Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1148 page)

Later it was supposed that a dangerous operation would be necessary, till the doctor inquired how long Hardy could lie in bed — could he lie there, if necessary, for months? — in which case there possibly need be no operation.

Now he had already written the early chapters of a story for Harper’s Magaiine — A Laodicean, which was to begin in the (nominally) December number, issued in November. The first part was already printed, and Du Maurier was illustrating it. The story had to go on somehow, it happening, unfortunately, that the number containing it was the first number also of the publication of Harper s as an English and not exclusively American magazine as hitherto, and the success of its launch in London depended largely upon the serial tale. Its writer was, during the first few weeks, in considerable pain, and compelled to lie on an inclined plane with the lower part of his body higher than his head. Yet he felt determined to finish the novel, at whatever stress to himself — so as not to ruin the new venture of the publishers, and also in the interests of his wife, for whom as yet he had made but a poor provision in the event of his own decease. Accordingly from November onwards he began dictating it to her from the awkward position he occupied; and continued to do so — with greater ease as the pain and haemorrhage went off. She worked bravely both at writing and nursing, till at the beginning of the following May a rough draft was finished by one shift and another.

‘November 20. Freiherr von Tauchnitz Junior called.’ This was probably about a Continental edition of The Trumpet-Major. But Hardy was still too ill to see him. The Trumpet-Major, however, duly appeared in the Tauchnitz series.

It is somewhat strange that at the end of November he makes a note of an intention to resume poetry as soon as possible. Having plenty of time to think he also projected as he lay what he calls a ‘Great Modern Drama’ — which seems to have been a considerable advance on his first conception, in June 1875, of a Napoleonic chronicle in ballad form — a sequence of such making a lyrical whole. Yet it does not appear to have been quite the same in detail as that of The Dynasts later on. He also made the following irrelative note of rather vague import:

‘Discover for how many years, and on how many occasions, the organism, Society, has been standing, lying, etc., in varied positions, as if it were a tree or a man hit by vicissitudes.

‘There would be found these periods:

1.Upright, normal or healthy periods.

2.Oblique or cramped periods.

3.Prostrate periods (intellect counterpoised by ignorance or narrowness, producing stagnation).

4.Drooping periods.

5.Inverted periods.’

George Eliot died during the winter in which he lay ill, and this set him thinking about Positivism, on which he remarks:

‘If Comte had introduced Christ among the worthies in his calendar it would have made Positivism tolerable to thousands who, from position, family connection, or early education, now decry what in their heart of hearts they hold to contain the germs of a true system. It would have enabled them to modulate gently into the new religion by deceiving themselves with the sophistry that they still continued one-quarter Christians, or one-eighth, or one-twentieth, as the case might be: This as a matter of policy, without which no religion succeeds in making way.’

Also on literary criticism:

‘Arnold is wrong about provincialism, if he means anything more aet 4o4,a difficult period,47

than a provincialism of style and manner in exposition. A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is of the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.’

Some days later he writes:

‘Romanticism will exist in human nature as long as human nature itself exists. The point is (in imaginative literature) to adopt that form of romanticism which is the mood of the age.’

Also on adversity — no doubt suggested by the distresses he was undergoing:

‘There is mercy in troubles coming in battalions — they neutralise each other. Tell a man in prosperity that he must suffer the amputation of a limb, and it is a horror to him; but tell him this the minute after he has been reduced to beggary and his only son has died: it hurts him but feebly.’

‘January 1881. My third month in bed. Driving snow: fine, and so fast that individual flakes cannot be seen.’ In sheltered places they occasionally stop, and balance themselves in the air like hawks. . . . It creeps into the house, the window-plants being covered as if out-of-doors. Our passage (downstairs) is sole-deep, Em says, and feet leave tracks on it.’

(Same month.) ‘ Style — Consider the Wordsworthian dictum (the more perfectly the natural object is reproduced, the more truly poetic the picture). This reproduction is achieved by seeing into the heart of a thing (as rain, wind, for instance), and is realism, in fact, though through being pursued by means of the imagination it is confounded with invention, which is pursued by the same means. It is, in short, reached by what M. Arnold calls “the imaginative reason “.’

‘January 30. Sunday. Dr. S. called as usual. I can by this time see all round his knowledge of my illness. He showed a lost manner on entering, as if among his many cases he had forgotten all about my case and me, which has to be revived in his mind by looking hard at me, when it all comes back.

‘He told us of having been called in to an accident which, do the best he possibly could, would only end in discredit to him. A lady had fallen down, and so badly broken her wrist that it must always be deformed even after the most careful treatment. But, seeing the result, she would give him a bad name for want of skill in setting it. These cases often occur in a surgeon’s practice, he says.’

‘January 31. Incidents of lying in bed for months. Skin gets fair: corns take their leave: feet and toes grow shapely as those of a Greek statue. Keys get rusty; watch dim, boots mildewed; hat and clothes old-fashioned; umbrella eaten out with rust; children seen through the window are grown taller.’

‘February 7. Carlyle died last Saturday. Both he and George Eliot have vanished into nescience while I have been lying here.’

‘February 17. Conservatism is not estimable in itself, nor is Change, or Radicalism. To conserve the existing good, to supplant the existing bad by good, is to act on a true political principle, w’\icb is neither Conservative nor Radical.’

‘February 21. A. G. called. Explained to Em about Aerostation, and how long her wings would have to be if she flew, — how light her weight, etc., and the process generally of turning her into a flying person.’

‘March 22. Maggie Macmillan called. Sat with Em in my room — had tea. She and Em worked, watching the sun set gorgeously. That I should also be able to see it Miss Macmillan conceived the kind idea of reflecting the sun into my face by a looking-glass.’ [The incident was made use of in Jude the Obscure as a plan adopted by Sue when the schoolmaster was ill.]

‘March 27. A Homeric Ballad, in which Napoleon is a sort of Achilles, to be written.’ [This entry, of a kind with earlier ones, is, however, superseded a few days later by the following:] ‘ Mode for a historical Drama. Action mostly automatic; reflex movement, etc. Not the result of what is called motive, though always ostensibly so, even to the actors’ own consciousness. Apply an enlargement of these theories to, say, “The Hundred Days”!’

This note is, apparently, Hardy’s first written idea of a philosophic scheme or framework as the larger feature of The Dynasts, enclosing the historic scenes.

On the 10th of April he went outside the door again for the first time since that October afternoon of the previous year when he returned from Cambridge, driving out with his wife and the doctor. On the 19th occurred the death of Disraeli, whom Hardy had met twice, and found unexpectedly urbane. On Sunday the ist of May he finished A Laodicean in pencil, and on the 3rd went with Mrs. Hardy by appointment to call on Sir Henry Thompson for a consultation.

‘May 9. After infinite trying to reconcile a scientific view of life with the emotional and spiritual, so that they may not be inter- destructive I come to the following:

‘General Principles. Law has produced in man a child who cannot but constantly reproach its parent for doing much and yet n0t all, and constantly say to such parent that it would have been better never to have begun doing than to have overdone so indeci- sively; that is, than to have created so far beyond all apparent first intention (on the emotional side), without mending matters by a second intent and execution, to eliminate the evils of the blunder of overdoing. The emotions have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice that they should have developed in it.

‘If Law itself had consciousness, how the aspect of its creatures would terrify it, fill it with remorse!’

Though he had been out in vehicles it was not till a day early in May, more than six months after he had taken to his bed, that he went forth on foot alone; and it being a warm and sunny morning he walked on Wandsworth Common, where, as he used to tell, standing still he repeated out loud to himself:

See the wretch that long has tost On the thorny bed of pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again:

The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise.

Immediately on Hardy’s recovery the question arose of whereabouts he and his wife should live. The three years’ lease of the house at Upper Tooting had run out on the preceding Lady Day, when Hardy was too ill to change, and he had been obliged to apply for a three months’ extension, which was granted. During the latter part of May they searched in Dorset, having concluded that it would be better to make London a place of sojourn for a few months only in each year, and establish their home in the country, both for reasons of health and for mental inspiration, Hardy finding, or thinking he found, that residence in or near a city tended to force mechanical and ordinary productions from his pen, concerning ordinary society-life and habits.

They found a little house called ‘Llanherne’ in the Avenue, Wimborne, that would at any rate suit them temporarily, and till they could discover a better, or perhaps build one. Hardy makes a note that on June 25 they slept at Llanherne for the first time, and saw the new comet from the conservatory. ‘Our garden’, he says a few days later, ‘ has all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, in full bloom: Canterbury Bells, blue and white, and Sweet Williams of every variety, strawberries and cherries that are ripe, currants and gooseberries that are almost ripe, peaches that are green, and apples that are decidedly immature.’

In July he jots down some notes on fiction, possibly for an article that was never written:

‘The real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction is to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal.

‘This is done all the more perfectly in proportion as the reader is illuded to believe the personages true and real like himself.

‘Solely to this latter end a work of fiction should be a precise transcript of ordinary life: but,

‘The uncommon would be absent and the interest lost. Hence,

‘The writer’s problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the other to give reality.

‘In working out this problem, human nature must never be made abnormal, which is introducing incredibility. The uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters; and the writer’s art lies in shaping that uncommonness while disguising its unlikelihood, if it be unlikely.’

On August 23rd Hardy and his wife left Wimborne for Scotland. Arriving at Edinburgh on the 24th, they discovered to their dismay that Queen Victoria was to review the Volunteers in that city on the very next day, and that they could get no lodging anywhere. They took train to Roslin and put up at the Royal Hotel there. At sight of the crowds in the city Hardy had made the entry: ‘ There are, then, some Scotch people who stay at home ‘.

The next day or two, though wet, they spent in viewing Roslin Castle and Chapel, and Hawthornden, the old man who showed them the castle saying that he remembered Sir Walter Scott. Returning to Edinburgh, now calm and normal, they stayed there a few days, and at the beginning of September went on to Stirling, where they were laid up with colds. They started again for Callander and the Tros- sadhs, where Hardy made a sketch of Ben Venue, and followed the usual route across Loch Katrine, by coach to Inversnaid, down Loch Lomond, and so on to Glasgow. On their way back they visited Windermere and Chester, returning through London to Wimborne.

During some sunny days in September Hardy corrected A Laodicean for the issue in volumes, sitting under the vine on their stable-wall, ‘which for want of training hangs in long arms over my head nearly to the ground. The sun tries to shine through the great leaves, making a green light on the paper, the tendrils twisting in every direction, in gymnastic endeavours to find something to lay hold of.’

Though they had expected to feel lonely in Wimborne after London, they were visited by many casual friends, were called in to Shakespeare readings, then much in vogue, and had a genial neighbour in the county-court judge, Tindal-Atkinson, one of the last of the Serjeants-at Law, who took care they should not mope if dinners and his and his daughter’s music could prevent it. They kept in touch with London, however, and were there in the following December, where they met various friends, and Hardy did some business in arranging for the publication in the Atlantic Monthly of a novel that he was about to begin writing, called off-hand by the title of Two on a Tower, a title he afterwards disliked, though it was much imitated. An amusing experience of formality occurred to him in connection with this novel. It was necessary that he should examine an observatory, the story moving in an astronomical medium, and he applied to the Astronomer Royal for permission to see Greenwich. He was requested to state before it could be granted if his application was made for astronomical and scientific reasons or not. He therefore drew up a scientific letter, the gist of which was that he wished to ascertain if it would be possible for him to adapt an old tower, built in a plantation in the West of England for other objects, to the requirements of a telescopic study of the stars by a young man very ardent in that pursuit (this being the imagined situation in the proposed novel). An order to view Greenwich Observatory was promptly sent.