Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1157 page)

Another outline scheme for The Dynasts was shaped in November, in which Napoleon was represented as haunted by an Evil Genius or Familiar, whose existence he has to confess to his wives. This was abandoned, and another tried in which Napoleon by means of necromancy becomes possessed of an insight, enabling him to see the thoughts of opposing generals. This does not seem to have come to anything either.

But in December he quotes from Addison:

‘In the description of Paradise the poet [Milton] has observed Aristotle’s rule of lavishing all the ornaments of diction on the weak, inactive parts of the fable.’ And although Hardy did not slavishly adopt this rule in The Dynasts, it is apparent that he had it in mind in concentrating the ‘ornaments of diction’ in particular places, thus following Coleridge in holding that a long poem should not attempt to be poetical all through.

‘December 11. Those who invent vices indulge in them with more judgment and restraint than those who imitate vices invented by others.’

‘December 31. A silent New Year’s Eve — no bell, or band, or voice.

‘The year has been a fairly friendly one to me. It showed me the south of France — Italy, above all Rome — and it brought me back unharmed and much illuminated. It has given me some new acquaintances, too, and enabled me to hold my own in fiction, whatever that may be worth, by the completion of The Woodlanders.

‘Books read or pieces looked at this year:

‘Milton, Dante, Calderon, Goethe.

‘Homer, Virgil, Moltere, Scott.

‘The Cid, Nibelungen, Crusoe, Don Quixote.

‘Aristophanes, Theocritus, Boccaccio.

‘Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lycidas.

‘Malory, Vicar of Wakefield, Ode to West Wind, Ode to Grecian Urn.

‘Christabel, Wye above Tintern.

‘Chapman’s Iliad, Lord Derby’s ditto, Worsley’s Odyssey.’

‘January 2. 1888. Different purposes, different men. Those in the city for money-making are not the same men as they were when at home the previous evening. Nor are these the same as they were when lying awake in the small hours.’

‘January 5. Be rather curious than anxious about your own career; for whatever result may accrue to its intellectual and social value, it will make little difference to your personal well-being. A naturalist’s interest in the hatching of a queer egg or germ is the utmost introspective consideration you should allow yourself.’

‘January 7. On New Year’s Eve and day I sent off five copies of the magazine containing a story of mine, and three letters — all eight to friends by way of New Year’s greeting and good wishes. Not a single reply. Mem.: Never send New Year’s letters, etc., again.’

[Two were dying: one ultimately replied. The story was either ‘The Withered Arm’, in Blackwood, or ‘The Waiting Supper’ in Murray’s Magaiine, both of which appeared about this time.]

‘Apprehension is a great element in imagination. It is a semi- madness, which sees enemies, etc., in inanimate objects.’

‘January 14. A “sensation-novel” is possible in which the sensationalism is not casualty, but evolution; not physical but psychical. . . . The difference between the latter kind of novel and the novel of physical sensationalism — i.e. personal adventure, etc., — is this: that whereas in the physical the adventure itself is the subject of interest, the psychical results being passed over as commonplace, in the psychical the casualty or adventure is held to be of no intrinsic interest, but the effect upon the faculties is the important matter to be depicted.’

‘January 24. I find that my politics really are neither Tory nor Radical. I may be called an Intrinsicalist. I am against privilege derived from accident of any kind, and am therefore equally opposed to aristocratic privilege and democratic privilege. (By the latter I mean the arrogant assumption that the only labour is hand-labour — a worse arrogance than that of the aristocrat, — the taxing of the worthy to help those masses of the population who will not help themselves when they might, etc.) Opportunity should be equal for all, but those who will not avail themselves of it should be cared for merely — not be a burden to, nor the rulers over, those who do avail themselves thereof.’

‘February 5. Heard a story of a farmer who was “over-looked” [malignly affected] by himself. He used to go and examine his stock every morning before breakfast with anxious scrutiny. The animals pined away. He went to a conjuror or white witch, who told him he had no enemy; that the evil was of his own causing, the eye of a fasting man being very blasting: that he should eat a “dew-bit” before going to survey any possession about which he had hopes.’ In the latter part of this month there arrived the following: ‘The Rev. Dr. A. B. Grosart ventures to address Mr. Hardy on a problem that is of life and death; personally, and in relation to young eager intellects for whom he is responsible. . . . Dr. Grosart finds abundant evidence that the facts and mysteries-of nature and human nature have come urgently before Mr. Hardy’s penetrative brain.’

He enumerated some of the horrors of human and animal life, particularly parasitic, and added:

‘The problem is how to reconcile these with the absolute goodness and non-limitation of God.’

Hardy replied: ‘ Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to suggest any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.’

He met Leslie Stephen shortly after, and Stephen told him that he too had received a similar letter from Grosart; to which he had replied that as the reverend doctor was a professor of theology, and he himself only a layman, he should have thought it was the doctor’s business to explain the difficulty to his correspondent, and not bis to explain it to the doctor.

Two or three days later the Bishop (Wordsworth) of Salisbury wrote to Hardy for his views on the migration of the peasantry, ‘which is of considerable social importance and has a very distinct bearing on the work of the Church’, adding that Hardy with his very accurate knowledge of the custom was well-qualified to be the historian of its causes and its results. ‘Are they good or bad morally and in respect of religion, respectability, etc., to men, women, and children.’ Hardy’s answer cannot be discovered, but he is known to have held that these modern migrations are fatal to local traditions, and to cottage horticulture. Labourers formerly, knowing they were permanent residents, would plant apple-trees and fruit-bushes with zealous care, to profit from them: but now they scarce ever plant one, knowing they will be finding a home elsewhere in a year or two; or if they do happen to plant any, digging them up and selling them before leaving! Hence the lack of picturesqueness in modern labourers’ dwellings.

‘March 1. Youthful recollections of four village beauties:

‘1. Elizabeth B, and her red hair. [She seems to appear in the poem called “Lizbie Browne”, and was a gamekeeper’s daughter, a year or two older than Hardy himself.]

‘2. Emily D, and her mere prettiness.

‘3. Rachel H, and her rich colour, and vanity, and frailty,

and clever artificial dimple-making. [She is probably in some respects the original of Arabella in Jude the Obscure.]

‘4. Alice Pand her mass of flaxen curls.’

‘March. At the Temperance Hotel. The people who stay here appear to include religious enthusiasts of all sorts. They talk the old faiths with such new fervours and original aspects that such faiths seem again arresting. They open fresh views of Christianity by turning it in reverse positions, as Gerome the painter did by painting the shadow of the Crucifixion instead of the Crucifixion itself as former painters had done.

‘In the street outside I heard a man coaxing money from a prostitute in slang language, his arm round her waist. The outside was a commentary on the inside.’

‘March 9. British Museum Reading Room. Souls are gliding about here in a sort of dream — screened somewhat by their bodies, but imaginable behind them. Dissolution is gnawing at them all, slightly hampered by renovations. In the great circle of the library Time is looking into Space. Coughs are floating in the same great vault, mixing with the rustle of book-leaves risen from the dead, and the touches of footsteps on the floor.’

‘March 28. On returning to London after an absence I find the people of my acquaintance abraded, their hair disappearing, also their flesh, by degrees.

‘People who to one’s-self are transient singularities are to themselves the permanent condition, the inevitable, the normal, the rest of mankind being to them the singularity. Think, that those (to us) strange transitory phenomena, their personalities, are with them always, at their going to bed, at their uprising!

‘Footsteps, cabs, etc., are continually passing our lodgings. And every echo, pit-pat, and rumble that makes up the general noise has behind it a motive, a prepossession, a hope, a fear, a fixed thought forward; perhaps more — a joy, a sorrow, a love, a revenge.

‘London appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody conscious of themselves collectively, except perhaps some poor gaper who stares round with a half-idiotic aspect.

‘There is no consciousness here of where anything comes from or goes to — only that it is present.

‘In the City. The fiendish precision or mechanism of town-life is what makes it so intolerable to the sick and infirm. Like an acrobat performing on a succession of swinging trapezes, as long as you are at particular points at precise instants, everything glides as if afloat; but if you are not up to time’

‘April 16. News of Matthew Arnold’s death, which occurred yesterday. . . . The Times speaks quite truly of his “enthusiasm for the nobler and detestation of the meaner elements in humanity”.’

‘April 19. Scenes in ordinary life that are insipid at 20 become interesting at 30, and tragic at 40.’

‘April 21. Dr. Quain told me some curious medical stories when we were dining at Mrs. Jeune’s. He said it was a mistake for anyone to have so many doctors as the German Emperor has, because neither feels responsible. Gave an account of Queen Adelaide, who died through her physicians’ ignorance of her malady, one of them, Dr. Chambers, remarking, when asked why he did not investigate her disorder, “Damn it, I wasn’t going to pull about the Queen” — she being such a prude that she would never have forgiven him for making an examination that, as it proved, would have saved her life.

‘Mary Jeune says that when she tries to convey some sort of moral or religious teaching to the East-end poor, so as to change their views from wrong to right, it ends by their convincing her that their view is the right one — not by her convincing them.’

‘April 23. To Alma-Tadema’s musical afternoon. Heckmann Quartett. The architecture of his house is incomplete without sunlight and warmth. Hence the dripping wintry afternoon without mocked his marble basin and brass steps and quilted blinds and silver apse.’

‘April 26. Thought in bed last night that Byron’s Childe Harold will live in the history of English poetry not so much because of the beauty of parts of it, which is great, but because of its good fortune in being an accretion of descriptive poems by the most fascinating personality in the world — for the English — not a common plebeian, but a romantically wicked noble lord. It affects even Arnold’s judgment.’

‘April 28. A short story of a young man — “who could not go to Oxford” — His struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide. [Probably the germ of Jude the Obscure.] There is something [in this] the world ought to be shown, and I am the one to show it to them — though I was not altogether hindered going, at least to Cambridge, and could have gone up easily at five-and-twenty.

‘In Regent Street, which commemorates the Prince Regent. It is in the fitness of things that The Promenade of Prostitutes should be here. One can imagine his shade stalking up and down every night, smiling approvingly.’

‘May 13. Lord Houghton tells me to-day at lunch at Lady Catherine Gaskell’s of a young lady who gave a full description of a ball to her neighbour during the Chapel Royal service by calling out at each response in the Litany as many details as she could get in. Also of Lordwho saves all his old tooth-brushes affectionately.

‘The Gaskells said that Lord and Lady Lymington and themselves went to the city in an omnibus, and one of them nearly sat on an Irishwoman’s baby. G. apologized, when she exclaimed, “Och, ‘twas not you: ‘twas the ugly one!” (pointing to Lord L.).

‘Lady C. says that the central position of St. James’s Square (where their house is) enables her to see so many more people. When she first comes to Town she feels a perfect lump the first fortnight — she knows nothing of the new phrases, and does not understand the social telegraphy and allusions.’

May 28. They went to Paris via London and Calais: and stayed in the Rue du Commandant Riviere several weeks, noticing on their arrival as they always did ‘the sour smell of a foreign city’.

June 4 and 7. At the Salon. ‘Was arrested by the sensational picture called “The Death of Jezebel” by Gabriel Guays, a horrible tragedy, and justly so, telling its story in a flash.’

‘June 10. To Longchamps and the Grand Prix de Paris. Roar from the course as I got near. It was Pandemonium: not a blade of grass: half overshoe in dust: the ground covered with halves of white, yellow, and blue tickets: bookmakers with staring brass- lettered names and addresses, in the very exuberance of honesty. The starter spoke to the jockeys entirely in English, and most of the cursing and swearing was done in English likewise, and done well. The horses passed in a volley, so close together that it seemed they must be striking each other. Excitement. Cries of “ Vive la France!” (a French horse having won).’

‘June 11. To the Embassy. Bon Marche with Em. Walked to l’Etoile in twilight. The enormous arch stood up to its knees in lamplight, dark above against the deep blue of the upper sky. Went under and read some names of victories which were never won.’

‘June 12. To see the tombs of St. Denis with E. A lantern at the slit on one side of the vault shows the coffins to us at the opposite slit.’