by Thomas Hardy
‘August 5, 1888. To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.’
‘8. The air is close, the sunshine suddenly disappears, and a bad kind of sea-fog comes up, smelling like a laundry or wash-house.’
‘19. Sent a story to H. Quilter, by request, for his Magazine, entitled A Tragedy of Two Ambitions’
‘21. The literary productions of men of rigidly good family and rigidly correct education, mostly treat social conventions and contrivances — the artificial forms of living — as if they were cardinal facts of life.
‘Society consists of Characters and No-characters — nine at least of the latter to one of the former.’
‘September 9. My Father says that Dick Facey used to rivet on the fetters of criminals when they were going off by coach (Facey was journeyman for Clare the smith). He was always sent for secretly, that people might not know and congregate at the gaol entrance. They were carried away at night, a stage-coach being specially ordered. One K. of Troytown, on the London Road, a poacher, who was in the great fray at Westwood Barn near Lulworth Castle about 1825, was brought past his own door thus, on his way to transportation: he called to his wife and family; they heard his shout and ran out to bid him good-bye as he sat in chains. He was never heard of again by them.
‘T. Voss used to take casts of heads of executed convicts. He took those of Preedy and Stone. Dan Pouncy held the heads while it was being done. Voss oiled the faces, and took them in halves, afterwards making casts from the masks. There was a groove where the rope went, and Voss saw a little blood in the case of Stone, where the skin had been broken, — not in Preedy’s.’
‘September 10. Destitution sometimes reaches the point of grandeur in its pathetic grimness: e.g., as shown in the statement of the lodging-house keeper in the Whitechapel murder:
‘“He had seen her in the lodging-house as late as half-past one o’clock or two that morning. He knew her as an unfortunate, and that she generally frequented Stratford for a living. He asked her for her lodging-money, when she said, ‘I have not got it. I am weak and ill, and have been in the infirmary.’ He told her that she knew the rules, whereupon she went out to get some money.” (Times report.)
‘O richest City in the world! “She knew the rules.’“
‘September 15. Visited the old White Horse Inn, Maiden Newton. Mullioned windows, queer old bedrooms. Fireplace in the late Perpendicular style. The landlady tells me that the attic was closed up for many years, and that on opening it they found a suit of clothes, supposed to be those of a man who was murdered.’ [This fine old Tudor inn is now pulled down.]
‘September 30. “The Valley of the Great Dairies” — Froom.
‘“The Valley of the Little Dairies” — Blackmoor.
‘In the afternoon by train to Evershot. Walked to Woolcombe, a property once owned by a — I think the senior — branch of the Hardys. Woolcombe House was to the left of where the dairy now is. On by the lane and path to Bubb-Down. Looking east you see High Stoy and the escarpment below it. The Vale of Blackmoor is almost entirely green, every hedge being studded with trees. On the left you see to an immense distance, including Shaftesbury.
‘The decline and fall of the Hardys much in evidence hereabout. An instance: Becky S.’s mother’s sister married one of the Hardys of this branch, who was considered to have bemeaned himself by the marriage. “All Woolcombe and Froom Quintin belonged to them at one time,” Becky used to say proudly. She might have added Up-Sydling and Toller Welme. This particular couple had an enormous lot of children. I remember when young seeing the man — tall and thin — walking beside a horse and common spring trap, and my mother pointing him out to me and saying he represented what was once the leading branch of the family. So we go down, down, down.’
‘October 7. The besetting sin of modern literature is its insincerity. Half its utterances are qualified, even contradicted, by an aside, and this particularly in morals and religion. When dogma has to be balanced on its feet by such hair-splitting as the late Mr. M. Arnold’s it must be in a very bad way.’
‘October 15-21. Has the tradition that Cerne-Abbas men have no whiskers any foundation in the fact of their being descendants of a family or tribe or clan who have not intermarried with neighbours on account of their isolation? They are said to be hot-tempered people.
‘Stephen B. says that he has “never had the nerve” to be a bearer at a funeral. Now his brother George, who has plenty of nerve, has borne many neighbours to their graves.
‘If you look beneath the surface of any farce you see a tragedy; and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce.
‘My mother says that my [paternal] grandmother told her she was ironing her best muslin gown (then worn by young women at any season) when news came that the Queen of France was beheaded. She put down her iron, and stood still, the event so greatly affecting her mind. She remembered the pattern of the gown so well that she would recognize it in a moment.’ Hardy himself said that one hot and thundery summer in his childhood she remarked to him: ‘ It was like this in the French Revolution, I remember.’
‘December 10. . . . He, she, had blundered; but not as the Prime Cause had blundered. He, she, had sinned; but not as the Prime Cause had sinned. He, she, was ashamed and sorry; but not as the Prime Cause would be ashamed and sorry if it knew.’ (The reference is unexplained.)
Among the letters received by Hardy for the New Year (1889) was one from Mr. Gosse, who wrote thanking him for A Tragedy of Two Ambitions, which he thought one of the most thrilling and most complete stories Hardy had written — ‘I walked under the moral burden of it for the remainder of the day. ... I am truly happy — being an old faded leaf and disembowelled bloater and wet rag myself — to find your genius ever so fresh and springing.’
They were in London the first week of the year, concerning which Hardy remarks:
‘On arriving in London I notice more and more that it (viz- London proper — the central parts) is becoming a vast hotel or caravan, having no connection with Middlesex — whole streets which were not so very long ago mostly of private residences consisting entirely of lodging-houses, and having a slatternly look about them.
‘Called on Lady . She is a slim girl still, and continually tells her age, and speaks practically of “before I was married”. Tells humorously of how she and Lord — her father, who is a nervous man, got to the church too soon, and drove drearily up and down the Thames Embankment till the right time. She has just now the fad of adoring art. When she can no longer endure the ugliness of London she goes down to the National Gallery and sits in front of the great Titian.’
‘January 8. To the City. Omnibus horses, Ludgate Hill. The greasy state of the streets caused constant slipping. The poor creatures struggled and struggled but could not start the omnibus. A man next me said: “It must take all heart and hope out of them! I shall get out.” He did; but the whole remaining selfish twenty-five of us sat on. The horses despairingly got us up the hill at last. I ought to have taken off my hat to him and said: “ Sir, though I was not stirred by your humane impulse I will profit by your good example”; and have followed him. I should like to know that man; but we shall never meet again!’
‘January 9. At the Old Masters, Royal Academy. Turner’s water-colours: each is a landscape plus a man’s soul. . . . What he paints chiefly is light as modified by objects. He first recognizes the impossibility of really reproducing on canvas all that is in a landscape; then gives for that which cannot be reproduced a something else which shall have upon the spectator an approximative effect to that of the real. He said, in his maddest and greatest days: “ What pictorial drug can I dose man with,’ which shall affect his eyes somewhat in the manner of this reality which I cannot carry to him?” — and set to make such strange mixtures as he was tending towards in “Rain, Steam and Speed”, “The Burial of Wilkie”, “Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus”, “Approach to Venice”, “Snowstorm a
nd a Steamboat”, etc. Hence, one may say, Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing the effect of a true. . . .
‘I am struck by the red glow of Romney’s backgrounds, and his red flesh shades. . . . Watteau paints claws for hands. They are unnatural — hideous sometimes. . . . Then the pictures of Sir Joshua, in which middle-aged people sit out of doors without hats,
on damp stone seats under porticoes, and expose themselves imprudently to draughts and chills, as if they had lost their senses. . . . Besides the above there were also the Holls, and the works of other recent English painters, such as Maclise. . . .
‘How Time begins to lift the veil and show us by degrees the truly great men among these, as distinct from the vaunted and the fashionable. The false glow thrown on them by their generation dies down, and we see them as they are.’
‘January 28. Alfred Parsons, the landscape painter, here. He gave as a reason for living in London and mixing a good deal with people (intellectual I presume) that you can let them do your thinking for you. A practice that will be disastrous to A. P.’s brush, I fear.’
‘February 6. (After reading Plato’s dialogue “Cratylus”): A very good way of looking at things would be to regard everything as having an actual or false name, and an intrinsic or true name, to ascertain which all endeavour should be made. . . . The fact is that nearly all things are falsely, or rather inadequately, named.’
‘February 19. The story of a face which goes through three generations or more, would make a fine novel or poem of the passage of Time. The differences in personality to be ignored.’ [This idea was to some extent carried out in the novel The Well-Beloved, the poem entitled ‘Heredity’, etc.]
‘February 26. In time one might get to regard every object, and every action, as composed, not of this or that material, this or that movement, but of the qualities pleasure and pain in varying proportions.’
‘March 1. In a Botticelli the soul is outside the body, permeating its spectator with its emotions. In a Rubens the flesh is without, and the soul (possibly) within. The very odour of the flesh is distinguishable in the latter.’
‘March 4. A Village story recalled to me yesterday:
‘Mary L., a handsome wench, had come to Bockhampton, leaving a lover at Askerswell, her native parish. William K. fell in love with her at the new place. The old lover, who was a shoemaker, smelling a rat, came anxiously to see her, with a present of a dainty pair of shoes he had made. He met her by chance at the pathway stile, but alas, on the arm of the other lover. In the rage of love the two men fought for her till they were out of breath, she looking on and holding both their hats the while; till William, wiping his face, said: “ Now, Polly, which of we two do you love best? Say it out straight!” She would not state then, but said she would consider (the hussy!). The young man to whom she had been fickle left her indignantly — throwing the shoes at her and her new lover as he went. She never saw or heard of him again, and accepted the other. But she kept the shoes, and was married in them. I knew her well as an old woman.’
‘March 15. What has been written cannot be blotted. Each new style of novel must be the old with added ideas, not an ignoring and avoidance of the old. And so of religion, and a good many other things!’
‘April 5. London. Four million forlorn hopes!’
‘April 7. A woeful fact — that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment. Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect. It may be questioned if Nature, or what we call Nature, so far back as when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission. This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences. Other planets may, though one can hardly see how.’
A day or two later brought him a long and interesting letter from J. Addington Symonds at Davos Platz concerning The Return of the Native, which he had just met with and read, and dwelling enthusiastically on ‘its vigour and its freshness and its charm’. The last week in April they went off to London again for a few months, staying at the West Central Hotel till they could find something more permanent, which this year chanced to be two furnished floors in Monmouth Road, Bayswater.
‘May 5. Morning. Sunday. To Bow Church, Cheapside, with Em. The classic architecture, especially now that it has been regilt and painted, makes one feel in Rome. About twenty or thirty people present. When you enter, the curate from the reading-desk and the rector from the chancel aim ost smile a greeting as they look up in their surplices, so glad are they that you have condescended to visit them in their loneliness.
‘That which, socially, is a great tragedy, may be in Nature no alarming circumstance.’
‘May 12. Evening. Sunday. To St. James’s, Westmoreland Street, with Em. Heard Haweis — a small lame figure who could with difficulty climb into the pulpit. His black hair, black beard, hollow cheeks and black gown, made him look like one of the skeletons in the Church of the Capuchins, Rome. The subject of his discourse was Cain and Abel, his first proposition being that Cain had excellent qualities, and was the larger character of the twain,
though Abel might have been the better man in some things. Yet, he reminded us, good people are very irritating sometimes, and the occasion was probably one of agricultural depression like the present, so that Cain said to himself: “ ‘Tis this year as it was last year, and all my labour wasted!” (titter from the congregation). Altogether the effect was comical. But one sympathized with the preacher, he was so weak, and quite in a perspiration when he had finished.’
‘May 20. Called on the Alma-Tademas. Tadema is like a school-boy, with untidy hair, a sturdy inquiring look, and bustling manner. I like this phase of him better than his man-of-the-world phase. He introduced me to M. Taine, a kindly, nicely trimmed old man with a slightly bent head.’
Earlier in the year Hardy had asked one of the Miss Sheridans, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. Brinsley Sheridan, Hardy’s neighbours at Frampton Court, Dorset, if she could sing to him ‘How oft, Louisa!’ the once celebrated song in her ancestor’s comic opera ‘The Duenna’. (It was not a woman’s song, by the way.) His literary sense was shocked by her telling him that she had never heard of it, since he himself had sung it as a youth, having in fact been in love with a Louisa himself. Now he was in London he remembered that he had promised it to her, and looked for a copy, but, much to his surprise, to find one seemed beyond his power. At last he called at a second-hand music-shop that used to stand where the Oxford Circus Tube-Station now is, and repeated hopelessly, ‘How oft, Louisa?’ The shop was kept by an old man, who was sitting on an office stool in a rusty dress-suit and very tall hat, and at the sound of the words he threw himself back in his seat, spread his arms like an opera-singer, and sang in a withered voice by way of answer:
How oft, Louisa, hast thou told,
(Nor wilt thou the fond boast disown) Thou would’st not lose Antonio’s love To reign the partner of a throne!
‘Ah, that carries me back to times that will never return!’ he added. ‘Yes; when I was a young man it was my favourite song. As to my having it, why, certainly, it is here somewhere. But I could not find it in a week.’ Hardy left him singing it, promising to return again.
When his shop was pulled down the delightful old man disappeared, and though Hardy searched for him afterwards he never saw him any more.
‘May 29. That girl in the omnibus had one of those faces of marvellous beauty which are seen casually in the streets but never among one’s friends. It was perfect in its softened classicality — a Greek face translated into English. Moreover she was fair, and her hair pale chestnut. Where do these women come from? Who marries them? Who knows them?’
They went to picture-galleries, concerts, French plays, and the usual lunches and dinners during the season; and in June Hardy ran down to Dorchester for a day or two, on which occasion, taking a walk in the meadows, he remarks: ‘ The birds are so passionately ha
ppy that they introduce variations into their songs to an outrageous degree — which are not always improvements.’
In London anew: ‘ One difference between the manners of the intellectual middle class and of the nobility is that the latter have more flexibility, almost a dependence on their encompassment, as if they were waiting upon future events; while the former are direct, and energetic, and crude, as if they were manufacturing a future to please them.’
‘July 9. Love lives on propinquity, but dies of contact.’
‘July 14. Sunday. Centenary of the fall of the Bastille. Went to Newton Hall to hear Frederic Harrison lecture on the French Revolution. The audience sang “The Marseillaise”. Very impressive.’
‘July 23. Of the people I have met this summer, the lady whose mouth recalls more fully than any other beauty’s the Elizabethan metaphor “Her lips are roses full of snow” (or is it Lodge’s?) is Mrs. Hamo Thornycroft — whom I talked to at Gosse’s dinner.’
‘July 24. B. Museum:
‘Greek text, etc. Soph. Oed. Tyr. 1365 (“and if there be a woe surpassing woes, it hath become the portion of Oedipus” — Jebb. Cf. Tennyson: “a deeper deep”).’
About this time Hardy was asked by a writer of some experience in adapting novels for the theatre — Mr. J. T. Grein — if he would grant permission for The Woodlanders to be so adapted. In his reply he says:
‘You have probably observed that the ending of the story — hinted rather than stated — is that the heroine is doomed to an unhappy life with an inconstant husband. I could not accentuate this strongly in the book, by reason of the conventions of the libraries, etc. Since the story was written, however, truth to character is not considered quite such a crime in literature as it was formerly; and it is therefore a question for you whether you will accent this ending, or prefer to obscure it.’