by Thomas Hardy
‘He told us of having been called in to an accident which, do the best he possibly could, would only end in discredit to him. A lady had fallen down, and so badly broken her wrist that it must always be deformed even after the most careful treatment. But, seeing the result, she would give him a bad name for want of skill in setting it. These cases often occur in a surgeon’s practice, he says.’
‘January 31. Incidents of lying in bed for months. Skin gets fair: corns take their leave: feet and toes grow shapely as those of a Greek statue. Keys get rusty; watch dim, boots mildewed; hat and clothes old-fashioned; umbrella eaten out with rust; children seen through the window are grown taller.’
‘February 7. Carlyle died last Saturday. Both he and George Eliot have vanished into nescience while I have been lying here.’
‘February 17. Conservatism is not estimable in itself, nor is Change, or Radicalism. To conserve the existing good, to supplant the existing bad by good, is to act on a true political principle, w’icb is neither Conservative nor Radical.’
‘February 21. A. G. called. Explained to Em about Aerostation, and how long her wings would have to be if she flew, — how light her weight, etc., and the process generally of turning her into a flying person.’
‘March 22. Maggie Macmillan called. Sat with Em in my room — had tea. She and Em worked, watching the sun set gorgeously. That I should also be able to see it Miss Macmillan conceived the kind idea of reflecting the sun into my face by a looking-glass.’ [The incident was made use of in Jude the Obscure as a plan adopted by Sue when the schoolmaster was ill.]
‘March 27. A Homeric Ballad, in which Napoleon is a sort of Achilles, to be written.’ [This entry, of a kind with earlier ones, is, however, superseded a few days later by the following:] ‘ Mode for a historical Drama. Action mostly automatic; reflex movement, etc. Not the result of what is called motive, though always ostensibly so, even to the actors’ own consciousness. Apply an enlargement of these theories to, say, “The Hundred Days”!’
This note is, apparently, Hardy’s first written idea of a philosophic scheme or framework as the larger feature of The Dynasts, enclosing the historic scenes.
On the 10th of April he went outside the door again for the first time since that October afternoon of the previous year when he returned from Cambridge, driving out with his wife and the doctor. On the 19th occurred the death of Disraeli, whom Hardy had met twice, and found unexpectedly urbane. On Sunday the ist of May he finished A Laodicean in pencil, and on the 3rd went with Mrs. Hardy by appointment to call on Sir Henry Thompson for a consultation.
‘May 9. After infinite trying to reconcile a scientific view of life with the emotional and spiritual, so that they may not be inter- destructive I come to the following:
‘General Principles. Law has produced in man a child who cannot but constantly reproach its parent for doing much and yet n0t all, and constantly say to such parent that it would have been better never to have begun doing than to have overdone so indeci- sively; that is, than to have created so far beyond all apparent first intention (on the emotional side), without mending matters by a second intent and execution, to eliminate the evils of the blunder of overdoing. The emotions have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice that they should have developed in it.
‘If Law itself had consciousness, how the aspect of its creatures would terrify it, fill it with remorse!’
Though he had been out in vehicles it was not till a day early in May, more than six months after he had taken to his bed, that he went forth on foot alone; and it being a warm and sunny morning he walked on Wandsworth Common, where, as he used to tell, standing still he repeated out loud to himself:
See the wretch that long has tost On the thorny bed of pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again:
The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise.
Immediately on Hardy’s recovery the question arose of whereabouts he and his wife should live. The three years’ lease of the house at Upper Tooting had run out on the preceding Lady Day, when Hardy was too ill to change, and he had been obliged to apply for a three months’ extension, which was granted. During the latter part of May they searched in Dorset, having concluded that it would be better to make London a place of sojourn for a few months only in each year, and establish their home in the country, both for reasons of health and for mental inspiration, Hardy finding, or thinking he found, that residence in or near a city tended to force mechanical and ordinary productions from his pen, concerning ordinary society-life and habits.
They found a little house called ‘Llanherne’ in the Avenue, Wimborne, that would at any rate suit them temporarily, and till they could discover a better, or perhaps build one. Hardy makes a note that on June 25 they slept at Llanherne for the first time, and saw the new comet from the conservatory. ‘Our garden’, he says a few days later, ‘ has all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, in full bloom: Canterbury Bells, blue and white, and Sweet Williams of every variety, strawberries and cherries that are ripe, currants and gooseberries that are almost ripe, peaches that are green, and apples that are decidedly immature.’
In July he jots down some notes on fiction, possibly for an article that was never written:
‘The real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction is to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal.
‘This is done all the more perfectly in proportion as the reader is illuded to believe the personages true and real like himself.
‘Solely to this latter end a work of fiction should be a precise transcript of ordinary life: but,
‘The uncommon would be absent and the interest lost. Hence,
‘The writer’s problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the other to give reality.
‘In working out this problem, human nature must never be made abnormal, which is introducing incredibility. The uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters; and the writer’s art lies in shaping that uncommonness while disguising its unlikelihood, if it be unlikely.’
On August 23rd Hardy and his wife left Wimborne for Scotland. Arriving at Edinburgh on the 24th, they discovered to their dismay that Queen Victoria was to review the Volunteers in that city on the very next day, and that they could get no lodging anywhere. They took train to Roslin and put up at the Royal Hotel there. At sight of the crowds in the city Hardy had made the entry: ‘ There are, then, some Scotch people who stay at home ‘.
The next day or two, though wet, they spent in viewing Roslin Castle and Chapel, and Hawthornden, the old man who showed them the castle saying that he remembered Sir Walter Scott. Returning to Edinburgh, now calm and normal, they stayed there a few days, and at the beginning of September went on to Stirling, where they were laid up with colds. They started again for Callander and the Tros- sadhs, where Hardy made a sketch of Ben Venue, and followed the usual route across Loch Katrine, by coach to Inversnaid, down Loch Lomond, and so on to Glasgow. On their way back they visited Windermere and Chester, returning through London to Wimborne.
During some sunny days in September Hardy corrected A Laodicean for the issue in volumes, sitting under the vine on their stable-wall, ‘which for want of training hangs in long arms over my head nearly to the ground. The sun tries to shine through the great leaves, making a green light on the paper, the tendrils twisting in every direction, in gymnastic endeavours to find something to lay hold of.’
Though they had expected to feel lonely in Wimborne after London, they were visited by many casual friends, were called in to Shakespeare readings, then much in vogue, and had a genial neighbour in the county-court judge, Tindal-Atkinson, one of the last of the Serjeants-at Law, who took care they should not mope if dinners and his and his daughter’s music could prevent it. They kept in touch with London, however, and were there i
n the following December, where they met various friends, and Hardy did some business in arranging for the publication in the Atlantic Monthly of a novel that he was about to begin writing, called off-hand by the title of Two on a Tower, a title he afterwards disliked, though it was much imitated. An amusing experience of formality occurred to him in connection with this novel. It was necessary that he should examine an observatory, the story moving in an astronomical medium, and he applied to the Astronomer Royal for permission to see Greenwich. He was requested to state before it could be granted if his application was made for astronomical and scientific reasons or not. He therefore drew up a scientific letter, the gist of which was that he wished to ascertain if it would be possible for him to adapt an old tower, built in a plantation in the West of England for other objects, to the requirements of a telescopic study of the stars by a young man very ardent in that pursuit (this being the imagined situation in the proposed novel). An order to view Greenwich Observatory was promptly sent.
The year was wound up by Hardy and his wife at a ball at Lady Wimborne’s, Canford Manor, where he met Sir Henry Layard. Lord Wimborne in a conversation about the house complained that it was rendered damp by the miller below penning the water for grinding, and, on Hardy’s suggesting the removal of the mill, his host amused him by saying that was out of the question, because the miller paid him £50 a year in rent. However that might have been, Hardy felt glad the old mill was to remain, having as great a repugnance to pulling down a mill where (to use his own words) they ground food for the body, as to pulling down a church where they ground food for the soul.
Thus ended 1881 — with a much brighter atmosphere for the author and his wife than the opening had shown.
CHAPTER XII
WIMBORNE AND ‘TWO ON A TOWER’
1882-1883: Aet. 41-43
‘January 26. Coleridge says, aim at illusion in audience or readers — i.e., the mental state when dreaming, intermediate between complete delusion (which the French mistakenly aim at) and a clear perception of falsity.’
‘February 4 and 11. Shakespeare readings at ‘s, “The Tempest” being the play chosen. The host was omnivorous of parts — absorbing other people’s besides his own, and was greedily vexed when I read a line of his part by mistake. When I praise his reading he tells me meditatively, “Oh, yes; I’ve given it a deal of study — thrown myself into the life of the character, you know; thought of what my supposed parents were, and my early life “. The firelight shone out as the day diminished, the young girl N.P. crouching on a footstool, the wealthy Mrs. B. impassive and grand in her unintelli- gence, like a Carthaginian statue. . . . The General reads with gingerly caution, telling me privately that he blurted out one of Shakespeare’s improprieties last time before he was aware, and is in fear and trembling lest he may do it again.’
In this month’s entries occurs another note which appears to be related to the philosophic scheme afterwards adopted as a framework for The Dynasts:
‘February 16. Write a history of human automatism, or impulsion — viz., an account of human action in spite of human knowledge, showing how very far conduct lags behind the knowledge that should really guide it.’
A dramatization of Far from the Madding Crowd, prepared by Mr. J. Comyns Carr some months earlier, was produced during March at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Liverpool, and Hardy and his wife took the trouble to make a trip to Liverpool to be present. The. play, with Miss Marion Terry as the heroine, was not sufficiently near the novel to be to Hardy’s liking, but it was well received, and was staged in London at the Globe Theatre in April, where it ran for many nights, but brought Hardy no profit, nor the adapter, as he was informed. During his stay in London he attended, on April 26, the funeral of Darwin in Westminster Abbey. As a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species.
‘May 13- The slow meditative lives of people who live in habitual solitude. . • • Solitude renders every trivial act of a solitary full of interest, as showing thoughts that cannot be expressed for want of an interlocutor.’
‘June 3. . . . As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature; yet the result is no mere photograph, but purely the product of the writer’s own mind.’
‘June 18. M. F., son of Parson F., was well known by sight to my mother in her childhood. He had taken his degree and had been ordained. But he drank. He worked with the labourers and “ yarn- barton-wenches” (as they were called in the village) in the yarn- barton. After a rollick as they worked he would suddenly stop, down his implement, and mounting a log or trestle, preach an excellent sermon to them; then go on cursing and swearing as before. He wore faded black clothes, and had an allowance of some small sum from his family, to which he liked to add a little by manual labour. He was a tall, upright, dignified man. She did not know what became of him.’
‘August. — An ample theme: the intense interests, passions, and strategy that throb through the commonest lives.
‘This month blackbirds and thrushes creep about under fruit- bushes and in other shady places in gardens rather like four-legged animals than birds. ... I notice that a blackbird has eaten nearly a whole pear lying in the garden-path in the course of the day.’
‘September 9. Dr. and Mrs. Brine . . . came to tea. Brine says that Jack White’s gibbet (near Wincanton) was standing as late as 1835 — i.e. the oak-post with the iron arm sticking out, and a portion of the cage in which the body had formerly hung. It would have been standing now if some young men had not burnt it down by piling faggots round it one fifth of November.’
Later in the month he went with Mrs. Hardy on a small circular tour in the adjoining counties — taking in Salisbury, Axminster, Lyme Regis, Charmouth, Bridport, Dorchester, and back to Wimborne.
From Axminster to Lyme the journey on the coach was spoilt f0 them by the condition of one of the horses.
‘The off-horse was weak and worn. “O yes, tender on his vore veet”, said the driver with nonchalance. The coach itself weighed a ton. The horse swayed, leant against the pole, then outwards His head hung like his tail. The straps and brass rings of the harness seemed barbarously harsh on his shrinking skin. E., with her admirable courage, would have interfered, at the cost of walking the rest of the distance: then we felt helpless against the anger of the other passengers who wanted to get on.’ They were, in fact, on the tableland half-way between the two towns. But they complained when they alighted — with what effect Hardy could not remember.
At Lyme they ‘met a cheerful man who had turned his trousers hind part before, because the knees had worn through’.
On The Cobb they encountered an old man who had undergone an operation for cataract:
‘It was like a red-hot needle in yer eye whilst he was doing it. But he wasn’t long about it. Oh no. If he had been long I couldn’t ha’ beared it. He wasn’t a minute more than three-quarters of an hour at the outside. When he had done one eye, ‘a said, “Now my man, you must make shift with that one, and be thankful you bain’t left wi’ nam.” So he didn’t do the other. And I’m glad ‘a didn’t. I’ve saved half-crowns and half-crowns out of number in only wanting one glass to my spectacles. T’other eye would never have paid the expenses of keeping en going.’
From Charmouth they came to Bridport on the box of a coach better horsed, and driven by a merry coachmen, ‘who wore a lavish quantity of wool in his ears, and in smiling checked his smile in the centre of his mouth by closing his lips, letting it continue at the corners’. (A sketch of the coachman’s mouth in the act of smiling was attached to illustrate this.)
Before returning to Wimborne Hardy called on the poet Barnes at Came Rectory. Mr. Barnes told him of an old woman who had asked him to explain a picture she possessed. He told her it was the
family of Darius at the feet of Alexander. She shook her head, and said: ‘But that’s not in the Bible’, looking up and down his clerical attire as if she thought him a wicked old man who disgraced his cloth by speaking of profane history.
This autumn Two on a Tower, which was ending its career in the Atlantic Monthly, came out in three volumes, and at the beginning of October its author and his wife started for Cherbourg via Wey-
mouth, and onward to Paris, where they took a little appartement of jviro bedrooms and a sitting room, near the left bank of the Seine. pjgre they stayed for some weeks, away from English and American tourists, roving about the city and to Versailles, studying the pictures at the Louvre and the Luxembourg, practising housekeeping in the Parisian bourgeois manner, buying their own groceries and vegetables, dining at restaurants, and catching bad colds owing to the uncertain weather. He seems to have done little in the French capital besides these things, making only one memorandum beyond personal trifles, expenses, and a few picture notes:
‘Since I discovered, several years ago, that I was living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently, I have troubled myself very little about theories. . . . Where development according to perfect reason is limited to the narrow region of pure mathematics, I am content with tentativeness from day to day.’
At the end of the autumn Mrs. Hardy received news at Wimborne of the death of her brother-in-law, the Rev. C. Holder, at St. Juliot Rectory, Cornwall, of which he had long been the incumbent; and they realised that the scene of the fairest romance of their lives, in the picturesque land of Lyonnesse, would have no more kinship with them. By this loss Hardy was reminded of the genial and genuine humour of his clerical relative and friend despite his fragility and ill-health; of his qualities; among them, of a mysterious power he had (as it seemed to his brother-in-law) of counting his congregation to a man before he had got half a dozen lines down the page in ‘Dearly beloved brethren’; and of his many strange and amusing stories of his experiences, such as that of the sick man to whose bedside he was called to read a chapter in the Bible, and who said when it was ended that it did him almost as much good as a glass of gin-and-water: or of the astonishing entry in the marriage register of Holder’s parish before he was rector, by which the bridegroom and bridesmaid had made themselves husband and wife, and the bride and best man the witnesses. Hardy himself had seen the entry.