Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1167 page)

Whether because he was assumed to have written a notorious novel or not Hardy could not say, but he found himself continually invited hither and thither to see famous beauties of the time — some of whom disappointed him; but some he owned to be very beautiful, such as Lady Powis, Lady Yarborough, Lady de Grey — ‘ handsome, tall, glance-giving, arch, friendly’ — the Duchess of Montrose, Mrs. John Hanbury, Lady Cynthia Graham, Amelie Rives, and many others. A crush at Lady Spencer’s at the Admiralty was one of the last of the parties they attended this season. But he mostly was compelled to slip away as soon as he could from these gatherings, finding that they exhausted him both of strength and ideas, few of the latter being given him in return for his own, because the fashionable throng either would not part from those it possessed, or did not possess any.

On the day of their giving up their house at South Kensington a curious mishap befell him. He had dispatched the servants and luggage in the morning; Mrs. Hardy also had driven off to the station, leaving him, as they had arranged, to look over the house, see all was right, and await the caretaker, when he and his portmanteau would follow the rest to Dorchester. He was coming down the stairs of the silent house dragging the portmanteau behind him when his back gave way, and there he had to sit till the woman arrived to help him. In the course of the afternoon he was better and managed to get off, the acute pain turning out to be rheumatism aggravated by lifting the portmanteau.

‘August 1 — 7. Dorchester: Seedy: back got better by degrees.’

‘October 16. To London to meet Henry Harper on business.’

‘October 20. Dined at the Guards’ Mess, St. James’s, with Major Henniker. After dinner went round with him to the sentries with a lantern.’

‘October 23. Dining at the Savile last Sunday with Ray Lankester we talked of hypnotism, will, etc. He did not believe in silent influence, such as making a person turn round by force of will without communication. But of willing, for example, certain types of women by speech to do as you desire — such as “ You shall, or you are to, marry me”, he seemed to have not much doubt. If true, it seems to open up unpleasant possibilities.’

‘November. Painful story. Old P, who narrowly escaped hanging for arson about 1830, returned after his imprisonment, died at West Stafford, his native village, and was buried there. His widow long after died in Fordington, having saved £5 to be buried with her husband. The rector of the village made no objection, and the grave was dug. Meanwhile the daughter had come home, and said the money was not enough to pay for carrying the body of her mother out there in the country; so the grave was filled in, and the woman buried where she died.’

‘November 11. Old song heard:

“And then she arose,

And put on her best clothes,

And went off to the north with the Blues.”

‘Another:

“Come ashore, Jolly Tar, with your trousers on.”

‘Another (sung at J. D.’s wedding):

“Somebody here has been . . .

Or else some charming shepherdess

That wears the gown of green.’“

In December he ran up to London alone on publishing business, and stayed at a temporary room off Piccadilly, to be near his club. It was then that there seems to have occurred, according to what he said later, some incident of the kind possibly adumbrated in the verses called ‘At Mayfair Lodgings’, in Moments of Vision. He watched during a sleepless night a lighted window close by, wondering who might be lying there ill. Afterwards he discovered that a woman had lain there dying, and that she was one whom he had cared for in his youth, when she was a girl in a neighbouring village.

In March of the next year (1895) Hardy was going about the neighbourhood of Dorchester and other places in Wessex with Mr. Macbeth Raeburn, the well-known etcher, who had been commissioned by the publishers to make sketches on the spot for frontispieces to the Wessex Novels. To those scenes which Hardy could not visit himself he sent the artist alone, one of which places, Char- borough Park, the scene of Two on a Tower, was extremely difficult of access, the owner jealously guarding ingress upon her estate, and particularly to her park and house. Raeburn came back in the evening full of his adventures. Reaching the outer park-gate he found it locked, but the lodge-keeper opened it on his saying he had important business at the house. He then reached the second park-gate, which was unfastened to him on the same representation of urgency, but more dubiously. He then got to the front door of the mansion, rang, and asked permission to sketch the house. ‘Good God!’ said the butler, ‘ you don’t know what you are asking. You had better be off before the mis’ess sees you, or the bailiff comes across you!’ He started away discomfited, but thought he would make an attempt at a sketch behind the shadow of a tree. Whilst doing this he heard a voice shouting, and beheld a man running up to him — the redoubtable bailiff — who promptly ordered him out of the park. Raeburn as he moved off thought he detected something familiar in the accent of the bailiff, and turning, said, ‘Surely you come from my country?’ ‘An’ faith, man, it may be so!’ the bailiff suddenly replied, whereon they compared notes, and found they had grown up in the same Scottish village. Then matters changed. ‘ Draw where you like and what you like, only don’t let her see you from the windows at a’. She’s a queer auld body, not bad at bottom, though it’s rather far down. Draw as ye will, an’ if I see her coming I’ll haud up my hand.’ Mr. Raeburn finished his sketch in peace and comfort, and it stands to this day at the beginning of the novel as evidence of the same.

During the spring they paid a visit of a few days to the Jeunes at Arlington Manor, where they also found Sir H. Drummond Wolff, home from Madrid, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Sir Henry Thompson, and other friends; and in May entered a flat at Ashley Gardens, Westminster, for the season. While here a portrait of Hardy was painted by Miss Winifred Thomson. A somewhat new feature in their doings this summer was going to teas on the terrace of the House of Commons — in those days a newly fashionable form of entertainment. Hardy was not a bit of a politician, but he attended several of these, and of course met many Members there.

On June 29 Hardy attended the laying of the foundation stone of the Westminster Cathedral, possibly because the site was close to the flat he occupied, for he had no leanings to Roman Catholicism. However, there he was, and deeply impressed by the scene. In July he visited St. Saviour’s, Southwark, by arrangement with Sir Arthur Blomfield, to see how he was getting on with the restoration. Dinners and theatres carried them through the month, in which he also paid a visit to Burford Bridge, to dine at the hotel with the Omar Khayyam Club and meet George Meredith, where the latter made a speech, and Hardy likewise, said to be the first and last ever made by either of them; at any rate it was the first, and last but one or two, by Hardy.

Hardy’s entries of his doings were always of a fitful and irregular kind, and now there occurs a hiatus which cannot be filled. But it is clear that at the end of the summer at Max Gate he was ‘ restoring the MS. of Jude the Obscure to its original state’ — on which process he sets down an undated remark, probably about the end of August, when he sent off the restored copy to the publishers:

‘On account of the labour of altering Jude the Obscure to suit the magazine, and then having to alter it back, I have lost energy for revising and improving the original as I meant to do.’

In September they paid a week’s visit to General and Mrs. Pitt- Rivers at Rushmore, and much enjoyed the time. It was on the occasion of the annual sports at the Larmer Tree, and a full moon and clear sky favouring, the dancing on the green was a great success. The local paper gives more than a readable description of the festivity for this particular year:

‘After nightfall the scene was one of extraordinary picturesqueness and poetry, its great features being the illumination of the grounds by thousands of Vauxhall lamps, and the dancing of hundreds of couples under these lights and the mellow radiance of the full moon. For the dancing a space was especially enclosed, the figures chosen being mostly the polka-mazurka and schottische, though some country dances were started by the house-party, and led off by the beautiful Mrs. Grove, the daughter of General Pitt-Rivers, and her charming sister-in-law, Mrs. Pitt. Probably at no other spot in England could such a spectacle have been witnessed at any time. One could hardly believe that one was not in a suburb of Paris, instead of a corner in old-fashioned Wiltshire, nearly ten miles from a railway-station in any direction.’

It may be worth mentioning that, passionately fond of dancing as Hardy had been from earliest childhood, this was the last occasion on which he ever trod a measure, according to his own recollection; at any rate on the greensward, which is by no means so springy to the foot as it looks, and left him stiff in the knees for some succeeding days. It was he who started the country dances, his partner being the above-mentioned Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Grove.

A garden-party of their own at Max Gate finished the summer doings of the Hardys this year; and a very different atmosphere from that of dancing on the green soon succeeded for him, of the coming of which, by a strange divination, he must have had a suspicion, else why should he have made the following note beforehand?

‘“ Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” Words said to Jowett by a very practical friend.’

On the 1 st November Jude the Obscure was published.

A week after, on the 8th, he sets down:

‘England seventy years ago. — I have heard of a girl, now a very old woman, who in her youth was seen following a goose about the common all the afternoon to get a quill from the bird, with which the parish-clerk could write for her a letter to her lover. Such a first-hand method of getting a quill-pen for important letters was not infrequent at that date.’ It may be added that Hardy himself had written such love-letters, and read the answers to them: but this was after the use of the quill had been largely abandoned for that of the steel pen, though old people still stuck to quills, and Hardy himself had to practise his earliest lessons in writing with a quill.

The onslaught upon Jude started by the vituperative section of the press — unequalled in violence since the publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads thirty years before — was taken up by the anonymous writers of libellous letters and post-cards, and other such gentry. It spread to America and Australia, whence among other appreciations he received a letter containing a packet of ashes, which the virtuous writer stated to be those of his iniquitous novel.

Thus, though Hardy with his quick sense of humour could not help seeing a ludicrous side to it all, and was well enough aware that the evil complained of was what these ‘nice minds with nasty ideas’ had read into his book, and not what he had put there, he underwent the strange experience of beholding a sinister lay figure of himself constructed by them, which had no sort of resemblance to him as he was, and which he, and those who knew him well, would not have recognized as being meant for himself if it had not been called by his name. Macaulay’s remark in his essay on Byron was well illustrated by Thomas Hardy’s experience at this time: ‘ We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’

In contrast to all this it is worth while to quote what Swinburne wrote to Hardy after reading Jude the Obscure:

‘The tragedy — if I may venture an opinion — is equally beautiful and terrible in its pathos. The beauty, the terror, and the truth, are all yours and yours alone. But (if I may say so) how cruel you are! Only the great and awful father of “Pierrette” and “L’Enfant Maudit” was ever so merciless to his children. I think it would hardly be seemly to enlarge on all that I admire in your work — or on half of it. — The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise, but I will risk saying how thankful we should be (I know that I may speak for other admirers as cordial as myself) for another admission into an English paradise “under the greenwood tree”.

But if you prefer to be — or to remain — the most tragic of authors no doubt you may; for Balzac is dead, and there has been no such tragedy in fiction — on anything like the same lines — since he died.

‘Yours most sincerely,

‘A. C. Swinburne.’

Three letters upon this same subject, written by Hardy himself to a close friend, may appropriately be given here.

Letter I

‘Max Gate,

‘Dorchester,

‘November 10th, 1895.

“... Your review (of Jude the Obscure) is the most discriminating that has yet appeared. It required an artist to see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed — I ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point, the characters necessitated it, and I simply let it come. As for the story itself, it is really sent out to those into whose souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some time of their lives. But one cannot choose one’s readers.

‘It is curious that some of the papers should look upon the novel as a manifesto on ‘the marriage question’ (although, of course, it involves it), seeing that it is concerned first with the labours of a poor student to get a University degree, and secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament peculiar to the family of the, parties. The only remarks which can be said to bear on the general marriage question occur in dialogue, and comprise no more than half a dozen pages in a book of five hundred. And of these remarks I state (p. 362) that my own views are not expressed therein. I suppose the attitude of these critics is to be accounted for by the accident that, during the serial publication of my story, a sheaf of “ purpose “ novels on the matter appeared.