Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1137 page)

‘E. L. Hardy.

‘Max Gate. January 4th, 1911.’1

This transcript from the first Mrs. Hardy’s ‘Recollections’ (of the existence of which he was unaware till after her death) has carried us onward four years further than the date of Thomas Hardy’s arrival in Cornwall on that evening of March 1870. He himself entered in a memorandum-book a few rough notes of his visit, and from these we are able to glean vaguely his impressions of the experience.

It is apparent that he was soon, if not immediately, struck by the nature and appearance of the lady who received him. She was so living, he used to say. Though her features were not regular her complexion at this date was perfect in hue, her figure and movement graceful, and her corn-coloured hair abundant in its coils.

It may be mentioned here that the story A Pair of Blue Eyes (which Hardy himself classes among his Romances and Fantasies — as if to suggest its visionary nature) has been considered to show a picture of his own personality as the architect on this visit. But in addition to Hardy’s own testimony there is proof that this is not the case, he having ever been shy of putting his personal characteristics into his novels. The Adonis depicted was known to be both in appearance and temperament an idealization of a pupil whom Hardy found at Mr. John Hicks’s on his return there temporarily from London; a nephew of that architect, and exactly of the age attributed to Stephen Smith. He is represented as altogether more youthful and sanguine in nature than Hardy, a thoughtful man of twenty-nine, with years of London buffeting and architectural and literary experiences, was at this time. Many of his verses with which readers have since grown familiar in JVessex Poems had already been written. Stephen Smith’s father was a mason in Hardy’s father’s employ, combined with one near Boscastle, while Smith’s ingenious mode of being 1 It will be seen later that she died the year after this was written.

tutored in Latin was based on a story Hardy had from Holder, as that of a man he had known. Its practicability is, however, doubtful, Henry Knight the reviewer, Elfride’s second lover, was really much more like Thomas Hardy as described in his future wife’s diary just given; while th° event of the young man arriving as a town-stranger at a village with which he was quite familiar, and the catastrophe that ensued when his familiarity with it was discovered, was an experience of an uncle of his, of which the dramatic possibilities had long arrested him. His own wooing in the ‘Delectable Duchy’ ran, in fact, without a hitch from beginning to end, and with encouragement from all parties concerned.

But the whole story, except as to the lonely drive across the hills towards the coast, the architectural detail, and a few other external scenes and incidents, is so at variance with any possible facts as to be quite misleading, Hardy’s wilful purpose in his early novels until Far from the Madding Crowd appeared, if not later, having been to mystify the reader as to their locality, origin, and authorship by various interchanges and inventions, probably owing at first to his doubt if he would pursue the craft, and his sense of the shadow that would fall on an architect who had failed as a novelist. He modified the landscape, and called the Rectory a vicarage in early editions, showing a church with the sea visible from it, which was not true of St. Juliot. The character and appearance of Elfride have points in common with those of Mrs. Hardy in quite young womanhood, a few years before Hardy met her (though her eyes would have been described as deep grey, not as blue); moreover, like Elfride, the moment she was on a horse she was part of the animal. But this is all that can be asserted, the plot of the story being one that he had thought of and written down long before he knew her.

What he says about the visit is laconic and hurried, but interesting enough to be given here:

‘March 7. The dreary yet poetical drive over the hills. Arrived at St. Juliot Rectory between 6 and 7. Received by young lady in brown (Miss Gifford, the rector’s sister-in-law). Mr. Holder gout. Saw Mrs. Holder. The meal. Talk. To Mr. Holder’s room. Returned downstairs. Music.

‘March 8. Austere grey view of hills from bedroom window. A funeral. Man tolled the bell (which stood inverted on the ground in the neglected transept) by lifting the clapper and letting it fall against the side. Five bells stood thus in a row (having been taken down from the cracked tower for safety). Staying there drawing jnd measuring all day, with intervals for meals at rectory.

‘March 9. Drove with Mrs. Holder and Miss Gifford to Boscastle, and on to Tintagel and Penpethy slate-quarries, with a view to the church roofing. Mr. Symons accompanied us to the quarries. Mr. Symons did not think himself a native; he was only born there. Now Mrs. Symons was a native; her family had been there 500 years. Talked about Douglas Cook coming home [the first editor of the Saturday Review, whom the Holders had known; buried on the hill above Tintagel]. . . . Music in the evening. The two ladies sang duets, including “The Elfin Call”, “Let us dance on the sands”, etc. . • • Miss Gifford said that a man asked her for “a drop o’ that that isn’t gin, please, Miss”. He meant hollands, which they kept at the Rectory, as he knew.

‘March 10. Went with E. L. G. to Beeny Cliff. She on horseback. ... On the cliff. . . . “The tender grace of a day”, etc. The run down to the edge. The coming home.

‘In the afternoon I walked to Boscastle, Mrs. H. and E. L. G. accompanying me three-quarters of the way: the overshot mill: E. provokingly reading as she walked; evening in garden; music later in evening.

‘March 11. Dawn. Adieu. E. L. G. had struck a light six times in her anxiety to call the servants early enough for me. The journey home. Photo of Bishop of Exeter (for Mrs. Holder). . . .’

The poem entitled ‘At the Word “Farewell”‘ seems to refer either to this or the following visit; and the one called ‘ When I set out for Lyonnesse’ refers certainly to this first visit, it having been his custom to apply the name ‘Lyonnesse’ to the whole of Cornwall. The latter poem, it may be mentioned, was hailed by a distant voice from the West of America as his sweetest lyric, an opinion from which he himself did not dissent.

‘March 12. (Sat.) Went to Weymouth. Mr. Crickmay’s account £6:10: 9.’

On April 5, having resumed lodgings at Weymouth, to proceed, probably, with the detailed drawings for the restoration of St. Juliot Church by the light of the survey and measurements he had made, Hardy received a letter from the Messrs. Macmillan declining to publish Desperate Remedies, the MS. of which they returned, on the ground (it is conjectured) of their disapproval of the incidents. By this time it seemed to have dawned upon him that the Macmillan publishing-house was not in the way of issuing novels of a sensational kind: and accordingly he packed up the MS. again and posted it to the Messrs. Tinsley, a firm to which he was a stranger, but which did publish such novels. Why he did not send it to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, with whom he had now a slight link, and whose reader, George Meredith, had recommended him to write what Hardy understood to be a story of this kind, is inexplicable. Possibly it was from an adventurous feeling that he would like the story to be judged on its own merits by a house which had no knowledge of how it came into existence; possibly from inexperience. Anyhow it was a mistake from which he suffered, for there is no doubt that Meredith would have taken an interest in a book he had, or was supposed to have, instigated; and would have offered some suggestions on how to make a better use of the good material at the back of the book. However, to Tinsley’s it had gone, and on May 6 Tinsley wrote, stating the terms on which he would publish it, if Hardy would complete the remaining three or four chapters of which a pricis only had been sent.

About the second week in May, and possibly as a result of the correspondence, Hardy left Mr. Crickmay (whose church-designing he appears to have airily used as something of a stop-gap when his own literary enterprises hung fire) and on the following Monday, the 16th, he started again for London — sadly, as he said, for he had left his heart in Cornwall.

‘May 18. Royal Academy. No. 118. “Death of Ney”, by Gerome. The presence of Death makes the picture great.

‘No. 985. “Jerusalem”, by the same. The shadows only of the three crucified ones are seen. A fine conception.’

He seems to have passed the days in Town desultorily and dreamily — mostly visiting museums and picture-galleries, and it is not clear what he was waiting for there. In his leisure he seems to have written the ‘Ditty’ in IVessex Poems, inscribed with Miss Gifford’s initials. In May he was reading Comte. Crossing Hyde Park one morning in June he saw the announcement of Dickens’s death. He was welcomed by Mr. Blomfield, to whom he lent help in finishing some drawings. Being acquainted with another well-known Gothic architect, Mr. Raphael Brandon, Hardy assisted him also for a few weeks, though not continuously.

Brandon was a man who interested him much. In collabouration with his brother David he had published, several years before, the Analysis of Gothic Architecture in two quarto volumes, and an extra volume on the Open Timber Roofs of the Middle Ages. Both these works were familiar to Hardy, having been quite text-books for architects’ pupils till latterly, when the absorbing interest given to French Gothic had caused them to be superseded by the works of Norman Shaw, Nesfield, and Viollet-le-Duc. Brandon, however, was convinced that the development of modern English architecture should be based on English Gothic and not on French, as was shown in his well-known design for the Catholic Apostolic Church in Gordon Square; and that his opinion was the true one was proved in the sequel, notwithstanding that the more fashionable architects, including Arthur Blomfield, were heart and soul of the other opinion at this date. It may have been partly on this account, partly because he was a ‘literary architect’ — a person always suspect in the profession in those days, Hardy used to say — that Brandon’s practice had latterly declined, and he had drifted into a backwater, spending much time in strange projects and hopes, one of these being a scheme for unifying railway-fares on the principle of letter-postage. Hardy was in something of a similar backwater himself — so far as there could be similarity in the circumstances of a man of twenty-nine and a man of sixty, and the old-world out-of-the-way corner of Clement’s Inn where Brandon’s offices were situate made his weeks with Brandon still more attractive to him, Knight’s chambers in A Pair of Blue Eyes being drawn from Brandon’s. Whilst the latter attended to his scheme for railway-travel, Hardy attended off and on to Brandon’s architecture, which had fallen behindhand. Sometimes Hardy helped him also in the details of his scheme; though, having proved to himself its utter futility, he felt in an awkward dilemma; whether to show Brandon its futility and offend him, or to go against his own conscience by indulging him in the hobby.

However, the summer was passed in this way, and his friend Horace Moule, the reviewer and leader-writer, being also in London, the time was pleasant enough. Nothing seems to have been done about the novel, of which the MS., representing about seven-eighths of the whole, was apparently still lying at Tinsley’s. He kept up a regular correspondence with ‘the young lady in brown’ who had attracted him at St. Juliot Rectory, and sent books to her, reading himself among other works Shakespeare and general poetry as usual, the Bible, Alison’s Europe, and Mohammed and Mohammedanism by Bosworth Smith, his friend in later years; though it does not appear that he wrote any verses.

‘June 30. What the world is saying, and what the world is thinking: It is the man who bases his action upon what the world is thinking, no matter what it may be saying, who rises to the top.

‘It is not by rushing straight towards fame that men come up with her, but by so adapting the direction of their path to hers that at some point ahead the two must inevitably intersect.’

On July 15 war was declared by France against Prussia — a cause of much excitement to Brandon, who during the early weeks of the struggle would go into the Strand for every edition of the afternoon papers as they came out, and bring them in and read them to Hardy, who grew as excited as he; though probably the younger man did not realise that, should England have become involved in the Continental strife, he might have been among the first to be called upon to serve, outside the regular Army. All he seems to have done was to go to a service at Chelsea Hospital and look at the tattered banners mended with netting, and talk to the old asthmatic and crippled men, many of whom in the hospital at that date had fought at Waterloo, and some in the Peninsula.

On August 6 occurred the Battle of Worth: and on the 8 th, in keeping with a promise given on his previous visit, he severed his temporary connection with Brandon and left for Cornwall.

Here, as he said, he found the ‘young lady in brown’ of the previous winter — at that time thickly muffled from the wind — to have become metamorphosed into a young lady in summer blue, which suited her fair complexion far better; and the visit was a most happy one. His hosts drove him to various picturesque points on the wild and rugged coast near the Rectory, among others to King Arthur’s Castle, Tintagel, which he now saw for the first time; and where, owing to their lingering too long among the ruins, they found themselves locked in, only narrowly escaping being imprisoned there for the night by much signalling with their handkerchiefs to cottagers in the valley. The lingering might have been considered prophetic, seeing that, after it had been smouldering in his mind for between forty and fifty years, he constructed The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall from the legends connected with that romantic spot. Why he did not do it sooner, while she was still living who knew the scene so well, and had frequently painted it, it is impossible to say.

H. M. Moule, who by this date knew of the vague understanding between the pair, sent them from time to time such of the daily and weekly papers as contained his leading articles on the war. Concerning such wars Hardy entered in his notebook: ‘ Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi!’ On the day that the bloody battle of Gravelotte was fought they were reading Tennyson in the grounds 0f the rectory. It was at this time and spot that Hardy was struck (,y the incident of the old horse harrowing the arable field in the valley below, which, when in far later years it was recalled to him by a still bloodier war, he made into the little poem of three verses entitled ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations’“. Several of the pieces — as is obvious — grouped as ‘Poems of 1912-13’the same volume with Satires of Circumstance, and three in Moments of Vision, namely, ‘The Figure in the Scene’, ‘Why did I sketch’, and ‘It never looks like Summer now’, with doubtless many others, are known to be also memories of the present and later sojourns here in this vague romantic land of’Lyonnesse’.