Thomas Hardy- birthday boy

Thomas Hardy- birthday boy.

If it had been left up to me then Thomas Hardy, had he still been around today, would certainly have thoroughly merited a knighthood from the Queen. In fact arise Sir Thomas Hardy has a rich ring to it but then Hardy would probably been very humbled and deeply flattered by such a honour so we'll never know anyway.

Today though marks the 177th birthday of one of England's finest classical authors and most highly regarded of late 19th and early 20th century writers. Happy Birthday Thomas Hardy. It's time to blow the candles out on your birthday cake. take a leisurely stroll down one of your well trodden Dorset country lanes and take a well deserved bow. But 177 hey? I think you should open up your birthday cards Thomas, take a hearty drop of brandy for lunch and then whole heartedly enjoy the fruits of your labours.

 I think that Hardy would have revelled in being at the centre of attention and a brandy would have been the most fitting of drinks. But long after his death I'm inclined to believe that hidden away in a timber beamed country pub the spirit of Hardy is still being celebrated raucously by all of his admirers. They'll be slapping his back, smiling at passages of the famous novels and then laughing joyously at all of those well rounded characters.

Next year is the 90th anniversary of Hardy's death and his gravestone resides in a quiet Dorset churchyard. Today we can only look back on the glorious literary legacy he left behind him and wonder if today's modern scribes could even come even remotely close to re-producing Hardy's poetic prose, prose that had life, animation, vividness, descriptive paragraphs  of the most exalted excellence and the whole emotional spectrum of society and the world.

From a personal point of view Thomas Hardy was by a considerable length of a Dorset country lane, the greatest writer I've ever read. It has been an inordinate privilege to read Tess of the D'Urbevilles, the Return of the Native, the lesser known perhaps Trumpet Major, Far From the Madding Crowd, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Laodicean and so many tragic, happy, tragi comic short stories, a huge treasure trove of writing that was by turns, memorably descriptive, wonderfully expressive and oozing prodigious lyricism.

It's hard to know why Hardy had such a profound effect on me, inspiring me to turn turn my hand to writing but the man was simply a literary genius, a man who loved to paint incomparable word pictures, who infused every sentence with the joy of living and left us with some of the most well embroidered poetry, language that had its own distinctive character, its personal stamp of brilliance, of classical virtuosity and earthy vitality.

Surely, I hear you cry, Hardy wasn't that good. It is impossible to judge and gauge any of the great composers, artists and writers of any age because this has to be a matter of opinion and quite clearly subjective but for me Hardy ticked all of the right literary boxes. He illustrated aspects of country life that none could really match. He remains beyond categorisation because there could have been few   Dorset authors capable of equalling his literary style let alone surpassing it. Or maybe they can and I've yet to read their work.

His biography has been well chronicled now and we know enough about the great man without looking for any other set of superlatives or complimentary tributes. It is enough to extend my personal  gratitude to Thomas Hardy. Hardy was a man of honesty, modesty, humility, a man who could conjure the most magical of literary sentences without ever resorting to cheap or vulgar dialogue. Of course Hardy experienced darkness and tragedy and even if the novels did descend into a murkier world, there were few if any authors who could write as well as he did. It's time for me to remember the 177th birthday of Thomas Hardy. In a deep corner of Dorset they'll be sighing with pleasure. What a jolly good fellow Hardy was.