On New Year’s Day 1865, when both Hardy and Moule were in Dorchester, he gave Hardy a copy of Marcus Aurelius, inscribed, ‘This is the chief thing: Be not perturbed: for all things are according to the nature of the universal.’ In the summer Moule spoke of his interest in Cardinal Newman, whom Hardy found attractive for his poetic writing but not for his views.34 At about the same time Moule also gave him Auguste Comte’s Positivism, as far from Newman’s thinking as it would be possible to go. With family encouragement and no doubt some special negotiation with the school authorities, Moule became an assistant master at Marlborough in 1865. His brothers Charles and Handley had both been teaching there, and both moved on to fellowships at Cambridge, but Horace remained at Marlborough with no prospect of advancement. He did not like the work. When he talked to Hardy about his unhappiness in 1866, Hardy’s sympathy wavered, and he thought momentarily of giving up the friendship.35 He may well have felt it was impossible for him, who had so little and whose life was going nowhere, to comfort Moule, who was sinking and failing despite having had so many talents and chances in life. Another of Moule’s offerings to Hardy was a translation of Goethe’s Faust, which suggests a grim parallel with his condition as he struggled with fiends he could not control. There was a story that he made a backstreet Dorchester girl pregnant, and that she was bundled off to Australia; and another of an engagement to a ‘splendid girl’, who broke it off.36 These crises seemed to pass, and Hardy’s friendship endured.
Blomfield gave him a grim architectural task in the autumn and winter of 1866. The building of the new Midland railway line into St Pancras meant that the graves around old St Pancras Church had to be moved. ‘Many hundreds of coffins, and bones in huge quantities’ were to be dealt with, as well as monuments to some of the famous dead. Mary Shelley had already removed the bodies of her mother and father, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but their monument remained, with Godwin’s second wife still beneath. The public was alerted to the possibility of mishandling of the dead, and the Bishop charged Blomfield with responsibility for making sure everything was done decently. It meant constant supervision of the work, which was done at night behind a hoarding with flare lamps as the coffins were dug up. Hardy’s job was to keep an eye on things in the evening and sometimes into the night. Many coffins fell apart as they were brought out, and Hardy and Blomfield were both there when a collapsed coffin gave up one skeleton and two skulls. Old St Pancras churchyard had become a gloomy spot since the open fields once surrounding it had been built over, and it was now overlooked by a workhouse and hemmed in by cheaply thrown-up terraced housing. In these circumstances even the thought that Shelley had wooed his Mary at her mother’s grave there half a century earlier could not do much to cheer Hardy. He got through the job, but it was to be his last winter in London for several years.
The spring of 1867 was cold, with snow falling in mid March. There are no letters from Hardy for the year, only a cheerful half-sheet from Moule to him, announcing he was ‘passing through’ Marlborough and had heard that Hardy was planning to return to Dorset:
Dear Tom I am delighted to hear of your intended move in our direction. / I shan’t trouble very hard now to effect a meeting in Town, spite of Patti & Titiens [two celebrated sopranos performing at the opera in London]. However if you like to call at the New Humm about 6.30 (I won’t engage a bed there) you may very likely find me, dress coat and all – But don’t swear if you don’t find me Yrs ever affly.37
Now Moule was up and Hardy was down. Of the few poems he dates 1867, one is a bitter epigram on existence:
A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.38
Another ends elegantly, expressing a truth he grasped but could not yet act on:
If I have seen one thing
It is the passing preciousness of dreams;
That aspects are within us; and who seems
Most kingly is the King.39
The best of his London poems is also from this year. It describes a scene of parting between a woman and the man who is recalling it. He lets us see that the woman is suffering, that he is emotionally spent and that the colourless wintry surroundings – pale sun, bare earth, grey fallen leaves, the ‘Neutral Tones’ of the title – reinforce and represent his refusal to share grief or even to allow it.40
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing…
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
With this poem Hardy establishes himself as a poet with a voice of his own, to be taken seriously. It was not published for another thirty years.41
In five years he had succeeded in becoming a Londoner. Or had he? During the cold spring of 1867 he began to feel ill. His colleagues told him he had lost the ruddy look of a countryman, and he suspected he was suffering from the London atmosphere, sitting in the office at a first-floor window above the stinking river, and reading and working in his room from six to midnight every evening. He was, in fact, embarking on something new, a plan for a novel, but for a time he felt so weak that he could hardly lift his pencil. In July, Blomfield urged him to take the summer off and return in October. So when Hardy had a letter from his old master, Hicks, who was looking for an assistant, he decided to offer himself, and in July he returned to Dorchester. He left most of his books and papers in his London lodging but took with him the plan of his novel.
It was not a glorious homecoming, and his mother did not disguise her disappointment that the son for whom she had such hopes was returning apparently with nothing to show for his years in London. But once he was at Bockhampton his strength began to return. He resumed his old daily walks, and within a few weeks he was well again. Working part time for Hicks left him the hours and the energy to get down to the novel. The manuscript grew and grew, becoming an attack on just about everything he had seen and heard during the past five years. He called it The Poor Man and the Lady, and gave it a social and political message, intending it as an onslaught on the callousness and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes and their indifference to the poor, workers and servants and any who aspired to better themselves by getting an education. By October he had made up his mind to finish it at all costs, dashed to London to collect what he had left in Westbourne Park Villas and told Blomfield he would not be returning to Adelphi Terrace. The first draft of the novel was finished in January 1868, and he immediately began on a fair copy.
Only some innocuous fragments of the novel survive, and they are without the sarcasm, aggression and mischief that publishers’ readers found in it; there is nothing to tell us about Hardy’s politics or anger.42 As the next chapter will show, he was persuaded to set aside both the manuscript and any display of the political opinions that inspired it. But the anger remained. The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed over in Hardy. Humiliation, rejection, condescension, failure and loss of love remained so close to the skin that the scars bled again at the slightest occasion. This is why many of his poems return to the griefs of the past. It is also why the rage that appears in his last novel, Jude the Obscure, was fuelled in the 1890s by the anger he felt in the 1860s. In a sense, The Poor Man and th
e Lady was a dry-run for Jude.
PART TWO
1867–1874
6. The Clever Lad’s Dream
Hardy produced a rough first draft of his ‘striking socialistic novel’ in five months, averaging three pages a day – he was a speedy writer from the first – and finishing on 16 January 1868. Over the next five months he revised and wrote out a fair copy.1 He could have no idea of his future prospects, and he knew the novel was a gamble, but he was determined to get it done.
Even if he had disappointed his mother, there was comfort in being at home again with her familiar cooking and care, the resumed routine of the walk in and out of Dorchester, and the rediscovery of the natural world. He had not heard a nightingale for six years, and when they congregated yards from the cottage windows in the spring he set about transcribing their song.2 John Hicks was his usual amiable self, glad to have him back and undemanding; Hardy could just about make a living as a part-time assistant in his office without needing to push himself. But not everything was easy. He believed the locals laughed at him for his failure to achieve anything in London, all too likely in a community where everyone knew everyone else’s business and any pretensions to be different were viewed with suspicion; and here he was back on his parents’ hands with nothing to show for his five years away. Tradition has it that at Bockhampton he had his own little room in which he slept and worked, but you wonder how this was possible with six people squashed into a three-bedroom cottage. Henry, a tall young man of sixteen, was learning the building trade with their father; Kate, ten years old, was now at day school in Dorchester; and Mary, teaching at Minterne in north-west Dorset, was still too far away to live at home in term time, but during the school holidays she joined the family. So perhaps Tom had to share a room with his brother.
For advice about his novel he went to Horace Moule, who may have read the first manuscript when he was home from Marlborough for the Christmas holidays and encouraged Hardy to make the fair copy. A note of recommendation from Moule went with this second version when it was posted off to the highly respectable publishing house of Macmillan in the summer holidays, on 25 July 1868. Since Horace was quite capable of giving Tom unwelcome advice, he must have thought it good enough to submit.3 Hardy also put in a letter of his own explaining that his intention was to attack the manners of the upper classes by seeing them through the eyes of an outsider. He then fell into the state of apprehension and despondency usual to writers as they wait for a verdict on their work. He read Mill, Carlyle and Wordsworth to steady himself. Moule, suffering his own recurring miseries, was on the point of giving up his teaching post at Marlborough, his future cloudy too.
The publishing history of Hardy’s first novel turned into a nightmare: not because there was a lack of interest in it, but because his hopes were alternately raised and dashed, month after month. The first response was an encouraging rejection, if such a thing can be, in the shape of a letter from Alexander Macmillan, dated 10 August: ‘If this is your first book I think you ought to go on. May I ask if it is? and – you are not a lady so perhaps you will forgive the question – are you young?’ Macmillan wrote of ‘real power and insight’ and praised the scenes of country life among working men, but he said the upper-class Londoners were presented with too much hostility, suggesting that, whereas Thackeray attacked the upper classes fairly, ‘you “mean mischief. ” ’
The utter heartlessness of all the conversation you give in drawing-rooms and ballrooms about the working-classes has some grounds of truth I fear, and might justly be scourged as you aim at doing… Will’s speech to the working men is full of wisdom… Much of the writing seems to me admirable. The scene in Rotten Row is full of power and insight… You see I am writing to you as a writer who seems to me, at least potentially, of considerable mark, of power and purpose.4
He said he was seeking further advice on whether and how the book might be modified, and he also sent Hardy his reader’s report:
A very curious and original performance… much of the writing is strong and fresh. But there crops up in parts a certain rawness of absurdity that is very displeasing and makes it read like some clever lad’s dream… There is real feeling in the writing… If the man is young, there is stuff and promise in him: but he must study form and composition, in such writers as Balzac and Thackeray, who would I think come as natural masters to him.
Macmillan did not at this point name his reader, John Morley, although he could hardly have chosen one more likely to find something congenial in Hardy’s work. Morley was a journalist only two years older than Hardy, liberal in his politics, a freethinker who had fallen out with his father while at Oxford and so started his professional life in London without a penny. He worked for the Saturday Review, had defied convention by marrying a woman with two illegitimate children, taken up Positivism and become a friend of Mill. It is impossible to judge how apt his comments on Hardy’s work were, since the manuscript no longer exists, but it is obvious that, for all his reservations, he took it seriously.
Hardy wrote back to Macmillan, waited some time for a response and wrote again in September: ‘I almost feel that I don’t care what happens to the book, so long as something happens.’5 He added that he had been ‘hunting up matter for another tale, which would consist entirely of rural scenes and humble life; but I have not courage enough to go on with it till something comes of the first.’ A postscript asked for suggestions about what sort of story or other literary work Macmillan thought he might take on. The manuscript of The Poor Man and the Lady was then returned. He revised it and sent it back in November. In December he went to see Macmillan in London, only to be told that, while he was not prepared to publish it, he would give Hardy an introduction to Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall, the publishers of Carlyle. Hardy spent a few days in town and met Chapman at his office in Sackville Street, noting afterwards ‘I fear the interview was an unfortunate one.’ He does not say why, or tell us where he stayed or whether he saw any friends or family, only that he went home, returned to work and filled up the difficult waiting time reading voraciously: Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Thackeray and Macaulay, the worldly letters of Horace Walpole and Virgil’s epic poem about the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid. Absorbed in them, he kept his fear of failure down.
In January 1869 he took himself to London yet again, this time intending to stay for a few weeks. Stoic and sceptical as he was, he still found consolation, or magic, in religious texts, and he marked the date, 17 January, in his prayerbook, beside the psalm that begins ‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord, and hear me: for I am poor, and in misery.’ It reveals how bad his anxiety was. Macmillan saw him again and this time suggested he might try to find work as a reviewer. After this, Hardy had his first meeting with Morley, who offered to introduce him to the editor of the Saturday Review. Although this kind of literary life was not what he wanted, it was at least a sign of their confidence in him, and even of friendly feelings. They liked him, saw his promise and wanted to do something to help him.
Chapman summoned him, and said he would publish the novel if Hardy was prepared to put up a £20 guarantee against loss. Hardy agreed, having saved a good deal of his salary from his London years. This time he travelled back to Dorset confident that his book was being prepared for press. Just as well, because before setting off he heard of the sudden death of John Hicks. It was sad news, because he had been a friend as well as an employer; it also looked as though he had lost his job in Dorchester.
At home, he waited for his proofs. They did not arrive. Hardy wrote to Chapman, who replied with an invitation to come and meet ‘the gentleman who read your manuscript’. Hardy returned to London, the fifth trip in five months, in March. The gentleman was George Meredith, a handsome man of forty in a frock coat, with wavy hair, moustache and brown beard. At first Hardy did not realize he was the novelist, but he listened to his advice, which was that he would do better not to publish this book: it would certainly bring down attacks from reviewers and damage
his future chances as a novelist. He might rewrite it, softening the bitterness of his satire on the rich, or better still put it aside and write another novel ‘with a purely artistic purpose’ and more of a plot. Even when Hardy realized who his reader was, he did not know that he was another freethinker, also from a modest background – Meredith’s father was a tailor, which he found embarrassing – and that ten years before he had been fiercely attacked for his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, judged so shocking that the powerful circulating library Mudie’s cancelled its order of 300 copies. Meredith lectured him, clearly, kindly and at length, and Hardy took his manuscript away.
Still, he could not bear to give up altogether the idea of finding a willing publisher, and in April he submitted it to Smith, Elder, who had published Thackeray. They took only two weeks to turn it down, and he asked them to post it to Dorchester Station rather than to his home address: there was no need for the family to follow all his humiliations. He had one more try in June, sending it to Tinsley Brothers, a much less prestigious firm. They appear to have communicated to Moule, who must have been in London then, that they would publish it if Hardy would guarantee them financially against loss. Hardy answered that their terms were ‘rather beyond me just now’.
Thomas Hardy Page 11