Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1170 page)

‘1897. January 27. To-day has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour, or articulate sound.’

‘January 30. Somebody says that the final dictum of the Ion of Plato is “inspiration, not art”. The passage is Greek text. And what is really meant by it is, I think, more nearly expressed by the words “inspiration, not technicality” — “art” being too comprehensive in English to use here.’

‘February 4. Title: “Wessex Poems: with Sketches of their Scenes by the Author”.’

‘February 10. In spite of myself I cannot help noticing countenances and tempers in objects of scenery, e.g. trees, hills, houses.’

‘February 21. My mother’s grandfather, Swetman — a descendant of the Christopher Swetman of 1631 mentioned in the History of the County as a small landed proprietor in the parish — used to have an old black bedstead, with the twelve apostles on it in carved figures, each about one foot six inches high. Some of them got loose, and the children played with them as dolls. What became of that bedstead?’

‘March 1. Make a lyric of the speech of Hyllus at the close of the Trachiniae.’ (It does not appear that this was ever carried out.)

At the beginning of March a dramatization of Tess of the d’Urber- villes was produced in America with much success by Mr. Fiske. About the same date Hardy went with Sir Francis Jeune to a banquet at the Mansion House in honour of Mr. Bayard, the American Ambassador, on his leaving England, which Hardy described as a ‘brilliant gathering’, though the night was so drenching and tempestuous as to blow off house-roofs and flood cellars. In the middle of the month a revised form of a novel of his which had been published serially in 1892 as The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, was issued in volume form as The Well-Beloved. The theory on which this fantastic tale of a subjective idea was constructed is explained in the preface to the novel, and again exemplified in a poem bearing the same name, written about this time and published with Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901 — the theory of the transmigration of the ideal beloved one, who only exists in the lover, from material woman to material woman — as exemplified also by Proust many years later. Certain critics affected to find unmentionable moral atrocities in its pages, but Hardy did not answer any of the charges further than by defining in a letter to a literary periodical the scheme of the story somewhat more fully than he had done in the preface:

‘Not only was it published serially five years ago but it was sketched many years before that date, when I was comparatively a young man, and interested in the Platonic Idea, which, considering its charm and its poetry, one could well wish to be interested in always. . . . There is, of course, underlying the fantasy followed by the visionary artist the truth that all men are pursuing a shadow, the Unattainable, and I venture to hope that this may redeem the tragicomedy from the charge of frivolity. . . . “Avice” is an old name common in the county, and “Caro” (like all the other surnames) is an imitation of a local name . . . this particular modification having been adopted because of its resemblance to the Italian for “dear”.’

In reply to an inquiry from an editor he wrote:

‘No: I do not intend to answer the article on The Well-Beloved. Personal abuse best answers itself. What struck me, next to its mendacious malice, was its maladroitness, as if the writer were blinded by malignity. . . . Upon those who have read the book the review must have produced the amazed risibility I remember feeling at Wilding’s assertions when as a youth I saw Foote’s comedy of The Liar. . . . There is more fleshliness in The Loves of the Triangles than in this story — at least to me. To be sure, there is one explanation which should not be overlooked: a reviewer himself afflicted with “sex mania” might review so — a thing terrible to think of.’

Such were the odd effects of Hardy’s introduction of the subjective theory of love into modern fiction, and so ended his prose contributions to literature (beyond two or three short sketches to fulfil engagements), his experiences of the few preceding years having killed all his interest in this form of imaginative work, which had ever been secondary to his interest in verse.

A letter from him to Swinburne was written about this time, in which he says:

‘I must thank you for your kind note about my fantastic little tale [ The Well-Beloved], which, if it can make, in its better parts, any faint claim to imaginative feeling, will owe something of such feeling to you, for I often thought of lines of yours during the writing; and indeed, was not able to resist the quotation of your words now and then.

‘And this reminds me that one day, when examining several English imitations of a well-known fragment of Sappho, I interested myself in trying to strike out a better equivalent for it than the commonplace “Thou, too, shalt die”, etc., which all the translators had used during the last hundred years. I then stumbled upon your “Thee, too, the years shall cover”, and all my spirit for poetic pains died out of me. Those few words present, I think, the finest drama of Death and Oblivion, so to speak, in our tongue.

‘Believe me to be ‘Yours very sincerely,

‘Thomas Hardy.’

‘P.S. — I should have added that The Well-Beloved is a fancifu exhibition of the artistic nature, and has, I think, some little foundation in fact. I have been much surprised, and even grieved, by a ferocious review attributing an immoral quality to the tale. The writer’s meaning is beyond me. T. H.’

PART II - VERSE, TO THE END OF ‘THE DYNASTS’

CHAPTER XXIV

COLLECTING OLD POEMS AND MAKING NEW

1897-1898: Aet. 57-58

The misrepresentations of the last two or three years affected but little, if at all, the informed appreciation of Hardy’s writings, being heeded almost entirely by those who had not read him; and turned out ultimately to be the best thing that could have happened; for they wellnigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form of it which had always been more instinctive with him, and which he had just been able to keep alive from his early years, half in secrecy, under the pressure of magazine writing. He abandoned it with all the less reluctance in that the novel was, in his own words, ‘gradually losing artistic form, with a beginning, middle, and end, and becoming a spasmodic inventory of items, which has nothing to do with art’.

The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment. He had mostly aimed at keeping his narratives close to natural life and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow, and had often regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still.

Nevertheless he had not known, whilst a writer of prose, whether he might not be driven to society novels, and hence, as has been seen, he had kept, at casual times, a record of his experiences in social life, though doing it had always been a drudgery to him. It was now with a sense of great comfort that he felt he might leave off further chronicles of that sort. But his thoughts on literature and life were often written down still, and from his notes much of which follows has been abridged.

He had already for some time been getting together the poems 291

which made up the first volume of verse that he was about to publish. In date they ranged from 1865 intermittently onwards, the middle period of his novel-writing producing very few or none, but of late years they had been added to with great rapidity, though at first with some consternation he had found an awkwardness in getting back to an easy expression in numbers after abandoning it for so many years; but that soon wore off.

He and his wife went to London as usual this year (1897), but did not take a house there. After two or three weeks’ stay they adopted the plan of living some way out, and going up and down every few days, the place they made their temporary centre being Basingstoke. In this way they saw London friends, went to concerts at the Imperial Institute (the orchestra this season being the famous Vienna band under Edouard Strauss), saw one or two Ibsen plays, and the year’s pictures. Being near they also went over the mournful relics of that city of the past, Silchester; till in the middle of June they started for Switzerland, thus entirely escaping the racket of the coming Diamond Jubilee, and the discomfort it would bring upon people like them who had no residence of their own in London.

All the world, including the people of fashion habitually abroad, was in London or arriving there, and the charm of a lonely Continent impressed the twain much. The almost empty Channel steamer, the ease with which they crossed France from Havre by Paris, Dijon, and Pontarlier to Neuchatel, the excellent rooms accorded them by obsequious hosts at the hotels in Switzerland, usually frequented by English and American tourists, made them glad they had come. On the actual day, the 20th, they were at Berne, where they celebrated it by attending a Jubilee Concert in the Cathedral, with the few others of their fellow-countryfolk who remained in the town. At Interlaken the comparative solitude was just as refreshing, the rosy glow from the Jungfrau, visible at three in the morning from Hardy’s bedroom, seeming an exhibition got up for themselves alone; and a pathetic procession of empty omnibuses went daily to and from each railway train between shops that looked like a banquet spread for people who delayed to come. They drove up the valley to Grindelwald, and having been conveyed to Scheidegg, walked thence to the Wengern Alp — overlooking the scene of Manfred — where a ljaby had just been born, and where Hardy was more impressed by the thundering rumble of unseen avalanches on the immense Jungfrau immediately facing than by the sight of the visible ones.

The next day, or the next following, The Times account of the celebration in London of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee reached Hardy’s hands, and he took it out and read it in the snowy presence of the maiden-monarch that dominated the whole place.

It was either in the train as it approached Interlaken, or while he was there looking at the peak, that there passed through his mind the sentiments afterwards expressed in the lines called ‘The Schreck- horn: with thoughts of Leslie Stephen’.

After a look at Lauterbrunnen, the Staubbach, the Lake and Castle of Thun, they stopped at the Hotel Gibbon, Lausanne, Hardy not having that aversion from the historian of the Decline and Fall which Ruskin recommended. He found that, though not much might remain of the original condition of the building or the site, the remoter and sloping part of the garden, with its acacias and irregular contours, could not have been much changed from what it was when Gibbon haunted it, and finished his history. Accordingly his recaller sat out there till midnight on June 27, and imagined the historian closing his last page on the spot, as described in his Autobiography:

‘It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.’

It is uncertain whether Hardy chose that particular evening for sitting out in the garden because he knew that June 27th was Gibbon’s date of conclusion, or whether the coincidence of dates was accidental. The later author’s imaginings took the form of the lines subjoined, which were printed in Poems of the Past and the Present.

LAUSANNE

In Gibbon s old garden: 11-12 p.m.

June 27, 1897

A spirit seems to pass,

Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand:

He contemplates a volume in his hand,

And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

Anon the book is closed,

With ‘It is finished!’

And at the alley’s end

He turns, and when on me his glances bend

As from the Past comes speech — small, muted, yet composed.

‘How fares the Truth now? — Ill? —

Do pens but slily further her advance?

May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

‘Still rule those minds on earth

At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:

“Truth like a bastard comes into the world

Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth “?’1

1 The quotation is from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the passage running as follows: ‘Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch, as the sunbeam; though this ill hap wait on her nativity, that she never comes into the world, but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth; till Time, the midwife rather than the mother of truth, have washed and salted the infant and declared her legitimate.

From Lausanne, making excursions to Ouchy, and by steamer to Territet, Chillon, Vevey, and other places on the lake, they afterwards left for Zermatt, going along the valley of the Rhone amid intense heat till they gradually rose out of it beside the roaring torrent of the Visp. That night Hardy looked out of their bedroom window in the Hotel Mt. Cervin, and ‘ Could see where the Matterhorn was by the absence of stars within its outline’, it being too dark to see the surface of the mountain itself although it stood facing him. He meant to make a poem of the strange feeling implanted by this black silhouette of the mountain on the pattern of the constellation; but never did, so far as is known. However, the mountain inspired him to begin one sonnet, finished some time after — that entitled ‘ To the Matterhorn ‘ — the terrible accident on whose summit, thirty-two years before this date, had so impressed him at the time of its occurrence.