Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  In spite of his lover-like promise of fidelity to her ladyship, the two never met again till he was a young man of twenty-two, and she quite an elderly woman; though it was not his fault, her husband selling the estate shortly after and occupying a house in London.

  It may be worthy of note that this harvest-home was among the last at which the old traditional ballads were sung, the railway having been extended to Dorchester just then, and the orally transmitted ditties of centuries being slain at a stroke by the London comic songs that were introduced. The particular ballad which he remembered hearing that night from the lips of the farm-women was that one variously called ‘The Outlandish Knight’, ‘May Colvine’, ‘The Western Tragedy’, etc. He could recall to old age the scene of the young women in their light gowns sitting on a bench against the wall in the barn, and leaning against each other as they warbled the Dorset version of the ballad, which differed a little from the northern:

  ‘Lie there, lie there, thou false-hearted man,

  Lie there instead o’ me;

  For six pretty maidens thou hast a-drown’d here,

  But the seventh hath drown-ed thee!’

  ‘O tell no more, my pretty par-rot,

  Lay not the blame on me;

  And your cage shall be made o’ the glittering gold,

  Wi’ a door o’ the white ivo-rie!’

  The question of moving from the parish, above alluded to, and taking more commodious premises nearer to or in the town, again arose with the Hardys — was, indeed, always arising. An opportunity to develop her husband’s business which a more convenient centre would have afforded him had been long in Mrs. Hardy’s perception, and she thought he should seek it for the sake of his growing family. It must be admitted that a lonely spot between a heath and a wood, the search for which by messengers and other people of affairs often became wearisomely tedious to them, was almost unreasonable as a place for carrying on the building trade. But Thomas Hardy the Second had not the tradesman’s soul. Instead of waylaying possible needers of brick and stone in the market-place or elsewhere, he liked going alone into the woods or on the heath, where, with a telescope inherited from some collateral ancestor who had been captain of a merchant craft, he would stay peering into the distance by the half- hour; or, in the hot weather, lying on a bank of thyme or camomile with the grasshoppers leaping over him. Among his son’s other childish memories were those of seeing men in the stocks, corn-law agitations, mail-coaches, road-waggons, tinder-boxes, and candle- snuffing. When still a small boy he was taken by his father to witness the burning in effigy of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman in the old Roman Amphitheatre at Dorchester during the No-Popery Riots. The sight to young Hardy was most lurid, and he never forgot it; and when the cowl of one of the monks in the ghastly procession blew aside and revealed the features of one of his father’s workmen his bewilderment was great.

  His earliest recollection was of receiving from his father the gift of a small accordion. He knew that he was but four years old at this time, as his name and the date were written by his father upon the toy: Thomas Hardy. 1844.

  Another memory, some two or three years later, is connected with the Corn Law Agitation. The boy had a little wooden sword, which his father had made for him, and this he dipped into the blood of a pig which had just been killed, and brandished it as he walked about the garden exclaiming: ‘ Free Trade or blood!’

  A member of his family recalled, even after an interval of sixty years, the innocent glee with which the young Thomas and his mother would set off on various expeditions. They were excellent companions, having each a keen sense of humour and a love of adventure. Hardy would tell of one prank when he and his mother put on fantastic garb, pulling cabbage-nets over their faces to disguise themselves. Thus oddly dressed they walked across the heath to visit a sister of Mrs. Hardy, living at Puddletown, whose amazement was great when she set eyes upon these strange visitors at her door.

  It was natural that with the imitativeness of a boy he should at an early age have attempted to perform on the violin, and under his father’s instruction was soon able to tweedle from notation some hundreds of jigs and country-dances that he found in his father’s and grandfather’s old books. From tuning fiddles as a boy he went on as a youth in his teens to keep his mother’s old table-piano in tune whenever he had the time, and was worried by’ The Wolf’ in a musical octave, which he thought a defect in his own ear.

  One other experience of his boyhood may be mentioned which, though comical in itself, gave him much mental distress. This was at church when listening to the sermon. Some mischievous movement of his mind set him imagining that the vicar was preaching mockingly, and he began trying to trace a humorous twitch in the corners of Mr. S — — ’s mouth, as if he could hardly keep a serious countenance. Once having imagined this the impish boy found to his consternation that he could not dismiss the idea. Like Sterne in the pulpit, the vicar seemed to be ‘always tottering on the verge of laughter’, and hence against his will Thomas could scarcely control his merriment, till it became a positive discomfort to him.

  By good fortune the report that the schoolmaster was an able teacher turned out to be true — and finding that he had an apt pupil who galloped unconcernedly over the ordinary school lessons, he either agreed to Hardy’s parents’ proposal, or proposed himself, that he should teach the boy Latin immediately, Latin being considered an extra.

  1852

  So at twelve years of age young Thomas was started on the old Eton grammar and readings in Eutropius and Caesar. Though extraordinarily quick in acquisition he was undoubtedly rather an idle schoolboy; and in respect of the grammar, having, like so many thousands of schoolboys before him, been worried by the ‘Propria quae maribus’, he devised a plan for saving himself trouble in learning the genders by colouring the nouns in three tints respectively; but whether he profited much by his plan is not known. Once, many years after, he deplored to a friend, a classical scholar and Fellow of his college, that he had been taught from the venerable Etonian ‘Introduction to the Latin Tongue’, and not from the celebrated new Latin primer which came out later. His friend said grimly: ‘ The old one was just as good as the new.’

  But despite the classics and his general bookishness he loved adventures with the fiddle, both now and far on towards young manhood, though it was strange that his mother, a ‘progressive’ woman, ambitious on his account though not her own, did not object to these performances. Possibly it was from a feeling that they would help to teach him what life was. His father, however, objected to them strongly, though as he himself had not been averse to them when young he could hardly do other than wink at them. So little Thomas played sometimes at village weddings, at one of which the bride, all in white, kissed him in her intense pleasure at the dance; once at a New Year’s Eve party in the house of the tailor who had breeched him; also in farmers’ parlours; and on another occasion at a homestead where he was stopped by his hostess clutching his bow-arm at the end of a three-quarter-hour’s unbroken footing to his notes by twelve tireless couples in the favourite country-dance of ‘The New- Rigged Ship’. The matron had done it lest he should ‘ burst a bloodvessel’, fearing the sustained exertion to be too much for a boy of thirteen or fourteen.

  He had always been told by his mother that he must on no account take any payment for these services as fiddler, but on one occasion temptation was too strong. A hatful of pennies was collected, amounting to four or five shillings, and Thomas had that morning seen in a shop in Dorchester a copy of The Boys’ Own Book which could be bought with about this sum. He accepted the money and soon owned the coveted volume. His mother shook her head over the transaction, and refused to see any merit in a book which was chiefly about games. This volume was carefully kept, and remained in his library to the end of his life.

  Among the queer occurrences accompanying these merry minstrel- lings may be described one that happened when he was coming home with his father at three in the morning from
a gentleman-farmer’s house where he had been second violin to his senior’s first for six or seven hours, his father for some reason having had a generous wish to oblige the entertainers to the full. It was bitterly cold, and the moon glistened bright upon the encrusted snow, amid which they saw motionless in the hedge what appeared to be a white human figure without a head. The boy, being very tired, with finger-tips tingling from pressing the strings, was for passing the ghastly sight quickly, but the elder went up to the object, which proved to be a very tall thin man in a long white smock-frock, leaning against the bank in a drunken stupor, his head hanging forward so low that at a distance he had seemed to have no head at all. Hardy senior, seeing the danger of leaving the man where he might be frozen to death, awoke him after much exertion, and they supported him to a cottage near, where he lived, and pushed him in through the door, their ears being greeted as they left with a stream of abuse from the man’s wife, which was also vented upon her unfortunate husband, whom she promptly knocked down. Hardy’s father remarked that it might have been as well to leave him where he was, to take his chance of being frozen to death.

  At this age Thomas also loved reading Dumas pkre’s romances, which he did in an English translation, and Shakespeare’s tragedies for the plots only, not thinking much of Hamlet because the ghost did not play his part up to the end as he ought to have done.

  1853-1854

  A year or two later his accomplished schoolmaster opened a more advanced school called an Academy, where boarders were taken. His abilities had in fact attracted the notice of parents and guardians, and but for an affection of the chest which compelled him later to give up teaching he would no doubt have been heard of further afield. (His son, it may be observed, became a well-known science-master at South Kensington.) Hardy followed him to the new school — the grammar school founded by his namesake being reported to be indifferent just then — and remained there all the rest of his school life, thus continuing his Latin under the same teacher, and winning the prize of Beza’s Latin Testament for his progress in the tongue — a little pocket edition which he often carried with him in after years. His course of instruction also included elementary drawing, advanced arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, in which he was fairly good, always saying that he found a certain poetry in the rule for the extraction of the cube-root, owing to its rhythm, and in some of the ‘ Miscellaneous Questions’ of Walkingame. In applied mathematics lie worked completely through Tate’s Mechanics and Nesbitt’s Mensuration.

  Hardy was popular — too popular almost — with his schoolfellows, for their friendship at times became burdensome. He loved being alone, but often, to his concealed discomfort, some of the other boys would volunteer to accompany him on his homeward journey to Bockhampton. How much this irked him he recalled long years after. He tried also to avoid being touched by his playmates. One lad with more insight than the rest, discovered the fact: ‘ Hardy, how is it that you do not like us to touch you?’ This peculiarity never left him, and to the end of his life he disliked even the most friendly hand being laid on his arm or his shoulder. Probably no one else ever observed this.

  One day at this time Hardy, then a boy of fourteen, fell madly in love with a pretty girl who passed him on horseback near the South Walk, Dorchester, as he came out of school hard by, and for some unaccountable reason smiled at him. She was a total stranger. Next day he saw her with an old gentleman, probably her father. He wandered about miserably, looking for her through several days, and caught sight of her once again — this time riding with a young man. Then she disappeared for ever. He told other boys in confidence, who sympathized, but could do nothing, though some boarders watched for her on his behalf. He was more than a week getting over this desperate attachment.

  At fifteen he was sent to receive French lessons from a lady who was the French governess at the school attended by his sister, and began the study of German from a periodical in which he had become deeply interested, entitled The Popular Educator, published by that genius in home-education, John Cassell. Hardy’s mother had begun to buy the publications of that firm for her son, and he himself continued their purchase whenever he had any pocket-money.

  And it was about this date that he formed one of a trio of youths (the vicar’s sons being the other two) who taught fti the Sunday School of the parish, where as a pupil in his class he had a dairymaid four years older than himself, who afterwards appeared in Tess of the d’ Urbervilles as Marian — one of the few portraits from life in his works. This pink and plump damsel had a marvellous power of memorizing whole chapters in the Bible, and would repeat to him by heart in class, to his boredom, the long gospels before Easter without missing a word, and with evident delight in her facility; though she was by no means a model of virtue in her love-affairs.

  Somewhat later, though it may as well be mentioned here among other such trivialities, he lost his heart for a few days to a young girl who had come from Windsor just after he had been reading Ains- worth’s Windsor Castle. But she disappointed him on his finding that she took no interest in Heme the Hunter or Anne Boleyn. In this kind there was another young girl, a gamekeeper’s pretty daughter,

  who won Hardy’s boyish admiration because of her beautiful bay-red hair. But she despised him, as being two or three years her junior, and married early. He celebrated her later on as ‘Lizbie Browne’. Yet another attachment, somewhat later, which went deeper, was to a farmer’s daughter named Louisa. There were more probably. They all appear, however, to have been quite fugitive, except perhaps the one for Louisa.

  He believed that his attachment to this damsel was reciprocated, for on one occasion when he was walking home from Dorchester he beheld her sauntering down the lane as if to meet him. He longed to speak to her, but bashfulness overcame him, and he passed on with a murmured ‘Good evening’, while poor Louisa had no word to say.

  Later he heard that she had gone to Weymouth to a boarding school for young ladies, and thither he went, Sunday after Sunday, until he discovered the church which the maiden of his affections attended with her fellow-scholars. But, alas, all that resulted from these efforts was a shy smile from Louisa.

  That the vision remained may be gathered from a poem ‘Louisa in the Lane’ written not many months before his death. Louisa lies under a nameless mound in ‘Mellstock’ churchyard. That ‘Good evening’ was the only word that passed between them.

  CHAPTER II

  STUDENT AND ARCHITECT

  1856-1862: Aet. 16-21

  At sixteen, though he had just begun to be interested in French and the Latin classics, the question arose of a profession or business. His father as a builder had carried out the designs of, and so become associated with, Mr. John Hicks, an architect and church-restorer originally in practice in Bristol and now in Dorchester. Having seen Thomas Hardy junior when his father conjointly with another builder was executing Mr. Hicks’s restoration of, it is believed, Woodsford Castle, and tested him by inviting him to assist at a survey, Hicks wished to have him as a pupil, offering to take him for somewhat less than the usual premium, payable in the middle of a term of three years. As the father was a ready-money man, Mrs. Hardy suggested to the architect a substantial abatement for paying down the whole premium at the beginning of the term, and to this Mr. Hicks, who was not a ready-money man, agreed. Hardy was a born bookworm, that and that alone was unchanging in him; he had sometimes, too, wished to enter the Church; but he cheerfully agreed to go to Mr. Hicks’s.

  July 1856

  The architect’s office was at 39 South Street, Dorchester, now part of a Temperance Hotel, though the room in which Hardy used to draw is unchanged. On arriving he found there a pupil of twenty- one, who was at the end of his term and was just leaving; also a pupil in the first year of his articles, a year or more older than himself, who had been well educated at a good school in or near London, and who, having a liking for the classical tongues, regretted his recent necessity °f breaking off his studies to take up architecture.
They began later to read together, and during the ensuing two or three years often gave more time to books than to drawing. Hicks, too, was exceptionally well educated for an ordinary country architect. The son of a loucestershire rector, who had been a good classical scholar, he had read some Greek, and had a smattering of Hebrew (probably taught him by his father); though, rather oddly, he was less at home with Latin. He was a kindly-natured man, almost jovial, and allowed the two youths some leisure for other than architectural study, though much of Hardy’s reading in the ensuing years was done between five and eight in the morning before he left home for the office. In the long summer days he would even rise at four and begin. In these circumstances he got through a moderately good number of the usual classical pages — several books of the Aeneid, some Horace and Ovid, etc.; and in fact grew so familiar with his authors that in his walks to and from the town he often caught himself soliloquizing in Latin on his various projects. He also took up Greek, which he had not learnt at schopl, getting on with some books of the Iliad. He once said that nearly all his readings in the last-named work had been done in the morning before breakfast.