Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1173 page)

When they left London this year is uncertain, but we find Hardy at the latter part of July bicycling about Dorset with his friend Mr. (later Sir) Hamo Thornycroft, and in August entertaining Mr. A. E. Housman, Mr. Clodd, and Sir Frederick Pollock, bicycling from Max Gate to Portland Bill and back in one day with the last named, a performance whose chief onerousness lay in roughness of road surface and steepness of gradient. Cycling went merrily along through August, September, and into October, mostly with Mrs. Hardy and other companions, reaching to the outskirts of the county and into Somerset, Devon, and Hants. In October, declining to be interviewed by the representative of the American National Red Cross Society, he wrote as a substitute:

‘A society for the relief of suffering is entitled to every man’s gratitude; and though, in the past century, material growth has been out of all proportion to moral growth, the existence of your Society leaves one not altogether without hope that during the next hundred years the relations between our inward and our outward progress may become less of a reproach to civilization.’

In the same month he replied to the Rev. J. Alexander Smith:

‘On referring to the incident in Tess of the d’Urbervilles to which you draw my attention, I do not find there anything more than an opinion, or feeling, on lay baptism by a person who was nettled at having his clerical ministration of the rite repulsed. The truth or error of his opinion is therefore immaterial. Nevertheless if it were worth while it might be plausibly argued that to refuse clerical performance and substitute lay performance not from necessity but from pure obstinacy (as he held), might deprive that particular instance of lay baptism of its validity.’

At the very close of the year Hardy’s much admired poem on the Century’s End, entitled ‘The Darkling Thrush’, was published in a periodical.

[end of the nineteenth century]

CHAPTER XXVI

‘POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT’, AND OTHERS

1901-1903: Aet. 60-63

May found them in London, and hearing music. At an Ysaye Concert at Queen’s Hall a passage in the descriptive programme evidently struck him — whether with amusement at the personifications in the rhetoric, or admiration for it, is not mentioned — for he takes the trouble to copy it:

‘“ The solo enters at the twelfth bar. . . . Later in the movement a new theme is heard — a brief episode, the thematic material of the opening sufficing the composer’s needs. In the Adagio the basses announce and develop a figure. Over this the soloists and first violins enter”, etc. (Bach’s Concerto in E.) I see them: black- headed, lark-spurred fellows, marching in on five wires.’

‘May 11. Leslie Stephen says: “The old ideals have become obsolete, and the new are not yet constructed. . . . We cannot write living poetry on the ancient model. The gods and heroes are too dead, and we cannot seriously sympathize with . . . the idealised prize-fighter.”‘

A few days later Hardy chronicles a feat of execution by Kubelik at a concert he attended at St. James’s Hall — that of playing ‘ pizzicato’ on his violin the air of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ with Ernst’s variations, and fingering and bowing a rapid accompaniment at the same time. At Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s Madame Sarah Bernhardt talked to him pensively on her consciousness that she was getting old, but on his taking his wife a day or two later to see her as the Due in M. Rostand’s L’Aiglon she appeared youthful enough, he said, ‘though unfortunately too melodramatically lime-lighted for naturalness’.

At the end of the month the well-known literary and journalistic fraternity called the Whitefriars Club paid Hardy a visit at Max Gate, where they were entertained in a tent on the lawn. To diversify their journey from London they had travelled the last ten miles by road in open carriages, and the beautiful new summer dresses of the ladies were encrusted with dust. But nobody minded — except perhaps some of the ladies themselves — and the visit was a most lively one, though the part of the country they had driven through was not the most picturesque part.

Thomas Hardy’s mother, now in her eighty-eighth year, was greatly interested to hear of this visit of the Club to the home of her son. Her devoted daughters, Mary and Katherine, promised to take her in her wheeled chair, for she was no longer able to walk abroad as formerly, to see the carriages drive past the end of a lane leading from Higher Bockhampton to the foot of Yellowham Hill, some three miles from Max Gate.

On the day appointed, the chair, its two attendants, and its occupant, a little bright-eyed lady in a shady hat, waited under some trees bordering the roadside for the members of the Whitefriars Club to pass.

Mrs. Hardy had announced gaily that she intended to wave her handkerchief to the travellers, but her more sedate daughters urged that this was not to be done. However, as soon as the dusty vehicles had whirled past the old lady pulled out a handkerchief which she had concealed under the rug covering her knees, and waved it triumphantly at the disappearing party. So unquenchable was her gay and youthful spirit even when approaching her ninetieth year.

Long afterwards one member of the visiting party said to the present writer: ‘If we had known who that was, what cheers there would have been, what waving of handkerchiefs, what a greeting for Thomas Hardy’s mother!’

In a letter on Rationalism written about this time, but apparently not sent, he remarks:

‘My own interest lies largely in non-rationalistic subjects, since non-rationality seems, so far as one can perceive, to be the principle of the Universe. By which I do not mean foolishness, but rather a principle for which there is no exact name, lying at the indifference point between rationality and irrationality.’

In reply to the letter of an inquirer as to the preservation of the prospect from Richmond Hill, he wrote, 10th June 1901:

‘I have always been in love with Richmond Hill — the Lass mcluded — and though I think I could produce a few specimens from this part of the country that would be fairly even with it, or her, in point of beauty, I am grieved to hear that the world-famed view is in danger of disfigurement. I cannot believe that any such foolish local policy will be persevered in.’

To Dr. Arnaldo Cervesato of Rome ‘June 20, 1901.

‘I do not think that there will be any permanent revival of the old transcendental ideals; but I think there may gradually be developed an Idealism of Fancy; that is, an idealism in which fancy is no longer tricked out and made to masquerade as belief, but is frankly and honestly accepted as an imaginative solace in the lack of any substantial solace to be found in life.’

‘July 8. Pictures. My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.’

During the seven weeks ensuing he was preparing for the press a number of lyrics and other verses which had accumulated since Wessex Poems appeared, and sent off the manuscript to the publishers at the end of August. It was published in the middle of November under the title of Poems of the Past and the Present. He seems to have taken no notice of the reception accorded to the book by the press, though it might have flattered him to find that some characteristic ideas in this volume — which he never tried to make consistent — such as in the pieces entitled ‘The Sleep-worker’, ‘The Lacking Sense’, ‘Doom and She’, and others — ideas that were further elabourated in The Dynasts, found their way into many prose writings after this date.

On the last day of the year he makes the following reflection: ‘After reading various philosophic systems, and being struck with their contradictions and futilities, I have come to this: Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience. He will not be able to escape using terms and phraseology from earlier philosophers, but let him avoid adopting their theories if he values his own mental life. Let him remember the fate of Coleridge, and save years of labour by working out his own views as given him by his surroundings.’

‘January 1 (1902). A Pessimist’s apology. Pessimism (or rather what is called such) is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.’

In reply this month to a writer in the Parisian Revue Bleue he gave it as his opinion that the effect of the South African War on English literature had been:

‘A vast multiplication of books on the war itself, and the issue of large quantities of warlike and patriotic poetry. These works naturally throw into the shade works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit; a curious minor feature in the case among a certain class of writers being the disguise under Christian terminology of principles not necessarily wrong from the point of view of international politics, but obviously anti-Christian, because inexorable and masterful.’

In view of the approaching centenary of Victor Hugo’s birth, Hardy, amongst other European men of letters, was asked at this time by a Continental paper for a brief tribute to the genius of the poet; and he sent the following:

‘His memory must endure. His works are the cathedrals of literary architecture, his imagination adding greatness to the colossal and charm to the small.’

‘March. Poetry. There is a latent music in the sincere utterance of deep emotion, however expressed, which fills the place of the actual word-music in rhythmic phraseology on thinner emotive subjects, or on subjects with next to none at all. And supposing a total poetic effect to be represented by a unit, its component fractions may be either, say:

‘Emotion three-quarters, plus Expression one quarter, or ‘Emotion one quarter, plus Expression three-quarters.

‘This suggested conception seems to me to be the only one which explains all cases, including those instances of verse that apparently infringe all rules, and yet bring unreasoned convictions that they are poetry.’

In April of this year he was writing ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ — a ballad based on some local story of an event more or less resembling the incidents embodied, which took place between 1820

and 1830. Hardy considered this, upon the whole, his most successful poem.

To Mr. (afterwards Sir) Rider Haggard, who was investigating the conditions of agriculture and agricultural labourers, he gave the following information:

‘March, 1902.

‘My dear Haggard,

‘As to your first question, my opinion on the past of the agricultural labourers in this county: I think, indeed know, that down to 1850 or 1855 their condition was in general one of great hardship. I say in general, for there have always been fancy-farms, resembling St. Clair’s in Uncle Toms Cabin, whereon they lived as smiling exceptions to those of their class all around them. I recall one such, the estate-owner being his own farmer, and ultimately ruining himself by his hobby. To go to the other extreme: as a child I knew a sheep-keeping boy who to my horror shortly afterwards died of want — the contents of his stomach at the autopsy being raw turnip only. His father’s wages were six shillings a week, with about two pounds at harvest, a cottage rent free, and an allowance of thorn faggots from the hedges as fuel. Between these examples came the great bulk of farms — wages whereon ranged from seven to nine shillings a week, and perquisites being better in proportion.

‘Secondly: as to the present. Things are of course widely different now. I am told that at the annual hiring-fair just ‘past, the old positions were absolutely reversed, the farmers walking about and importuning the labourers to come and be hired, instead of, as formerly, the labourers anxiously entreating the stolid farmers to take them on at any pittance. Their present life is almost without exception one of comfort, if the most ordinary thrift be observed. I could take you to the cottage of a shepherd not many miles from here that has a carpet and brass-rods to the staircase, and from the open door of which you hear a piano strumming within. Of course bicycles stand by the doorway, while at night a large paraffin lamp throws out a perfect blaze of light upon the passer-by.

‘The son of another labourer I know takes dancing lessons at a quadrille-class in the neighbouring town. Well, why not?

‘But changes at which we must all rejoice have brought other changes which are not so attractive. The labourers have become more and more migratory — the younger families in especial, who enjoy nothing so much as fresh scenery and new acquaintance. The consequences are curious and unexpected. For one thing, village tradition — a vast mass of unwritten folk-lore, local chronicle, local topography, and nomenclature — is absolutely sinking, has nearly sunk, into eternal oblivion. I cannot recall a single instance of a labourer who still lives on the farm where he was born, and I can only recall a few who have been five years on their present farms. Thus you see, there being no continifity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next. For example, if you ask one of the workfolk (they always used to be called “workfolk” hereabout — “labourers” is an imported word) the names of surrounding hills, streams; the character and circumstances of people buried in particular graves; at what spots parish personages lie interred; questions on local fairies, ghosts, herbs, etc., they can give no answer: yet I can recollect the time when the places of burial even of the poor and tombless were all remembered, and the history of the parish and squire’s family for 150 years back known. Such and such ballads appertained to such and such a locality, ghost tales were attached to particular sites, and nooks wherein wild herbs grew for the cure of divers maladies were pointed out readily.

‘On the subject of the migration to the towns I think I have printed my opinions from time to time: so that I will only say a word or two about it here. In this consideration the case of the farm labourers merges itself in that of rural cottagers generally, including jobbing labourers, artizans, and nondescripts of all sorts who go to make up the body of English villagery. That these people have removed to the towns of sheer choice during the last forty years it would be absurd to argue, except as to that percentage of young, adventurous and ambitious spirits among them which is found in all societies. The prime cause of the removal is, unquestionably, insecurity of tenure. If they do not escape this in the towns it is not fraught with such trying consequences there as in a village, whence they may have to travel ten or twenty miles to find another house and other work. Moreover, if in a town lodgings an honest man’s daughter should have an illegitimate child, or his wife should take to drinking, he is not compelled by any squire to pack up his furniture and get his living elsewhere, as is, or was lately, too often the case m the country. (I am neither attacking nor defending this order of things; I merely relate it: the landlord sometimes had reason on his side; sometimes not.)