Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1149 page)

The year was wound up by Hardy and his wife at a ball at Lady Wimborne’s, Canford Manor, where he met Sir Henry Layard. Lord Wimborne in a conversation about the house complained that it was rendered damp by the miller below penning the water for grinding, and, on Hardy’s suggesting the removal of the mill, his host amused him by saying that was out of the question, because the miller paid him £50 a year in rent. However that might have been, Hardy felt glad the old mill was to remain, having as great a repugnance to pulling down a mill where (to use his own words) they ground food for the body, as to pulling down a church where they ground food for the soul.

Thus ended 1881 — with a much brighter atmosphere for the author and his wife than the opening had shown.

CHAPTER XII

WIMBORNE AND ‘TWO ON A TOWER’

1882-1883: Aet. 41-43

‘January 26. Coleridge says, aim at illusion in audience or readers — i.e., the mental state when dreaming, intermediate between complete delusion (which the French mistakenly aim at) and a clear perception of falsity.’

‘February 4 and 11. Shakespeare readings at ‘s, “The Tempest” being the play chosen. The host was omnivorous of parts — absorbing other people’s besides his own, and was greedily vexed when I read a line of his part by mistake. When I praise his reading he tells me meditatively, “Oh, yes; I’ve given it a deal of study — thrown myself into the life of the character, you know; thought of what my supposed parents were, and my early life “. The firelight shone out as the day diminished, the young girl N.P. crouching on a footstool, the wealthy Mrs. B. impassive and grand in her unintelli- gence, like a Carthaginian statue. . . . The General reads with gingerly caution, telling me privately that he blurted out one of Shakespeare’s improprieties last time before he was aware, and is in fear and trembling lest he may do it again.’

In this month’s entries occurs another note which appears to be related to the philosophic scheme afterwards adopted as a framework for The Dynasts:

‘February 16. Write a history of human automatism, or impulsion — viz., an account of human action in spite of human knowledge, showing how very far conduct lags behind the knowledge that should really guide it.’

A dramatization of Far from the Madding Crowd, prepared by Mr. J. Comyns Carr some months earlier, was produced during March at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Liverpool, and Hardy and his wife took the trouble to make a trip to Liverpool to be present. The. play, with Miss Marion Terry as the heroine, was not sufficiently near the novel to be to Hardy’s liking, but it was well received, and was staged in London at the Globe Theatre in April, where it ran for many nights, but brought Hardy no profit, nor the adapter, as he was informed. During his stay in London he attended, on April 26, the funeral of Darwin in Westminster Abbey. As a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species.

‘May 13- The slow meditative lives of people who live in habitual solitude. . • • Solitude renders every trivial act of a solitary full of interest, as showing thoughts that cannot be expressed for want of an interlocutor.’

‘June 3. . . . As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature; yet the result is no mere photograph, but purely the product of the writer’s own mind.’

‘June 18. M. F., son of Parson F., was well known by sight to my mother in her childhood. He had taken his degree and had been ordained. But he drank. He worked with the labourers and “ yarn- barton-wenches” (as they were called in the village) in the yarn- barton. After a rollick as they worked he would suddenly stop, down his implement, and mounting a log or trestle, preach an excellent sermon to them; then go on cursing and swearing as before. He wore faded black clothes, and had an allowance of some small sum from his family, to which he liked to add a little by manual labour. He was a tall, upright, dignified man. She did not know what became of him.’

‘August. — An ample theme: the intense interests, passions, and strategy that throb through the commonest lives.

‘This month blackbirds and thrushes creep about under fruit- bushes and in other shady places in gardens rather like four-legged animals than birds. ... I notice that a blackbird has eaten nearly a whole pear lying in the garden-path in the course of the day.’

‘September 9. Dr. and Mrs. Brine . . . came to tea. Brine says that Jack White’s gibbet (near Wincanton) was standing as late as 1835 — i.e. the oak-post with the iron arm sticking out, and a portion of the cage in which the body had formerly hung. It would have been standing now if some young men had not burnt it down by piling faggots round it one fifth of November.’

Later in the month he went with Mrs. Hardy on a small circular tour in the adjoining counties — taking in Salisbury, Axminster, Lyme Regis, Charmouth, Bridport, Dorchester, and back to Wimborne.

From Axminster to Lyme the journey on the coach was spoilt f0 them by the condition of one of the horses.

‘The off-horse was weak and worn. “O yes, tender on his vore veet”, said the driver with nonchalance. The coach itself weighed a ton. The horse swayed, leant against the pole, then outwards His head hung like his tail. The straps and brass rings of the harness seemed barbarously harsh on his shrinking skin. E., with her admirable courage, would have interfered, at the cost of walking the rest of the distance: then we felt helpless against the anger of the other passengers who wanted to get on.’ They were, in fact, on the tableland half-way between the two towns. But they complained when they alighted — with what effect Hardy could not remember.

At Lyme they ‘met a cheerful man who had turned his trousers hind part before, because the knees had worn through’.

On The Cobb they encountered an old man who had undergone an operation for cataract:

‘It was like a red-hot needle in yer eye whilst he was doing it. But he wasn’t long about it. Oh no. If he had been long I couldn’t ha’ beared it. He wasn’t a minute more than three-quarters of an hour at the outside. When he had done one eye, ‘a said, “Now my man, you must make shift with that one, and be thankful you bain’t left wi’ nam.” So he didn’t do the other. And I’m glad ‘a didn’t. I’ve saved half-crowns and half-crowns out of number in only wanting one glass to my spectacles. T’other eye would never have paid the expenses of keeping en going.’

From Charmouth they came to Bridport on the box of a coach better horsed, and driven by a merry coachmen, ‘who wore a lavish quantity of wool in his ears, and in smiling checked his smile in the centre of his mouth by closing his lips, letting it continue at the corners’. (A sketch of the coachman’s mouth in the act of smiling was attached to illustrate this.)

Before returning to Wimborne Hardy called on the poet Barnes at Came Rectory. Mr. Barnes told him of an old woman who had asked him to explain a picture she possessed. He told her it was the family of Darius at the feet of Alexander. She shook her head, and said: ‘But that’s not in the Bible’, looking up and down his clerical attire as if she thought him a wicked old man who disgraced his cloth by speaking of profane history.

This autumn Two on a Tower, which was ending its career in the Atlantic Monthly, came out in three volumes, and at the beginning of October its author and his wife started for Cherbourg via Wey-

mouth, and onward to Paris, where they took a little appartement of jviro bedrooms and a sitting room, near the left bank of the Seine. pjgre they stayed for some weeks, away from English and American tourists, roving about the city and to Versailles, studying the pictures at the Louvre and the Luxembourg, practising housekeeping in the Parisian bourgeois manner, buying their own groceries and vegetables, dining at restaurants, and catching bad colds owing to the uncertain weather. He seems to have done little in the French capital besides these things, making only one memorandum beyond personal trifles, expenses, and a few picture notes:

‘Since I discovered, several years ago, that I was living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently, I have troubled myself very little about theories. . . . Where development according to perfect reason is limited to the narrow region of pure mathematics, I am content with tentativeness from day to day.’

At the end of the autumn Mrs. Hardy received news at Wimborne of the death of her brother-in-law, the Rev. C. Holder, at St. Juliot Rectory, Cornwall, of which he had long been the incumbent; and they realised that the scene of the fairest romance of their lives, in the picturesque land of Lyonnesse, would have no more kinship with them. By this loss Hardy was reminded of the genial and genuine humour of his clerical relative and friend despite his fragility and ill-health; of his qualities; among them, of a mysterious power he had (as it seemed to his brother-in-law) of counting his congregation to a man before he had got half a dozen lines down the page in ‘Dearly beloved brethren’; and of his many strange and amusing stories of his experiences, such as that of the sick man to whose bedside he was called to read a chapter in the Bible, and who said when it was ended that it did him almost as much good as a glass of gin-and-water: or of the astonishing entry in the marriage register of Holder’s parish before he was rector, by which the bridegroom and bridesmaid had made themselves husband and wife, and the bride and best man the witnesses. Hardy himself had seen the entry.

Of another cast was the following. Holder as a young man was a curate in Bristol during the terrible cholera visitation. He related that one day at a friend’s house he met a charming young widow, who invited him to call on her. With pleasant anticipations he went at tea-time a day or two later, and duly inquired if she was at home. The servant said with a strange face: ‘ Why, Sir, you buried her this morning!’ He found that amongst the many funerals of cholera victims he had conducted that day, as on every day, hers had been one.

At another of these funerals the clerk or sexton rushed to hii* 1 immediately before the procession arrived to ask him to come and 1 look at the just opened grave, which was of brick, with room for t\v0 or more, the first place being occupied by the coffin of the deceased person’s husband, who had died three weeks before. The coffin was overturned into the space beside it. Holder hastily told the sexton ‘ to turn it back into its place, and say nothing, to avoid distressing; the relatives by the obvious inference.

He also remembered a singular alarm to which he had once been subjected. He was roused one night by a voice calling from below ‘Holder, Holder! Can you help me?’ It was the voice of a neighbouring incumbent named Woodman, and wondering what terrible thing had happened he rushed downstairs as soon as he could, seizing a heavy stick on the way. He found his neighbour in great agitation, who explained that the news had come late the previous evening that a certain noble lord the patron, who was a great critic of sermons, had arrived in the parish, and was going to attend next morning’s service. ‘Have you a sermon that will do? I have nothing — nothing!’ The conjuncture had so preyed upon his friend’s nerves during the night that he had not been able to resist getting up and coming. Holder found something he thought might suit the noble critic, and Woodman departed with it under his arm, much relieved.

Some of Holder’s stories to him were, as Hardy guessed, rather well-found than well-founded, but they were always told with much solemnity. Yet he would sometimes recount one ‘ the truth of which he could not quite guarantee’. It was what had been related to him by some of his aged parishioners concerning an incumbent of that or an adjacent living many years before. This worthy ecclesiastic was a bachelor addicted to drinking habits, and one night when riding up Boscastle Hill fell off his horse. He lay a few minutes in the road, when he said ‘Help me up, Jolly!’ and a local man who was returning home behind him saw a dark figure with a cloven foot emerge from the fence, and toss him upon his horse in a jiffy. The end of him was that on one night of terrific lightning and thunder he was missed, and was found to have entirely disappeared.

Holder had kept up a friendly acquaintance with Hawker of Morwenstow, who predeceased him by seven years, though the broad and tolerant views of the rector of St. Juliot did not quite chime in with the poet-vicar’s precisianism; and the twenty miles of wild Cornish coast that separated their livings was a heavy bit of road for the rector’s stout cob to traverse both ways in a day. Hardy re- retted the loss of his relative, and was reminded sadly of the pleasure used to find in reading the lessons in the ancient church when his brother-in-law was not in vigour. The poem ‘Quid hie agis?’ in Moments of Vision is in part apparently a reminiscence of these readings.

In December Hardy was told a story by a Mrs. Cross, a very old country-woman he met, of a girl she had known who had been betrayed and deserted by a lover. She kept her child by her own exertions, and lived bravely and throve. After a time the man returned poorer than she, and wanted to marry her; but she refused. He ultimately went into the Union workhouse. The young woman’s conduct in not caring to be ‘made respectable’ won the novelist- poet’s admiration, and he wished to know her name; but the old narrator said, ‘Oh, never mind their names! they be dead and rotted by now’.

The eminently modern idea embodied in this example — of a woman’s not becoming necessarily the chattel and slave of her seducer — impressed Hardy as being one of the first glimmers of woman’s enfranchisement; and he made use of it in succeeding years in more than one case in his fiction and verse.

In the same month the Hardys attended Ambulance-Society lectures — First-Aid teaching being in fashion just then. He makes a note concerning a particular lecture:

‘A skeleton — the one used in these lectures — is hung up inside the window. We face it as we sit. Outside the band is playing, and the children are dancing. I can see their little figures through the window past the skeleton dangling in front.’ Another note — this on the wintry weather: ‘Heard of an open cart being driven through the freezing rain. The people in it became literally packed in ice; the men’s beards and hair were hung with icicles. Getting one of the men into the house was like bringing in a chandelier of lustres.’