by Thomas Hardy
‘Thirdly: as to the future, the evils of instability, and the ultimate results from such a state of things, it hardly becomes me to attempt to prophesy here. That remedies exist for them and are easily applicable you will easily gather from what I have stated above.’
‘April 20. Vagg Hollow, on the way to Load Bridge (Somerset) is a place where “things” used to be seen — usually taking the form of a wool-pack in the middle of the road. Teams and other horses always stopped on the brow of the hollow, and could only be made to go on by whipping. A waggoner once cut at the pack with his whip: it opened in two, and smoke and a hoofed figure rose out of it.’
‘May 1. Life is what we make it as Whist is what we make it; but not as Chess is what we make it; which ranks higher as a purely intellectual game than either Whist or Life.’
Letter sent to and printed in The Academy and Literature, May 17, 1902, concerning a review of Maeterlinck’s Apology for Nature:
‘Sir,
‘In your review of M. Maeterlinck’s book you quote with seeming approval his vindication of Nature’s ways, which is (as I understand it) to the effect that, though she does not appear to be just from our point of view, she may practise a scheme of morality unknown to us, in which she is just. Now, admit but the bare possibility of such a hidden morality, and she would go out of court without the slightest stain on her character, so certain should we feel that indifference to morality was beneath her greatness.
‘Far be it from my wish to distrust any comforting fantasy, if it can be barely tenable. But alas, no profound reflection can be needed to detect the sophistry in M. Maeterlinck’s argument, and to see that the original difficulty recognized by thinkers like Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Haeckel, etc., and by most of the persons called pessimists, remains unsurmounted.
‘Pain has been, and pain is: no new sort of morals in Nature can remove pain from the past and make it pleasure for those who are its infallible estimators, the bearers therof. And no injustice, however slight, can be atoned for by her future generosity, however ample, so long as we consider Nature to be, or to stand for, unlimited power. The exoneration of an omnipotent Mother by her retrospective justice becomes an absurdity when we ask, what made the foregone injustice necessary to her Omnipotence?
‘So you cannot, I fear, save her good name except by assuming one of two things: that she is blind and not a judge of her actions’ or that she is an automaton, and unable to control them: in either of which assumptions, though you have the chivalrous satisfaction of screening one of her sex, you only throw responsibility a stage further back.
‘But the story is not new. It is true, nevertheless, that, as M. Maeterlinck contends, to dwell too long amid such reflections does no good, and that to model our conduct on Nature’s apparent conduct, as Nietzsche would have taught, can only bring disaster to humanity.
‘Yours truly,
‘Thomas Hardy.
‘Max Gate, Dorchester.’
In June Hardy was engaged in a correspondence in the pages of the Dorset County Chronicle on Edmund Kean’s connection with Dorchester, which town he visited as a player before he became famous, putting up with his wife and child at an inn called ‘The Little Jockey’ on Glyde-Path Hill (standing in Hardy’s time). His child died whilst here, and was buried in Trinity Churchyard near at hand. The entry in the register runs as follows:
‘Burials in the Parish of Holy Trinity in Dorchester in the County of Dorset in the year 1813:
‘Name, Howard, son of Edmund and Mary Kean. Abode, Residing at Glyde Path Hill in this Parish. When buried, Nov. 24. Age 4. By whom the Ceremony was performed, Henry John Richman.’
Readers of the life of Kean will remember the heaviness of heart with which he noted his experience at Dorchester on this occasion — that it was a very wet night, that there was a small audience, that, unless we are mistaken, the play was Coriolanus (fancy playing Corio- lanus at Dorchester now!), that he performed his part badly. Yet he was standing on the very brink of fame, for it was on this very occasion that the emissary from Old Drury — Arnold, the stage manager — witnessed his performance, and decided that he was the man for the London boards.
In his letters to the paper under the pseudonym of ‘History’ Hardy observed:
‘Your correspondent “Dorset” who proposes to “turn the hose” upon the natural interest of Dorchester people in Edmund Kean, should, I think, first turn the hose upon his own uncharitableness. His contention amounts to this, that because one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of English tragedians was not without blemish in his morals, no admiration is to be felt for his histrionic achievements, or regard for the details of his life. So, then, Lord Nelson should have no place in our sentiment, nor Burns, nor Byron — not even Shakespeare himself — nor unhappily many another great man whose flesh has been weak. With amusing maladroitness your correspondent calls himself by the name of the county which has lately commemorated King Charles the Second — a worthy who seduced scores of men’s wives, to Kean’s one.
‘Kean was, in truth, a sorely tried man, and it is no wonder that he may have succumbed. The illegitimate child of a struggling actress, the vicissitudes and hardships of his youth and young manhood left him without moral ballast when the fire of his genius brought him success and adulation. The usual result followed, and owing to the publicity of his life it has been his misfortune ever since to have, like Cassius in Julius Caesar,
All his faults observed,
Set in a note-book, learn’d and conn’d by rote,
by people who show the Christian feeling of your correspondent.’
The following week Hardy sent a supplementary note:
‘One word as to the building [in Dorchester] in which Kean performed in 1813. There is little doubt that it was in the old theatre yet existing [though not as such], stage and all, at the back of Messrs. Godwin’s china shop; and for these among other reasons. A new theatre in North Square [Qy. Back West Street?], built by Curme, was opened in February 1828, while there are still dwellers in Dorchester who have heard persons speak of seeing plays in the older theatre about 1821 or 1822, Kean’s visit having been only a few years earlier.’
During the latter half of this year 1902 Hardy was working more or less on the first part of The Dynasts, which was interrupted in August and September by bicycle trips, and in October by a short stay in Bath, where the cycling was continued. On one of these occasions, having reached Bristol by road, and suddenly entered on the watered streets, he came off into the mud with a side-slip, and was rubbed down by a kindly coal-heaver with one of his sacks. In this condition he caught sight of some rare old volume in a lumber- shop; and looking him up and down when he asked the price, the woman who kept the shop said: ‘Well, sixpence won’t hurt ye, I suppose?’ He used to state that if he had proposed threepence he would doubtless have got the volume.
To a correspondent who was preparing a Report on Capital Punishment for the Department of Economics, Stanford University, California, and who asked for the expression of his opinion on the advisability of abolishing it in highly civilized communities, he replied about this time:
‘As an acting magistrate I think that Capital Punishment operates as a deterrent from deliberate crimes against life to an extent that no other form of punishment can rival. But the question of the moral right of a community to inflict that punishment is one I cannot enter into in this necessarily brief communication.’
It may be observed that the writer describes himself as an ‘acting magistrate’, yet he acted but little at sessions. He was not infrequently, however, on Grand Juries at the Assizes, where he would meet with capital offences.
Returning to the country in July he sat down to finish the first part of The Dynasts, the MS. of which was sent to the Messrs. Mac- millan at the end of September. He then corrected the proofs of A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ for the North American Review, in which pages it was published in November. When the ballad was read in England by the few good ju
dges who met with it, they reproached Hardy with sending it out of the country for publication, not knowing that it was first offered to the Cornhill Magazine, and declined by the editor on the ground of it not being a poem he could possibly print in a family periodical. That there was any impropriety in the verses had never struck the author at all, nor did it strike any readers, so far as he was aware.
In December he answered an inquiry addressed to him by the editor of L’Europien, an international journal published in Paris:
‘I would say that I am not of opinion that France is in a decadent state. Her history seems to take the form of a serrated line, thus:
and a true judgement of her general tendency cannot be based on a momentary observation, but must extend over whole periods of variation.
‘What will sustain France as a nation is, I think, her unique accessibility to new ideas, and her ready power of emancipation from those which reveal themselves to be effete.’
In the same month of December the first part of The Dynasts was published.
It was some time in this year that Hardy, in concurrence with his brother and sisters, erected in Stinsford Church a brass tablet to commemorate the connection of his father, grandfather, and uncle with the musical services there in the early part of the previous century — the west gallery, wherein their ministrations had covered altogether about forty years, having been removed some sixty years before this date. The inscription on the brass runs as follows:
In drawing up this inscription Hardy was guided by his belief that the English language was liable to undergo great alterations in the future, whereas Latin would remain unchanged.
CHAPTER XXVII
PART FIRST OF ‘THE DYNASTS’
1904-1905: Aet. 63-65
As The Dynasts contained ideas of some freshness, and was not a copy of something else, a large number of critics were too puzzled by it to be unprejudiced. The appraisement of the work was in truth, while nominally literary, at the core narrowly Philistine, and even theosophic. Its author had erroneously supposed that by writing a frank preface on his method — that the scheme of the drama was based on a tentative theory of things which seemed to accord with the mind of the age; but that whether such theory did or not so accord, and whether it were true or false, little affected his object, which was a poetical one wherein nothing more was necessary than that the theory should be plausible — a polemic handling of his book would be avoided. Briefly, that the drama being advanced not as a reasoned system of philosophy, nor as a new philosophy, but as a poem, with the discrepancies that are to be expected in an imaginative work, as such it would be read.
However, the latitude claimed was allowed but in few instances, and an unfavourable reception was pretty general, the substance of which was ‘On what ground do you arrogate to yourself a right to express in poetry a philosophy which has never been expressed in poetry before?’
Notwithstanding his hopes, he had a suspicion that such might be the case, as we may gather from a note he had written:
‘The old theologies may or may not have worked for good in their time. But they will not bear stretching further in epic or dramatic art. The Greeks used up theirs: the Jews used up theirs: the Christians have used up theirs. So that one must make an independent plunge, embodying the real, if only temporary, thought of the age. But I expect that I shall catch it hot and strong for attempting it!*
Hardy replied to one of these criticisms written by the dramatic critic of The Times in the Literary Supplement (Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 5 and Feb. 19, 1904), but did not make many private memoranda on the reviews. One memorandum is as follows:
‘I suppose I have handicapped myself by expressing, both in this drama and previous verse, philosophies and feelings as yet not well established or formally adopted into the general teaching; and by thus over-stepping the standard boundary set up for the thought of the age by the proctors of opinion, I have thrown back my chance of acceptance in poetry by many years. The very fact of my having tried to spread over art the latest illumination of the time has darkened counsel in respect of me.
‘What the reviewers really assert is, not “This is an untrue and inartistic view of life”, but “This is not the view of life that we people who thrive on conventions can permit to be painted”. If, instead of the machinery I adopted, I had constructed a theory of a world directed by fairies, nobody would have objected, and the critics would probably have said, “What a charming fancy of Mr. Hardy’s!” But having chosen a scheme which may or may not be a valid one, but is presumably much nearer reality than the fancy of a world ordered by fairies would be, they straightway lift their brows.’
Writing to his friend Edward Clodd on March 22, he says:
‘I did not quite think that the Dynasts would suit your scientific mind, or shall I say the scientific side of your mind, so that I am much pleased to hear that you have got pleasure out of it.
‘As to my having said nothing or little (I think I did just allude to it a long while ago) about having it in hand, the explanation is simple enough — I did not mean to publish Part I. by itself until after a quite few days before I sent it up to the publishers: and to be engaged in a desultory way on a MS. which may be finished in five years (the date at which I thought I might print it, complete) does not lead one to say much about it. On my return here from London I had a sudden feeling that I should never carry the thing any further, so off it went. But now I am better inclined to go on with it. Though I rather wish I had kept back the parts till the whole could be launched, as I at first intended.
‘What you say about the “Will” is true enough, if you take the word in its ordinary sense. But in the lack of another word to express precisely what is meant, a secondary sense has gradually arisen, that of effort exercised in a reflex or unconscious manner. Another word would have been better if one could have had it, though “Power” would not do, as power can be suspended or withheld, and the forces of Nature cannot: However, there are inconsistencies in the Phantoms,
no doubt. But that was a point to which I was somewhat indifferent, since they are not supposed to be more than the best human intelligences of their time in a sort of quint-essential form. I speak of the “Years”. The “Pities” are, of course, merely Humanity, with all its weaknesses.
‘You speak of Meredith. I am sorry to learn that he has been so seriously ill. Leslie Stephen gone too. They are thinning out ahead of us. I have just lost an old friend down here, of forty-seven years’ standing. A man whose opinions differed almost entirely from my own on most subjects, and yet he was a good and sincere friend — the brother of the present Bishop of Durham, and like him in old- fashioned views of the Evangelical school.’
His mind was, however, drawn away from the perils of attempting to express his age in poetry by a noticeable change in his mother’s state of health. She was now in her ninety-first year, and though she had long suffered from deafness was mentally as clear and alert as ever. She sank gradually, but it was no’t till two days before her death that she failed to comprehend his words to her. She died on Easter Sunday, April 3, and was buried at Stinsford in the grave of her husband. She had been a woman with an extraordinary store of local memories, reaching back to the days when the ancient ballads were everywhere heard at country feasts, in weaving shops, and at spinning-wheels; and her good taste in literature was expressed by the books she selected for her children in circumstances in which opportunities for selection were not numerous. The portraits of her which appeared in the Sphere, the Gentlewoman, the Book Monthly, and other papers — the best being from a painting by her daughter Mary — show a face of dignity and judgment.
A month earlier he had sent a reply to the Rev. S. Whittell Key, who had inquired of him concerning ‘sport’:
‘I am not sufficiently acquainted with the many varieties of sport to pronounce which is, quantitatively, the most cruel. I can only say generally that the prevalence of those sports which consist in the pleasure of watching
a fellow-creature, weaker or less favoured than ourselves, in its struggles, by Nature’s poor resources only, to escape the death-agony we mean to inflict by the treacherous contrivances of science, seems one of the many convincing proofs that we have not yet emerged from barbarism.
‘In the present state of affairs there would appear to be no logical reason why the smaller children, say, of overcrowded families, should not be used for sporting purposes. Darwin has revealed that there would be no difference in principle; moreover, these children would often escape lives intrinsically less happy than those of wild birds and other animals.’
During May he was in London reading at the British Museum on various days — probably historic details that bore upon The Dynasts — and went to Sunday concerts at the Queen’s Hall, and to afternoon services at St. Paul’s whenever he happened to be near the Cathedral, a custom of his covering many years before and after.
On June 28 The Times published the following letter:
‘Sir,
‘I should like to be allowed space to express in the fewest words a view of Count Tolstoy’s philosophic sermon on war, of which you print a translation in your impression of to-day and a comment in your leading article.
‘The sermon may show many of the extravagances of detail to which the world has grown accustomed in Count Tolstoy’s alter writings. It may exhibit, here and there, incoherence as a moral system. Many people may object to the second half of the dissertation — its special application to Russia in the present war (on which I can say nothing). Others may be unable to see advantage in the writer’s use of theological terms for describing and illustrating the moral evolutions of past ages. But surely all these objectors should be hushed by his great argument, and every defect in his particular reasonings hidden by the blaze of glory that shines from his masterly general indictment of war as a modern principle, with all its senseless and illogical crimes.