Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1152 page)

‘The grey stones of the fifteenth-century masonry have many of their joints mortarless, and are carved with many initials and dates.

On the sill of one louvred window stands a great pewter pot with a hinged cover and engraved: “For the use of the ringers 16 — ”‘ [It is now in the County Museum.]

In the early part of the next year (1885) Hardy accepted a longstanding invitation to Eggesford by his friend Lady Portsmouth, whither he was to bring his work and continue it as if at home, but Mrs. Hardy was unable to accompany him. He found her there surrounded by her daughters, and their cousin Lady Winifred Herbert, afterwards Lady Burghclere; making altogether a lively house-party, Lady Portsmouth apologizing for its being mostly composed of ‘better halves’. Hence, though the library was placed at his disposal, and entry forbidden, that his labours should not be interrupted, very little work indeed was done while he stayed there, most of the time being spent in driving about the villages with his hosts and walking in the Park. Lord Portsmouth he found to be ‘a farmer-like man with a broad Devon accent. He showed me a bridge over which bastards were thrown and drowned, even down to quite recent times.’ Lady Dorothea, one of the daughters, told him of some of the escapades of her uncle Auberon Herbert — whom Hardy afterwards got to know very well — one of the most amusing being how he had personated a groom of his father’s at a Drawing-room, and by that trick got to see a flame of his who was to be there. Altogether they were an extraordinarily sympathetic group of women, and among other discussions was, of course, one on love, in which Lady Camilla informed him that ‘a woman is never so near being in love with a man she does not love as immediately he has left her after she has refused him’.

‘Lady P. tells me she never knew real anxiety till she had a family of daughters. She wants us to come to Devonshire and live near them. She says they would find a house for us. Cannot think why we live in benighted Dorset. Em would go willingly, as it is her native county; but alas, my house at Dorchester is nearly finished.’

‘Easter Sunday. Evidences of art in Bible narratives. They are written with a watchful attention (though disguised) as to their effect on their reader. Their so-called simplicity is, in fact, the simplicity of the highest cunning. And one is led to inquire, when even in these latter days artistic development and arrangement are the qualities least appreciated by readers, who was there likely to appreciate the art in these chronicles at that day?

‘Looking round on a well-selected jhelf of fiction or history, how few stories of any length does one recognize as well told from begin ning to end! The first half of this story, the last half of that, the middle of another. . . . The modern art of narration is yet in its infancy.

‘But in these Bible lives and adventures there is the spherical completeness of perfect art. And our first, and second, feeling that they must be true because they are so impressive, becomes, as a third feeling, modified to, “Are they so very true, after all? Is not the fact of their being so convincing an argument, not for their actuality, but for the actuality of a consummate artist who was no more content with what Nature offered than Sophocles and Pheidias were content?”‘

‘Friday, April 17. Wrote the last page of The Mayor of Caster- bridge, begun at least a year ago, and frequently interrupted in the writing of each part.’

‘April 19. The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.’

He was in London at the end of April, and probably saw Leslie Stephen there, since he makes the following remark: ‘Leslie Stephen as a critic. His approval is disapproval minimized.’

They went to the Academy this year as usual. On the Private View Hardy remarks: ‘ The great difference between a Private View and a public one is the loud chatter that prevails at the former, everybody knowing everybody else’. In the evening of the same day they were at a party at Lady Carnarvon’s, where Hardy met Lord Salisbury for the first time, and had an interesting talk with him on the art of making speeches — ‘whether it is best to plunge in medias res, or to adopt a developing method’. In the middle of May they were at another of these parties of Lady Carnarvon’s, where they met Browning again; also Mrs. Jeune (afterwards Lady St. Helier), and the usual friends whom they found there.

‘May 28. Waiting at the Marble Arch while Em called a little way further on. . . . This hum of the wheel — the roar of London! What is it composed of? Hurry, speech, laughters, moans, cries of little children. The people in this tragedy laugh, sing, smoke, toss off wines, etc., make love to girls in drawing-rooms and areas; and yet are playing their parts in the tragedy just the same. Some wear jewels and feathers, some wear rags. All are caged birds; the only difference lies in the size of the cage. This too is part of the tragedy.’

‘Sunday May 31. Called on Mrs. Procter. Shocked to find her in mourning for Edith. Can’t tell why I did not see announcement of her death. Browning also present.

‘Mrs. Procter was vexed with Browning and myself for sending cards to Victor Hugo’s funeral to attach to wreaths.’

At one of these crushes in the early part of 1885 they found themselves on a particular evening amid a simmer of political excitement. It was supposed to be a non-political ‘small-and-early’, but on their arrival the house was already full to overflowing; and a well-known Conservative peeress of that date, who had lately invited Hardy to her friendship, came up to him as if she must express her feelings to somebody, and said, ‘I’m ashamed of my party! They are actually all hoping that General Gordon is murdered, in order that it may ruin Gladstone!’ It seems to have been this rumour of Goran’s death, which had just been circulated, that had brought so many brilliant and titled people there. Auberon Herbert, who was also there, told Hardy privately that it was true. Presently another and grimmer lady, the Dowager Viscountess Galway, said to him that she half-believed Gordon was still alive, because no relic, bloody rag, or any scrap of him had been produced, which from her experience of those countries she knew to be almost the invariable custom. So the crowd waited, and conjectured, and did not leave till a late hour, the truth as to Gordon’s fate not being generally known till some days after.

It must have been his experiences at these nominally social but really political parties that gave rise to the following note at the same date:

‘History is rather a stream than a tree. There is nothing organic in its shape, nothing systematic in its development. It flows on like a thunderstorm-rill by a road side; now a straw turns it this way, now a tiny barrier of sand that. The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years. Consider the evenings at Lord Carnarvon’s, and the intensely average conversation on politics held there by average men who two or three weeks later were members of the Cabinet. A row of shopkeepers in Oxford Street taken just as they came would conduct the affairs of the nation as ably as these.

‘Thus, judging by bulk of effect, it becomes impossible to estimate the intrinsic value of ideas, acts, material things: we are forced to appraise them by the curves of their career. There were more beautiful women in Greece than Helen; but what of them?

‘What Ruskin says as to the cause of the want of imagination in works of the present age is probably true — that it is the flippant sarcasm of the time. “ Men dare not open their hearts to us if we are to broil them on a thorn fire.’“

At the end of the month of June Hardy was obliged to go down to Dorset to superintend the removal of his furniture from the house he had temporarily taken in Dorchester to the one he had built in the fields at Max Gate, a mile out of the town.

This house, one mile east of Dorchester, had been about eighteen months in building, commencing November 26, 1883, during which time Hardy was constantly overlooking operations. The plot of ground, which he bought from the Duchy of Cornwall, was acres in extent, and nearly forty years later another half-acre was added to the garden.

A visitor to Max Gate in 1886 gives the following description:

‘The house that is, from its position, almost the first object in the neighbourhood to catch the sun’s morning rays, and the last to relinquish the evening glow, is approached . . . along the Wareham road across an open down. From this side the building appears as an unpretending red-brick structure of moderate size, somewhat quaintly built, and standing in a garden which is divided from the upland without by an enclosing wall. . . . The place is as lonely as it is elevated; and it is evident that from the narrow windows of a turret which rises at the salient angle an extensive view of the surrounding country may be obtained.

‘From the white entrance gate in the wall a short drive, planted on the windward side with beech and sycamore, leads up to the house, arrivals being notified to the inmates by the voice of a glossy black setter [Moss], who comes into view from the stable at the back as far as his chain will allow him. Within, we find ourselves in a small square hall, floored with dark polished wood, and resembling rather a cosy sitting-room with a staircase in it than a hall as commonly understood. It is lighted by a window of leaded panes, through which may be seen Conygar Hill, Came Plantation, and the elevated seamark of Culliford Tree.’

Some two or three thousand small trees, mostly Austrian pines, were planted around the house by Hardy himself, and in later years these grew so thickly that the house was almost entirely screened from the road, and finally appeared, in summer, as if at the bottom of a dark green well of trees.

To the right of the front door upon entering is the drawing-room, and to the left the dining-room. Above the drawing-room is the room which Hardy used as his first study at Max Gate, and in this room The Woodlanders was written. Later he moved his study to the back of the house with a window facing west, where Tess of the d’Urbervilles took shape. In after years another study was built over a new kitchen, and here The Dynasts and all the later poems were written, with the remaining literary work of Hardy’s life. The rather large window of this, the last of all his workrooms, faced east, and the full moon rising over the tops of the dark pines was a familiar sight.

When Max Gate was built Hardy intended to have a sundial affixed to the easternmost turret, as shown in an illustration drawn by himself for IVessex Poems. This design, constantly in his mind, never matured during his life, though at the time of his death the sundial was actually being made in Dorchester, from a model prepared by himself, more than forty years after it was first planned.

A description of his personal appearance at this time, by a careful observer, is as follows:

‘A somewhat fair-complexioned man, a trifle below the middle- height [he was actually 5 ft. 6\ ins.] of slight build, with a pleasant thoughtful face, exceptionally broad at the temples, and fringed by a beard trimmed after the Elizabethan manner [this beard was shaved off about 1890, and he never grew another, but had always a moustache]; a man readily sociable and genial, but one whose mien conveys the impression that the world in his eyes has rather more of the tragedy than the comedy about it.’

His smile was of exceptional sweetness, and his eyes were a clear blue-grey. His whole aspect was almost childlike in its sincerity and simplicity, the features being strongly marked, and his nose, as he himself once described it, more Roman than aquiline. The nobility of his brow was striking. When young he had abundant hair of a deep chestnut colour, which later became a dark brown, almost black, until it turned grey. His hands were well shaped, with long deft fingers; his shoulders particularly neat, and his gait light and easy. He walked very rapidly. He was always a spare man, though not actually thin, and he never in his life allowed himself to be weighed, as he said he considered that to be unlucky.

CHAPTER XIV

MAX GATE AND ‘THE WOODLANDERS’

1885-1887: Aet. 45-46

On June 29 the Hardys slept at Max Gate for the first time — the house being one they were destined to occupy permanently thence onward, except during the four or five months in each year that were spent in London or abroad. Almost the first visitor at their new house was R. L. Stevenson, till then a stranger to Hardy, who wrote from Bournemouth to announce his coming, adding characteristically: ‘I could have got an introduction, but my acquaintance with your mind is already of old date. ... If you should be busy or unwilling, the irregularity of my approach leaves you the safer retreat.’ He appeared two days afterwards, with his wife, wife’s son, and cousin. They were on their way to Dartmoor, the air of which Stevenson had learnt would be good for his complaint. But, alas, he never reached Dartmoor, falling ill at Exeter and being detained there till he was well enough to go home again.

‘September 16. Dined with [Hon. Aubrey] Spring-Rice [who lived at Dorchester]. Met there his cousin Aubrey de Vere the poet, and Father Poole. De Vere says that his father used to say a Greek drama was the fifth act of an Elizabethan one, which of course it is, when not a sixth.’

‘October 17. Called on William Bames. Talked of old families. He told me a story of Louis Napoleon. During his residence in England he was friendly with the Damers, and used to visit at Winterborne-Came House, near Dorchester, where they lived. (It Was a current tradition that he wished to marry Miss Damer; also lhat he would dreamily remark that it was fated he should be the Emperor of the French to avenge the defeat of Waterloo.) It was lhe fashion then for the Dorchester people to parade in full dress in the South Walk on Sunday afternoons, and on one occasion the gamers with their guest came in from their house a mile off and joined 111 the promenade. Barnes, who kept a school in the town, had an usher from Blackmore Vale named Hann (whose people seem to have been of my mother’s stock), and Barnes and his usher also promenaded. For a freak Louis Napoleon, who was walking with Colonel Damer, slipt his cane between Hann’s legs when they brushed past each other in opposite directions, and nearly threw the usher down. Hann was peppery, like all of that pedigree, my maternal line included, and almost before Barnes knew what was happening had pulled off his coat, thrown it on Barnes, and was challenging Louis Napoleon to fight. The latter apologized profusely, said it was quite an accident, and laughed the affair off; so the burghers who had stood round expecting a fight resumed their walk disappointed.’