Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1162 page)

‘April 28. Talking to Kipling to-day at the Savile, he said that he once as an experiment took the ideas of some mature writer or speaker (on Indian politics, I think) and translating them into his own language used them as his. They were pronounced to be the crude ideas of an immature boy.’

The Royal Academy this year struck Hardy as containing some good colouring but no creative power, and that as visitors went by names only the new geniuses, even if there were any, were likely to be overlooked. He recalled in respect of the fair spring and summer landscapes that ‘They were not pictures of this spring and summer, although they seem to be so. All this green grass and fresh leafage perished yesterday; after withering and falling, it is gone like a dream.’

In the Gallery of the English Art Club: ‘If I were a painter, I would paint a picture of a room as viewed by a mouse from a chink under the skirting.’

Hardy’s friend Dr. (afterwards Sir) Joshua Fitch took him over Whitelands Training College for schoolmistresses, where it was the custom in those days, and may be now, to choose a May Queen every year, a custom originated by Ruskin. Hardy did not, however, make any observation on this, but merely: ‘A community of women, especially young women, inspires not reverence but protective tenderness in the breast of one who views them. Their belief in circumstances, in convention, in the Tightness of things, which you know to be not only wrong but damnably wrong, makes the heart ache, even when they are waspish and hard. . . . You feel how entirely the difference of their ideas from yours is of the nature of misunderstanding. . . . There is much that is pathetic about these girls, and I wouldn’t have missed the visit for anything. How far nobler in its aspirations is the life here than the life of those I met at the crush two nights back!’

Piccadilly at night. ‘A girl held a long-stemmed narcissus to my nose as we went by each other. At the Circus, among all the wily crew, there was a little innocent family standing waiting, I suppose for an omnibus. How pure they looked! A man on a stretcher, with a bloody bandage round his head, was wheeled past by two policemen, stragglers following. Such is Piccadilly.’

He used to see Piccadilly under other aspects, however, for the next day, Sunday, he attended the service at St. James’s — as he did off and on for many years — because it was the church his mother had been accustomed to go to when as a young woman she was ‘iving for some months in London. ‘The preacher said that only five per cent of the inhabitants entered a church, according to the Bishop of London. On coming out there was a drizzle across the electric lights, and the paper-boys were shouting, not,” Go to church!” but, “Wee-naw of the French Oaks!’“

Next day — wet — at the British Museum: ‘ Crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking to-day is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus [?]. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated MSS. — the labours of years — and stand under Rameses the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge in proletarian, and when these people are our masters it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature! . . . Looking, when I came out, at the Oxford Music Hall, an hour before the time of opening, there was already a queue.’

‘Mayr,. Sunday. Em and I lunch at the Jeunes’ to see the house they have just moved into — 79 Harley St. Sun came in hot upon us through back windows, the blinds not being yet up. Frederic Harrison called afterwards. He is leaving London to live in the country.’

During the month of May he was much impressed by a visit paid with his friend Dr. (later Sir) T. Clifford Allbutt, theaa Commissioner in Lunacy, to a large private lunatic asylum, where he had intended to stay only a quarter of an hour, but became so interested in the pathos of the cases that he remained the greater part of the day. He talked to ‘ the gentleman who was staying there of his own will, to expose the devices of the Commissioners; to the old man who offers snuff to everybody; to the scholar of high literary aims, as sane in his conversation as any of us; to the artist whose great trouble was that he could not hear the birds sing; “which as you will see, Mr. Hardy, is hard on a man of my temperament”; and, on the women’s side, listened to their stories of their seduction; to the Jewess who sang to us; to the young woman who, with eyes brimming with reproach, said to the doctor, “When are you going to let me out of this?” [Hardy appealed for a re-examination of her, which was done afterwards.] Then came the ladies who thought themselves queens — less touching cases, as they were quite happy — one of them, who was really a Plantagenet by descent, perversely insisted on being considered a Stuart. All the women seemed prematurely dried, faded, flitries.’

In June he visited Stockwell Training College. ‘A pretty custom among the girls here is that of each senior student choosing a daughter from the list of junior girls who are coming. The senior is mother to the daughter for the whole year, and looks after her. Sometimes the pair get fond of each other; at other times not. I gather that they are chosen blindly before arrival, from the names only. There must be singular expectancies, confrontings, and excitements resulting therefrom.’

In July he took Mrs. Hardy to the balcony of the Athenaeum Club to see the German Emperor William II pass to the City; the next day he met W. E. Henley at the Savile. ‘He is paler, and his once brown locks are getting iron-grey.’ On the 13th, lunching at Lady Wynford’s, Grosvenor Square, Hardy discovered, or thought he did, that the ceiling of the drawing-room contained oval paintings by Angelica Kauffmann, and that the house was built by the Adams; ‘I was amused by Ld. Wynford, who told me he would not live in Dorset for £50,000 a year, and wanted me to smoke cigarettes made of tobacco from Lebanon — “same as smoked by Laurence Oliphant”. Wynford’s nose is two sides of a spherical triangle in profile.’ In the same week, on a visit with his wife to G. F. Watts, the painter, he was much struck with his host; ‘ that old small man with a grey coat and black velvet skull-cap, who, when he saw one of his picture- frames pressing against a figure on canvas, moved it away gently, as if the figure could feel.’

‘Dining at the Milnes-Gaskells’, Lady Catherine told me that the Webbs of Newstead have buried the skulls that Byron used to drink from, but that the place seems to throw “a sort of doom on the family”. I then told her of the tragic Damers of the last century, who owned Abbey property, and thought she rather shrank from what I said; I afterwards remembered to my dismay that her own place was an Abbey.’ Hardy, however, found later that this was only a moment’s mood, she being as free from superstitions as any woman.

‘July 19. Note the weight of a landau and pair, the coachman in his grey great-coat, footmen ditto. All this mass of matter is moved along with brute force and clatter through a street congested and obstructed, to bear the petite figure of the owner’s young wife in violet velvet and silver trimming, slim, small; who could be easily carried under a man’s arm, and who, if held up by the hair and slipped out of her clothes, carriage, etc. etc., aforesaid, would not be much larger than a skinned rabbit, and of less use.

‘At Mary Jeune’s lunch to-day sat between a pair of beauties.

Mrs. A. Gwith her violet eyes, was the more seductive; Mrs.

R. Cthe more vivacious. The latter in yellow: the former in pale brown, and more venust and warm-blooded than Mrs. C,

who is large-eyed, somewhat slight, with quick impulsive motions, and who neglects the dishes and the coffee because possessed by some idea.’ At another luncheon or dinner at this time ‘the talk was entirely political — of when the next election would be — of the probable Prime Minister — of ins and outs — of Lord This and the Duke of That — everything except the people for whose existence alone these politicians exist. Their welfare is never once thought of.’

The same week: ‘After a day of headache, went to I’s Hotel to supper. This is one of the few old taverns remaining in London, whose frequenters after theatre-closing know each other, and talk across from table to table. The head waiter is called William. There is always something homely when the waiter is called William. He talks of his affairs to the guests, as the guests talk of theirs to him. He has whiskers of the rare old mutton-chop pattern, and a manner of confidence. He has shaved so many years that his face is of a bluish soap-colour, and if wetted and rubbed would raise a lather of itself. . . . Shakespeare is largely quoted at the tables; especially “ How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot? “ Theatrical affairs are discussed neither from the point of view of the audience, nor of the actors, but from a third point — that of the recaller of past appearances.

‘Old-fashioned country couples also come in, their fathers having recommended the tavern from recollections of the early part of the century. They talk on innocently-friendly terms with the theatrical young men, and handsome ladies who enter with them as their “husbands”, after the play.’

They annexed to their London campaign this year a visit to Sir Brampton and Lady Camilla Gurdon at Grundesburgh Hall, Suffolk — a house standing amid green slopes timbered with old oaks. The attraction was its possession of the most old-fashioned and delightful — probably Elizabethan — garden with high buttressed walls that Hardy had ever seen, which happily had been left unimproved and unchanged, owing to the Hall having been used merely as a farmhouse for a century or two, and hence neglected. The vegetables were planted in the middle of square plots surrounded by broad green alleys, and screened by thickets and palisades of tall flowers, ‘so that one does not know any vegetables are there’.

Hardy spent a good deal of time in August and the autumn correcting Tess of the d’Urbervilles for its volume form, which process consisted in restoring to their places the passages and chapters of the original MS. that had been omitted from the serial publication. The name ‘Talbothays’, given in the diary, was based on that of a farm belonging to his father, which, however, had no house on it at that time.

In September he and his wife paid a visit to his friend Sir George Douglas at Springwood Park, in fulfilment of a long promise, passing on their way north by the coastline near Holy Isle or Lindisfarne, at that moment glowing reddish on a deep blue sea under the evening sun, with all the romance of Marmion about its aspect. It was the place which he afterwards urged Swinburne to make his headquarters, as being specially suited for him — a Northumbrian — an idea which Swinburne was much attracted by, though he owned that ‘to his great shame’ he had never been on the isle. They had a very charming time in Scotland, visiting many Scott scenes, including Edie Ochiltree’s grave, and one that Hardy had always been anxious to see — Smaylho’me Tower — the setting of the ‘Eve of St. John’ — a ballad which was among the verse he liked better than any of Scott’s prose. At Springwood they met at dinner one evening old Mr. Usher, aged eighty-one, who had known Scott and Lady Scott well, and whose father had sold Scott the land called Huntley Burn. He said that when he was a boy Scott asked him to sing, which he did; and Scott was so pleased that he gave him a pony. When Hardy wondered why Lady Scott should have taken the poet’s fancy, Mr. Usher replied grimly, ‘She wadna’ ha’ taken mine!’

They finished this autumn visit by a little tour to Durham, Whitby, Scarborough, York, and Peterborough. At the last- mentioned place the verger ‘ told us of a lady’s body found in excavating, of which the neck and bosoms glistened, being coated with a species of enamel. She had been maid of honour to Catherine of Arragon who lies near. ... In the train there was a woman of various ages — hands old, frame middle-aged, and face young. What her mean age was I had no conception of.’

‘October 28. It is the incompleteness that is loved, when love is sterling and true. This is what differentiates the real one from the imaginary, the practicable from the impossible, the Love who returns the kiss from the Vision that melts away. A man sees the Diana or the Venus in his Beloved, but what he loves is the difference.’

‘October 30. Howells and those of his school forget that a story must be striking enough to be worth telling. Therein lies the problem — to reconcile the average with that uncommonness which alone makes it natural that a tale or experience would dwell in the memory and induce repetition.’

Sir Charles Cave was the judge at the Dorset assizes this autumn, and Hardy dined with him and Mr. Frith his marshal while they were in the town. Cave told him, among other things, that when he and Sir J. F. Stephen, also on the bench, were struggling young men the latter came to him and said a man was going to be hanged at the Old Bailey, jocularly remarking as an excuse for proposing to go and see it: ‘ Who knows; we may be judges some day; and it will be well to have learnt how the last sentence of the law is carried out.’

During the first week in November the Rev. Dr. Robertson Nicoll, editor of the Bookman, forwarded particulars of a discussion in the papers on whether national recognition should be given to eminent men of letters. Hardy’s reply was:

‘I daresay it would be very interesting that literature should be honoured by the state. But I don’t see how it could be satisfactorily done. The highest flights of the pen are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life, while the natural tendency of a government would be to encourage acquiescence in life as it is. However, I have not thought much about the matter.’

As the year drew to a close an incident that took place during the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a serial in the Graphic might have prepared him for certain events that were to follow. The editor objected to the description of Angel Clare carrying in his arms, across a flooded lane, Tess and her three dairymaid companions. He suggested that it would be more decorous and suitable for the pages of a periodical intended for family reading if the damsels were wheeled across the lane in a wheel-barrow. This was accordingly done.

Also the Graphic refused to print the chapter describing the christening of the infant child of Tess. This appeared in Henley’s Scots Observer, and was afterwards restored to the novel, where it was considered one of the finest passages.