Watching the full-starred heavens that Winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?"
The reader instinctively pictures Hardy as a morose, grim, cynical man—but he is really anything but that. From all accounts Hardy is mirrored in the whimsical and deep mirth that is so intermixed in the rustic characters in his novels. "It is too often assumed," says the capricious and tiresome Ethelberta—April-natured Hardy would call her—"that a person's fancy is a person's real mind.... Some of the lightest of rhymes were composed between the deepest fits of dismals I have known."
Some years ago The English Illustrated Magazine printed an account of a visit paid by a cyclist to Hardy at his Dorchester home. Authentic pictures of Hardy are so scarce that I venture to draw on this interview:
"The picture he presented was, for the moment at least, all-satisfying; there was more than nervousness in the strangely harassed-looking face, with the most sensitive features that I had ever seen. The deep-set eyes were troubled, but there was no mistaking their fearless courage. I knew that I was looking at a man whose soul was more ravaged than ever his careworn features were with the riddle of life and the tragedy of it, and yet a soul utterly self-reliant, for all the shyness of the outward man.
"I attempted no compliments, and asked him instead why he was so pessimistic a writer, why he wrote at once the most beautiful and the most dreadful of stories, and why he had not shown us far more often than he has done a picture of requited love, or of requited love that was not victimised at once by some pitiless act of fate.
"Mr Hardy had not sat down himself, but had stood by the fireplace, with his white hands holding the lapels of his old-fashioned tweed coat.
"We were on better terms in a moment, as Mr Hardy replied, his voice curiously halting, but not as if he was in any doubt of his sentiments. It seemed a mixture of irony and diffidence.
"'You are a young man,' he said. 'The cruelty of fate becomes apparent to people as they grow older. At first one may perhaps escape contact with it, but if one lives long enough one realises that happiness is very ephemeral.'