AUTHORS AND THEIR WORK.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1313, 16 December 1911, Page 9

AUTHORS AND THEIR WORK.

; Mt. Hardy has been writing to a friend —in answer, no doubt, to an inquiry as. to the, prefaces to the impending American editinn of his works—that he is no longer sufficiently interested in the Wessex novels to tike much trouble about them.- It will prove , a comfortable. word (says an English writer) to owners of the last complete lfard.v who have been afraid that the new-issue would aiitiriuate their edition, and it indicates, upon tho part; e£'the novelist an. easily explicable state of mind, ife has rend (Hid reread his own books so often that, although .they continue .to interest him, they do nnl do so sufficient!)' for him to 'take rurnh trouble about' them. In this rer.ncct Mr. Hardy may bo said to stand between two extremes. One extreme is that of those—and Ihev are to bo found in'all the arts—who, once having finished n work, can. no longer bear tho sight of it. Thus the story is told of an architect i rrho, having, to the praise of his fellow- j citizens, finished a public building, mi- j prated elsewhere that lie might msvor I nave the torment of looking upon it j apt!n. Similarly there is in Anatolo IVaiiw's "fie I.ys Rouge" a sculptor who, !*l>«n It is poinled out that he has no ] of his own, justifies the fact by taking: "Do ynti imagine that it would n pli-nniire to inn to live among my (tin works? I know them far too well; thf/ l/.re me." France is liiinsolf an inttnr** In literature; A frioud to whom U* hi'l pointed out that ho never read th« trorkn produced in his own tiino sugr«U<) that h" must racopt his own, bnt VnmA roundly declared that not only

did he not read his own books, font that he did not even have copies of them. "No," he said, "what a man has built himself—even supposing it to be a palace —he knows so well that ho cannot endure tho sight of it. X could not liear to have m.v own book in my hands. Why should 1 look at tliem?"_ The opposite extreme of those who read" no books but their own is probably commoner. Thus loti, when, in his discourse of reception intq the Academy, he uttered the historic "Je 110 lis jamais," made, no doubt, a mental reservation in favour of "I'echeur d'lslande" , and the rest of the scries. Wordsworth is an instance nearer home. Indeed tho conception of Wordsworth sitting- in a library crowded with tho best books in tho world, reading a volume of his own, is oddly in keeping with an anecdote of Hazlitt's. Jlazlitt tells us that at the time when the whole reading world was in a state of enthusiasm over "Tlob Roy" Wordsworth entered a company where that novel was being discussed, saw a verse of his own on tho .title-page, and, taking down his volmno from the shelf, read aloud, with manifest complacency, the whole poem (it runs to twenty-nine stanzas), then walked away, "taking," savs Ilazlitt, "no more notice of Kob Boy than if there had been .no such person, nor of the new novel than if it had not boon written by its renowned author." There may be more than one who has been apt to think in Sainte-lJcuvo's remark thal_ "great authors, once they have attained renown, read their own hooks, and no books but tlicir own." '