posted to a Tank Corps base in Wool, Dorset, in 1923. He would turn up for tea at Max Gate on Sunday afternoons, wearing his private's uniform and riding a powerful motorcycle—he would die in a motorcycle accident in 1935.

Lawrence got on well with older women and formed a close friendship with Thomas and Florence Hardy, just as he had with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw. In August 1923 he diffidently asked Florence whether Hardy would be willing to sign copies of his books: “If Mr. Hardy does such things, would he inscribe me copies of his thinpaper Poems & Dynasts. I have them & could bring them across. I know it's a vulgar desire; but I live in vulgar company: and they would be very precious possessions.” Lawrence had seen many young men killed in the war, had himself survived serious wounds and, like Sassoon, was fascinated by Hardy's extraordinary old age. Writing to Graves the following month, he contrasted the squalor of his barracks with the ease of Max Gate and described Hardy as “so pale, so quiet, so refined into an essence. … There is an unbelievable dignity and ripeness about Hardy: he is waiting so tranquilly for death.” In contrast to the young warriors who worshipped him, Hardy “feels interest in everyone, and veneration for no-one. I've not found in him any bowing-down, moral or material or spiritual.” Using the same word as Sassoon to describe his relationship with Hardy, Lawrence told Graves that it “is so precious that I grudge writing about it.”

In June 1926 Lawrence wrote Mrs. Hardy that he “would have liked a documented, intimate study of [Hardy's exemplary] old age, since its reality would be worth a great deal to everyone old, or growing old.” Two years later, the over-scrupulous Lawrence, though always a welcome guest, told her that he constantly had to overcome doubts about imposing on the hospitality of the almost other-worldly Hardy: “Each time I left Max Gate … I used to blame myself for intruding upon a presence which had done with things like me and mine. I would half-determine not to trouble his peace again. But as you know I always came back the next chance I had. I think I'd have tried to come even if you had not been good to me: while you were very good: and T. H.” After the poet's death Lawrence (with a certain mock-modesty) wrote Rothenstein: “I was a sudden loser when Hardy went. Not that I could be a friend of his: the difference in size and age and performance between us was too overwhelming.”

Like many Englishmen of his time and class, Lawrence had great difficulty expressing emotion. But his letter to Mrs. Hardy, written from Karachi in January 1927 and describing their final parting before he sailed to India in November 1926, was deeply moving. Lawrence suggested, but did not state, that both he and Hardy knew they would never see each other again, and that he sped away on his motorcycle because he could not bear their final farewell: “The afternoon was raw and miserable, like the day, and when T. H. turned back into the house to get a shawl (as I guessed) instantly I ran the bicycle out into the road and away, so that no possible reproach might lie against me for having helped him into danger of a chill.” Again writing about himself in the third person, Hardy made his own approaching death the covert motif of his poignant description of their last moments together:

His friend Colonel T. E. Lawrence called to say good-bye before starting for India. Hardy was much affected by this parting, as T. E. Lawrence was one of his most valued friends. He went into the little porch and stood at the front door to see the departure of Lawrence on his motor-bicycle. This machine was difficult to start, and, thinking he might have to wait some time Hardy turned into the house to fetch a shawl to wrap round him. In the meantime, fearing that Hardy might take a chill, Lawrence started the motor-bicycle and hurried away. Returning a few moments after, Hardy was grieved that he had not seen the actual departure, and said that he had particularly wished to see Lawrence go.

In March 1928, shortly after Hardy's death, Mrs. Hardy wrote Lawrence that he had strengthened Hardy's hold on life: “He was devoted to you. Somehow I think he might have lived had you been here. … You seem nearer to him, somehow, than anyone else, certainly more akin.”

Hardy's traditional style and form—unlike the free-verse experimental poetry of Eliot and Pound—appealed deeply to these war poets. When the fabric of European civilization seemed irreparably damaged, his love for and knowledge of pre-industrial, rural society encouraged them to look back to the prewar world for the continuity of culture. Graves would go on to write historical novels and poetry on classical themes, and spend most of his years in a remote village in Spain; Sassoon celebrated the beauty and sporting life of the Kentish countryside; and Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, left a lasting memorial to the wild desert tribes of Arabia. Unlike the aesthetic Eliot and Pound—who concentrated on the symbolic, mythic and religious—or the popular patriotic and jingoistic English poets, Hardy was able to understand their war experience. They were alienated from the older generation who'd sent them into combat, but Hardy's dark vision enabled them to hold on to the redeeming power of poetry and “shake off misery.” In this way, he created a precious bond with the traumatized and psychologically frail warriors.

Note

1. The discussion of Hardy's reputation in R. G. Cox's Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1970) ends, rather oddly, in 1914.