Years later Hardy said The Return of the Native was the novel for which he had most affection: ‘it had a suggestive atmosphere and he thought Clym an interesting and loveable figure, though he had no personal connection with himself.’14 You might say the book is all atmosphere, but there are many other things to be admired. One is its virtuoso structure. Hardy has given it the unity of a Racine tragedy, not only by confining all the action to the heath but by assembling his group of men and women so tightly clenched together in love, hate and mutual dependence that they are like fingers in a fist. They are so tightly held that they destroy one another.
There is also his usual loving attention to details of natural history woven into the narrative. Either he was blessed with an unusually good memory for the minutiae of his native heath as he sat writing above the River Stour or – more likely – he had kept notes almost as meticulous as Gilbert White’s. He writes confidently, for instance, of the ‘strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere’ that ‘alighted on Clym’s bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down’. Reference to a modern butterfly book confirms what he says and names them as Lulworth Skippers.15 He describes the precise effect of the wind on different forms of vegetation, giving each a different voice, ‘the linguistic peculiarity of the heath’. Here is the dead heather, its bells ‘now washed colourless by the Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns… each of the tiny trumpets was seized on, entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater’.16 And here the reeds growing behind Wildeve’s inn announce their presence ‘by sounds as of a congregation praying humbly, produced by their rubbing against each other in the slow wind’.17 In Mrs Yeobright’s garden a hot August day makes the large-leaved plants flag by the clock, the rhubarb bending downward by eleven, ‘and even stiff cabbages were limp by noon.’ It sounds like a memory of his father’s vegetable garden at Bockhampton.18 And this is Mrs Yeobright’s exquisite observation of a heron flying towards the late-afternoon sun: ‘He had come dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and lining of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver.’19 The heron is one of the last things she sees in her life, and he makes her wish for a moment that she could arise and fly as he flew, to what seemed a ‘free and happy place’ in the sky. She dies soon after, from exhaustion and unhappiness and the bite of an adder. A Christian writer would have seen this as her release into just such a free and happy place. Hardy did not, but at least he gave her, and us, the wonderful image of the bird lit up by the sun.
Writing the book was one thing; placing it as a serial and finding a publisher another. If Hardy started with justified confidence on his first chapter, it was soon under attack. While he was still in an early stage of writing, in February 1877, he sent a few chapters to Leslie Stephen to consider for the Cornhill; he also wrote to George Smith, asking him ‘if you think it a kind of story likely to create a demand in the market’.20 Neither committed himself, so Hardy turned to John Blackwood – George Eliot’s publisher and editor of Blackwood’s Magazine – to see if he were interested.21 Blackwood politely declared himself unable to place it in the near future and offered some criticism. He complained that ‘There is hardly anything like what is called Novel interest’ in the first chapter – it describes the heath – although he found Eustacia ‘a remarkable character and might have been educated in Paris’ (ambivalent praise from a British editor).22 Hardy went back to Stephen, who now said he would not consider it without seeing the finished novel: ‘he feared that the relations between Eustacia, Wildeve and Thomasin might develop into something “dangerous” for a family magazine.’23 Hardy decided to give up on the Cornhill and wrote to two more magazines, finally setting up the serialization with the poorly regarded Belgravia and getting only £20 for each instalment. At least they were prepared to take it sight unseen, as was Harper’s in New York. By November 1877 the first five instalments were sent off, and it ran monthly through the whole of 1878. Arthur Hopkins, brother of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, did the illustrations, but, although Hardy discussed them with him, and he was a competent artist, they do not begin to suggest the wild expanses of the heath or the originality of the conception. Instead they weaken its power by making the characters into nicely dressed people you might expect to meet on a croquet lawn.
Hardy may have realized this, because the book was published in volume form without illustrations, except for a map of the heath drawn by Hardy himself.24 It was not a success, only 900 of the 1,000 copies printed being sold, and British reviewers were grudging about it. Hardy was found guilty of imitating Victor Hugo, and Eustacia was described as belonging to ‘the class of which Madame Bovary is the type’, which was not meant as praise. Any supposed French influence was regarded as objectionable by British critics. So was what they saw as pretentiousness and low moral tone exhibited through the portrayal of selfish and sensual characters, because novels were required to be straightforwardly morally uplifting. The anonymous writer doing a batch of novels for the Athenaeum said it was Hardy’s worst book yet and was puzzled by the ‘low social position of the characters’ and the way they were made ‘to talk as no people ever talked before’. Perhaps he missed the comforting condescension to the lower orders shown in Under the Greenwood Tree.
W. E. Henley, a young poet and a protégé of Leslie Stephen, found it less good than A Pair of Blue Eyes, ‘very French’ and ‘disagreeable’ but also ‘acute, prescient, imaginative, insatiably observant and… rigidly and finely artistic’. Only the Spectator’s reviewer saw that it was the book of a poet, and one of brilliant talent, ‘even of high genius’, although he also had unfavourable comments about the rustics and Hardy’s failure to present ‘grief of the deepest and noblest type’. Hardy felt the pain of the onslaughts and hardly noticed the praise. He wrote in his notebook for 28 November 1878, ‘Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’25 He was always exceptionally anxious and sensitive about reviews, and he sent a letter to the Athenaeum defending his presentation of ‘intelligent peasant speech’.26 He might have spared himself the trouble: the divide between those who disliked his language, his lower-class characters, his troubling women and his gloom, and those who appreciated the beauty and imaginative power of his work, was already there and remained firmly fixed throughout his career as a novelist.
This is to run ahead of the Sturminster years. Emma had the pleasure of organizing and ordering her new home above the river, and two of her brothers came for a three-day visit in October 1876. The Hardys were for the first time accepted as solid, respectable citizens, and they made friends, particularly with the Dashwoods, the local solicitor and his wife, to whom Emma confided her literary ambitions.27 At Christmas, Hardy took her to stay with his parents, her first visit. His father was always genial, Kate was enjoying her last bit of freedom before starting teacher training at Salisbury, Mary was home for the school holidays and Henry was solid and unexcitable. Six adult Hardys and Emma in the cottage meant it was crowded, and you can imagine the men going out to look at the garden together to get away from the women’s tongues. There was the walk to church on Christmas Day, and the familiar service, still taken by Mr Shirley. Did Hardy introduce Emma to the man who had preached against the over-ambitious poor? We don’t know, because nobody has left any account of the visit. What is certain is that everyone understood that the danger point was between Jemima and Emma. They did not make friends, but there was at least a truce – although there is no record of any later visit.
Winter, spring, summer were spent writing. Hardy sometimes took Emma boating on the Stour, and they still read poetry together. He often also took long walks by himself – her lameness did not encourage her to join him – and he kept an image of her standing in the porch, we
aring a white muslin dress, eager for his return, the notes from her musical box coming faintly from indoors.28 Looking back, he was in no doubt that he loved her then: ‘And beneath the roof is she who in the dark world shows / As a lattice-gleam when midnight moans.’29 But he also remembered how often he failed to notice her, withdrawn into his own world as he needed to be.
Both of them expected and hoped to have children. During 1877 Emma’s brother Walter had a boy, Gordon, Hardy’s cousin Nat also had a son, and Nat’s sister Tryphena, Hardy’s one-time flirt, gave up her teaching career to marry a publican and soon had a family. Early in the next year Leslie Stephen remarried, choosing a widow with three children, and they were to have four more together.30 During the summer the Hardys’ maid Jane also became pregnant. They caught her as she crept out of the back door in her nightdress, after midnight, to meet a lover hiding in an outhouse in the garden, believing she intended to bring him into the house, because the bolts on the kitchen door had been oiled. They led her back inside and the man fled, but she got out of the dining-room window early in the morning, taking her best clothes with her, and was not seen again. Hardy went to her family – they were haymaking – but she was not with them. In August they had news of her. Hardy wrote: ‘Aug. 13. We hear that Jane, our late servant is soon to have a baby. Yet never a sign of one is there for us.’31 If he reflected that he himself had been conceived in similar circumstances, while his mother was in service and his father without any thought of getting married, he could hardly talk about it with Emma. When Jane gave birth at the end of November, she was still unmarried, named no father and called her infant son Tom. The child died two days later, and no more was heard of her.32
Hardy and Emma’s failure to have children is the saddest thing about their life together. He would have made a gentle and humorous father, and a child would have given Emma a focus for her attention and love, and filled up the long hours when he was absorbed in his writing. It would have relieved the tensions and resentments that built up between them, and might even have helped to soften relations with Bockhampton. As it was, Jemima could claim that Emma brought Hardy neither youth nor wealth, small intelligence and no children.
The episode prompts the question, when did Hardy find out the circumstances of his parents’ marriage and his own birth? It is not something children think about or parents talked about. The most likely source of information was his Sparks cousins, whose parents had been instrumental in getting his father to marry his mother. Maria Sparks was the closest of Jemima’s sisters, and their children knew each other well enough to discuss family history as they grew up. It could help to explain the distinct cooling in his relations with the Sparks cousins who remained in England, who remembered and talked about the story of Jemima’s forced wedding. If Hardy did not already know, the approach of his own wedding may have aroused his curiosity about that of his parents, and so led him to find out. However and whenever he did, he kept it to himself.
In October 1877 Hardy performed the duty of a son towards his father, whose rheumatism was getting worse. A cure in Bath was recommended; Hardy met his father there and helped him find lodgings in Church Street, took him to the theatre and departed the next morning. Two weeks later Mr Hardy wrote a lively letter to his daughter Kate, interesting in itself and because it shows the width of the cultural gap between father and son:
Bath is a very Grand Place and I like it very much. I have taken 6 Baths and am to take one to Day and I am to Drink two Glasses of the Water a Day But Have not gaind much Benefit by it as yet the Dr Says its a good Sign when it make any one Worse at first as it tis likely to do good.
I have very Comfortable lodgings… there is a man and His Wife and 3 more Respectable Gents and one Young lady Lodge in the Same House all of us in Separate rooms and 3 of us have the rheumatism and take the Same Baths.
There is so very many Cripples about Bath and most of them Seems to be respectable people and thousands and thousands of Bath Chairs you can scarcely move for them as they all go on the Pavement – the Drapery Shops are very grand and numerous.
I Have been Hear a month… Mrs Gill of Stafford Has fell Down and broken Her Leg She is gone in the Hospatle to Have it off and Henry tell me she is not expected to come out again a live. Yours afftly Thos Hardy.33
For some time Hardy had been thinking of writing a historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars. This was partly what made him so determined to walk over the field of Waterloo. He had also, when in London with Emma, twice taken her with him to visit the Chelsea Pensioners, among whom there were still survivors from the battle with stories to tell. And, although they were happy at Sturminster, he was restless. With The Return of the Native nearly finished at the end of 1877, he began to think of returning to London, where he could more easily do the necessary background reading for his new book at the British Museum. Emma was agreeable, but both felt disinclined to live in the centre of town. The 1870s was a time when the middle classes made a mass move to the leafier suburbs, and they decided to look to the south of London again. In February they decided on a house in Tooting, close to Wandsworth Common, with a regular train service to Victoria. 1 Arundel Terrace, Trinity Road, was an end-of-terrace house, larger than the one in Sturminster. There was nothing picturesque about it or its situation, but it was undoubtedly genteel.34 In March they packed up their things and left Dorset. The two-years’ idyll was over.
12. Hardy Joins a Club
Hardy had decided that ‘the practical side of his vocation of novelist demanded that he should have his head-quarters in or near London,’ and three years based in Tooting followed.1 Although he later, characteristically, doubted whether it was a wise move, it was, in fact, a highly successful strategy for meeting publishers and editors, writers, artists and distinguished men and women with an interest in literature, and he put a lot of energy into taking up the invitations he received. Within weeks he was being welcomed to social events as one of the younger writers people wanted to meet, and he must have become a familiar figure on the Wandsworth–Victoria train. Very early on he and Emma were invited by their near neighbour Alexander Macmillan, the grand old man of British publishing, who had started life in much the same way as Hardy, a penniless, half-schooled Scots boy who came south and worked his way to the top of his profession – and who had also turned down Hardy’s first three novels. At his house Hardy met Morley, his earliest reader, again, and scientists of the calibre of T. H. Huxley, whose high intelligence and modest manner Hardy particularly admired, and whom he knew to be the friend and ally of Darwin. Another influential figure, Charles Kegan Paul, a Dorset clergyman who had left the Church and become a writer and publisher, admired Hardy’s work, asked him to dine and supported his election to the Savile Club. He was elected to the club only three months after his arrival in Tooting, and in early August he spent an uncharacteristically riotous evening there and at the Lyceum, where Henry Irving, a fellow member, dispensed champagne to a party from the club, whose members were for the most part writers.
The Savile had been going for only a decade, one of a growing number of such establishments where gentlemen enjoyed something between the comforts of hotel and home in central London without being troubled by their families. You could have any meal served and spend any hour of the day or night there, knowing you would meet no one but your carefully chosen fellow members, and no women at all – female servants being effectively invisible. Did Hardy ever think of his mother’s ambition to become a cook in a gentlemen’s club? It is likely it was from her that he first knew a gentleman should have a club. Almost at once he was using the Savile as his address in his correspondence – 15 Savile Row, W – and inviting visiting American literary men to lunch there. But, although the Savile was undoubtedly a convenience for him, it did not make him into a clubbable man. The evening with Irving was not repeated, and Hardy did not become a fixture either at the lunch table or in the card room. ‘Considering his eminence, Hardy seems to have made… small impa
ct at the Savile,’ writes the historian of the club.’2
He did all the same make an effort to take part in some of the rather forced jollities of the literary world. When a fellow member of the Savile, Walter Besant, pressed him to join the Rabelais Club, set up to celebrate virility in literature, Hardy was flattered enough to agree, confessing at the same time that he had barely read Rabelais. His account of the inaugural dinner makes you glad not to have been there. It was held at the Tavistock Hotel, on a dismal winter night, the fog in the Bloomsbury streets creeping into the ‘large, empty, dimly-lit, cheerless apartment’ in which they met.3
He told Kegan Paul, ‘I have only settled temporarily in this suburb, to have a foothold from which to choose some permanent spot. We might have ventured on Kensington, but for such utter rustics as ourselves Tooting seemed town enough to begin with.’4 This was not literally true, since he had taken the lease for three years, but it probably expressed a true wish or intention. Something similar was at work when, having been asked by an American paper to provide autobiographical notes about himself, he left out any mention of his early struggles and presented himself as effortlessly cultivated, having received his ‘higher education’ from a Cambridge scholar and visited ‘several of the great collections of paintings in Continental Capitals from time to time’.5 He was striking what he thought was the right note.
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