Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/45

 days of the great poet drift slowly into the living nothingness of the past.

Hardy the man, meanwhile, sitting back there in Max Gate, off the Wareham Road, remains unconcerned, reflective, withdrawn; darkness assailing his memory as he feeds Wessie with bits of cheese. He admits it. He loves his Wessex and his verse. Or more exactly, he is frankly interested in them both.

But he is not ardent—about anything. Why should he be? The Immanent Will Itself is unmindful, unconscious. Hardy has said it himself, many times: "Nothing that men do . . . matters much."

It is all a kind of miracle, this mood and this picture, this man's weird effect on a section of rich country, and on us. The core of the mystery can never be properly exposed. One can only, as time goes on, collect, assemble, digest, look at what we call “facts,” and try to distill from them something like a story, something like a character-sketch. Succeeding years will bring many such trials.

Here follows one, written directly under the spell of the twilight—faulty and incomplete for that reason, but perhaps also worth more than nothing, for the same reason.