TTHA: Resources Page

Specified "Uncollected" items in RESOURCES are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Compiled by Rosemarie Morgan for TTHA: unauthorised copying is a violation of the United States' copyright laws.

I expect to arrive in Dorchester tomorrow or next day; and if I shall be strong enough, I shall do myself the pleasure of calling on you -- if not, I shall let you know at what inn I put up, and perhaps you will be kind enough to call on me? I think you must have heard of me from Gosse; - from whom, if the time had served, I could have got an introduction; but my acquaintance with your mind is already of so old a date, that I scarce felt such formalities were needed --; and if you should be busy or unwilling, the irregularity of my approach leaves you the safer retreat. Yours truly

I have read The Mayor of Casterbridge with sincere admiration: Henchard is a great fellow, and Dorchester is touched in with the hand of a master. Do you think you could let me try to dramatize it? I keep reasonably well and am, Yours very sincerely

I feel several inches taller at the idea of your thinking of dramatizing the Mayor. Yes, by all means. The story, to my surprise, has met with approval from competent critics. The Saturday has thrown cold water on it but then the Saturday man into whose hands my books are put has always been saying that my stories are dull. We are up here for a time, & and are both so very glad to hear that you are better. Curiously enough your name was on my tongue a good many times last night, at the Rabelais dinner--Henry James sat next me on one side, & on the other Cotter Morrison and George Meredith. We were talking of your immense imaginative power--& wished you could have been there. O. Wendell Holmes was the guest. He is not quite used up yet, though I wonder how he stands so much. I have some writing to do whilst in town, & can't touch it : it is becoming quite a nightmare. I wish you would write something on the art of criticism. Meredith says somebody who has produced creative work ought to do it--so that the critics may get some rudimentary knowledge of the trade they profess. Believe me, with kind regards

From Stevenson to W.E. Henley (1849-1903, lifelong friend, co-playwright, editor of Magazine of Art, critic, poet -- 'England, My England'; journalist; model for John Silver in Treasure Island)

. . . . I still incline to the sheep in Far From the Madding Crowd; did you find the place? it is a little farther on than I thought (p. 33) and if not a masterpiece stands alone in our collection, as a piece of clear-seeing, meditative, quiet, episodic work; and the dog (touched in, and away) is truly touching....The thunderstorm from the Crowd has a touch of love; we could get it into seven pages; I guess it's the best, and dam fine, too.

From Hardy to Edmund Gosse (1849-1928; lifelong friend; novelist -- Father and Son, 1907)

. . . . I wish I could have seen R.L.Stevenson: will he ever come back? I imagine, although you do not say so, that he was in the same high-spirited ardent mood we are accustomed to look upon as his natural state, irrespective of circumstances. As to despondency I have known the very depths of it . . . .

Also printed in CL, Vol One, 167: Gosse had earlier mentioned to TH that Stevenson had left for Colorado taking with him a copy of The Woodlanders.

From Stevenson to Sidney Colvin (1845-1927; lifelong friend, Slade Professor, biographer of Keats, Keeper of Dept. of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum)

. . . .Of course, I mean something different from the false fire of Hardy -- as false a thing as ever I perused, unworthy of Hardy and untrue to all I know of life. If I do a rape, which may the almighty God forfend! you would hear a noise about my rape, and it should be man that did it . . . .

From Stevenson to J.M. Barrie (1860-1937, playwright -- The Admirable Crichton, 1902, Peter Pan, 1904, Dear Brutus, 1917; lifelong friend of TH)

. . . . I have always thought it was one of the hardest parts of the fate of the man of letters that he has so few books he can read. Even Hardy has failed me this last time. Tess of the D'Urbervilles being, as far as I could read in it, so unaffectedly languid and false to every fact and principle of human nature that Hardy will require to regain his character in at least two works before I can forgive him....I dare say you, like what I hear of all the rest of England, have accepted Tess. I wish I could give you the proper cure. If you could only read your own love scenes in The Little Minister, you would find in them so much more love as would persuade you of the hollowness and falsity of the other . . . .

. . . .Yon was an exquisite story about the barrow,* but I think I can beat it. In a little tale of mine, the slashed and gaping ruins of which appeared recently in the Illustrated London News, a perfect synod of appalled editors and apologetic friends had sat and wrangled over the thing in private with astonishing results. The flower of their cuts was this. Two little native children were described as wriggling out of their clothes and running away mother-naked. The celestial idiots cut it out. I wish we could afford to do without serial publication altogether. It is odd that Hardy's adventure with the barrow and mine with the little children should happen in the same year with the publication and success of Tess. Surely these editor people are wrong....But...my heroine. Suffice it to breathe in your ear that she was what Hardy calls (and others in their plain way, don't) a Pure Woman. Much virtue in a capital letter. . . .

Printed in LRLS, Vol 7, 413-414. Barrie had earlier mentioned that whereas in the book Angel carries each of the milkmaids across the river in his arms, the publishers, the Graphic, had found this improper: the milkmaids had to be carted across in a wheelbarrow.

Stevenson to Henry James (1843-1916, novelist: Daisy Miller, 1879; The Portrait of a Lady, 1881; The Ambassadors, 1903; The Golden Bowl, 1904 -- mutual friend of RLS and TH)

. . . . .As for Hardy -- you remember the old gag? -- Are you wownded, my lord? -- Wownded, 'Ardy -- Mortually, my lord? -- Mortually, 'Ardy -- Well, I was mortually wounded by Tess of the Durbeyfields. I do not know that I am exaggerative in criticism; but I will say that Tess is one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu books I have yet read. Bar the style, it seems to me about as bad as Reynolds -- I maintain it -- Reynolds: or to be more plain, to have no earthly connexion with human life or human nature; and to be merely the unconscious portrait of a weakish man under a vow to appear clever, or a rickety schoolchild setting up to be naughty and not knowing how. I should tell you in fairness I could never finish it; there may be the treasures of the Indies further on; but so far as I read, James, (in one word) damnable. Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read; and at last -- not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth. I write in anger? I almost think I do; I was betrayed in a friend's house -- and I was pained to hear that other friends delighted in that barmecide feast. I cannot read a page of Hardy for many a long day, my confidence is gone . . . .

April 15. Good Friday [1892]....Hardy's good-natured friends Henry James and R.L.Stevenson (whom he afterwards called the Polonius and Osric of novelists) corresponded about it in this vein: 'Oh, yes, dear Louis: "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is vile. The pretence of sexuality is only equalled by the absence of it [?], and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style.' Life, 246

From Hardy to Florence Henniker (l1855-1923: lifelong friend; author of short-stories: In Scarlet and Grey, which includes "The Spectre of the Real", with TH, 1896)

Thomas Hardy

1893

William Strang