Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Two on a Tower came out in volume form in October. It was found shocking, even repulsive, and called his ‘worst yet’ by one critic. Hardy must have expected, or even intended, to produce some sort of shock and indeed had suggested an advertisement, to go in the Athenaeum, that singled out the age gap between hero and heroine and her ‘desperate coup d’audace’ involving a bishop; but he was still worried by the attacks.25 There was some reassurance from the young Henry Havelock Ellis, who took the occasion to write a long essay in the Westminster Review in which he discussed all Hardy’s work, praised him for his presentation of women who are ‘not too good’ and very real, and hailed him as ‘a writer who has a finer sense of his art than any living English novelist’.26 Ellis was not upset by sexual passion, young lovers of older women or by the presentation of a bishop as a self-satisfied fool; he was only ahead of his time, and Hardy wrote him a grateful letter. But many readers were horrified, and Hardy was reduced to making lame excuses, saying the plot had required a bishop, that he meant no disrespect to the Church, that another character was an entirely honourable clergyman, that the heroine was deeply religious and so forth. Since Emma’s uncle Canon Gifford, who had conducted their wedding, had just married a daughter of the Bishop of Peterborough, she also may have felt the book to be embarrassing. In the preface to the 1895 edition Hardy again lamely pointed out that ‘the Bishop is every inch a gentleman.’

  Pompous bishops have been known to exist, women to fall in love with younger men and to pass off babies on the wrong man. The love affair is perfectly believable, the best of the book being its exploration of the situation that arises when a clever youth is wooed by a lady: delicate, ecstatic, sometimes absurd and sometimes painful. The real problem with Two on a Tower is a quite different one, and it is that, after the arresting start that seems to promise a brave, original story, the heavy paraphernalia of the Victorian thriller is wheeled out creaking: coincidences pile up one after another, letters appear at the wrong moment and are read by the wrong people, distant uncles leave wills with upsetting clauses, a marriage turns out to be invalid, Viviette’s meddling brother appears suddenly from abroad for no good reason, and her husband Sir Blount is first reported dead, then alive, then again dead. Some of this can be put down to the usual problem that Hardy was writing for serialization, which drove him to pack in far too much plot, and that he wrote too fast, without time to think or reconsider. This time he did not even trouble to revise the serialized text for book publication. So the narrative veers between comedy, some light, some black, and pathos, confusing our responses.

  The one thing no reader can miss is that Hardy had a good time imagining Viviette. He was captivated by her, still more than he had been by the beautiful pagan Eustacia. He gives her the allure of a woman who can be thought of as part sister, part mother, part lover, describing her look ‘that was neither maternal, sisterly, nor amorous; but partook in an indescribable manner of all three kinds’.27 She is ‘fervid, cordial, and spontaneous’.28 Even the virtuous vicar of the parish is made aware of her ‘soft dark eyes… the natural indices of a warm and affectionate, perhaps slightly voluptuous temperament, languishing for want of something to do, cherish, or suffer for’.29 She is driven to behave badly only when circumstances have trapped her and she is desperate, and, although she is punished by her author with a severity that should have reassured conventional readers, she appears throughout as a charming woman who has the author’s sympathy, admiration and tenderness. She was one of the well-loved dream women who kept him company away from the real world. Some years later Emma complained that he cared more for the women he imagined than for any real woman, a remark that suggests she understood him better than she is usually given credit for.30

  On the other hand, he failed to revise or improve Two on a Tower precisely because he set off with his own real woman, Emma herself, for a prolonged holiday in Paris in the autumn, ‘playing truant’, as he put it cheerfully to Gosse, just when he should have been working on revisions.31 They took a flat in the rue des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank for more than a month, bought their own groceries and vegetables ‘in the Parisian bourgeois manner’, dined out in restaurants every night, walked about Paris together visiting the Louvre and other galleries, where he jotted down his ideas about the paintings, and appreciated the beauty of the city. They also revisited Versailles, where they had been on their honeymoon. Hardy notes that they both caught colds, and Emma kept no diary this time, but it was the sort of jaunt she loved.32 There were no distractions, and it’s a fair guess that they enjoyed themselves, and even each other’s company. George Douglas, who first met them in Wimborne in 1881, said of Hardy that he was ‘at his best and happiest about the year ’81. Besides his work – ever with him the first consideration – there were, of course, other things to minister to his happiness – most notably his wedded life, and unmistakable, though all too slow recognition by the public of his work… the Hardy of 1881 was a robuster figure than any I ever saw again, robuster and less over-weighted by care. His talk, too, was light and cheerful – mainly about literature.’33

  If he was happy with Emma in Paris, he was still set on moving back into the orbit of Bockhampton. Like a migrating bird or a salmon driven to return to the place of its origin, he seems to have been drawn by an irresistible force. Early in 1882 he wrote to Lord Ilchester’s estate office asking the price of a freehold site on which to build, at Stinsford Hill, between Bockhampton and Dorchester. He had no luck with this request, but he had made up his mind to build himself a house in the district. The builders were there, in the shape of his father and brother, and he was to be his own architect.

  Emma’s family, apart from her brother Walter, was as distant as ever. A letter from Helen at this time shows what Emma had to put up with in the way of condescension, ignorance and insult from her sister. Helen does not mention Hardy. ‘I am glad that you have at last settled in the country I am certain it is best, and you can always go to town,’ she wrote. ‘Have you ever read Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra – We have had it lent us, a most delicious book.’ A postscript reads, ‘One of our servants tells me that one of the books on the drawing room table “Far from the medelling [sic] crowd” is so nice.’34

  In November 1882 Helen wrote to Emma again, this time with the news of the death of her husband. Cadell Holder had been nearly eighty when he died peacefully: ‘I asked him if he was happy and he looked earnestly and said “Yes darling” his last words… Pa is coming on Thursday,’ she wrote to Emma, still without mentioning her husband.35 Hardy regretted the death of Holder and kept a friendly memory of the man who had encouraged his wooing of Emma.

  At the end of the year he decided to take a house in Dorchester, where he would be best placed to look for the building site he wanted. They moved in the summer of 1883. In the eight years of their marriage they had lived in seven different places and made three trips to the Continent. Hardy had worked steadily, producing five novels, but nothing he had written during this time had matched the success of Far from the Madding Crowd. Still, like Dickens and George Eliot, he had established himself by his pen as a solid member of the middle class within a decade of his first book appearing. He had understood the business side of writing, the importance of serialization, and how to deal with the American market, and the Australian, as well as British publishers and magazine editors. Even when one of his books was badly reviewed and sold poorly, the demand for the next remained strong enough for him to turn from one magazine to another, and from one publishing house to another. All this was negotiated by Hardy himself. No one had yet thought of becoming a literary agent, and it is unlikely he would have employed one if they had. He was not yet ready to start on another novel, but he kept going with short stories: ‘The Three Strangers’, a dramatic and sinister tale with a Dorset setting, greatly admired by Robert Louis Stevenson, a sentimental pot-boiler called ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’, specifically for the American market, and a fresh and lively adventur
e story for children, ‘Our Exploits at West Poley’.36

  He was also persuaded to provide an article, ‘The Dorsetshire Farm Labourer’, for Longman’s Magazine, in which he praised Joseph Arch, whom he had heard speak and greatly admired. Arch had been setting up trades unions among agricultural workers and was shortly to go into Parliament as a Liberal. There was widespread anxiety about conditions on the land and the future of farming, and against this background Hardy gave his personal view that things had improved for Dorset farm workers during his lifetime in terms of education and freedom, and that they were less exploited by their employers than they had been. At the same time he warned that rural communities were breaking down, as villagers left to live in towns, many moved from job to job, and the loss of ‘long local participancy’ left them without any comforting sense of belonging to a particular place and group. He was then asked to write another article about labourers and the vote but declined on the grounds that it was ‘a purely political subject’. Liberal by family tradition and personal conviction, he now decided not to take a public stance on politics, saying that a writer was more effective if he appeared open-minded on strictly political questions.37 In his letter to the commissioning editor, however, he commented privately that the insecurity of labourers’ lives caused them painful anxiety, and he believed that ‘some system by which he could have a personal interest in a particular piece of land’ would be desirable.38 Some of the ideas that helped to shape his later novels, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, in which he shows the insecurity of the lives of the rural poor, were slowly building in his mind.

  14. The Conformers

  In 1883 he and Emma moved into a rented house in Dorchester, and he bought a lease on a building site just outside the town, making it clear that he planned to settle permanently. He was even ready to take up his responsibilities as a prosperous citizen and soon accepted a nomination to sit on the bench as a Justice of the Peace. The place had not grown or changed very much in the twenty years since he left it, although there was a new museum, a new brewery and a few more churches. Strolling players still came to perform in the market field, and the proprietor and leading actor playing Othello, whose voice could be heard as far as the town pump, had to reproach people for laughing in the murder scene. ‘Is this the nineteenth century?’ he asked his ignorant audience, reducing them to silence, although they clapped the placing of the pillow over Desdemona’s face.1 Circuses came to Fordington Field, itinerant girl musicians played in the high street, and old men rang in the new year in the belfry of St Peter’s as they had always done. Hardy began to meditate a novel in which Dorchester itself would figure as prominently as the characters. Within a year he would start searching the files of the Dorset County Chronicle for stories from the 1820s that he might make use of. He became absorbed in the history and fabric of the town, its pattern of streets based on the camp set up by the Romans and now ‘shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden ground by a box-edging’. Viewed from the hills above, it was still small enough to appear ‘clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green table-cloth’. He noticed that most of its citizens left their front doors open so that you could look right through their houses to the flower gardens at the back. The shops were full of agricultural implements, and the people remained rough, humorous and down to earth.

  In August he had the gloomy task of attending on an old friend, Hooper Tolbort, one-time pupil of Horace Moule and William Barnes, who had done so brilliantly in the Indian Civil Service examinations in the 1850s. He was now ill with tuberculosis and back in England, bringing with him a half-written study of ‘The Portuguese in India’ which he asked Hardy to have published, should he prove unable to see it through himself. It was a sad business. Hardy said he would, Tolbort died in August, and on examining the manuscript Hardy found it was unpublishable. He wrote an obituary for the Dorset County Chronicle, and brooded on the waste of hope and promise: ‘Tolbort lived and studied as if everything in the world were so very much worth while. But what a bright mind has gone out at one-and-forty!’2 Praising his friend’s commitment, intelligence and enthusiasm, he saw that ‘everything in the world’, far from being worth while for him, had been rendered useless by his early death.

  His own planned progress continued smoothly. In June he had signed a lease with the Duchy of Cornwall for a plot of land of an acre and a half on which to build, committing himself to spending at least £1,000 on the house (and in 1886 he paid £450 for the freehold).3 A visit to the house and walled garden today, with encircling main roads, traffic, suburban housing and thickets of trees, gives almost no impression at all of how it was then, a bare plot with open land and wide views all around, a mile outside Dorchester in a still unenclosed part of Fordington Field, ‘with rolling, massive downs, crowned with little tree coronets before and behind’.4 He had made time to draw up his own plans, and his father and brother were to be the builders, although old Mr Hardy’s participation cannot have been great, given his age and poor health; but Bockhampton was near enough for him to drive over to give his advice. Work started on the site almost at once, and at the end of the year Hardy himself planted an infant forest around the site, mostly beech trees and Austrian pines, to provide shelter from the wind as they grew. He had never planted trees before, as far as we know, but either he knew instinctively how to set about it or he sought expert advice. Two years later, when he described Giles Winterborne and Marty South at work in The Woodlanders, he was able to draw on his own experience:

  Winterborne’s fingers were endowed with a gentle conjuror’s touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the delicate fibres all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth…

  ‘How they sigh directly we put ’em upright, though while they are lying down they don’t sigh at all,’ said Marty.

  ‘Do they?’ said Giles. ‘I’ve never noticed it.’

  She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled – probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves.

  ‘It seems to me,’ the girl continued, ‘as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest – just as we be.’

  Giles plants skilfully, but it is only Marty who notices the sighing of the newly set trees. Hardy must have heard it when he planted his. He became their protector and would never have them lopped back or cut down, even when they grew into dense thickets. He spoke of ‘wounding’ them, and refused to curtail the ‘soft musical breathing’ he had initiated and given to Marty to appreciate.5 His trees were silenced only after his death, when his widow had most of them cut down.

  During the preliminary work of digging a well, three feet below the surface, three skeletons were found in separate graves, cut into the solid chalk, each an oval about four feet long and two and a half feet wide. The bodies had been laid on their right sides, with their knees drawn up to their chests and their arms extended so that their hands rested on their ankles. ‘Each body was fitted with… perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other,’ wrote Hardy, as tightly fitted as chicks inside the egg shell.6 Two had metal circlets with clasps fixed around their heads, and one was a woman, from whom Hardy himself removed ‘a little bronze-gilt fibula that had fastened the fillet across her brow’ with his own hands.7 All were buried with urns of a design that suggested Roman work of the third or fourth century. Near them was a deeper hole with the horn, teeth and bones of a bull. Hardy assumed that this was an out-of-town, single-household resting place. Later the workmen making the drive to the house found they had decapitated five more skeletons. The link with the ancient past interested him, but he did not tell Emma about the skeletons at the time, thinking she might be frightened, and it occurred to him that they mig
ht be an evil omen.8

  The site was on the Wareham road, near a disused toll gate whose last keeper had been Henry Mack, and the place was known as ‘Mack’s Gate’. Hardy changed it to Max Gate, a name that has always seemed unsuitable, with a suggestion of sophistication and urbanity. Even he had doubts about it and once jokingly made it ‘Porta Maxima’ in a letter to Gosse. Bockhampton has the ring of an ancient English place name; ‘Max Gate’ has nothing of what Hardy described as ‘the quaintnesses of a primitive rustic life’.9 But so he named it. Within months of moving into the finished house he was doubtful that it had been right to build it at all: ‘Whether building this house at Max Gate was a wise expenditure of energy is one doubt, which, if resolved in the negative, is depressing enough. And there are others,’ he wrote in his notebook.10

  In September 1883 Oscar Wilde, who was raising money by lecturing before he got married, spoke in the Town Hall in Dorchester on one of his standard subjects, ‘The House Beautiful’. He led his audiences round an imaginary house, telling them what was good and what to avoid, for example no wallpaper in the entrance hall but wainscoting, and tiles rather than carpet. Only secondary colours on walls and ceilings. Windows must be small to avoid glare. No gas chandeliers but sidelights instead. Furniture should be Queen Anne, and stoves should be Dutch porcelain. He then turned his attention to the people in the house and advised the women to give up corsets and wear simple Grecian drapery, and the men to return to knee breeches.11 As long as you could afford Queen Anne furniture and had the figure for simple Grecian drapery, there was nothing outrageous about his advice. He had given the talk with great success all over America, and he went on from Dorchester to Bournemouth and Exeter with it. Hardy was invited to meet the lecturer after the talk, but no local reporter was taking notes, and it may be these two remarkable men failed to exchange any words. Later Hardy gave his opinion that Wilde’s wit relied on a formula by which he took a well-known saying and distorted it to make it shocking, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today’ becoming ‘Always put off till tomorrow what you can do today’. This was clever of Hardy but not quite fair – Wilde is funnier than that.12 And, as far as the House Beautiful went, he does not appear to have considered any Wildean adjustments to his arrangements for Max Gate, where the hall floor was of polished wood, some windows were made small and others large, and where there were never any gas chandeliers for the good reason that there was no gas supply. ‘I never have cared for possessions,’ he once said. ‘What is in this house has come together by chance. The things I have bought, I bought as I needed them, and for the use I needed them for.’13