Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1160 page)

However, the business immediately in hand was the new story Tess of the d’Urbervilles, for the serial use of which Hardy had three requests, if not more, on his list; and in October as much of it as was written was offered to the first who had asked for it, the editor of Murray’s Magaiine. It was declined and returned to him in the middle of November virtually on the score of its improper explicitness. It was at once sent on to the second, the editor of Macmillan’s Magaiine, and on the 25 th was declined by him for practically the same reason. Hardy would now have much preferred to finish the story and bring it out in volume form only, but there were reasons why he could not afford to do this; and he adopted a plan till then, it is believed, unprecedented in the annals of fiction. This was not to offer the novel intact to the third editor on his list (his experience with the first two editors having taught him that it would be useless to send it to the third as it stood), but to send it up with some chapters or parts of chapters cut out, and instead of destroying these to publish them, or much of them, elsewhere, if practicable, as episodic adventures of anonymous personages (which in fact was done, with the omission of a few paragraphs); till they could be put back in their places at the printing of the whole in volume form. In addition several passages were modified. Hardy carried out this unceremonious concession to conventionality with cynical amusement, knowing the novel was moral enough and to spare. But the work was sheer drudgery, the modified passages having to be written in coloured ink, that the originals might be easily restored, and he frequently asserted that it would have been almost easier for him to write a new story altogether. Hence the labour brought no profit. He resolved to get away from the supply of family fiction to magazines as soon as he conveniently could do so.

However, the treatment was a complete success, and the mutilated novel was accepted by the editor of the Graphic, the third editor on Hardy’s list, and an arrangement come to for beginning it in the pages of that paper in July 1891. It may be mentioned that no complaint of impropriety in its cut-down form was made by readers, except by one gentleman with a family of daughters, who thought the bloodstain on the ceiling indecent — Hardy could never understand why.

‘December 1. It was the custom at Stinsford down to 1820 or so to take a corpse to church on the Sunday of the funeral, and let it remain in the nave through the service, after which the burial took place. The people liked the custom, and always tried to keep a corpse till Sunday. The funeral psalms were used for the psalms of the day, and the funeral chapter for the second lesson.’

‘December 13. Read in the papers that Browning died at Venice yesterday.’ He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 31.

‘“Incidents in the development of a soul! little else is worth study,” — Browning.

‘What the Athenceum says is true, though not all the truth, that intellectual subtlety is the disturbing element in his art.’

Among other poems written about this time was the one called ‘At Middle-Field Gate in February’, describing the field-women of the author’s childhood. On the present writer’s once asking Hardy the names of those he calls the ‘bevy now underground’, he said they were Unity Sargent, Susan Chamberlain, Esther Oliver, Emma Shipton, Anna Barrett, Ann West, Elizabeth Hurden, Eliza Trevis, and others, who had been young women about twenty when he was a child.

CHAPTER XVIII

OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLE AND THINGS

1890: Aet. 49 — 50

‘January 5. Looking over old Punches. Am struck with the frequent wrong direction of satire, and of commendation, when seen by the light of later days.’

‘January 29. I have been looking for God 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him. As an external personality, of course — the only true meaning of the word.’

‘March 5. A staid, worn, weak man at the railway station. His back, his legs, his hands, his face, were longing to be out of the world. His brain was not longing to be, because, like the brain of most people, it was the last part of his body to realise a situation.

‘In the train on the way to London. Wrote the first four or six lines of “ Not a line of her writing have I”. It was a curious instance of sympathetic telepathy. The woman whom I was thinking of — a cousin - — was dying at the time, and I quite in ignorance of it. She died six days later. The remainder of the piece was not written till after her death.’

‘March 15. With E. to a crush at the Jeunes’. Met Mrs. T. and her great eyes in a corner of the rooms, as if washed up by the surging crowd. The most beautiful woman present. . . . But these women! If put into rough wrappers ih a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?’

He observes later in respect of such scenes as these: ‘ Society, collectively, has neither seen what any ordinary person can see, read what every ordinary person has read, nor thought what every ordinary person has thought.’

‘March-April:

‘Altruism, or The Golden Rule, or whatever “Love your Neighbour as Yourself” may be called, will ultimately be brought about I think by the pain we see in others reacting on ourselves, as if we and they were a part of one body. Mankind, in fact, may be and possibly will be viewed as members of one corporeal frame.

‘Tories will often do by way of exception to their principles more extreme acts of democratism or broad-mindedness than Radicals do by rule — such as help on promising plebeians, tolerate wild beliefs, etc.

‘Art consists in so depicting the common events of life as to bring out the features which illustrate the author’s idiosyncratic mode of regard; making old incidents and things seem as new.’

‘Easter. Sir George Douglas came. Went to Barnes’s grave with him; next day to Portland. Lunched at the Mermaid.

‘In an article on Ibsen in the Fortnightly the writer says that his manner is wrong. That the drama, like the novel, should not be for edification. In this I think the writer errs. It should be so, but the edified should not perceive the edification. Ibsen’s edifying is too obvious.’

‘April 26. View the Prime Cause or Invariable Antecedent as “It” and recount its doings.’ [This was done in The Dynasts.]

In May the Hardys were again resident in London, and went their customary round of picture-viewing, luncheons, calls, dinners, and receptions. At the Academy he reminds himself of old Academy exhibitions, e.g. the years in which there was a rail round Frith’s pictures, and of the curious effect upon an observer of the fashionable crowd — seeming like people moving about under enchantment, or as somnambulists. At an evening service at St. George’s, Hanover Square, ‘everything looks the Modern World: the electric light and old theology seem strange companions; and the sermon was as if addressed to native tribes of primitive simplicity, and not to the Nineteenth-Century English.’ Coming out of church he went into the Criterion for supper, where, first going to the second floor, he stumbled into a room whence proceeded ‘ low laughter and murmurs, the light of lamps with pink shades; where the men were all in evening clothes, ringed and studded, and the women much uncovered in the neck and heavily jewelled, their glazed and lamp-blacked eyes wandering’. He descended and had his supper in the grill-room.

‘May 9. MS. of A Group of Noble Dames sent to the Graphic as promised.

‘In the streets I see patient hundreds, labouring on, and boxes on wheels packed with men and women. There are charcoal trees in the squares. A man says: “ When one is half-drunk London seems a wonderfully enjoyable place, with its lamps, and cabs moving like fire-flies.” Yes, man has done more with his materials than God has done with his.

‘A physician cannot cure a disease, but he can change its mode of expression.’

‘May 15. Coming home from seeing Irving in The Bells. Between 11 and 12. The 4,000,000 suggest their existence now, when one sees the brilliancy about Piccadilly Circus at this hour, and notices the kiln-dried features around.’

At Mr. Gosse’s this month they met Miss Balestier — an attractive and thoughtful young woman on her first visit to England from America, who remarked to him that it was so reposeful over here; ‘In America you feel at night, “I must be quick and sleep; there is not much time to give to it”.’ She afterwards became Mrs. Rudyard Kipling. About the same date Hardy also met — it is probable for the first time — Mr. Kipling himself. ‘He talked about the East, and he well said that the East is the world, both in numbers and in experiences. It has passed through our present bustling stages, and has become quiescent. He told curious details of Indian life.’

Hardy remarks that June 2 is his fiftieth birthday: and during the month went frequently to the Savile Club, sometimes dining there with acquaintances, among others J. H. Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge. Hardy used to find fault with Middleton as having no sense of life as such; as one who would talk, for instance, about bishops’ copes and mitres with an earnest, serious, anxious manner, as if there were no cakes and ale in the world, or laughter and tears, or human misery beyond tears. His sense of art had caused him to lose all sense of relativity, and of art’s subsidiary relation to existence.

This season also Hardy seems to have had a humour for going the round of the music-halls, and pronounces upon the beauties ‘whose lustrous eyes and pearly countenances show that they owe their attractions to art’, that they are seldom well-formed physically; notes the ‘ round-hatted young men gaping at the stage, with receding chins and rudimentary mouths’; and comments upon the odd fact that though there were so many obvious drunkards around him, the character on the stage which always gave the most delight was that of a drunkard imitated. At Bizet’s opera of Carmen he was struck, as he had been struck before, with the manner in which people-conducted themselves on the operatic stage; that of being ‘ possessed, maudlin, distraught, as if they lived on a planet whose atmosphere was intoxicating’. At a ballet at the Alhambra he noticed ‘the air of docile obedience on the faces of some of the dancing women, a passive resignation like that of a plodding horse, as if long accustomed to correction. Also marks of fatigue. The morality of actresses, dancers, etc., cannot be judged by the same standard as that of people who lead slower lives. Living in a throbbing atmosphere they are perforce throbbed by it in spite of themselves. We should either put down these places altogether because of their effect upon the performers, or forgive the performers as irresponsibles. . . . The Premiere Danseuse strokes each calf with the sole of her other foot like a fly — on her mouth hanging a perpetual smile.’

‘June 23. Called on Arthur Locker [editor] at the Graphic office in answer to his letter. He says he does not object to the stories \A Group of Noble Dames] but the Directors do. Here’s a pretty job! Must smooth down these Directors somehow I suppose.’

In the same month he met Mr. (afterwards Sir) H. M. Stanley, the explorer, at a dinner given by the publishers of his travels. Hardy does not seem to have been much attracted by his personality. He observed that Stanley was shorter than himself, ‘with a disdainful curve on his mouth and look in his eye which would soon become resentment’. He made a speech in the worst taste, in Hardy’s opinion, being to the effect that everybody who had had to do with producing his book was, rightly, delighted with the honour. At the same dinner Hardy talked to Du Chaillu, who had also spoken a few words. Hardy asked him: ‘ Why didn’t you claim more credit for finding those dwarfs?’ The good-natured Du Chaillu said with a twinkle: ‘Noh, noh! It is his dinner.’ Hardy also made the acquaintance of the Bishop of Ripon at that dinner, from what he says: ‘ He [the Bishop] has a nice face — a sort of ingenuous archness in it — as if he would be quite willing to let supernaturalism down easy, if he could.’

At the police courts, where just at this time he occasionally spent half an hour, being still compelled to get novel padding, he noticed that ‘the public’ appeared to be mostly represented by grimy gentlemen who had had previous experience of the courts from a position in the dock: that there were people sitting round an anteroom of the courts as if waiting for the doctor; that the character of the witness usually deteriorated under cross-examination; and that the magistrate’s spectacles as a rule endeavoured to flash out a strictly just manner combined with as much generosity as justice would allow.

On the last day of the month he wound up his series of visits to London entertainments and law-offices with the remark, ‘Am getting tired of investigating life at music-halls and police-courts’. About the same time he lost his friend Lord Carnarvon, who had written with prophetic insight when proposing him for the Athenaeum that it would have been better if his proposer had been a younger man. Before leaving London he met Miss Ada Rehan, for whom he had a great liking, and, in some of her parts, admiration, that of the Shrew being of course one of them. He says of her: ‘A kindly natured, winning woman with really a heart. I fear she is wearing herself out with too hard work.’ Two days later they were present at the Lyceum to see her as Rosalind in As You Like It. She was not so real — indeed could not be — in the character as in The Shrew. Before starting Hardy wrote: ‘Am going with E. to see Rosalind, after not seeing her for more than twenty years. This time she is composed of Ada Rehan.’ After going he added: ‘At the end of the second act I went round, and found her alone, in a highly strung throbbing state — and rather despondent. “ O yes — it goes smoothly,” she said. “But I am in a whirlwind. . . . Well, it is an old thing, and Mr. Daly liked to produce it!” I endeavoured to assure her that it was going to be satisfactory, and perhaps succeeded, for in the remaining acts she played full of spirit.’ It is possible that the dramatic poem entitled ‘The Two Rosalinds’ was suggested by this performance combined with some other; but there is no certainty about this, and dates and other characteristics do not quite accord.

Mrs. Hardy had to leave London shortly after, on account of the illness and death of her father; but her husband had promised to write an Epilogue to be spoken by Miss Rehan at a performance on behalf of Mrs. Jeune’s Holiday Fund for Children. So he remained in London till he had written it, and it had been duly delivered. He did not go himself to the performance, but in the evening of the same day was present at a debate at the St. James’s Hall between Messrs. Hyndman and Bradlaugh, in which he was much struck by the extraordinary force in the features of the latter.