HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO2066 10/18/02 "OCTOBER 2002 NOTES AND QUERIES" =================================================================== Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 10:35:25 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Hardy meets Tennyson I've just finished reading Michael Thorn's biography *Tennyson* (St Martins P, 1992), and was intrigued by his description of Hardy's only meeting with the older poet. "In the meantime he [Tennyson, wife Emily, and son Hallam] . . . took a new town house in Upper Belgrave Street. It was here, in March [1880] that Tennyson had his first and only meeting with the novelist Thomas Hardy. Hardy was no juvenile worshiper. He was forty years old with half a dozen volumes of fiction to his credit, but, considering himself primarily a poet, he approached Tennnyson with awesome preconceptions. When he arrived - the visit was arranged and chaperoned by Mrs. Anne Proctor - Emily was 'lying as if in a coffin,' but she got up to welcome him. For lunch . . . Emily reclined at the head of the table and Tennyson, surprising Hardy with his sociability and humour, asked Mrs. Proctor absurd riddles - (Q: Who was the first man mentioned in the Bible? A: Chap first) - and told Hardy about the funniest misprints that had occurred in his work. Hardy, who never took up an invitation to visit the Tennysons at Farringford, is just one more of those reliable sources on record as saying that the flesh-and-blood Tennyson belied the somewhat grave and patrician public image of the man" (462). Thorn's description of the meeting appears to have been drawn almost totally from Hardy's account of it in the LIFE Betty Cortus ===========