Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  ‘If I were asked to advise a priest preparing to become a village rector I would suggest first that he should make a good retreat . . . and then that he should make a careful study of Thomas Hardy’s novels. . . . From Thomas Hardy he would learn the essential dignity of country people and what deep and often passionate interest belongs to every individual life. You cannot treat them in the mass: each single soul is to be the object of your special and peculiar prayer.’

  The author of this article is an eminent clergyman of the Church of England.

  in the matter, and used Jude’s difficulties of study as he would have used war, fire, or shipwreck for bringing about a catastrophe.

  It has been remarked above that Hardy with his quick sense of humour could not help seeing a ludicrous side to his troubles over Jude, and an instance to that effect now occurred. The New York World had been among those papers that fell foul of the book in the strongest terms, the critic being a maiden lady who expressed herself thus:

  ‘What has happened to Thomas Hardy? ... I am shocked, appalled by this story! ... It is almost the worst book I ever read. ... I thought that Tess of the d’Urbervilles was bad enough, but that is milk for babes compared to this. ... It is the handling of it that is the horror of it. ... I do not believe that there is a newspaper in England or America that would print this story of Thomas Hardy’s as it stands in the book. Aside from its immorality there is coarseness which is beyond belief. . . . When I finished the story I opened the windows and let in the fresh air, and I turned to my bookshelves and I said: “ Thank God for Kipling and Stevenson, Barrie and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Here are four great writers who have never trailed their talents in the dirt”.’

  It was therefore with some amazement that in the summer, after reading the above and other exclamations grossly maligning the book and the character of its author, to show that she would not touch him with a pair of tongs, he received a letter from the writer herself. She was in London, and requested him to let her interview him ‘to get your side of the argument’. He answered:

  ‘Savile Club,

  ‘July 16, 1896.

  ‘My dear Madam:

  ‘I have to inform you in answer to your letter that ever since the publication of Jude the Obscure I have declined to be interviewed on the subject of that book; and you must make allowance for human nature when I tell you that I do not feel disposed to depart from this rule in favour of the author of the review of the novel in the New York World.

  ‘I am aware that the outcry against it in America was only an echo of its misrepresentation here by one or two scurrilous papers which got the start of the more sober press, and that dumb public opinion was never with these writers. But the fact remains that such a meeting would be painful to me and, I think, a disappointment to you.

  ‘Moreover, my respect for my own writings and reputation is so very slight that I care little about what happens to either, so that the rectification of judgements, etc., and the way in which my books are interpreted, do not much interest me. Those readers who, like yourself, could not see that Jude (though a book quite without a “purpose” as it is called) makes for morality more than any other book I have written, are not likely to be made to do so by a newspaper article, even from your attractive pen.

  ‘At the same time I cannot but be touched by your kindly wish to set right any misapprehension you may have caused about the story. Such a wish will always be cherished in my recollection, and it removes from my vision of you some obviously unjust characteristics I had given it in my mind. This is, at any rate on my part, a pleasant gain from your letter, whilst I am “never the worse for a touch or two on my speckled hide” as the consequence of your review.

  ‘Believe me, dear Madam, ‘Yours sincerely,

  ‘Thomas Hardy.

  ‘To Miss Jeannette Gilder.’

  It may be interesting to give Miss Gilder’s reply to this:

  ‘Hotel Cecil,

  ‘July 17, ‘96-

  ‘Dear Mr. Hardy,

  ‘I knew that you were a great man, but I did not appreciate your goodness until I received your letter this morning.

  ‘Sincerely yours, ‘Jeannette L. Gilder.’

  Hardy must indeed have shown some magnanimity in condescending to answer the writer of a review containing such contumelious misrepresentations as hers had contained. But, as he said, she was a woman, after all — one of the sex that makes up for lack of justice by excess of generosity — and she had screamed so grotesquely loud in her article that Hardy’s sense of the comicality of it had saved his feelings from being much hurt by the outrageous slurs.

  Here, he thought, the matter had ended. But make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement. The amusing sequel to the episode was that the unsuspecting Hardy was invited to an evening party a few days later by an American lady resident in London, and though he knew her but slightly he went, having nothing better to do. While he was talking to his hostess on the sofa a strange lady drew up her chair rather near them, and listened to the conversation, but did not join in it. It was not till afterwards that he discovered that this silent person had been his reviewer, who was an acquaintance of his entertainer, and that the whole thing had been carefully schemed.

  Various social events took them into and through July; Hardy’s chief pleasure, however, being none of these, but a pretty regular attendance with his wife in this, as in other summers, at the Imperial Institute, not far from their house, where they would sit and listen to the famous bands of Europe that were engaged year after year by the management, but were not, to Hardy’s regret, sufficiently appreciated by the London public. Here one evening they met, with other of their friends, the beautiful Mrs., afterwards Lady, Grove; and the ‘Blue Danube’ Waltz being started, Hardy and the latter lady danced two or three turns to it among the promenaders, who eyed them with a mild surmise as to whether they had been drinking or not. In such wise the London season drew to a close and was wound up, as far as they were concerned, with the wedding of one of Lady Jeune’s daughters, Miss Dorothy Stanley, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, to Mr. Henry Allhusen.

  When he reached Dorchester he paid a visit to his mother, on whom he remarks that she was well, but that ‘her face looked smaller’.

  On the 12th August they left Dorchester for Malvern, where they put up at the Foley Arms, climbed the Beacon, Hardy on foot, Mrs. Hardy on a mule; drove round the hills, visited the Priory Church, and thence went on to Worcester to see the Cathedral and porcelain works; after which they proceeded to Warwick and Kenilworth, stopping to correct proofs at the former place, and to go over the castle and church. A strange reminder of the transitoriness of life was given to Hardy in the church, where, looking through a slit by chance, he saw the coffin of the then recent Lord Warwick, who, a most kindly man, some while before, on meeting him in London, had invited him to Warwick Castle, an invitation which he had been unable to accept at the time, though he had promised to do so later.

  Here I am at last’, he said to the coffin as he looked; ‘and here are you to receive me!’ It made an impression on Hardy which he never forgot.

  They took lodgings for a week at Stratford-on-Avon, and visited the usual spots associated with Shakespeare’s name; going on to Coventry and to Reading, a town which had come into the life of Hardy’s paternal grandmother, who had lived here awhile; after which they went to Dover, where Hardy read King Lear, which was begun at Stratford. He makes the following observation on the play:

  ‘September 6. Finished reading King Lear. The grand scale of the tragedy, scenically, strikes one, and also the large scheme of the plot. The play rises from and after the beginning of the third act, and Lear’s dignity with it. Shakespeare did not quite reach his intention in the King’s character, and the splitting of the tragic interest between him and Gloucester does not, to my mind, enhance its intensity, although commentators assert that it does.’

  ‘September 8. Why true conclusions are not reached, notwit
hstanding everlasting palaver: Men endeavour to hold to a mathematical consistency in things, instead of recognizing that certain things may both be good and mutually antagonistic: e.g., patriotism and universal humanity; unbelief and happiness.

  ‘There are certain questions which are made unimportant by their very magnitude. For example, the question whether we are moving in Space this way or that; the existence of a God, etc.’

  Having remained at Dover about a fortnight they crossed to Ostend in the middle of September, and went on to Bruges. He always thought the railway station of this town the only satisfactory one in architectural design that he knew. It was the custom at this date to admire the brick buildings of Flanders, and Hardy himself had written a prize essay as a young man on Brick and Terra-Cotta architecture; but he held then, as always, that nothing can really compensate in architecture for the lack of stone, and would say on this point — with perhaps some intentional exaggeration — that the ashlar back-yards of Bath had more dignity than any brick front in Europe. From Bruges they went on to Brussels, Namur, and Dinant, through scenes to become synonymous with desolation in the war of after years.

  ‘September 23. At dinner at the public table [of the hotel] met a man possessed of the veritable gambling fever. He has been playing many days at the Casino (roulette and trente-et-quarante). He believes thoroughly in his “system”, and yet, inconsistently, believes in luck: e.g., 36 came into his head as he was walking down the street towards the Casino to-day; and it made him back it, and he won. He plays all the afternoon and all the evening.

  ‘His system appears to be that of watching for numbers which have not turned up for a long time; but I am not sure.

  ‘He is a little man; military looking; large iron-grey moustache standing out detached; iron-grey hair; fresh crimson skin. Produces the book, ruled in vertical columns, in which he records results. Discusses his system incessantly with the big grey-bearded man near. Can talk of nothing else. . . . Has lost to-day 4500 francs. Has won back some — is going to play to-night till he has won it all back, and if he can profit enough to pay the expenses of his trip on the Continent he will be satisfied. His friend with the beard, who seems to live in the hotel permanently, commends him by a nod and a word now and then, but not emphatically.’

  ‘September 24. After breakfast unexpectedly saw the gambler standing outside the hotel-entrance without a hat, looking wild, and by comparison with the previous night like a tree that has suddenly lost its leaves. He came up to me; said he had had no luck on the previous night; had plunged, and lost heavily. He had not enough money left to take him home third-class. Is going to Monte Carlo in November with £2000 to retrieve his losses. . . .

  ‘We left between 12 and 1. The gambler left at the same time by a train going in the opposite direction, and was carefully put into a third-class carriage by his friend of the hotel, who bought his ticket. He wore a green-grey suit and felt hat, looking bleak-faced and absent, and seemed passive in the other’s hands. His friend is apparently a decoy from the Casino.’

  Mrs. Hardy, not being a good walker, had brought her bicycle as many people did just then, bicycling being wildly popular at the time, and Flanders being level. After they had paid twenty-four francs duty at Ostend for importing it, it had several adventures in its transit from place to place, was always getting lost, and miraculously turned up again when they were just enjoying the relief of finding themselves free of it. At Liege it really did seem gone, Hardy having watched the transfer of all the luggage at a previous junction, and the bicycle not being among it. Having given up thinking of it they were hailed by an official, who took them with a mysterious manner to a storeroom some way off, unlocked it, and with a leer said, to Hardy’s dismay: ‘Le viloie!’ How it had got there they did not know.

  At Spa they drove to the various fountains, examined the old gaming-house in the Rue Vauxhall where those that were now cold skeletons had burnt hot with the excitement of play, thought of the town’s associations in fact and fiction, of the crowned heads of all the countries of Europe who had found their pleasure and cure at this Mother of Watering-places — now shrunk small like any other ancient matron.

  Getting back to Brussels they put up for association’s sake at the same hotel they had patronized twenty years before, but found it had altered for the worse since those bright days. Hardy again went out to Waterloo, which had been his chief reason for stopping at the Belgian capital, and no doubt made some more observations with a view to The Dynasts, to which he at this time had given the provisional name of ‘Europe in Throes’. All he writes thereon in his pocket- book while in Brussels is:

  ‘Europe in Throes.

  ‘Three Parts. Five Acts each.

  ‘Characters: Burke, Pitt, Napoleon, George III., Wellington. . . .

  and many others.’

  But he set down more copious notes for the drama elsewhere. It is believed he gave time to further conjectures as to the scene of the Duchess’s Ball, which he had considered when here before, and on which it may be remembered there is a note in The Dynasts, ending, ‘The event happened less than a century ago, but the spot is almost as phantasmal in its elusive mystery as towered Camelot, the Palace of Priam, or the Hill of Calvary’.

  Concerning the scene of the battle itself he writes:

  ‘October 2. To Field of Waterloo. Walked alone from the English line along the Charleroi Road to “La Belle Alliance”. Struck with the nearness of the French and English lines to each other. Shepherds with their flocks and dogs, men ploughing, two cats, and myself, the only living creatures on the field.’

  Returning homeward through Ostend a little later they found the hotels and shops closed and boarded up, and the Digue empty, Mrs. Hardy being the single woman bicyclist where there had been so many.

  ‘Max Gate. October 17. A novel, good, microscopic touch in Crabbe [which would strike one trained in architecture]. He gives surface without outline, describing his church by telling the colour of the lichens.

  ‘Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion — hard as a rock — which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. To cry out in a passionate poem that (for instance) the Supreme Mover or Movers, the Prime Force or Forces, must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel — which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries — will cause them merely a shake of the head; but to put it in argumentative prose will make them sneer, or foam, and set all the literary contortionists jumping upon me, a harmless agnostic, as if I were a clamorous atheist, which in their crass illiteracy they seem to think is the same thing. ... If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.’

  ‘1897. January 27. To-day has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour, or articulate sound.’

  ‘January 30. Somebody says that the final dictum of the Ion of Plato is “inspiration, not art”. The passage is Greek text. And what is really meant by it is, I think, more nearly expressed by the words “inspiration, not technicality” — “art” being too comprehensive in English to use here.’

  ‘February 4. Title: “Wessex Poems: with Sketches of their Scenes by the Author”.’

  ‘February 10. In spite of myself I cannot help noticing countenances and tempers in objects of scenery, e.g. trees, hills, houses.’

  ‘February 21. My mother’s grandfather, Swetman — a descendant of the Christopher Swetman of 1631 mentioned in the History of the County as a small landed proprietor in the parish — used to have an old black bedstead, with the twelve apostles on it in carved figures, each about one foot six inches high. Some of them got loose, and the children played with them as dolls. What became of that bedstead?’

  ‘March 1. Make a lyric of the speech of Hyllus at the close of the Trachiniae.’ (It does not appear that this was ever carried out.)
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  At the beginning of March a dramatization of Tess of the d’Urber- villes was produced in America with much success by Mr. Fiske. About the same date Hardy went with Sir Francis Jeune to a banquet at the Mansion House in honour of Mr. Bayard, the American Ambassador, on his leaving England, which Hardy described as a ‘brilliant gathering’, though the night was so drenching and tempestuous as to blow off house-roofs and flood cellars. In the middle of the month a revised form of a novel of his which had been published serially in 1892 as The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, was issued in volume form as The Well-Beloved. The theory on which this fantastic tale of a subjective idea was constructed is explained in the preface to the novel, and again exemplified in a poem bearing the same name, written about this time and published with Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901 — the theory of the transmigration of the ideal beloved one, who only exists in the lover, from material woman to material woman — as exemplified also by Proust many years later. Certain critics affected to find unmentionable moral atrocities in its pages, but Hardy did not answer any of the charges further than by defining in a letter to a literary periodical the scheme of the story somewhat more fully than he had done in the preface:

  ‘Not only was it published serially five years ago but it was sketched many years before that date, when I was comparatively a young man, and interested in the Platonic Idea, which, considering its charm and its poetry, one could well wish to be interested in always. . . . There is, of course, underlying the fantasy followed by the visionary artist the truth that all men are pursuing a shadow, the Unattainable, and I venture to hope that this may redeem the tragicomedy from the charge of frivolity. . . . “Avice” is an old name common in the county, and “Caro” (like all the other surnames) is an imitation of a local name . . . this particular modification having been adopted because of its resemblance to the Italian for “dear”.’