by Thomas Hardy
In March he went to the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-Race, and entered rooms taken in Newton Road, Westbourne Grove, a light being thrown on the domestic and practical side of his life at this time by the following:
‘Newton Road, Westbourne Grove, March 19, 1875.
‘Messrs Townly and Bonniwell, Surbiton.
‘Gentlemen: Please to warehouse the cases and boxes sent herewith, and numbered as follows:
‘No. 1. Size 3 ft. 6 ins. x 2 ft. 6 ins. x 2 ft. 2 ins., containing linen and books.
‘No. 2. Size 2 ft. o ins. x 1 ft. 9 insx 1 ft. ins. containing books.
‘No. 3. Size 2 ft. o ins. xi ft. 4 ins. xf ft. 2 ins. containing books.
‘No- 4. Size 1 ft. 5 ins. x 1 ft. o ins. x 1 ft. o ins. containing sundries.
‘A receipt for same will oblige’.
Their entire worldly goods were contained in this small compass.
The next three months were spent at the address given above, where they followed an ordinary round of museum, theatre, and concert-going, with some dining-out, in keeping with (what he had written earlier to Mr. George Smith: ‘ We are coming to Town for three months on account of Ethelberta, some London scenes occurring in her chequered career which I want to do as vigorously as possible — having already visited Rouen and Paris with the same object, other adventures of hers taking place there.’ He also asked Smith’s advice on a German translation of Far from the Madding Crowd, which had been asked for.
The Comedy in Chapters, despite its departure from a path desired by his new-found readers, and to some extent desired by himself, was accepted for the magazine. The beginning appeared in the Cornhill for May, when Hardy had at last the satisfaction of proving, amid the general disappointment at the lack of sheep and shepherds, that he did not mean to imitate anybody, whatever the satisfaction might have been worth. The sub-title did not appear in the magazine, Mr. Stephen having written in respect of it:
104NOVELS — TO ILLNESS1873-76
‘I am sorry to have to bother you about a trifle! I fully approved of your suggestion for adding to “ Ethelberta’s Hand” the descriptive title “A Comedy in Chapters”. I find however from other people that it gives rather an unfortunate idea. They understand by Comedy something of the farce description, and expect you to be funny after the fashion of Mr., or some professional joker. This, of course,
is stupid; but then, advertisements are meant for stupid people. The question is, unluckily, not what they ought to feel but what they do feel. ... I think, therefore, that if you have no strong reason to the contrary it will be better to drop the second title for the present. When the book is reprinted it can of course appear, because then the illusion would be immediately dispelled.’
One reflection about himself at this date sometimes made Hardy uneasy. He perceived that he was ‘up against’ the position of having to carry on his life not as an emotion, but as a scientific game; that he was committed by circumstances to novel-writing as a regular trade, as much as he had formerly been to architecture; and that hence he would, he deemed, have to look for material in manners — in ordinary social and fashionable life as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only. So far what he had written had not been novels at all, as usually understood — that is pictures of modern customs and observances — and might not long sustain the interest of the circulating library subscriber who cared mainly for those things. On the other hand, to go about to dinners and clubs and crushes as a business was not much to his mind. Yet that was necessary meat and drink to the popular author. Not that he was unsociable, but events and long habit had accustomed him to solitary living. So it was also with his wife, of whom he wrote later, in the poem entitled ‘A Dream or No’:
Lonely I found her,
The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.
He mentioned this doubt of himself one day to Miss Thackeray, who confirmed his gloomy misgivings by saying with surprise: ‘ Certainly; a novelist must necessarily like society!’
Another incident which added to his dubiety was the arrival of a letter from Coventry Patmore, a total stranger to him, expressing the view that A Pair of Blue Eyes was in its nature not a conception for prose, and that he ‘regretted at almost every page that such unequalled beauty and power should not have assured themselves the immortality which would have been impressed upon them by the form of verse’. Hardy was much struck by this opinion from Pat- more. However, finding himself committed to prose, he renewed his consideration of a prose style, as it is evident from the following note: ‘Read again Addison, Macaulay, Newman, Sterne, Defoe, Lamb, Gibbon, Burke, Times leaders, etc., in a study of style. Am more and more confirmed in an idea I have long held, as a matter of common sense, long before I thought of any old aphorism bearing on the subject: “Ars est celare artem”. The whole secret of a living style and the difference between it and a dead style, lies in not having too much style — being, in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there. It brings wonderful life into the writing:
‘A sweet disorder in the dress . . .
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.
‘Otherwise your style is like worn half-pence — all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing, and no crispness or movement at all.
‘It is, of course, simply a carrying into prose the knowledge I have acquired in poetry — that inexact rhymes and rhythms now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones.’
About the time at which the Hardys were leaving Surbiton for Newton Road occurred an incident, which can best be described by quoting Hardy’s own account of it as printed in Mr. F. W. Maitland’s Life of Leslie Stephen:
‘One day (March 23, 1875) I received from Stephen a mysterious note asking me to call in the evening, as late as I liked. I went, and found him alone, wandering up and down his library in slippers; his tall thin figure wrapt in a heath-coloured dressing-gown. After a few remarks on our magazine arrangements he said he wanted me to witness his signature to what, for a moment, I thought was his will; but it turned out to be a deed renunciatory of holy-orders under the act of 1870. He said grimly that he was really a reverend gentleman still, little as he might look it, and that he thought it was as well to cut himself adrift of a calling for which, to say the least, he had always been utterly unfit. The deed was executed with due formality. Our conversation then turned upon theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, the unreality of time and kindred subjects. He told me that he had “wasted”
much time on systems of religion and metaphysics, and that the new theory of vortex rings had “a staggering fascination” for him.’
On this description the editor of the Life, Mr. Maitland, remarks: ‘ This scene — I need not say it — is well drawn. A tall thin figure wrapt in a heath-coloured dressing-gown was what one saw if one climbed to that Stylites study at dead of night.’
In May Hardy formed one of a deputation to Mr. Disraeli in support of a motion for a Select Committee to inquire into the state of Copyright Law; and on Waterloo Day he and his wife went to Chelsea Hospital — it being the 60th anniversary of the battle — and made acquaintance with the Waterloo men still surviving there. Hardy would tell that one of these — a delightful old campaigner named John Bentley whom he knew to the last — put his arm round Mrs. Hardy’s waist, and interlarded his discourse with ‘my dear young woman’, while he described to her his experiences of that memorable day, one rather incisive touch in his tale to her being that through the haze of smoke all that could be discerned was ‘ anything that shined’, such as bayonets, helmets, and swords. The wet eve of the battle, when they slept” in the rain with nothing over them, he spoke of as ‘last night’, as if he were speaking on the actual day. Another experience he related to her was a love-affair. While quartered in Brussels
he had a sweetheart. When ordered to advance to Waterloo her friends offered to hide him if he would desert, as the French were sure to win. He refused, urging the oath he had taken; but he felt strongly tempted, as she was very fond of him, and he of her. She begged him to write, if he lived through the campaign, and to be sure to get a Belgian or Frenchman to direct the letter, or it might not find her. After the battle, and when he was in Paris he did write, and received an answer, saying she would come to Paris and meet him on Christmas Day at 3 o’clock. His regiment had received orders to march before that time, and at Christmas he was — Mrs. Hardy forgot where. But he thought of her, and wondered if she came. ‘Yes, you see, ‘twas God’s will we should meet no more’, said Bentley, speaking of her with peculiar tenderness.
In this same month of 1875, it may be interesting to note, occurs the first mention in Hardy’s memoranda of the idea of an epic on the war with Napoleon — carried out so many years later in The Dynasts. This earliest note runs as follows:
‘Mem: A Ballad of the Hundred Days. Then another of Moscow. Others of earlier campaigns — forming altogether an Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815.’
That Hardy, however, was endeavouring to live practically at this time, as well as imaginatively, is shown by an entry immediately following:
‘House at Childe-Okeford, Dorset. To be sold by auction June 10’; and by his starting on the 22nd for a day or two in Dorsetshire house-hunting, first visiting Shaftesbury, where he found a cottage for £25 a year, that did not, however, suit; thence to Blandford, and thence to Wimborne, where on arrival he entered the Minster at ten at night, having seen a light within, and sat in a stall listening to the organist practising, while the rays from the musician’s solitary candle streamed across the arcades. This incident seems to have inclined him to Wimborne; but he did not go there yet.
In July the couple went to Bournemouth, and thence by steamer to Swanage, where they found lodgings at the house of an invalided captain of smacks and ketches; and Hardy, suspending his househunting, settled down there for the autumn and winter to finish The Hand of Ethelberta.
While completing it he published in the Gentleman’s Magazine a ballad he had written nine or ten years earlier during his time with Blomfield, called ‘The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s’ (and in some editions ‘The Bride-night Fire’) — which, as with his other verses, he had been unable to get into print at the date of its composition by the rather perfunctory efforts he made.
‘Nov. 28. I sit under a tree, and feel alone: I think of certain insects around me as magnified by the microscope: creatures like elephants, flying dragons, etc. And I feel I am by no means alone.
‘29. He has read well who has learnt that there is more to read outside books than in them.’
Their landlord, the ‘captain’, used to tell them, as sailors will, strange stories of his sea-farings; mostly smuggling stories — one of them Hardy always remembered because of its odd development. The narrator was in a fishing-boat going to meet a French lugger half-Channel-over, to receive spirit-tubs and land them. He and his mates were some nine miles off Portland, which was the limit allowed, when they were sighted by the revenue-cutter. Seeing the cutter coming up, they said ‘ We must act as if we were fishing for mackerel’. But they had no bait, and the ruse would be discovered. They snapped up the stems of their tobacco-pipes, and unfastening the hook from a line they had with them slipped on the bits of tobacco- pipe above the shank. The officers came — saw them fishing, and merely observing that they were a long way from shore, and dubiously asking why, and being innocently told because the fish were there, left them. Then, as if the bait had been genuine, to their surprise, on pulling up the sham line they began to haul in mackerel. The fish had made their deception truth.
Masters also told them that when persons are drowned in a high sea in the West (or Deadman’s) Bay, ‘ the sea undresses them’ — mauling off their clothes and leaving them naked.
While here at Swanage they walked daily on the cliffs and shore, Hardy noting thereon:
‘Evening. Just after sunset. Sitting with E. on a stone under the wall before the Refreshment Cottage. The sounds are two, and only two. On the left Durlstone Head roaring high and low, like a giant asleep. On the right a thrush. Above the bird hangs the new moon, and a steady planet.’
In the same winter of 1875 an article appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes on Far from the Madding Crowd entitled ‘ Le roman pastoral en Angleterre’.
Ethelberta was finished in the January of the next year (1876) and the MS. dispatched. Pending the appearance of the story in volumes the twain removed in March to lodgings at Yeovil to facilitate their search for a little dwelling. Here they were living when the novel was published. It was received in a friendly spirit and even with admiration in some quarters — more, indeed, than Hardy had expected — one experienced critic going so far as to write that it was the finest ideal comedy since the days of Shakespeare. ‘Show me the lady in the flesh’, he said in a letter to the author, ‘and I vow on my honour as a bachelor to become a humble addition to her devoted train.’ It did not, however, win the cordiality that had greeted its two forerunners, the chief objection seeming to be that it was ‘impossible’. It was, in fact, thirty years too soon for a Comedy of Society of that kind — just as The Poor Man and the Lady had been too soon for a socialist story, and as other of his writings — in prose and verse — were too soon for their date. The most impossible situation in it was said to be that of the heroine sitting at table at a dinner-party of ‘the best people’, at which her father was present by the sideboard as butler. Yet a similar situation has been applauded in a play in recent years by Mr. Bernard Shaw, without any sense of improbability.
This ended Hardy’s connection with Leslie Stephen as editor, though not as friend; and in the course of a letter expressing a hope that it might be renewed, Stephen wrote (May 16, 1876):
‘My remark about modern lectures [?] was of course “wrote sarcastic”, as Artemus Ward says, and intended for a passing dig in the ribs of some modern critics, who think that they can lay down laws in art like the Pope in religion; e.g. the whole Rossetti-Swinburne school1 think as a critic, that the less authors read of criticism the better. You, e.g., have a perfectly fresh and original vein, and I think the less you bother yourself about critical canons the less chance there is of your becoming self-conscious and cramped. . . . Ste. Beuve, and Mat Arnold (in a smaller way), are the only modern critics who seem to me worth reading. . . . We are generally a poor lot, horribly afraid of not being in the fashion, and disposed to give ourselves airs on very small grounds.’
1 May. In an orchard at Closeworth. Cowslips under trees. A light proceeds from them, as from Chinese lanterns or glow-worms.’
CHAPTER VIII
HOLLAND, THE RHINE, AND STURMINSTER NEWTON
1876-1878: Aet. 36-37
From their lodgings in Yeovil they set out at the end of May for Holland and the Rhine — the first thing that struck them being that ‘the Dutch seemed like police perpetually keeping back an unruly crowd composed of waves’. They visited Rotterdam — ‘looking over-clean and new, with not enough shadow, and with houses nearly all out of the perpendicular’; then The Hague, Scheveningen, Emmerich, and Cologne, where Hardy was disappointed by the machine- made Gothic of the Cathedral, and whence in a few days they went on ‘between the banks that bear the vine’, to Bonn, Coblentz, Ehrenbreitstein, and Mainz, where they were impressed by a huge confirmation in the cathedral which, by the way, was accompanied by a tune like that of Keble’s Evening Hymn. Heidelberg they loved, and looking west one evening from the top of the tower on the Konigsstuhl, Hardy remarks on a singular optical effect that was almost tragic. Owing to mist the wide landscape itself was not visible, but’ the Rhine glared like a riband of blood, as if it serpentined through the atmosphere above the earth’s surface’. Thence they went to Carlsruhe, where they attended a fair, and searched for a German lady Hardy had known in England, but
were unable to find her. Baden and the Black Forest followed, and next they proceeded to Strassburg, and then they turned back, travelling by way of Metz to Brussels. Here Hardy — maybe with his mind on The Dynasts — explored the field of Waterloo, and a day or two later spent some time in investigating the problem of the actual scene of the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, with no result that satisfied him, writing a letter while here to some London paper to that effect — a letter which has not been traced.
A short stay in Brussels was followed by their homeward course through Antwerp, where they halted awhile; and Harwich, having a miserable passage on a windy night in a small steamer with cattle on board.
In London they were much astonished and amused to see in large letters on the newspaper-posters that there had been riots at Antwerp; and they recalled that they had noticed a brass band parading the streets with about a dozen workmen walking quietly behind.
June (1876). Arriving at Yeovil again after another Waterloo- day visit to Chelsea by Hardy (where, in the private parlour of’The Turk’s Head’ over glasses of grog, the battle was fought yet again by the dwindling number of pensioners who had taken part in it), his first consideration was the resumed question of a cottage, having ere this received hints from relatives that he and his wife ‘appeared to be wandering about like two tramps’; and also growing incommoded by an accumulation of luggage in packing-cases, mostly books, for of other furniture they had as yet not a stick; till they went out one day to an auction and bought a door-scraper and a book-case, with which two articles they laid the foundation of household goods and effects.