LATE THOMAS HARDY.

Hokitika Guardian, 17 January 1928, Page 3

LATE THOMAS HARDY.

FUNERAL OBSEQUI EX. [By Telegraph, Per Press Association.] (Received this day at 1.30 p.m.) LONDON, Jan. IG. The creator of “Tess,” joined the immortals in the Poet’s Corner amid a demonstration of national homage, recalling the funerals of Dickens and Tennyson. That the Novelist’s well loved Wessex might partake of everenduring honour, a clod of Wessex earth was mingled with London’s day in which the casket rests.

A great queue early gathered for admission to the nave and later the south transept was filled by literary notables representing the numerous societies with which Hardy had been associated as the acknowledged head of English letters.

Every seat was filled by two when the singing of the choir heralded a procession hearing the casket, covered by a white and golden pall from Saint Faith’s Chapel ti> the Sanctuary. Holding the pall’s fringes on either side, walked Baldwin, MacDonald, Kipling. Gosse. R. Housman, Barrie, Shaw. Galsworthy. and representatives of Oxford and Cambridge. Then followed Mistress Hardy bowed with grief and heavily veiled. The service was of lhe simplest, consisting of the 23rd Psalm, billowed b.v a passage from “Ecclesiastics”— “Let us praise famous men.”

Then the pull hearers accompanied the coffin to the grave next to Dickens, where the burial service was completed, closing with Newman’s “Lead Kindly Light,” and Handel’s “Deal March.”

Thousands of Londoners dining the rest of the day passe! the tiny casket, surrounded by scores of wreaths. Meanwhile, a service much more characteristic of Hardy’s message was taking place at Stinford in Wellstock Church, the village choir singing the hymns Hardy loved, to the accompaniment of an harmonium. "When the heart had been buried in the shadow of a Yew tree in the church yard, a national tribute >:> the creator of Wessex tales was complete.

THE LAST VICTORIAN

(Auckland Star). The death of Thomas Hardy severs one of the few surviving links that sLill hind the twentieth century in a literary sense to the Victorian Age. For Hardy was born only three years after the Great Queen ascended the tin one, and it is over half-a-eeiitury since he began the production of the long series of novels which have placed him in the front rank of modern literary artists. At a time when .sentiment and romance were the keynotes of literary work, and the watchwords of all successful authors, Hardy went hack to the foundations of human life and human nature, and by the direct simplicity of his met lids and the stern fidelity of his portraiture, he created a new form of fiction stamped for all time with the seal of true genius. But Hardy never could he in the ordinary sense a popular writer. His fatalistic and gloomy conception of life, his realism, his occasional

hursts of hitter irony, and especially his comparatively unsympathetic treatment of the women that he describes, must always prevent his hooks from attracting a large popular audience. Yet. with the exception of Thackeray in England, and Balzac in Franco, it is impossible to find any modern novelist to compare with Hardy in truth and courage, in sustained power. in knowledge of human nature, and in artistic skill. But Hardy cared little lor popularity, in the ordinarv sense of the term. (haraetcrislicaily enough, he had convinced himself early in life that he was more a poet than a novelist. and Ihe Dwiast.-. the epic drama of his rinsing years, well deserves its high reputation. But “The Dynasts.” like most of his novels. is a sealed hook to the average reader, and Hardy will remain for all time in the history of our literature ns tin’ type of that small class of great artists who have been too profound and too uncompromising ever to attain popularity and the reward that it brings..