Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1142 page)

In this same month of 1875, it may be interesting to note, occurs the first mention in Hardy’s memoranda of the idea of an epic on the war with Napoleon — carried out so many years later in The Dynasts. This earliest note runs as follows:

‘Mem: A Ballad of the Hundred Days. Then another of Moscow. Others of earlier campaigns — forming altogether an Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815.’

That Hardy, however, was endeavouring to live practically at this time, as well as imaginatively, is shown by an entry immediately following:

‘House at Childe-Okeford, Dorset. To be sold by auction June 10’; and by his starting on the 22nd for a day or two in Dorsetshire house-hunting, first visiting Shaftesbury, where he found a cottage for £25 a year, that did not, however, suit; thence to Blandford, and thence to Wimborne, where on arrival he entered the Minster at ten at night, having seen a light within, and sat in a stall listening to the organist practising, while the rays from the musician’s solitary candle streamed across the arcades. This incident seems to have inclined him to Wimborne; but he did not go there yet.

In July the couple went to Bournemouth, and thence by steamer to Swanage, where they found lodgings at the house of an invalided captain of smacks and ketches; and Hardy, suspending his househunting, settled down there for the autumn and winter to finish The Hand of Ethelberta.

While completing it he published in the Gentleman’s Magazine a ballad he had written nine or ten years earlier during his time with Blomfield, called ‘The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s’ (and in some editions ‘The Bride-night Fire’) — which, as with his other verses, he had been unable to get into print at the date of its composition by the rather perfunctory efforts he made.

‘Nov. 28. I sit under a tree, and feel alone: I think of certain insects around me as magnified by the microscope: creatures like elephants, flying dragons, etc. And I feel I am by no means alone.

‘29. He has read well who has learnt that there is more to read outside books than in them.’

Their landlord, the ‘captain’, used to tell them, as sailors will, strange stories of his sea-farings; mostly smuggling stories — one of them Hardy always remembered because of its odd development. The narrator was in a fishing-boat going to meet a French lugger half-Channel-over, to receive spirit-tubs and land them. He and his mates were some nine miles off Portland, which was the limit allowed, when they were sighted by the revenue-cutter. Seeing the cutter coming up, they said ‘ We must act as if we were fishing for mackerel’. But they had no bait, and the ruse would be discovered. They snapped up the stems of their tobacco-pipes, and unfastening the hook from a line they had with them slipped on the bits of tobacco- pipe above the shank. The officers came — saw them fishing, and merely observing that they were a long way from shore, and dubiously asking why, and being innocently told because the fish were there, left them. Then, as if the bait had been genuine, to their surprise, on pulling up the sham line they began to haul in mackerel. The fish had made their deception truth.

Masters also told them that when persons are drowned in a high sea in the West (or Deadman’s) Bay, ‘ the sea undresses them’ — mauling off their clothes and leaving them naked.

While here at Swanage they walked daily on the cliffs and shore, Hardy noting thereon:

‘Evening. Just after sunset. Sitting with E. on a stone under the wall before the Refreshment Cottage. The sounds are two, and only two. On the left Durlstone Head roaring high and low, like a giant asleep. On the right a thrush. Above the bird hangs the new moon, and a steady planet.’

In the same winter of 1875 an article appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes on Far from the Madding Crowd entitled ‘ Le roman pastoral en Angleterre’.

Ethelberta was finished in the January of the next year (1876) and the MS. dispatched. Pending the appearance of the story in volumes the twain removed in March to lodgings at Yeovil to facilitate their search for a little dwelling. Here they were living when the novel was published. It was received in a friendly spirit and even with admiration in some quarters — more, indeed, than Hardy had expected — one experienced critic going so far as to write that it was the finest ideal comedy since the days of Shakespeare. ‘Show me the lady in the flesh’, he said in a letter to the author, ‘and I vow on my honour as a bachelor to become a humble addition to her devoted train.’ It did not, however, win the cordiality that had greeted its two forerunners, the chief objection seeming to be that it was ‘impossible’. It was, in fact, thirty years too soon for a Comedy of Society of that kind — just as The Poor Man and the Lady had been too soon for a socialist story, and as other of his writings — in prose and verse — were too soon for their date. The most impossible situation in it was said to be that of the heroine sitting at table at a dinner-party of ‘the best people’, at which her father was present by the sideboard as butler. Yet a similar situation has been applauded in a play in recent years by Mr. Bernard Shaw, without any sense of improbability.

This ended Hardy’s connection with Leslie Stephen as editor, though not as friend; and in the course of a letter expressing a hope that it might be renewed, Stephen wrote (May 16, 1876):

‘My remark about modern lectures [?] was of course “wrote sarcastic”, as Artemus Ward says, and intended for a passing dig in the ribs of some modern critics, who think that they can lay down laws in art like the Pope in religion; e.g. the whole Rossetti-Swinburne school1 think as a critic, that the less authors read of criticism the better. You, e.g., have a perfectly fresh and original vein, and I think the less you bother yourself about critical canons the less chance there is of your becoming self-conscious and cramped. . . . Ste. Beuve, and Mat Arnold (in a smaller way), are the only modern critics who seem to me worth reading. . . . We are generally a poor lot, horribly afraid of not being in the fashion, and disposed to give ourselves airs on very small grounds.’

1 May. In an orchard at Closeworth. Cowslips under trees. A light proceeds from them, as from Chinese lanterns or glow-worms.’

CHAPTER VIII

HOLLAND, THE RHINE, AND STURMINSTER NEWTON

1876-1878: Aet. 36-37

From their lodgings in Yeovil they set out at the end of May for Holland and the Rhine — the first thing that struck them being that ‘the Dutch seemed like police perpetually keeping back an unruly crowd composed of waves’. They visited Rotterdam — ‘looking over-clean and new, with not enough shadow, and with houses nearly all out of the perpendicular’; then The Hague, Scheveningen, Emmerich, and Cologne, where Hardy was disappointed by the machine- made Gothic of the Cathedral, and whence in a few days they went on ‘between the banks that bear the vine’, to Bonn, Coblentz, Ehrenbreitstein, and Mainz, where they were impressed by a huge confirmation in the cathedral which, by the way, was accompanied by a tune like that of Keble’s Evening Hymn. Heidelberg they loved, and looking west one evening from the top of the tower on the Konigsstuhl, Hardy remarks on a singular optical effect that was almost tragic. Owing to mist the wide landscape itself was not visible, but’ the Rhine glared like a riband of blood, as if it serpentined through the atmosphere above the earth’s surface’. Thence they went to Carlsruhe, where they attended a fair, and searched for a German lady Hardy had known in England, but were unable to find her. Baden and the Black Forest followed, and next they proceeded to Strassburg, and then they turned back, travelling by way of Metz to Brussels. Here Hardy — maybe with his mind on The Dynasts — explored the field of Waterloo, and a day or two later spent some time in investigating the problem of the actual scene of the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, with no result that satisfied him, writing a letter while here to some London paper to that effect — a letter which has not been traced.

A short stay in Brussels was followed by their homeward course through Antwerp, where they halted awhile; and Harwich, having a miserable passage on a windy night in a small steamer with cattle on board.

In London they were much astonished and amused to see in large letters on the newspaper-posters that there had been riots at Antwerp; and they recalled that they had noticed a brass band parading the streets with about a dozen workmen walking quietly behind.

June (1876). Arriving at Yeovil again after another Waterloo- day visit to Chelsea by Hardy (where, in the private parlour of’The Turk’s Head’ over glasses of grog, the battle was fought yet again by the dwindling number of pensioners who had taken part in it), his first consideration was the resumed question of a cottage, having ere this received hints from relatives that he and his wife ‘appeared to be wandering about like two tramps’; and also growing incommoded by an accumulation of luggage in packing-cases, mostly books, for of other furniture they had as yet not a stick; till they went out one day to an auction and bought a door-scraper and a book-case, with which two articles they laid the foundation of household goods and effects.

‘June 25. The irritating necessity of conforming to rules which in themselves have no virtue.’

‘June 26. If it be possible to compress into a sentence all that a man learns between 20 and 40, it is that all things merge in one another — good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics, the year into the ages, the world into the universe. With this in view the evolution of species seems but a minute and obvious process in the same movement.’

A pretty cottage overlooking the Dorset Stour — called ‘ Riverside Villa’ — offered itself at Sturminster Newton, and this they took at midsummer, hastily furnished it in part by going to Bristol and buying £100 worth of mid-Victorian furniture in two hours; entering on July 3. It was their first house and, though small, probably that in which they spent their happiest days. Several poems commemorate their term there of nearly two years. A memorandum dated just after their entry runs as follows:

‘Rowed on the Stour in the evening, the sun setting up the river. Just afterwards a faint exhalation visible on surface of water as we stirred it with the oars. A fishy smell from the numerous eels and other fish beneath. Mowers salute us. Rowed among the water- lilies to gather them. Their long ropy stems.

‘Passing the island drove out a flock of swallows from the bushes and sedge, which had gone there to roost. Gathered meadow-sweet.

Rowed with difficulty through the weeds, the rushes on the border standing like palisades against the bright sky. ... A cloud in the sky like a huge quill-pen.’

Another entry at this time:

‘A story has been told me of a doctor at Maiden Newton, who attended a woman who could not pay him. He said he would take the dead baby in payment. He had it, and it was kept on his mantelpiece in a large glass jar in spirits, which stained the body brown. The doctor, who was a young man, afterwards married and used his wife badly, insisting on keeping the other woman’s dead baby on his mantelpiece.’

Another:

‘Mr. Warry says that a farmer who was tenant of a friend of his, used to take the heart of every calf that died, and, sticking it full of black thorns, hang it on the cotterel, or cross-bar, of his chimney: this was done to prevent the spread of the disease that had killed the calf. When the next tenant came the chimney smoked very much, and examining it, they found it choked with hearts treated in the manner described — by that time dry and parched.’

Another:

‘“Toad Fair.” An old man, a wizard, used to bring toads’ legs in little bags to Bagber Bridge [close to where Hardy was living], where he was met by crowds of people who came in vehicles and on foot, and bought them as charms to cure scrofula by wearing them round the neck. These legs were supposed to twitch occasionally in the bag, and probably did, when it gave the wearer’s blood a “ turn “, and changed the course of the disease.’

‘There are two sorts of church people; those who go, and those who don’t go: there is only one sort of chapel-people; those who go-’

‘“All is vanity”, saith the Preacher. But if all were only vanity, who would mind? Alas, it is too often worse than vanity; agony, darkness, death also.’

‘A man would never laugh were he not to forget his situation, or were he not one who never has learnt it. After risibility from comedy, how often does the thoughtful mind reproach itself for forgetting the truth? Laughter always means blindness — either from defect, choice, or accident.’

During a visit to London in December Hardy attended a Conference on the Eastern Question at St. James’s Hall, and heard speak Mr. Gladstone, Lord Shaftesbury, Hon. E. Ashley, Anthony Trollope,

and the Duke of Westminster. ‘Trollope outran the five or seven minutes allowed for each speech, and the Duke, who was chairman, after various soundings of the bell, and other hints that he must stop, tugged at Trollope’s coat-tails in desperation. Trollope turned round, exclaimed parenthetically, “Please leave my coat alone,” and went on speaking.’

They spent Christmas with Hardy’s father and mother; and while there his father told them that when he was a boy the hobby-horse was still a Christmas amusement. On one occasion the village band of West Stafford was at Mr. Floyer’s (the landowner’s) at a party, where among other entertainments was that of the said hobby-horse. One of the servants was terrified death-white at the sight of it running about, and rushed into an adjoining dark room where the band’s violoncello was lying, entering with such force as to knock off the neck of the instrument.

A Pair of Blue Eyes was much to the taste of French readers, and was favourably criticized in the Revue des Deux Mondes early the next year (1877). It appears to have been also a romance that Hardy himself did not wish to let die, for we find him writing to Mr. George Smith in the following April:

‘There are circumstances in connection with A Pair of Blue Eyes which make me anxious to favour it, even at the expense of profit, if I can possibly do so. ... I know that you do sometimes, not to say frequently, take an interest in producing a book quite apart from commercial views as a publisher, and I should like to gain such interest for this one of mine. ... I can get a photograph of the picturesque Cornish coast, the scene of the story, from which a drawing could be made for the frontispiece.’