Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1132 page)

On his way to Adelphi Terrace he used to take some short cut near Seven Dials, passing daily the liquor saloons of Alec Keene and Tom King (?) in West Street (now demolished), and Nat Langham at the top of St. Martin’s Lane, when he could sometimes discern the forms of those famous prize-fighters behind their respective bars.

There was no Thames Embankment. Temple Bar still stood in its place, and the huge block of buildings known as the Law Courts was not erected. Holborn Hill was still a steep and noisy thoroughfare which almost broke the legs of the slipping horses, and Skinner Street ran close by, with presumably Godwin’s house yet standing in it, at which Shelley first set eyes on Mary. No bridge across Ludgate Hill disfigured St. Paul’s and the whole neighbourhood. The South Kensington Museum was housed in iron sheds nicknamed the ‘Brompton Boilers’, which Hardy used to frequent this year to obtain materials for an Essay he sent in to the Royal Institute of British Architects; it was awarded the prize in the following spring. The Underground Railway was just in its infancy, and omnibus conductors leaving ‘Kilburn Gate’, near which Hardy lived awhile, cried, ‘Any more passengers for London?’ The list of such changes might be infinitely extended.

Charles Kean and his wife were still performing Shakespeare at the Princess’s Theatre, and Buckstone was at the Haymarket in the new play of The American Cousin, in which he played the name-part. At most of the theatres about nine o’clock there was a noise of trampling feet, and the audience whispered, ‘Half-price coming in’. The play paused for a few moments, and when all was quiet went on again.

Balls were constant at Willis’s Rooms, earlier Almack’s, and in 1862 Hardy danced at these rooms, or at Almack’s as he preferred to call the place, realising its historic character. He used to recount that inotp se old days, the pretty Lancers and Caledonians were still footed there to the original charming tunes, which brought out the beauty of the figures as no later tunes did, and every movement was a correct quadrille step and gesture. For those dances had not at that date degenerated to a waltzing step, to be followed by galloping romps to uproarious pieces.

Cremorne and the Argyle he also sought, remembering the jaunty senior-pupil at Hicks’s who had used to haunt those gallant resorts. But he did not dance there much himself, if at all, and the fascinating quadrille-tune has vanished like a ghost, though he went one day to second-hand music shops, and also to the British Museum, and hunted over a lot of such music in a search for it. Allusions to these experiences occur in more than one of his poems, ‘Reminiscences of a Dancing Man’ in particular; and they were largely drawn upon, so he once remarked, in the destroyed novel The Poor Man and the Lady — of which later on.

In a corresponding fit of musical enthusiasm he also bought an old fiddle at this time, with which he practised at his lodgings, with another man there who performed on the piano, pieces from the romantic Italian operas of Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s, the latter being then also an opera house, which places they used to frequent two or three times a week; not, except on rare occasions, in the best parts of the houses, as will be well imagined, but in the half-crown amphitheatre.

The foreign operas in vogue were those of Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Bellini: and thus Hardy became familiar with such singers as Mario (Grisi had just departed), Tietjens, Nilsson, Patti (just come), Giuglini, Parepa, and others of the date. An English Opera Company was also in existence, and Hardy patriotically supported it by going often to operas by Balfe, Wallace, and others. Here he had the painful experience of hearing the gradual breakdown of the once fine voice of William Harrison, who, with Miss Louisa Pyne, had established the company and endeavoured to keep such opera going. Hardy was heard to assert that, as it were in defiance of fate, Harrison would sing night after night his favourite songs, such as ‘Let me like a soldier fall’ in Maritana, and, particularly, ‘When other lips’ in The Bohemian Girl, wherein his complete failure towards the last attempts would move a sensitive listener to tears: he thought Harrison’s courage in struggling on, hoping against hope,

might probably cause him to be remembered longer than his greatest success.

At Blomfield’s Mr. Blomfield (afterwards Sir Arthur) being the son of a late Bishop of London, was considered a right and proper man for supervising the removal of human bodies in cases where railways had obtained a faculty for making cuttings through the city churchyards, so that it should be done decently and in order. A case occurred in which this function on the Bishop’s behalf was considered to be duly carried out. But afterwards Mr. Blomfield came to Hardy and informed him with a look of concern that he had just returned from visiting the site on which all the removed bodies were said by the company to be reinterred; but there appeared to be nothing deposited, the surface of the ground lying quite level as before. Also that there were rumours of mysterious full bags of something that rattled, and cartage to bone-mills. He much feared that he had not exercised a sufficiently sharp supervision, and that the railway company had got over him somehow. ‘I believe these people are all ground up!’ said Blomfield grimly.

Soon there was to occur a similar proceeding on a much larger scale by another company; the carrying of a cutting by the Midland Railway through Old St. Pancras Churchyard, which would necessitate the removal of many hundreds of coffins, and bones in huge quantities. In this business Mr. Blomfield was to represent the Bishop as before. The architect said that now there should be no mistake about his thoroughly carrying out the superintendence. Accordingly, he set a clerk-of-works in the churchyard, who was never to leave during working hours; and as the removals were effected by night, and the clerk-of-works might be lax or late, he deputed Hardy to go on evenings at uncertain hours, to see that the clerk-of-works was performing his duties; while Hardy’s chief himself was to drop in at unexpected moments during the week, presumably to see that neither his assistant nor the clerk-of-works was a defaulter.

The plan succeeded excellently, and throughout the late autumn and early winter (of probably the year 1865 or thereabouts) Hardy attended at the churchyard — each evening between five and six, as well as sometimes at other hours. There after nightfall, within a high hoarding that could not be overlooked, and by the light of flare-lamps, the exhumation went on continuously of the coffins that had been uncovered during the day, new coffins being provided for those that came apart in lifting, and for loose skeletons; and those that held together being carried to the new ground on a board merely; Hardy supervising these mournful processions when present, with what thoughts may be imagined, and Blomfield sometimes meeting him there. In one coffin that fell apart was a skeleton and two skulls. He used to tell that when, after some fifteen years of separation, he met Arthur Blomfield again and their friendship was fully renewed, among the latter’s first words were: ‘ Do you remember how we found the man with two heads at St. Pancras?’

It may conceivably have been some rumour of the possibility of this lamentable upheaval of Old St. Pancras Churchyard by the railway company in the near future which had led Sir Percy, the son of Mary Shelley, to remove the bodies of her parents therefrom to St. Peter’s, Bournemouth, where she had been buried in 1851, and where they now lie beside her, though few people seem to know that such an illustrious group is in the churchyard.

Hardy used to tell some amusing stories of his chief, a genuine humorist like his father the bishop. Among other strange ways in which he and his pupils, including Hardy, used to get on with their architecture was by singing glees and catches at intervals during office hours. Having always been musically inclined and, as has been stated, a fiddler of countless jigs and reels in his boyhood, Hardy could sing at sight with moderate accuracy from notation, though his voice was not strong. Hence Blomfield welcomed him in the office choir, where he himself took the bass, the rest waiting till he had ‘got his low E\ Hardy also, at Blomfield’s request, sang in the church-choir at the opening of the organ at St. Matthias’ Church, Richmond, where Blomfield took a bass part, one of his pupils being organist. But in the office the alto part was the difficulty, and Blomfield would say: ‘If you meet an alto anywhere in the Strand, Hardy, ask him to come in and join us’.

Among other things, the architect related that one day before he (Hardy) came, a Punch-and-Judy show performed outside the office in St. Martin’s Place. Presently the housekeeper, a woman London- bred, came running upstairs exclaiming, ‘Why, Mr. Arthur, I declare there’s a man inside! And I never knew it before!’

On an occasion when a builder had called on business, Hardy being present and some pupils, Blomfield airily said to the builder:

‘Well, Mr. T, what can I do for you? What will you take this morning — sherry or port?’ Though it was only between 10 and 11 Mr. Treflected earnestly and said, ‘ Port, sir, if you please’.

As they naturally had no wine or any other liquor at the offices, Blomfield was comically disconcerted at the worthy builder’s seriousness, but was as good as his word, and the office-boy was secretly dispatched to the Strand to buy a bottle of port, and to the housekeeper to borrow a glass.

Grotesque incidents that seldom happened to other people seemed to happen to Blomfield. One day he and Hardy went together to some slum near Soho to survey the site for a new building. The inspection made their boots muddy, and on the way back Blomfield suggested they should have them cleaned, as two bootblacks had come up pointing significantly. When Hardy and he had placed themselves Blomfield asked the second why he did not proceed with his brushing, like the first. “Cause he’s got no blacking nor brush’, said the first. ‘ What good is he then?’ asked Blomfield. ‘ I’ve cracked my blacking- bottle, and it goes dry; so I pay him a penny a day to spit for me.’

However, matters were graver sometimes. Hardy remembered how one morning he arrived at the Terrace to find Blomfield standing with his back to the fireplace, and with a very anxious face. The architect said slowly without any preface, ‘Hardy, that tower has fallen’. His eyes were fixed on the opposite wall where was the drawing of a new church just then finished. It was a serious matter, especially as some years earlier another well-known architect had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for manslaughter, one of his new erections having fallen and killed some people. Fortunately no one was killed in the present case, and the designer was quite exonerated by having the tower rebuilt stone by stone as it had been before, and so proving the construction to be unimpeachable, for there it has stood ever since without a crack. What had caused the fall was always a mystery.

This used to remind Hardy of another church-tower story. Mr. Hicks, with whom he served his pupillage, once told him that at the beginning of his practice he built a church-tower near Bristol, and on a night just after its erection he dreamt that on approaching it he saw a huge crack in its west wall from the parapet downwards. He was so disturbed that next morning he mounted his horse; it was before railways, and architects often then rode on horseback to the supervision of their buildings; and trotting off to the village the tower rose into his view. There was the crack in its face exactly as he had beheld it in his dream.

Having somewhat settled down with Blomfield, but feeling that architectural drawing in which the actual designing had no great part was monotonous and mechanical; having besides little inclination for pushing his way into influential sets which would help him to start a practice of his own, Hardy’s tastes reverted to the literary pursuits that he had been compelled to abandon in 1861, and had not resumed except to write the Prize Architectural Essay before mentioned. By as early as the end of 1863 he had recommenced to read a great deal, with a growing tendency towards poetry. But he was forced to consider ways and means, and it was suggested to him that he might combine literature with architecture by becoming an art- critic for the press, particularly in the province of architectural art. It is probable that he might easily have carried this out, reviewers with a speciality being then, and possibly now, in demand. His preparations for such a course were, however, quickly abandoned, and by 1865 he had begun to write verses, and by 1866 to send his productions to magazines. That these were rejected by editors, and that he paid such respect to their judgment as scarcely ever to send out a MS. twice, was in one feature fortunate for him, since in years long after he was able to examine those poems of which he kept copies, and by the mere change of a few words or the rewriting of a line or two to make them quite worthy of publication. Such of them as are dated in these years were all written in his lodgings at 16 West- bourne Park Villas. He also began turning the Book of Ecclesiastes into Spenserian stanzas, but finding the original unmatchable abandoned the task.

As another outcome of the same drift of mind, he used to deliver short addresses or talks on poets and poetry to Blomfield’s pupils and assistants on afternoons when there was not much to be done, or at all events when not much was done. There is no tradition of what Blomfield thought of this method of passing office hours instead of making architectural plans.

The only thing he got published at the time was, so far as is known, a trifle in Chambers’s Journab\n 1865 entitled ‘How I built myself a house’, written to amuse the ^pupils of Blomfield. It may have been the acceptance of this jeu d’esprit that turned his mind in the direction of prose; yet he made such notes as the following:

‘April, 1865. The form on the canvas which immortalises the painter is but the last of a series of tentative and abandoned sketches each of which contained some particular feature nearer perfection than any part of the finished product.’

‘Public opinion is of the nature of a woman.’

There is not that regular gradation among womankind that there is among men. You may meet with 999 exactly alike, and then the thousandth — not a little better, but far above them. Practically therefore it is useless for a man to seek after this thousandth to make her his.’