December 13
Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently, she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead leaves—a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and kicked them. Then moved on again—rustling about intermittently like a winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: “Ain’t you ’shamed, you lazybones?” till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit a match and got it for him.
He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment’s hesitation, she went upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
And I believe if he had said “Rats,” she would have shot out silently into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of such service.
“You did not come,
And marching time drew on and wore me numb—
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure loving-kindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.”
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy’s poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength. Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, Hephaestian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy’s poetry is Michelangelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.