‘Lie there, lie there, thou false-hearted man,
Lie there instead o’ me.’”
He could remember how his father, the music-loving builder, would stroll on to the heath alone with the telescope that had belonged to some sea-faring Hardy and “stay peering out into the distance by the half-hour”. He could remember how he had once stood on the heath and put that same brass telescope to his eye and seen a man in white fustian on the gallows at Dorchester. At that moment the figure “dropped downward and the faint note of the town clock struck eight”, and he seemed alone on the heath with the hanged man. But more distinctly than anything else he could remember lying on his back as a small boy and thinking how useless he was and how he did not wish to grow up— “he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew (about half a dozen). Yet... he was in perfect health and happy circumstances.”
So the memories succeed each other, like poems, visualized and complete. It was thus, perhaps, that Hardy’s mind worked when it was most at its ease, flashing its light fitfully and capriciously like a lantern swinging in a hand, now on a rose-bush, now on a tramp frozen in the hedge. He has none of that steady and remorseless purpose that people would attribute to him. It was by chance that he saw things, not by design. He puts the telescope to his eye and there is a man on the gallows. He walks in Dorchester High Street and sees the gipsy girls with their big brass earrings in the light from a silversmith’s shop. At once these sights shape themselves into poems and set themselves to some old tune that has been running in his mind. He stops to muse upon their meaning. He cannot hold firmly on his way. Indeed, he “cared for life only as an emotion and not as a scientific game”; he did not want to grow up and possess things. Hence the doubts and the fluctuations of his career. He might have gone to Cambridge had he chosen, but he did not make the effort. He fumbled about with architecture, pulled down the old churches that he loved and built new ones. Now he was going to devote himself to poetry, now to fiction. One result of this vacillation seems to have been that he lay singularly open to influence. He wrote a satirical novel in the manner of Defoe, and because Meredith advised him to write another with a more complicated plot, he sat down and wrote Desperate Remedies with a plot as complicated as a mediaeval mouse-trap. When The Spectator said that the novel (because there is a rich spinster in it with an illegitimate child) was rightly anonymous, for even a nom-de-plume might “at some future time disgrace the family name, and still more the Christian name, of a repentant and remorseful novelist”, Hardy sat on a stile and wished himself dead. It was in deference to another critic, John Morley, that he wrote Under the Greenwood Tree in the pastoral manner; and it was in reply to the jibes of the journalists, who said that he was a house decorator, that he put aside the first version of The Woodlanders and proved his sophistication by writing The Hand of Ethelberta.
All this deference to authority, which contrasts so queerly with the perfectly uncompromising character of his genius, comes no doubt from some inertness of temper in the descendant of a spent race; but it rose, too, from a fact which Hardy himself noticed, that he came to maturity much later than most men. His gifts lay hidden far longer than is usual. Poems dropped now and again into a drawer. But the desire to write poetry seems to have been fitful and dubious even when he was at the most poetic age. Bread and butter had to be earned, however, and therefore reluctantly and hesitatingly, without the illusions or the hot-headedness of the born novelist he stumbled into a calling for which he had little respect, and for which, if he had magnificent gifts, he had also great disabilities.
For though it was all very well to write novels like Far from the Madding Crowd upon chips of wood or white leaves or even upon flat stones out-of-doors, he was persuaded that a novelist, to be successful, must describe manners and customs. He must live in town. He must frequent dinners, and clubs and crushes. He must keep a note-book. And so, though Hardy could not bear the touch of an arm upon his shoulder, and a note-book in his pocket made him “barren as the Sahara”, he faced the position squarely; rented a house in Upper Tooting, bought a note-book, and dined out nightly. “Certainly,” exclaimed Miss Thackeray, when he consulted her, “a novelist must necessarily like society!”
Society seen from Upper Tooting looked a little queer. He put the brass telescope to his eye and saw the strangest sights. Men and women were being hung even in the gayest streets. He mused upon the passions and sorrows that raged in the breasts of the crowd at the Marble Arch. He lay in bed at Upper Tooting and could not sleep because he lay so close “to a monster who had four heads and eight million eyes”. He sat next Lady Camperdown at dinner “and could not get rid of the feeling that I was close to a great naval engagement”. But he also noted down the correct things. He met Matthew Arnold, who “had a manner of having made up his mind upon everything years ago”, and Henry James, “who has a ponderously warm manner of saying nothing in infinite sentences;” and old Mrs. Proctor, “who swam about through the crowd like a swan”; and Byron’s Ianthe, “ a feeble beldame muffled up in black and furs”; and the Carnarvons and the Salisburys and the Portsmouths — and of all this he took note as a novelist should. Moreover, when the books were finished he did whatever the editors required him to do to make them saleable. Book after book appeared in magazines with passages cut out or with incidents put in to please the British public. For if the whole thing — in this case the whole thing was The Mayor of Casterbridge — was “mere journey work”, did it very much matter what compromise he made? Fiction was a trade like another — off he went to the Crawford-Dilke case, note-book in hand. Yet now and then the note-book would record a state of mind or a thought that was quite unsuitable for fiction. For instance: “... when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment; only fit to behold and say, as another spectre said, ‘Peace be unto you’.” Or again he mused, “people are somnambulists — the material is not the real — only the visible, the real being invisible optically.”
For while with one-half of his mind Hardy noted down what a successful novelist ought to observe, the other half remorselessly saw through these observations and turned them to moonshine. Hardy, of course, might have suppressed the second half; he might have succeeded in writing agreeable cynical novels of London life like any other. But that obstinate conviction that made him for all his efforts an outsider, that faculty for putting the telescope to his eye and seeing strange, grim pictures — if he went to a First-Aid lecture he saw children in the street behind a skeleton, if he went to a French play he saw a cemetery behind the players’ heads — all this fecundity and pressure of the imagination brought about at last not a compromise but a solution. Why run about with note-books observing manners and customs when his mind involuntarily flooded itself with strange imaginations and sung itself scraps of old ballads? Why not simplify, make abstract, give the whole rather than the detail? Again the note-book records certain ideas that would be out of place in a novel. “The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer. The much decried, mad, late-Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art — I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.” But it was a question how far abstract imagination could be expressed in a novel. Would not realities fatally conflict with that observation of manners and customs which Hardy, so simply and so modestly, had accepted as the staple of the novelist’s trade?
The first half of Hardy’s life ends with that note of interrogation. We have reached the year 1891. He has written Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It has appeared in The Graphic. At the editor’s request, Hardy has omitted the christening scene; he has allowed the milkmaids to be wheeled across the lane in a wheelbarrow instead of being carried in
Clare’s arms; and, although one father of daughters still objects that the bloodstain on the ceiling is indecent— “Hardy could never understand why” — the book is a great success. But, we ask ourselves, what is going to happen next?
Leslie Stephen
BY the time that his children were growing up the great days of my father’s life were over. His feats on the river and on the mountains had been won before they were born. Relics of them were to be found lying about the house — the silver cup on the study mantelpiece; the rusty alpenstocks that leant against the bookcase in the corner; and to the end of his days he would speak of great climbers and explorers with a peculiar mixture of admiration and envy. But his own years of activity were over, and my father had to content himself with pottering about the Swiss valleys or taking a stroll across the Cornish moors.
That to potter and to stroll meant more on his lips than on other people’s is becoming obvious now that some of his friends have given their own version of those expeditions. He would start off after breakfast alone, or with one companion. Shortly before dinner he would return. If the walk had been successful, he would have out his great map and commemorate a new short cut in red ink. And he was quite capable, it appears, of striding all day across the moors without speaking more than a word or two to his companion. By that time, too, he had written the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, which is said by some to be his masterpiece; and the Science of Ethics — the book which interested him most; and The Playground of Europe, in which is to be found “The Sunset on Mont Blanc” — in his opinion the best thing he ever wrote.
He still wrote daily and methodically, though never for long at a time. In London he wrote in the large room with three long windows at the top of the house. He wrote lying almost recumbent in a low rocking chair which he tipped to and fro as he wrote, like a cradle, and as he wrote he smoked a short clay pipe, and he scattered books round him in a circle. The thud of a book dropped on the floor could be heard in the room beneath. And often as he mounted the stairs to his study with his firm, regular tread he would burst, not into song, for he was entirely unmusical, but into a strange rhythmical chant, for verse of all kinds, both “utter trash”, as he called it, and the most sublime words of Milton and Wordsworth stuck in his memory, and the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood.
But it was his dexterity with his fingers that delighted his children before they could potter along the lanes at his heels or read his books. He would twist a sheet of paper beneath a pair of scissors and out would drop an elephant, a stag, or a monkey with trunks, horns, and tails delicately and exactly formed. Or, taking a pencil, he would draw beast after beast — an art that he practised almost unconsciously as he read, so that the fly-leaves of his books swarm with owls and donkeys as if to illustrate the “Oh, you ass!” or “Conceited dunce”, that he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin. Such brief comments, in which one may find the germ of the more temperate statements of his essays, recall some of the characteristics of his talk. He could be very silent, as his friends have testified. But his remarks, made suddenly in a low voice between the puffs of his pipe, were extremely effective. Sometimes with one word — but his one word was accompanied by a gesture of the hand — he would dispose of the tissue of exaggerations which his own sobriety seemed to provoke. “There are 40,000,000 unmarried women in London alone!” Lady Ritchie once informed him. “Oh, Annie, Annie!” my father exclaimed in tones of horrified but affectionate rebuke. But Lady Ritchie, as if she enjoyed being rebuked, would pile it up even higher next time she came.
The stories he told to amuse his children of adventures in the Alps — but accidents only happened, he would explain, if you were so foolish as to disobey your guides — or of those long walks, after one of which, from Cambridge to London on a hot day, “I drank, I am sorry to say, rather more than was good for me,” were told very briefly, but with a curious power to impress the scene. The things that he did not say were always there in the background. So, too, though he seldom told anecdotes, and his memory for facts was bad, when he described a person — and he had known many people, both famous and obscure — he would convey exactly what he thought of him in two or three words. And what he thought might be the opposite of what other people thought. He had a way of upsetting established reputations and disregarding conventional values that could be disconcerting, and sometimes perhaps wounding, though no one was more respectful of any feeling that seemed to him genuine. But when, suddenly opening his bright blue eyes, and rousing himself from what had seemed complete abstraction, he gave his opinion, it was difficult to disregard it. It was a habit, especially when deafness made him unaware that this opinion could be heard, that had its inconveniences.
“I am the most easily bored of men,” he wrote, truthfully as usual: and when, as was inevitable in a large family, some visitor threatened to stay not merely for tea but also for dinner, my father would express his anguish at first by twisting and untwisting a certain lock of hair. Then he would burst out, half to himself, half to the powers above, but quite audibly, “Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?” Yet such is the charm of simplicity — and did he not say, also truthfully, that “bores are the salt of the earth”? — that the bores seldom went, or, if they did, forgave him and came again.
Too much, perhaps, has been said of his silence; too much stress has been laid upon his reserve. He loved clear thinking; he hated sentimentality and gush; but this by no means meant that he was cold and unemotional, perpetually critical and condemnatory in daily life. On the contrary, it was his power of feeling strongly and of expressing his feeling with vigour that made him sometimes so alarming as a companion. A lady, for instance, complained of the wet summer that was spoiling her tour in Cornwall. But to my father, though he never called himself a democrat, the rain meant that the corn was being laid; some poor man was being ruined; and the energy with which he expressed his sympathy — not with the lady — left her discomfited. He had something of the same respect for farmers and fishermen that he had for climbers and explorers. So, too, he talked little of patriotism, but during the South African War — and all wars were hateful to him — he lay awake thinking that he heard the guns on the battlefield. Again, neither his reason nor his cold common sense helped to convince him that a child could be late for dinner without having been maimed or killed in an accident. And not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to signing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”, as he put it. The pictures that he would draw of old age and the bankruptcy court, of ruined men of letters who have to support large families in small houses at Wimbledon (he owned a very small house at Wimbledon) might have convinced those who complain of his under-statements that hyperbole was well within his reach had he chosen.
Yet the unreasonable mood was superficial, as the rapidity with which it vanished would prove. The chequebook was shut; Wimbledon and the workhouse were forgotten. Some thought of a humorous kind made him chuckle. Taking his hat and his stick, calling for his dog and his daughter, he would stride off into Kensington Gardens, where he had walked as a little boy, where his brother Fitzjames and he had made beautiful bows to young Queen Victoria and she had swept them a curtsey, and so, round the Serpentine, to Hyde Park Corner, where he had once saluted the great Duke himself; and so home. He was not then in the least “alarming”; he was very simple, very confiding; and his silence, though one might last unbroken from the Round Pond to the Marble Arch was curiously full of meaning, as if he were thinking half aloud, about poetry and philosophy and people he had known.
He himself was the most abstemious of men. He smoked a pipe perpetually, but never a cigar. He wore his clothes until they were too shabby to be tolerable; and he held old-fashioned and rather puritanical views as to the vice of luxury and the sin of idleness. The relati
ons between parents and children to-day have a freedom that would have been impossible with my father. He expected a certain standard of behaviour, even of ceremony, in family life. Yet if freedom means the right to think one’s own thoughts and to follow one’s own pursuits, then no one respected and indeed insisted upon freedom more completely than he did. His sons, with the exception of the Army and Navy, should follow whatever professions they chose; his daughters, though he cared little enough for the higher education of women, should have the same liberty. If at one moment he rebuked a daughter sharply for smoking a cigarette — smoking was not in his opinion a nice habit in the other sex — she had only to ask him if she might become a painter, and he assured her that so long as she took her work seriously he would give her all the help he could. He had no special love for painting; but he kept his word. Freedom of that sort was worth thousands of cigarettes.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 456