Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/303

 after something fresh and free; at any rate, some of the lightest of those rhymes were composed between the deepest fits of dismals I have known."

Mrs. Lonise Chandler Moulton, who was very well acquainted with Hardy in the nineties, was once asked whether he was as cynical a misogynist as was implied by the pictures of the women in his Group of Noble Dames. She replied, “But he doesn't think he is cynical. He thinks he is photographic. I know no man who likes women better, and there is nothing that a woman could possibly do that would seem wrong to him." This, it must be remembered, was the impression given by the creator of Bathsheba, whose vanity and folly, and of Arabella, whose sensuality and calculating covetousness, are the chief agents of a malignant destiny in the stories in which they enact their unenviable rôles. It was a remarkable impression, even if it be discounted by the inevitable sentimentality of its fair recorder.

Another acquaintance thus described the man in 1892: "Mr. Hardy is in himself a gentle and singularly pleasing personality. Of middle height, with a very thoughtful face and rather melancholy eyes, he is nevertheless an interesting and amusing companion. He is regarded by the public at large as a hermit ever brooding in the far-off seclusion of a west-country village. A fond delusion, which is disproved by the fact that he is almost more frequently to be seen in a London drawing-room, or a Continental hotel, than in the quiet old-world lanes of rural Dorchester."

One aspect of Hardy's temperament seems to have retarded somewhat a popular and universal recognition of