Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1147 page)

Hardy said after her death that on such occasions she sat in a fixed attitude, almost as if placed in her seat like an unconscious image of Buddha. Into her eyes and face would come continually an expression from a time fifty or sixty years before, when she was a handsome coquette, a faint tendency to which would show even in old age in the momentary archness of her glance now and then. ‘You would talk to her’, he said, ‘and believe you were talking to a person of the same date as yourself, with recent emotions and impulses: you would see her sideways when crossing the room to show you something, and realise her, with sudden sadness, to be a withered woman whose interests and emotions must be nearly extinct.’

Of the poets she had met she expressed herself to have been un- attracted by Wordsworth’s personality, but to have had a great liking for Leigh Hunt. She remembered that the latter called one day, bringing with him ‘a youth whom nobody noticed much’, and who remained in the background, Hunt casually introducing him as ‘Mr. Keats’.

She would also tell of an experience she and her husband had, shortly after their marriage, when they were living in fashionable lodgings in Southampton Row. They went to see Lamb at Edmonton, and caused him much embarrassment by a hint that she would like to wash her hands, it being a hot day. He seemed bewildered and asked stammeringly if she would mind washing them in the kitchen, which she did.

A little later she wrote to Hardy concerning his short story Fellow- Townsmen, which had lately come out in a periodical:

‘You are cruel. Why not let him come home again and marry his first love? But I see you are right. He should not have deserted her. I smiled about the Tombstone. Sir Francis Chantrey told me that he had prepared fine plans — nothing could be too beautiful and too expensive at first, and the end was generally merely a headstone.’

It was in the same month, and in the company of Mrs. Procter, that Hardy lunched at Tennyson’s at a house Tennyson had temporarily taken in Belgrave Street; Mrs. Tennyson, though an invalid, presiding at the table, at the end of which she reclined, and his friends F. Locker, Countess Russell (Lord John’s widow), Lady Agatha Russell, and others, being present. ‘When I arrived Mrs. Tennyson was lying as if in a coffin, but she got up to welcome me.’ Hardy often said that he was surprised to find such an expression of humour in the Poet-Laureate’s face, the corners of his mouth twitching with that mood when he talked; ‘it was a genial human face, which all his portraits belied’; and it was enhanced by a beard and hair straggling like briars, a shirt with a large loose collar, and old steel spectacles. He was very sociable that day, asking Mrs. Procter absurd riddles, and telling Hardy amusing stories, and about misprints in hi abooks that drove him wild, one in especial of late, where ‘airy does ‘eiad appeared as ‘hairy does’. He said he liked A Pair of Blue Eyes the best of Hardy’s novels. Tennyson also told him that he and his family were compelled to come to London for a month or two every year, though he hated it, because they all ‘got so rusty’ down in the Isle of Wight if they did not come at all. Hardy often regretted that he never again went to see them, though warmly invited that day both by Tennyson and his wife to pay them a visit at Freshwater.

‘March 24. Lunched with Mrs. Procter. She showed me one of her late husband’s love-letters, date 1824. Also a photo of Henry James. She says he has made her an offer of marriage. Can it be so?’ Mrs. Procter was born in 1800.

At this time he writes down, ‘A Hint for Reviewers — adapted from Carlyle:

‘Observe what is true, not what is false; what is to be loved and held fast, and earnestly laid to heart; not what is to be contemned, and derided, and sportfully cast out-of-doors.’

The Hardys’ house at Upper Tooting stood in a rather elevated position, and when the air was clear they could see a long way from the top windows. The following note on London at dawn occurs on May 19, a night on which he could not sleep, partly on account of an eerie feeling which sometimes haunted him, a horror at lying down in close proximity to ‘a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes’:

‘In upper back bedroom at daybreak: just past three. A golden light behind the horizon; within it are the Four Millions. The roofs are damp gray: the streets are still filled with night as with a dark stagnant flood whose surface brims to the tops of the houses. Above the air is light. A fire or two glares within the mass. Behind are the Highgate Hills. On the Crystal Palace hills in the other direction a lamp is still burning up in the daylight. The lamps are also still flickering in the street, and one policeman walks down it as if it were noon.’

Two days later they were sitting in the chairs by Rotten Row and the Park Drive, and the chief thing he noticed against the sun in the west was that ‘a sparrow descends from the tree amid the stream of vehicles, and drinks from the little pool left by the watering- cart’ — the same sunlight causing ‘a glitter from carriage-lamp glasses, from Coachmen’s and footmen’s buttons, from silver carriage handles and harness mountings, from a matron’s bracelet, from four parasols of four young ladies in a landau, their parasol-lYdis touching like four mushrooms growing close together.’•’-

On the 26th, the Derby Day, Hardy went alone to Epsom. On his way he noticed that ‘all the people going to the races have a twinkle in their eye, particularly the old men’. He lunched there with a friend, and together they proceeded, by permission, through Lord Rosebery’s grounds to the Down. They saw and examined the favourite before he emerged — neither one of the twain knowing anything of race-horses or betting — ’ the jockeys in their greatcoats; little ghastly men looking half putrid, standing silent and apathetic while their horses were rubbed down, and saddles adjusted’; till they passed on into the paddock, and the race was run, and the shouts arose, and they ‘were greeted by a breeze of tobacco-smoke and orange-peels’.

During the summer he dined at clubs, etc., meeting again Lord Houghton, Du Maurier, Henry Irving, and Alma-Tadema, among others. Toole, who was at one of these dinners, imitated a number of other actors, Irving included; and though the mimicry was funny and good, ‘ghostliness arose, in my mind at least, when after a few living ones had been mimicked, each succeeding representation turned out to be that of an actor then in his grave. “What did they go dying for, stupids!” said somebody, when Toole’s face suddenly lost its smiling.’

In July he met Lord Houghton again at dinner, and was introduced by him to James Russell Lowell, who was also present. His opinion of Lowell was that as a man he was charming, as a writer one of extraordinary talent, but of no instinctive and creative genius.

In the same month he arranged with Messrs. Smith and Elder for the three-volume publication of The Trumpet-Major, which had been coming out in a periodical, and on the 27th started with Mrs. Hardy for Boulogne, Amiens — ’ the misfortune of the Cathedral is that it does not look half so lofty as it really is’ — and several towns in Normandy, including Etretat, where they put up at the Hotel Blan- quet, and stayed some time, bathing every day — a recreation which cost Hardy dear, for being fond of swimming he was apt to stay too long in the water. Anyhow he blamed these frequent immersions for starting the long illness from which he suffered the following autumn and winter.

From Etretat they went to Havre, and here they had half an hour of whimsical uneasiness. The hotel they chose was on the Quay,

one that had been recommended to Hardy by a stranger on the coach, and was old and gloomy in the extreme when they got inside. Mrs. Hardy fancied that the landlord’s look was sinister; also the landlady’s; and the waiter’s manner seemed queer. Their room was hung with heavy dark velvet, and when the chambermaid came, and they talked to her, she sighed continually and spoke in a foreboding voice; as if she knew what was going to happen to them, and was on their side, but could do nothing. The floor of the bedroom was painted a bloody red, and the wall beside the bed was a little battered, as if struggles had taken place there. When they were left to themselves Hardy suddenly remembered that he had told the friendly stranger with whom he had travelled on the coach from fitretat, and who had recommended the inn, that he carried his money with him in Bank notes to save the trouble of circular notes. He had known it was a thing one never should do; yet he had done it.

They then began to search the room, found a small door behind the curtains of one of their beds, and on opening it there was revealed inside a closet of lumber, which had at its innermost recess another door, leading they did not know whither. With their luggage they barricaded the closet door, so jamming their trunks and portmanteau between the door and the nearest bedstead that it was impossible to open the closet. They lay down and waited, keeping the light burning a long time. Nothing happened, and they slept soundly at last, and awoke to a bright sunny morning.

August 5. They went on to Trouville, to the then fashionable Hotel Bellevue, and thence to Honfleur, a place more to Hardy’s mind, after the fast life of Trouville. On a gloomy gusty afternoon, going up the steep incline through the trees behind the town they came upon a Calvary tottering to its fall; and as it rocked in the wind like a ship’s mast Hardy thought that the crudely painted figure of Christ upon it seemed to writhe and cry in the twilight: ‘ Yes, Yes! I agree that this travesty of me and my doctrines should totter and overturn in this modern world!’ They hastened on from the strange and ghastly scene.

Thence they went to Lisieux and Caen, where they spent some days, returning to London by the way they had come.

Going down to Dorset in September, Hardy was informed of a curious bit of family history; that his mother’s grandfather was a man who worried a good deal about the disposition of his property as he grew old. It was mostly in the form of long leasehold and life- hold houses, and he would call on his lawyer about once a fortnight to make some alteration in his will. The lawyer lived at Bere Regis and her grandfather used to talk the matter over with the man who was accustomed to drive him there and back — a connection of his by marriage. Gradually this man so influenced the testator on each journey, by artfully playing on his nervous perplexities as they drove along, that he got three-quarters of the property, including the houses, bequeathed to himself.

The same month he replied to a letter from J. R. Lowell, then American Minister in London:

‘Dear Mr. Lowell:

‘I have read with great interest the outline of the proposed Copyright treaty that you have communicated to me in your letter of the 16 th.

‘For my own part I should be quite ready to accept some such treaty — with a modification in detail mentioned below — since whatever may be one’s opinion on an author’s abstract right to manufacture his property in any country most convenient to him, the treaty would unquestionably remove the heaviest grievances complained of under the existing law.

‘The modification I mention refers to the three-months term of grace to be allowed to foreign authors who do not choose to print in both countries simultaneously.

‘If I clearly understand the provisions under this head it may happen that in the event of any difficulty about terms between the author and his foreign publishers the author would be bound to give way as the end of the three months approached, or lose all by lapse of copyright. With some provision to meet such a contingency as this the treaty would seem to me satisfactory.’

Accompanying Mrs. Hardy on a day’s shopping in October Hardy makes this remark on the saleswoman at a fashionable dressmaking establishment in Regent Street, from observing her while he sat waiting:

‘She is a woman of somewhat striking appearance, tall, thin, decided; one who knows what life is, and human nature, to plenitude. Hence she acts as by clockwork; she puts each cloak on herself, turns round, makes a remark, puts on the next cloak, and the next, and so on, like an automaton. She knows by heart every mood in which a feminine buyer of cloaks can possibly be, and has a machine- made answer promptly ready for each.’

On the 16th of October he and his wife paid a visit of a week to Cambridge, in spirits that would have been considerably lower if they had known what was to befall them on their return. They received much hospitality, and were shown the usual buildings and other things worth seeing, though Cambridge was not new to Hardy. After the first day or two he felt an indescribable physical weariness, which was really the beginning of the long illness he was to endure; but he kept going.

Attending the 5 o’clock service at King’s Chapel, he comments upon the architect ‘who planned this glorious work of fine intelligence’; also upon Milton’s ‘dim religious light’ beheld here, and the scene presented by the growing darkness as viewed from the stalls where they sat. ‘ The reds and the blues of the windows became of one indistinguishable black, the candles guttered in the most fantastic shapes I ever saw — and while the wicks burnt down these weird shapes changed form; so that you were fascinated into watching them, and wondering what shape those wisps of wax would take next, till they dropped off with a click during a silence. They were stalactites, plumes, laces; or rather they were surplices, — frayed shreds from those of bygone “white-robed scholars”, or from their shrouds — dropping bit by bit in a ghostly decay. Wordsworth’s ghost, too, seemed to haunt the place, lingering and wandering on somewhere alone in the fan-traceried vaulting.’

PART III - ILLNESS, NOVELS, AND ITALY

CHAPTER XI

A DIFFICULT PERIOD; AND A CHANGE

1880-1881: Aet. 40-41

They returned to London on October the 23rd — the very day The Trumpet-Major was published, Hardy feeling by this time very unwell, so unwell that he had to write and postpone an engagement or two, and decline an invitation to Fryston by Lord Houghton. On the Sunday after he was worse, and seeing the name of a surgeon on a brass plate opposite his house, sent for him. The surgeon came at once, and came again on that and the two or three succeeding days; he said that Hardy was bleeding internally. Mrs. Hardy, in her distress, called on their neighbours the Macmillans, to ask their opinion, and they immediately sent their own doctor. He agreed about the bleeding, said the case was serious; and that the patient was not to get up on any account.