Rather gloomy

Sunday, January 22nd., Cadogan Square, London.

I read more of "Faust" and spent a lot of time in loose reflection - vaguely on a new play and on my next Evening Standard article.  I went for a walk right down over Chelsea Bridge and along Battersea Park Road, and home by Albert Bridge Road and King's Road. Then I filled up the time in writing to Phillpotts about Hardy's funeral. The more I think of it the more wrong it seems to me that Hardy's wish to be buried in his native Dorset was peremptorily set aside. Surely the disposal of our bodies after death is a matter where our wishes should be respected? I certainly hope mine will be. I want to go into Burslem Cemetery and will make my wish well known before I go! I don't think Hardy even believed in God, though he wouldn't say so directly. I wish now I had asked him when we met. This business of grand funerals is all about the established church attempting to demonstrate that it still has a valuable role to play. I give it another 50 years and it will have withered away.

Battersea Park Road

Battersea is a different world. I saw on a Sunday Express poster: "Hardy's last novel, by Sir Edmund Gosse". It seemed terribly absurd there. How many people in Battersea Bridge had heard of Hardy, or of Gosse, or could get up any interest whatever in a last novel though it were written by God himself? It is a gloomy, drab area with most repulsive tenements, a big technical institiute, an open gramophone shop (with a machine grinding out a tune and a song) and an open 'Fun Fair' sort of place (a shop with the front taken out) and a few small boys therein amusing themselves with penny-in-the-slot machines. One wonders whether gambling habits acquired at an early age become serious addictions later in life? I'm not going to say that gambling is a sin; I've done a bit myself from time to time. But it certainly blights the life of many in the working classes from what I read and see around me.

We dined this evening at Mrs. Patrick Campbell's across the Square.