One society hostess became a real friend. In 1886 he met Mrs Jeune, five years younger than him, nice-looking, very rich in her own right and given to good works as well as to hospitality. She came from the Highland aristocracy and was related to the Duke of Wellington, and royalty had been present at her wedding to her first husband, a son of Lord Stanley of Alderley, who died young, leaving her with two infant daughters. Her second husband was Francis Jeune, son of a bishop, himself a lawyer and Conservative MP who became a judge, was knighted and finally accorded a peerage. They lived at the very heart of the Establishment.33 During the Season she ran almost non-stop lunches, dinners and crushes in her Wimpole Street house, moving in 1891 to Harley Street. Edith Wharton described her as ‘a born “entertainer” according to the traditional London idea, which regarded… the act of fighting one’s way through a struggling crowd of celebrities as the finest expression of social intercourse… She took a frank and indefatigable interest in celebrities, and was determined to have them all at her house.’34 Wharton nevertheless found her charming, became her close friend and loved staying with her. So did Hardy, who called her ‘the irrepressible Mrs Jeune’, but found that for him she would make time to sit quietly. She encouraged him to talk about his writing, which she admired, as she admired his modesty, and they came to know one another very well. He was there so often that Lord Rowton, who built lodging houses for the homeless, jocularly described him as Mrs Jeune’s dosser.35 He was captivated by her warmth and also by her small daughters. They filled a need for him, as he did for them, since they had no memory of their father, and by now he must have given up any hope of having children of his own. He stayed often enough in Wimpole Street to become ‘Uncle Tom’ to Madeleine and Dorothy, romping up and down the stairs with them and, as they grew older, taking them to the theatre. Long after she was grown up, married to a Conservative politician and a mother herself, he went on writing to ‘My dear little Dorothy’, and she went on calling him ‘Uncle’ for the rest of her life. They not only gave him their affection, they showed him what family happiness could be. There was always a bedroom for him at the Jeunes’ if he was in town on his own. Emma was also invited, although she rarely stayed with them. A surprising family connection was made when her uncle Archdeacon Gifford married Francis Jeune’s sister. It was a pity that Madeleine and Dorothy disliked Aunt Emma as much as they liked Uncle Tom, but they were too well brought up not to do their best to hide what they felt.36
Another who nudged Hardy slowly into friendship was his fellow Savilian, Edmund Gosse. Gosse was the man who had appointed himself the fixer of the London literary world. He was nine years younger than Hardy and had grown up in a modest household in Devon with a scholarly father whose interest in science existed alongside a rigid religious faith which rejected Darwin’s account of evolution. The younger Gosse was as clever as his father and soon they were in intellectual conflict. There was no money for university, and at seventeen he was given a probationary job at the British Museum, where he found the work ‘tedious slavery’ but stuck at it. His ambition was to become a poet, and he had an easy way of making friends with the younger lights of the world he aspired to enter; soon he was close to Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti and Swinburne. He began to review books. He was a fine linguist, took a holiday in Norway, discovered Ibsen’s work and introduced it to the English, to great effect. He married in the same year as Hardy, and his new brother-in-law, the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, lent him a house close to Regent’s Park in which to begin his married life, which was a cheerful one and blessed with children. At the same time he was offered a well-paid sinecure as permanent translator to the Board of Trade. He had earned his luck, but it was astoundingly good luck, and from now on Gosse published his own indifferent poetry and a great many quickly forgotten studies of writers. He entertained energetically at home and in clubs, flattered his friends and proposed them for honours, became librarian to the House of Lords and dedicated himself to living the literary life more seriously than anyone else has ever done. There was something absurd about him, but he was not all absurd, because in his fifties he produced a masterpiece, one of the most powerful autobiographical books ever written, an account of his childhood, Father and Son.
Gosse’s eagerness to be Hardy’s friend came out of a sincere admiration for his work, and he persevered so successfully that in June 1883, having known him for several years and visited him during his illness in Tooting, he persuaded him to stay with his family for a weekend. Inevitably it culminated in a literary party at the Savile in honour of Howells, the American novelist, editor and friend of Henry James. Hardy found Howells amusing and noted down his stories. Howells found Hardy shy.37 But the friendship was now well launched, and Gosse was rewarded with a reciprocal invitation for a weekend visit to Dorchester in July, as well as a promise that Hardy would take him to meet William Barnes.
Gosse came when the Hardys had just made their move from Wimborne and were installed in Shire Hall Place, the rambling old house in the highest part of the town, where they were to live while the purchase of a building site was negotiated and their own house built. Hardy must have felt satisfaction in returning to Dorchester after so many years away, visibly successful, with a reputation as a writer, a wife and enough money to run a comfortable household and take himself to London or abroad whenever he chose, and the invitation to Gosse shows he felt at ease with his situation. Henry Moule was asked over to meet Gosse, and the three men went out for a stroll round the town together. Gosse was struck by the ‘colour and animation’ of Dorchester on a Saturday evening: ‘it looked in the dusk like a bright foreign town,’ he wrote to his wife, who had stayed at home with their children.38 The liveliness of the streets came from farmers and labourers in town to do their shopping at the Saturday fair, and the brilliantly uniformed infantry and cavalry soldiers from the barracks.39 On Sunday, Hardy escorted Gosse to hear the 82-year-old Barnes preach with undiminished energy to his flock at Winterborne Came, and accepted his invitation to take high tea with him afterwards.
Gosse’s letter to his wife Nellie included a careful comment on Emma: ‘she means to be very kind,’ he wrote. Hardy was too observant not to notice that his friend was sometimes rather at a loss in his attempts at conversation with his wife. To find that Emma’s zest for life, so much prized by him during their wooing, was not so attractive to others, and that her charm fell flat, was upsetting. Of course she was middle aged now. She no longer wore her glorious hair over her shoulders in curls, her strong features were settling into heaviness, and her talk sometimes strayed from the point and followed its own track in a way that had once seemed delightful but now sometimes disconcerting. Feeling unappreciated brings out the worst in everyone, and when people failed to warm to Emma she became more difficult. She had lost her hope of children, hardly saw her own family and was suspicious of his. A letter this year from her friend in Sturminster, Mrs Dashwood, also reminded her of her failed literary ambitions: ‘I hope your stories will emerge one after the other and pleasantly astonish the literary world, they have been concocting in your brain long enough and should now see the light… When will you and Mr Hardy spend a day with us? You have not visited this gay city for a long time, and ought to renew your acquaintance once with it.’40 Emma could say nothing of any publication prospects, alas, and there was no visit to the gay city of Sturminster. Gosse’s friendship with Hardy was strong enough to include Emma, but he never warmed to her in her own right.
The following summer, in August 1884, Hardy made a trip to the Channel Islands with his brother Henry, and without Emma. In October he was in London to dine with the Lord Mayor, and early in 1885 he went to stay with Lord and Lady Portsmouth in their ‘very handsome’ house in Devon, where he was fussed over by the ladies of the family. As well as this he worked at copying stories from local newspaper files of the 1820s and 1830s, using some of his findings in the current book: for instance, three stories about wife-selling and an account of wrestling. Emma
took on a good deal of the copying for him.41 Their tenth wedding anniversary had been reached in September. In the previous year Hardy had written a poem called ‘He Abjures Love’, which he is unlikely to have shown her.42 No wife would be overjoyed to read:
At last I put off love,
For twice ten years
The daysman of my thought,
And hope, and doing…
No more will now rate I
The common rare,
The midnight drizzle dew,
The gray hour golden,
The wind a yearning cry,
The faulty fair,
Things dreamt, of comelier hue
Than things beholden!…
Even if the last lines set it in perspective:
– I speak as one who plumbs
Life’s dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But – after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.
Hardy’s poems are as likely to be dramatic statements of mood as expressions of fixed feeling, and moods are changeable. This terse farewell to love was by no means his last word on the subject, and there was a good deal more of it to come in his life. Another poem printed in the same group is ‘The Conformers’, which is also about the end of romance, this time for a couple, now settling down in ‘a villa chastely gray’. In it they will ‘house, and sleep, and dine… / friends will ask me of your health, / and you about my own’; and, their ‘dreaming done’, they will be remembered as ‘A worthy pair, who helped advance / Sound parish views’.43 For all the scorn in the poem, Hardy had become a JP, Emma was a regular churchgoer – often joined by him – and they were giving up their peripatetic life and building their own villa – plum-red rather than grey but solid enough to qualify as the home of a worthy pair of conformers, as Hardy saw, and was protesting about to himself.
15. The Blighted Star
Hardy was now for the first time in his life a householder and a man with civic responsibilities. His imagination responded by leading him into dark places. The three novels he published during his first decade at Max Gate, from 1885 to 1895, were marked by a fierce questioning of accepted ideas about society and by a gloom that grew deeper from book to book. He sometimes denied that he was a pessimist, and it is true that he kept up his cheerful social life in London, was an assiduous party-goer, took many holidays, indulged in flirtations and wrote several light-hearted stories at the same time as he was working on these novels. More than most writers he knew how to keep an absolute division, a closed and barred door between the polite and quietly spoken person who enjoyed London society and dispensed justice in Dorchester, and the raging, wounded inner self who chastised the values of the world he inhabited. The books are powerful, bleak and sometimes savage in their representation of human experience: the Hardy who moved between his London club, visits to distinguished friends and a home well staffed with servants is not easy to connect with them.
The reception of these books, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, was such that Hardy became a rich man with a world reputation. They also caused scandal, and even the critics who saw they were master works were disturbed by them. What especially worried them was that he seemed to suggest that human beings might be brought down by malignant forces at work in the world, using their power to turn things to evil. Already in The Mayor of Casterbridge he had asserted that Henchard gave up his struggle partly because the odds were fixed against him by ‘that ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum’.1 And when Elizabeth-Jane finds love, marriage and wealth, she still believes that happiness can be only ‘the occasional episode in a general drama of pain’. This thought of hers closes the book. Hardy wanted the reader to remember it.2
He had written enough about Arcadian country life to show that at one time he believed in the possibility of happiness being more than an occasional episode, even something quite substantial. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Fanny Robin dies with her baby, Troy is killed and Boldwood destroyed, but there is light as well as shade, and Bathsheba is allowed to recover and given a second chance with Gabriel Oak. The signs are that they will live a decorous and happy life together. The Woodlanders, which he embarked on in 1885 and wrote entirely at Max Gate, is like a black version of Far from the Madding Crowd. This time the good man dies needlessly, and the bad man wins his woman and keeps her in spite of his blatant infidelities. All the women are humiliated, suffer and end in sorrow. Grace, educated out of her class by her ambitious father, fits nowhere, makes a bad marriage and fails to get the divorce she wants. She brings about the death of one of the men she loves. The rich Felice Charmond is murdered. The village wench, Sukie Damson, is carried off to New Zealand by an angry, cheated husband. Giles Winterborne, a fine, upright, skilled, hard-working man, first loses the girl who had been promised to him and whom he loves, then his family home and much of his livelihood, and finally his life. Of the two women who love him, one is left trapped in a bad marriage, the other in poverty and mourning, stoically endured. Richard Hutton, an editor of the Spectator and usually an admirer of Hardy’s work, reviewed The Woodlanders as a ‘powerful book, and as disagreeable as it is powerful… written with an indifference to the moral effect it conveys… [that] lowers the art of his works quite as much as it lowers the moral tone’.3 Hutton, although he claimed not to be asking for poetic justice, in fact disapproved of Hardy making things too easy for the badly behaved Fitzpiers and unleashing punishment on the blameless Winterborne. He saw Hardy as setting out to shock and depress, and skewing the plot accordingly, and this worried him quite as much as the sexual misbehaviour of the characters.
The criticism has been repeated in a different form by one of Hardy’s most intelligent twentieth-century critics, Irving Howe, who writes:
Because Hardy remained enough of a Christian to believe that purpose courses through the universe but not enough of a Christian to believe that purpose is benevolent or the attribute of a particular Being, he had to make his plots convey the oppressiveness of fatality without positing an agency determining the course of fate… The result was that he often seems to be coercing his plots… and sometimes… he seems to be plotting against his own characters.4
The Woodlanders has been read in many different ways: as a lament for the changes affecting rural life, or as a pastoral elegy, partly comic, and pathetic rather than tragic. This is David Lodge’s reading. He diagnoses its pessimism as evolutionary and suggests that Fitzpiers survives because he is fitter to do so in the modern age than Winterborne, who represents the old order. He supports this view by pointing out that Hardy’s description of the natural world stresses the brutal evolutionary struggle among trees and other plants. Lodge thinks that Hardy, well read in Darwin, accepted the inevitability of the process that destroyed the old-fashioned rural worker, and that it is simple and sentimental to read his novel as tragedy. Hardy himself partly endorsed this when he wrote, in October 1888, ‘If you look beneath the surface of any farce you see a tragedy; and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce.’5 He sounds like a modernist, well aware that his work is open to alternative interpretations. But when he later described it as his favourite among his own books, he took a much simpler stance: ‘I think I like it, as a story, the best of all. Perhaps that is owing to the locality and scenery of the action.’6 And for many readers his descriptions of the woodlands, apple orchards and north Dorset landscape have more substance than most of the characters.
There is pastoral magic in the book: Grace thinks of Giles as a fruit god or a tree god, ‘cider-stained and starred with apple pips’, and he blends into the woodlands, carrying an emblematic apple tree in his arms, taller than himself. Marty’s father believes he will die when the great tree by his house falls, and he is p
roved right. ‘English trees! How that book rustles with them,’ wrote E. M. Forster.7 There is comedy, both light-hearted and dark: Grace finding a slug on her plate at Giles’s party, Fitzpiers caught out when his three women realize they have been sharing him, a man-trap set off by the wrong person. But there is nothing to smile at in the fate of Giles or Marty. Solid and steady, they are the two characters who carry the book on their shoulders and are remembered when the rest of the story fades. To deny that their fate is tragic is to deny them their dignity and truth, and to miss Hardy’s gloomy point about the vulnerability of the poor.8
The next book goes a stage further. Tess of the D’Urbervilles sets out to show the crushing of its innocent heroine by the society in which she lives, its Christian hypocrisy, its double standard, its exploitation of cheap labour, all combining to reduce her to desperation, so that she ends her life as a ritual sacrifice to society’s values. Early in the book Tess tells her brother that they are living on a ‘blighted star’. She is giving her own opinion only, but her subsequent history goes to confirm her view. In the final paragraph Hardy famously invoked the idea of the President of the Immortals sporting with her, taking the phrase from Aeschylus. When he was attacked for it, he explained that ‘the forces opposed to the heroine were allegorized as a personality’, and that this was ‘not unusual in imaginative prose or poetry’.9 To suggest that readers should see that ‘the President of the Immortals’ is meant only to symbolize the forces of society that brought Tess down will not do as a defence. There is something more there, something that makes sport with her sufferings, and making sport with suffering is cruelty.
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