Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1145 page)

‘September 20. Returned and called on G. Smith. Agreed to his terms for publishing The Return of the Native.’

Shortly after he wrote to Messrs. Smith and Elder:

‘I enclose a sketch-map of the supposed scene in which The Return of the Native is laid, copied from the one I used in writing ihe story; and my suggestion is that we place an engraving of it as frontispiece to the first volume. Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels that a map of the scene of action is as a rule quite impracticable. But since the present story affords an opportunity of doing so I am of opinion that it would be a desirable novelty.’ The publishers fell in with the idea and the map was made.

A peculiarity in the local descriptions running through all Hardy’s writings may be instanced here — that he never uses the word ‘Dorset’, never names the county at all (except possibly in an explanatory footnote), but obliterates the names of the six counties, whose area he traverses in his scenes, under the general appellation of ‘ Wessex’ — an old word that became quite popular after the date of Far from the Madding Crowd, where he first introduced it. So far did he carry this idea of the unity of Wessex that he used to say he had grown to forget the crossing of county boundaries within the ancient kingdom — in this respect being quite unlike the poet Barnes, who was ‘Dorset’ emphatically.

Mrs. Hardy used to relate that during this summer, she could not tell exactly when, she looked out of a window at the back of the house, and saw her husband running without a hat down Brodrick Road, and disappearing round a corner into a by-street. Before she had done wondering what could have happened, he returned, and all was explained. While sitting in his writing-room he had heard a street barrel-organ of the kind that used to be called a ‘harmoniflute’, playing somewhere near at hand the very quadrille over which the jaunty young man who had reached the end of his time at Hicks’s had spread such a bewitching halo more than twenty years earlier by describing the glories of dancing round to its beats on the Cre- morne platform or at the Argyle Rooms, and which Hardy had never been able to identify. He had thrown down his pen, and, as she had beheld, flown out and approached the organ-grinder with such speed that the latter, looking frightened, began to shuffle off. Hardy called out, ‘What’s the name of that tune?’ The grinder — a young foreigner, who could not speak English — exclaimed trembling as he stopped, ‘Quad-ree-ya! quad-ree-ya!’ and pointed to the index in front of the instrument. Hardy looked: ‘Quadrille’ was the only word there. He had till then never heard it since his smart senior had whistled it; he never heard it again, and never ascertained its name. It was possibly one of Jullien’s — then gone out of vogue — set off rather by the youthful imagination of Hardy at sixteen than by any virtue in the music itself.

‘October 27. Sunday. To Chelsea Hospital and Ranelagh Gardens: met a palsied pensioner — deaf. He is 88 — was in the Seventh (?) Hussars. He enlisted in 1807 or 1808, served under Sir John Moore in the Peninsula, through the Retreat, and was at Waterloo. It was extraordinary to talk and shake hands with a man who had shared in that terrible winter march to Coruna, and had seen Moore face to face.

‘Afterwards spoke to two or three others. When an incorrigible was drummed out of barracks to the tune of the Rogue’s March — (as my father had told me) — all the facings and the buttons were previously cut from his uniform, and a shilling given him. The fifes and drums accompanied him only just beyond the barrack-gates.

‘In those days if you only turned your eye you were punished. My informant had known men receive 600 lashes — 300 at a time, or 900, if the doctor said it could be borne. After the punishment salt was rubbed on the victim’s back, to harden it. He did not feel the pain of this, his back being numbed by the lashes. The men would hold a bullet between their teeth and chew it during the operation.’

The Return of the Native was published by Messrs. Smith and Elder in November, The Times’ remark upon the book being that the reader found himself taken farther from the madding crowd than ever. Old Mrs. Procter’s amusing criticism in a letter was: ‘ Poor Eustacia. I so fully understood her longing for the Beautiful. I love the Common; but still one may wish for something else. I rejoice that Venn [a character] is happy. A man is never cured when he loves a stupid woman [Thomasin]. Beauty fades, and intelligence and wit grow irritating; but your dear Dulness is always the same.’

‘November 28. Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’

On the last day of the year Hardy’s father wrote, saying that his mother was unwell, and that he had ‘drunk both their healths in gin and rhubarb wine, with hopes that they would live to see many and many a New Year’s day’. He suggested that they should come ere long.

‘1879. January New Year’s thought. A perception of the FAILURE of THINGS to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind.’

The poem ‘A January Night. 1879’ in Moments of Vision relates to an incident of this new year (1879) which occurred here at Tooting, where they seemed to begin to feel that ‘ there had past away a glory from the earth’. And it was in this house that their troubles began. This, however, is anticipating unduly.

‘January 30. 1879. In Steven’s book-shop, Holywell Street. A bustling, vigorous young curate comes in — red-faced and full of life — the warm breath puffing from his mouth in a jet into the frosty air, and religion sitting with an ill grace upon him.

‘“Have you Able to Save?”

‘Shopman addressed does not know, and passes on the inquiry to the master standing behind with his hat on: “Able to Save?”

“‘I don’t know — hoi! (to boy at other end). Got Able to Save? Why the devil can’t you attend!”

‘“What, Sir?”

‘“Able to Save/”

‘Boy’s face a blank. Shopman to curate: “ Get it by to-morrow afternoon, Sir.”

‘“And please get Words of Comfort.”

‘“ Words of Comfort. Yes, Sir.” Exit curate.

‘Master: “Why the h don’t anybody here know what’s in stock?” Business proceeds in a subdued manner.’

‘February i. To Dorchester. Cold. Rain on snow. Henry seen advancing through it, with wagonette and Bob [their father’s horse], to the station entrance. Drove me to Bockhampton through the sleet and rain from the East, which shaved us like a razor. Wind on Fordington Moor cut up my sleeves and round my wrists — even up to my elbows. The light of the lamp at the bottom of the town shone on the reins in Henry’s hands, and showed them glistening with ice. Bob’s behind-part was a mere grey arch; his foreparts invisible.’

‘February 4. To Weymouth and Portland. As to the ruined walls in the low part of Chesil, a woman says the house was washed down in the November gale of 1824. The owner never rebuilt it, but emigrated with his family. She says that in her house one person was drowned (they were all in bed except the fishermen) and next door two people. It was about four in the morning that the wave came.’

‘February 7. Father says that when there was a hanging at Dorchester in his boyhood it was carried out at one o’clock, it being the custom to wait till the mail-coach came in from London in case of a reprieve.

‘He says that at Puddletown Church, at the time of the old west- gallery violin, oboe, and clarionet players, Tom Sherren (one of them) used to copy tunes during the sermon. So did my grandfather at Stinsford Church. Old Squibb the parish-clerk used also to stay up late at night helping my grandfather in his “prick-noting” (as he called it).

‘He says that William, son of Mr. Sthe Rector of W,

became a miller at OMill, and married a German woman whom he met at Puddletown Fair playing her tambourine. When her husband was gone to market she used to call in John Porter, who could play the fiddle, and lived near, and give him some gin, when she would beat the tambourine to his playing. She was a good-natured woman with blue eyes, brown hair, and a round face; rather slovenly.

Her husband was a hot, hasty fellow, though you could hear by his speech that he was a better educated man than ordinary millers.

‘G. R. (who is a humorist) showed me his fowl-house,

which was built of old church-materials bought at Wellspring the builder’s sale. R.’s chickens roost under the gilt-lettered Lord’s Prayer and Creed, and the cock crows and flaps his wings against the Ten Commandments. It reminded me that I had seen these same Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, and Creed, before, forming the sides of the stone-mason’s shed in that same builder’s yard, and that he had remarked casually that they did not prevent the workmen “cussing and damning” the same as ever. It also reminded me of seeing the old font ofChurch, Dorchester, in a garden, used as a flower-vase, the initials of ancient godparents and Churchwardens still legible upon it. A comic business — church restoration.

‘A villager says of the parson, who has been asked to pray for a sick person: “His prayers wouldn’t save a mouse”.’

‘February 12. Sketched the English Channel from Mayne Down.

‘I am told that when Jack Ketch had done whipping by the Town Pump [Dorchester] the prisoners’ coats were thrown over their bleeding backs, and, guarded by the town constables with their long staves, they were conducted back to prison. Close at their heels came J. K., the cats held erect — there was one cat to each man — the lashes were of knotted whipcord.

‘Also that in a village near Yeovil about 100 years ago, there lived a dumb woman, well known to my informant’s mother. One day the woman suddenly spoke and said:

‘“A cold winter, a forward spring, A bloody summer, a dead King” j ‘She then dropped dead. The French Revolution followed immediately after.’

‘February 15. Returned to London.’

‘April 5. Mary writes to tell me that “there is a very queer quire at Steepleton Church. It consists only of a shoemaker who plays the bass-viol, and his mother who sings the air.”‘

‘June 9. To the International Literary Congress at the rooms of the Society of Arts. Met M. de Lesseps. A few days afterwards to the Soiree Musicale at the Hanover Square Club, to meet members of the Literary Congress and the Com^die Frangaise: A large gathering. The whole thing a free-and-easy mix-up. I was a total stranger, and wondered why I was there: many others were total strangers to everybody else; sometimes two or three of these total strangers would fraternize from very despair. A little old Frenchman, however, who bustled about in a skull cap and frilled shirt, seemed to know everybody.’

‘June 21. With E. to Bosworth Smith’s, Harrow (for the weekend). In the aviary he has a raven and a barn owl. One ridiculously small boy was in tails — he must have been a bright boy, but I forgot to ask about him. One of the boys in charity-tails could have eaten him.

‘Bos’s brother Henry the invalid has what I fear to be a churchyard cough [he died not so very long after]. His cough pleases the baby, so he coughs artificially much more than required by his disease, to go on pleasing the baby. Mrs. H. S. implores her husband not to do so; but he does, nevertheless, showing the extraordinary nonchalance about death that so many of his family show.

‘In chapel — which we attended — the little tablets in memory of the boys who have died at school there were a moving sight.

‘Sunday night we went with Bos, to the boys’ dormitories. One boy was unwell, and we talked to him as he lay in bed, his arm thrown over his head. Another boy has his room hung with proof engravings after Landseer. In another room were the two Ks of Clyffe. In another a big boy and a little boy — the little boy being very earnest about birds’ eggs, and the big boy silently affecting a mind above the subject, though covertly interested.’

‘27. From Tooting to Town again. In railway carriage a too statuesque girl; but her features were absolutely perfect. She sat quite still, and her smiles did not extend further than a finger-nail’s breadth from the edge of her mouth. The repose of her face was such that when the train shook her it seemed painful. Her mouth was very small, and her face not unlike that of a nymph. In the train coming home there was a contrasting girl of sly humour — the pupil of her eye being mostly half under the eyelid.’

It was in this year that pourparlers were opened with Leslie Stephen about another story for the Cornhill; and Hardy informed him that he was writing a tale of the reign of George III; on which Stephen remarks in respect of historical novels:

‘I can only tell you what is my own taste, but I rather think that my taste is in this case the common one. I think that a historical character in a novel is almost always a nuisance; but I like to have a bit of history in the background, so to speak; to feel that George III. is just round the corner, though he does not present himself in full front.’

Since coming into contact with Leslie Stephen about 1873, as has been shown, Hardy had been much influenced by his philosophy, and also by his criticism. He quotes the following sentence from Stephen in his note-book under the date of July 1, 1879:

‘The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own, and not to exhibit his learning, or his fine taste, or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors.’ That Hardy adhered pretty closely to this principle when he resumed the writing of poetry can hardly be denied.

‘July 8 or 9. With E. to Mrs. [Alexander] Macmillan’s garden- party at Knapdale, near our house. A great many present. Talked to Mr. White of Harvard University, and Mr. Henry Holt the New York publisher, who said that American spelling and idiom must prevail over the English, as it was sixty millions against thirty. I forgot for the moment to say that it did not follow, the usage set up by a few people of rank, education, and fashion being the deciding factor. Also to John Morley, whom I had not seen since he read my first manuscript. He remembered it, and said in his level uninterested voice: “Well, since we met, you have . . .” etc. etc. Also met a Mrs. H., who pretended to be an admirer of my books, and apparently had never read one. She had with her an American lady, sallow, with black dancing eyes, dangling earrings, yellow costume, and gay laugh.’ It was at this garden-party at Mrs. Macmillan’s that the thunderstorm came on which Hardy made use of in a similar scene in A Laodicean.