Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  Later in this month of August Hardy started with his brother for Paris by way of Southampton and Havre, leaving the former port at night, when ‘the Jersey boat and ours were almost overwhelmed by the enormous bulk of the “Magdalena” (Brazil and River Plate) — the white figure of her at the ship’s head stretching into the blue- black sky above us’. The journey was undertaken by Hardy solely on his brother’s account, and they merely went the usual round of sight-seeing. As was the case with Hardy almost always, a strange bizarre effect was noticed by him at the Moulin Rouge — in those days a very popular place of entertainment. As everybody knows, or knew, it was close to the cemetery of Montmartre, being, it seems, only divided therefrom by a wall and erection or two, and as he stood somewhere in the building looking down at the young women dancing the cancan, and grimacing at the men, it appears that he could see through some back windows over their heads to the last resting-place of so many similar gay Parisians silent under the moonlight, and, as he notes, to near the grave of Heinrich Heine.

  Coming back towards Havre he sees ‘A Cleopatra in the railway carriage. Her French husband sits opposite, and seems to study her; to keep wondering why he married her; and why she married him. She is a good-natured amative creature by her voice, and her heavy moist lips.’

  The autumn was passed in the country, visiting and entertaining neighbours, and attending garden-parties. In September, to their great grief, their watch-dog ‘ Moss’ died — an affectionate retriever whose grave can still be seen at Max Gate.

  In the latter part of this year, having finished adapting Tess of the d’Urbervilles for the serial issue, he seems to have dipped into a good many books — mostly the satirists: including Horace, Martial, Lucian, ‘the Voltaire of Paganism’, Voltaire himself, Cervantes, Le Sage, Moli^re, Dryden, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Byron, Heine, Carlyle, Thackeray, Satires and Profanities by James Thomson, and Weismann’s Essays on Heredity.

  In December, staying in London, Hardy chanced to find himself in political circles for a time, though he never sought them. At one house he was a fellow-guest with Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the ‘I forgot Goschen’ story was still going about. At another house just afterwards he chanced to converse with the then Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Randolph Churchill’s mother: ‘ She is a nice warm-feeling woman, and expressed her grief at what had happened to her son, though her hostess had told her flatly it was his own doing. She deplores that young men like should stand in the fore-front of the Tory party, and her son should be nowhere. She says he has learnt by bitter experience, and would take any subordinate position the Government might offer him. Poor woman — I was sorry for her, as she really suffers about it. Parnell, however, was the main thing talked about, and not Randolph.’

  ‘December 4. I am more than ever convinced that persons are successively various persons, according as each special strand in their characters is brought uppermost by circumstances.’

  ‘December 8 onwards. Lodging at the Jeunes. Lord Rowton, who is great on lodging-houses, says I am her “dosser”.’

  ‘December 18. Mr. E. Clodd this morning gives an excellently neat answer to my question why the superstitions of a remote Asiatic and a Dorset labourer are the same: “The attitude of man”, he says, “at corresponding levels of culture, before like phenomena, is pretty much the same, your Dorset peasants representing the persistence of the barbaric idea which confuses persons and things, and founds wide generalizations on the slenderest analogies.”

  ‘(This “ barbaric idea which confuses persons and things “ is, by the way, also common to the highest imaginative genius — that of the poet.)’

  ‘Christmas Day. While thinking of resuming “ the viewless wings of poesy” before dawn this morning, new horizons seemed to open, and worrying pettinesses to disappear.

  ‘Heard to-day an old country tradition; that if a woman goes off her own premises before being churched, e.g. crosses a road that forms the boundary of her residence — she may be made to do penance, or be excommunicated. I cannot explain this, but it reminds me of what old Mr. Hibbs of Bere Regis told me lately; that a native of that place, now ninety, says he remembers a young woman doing penance in Bere Church for singing scandalous songs about “a great lady”. The girl stood in a white sheet while she went through “the service of penance”, whatever that was.

  ‘Also heard another curious story. Mil [Amelia] Chad an illegitimate child by the parish doctor. She christened him all the doctor’s names, which happened to be a mouthful — Frederick Washington Ingen — and always called him by the three names complete. Moreover the doctor had a squint, and to identify him still more fully as the father she hung a bobbin from the baby’s cap between his eyes, and so trained him to squint likewise.’

  Next day they lunched with a remote cousin of Hardy’s on the maternal side — Dr. Christopher Childs of Weymouth — to meet his brother and sister-in-law Mr. and Mrs. Borlase Childs on a visit from Cornwall, and heard from Borlase Childs (whose grandfather had married into the Borlase family) some traditions of his and Hardy’s common ancestors, on which Hardy remarks: ‘The Christopher Childs, brother of my great-grandmother, who left Dorset, was a Jacobite, which accounted for the fall in their fortunes. There is also a tradition — that I had heard before from my mother — that one of the family added the “s” to the name, and that it was connected with the Josiah Child who founded Child’s Bank, and with the family of Lord Jersey. I doubt the first statement, and have no real evidence of the latter.’

  ‘New Year’s Eve. Looked out of doors just before twelve, and was confronted by the toneless white of the snow spread in front, against which stood the row of pines breathing out: “ ‘Tis no better with us than with the rest of creation, you see!” I could not hear the church bells.’

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE NOVEL ‘TESS’ RESTORED AND PUBLISHED

  1891: Aet. 50-51

  At the beginning of January 1891, he was at home arranging A Group of Noble Dames for publication in a volume. He was also in London a part of the month, where he saw ‘what is called sunshine up here — a red-hot bullet hanging in a livid atmosphere — reflected from window-panes in the form of bleared copper eyes, and inflaming the sheets of plate-glass with smears of gory light. A drab snow mingled itself with liquid horsedung, and in the river puddings of ice moved slowly on. The steamers were moored, with snow on their gangways. A captain, in sad solitude, smoked his pipe against the bulk-head of the cabin stairs. The lack of traffic made the water like a stream through a deserted metropolis. In the City George Peabody sat comfortably in his easy chair, with snow on the folds of his ample waistcoat, the top of his bare head, and shoulders, and knees.’

  After seeing Irving at the Lyceum, and admiring the staging: ‘But, after all, scenic perfection such as this only banishes one plane further back the jarring point between illusion and disillusion. You must have it somewhere, and begin calling in “make believe” forthwith, and it may as well be soon as late — immediate as postponed — and no elabourate scenery be attempted.

  ‘I don’t care about the fashionable first night at a play: it is so insincere, meretricious; the staginess behind the footlights seem to flow over upon the audience.’

  On the Sunday following a number of people dined at the house where Hardy was staying. ‘ Presently Ellen Terry arrived — diaphanous — a sort of balsam or sea-anemone, without shadow. Also Irving, Sir Henry Thompson, Evelyn Ashley, Lady Dorothy [Nevill], Justin McCarthy, and many others. Ellen Terry was like a machine in which, if you press a spring, all the works fly open. E. Ashley’s laugh is like a clap, or report; it was so loud that it woke the children asleep on the third floor. Lady Dorothy said she collected death’s.

  heads — (what did she mean?). Ashley told me about his electioneering experiences. The spectacle of another guest — a Judge of the Supreme Court — telling broad stories with a broad laugh in a broad accent, after the ladies had gone,
reminded one of Baron Nicholson of “Judge-and-Jury” fame. “Tom” Hughes and Miss Hughes came in after dinner. Miss Hilda Gorst said that at dinner we made such a noise at our end of the table that at her end they wondered what we had to amuse us so much. (That’s how it always seems.) ... A great crush of people afterwards, till at one o’clock they dwindled away, leaving nothing but us, blank, on the wide polished floor.’

  At the end of the month he and his wife were at a ball at Mrs. Sheridan’s at Frampton Court, Dorset, where he saw a friend of his ‘waltzing round with a face of ambition, not of slightest pleasure, as if he were saying to himself “this has to be done”. We are all inveterate joy-makers: some do it more successfully than others; and the actual fabrication is hardly pleasure.’

  ‘February 10. Newman and Carlyle. The former’s was a feminine nature, which first decides and then finds reasons for having decided. He was an enthusiast with the absurd reputation of a logician and reasoner. Carlyle was a poet with the reputation of a philosopher. Neither was truly a thinker.’

  On the 21 st Hardy notes that Mrs. Hardy rode on horse-back for what turned out to be the last time in her life. It was to Mrs. Sheridan’s at Frampton, and a train crossed a bridge overhead, causing the mare to rear; but happily not throwing the rider. Very few horses could.

  In March they were again in London. A deep snow came on shortly after, but they had got home. It was in drifts:

  ‘Sculptured, scooped, gouged, pared, trowelled, moulded, by the wind. Em says it is architectural. ... A person aged 50 is an old man in winter and a young man in summer. . . Was told by J. A. of a poor young fellow who is dying of consumption, so that he has to sit up in the night, and to get up because he cannot sleep. Yet he described tc my informant that one night he had such a funny dream of pigs knocking down a thatcher’s ladder that he lay awake laughing uncontrollably.’

  In the same month Hardy erected what he called ‘The Druid Stone’ on the lawn at Max Gate. This was a large block they discovered about three feet underground in the garden, and the labour of getting it from the hole where it had lain for perhaps two thousand years was a heavy one even for seven men with levers and other appliances. — ‘ It was a primitive problem in mechanics, and the scene was such a one as may have occurred in building the Tower of Babel.’ Round the stone, which had been lying flat, they had found a quantity of ashes and half charred bones.

  Though Hardy was at this time putting the finishing touches to Tess he was thinking of ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Europe at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. ... It may be called “A Drama of the Times of the First Napoleon”.’ He does not appear to have done more than think of it at this date.

  In April he was at a morning performance at the old Olympic Theatre of that once popular play The Stranger, by Kotzebue; and he ‘ thought of the eyes and ears that had followed the acting first and last, including Thackeray’s’. Miss Winifred Emery was Mrs. Haller on this occasion. During his time in London he notes the difference between English and French stage-dancing; ‘The English girls dance as if they had learned dancing; the French as if dancing had produced them,’ He also while in Town dined at the Lushingtons’ ‘and looked at the portrait of Lushington’s father, who had known Lady Byron’s secret’. He went to hear Spurgeon preach, for the first and last time. As Spurgeon died soon after, he was glad he had gone, the preacher having been a great force in his day, though it had been spent for many years. He witnessed the performance of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville, on which he remarks that it seems to him that the rule for staging nowadays should be to have no scene which would not be physically possible in the time of acting. [An idea carried out years after in The Queen of Cornwall.]

  The Hardys were now as usual looking for a place in which to spend three or four months in London. Much as they disliked handling other people’s furniture, taking on their breakages, cracks, and stains, and paying for them at the end of the season as if they had made them themselves, there was no help for it in their inability to afford a London house or flat all the year round. ‘ The dirty house-fronts, leaning gate-piers, rusty gates, broken bells, Dore monstrosities of womankind who showed us the rooms, left Em nearly fainting, and at one place she could not stay for the drawing-room floor to be exhibited.’ They found a flat at last in Mandeville Place, just about the time that Hardy learnt of his being elected to the Athenaeum Club by the Committee under Rule 2.

  ‘April 28. Talking to Kipling to-day at the Savile, he said that he once as an experiment took the ideas of some mature writer or speaker (on Indian politics, I think) and translating them into his own language used them as his. They were pronounced to be the crude ideas of an immature boy.’

  The Royal Academy this year struck Hardy as containing some good colouring but no creative power, and that as visitors went by names only the new geniuses, even if there were any, were likely to be overlooked. He recalled in respect of the fair spring and summer landscapes that ‘They were not pictures of this spring and summer, although they seem to be so. All this green grass and fresh leafage perished yesterday; after withering and falling, it is gone like a dream.’

  In the Gallery of the English Art Club: ‘If I were a painter, I would paint a picture of a room as viewed by a mouse from a chink under the skirting.’

  Hardy’s friend Dr. (afterwards Sir) Joshua Fitch took him over Whitelands Training College for schoolmistresses, where it was the custom in those days, and may be now, to choose a May Queen every year, a custom originated by Ruskin. Hardy did not, however, make any observation on this, but merely: ‘A community of women, especially young women, inspires not reverence but protective tenderness in the breast of one who views them. Their belief in circumstances, in convention, in the Tightness of things, which you know to be not only wrong but damnably wrong, makes the heart ache, even when they are waspish and hard. . . . You feel how entirely the difference of their ideas from yours is of the nature of misunderstanding. . . . There is much that is pathetic about these girls, and I wouldn’t have missed the visit for anything. How far nobler in its aspirations is the life here than the life of those I met at the crush two nights back!’

  Piccadilly at night. ‘A girl held a long-stemmed narcissus to my nose as we went by each other. At the Circus, among all the wily crew, there was a little innocent family standing waiting, I suppose for an omnibus. How pure they looked! A man on a stretcher, with a bloody bandage round his head, was wheeled past by two policemen, stragglers following. Such is Piccadilly.’

  He used to see Piccadilly under other aspects, however, for the next day, Sunday, he attended the service at St. James’s — as he did off and on for many years — because it was the church his mother had been accustomed to go to when as a young woman she was ‘iving for some months in London. ‘The preacher said that only five per cent of the inhabitants entered a church, according to the Bishop of London. On coming out there was a drizzle across the electric lights, and the paper-boys were shouting, not,” Go to church!” but, “Wee-naw of the French Oaks!’“

  Next day — wet — at the British Museum: ‘ Crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking to-day is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus [?]. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated MSS. — the labours of years — and stand under Rameses the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge in proletarian, and when these people are our masters it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature! . . . Looking, when I came out, at the Oxford Music Hall, an hour before the time of opening, there was already a queue.’

  ‘Mayr,. Sunday. Em and I lunch at the Jeunes’ to see the house they have just moved into — 79 Harley St. Sun came in hot upon us through back windows, the blinds not being yet up. Frederic Harrison called afterwards. He is leaving London to live in the country.’

  During the month of May he was much impressed by a visit
paid with his friend Dr. (later Sir) T. Clifford Allbutt, theaa Commissioner in Lunacy, to a large private lunatic asylum, where he had intended to stay only a quarter of an hour, but became so interested in the pathos of the cases that he remained the greater part of the day. He talked to ‘ the gentleman who was staying there of his own will, to expose the devices of the Commissioners; to the old man who offers snuff to everybody; to the scholar of high literary aims, as sane in his conversation as any of us; to the artist whose great trouble was that he could not hear the birds sing; “which as you will see, Mr. Hardy, is hard on a man of my temperament”; and, on the women’s side, listened to their stories of their seduction; to the Jewess who sang to us; to the young woman who, with eyes brimming with reproach, said to the doctor, “When are you going to let me out of this?” [Hardy appealed for a re-examination of her, which was done afterwards.] Then came the ladies who thought themselves queens — less touching cases, as they were quite happy — one of them, who was really a Plantagenet by descent, perversely insisted on being considered a Stuart. All the women seemed prematurely dried, faded, flitries.’

  In June he visited Stockwell Training College. ‘A pretty custom among the girls here is that of each senior student choosing a daughter from the list of junior girls who are coming. The senior is mother to the daughter for the whole year, and looks after her. Sometimes the pair get fond of each other; at other times not. I gather that they are chosen blindly before arrival, from the names only. There must be singular expectancies, confrontings, and excitements resulting therefrom.’

  In July he took Mrs. Hardy to the balcony of the Athenaeum Club to see the German Emperor William II pass to the City; the next day he met W. E. Henley at the Savile. ‘He is paler, and his once brown locks are getting iron-grey.’ On the 13th, lunching at Lady Wynford’s, Grosvenor Square, Hardy discovered, or thought he did, that the ceiling of the drawing-room contained oval paintings by Angelica Kauffmann, and that the house was built by the Adams; ‘I was amused by Ld. Wynford, who told me he would not live in Dorset for £50,000 a year, and wanted me to smoke cigarettes made of tobacco from Lebanon — “same as smoked by Laurence Oliphant”. Wynford’s nose is two sides of a spherical triangle in profile.’ In the same week, on a visit with his wife to G. F. Watts, the painter, he was much struck with his host; ‘ that old small man with a grey coat and black velvet skull-cap, who, when he saw one of his picture- frames pressing against a figure on canvas, moved it away gently, as if the figure could feel.’