Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Before the move George Smith had advised Hardy to ask Tinsley to sell him back the copyright of Under the Greenwood Tree. Tinsley cannily put a price of £300, ten times what he had paid (‘preposterous’ said Smith) and threw in some criticism for good measure. ‘I think your genius truer than Dickenses [sic.] ever was, but you want a monitor more than the great Novelist ever did. Apologising for being so plain spoken.’7 Hardy told Tinsley he was asking twice what he was prepared to pay, and the matter lapsed. Meanwhile the first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd sold out in January and a second was printed.8 In America Publishers Weekly talked of ‘Mr Hardy’s great novel’ and predicted it would be ‘one of the hits of the season’.9 And it was, in spite of Henry James’s savagely superior attack in the Nation: ‘imitative talent… second rate… fatal lack of magic… verbose and redundant style… little sense of proportion and almost none of composition… Everything human in the book strikes us as factious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.’ Clever, and funny, but, for all James’s fine intelligence, wrong.

  He was wrong because Hardy had found a true voice, sometimes awkward but tuned into experiences and feelings outside the range of Henry James. It is a voice that speaks to readers in many countries and to which successive generations have responded. With this voice Hardy established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist’s eye and country people are shown playing out their lives ‘between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change’.10 From now on all his best novels – The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure – were built on this foundation. But something wilful, or whimsical, or stubbornly resistant to producing merely what people wanted made him turn away repeatedly from what he did best. Few novelists maintain their highest standards in book after book; Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, even Dickens all had their failures. But Hardy’s output is exceptionally uneven. Over the next decade, the first ten years of his married life, it went like this: failure (Ethelberta), masterpiece (The Return of the Native), slight historical novel (The Trumpet-Major), failure (A Laodicean), interesting oddity (Two on a Tower), masterpiece (The Mayor of Casterbridge). To produce two masterpieces in a decade is enough for any writer. Even the two failures have their points of interest, and the second was written during a painful and prolonged illness. But the first is a very curious case, because it was written on the back of the great success of Far from the Madding Crowd and managed to dissipate almost all the goodwill, commercial and critical, it had earned.

  While they were still at Surbiton, Stephen asked for a new serial for the Cornhill, and Smith wanted to sign him up for publication in volume form. They offered him £700 for the combined rights, and from America there was a further £550, the increased advances being the direct result of the success of Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy had been planning a comedy of manners, perhaps encouraged by Anny Thackeray telling him that ‘a novelist must necessarily like society.’11 It was to be set largely in London and partly in France and called The Hand of Ethelberta. He was annoyed by the reviewers’ insistence that his gift was for rural stories, and, although he had another idea for one with a woodland setting, he put that aside and started on Ethelberta. Stephen and Smith were both disconcerted by what he told them about it, but they were committed to it, and Stephen wrote politely of his pleasure in reading the early chapters.12 But the public were disappointed in due course – it sold badly – and Ethelberta remains one of the least read of Hardy’s novels.13 You can see why. It is too long and too busily plotted, and the characters remain notional figures, there to make points. At the same time it is full of odd and arresting touches – as are all Hardy’s novels – and Ethelberta herself, quickwitted and ambitious, and with an awkward path to negotiate, is a brave attempt to show a modern woman who finds herself outside the conventional structures of society and sets out defiantly to make the most of her situation. Some critics praised its originality and element of fantasy, and one saw it as ‘a humorous fable’ and an attack on the rich, which it partly is. But it is more than that.

  Hardy had imagined a young woman whose parents are servants, father a butler, mother once a children’s nurse in a county family, her aunt a maid who married a valet. Her many siblings are also all employed in lowly occupations, as cook, dressmaker, carpenter, housepainter, pupil teacher, page-boy, etc. She alone, educated well enough to become a governess in a wealthy family, has escaped from her class, first marrying the son of the house where she worked, then widowed almost as soon as married and taken abroad by her mother-in-law to have her education finished and a little polish put on. She now passes as a lady and has also become a published poet. She is beautiful, with what Hardy calls squirrelcoloured hair, and performs so effectively as an extemporizer that she can fill a London theatre. Society is at her feet, and suitors are queuing up. But, although she is ambitious for herself, she is unwilling to jettison her family and tries to lead a double life, sharing her London house with them – they pretend to be unrelated to her and merely her servants – while she makes up her mind how to proceed with her life. It was the emphasis on servants that upset Emma. Hardy called it a comedy, and some of it is farcical. It is also of course a commentary on his own position, which parallels Ethelberta’s in obvious ways, and on the English preoccupation with class. What makes a lady or a gentleman? How central this question was: Leslie Stephen, on declaring himself an unbeliever, announced, ‘I now believe in nothing… but I do not the less believe in morality… I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.’14

  Hardy shows how uncomfortable Ethelberta sometimes finds her position. Attempting to communicate with one of her sisters, she thinks:

  The wretched homeliness of Gwendoline’s mind seemed… to be absolutely intolerable, and Ethelberta was suddenly convinced that to involve Gwendoline in any… discussion would simply be increasing her own burden, and adding worse confusion to her sister’s already confused existence… As she ascended the stairs, Ethelberta ached with an added pain… It was that old sense of disloyalty to her class and kin by feeling as she felt now which caused the pain, and there was no escaping it. [my italics] Gwendoline would have gone to the ends of the earth for her: she could not confide a thought to Gwendoline!15

  As you read this passage, you think at once of Hardy’s relations with his own family, parents, brother, sisters and cousins. While he was writing Ethelberta his sister Kate was working as a pupil teacher in Piddlehinton’s mixed National School and his brother Henry as a builder with their father; his cousin Martha and her husband, ex-lady’s maid and butler, were preparing to emigrate to Queensland, Australia, despairing of making a good life in England.16 So the book was among other things a farewell to Martha, and one of its most striking scenes may have come from something she told him about her working years. It describes an evening when the family are at dinner downstairs and the staff decide to come up from the basement and play games in the first-floor drawing rooms.

  ‘Now let’s have a game of cat-and-mice,’ said the maidservant cheerily… Away then ran the housemaid and Menlove [the lady’s maid] and the young footman started at their heels. Round the room, over the furniture, under the furniture, through the furniture, out of one window, along the balcony, in at another window, again round the room – so they glided with the swiftness of swallows and the noiselessness of ghosts. Then the housemaid drew a jew’s-harp from her pocket, and struck up a lively waltz sotto voce. The footman seized Menlove… and began spinning gently round the room with her… ‘They’ll hear you underneath, they’ll hear you, and we shall all be ruined!’ ‘Not at all,’ came from the cautious dancers. ‘These are some of the best built houses in London – double floors, filled in with material that will deaden any row you like to make…’17

  The scene must have caused a stir in some Lo
ndon households.

  The whole book is built around class encounters. Ethelberta moves through the social layers, while her older sisters end up emigrating to Australia. Her brothers remain working men, rough in their speech and appearance, and so radical in their views that one does his best to prevent Ethelberta marrying into the peerage. A London society lady gives her views on not spoiling servants by lending them books ‘of the wrong kind for their station’ and making them dissatisfied – ‘and dreadfully ambitious!’ suggests Ethelberta slyly.18 A smooth, well-connected gentleman who courts her prides himself on his nonchalance and ‘never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when he was obliged to do so’. Ethelberta rather likes him but goes off him when she finds he owes his fortune to buying up old horses for slaughter and selling horsemeat for hounds.19

  A sensation is caused at a dinner when an apparently disembodied voice is heard to exclaim ‘Good God’. It turns out to be the butler, Ethelberta’s father, reacting to hearing the diners he is serving gossip about her impending marriage. His employers are shocked, first by his speaking at all, and then by the discovery that they have unknowingly entertained their butler’s daughter at this same dinner table. The mistress of the house wants to sack him at once, and his job is saved only because the master values him too highly to let him go and is prepared to excuse his lapse into human behaviour.20 When Ethelberta takes her builder brothers on an educational visit to the Royal Academy, they arrive in their best clothes, ‘chests covered with broad triangular areas of padded blue silk’, and walk through the gallery ‘with the contrite bearing of meek people in church’, admiring the construction of the skylights overhead. Dan observes, superfluously, ‘I feel that I baint upon my own ground today.’21

  Ethelberta is worldly enough to opt in the end for marriage to the disreputable – but very rich – old peer who pursues her. In making her choice, she consults a treatise on Utilitarianism, and in pondering whether to tell the old man about her background she picks up another on Casuistry. This is Hardy determined to show her serious intellectual qualifications. She chooses to tell her aristocratic lover the truth, and he of course doesn’t give a damn – he knew already, and relishes it. She neither loves him nor even likes him much, but sees him as the solution to her problems and is confident she can keep him in order. Her brother Sol scolds her for ‘creeping up among the useless lumber of our nation that’ll be the first to burn if there comes a flare. I never see such a deserter of your own lot as you be… When you were a girl, you wouldn’t drop a curtsey to ’em… But, instead of sticking to such principles, you must needs push up, so as to get girls such as you were once to curtsey to you.’22 Sol need not have worried. By the end of the book the old viscount has been tamed, and his lady is running the estate and, in her spare time, working on an epic poem, inspired by her admiration for the republican poet Milton (her epic ambitions curiously predict Hardy’s composition of The Dynasts three decades later). She is also helping her family. Her parents are installed in a villa on the south coast. She gives her younger sister a dowry and enables her youngest brother – the page-boy – to go into the Church, a nice Hardy joke. Even her builder brothers Sol and Dan have acquired their own business with a loan from her and signed a contract to build a hospital for £20,000.23 Hardy passes few overt judgements, letting the story do its own work. It is a pity he packs it with too much material and too many thin sketches of people, because he has a good theme that deserves better treatment. Its failure is tantalizing, but it is a failure. Leslie Stephen should have made him work it over, cutting, sharpening and rewriting.

  But Stephen had other things on his mind, and he made few suggestions beyond bowdlerizations. He asked Hardy not to describe Ethelberta’s poems as ‘amorous’ and fussed, ‘I may be over particular, but I don’t quite like the suggestion of the very close embrace in the London churchyard,’ where she is kissed by one of her admirers on a visit to Milton’s tomb.24 The two men met and talked in March 1875 but not about Hardy’s intentions for his new book. Stephen wrote to him inviting him to call alone, as late as he liked in the evening, without giving a reason.

  I went, and found him alone, wandering up and down his library in slippers; his tall thin figure wrapt in a heath-coloured dressing-gown. After a few remarks on our magazine arrangements, he said he wanted me to witness his signature to what, for a moment, I thought was his will; but it turned out to be a deed renunciatory of holy orders, under the Act of 1870. He said grimly that he was really a reverend gentleman still, little as he might look it, and that he thought it as well to cut himself adrift of a calling for which, to say the least, he had always been utterly unfit. The deed was executed with due formality. Our conversation then turned upon theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, the unreality of time and kindred subjects.25

  Hardy could only be flattered that Stephen should make a request so personal, trusting and friendly.

  The Hardys stayed in London until July, and the two men exchanged further letters. There was, however, no invitation to them as a couple. Minny, as we have seen, did not like Hardy, and that was a good enough reason. She was also experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Stephen took her to Switzerland in the summer. So there is no knowing what Minny would have made of Emma, whose inconsequentiality and chatter was faintly in the style of her sister Anny. In November, almost without warning, Minny died of convulsions brought on by her pregnancy. Stephen was broken with grief. Her death came on his birthday, and he never celebrated the day again. It was a ceremonious gesture of a kind Hardy understood and observed himself in the same spirit later in his own life, feeling the need to give love and death and sorrow their due.

  In London, Hardy took a first cautious step as a professional author speaking up for his profession when he joined the Copyright Association and was one of a delegation to the Prime Minister, Disraeli, encouraging him to set up a Select Committee to look into the law of copyright. This was in May. In June he went house hunting in Dorset without Emma, visiting Shaftesbury, Blandford and Wimborne, all at a discreet distance from Bockhampton, although he must have taken the opportunity of dropping in on his parents. None of the houses he saw appealed, but he and Emma agreed to leave London in July in any case and make for Swanage on the Dorset coast, where he said he intended to set some scenes in Ethelberta.

  On the way they stopped in Bournemouth and on St Swithin’s Day spent a rainy afternoon at a hotel. The day is sadly commemorated in his poem ‘We Sat at the Window’, published after her death with the inscription ‘(Bournemouth, 1875)’ below the title.26 They had been married for ten months, and this is his first known utterance about the state of things between them – a case of true Hardyesque irony. Far from describing the enjoyment of a trip out of town together, it is about their discontent as the rain falls and neither can find anything to like in the other. ‘We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes’ – and this is toned down from the manuscript’s sharper ‘We were irked by the scene, by each other, yes.’ It is a stiff, remorseful poem about a bad moment. It is also entirely theoretical, giving no impression of either as individuals. The only physical detail is the rain. He says he failed to ‘see’ her then, but he also fails to let us see her in the poem. For a poem that takes on an intensely personal moment to be so impersonal is disconcerting.

  What had happened to the living, high-spirited girl in Cornwall? Hardy had killed off Elfride at the end of A Pair of Blue Eyes, and he may have begun to think that the Emma he had fallen in love with was as insubstantial as Elfride. A friend who met her a few years further into their marriage said of her, ‘Mrs Hardy belonged essentially to the class of woman gifted with spirit and the power of deciding for herself, which had attracted Hardy in his early manhood. She had the makings of a Bathsheba, with restricted opportunities.’27 Perhaps she was finding that her opportunities were as restricted within marriage as they had been before. He knew he ought to value her, just as she doubtless kne
w she ought to praise the chapters of Ethelberta he showed her, and failed to. When things were not going well between them, his response was to withdraw into himself. He preferred silence to quarrels, which might have cleared the air and sent them into each other’s arms.

  With Hardy it is usually easier to find evidence of things going badly than accounts of happiness, but it was not all gloom. The steamer carried them on to Swanage, ‘a seaside village lying snug within two headlands as between a finger and a thumb’, with beach, boats and spectacular cliff walks with views over outlying rocks and sea, a spot likely to please Emma as much as himself. It was not yet a popular resort, and they had no difficulty finding lodgings with a retired sea captain and his wife at West End Cottage, a modest house on the hill leading out of town. Captain Masters told them sea stories and took them out in his boat; Mrs Masters looked after them. Asked about her later, Emma said she was fairly pleasant, adding that she stole from them.28 Since the Hardys possessed almost nothing, it must have been money she took. It can’t have been much, and they liked the place enough to stay there for nearly a year, until May 1876.