by Thomas Hardy
‘I can only tell you what is my own taste, but I rather think that my taste is in this case the common one. I think that a historical character in a novel is almost always a nuisance; but I like to have a bit of history in the background, so to speak; to feel that George III. is just round the corner, though he does not present himself in full front.’
Since coming into contact with Leslie Stephen about 1873, as has been shown, Hardy had been much influenced by his philosophy, and also by his criticism. He quotes the following sentence from Stephen in his note-book under the date of July 1, 1879:
‘The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors.’ That Hardy adhered pretty closely to this principle when he resumed the writing of poetry can hardly be denied.
‘July 8 or 9. With E. to Mrs. [Alexander] Macmillan’s garden- party at Knapdale, near our house. A great many present. Talked to Mr. White of Harvard University, and Mr. Henry Holt the New York publisher, who said that American spelling and idiom must prevail over the English, as it was sixty millions against thirty. I forgot for the moment to say that it did not follow, the usage set up by a few people of rank, education, and fashion being the deciding factor. Also to John Morley, whom I had not seen since he read my first manuscript. He remembered it, and said in his level uninterested voice: “Well, since we met, you have . . .” etc. etc. Also met a Mrs. H., who pretended to be an admirer of my books, and apparently had never read one. She had with her an American lady, sallow, with black dancing eyes, dangling earrings, yellow costume, and gay laugh.’ It was at this garden-party at Mrs. Macmillan’s that the thunderstorm came on which Hardy made use of in a similar scene in A Laodicean.
‘July 12. To Chislehurst to funeral of young Louis Napoleon. Met [Sir G.] Greenhill in the crowd. We stood on the common while the procession passed. Was struck by the profile of Prince Napoleon as he walked by bareheaded, a son on each arm: complexion dark, sallow, even sinister: a round projecting chin: countenance altogether extraordinarily remindful of Boney.’ Hardy said long after that this sight of Napoleon’s nephew — ‘Plon-Plon’ — had been of enormous use to him, when writing The Dynasts, in imagining the Emperor’s appearance. And it has been remarked somewhere in print that when the Prince had been met, without warning in Paris at night, crossing one of the bridges over the Seine, the beholder had started back aghast under the impression that he was seeing the spirit of the great Napoleon.
‘July 29. Charles Leland — a man of higher literary rank than ever was accorded him [the American author of Hans Breitmanns Ballads and translator of Heine] — told some of his gipsy tales at the Savile Club, including one of how he visited at a country mansion and while there went to see a gipsy-family living in a tent on the squire’s land. He talked to them in Romany, and was received by the whole family as a bosom-friend. He was told by the head gipsy that his, the gipsy’s, brother would be happy to know him when he came out of gaol, but that at present he was doing six months for a horse. While Leland was sitting by the fire drinking brandy-and- water with this friend, the arrival of some gentlemen and ladies, fellow-guests at the house he was staying at, was announced. They had come to see the gipsies out of curiosity. Leland threw his brandy from his glass into the fire, not to be seen tippling there, but as they entered it blazed up in a blue flare much to their amazement, as if they thought it some unholy libation, which added to their surprise at discovering him. How he explained himself I cannot remember.’
In the latter half of August Hardy paid a visit to his parents in Dorset and a week later Mrs. Hardy joined him there. They spent a few days in going about the district, and then took lodgings at Weymouth, right over the harbour, his mother coming to see them, and driving to Portland, Upwey, etc., in their company. Their time in the port was mostly wet; ‘ the [excursion] steamer-bell ringing persistently, and nobody going on board except an unfortunate boys’ school that had come eight miles by train that morning to spend a happy day by the sea. The rain goes into their baskets of provisions, and runs out a strange mixture of cake-juice and mustard-water, but they try to look as if they were enjoying it — all except the pale thin assistant-master who has come with them, and whose face is tragic with his responsibilities. The Quay seems quite deserted till, on going along it, groups of boatmen are discovered behind each projecting angle of wall — martyrs in countenance, talking of what their receipts would have been if the season had turned out fine; and the landladies’ faces at every lodging-house window watching the drizzle and the sea it half obscures. Two adventurous visitors have emerged from their lodgings as far as the doorway, where they stand in their waterproof cloaks and goloshes, saying cheerfully, “the air will do us good, and we can change as soon as we come in”. Young men rush to the bathing machines in ulsters, and the men engaged in loading a long-voyage steamer lose all patience, and say: “ I’m blanked, if it goes on much longer like this we shall be rotted alive!” The tradespeople are exceptionally civil, and fancy prices have miraculously disappeared. . . .
‘Am told that has turned upon her drunken husband at last, and knocks him down without ceremony. In the morning he holds out his trembling hand and says, “Give me a sixpence for a drop o’ brandy — please do ye, my dear!’“ This was a woman Hardy had known as a pretty laughing girl, who had been married for the little money she had.
CHAPTER X
LONDON, NORMANDY, AND CAMBRIDGE
1879-1880: Aet. 39-40
After their return to London they visited and dined out here and there, and as Mrs. Hardy had never seen the Lord Mayor’s Show Hardy took her to view it from the upper windows of Good Words in Ludgate Hill. She remarked that the surface of the crowd seemed like a boiling cauldron of porridge. He jots down that ‘as the crowd grows denser it loses its character of an aggregate of countless units, and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity, that takes the shape of the streets along which it has lain itself, and throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighbouring alleys; a creature whose voice exudes from its scaly coat, and who has an eye in every pore of its body. The balconies, stands, and railway-bridge are occupied by small detached shapes of the same tissue, but of gentler motion, as if they were the spawn of the monster in their midst.’
On a Sunday in the same November they met in Mr. Frith’s studio, to which they had been invited, Sir Percy Shelley (the son of Percy Bysshe) and Lady Shelley. Hardy said afterwards that the meeting was as shadowy and remote as were those previous occasions when he had impinged on the penumbra of the poet he loved — that time of his sleeping at the Cross-Keys, St. John Street, and that of the visits he paid to Old St. Pancras Churchyard. He was to enter that faint penumbra twice more, once when he stood beside Shelley’s dust in the English cemetery at Rome, and last when by Mary Shelley’s grave at Bournemouth.
They also met in the studio a deaf old lady, introduced as ‘Lady Bacon’ (though she must have been Lady Charlotte Bacon), who ‘ talked vapidly of novels, saying she never read them — not thinking them positively wicked, but, well . . .’. Mr. Frith afterwards explained that she was Byron’s Ianthe, to whom he dedicated the First and Second Cantos of Childe Harold when she was Lady Charlotte Harley. That ‘Peri of the West’, with an eye ‘wild as the Gazelle’s’, and a voice that had entered Byron’s ear, was now a feeble beldame muffled up in black and furs. (It may be mentioned that she died the following year.)
Hardy met there too — a distinctly modern juxtaposition — Miss Braddon, who ‘had a broad, thought-creased, world-beaten face a most amiable woman’, whom he always liked.
In December Hardy attended the inaugural dinner of the Rabelais Club at the Tavistock Hotel, in a ‘large, empty, dimly-lit, cheerless apartment, with a gloomy crimson screen hiding what remained of the only cheerful object there — the fire. There was a fog in the room as in the streets, and one ma
n only came in evening dress, who, Walter Pollock said, looked like the skull at the banquet, but who really looked like a conjuror dying of the cold among a common set of thick-jacketed men who could stand it. When I came in Leland turned his high flat fa$ade to me — like that of a clock-tower; his face being the clock-face, his coat swaying like a pendulum; features earnest and energetic, altogether those of a single-minded man. There were also Fred Pollock, girlish-looking; and genial Walter Besant, with his West-of-England sailor face and silent pantomimic laughter. Sir Patrick Colquhoun was as if he didn’t know what he was there for, how he arrived there, or how he was going to get home again. Two others present, Palmer [afterwards murdered in the East] and Joe Knight [the dramatic critic] also seemed puzzled about it.
‘When dinner was over and things had got warmer, Leland in his speech remarked with much emphasis that we were men who ought to be encouraged, which sentiment was applauded with no misgivings of self-conceit. D, now as always, made himself the clown of our court, privileged to say anything by virtue of his’ office. Hence when we rose to drink the health of absent members, he stayed firmly sitting, saying he would not drink it because they ought to have been there, afterwards lapsing into Spanish on the strength of his being going some day to publish a translation of Don Quixote. Altogether we were as Rabelaisian as it was possible to be in the foggy circumstances, though I succeeded but poorly.’
It should be explained that this Rabelais Club, which had a successful existence for many years, had been instituted by Sir Walter Besant — a great lover of clubs and societies — as a declaration for virility in literature. Hardy was pressed to join as being the most virile writer of works of imagination then in London; while, it may be added, Henry James after a discussion was rejected for the lack of that quality, though he was afterwards invited as a guest.
On the first of February 1B80 Hardy observed a man skating by himself on the pond by the Trinity-Church Schools at Upper Tooting, near his own house, and was moved to note down:
‘It is a warm evening for the date, and there has been a thaw for two or three days, so that the birds sing cheerfully. A buttercup is said to be visible somewhere, and spring has, in short, peeped in upon us. What can the sentiments of that man be, to enjoy ice at such a time? The mental jar must overcome physical enjoyment in any well-regulated mind. He skates round the edge, it being unsafe to go into the middle, and he seems to sigh as he puts up with a limitation resulting from blessed promise.’
‘1 Arundel Terrace, Trinity Road, ‘Upper Tooting, S.W.
‘Feb. 2, 1880.
‘Dear Mr. Locker,
‘I can hardly express to you how grateful I am to get your letter. When I consider the perfect literary taste that is shown in all your own writings, apart from their other merits, I am not sure that I do not value your expressions of pleasure more highly than all the printed criticisms put together. It is very generous of you to pass over the defects of style in the book which, whenever I look into it, seem blunders that any child ought to have avoided.
‘In enjoying your poems over again, I felt — will you mind my saying it? — quite ill-used to find you had altered two of my favourite lines which I had been in the habit of muttering to myself for some years past. I mean ‘“They never do so now — because I’m not so handsome as I was.”
‘I shall stick to the old reading as much the nicest, whatever you may choose to do in new editions.
‘One other remark of quite a different sort. I unhesitatingly affirm that nothing more beautiful and powerful, for its length, than “the Old Stone-Mason” has been done by any modern poet. The only poem which has affected me at all in the same way is Wordsworth’s “Two April Mornings”, but this being less condensed than yours does not strike through one with such sudden power as yours in the last verse.
‘I will not forget to give myself the pleasure of calling some Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile I should hope that you will be so kindly disposed as to give us a few more “ old stone-masons” as well as ballads of a lighter kind.
‘Believe me, Yours very truly,
‘Thomas Hardy.’
The same week Hardy met Matthew Arnold — probably for the first time — at a dinner given by Mr. G. Murray Smith, the publisher, at the Continental Hotel, where also were present Henry James and Richard Jefferies — the latter a modest young man then getting into notice as a writer, through having a year or so earlier published his first successful book, entitled The Gamekeeper at Home.
Arnold, according to Hardy’s account of their meeting much later, ‘had a manner of having made up his mind upon everything years ago, so that it was a pleasing futility for his interlocutor to begin thinking new ideas, different from his own, at that time of day’. Yet he was frank and modest enough to assure Hardy deprecatingly that he was only a hard-worked school-inspector.
He seems to have discussed the subject of literary style with the younger writer, but all the latter could recall of his remarks thereon was his saying that ‘ the best man to read for style — narrative style — was Swift’ — an opinion that may well be questioned, like many more of Arnold’s pronouncements, despite his undoubtedly true ones.
At dinner an incident occurred in which he was charmingly amusing. Mrs. Murray Smith having that afternoon found herself suddenly too unwell to preside, her place had to be taken at the last minute by her daughter, and, it being the latter’s first experience of the kind, she was timorous as to the time of withdrawal, murmuring to Arnold, ‘I — think we must retire now?’ Arnold put his hand upon her shoulder and pressed her down into her seat as if she were a child — she was not much more, — saying, ‘No, no! what’s the use of going into that room? Now I’ll pour you out a glass of sherry to keep you here.’ And kept there she and the other ladies were.
‘Savile Club, ‘Savile Row, W.
‘February 11, 1880.
‘Dear Mr. Handley Moule,
‘I have just been reading in a Dorset paper a report of your sermon on the death of the Rev. H. Moule, and I cannot refrain from sending you a line to tell you how deeply it has affected me, and — what is more to the point — to express my sense of the singular power with which you have brought Mr. Moule’s life and innermost heart before all readers of that address.
‘You will, I am sure, believe me when I say that I have been frequently with you and your brothers in spirit during the last few days. Though not, topographically, a parishioner of your father’s I virtually stood in that relation to him, and his home generally, during many years of my life, and I always feel precisely as if I had been one. I had many times resolved during the year or two before his death to try to attend a service in the old Church in the old way before he should be gone: but to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow! — I never did.
‘A day or two ago Matthew Arnold talked a good deal about him to me: he was greatly struck with an imperfect description I gave him (from what I had heard my father say) of the state of Fordington 50 years ago, and its state after the vicar had brought his energies to bear upon the village for a few years. His words “energy is genius” express your father very happily.
‘Please give my kind remembrances to Mr. Charles Moule and your other brothers who have not forgotten me — if they are with you — and believe me,
‘Sincerely yours,
‘Thomas Hardy.’
The first week in March the Hardys called by arrangement on Mrs. Procter — the widow of ‘Barry Cornwall’ — at her flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions. Hardy had been asked to her house when he first made her acquaintance before his marriage, and when her husband was living, though bedridden: but being then, as always, backward in seeking new friends, Hardy had never gone — to his regret. He was evidently impressed newly by her on this call, as one who was a remarkable link with the literary past, though she herself was not a literary woman; and the visit on this Sunday afternoon was the first one of a long series of such, extending over many years almost to her death, for she showed a gr
eat liking for Hardy and his wife, and she always made them particularly welcome. It was here, on these Sunday afternoons, that they used frequently to meet Browning.
Hardy said after her death that on such occasions she sat in a fixed attitude, almost as if placed in her seat like an unconscious image of Buddha. Into her eyes and face would come continually an expression from a time fifty or sixty years before, when she was a handsome coquette, a faint tendency to which would show even in old age in the momentary archness of her glance now and then. ‘You would talk to her’, he said, ‘and believe you were talking to a person of the same date as yourself, with recent emotions and impulses: you would see her sideways when crossing the room to show you something, and realise her, with sudden sadness, to be a withered woman whose interests and emotions must be nearly extinct.’
Of the poets she had met she expressed herself to have been un- attracted by Wordsworth’s personality, but to have had a great liking for Leigh Hunt. She remembered that the latter called one day, bringing with him ‘a youth whom nobody noticed much’, and who remained in the background, Hunt casually introducing him as ‘Mr. Keats’.
She would also tell of an experience she and her husband had, shortly after their marriage, when they were living in fashionable lodgings in Southampton Row. They went to see Lamb at Edmonton, and caused him much embarrassment by a hint that she would like to wash her hands, it being a hot day. He seemed bewildered and asked stammeringly if she would mind washing them in the kitchen, which she did.
A little later she wrote to Hardy concerning his short story Fellow- Townsmen, which had lately come out in a periodical:
‘You are cruel. Why not let him come home again and marry his first love? But I see you are right. He should not have deserted her. I smiled about the Tombstone. Sir Francis Chantrey told me that he had prepared fine plans — nothing could be too beautiful and too expensive at first, and the end was generally merely a headstone.’