Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1174 page)

‘Now why such migrations to cities did not largely take place till within the last forty years or so is, I think (in respect of farm labourers), that they had neither the means nor the knowledge in old times that they have now. And owing to the then stability of villagers of the other class — such as mechanics and small traders, the backbone of village life — they had not the inclination. The tenure of these latter was, down to about fifty years ago, a fairly secure one, even if they were not in the possession of small freeholds. The custom of granting leaseholds for three lives, or other life-holding privileges, obtained largely in our villages, and though tenures by lifehold may not be ideally good or fair, they did at least serve the purpose of keeping the native population at home. Villages in which there is now not a single cottager other than a weekly tenant were formerly occupied almost entirely on the life-hold principle, the term extending over seventy or a hundred years; and the young man who knows that he is secure of his father’s and grandfather’s cottage for his own lifetime thinks twice and three times before he embarks on the uncertainties of a wandering career. Now though, as I have said, these cottagers were not often farm labourers, their permanency reacted on the farm labourers, and made their lives with such comfortable associates better worth living.

‘Thirdly: as to the future, the evils of instability, and the ultimate results from such a state of things, it hardly becomes me to attempt to prophesy here. That remedies exist for them and are easily applicable you will easily gather from what I have stated above.’

‘April 20. Vagg Hollow, on the way to Load Bridge (Somerset) is a place where “things” used to be seen — usually taking the form of a wool-pack in the middle of the road. Teams and other horses always stopped on the brow of the hollow, and could only be made to go on by whipping. A waggoner once cut at the pack with his whip: it opened in two, and smoke and a hoofed figure rose out of it.’

‘May 1. Life is what we make it as Whist is what we make it; but not as Chess is what we make it; which ranks higher as a purely intellectual game than either Whist or Life.’

Letter sent to and printed in The Academy and Literature, May 17, 1902, concerning a review of Maeterlinck’s Apology for Nature:

‘Sir,

‘In your review of M. Maeterlinck’s book you quote with seeming approval his vindication of Nature’s ways, which is (as I understand it) to the effect that, though she does not appear to be just from our point of view, she may practise a scheme of morality unknown to us, in which she is just. Now, admit but the bare possibility of such a hidden morality, and she would go out of court without the slightest stain on her character, so certain should we feel that indifference to morality was beneath her greatness.

‘Far be it from my wish to distrust any comforting fantasy, if it can be barely tenable. But alas, no profound reflection can be needed to detect the sophistry in M. Maeterlinck’s argument, and to see that the original difficulty recognized by thinkers like Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Haeckel, etc., and by most of the persons called pessimists, remains unsurmounted.

‘Pain has been, and pain is: no new sort of morals in Nature can remove pain from the past and make it pleasure for those who are its infallible estimators, the bearers therof. And no injustice, however slight, can be atoned for by her future generosity, however ample, so long as we consider Nature to be, or to stand for, unlimited power. The exoneration of an omnipotent Mother by her retrospective justice becomes an absurdity when we ask, what made the foregone injustice necessary to her Omnipotence?

‘So you cannot, I fear, save her good name except by assuming one of two things: that she is blind and not a judge of her actions’ or that she is an automaton, and unable to control them: in either of which assumptions, though you have the chivalrous satisfaction of screening one of her sex, you only throw responsibility a stage further back.

‘But the story is not new. It is true, nevertheless, that, as M. Maeterlinck contends, to dwell too long amid such reflections does no good, and that to model our conduct on Nature’s apparent conduct, as Nietzsche would have taught, can only bring disaster to humanity.

‘Yours truly,

‘Thomas Hardy.

‘Max Gate, Dorchester.’

In June Hardy was engaged in a correspondence in the pages of the Dorset County Chronicle on Edmund Kean’s connection with Dorchester, which town he visited as a player before he became famous, putting up with his wife and child at an inn called ‘The Little Jockey’ on Glyde-Path Hill (standing in Hardy’s time). His child died whilst here, and was buried in Trinity Churchyard near at hand. The entry in the register runs as follows:

‘Burials in the Parish of Holy Trinity in Dorchester in the County of Dorset in the year 1813:

‘Name, Howard, son of Edmund and Mary Kean. Abode, Residing at Glyde Path Hill in this Parish. When buried, Nov. 24. Age 4. By whom the Ceremony was performed, Henry John Richman.’

Readers of the life of Kean will remember the heaviness of heart with which he noted his experience at Dorchester on this occasion — that it was a very wet night, that there was a small audience, that, unless we are mistaken, the play was Coriolanus (fancy playing Corio- lanus at Dorchester now!), that he performed his part badly. Yet he was standing on the very brink of fame, for it was on this very occasion that the emissary from Old Drury — Arnold, the stage manager — witnessed his performance, and decided that he was the man for the London boards.

In his letters to the paper under the pseudonym of ‘History’ Hardy observed:

‘Your correspondent “Dorset” who proposes to “turn the hose” upon the natural interest of Dorchester people in Edmund Kean, should, I think, first turn the hose upon his own uncharitableness. His contention amounts to this, that because one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of English tragedians was not without blemish in his morals, no admiration is to be felt for his histrionic achievements, or regard for the details of his life. So, then, Lord Nelson should have no place in our sentiment, nor Burns, nor Byron — not even Shakespeare himself — nor unhappily many another great man whose flesh has been weak. With amusing maladroitness your correspondent calls himself by the name of the county which has lately commemorated King Charles the Second — a worthy who seduced scores of men’s wives, to Kean’s one.

‘Kean was, in truth, a sorely tried man, and it is no wonder that he may have succumbed. The illegitimate child of a struggling actress, the vicissitudes and hardships of his youth and young manhood left him without moral ballast when the fire of his genius brought him success and adulation. The usual result followed, and owing to the publicity of his life it has been his misfortune ever since to have, like Cassius in Julius Caesar,

All his faults observed,

Set in a note-book, learn’d and conn’d by rote,

by people who show the Christian feeling of your correspondent.’

The following week Hardy sent a supplementary note:

‘One word as to the building [in Dorchester] in which Kean performed in 1813. There is little doubt that it was in the old theatre yet existing [though not as such], stage and all, at the back of Messrs. Godwin’s china shop; and for these among other reasons. A new theatre in North Square [Qy. Back West Street?], built by Curme, was opened in February 1828, while there are still dwellers in Dorchester who have heard persons speak of seeing plays in the older theatre about 1821 or 1822, Kean’s visit having been only a few years earlier.’

During the latter half of this year 1902 Hardy was working more or less on the first part of The Dynasts, which was interrupted in August and September by bicycle trips, and in October by a short stay in Bath, where the cycling was continued. On one of these occasions, having reached Bristol by road, and suddenly entered on the watered streets, he came off into the mud with a side-slip, and was rubbed down by a kindly coal-heaver with one of his sacks. In this condition he caught sight of some rare old volume in a lumber- shop; and looking him up and down when he asked the price, the woman who kept the shop said: ‘Well, sixpence won’t hurt ye, I suppose?’ He used to state that if he had proposed threepence he would doubtless have got the volume.

To a correspondent who was preparing a Report on Capital Punishment for the Department of Economics, Stanford University, California, and who asked for the expression of his opinion on the advisability of abolishing it in highly civilized communities, he replied about this time:

‘As an acting magistrate I think that Capital Punishment operates as a deterrent from deliberate crimes against life to an extent that no other form of punishment can rival. But the question of the moral right of a community to inflict that punishment is one I cannot enter into in this necessarily brief communication.’

It may be observed that the writer describes himself as an ‘acting magistrate’, yet he acted but little at sessions. He was not infrequently, however, on Grand Juries at the Assizes, where he would meet with capital offences.

Returning to the country in July he sat down to finish the first part of The Dynasts, the MS. of which was sent to the Messrs. Mac- millan at the end of September. He then corrected the proofs of A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ for the North American Review, in which pages it was published in November. When the ballad was read in England by the few good judges who met with it, they reproached Hardy with sending it out of the country for publication, not knowing that it was first offered to the Cornhill Magazine, and declined by the editor on the ground of it not being a poem he could possibly print in a family periodical. That there was any impropriety in the verses had never struck the author at all, nor did it strike any readers, so far as he was aware.

In December he answered an inquiry addressed to him by the editor of L’Europien, an international journal published in Paris:

‘I would say that I am not of opinion that France is in a decadent state. Her history seems to take the form of a serrated line, thus:

and a true judgement of her general tendency cannot be based on a momentary observation, but must extend over whole periods of variation.

‘What will sustain France as a nation is, I think, her unique accessibility to new ideas, and her ready power of emancipation from those which reveal themselves to be effete.’

In the same month of December the first part of The Dynasts was published.

It was some time in this year that Hardy, in concurrence with his brother and sisters, erected in Stinsford Church a brass tablet to commemorate the connection of his father, grandfather, and uncle with the musical services there in the early part of the previous century — the west gallery, wherein their ministrations had covered altogether about forty years, having been removed some sixty years before this date. The inscription on the brass runs as follows:

In drawing up this inscription Hardy was guided by his belief that the English language was liable to undergo great alterations in the future, whereas Latin would remain unchanged.

CHAPTER XXVII

PART FIRST OF ‘THE DYNASTS’

1904-1905: Aet. 63-65

As The Dynasts contained ideas of some freshness, and was not a copy of something else, a large number of critics were too puzzled by it to be unprejudiced. The appraisement of the work was in truth, while nominally literary, at the core narrowly Philistine, and even theosophic. Its author had erroneously supposed that by writing a frank preface on his method — that the scheme of the drama was based on a tentative theory of things which seemed to accord with the mind of the age; but that whether such theory did or not so accord, and whether it were true or false, little affected his object, which was a poetical one wherein nothing more was necessary than that the theory should be plausible — a polemic handling of his book would be avoided. Briefly, that the drama being advanced not as a reasoned system of philosophy, nor as a new philosophy, but as a poem, with the discrepancies that are to be expected in an imaginative work, as such it would be read.