The Characteristic of all Great Poetry — The General Perfectly Reduced in the Particular’: Thomas Hardy

Abstract

It is a fallacy that Hardy’s old age was spent in a recluse-like existence at Max Gate. Celebrities, friends and relations came through its gates in such numbers that it is surprising how much work he still managed to do. One such visitor was a young army officer who was stationed near Dorchester at the end of the Great War and was welcomed by Hardy to Max Gate on several occasions in 1918 and 1919. Lt. Elliott Felkin came bearing an introduction from Lowes Dickinson and kept a full record of their discussions.¹ They make interesting reading. The earliest is dated 21 October 1918 when he had tea with the Hardys and he found Hardy ‘amazingly lively, interested and interesting’. After discussing the novel and Hardy’s assertion that ‘all imaginative work was events seen through a temperament’, Hardy, described as ‘extraordinarily active’, went for a walk with Felkin during which they discussed how much of a person’s private life should be revealed by a biographer. He thought that George Eliot should be ranked with Goethe and Kant rather than Shakespeare and Sophocles, and that she was a neglected writer. When Felkin left, Hardy accompanied him for a walk and turned his money in his pocket at the sight of the new moon just ‘in case’.