Complete works of thomas.., p.899
Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated), page 899
‘May. Reading in the British Museum. Have been thinking over the dictum of Hegel — that the real is the rational and the rational the real — that real pain is compatible with a formal pleasure — that the idea is all, etc., but it doesn’t help much. These venerable philosophers seem to start wrong; they cannot get away from a prepossession that the world must somehow have been made to be a comfortable place for man. If I remember, it was Comte who said that metaphysics was a mere sorry attempt to reconcile theology and physics.’
‘May 17. At a curious soiree in Bond Street. Met a Hindu Buddhist, a remarkably well-educated man who speaks English fluently. He is the coach of the Theosophical Society. Also encountered a Mr. E. Maitland, author of a book called The Pilgrim and the Shrine, which I remember. He mentioned also another, written, I think he said, by himself and Dr. Anna Kingsford in collabouration. If he could not get on with the work on any particular night he would go to her next morning and she would supply him with the sentences, written down by her on waking, as sentences she had dreamt of without knowing why. Met also Dr. Anna Kingsford herself, and others; all very strange people.’
The Mayor of Casterbridge was issued complete about the end of May. It was a story which Hardy fancied he had damaged more recklessly as an artistic whole, in the interest of the newspaper in which it appeared serially, than perhaps any other of his novels, his aiming to get an incident into almost every week’s part causing him in his own judgment to add events to the narrative somewhat too freely. However, as at this time he called his novel-writing ‘mere journeywork’ he cared little about it as art, though it must be said in favour of the plot, as he admitted later, that it was quite coherent and organic, in spite of its complication. And others thought better of it than he did himself, as is shown by the letter R. L. Stevenson writes thereon:
‘Skerryvore,
‘Bournemouth,
‘My dear Hardy,
‘I have read “ The Mayor of Casterbridge” with sincere admiration: Henchard is a great fellow, and Dorchester is touched in with the hand of a master.
‘Do you think you would let me try to dramatize it? I keep unusually well, and am ‘Yours very sincerely,
‘Robert Louis Stevenson.’
What became of this dramatic project there is no evidence to show in the Life of Stevenson, so far as is remembered by the present writer. The story in long after years became highly popular; but it is curious to find that Hardy had some difficulty in getting it issued in volume-form, James Payn, the publishers’ reader, having reported to Smith, Elder and Co. that the lack of gentry among the characters made it uninteresting — a typical estimate of what was, or was supposed to be, mid-Victorian taste.
During the remainder of this month, and through June and July, they were dining and lunching out almost every day. Hardy did not take much account of these functions, though some remarks he makes are interesting. For instance, he describes the charming daughter of a then popular hostess with whom he and his wife had been lunching:
‘MWis still as childlike as when I first met her. She has an instinct to give something which she cannot resist. Gave me a flower. She expresses as usual contrary opinions at different moments. At one time she is going to marry; then she never is: at one moment she has been ill; at another she is always well. Pities the row of poor husbands at Marshall and Snelgrove’s. Gave a poor crossing-sweeper a shilling; came back and found her drunk. An emotional delicate girl, in spite of what she calls her “largeness”, i.e. her being bigly built.’
In these weeks Hardy met Walter Pater, ‘whose manner is that of one carrying weighty ideas without spilling them’. Also a lot of politicians, on whom he notes: ‘ Plenty of form in their handling of politics, but no matter, or originality.’ Either on this occasion or a few days later the hostess, Mrs. Jeune, drew the attention of Justin McCarthy — also a guest — to the Conservative placard in her window. ‘I hope you don’t mind the blue bill?’ ‘Not at all,’ said the amiable McCarthy blandly. ‘Blue is a colour I have liked from a boy.’
At Mr. and Mrs. Gosse’s they met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his daughter:
‘His is a little figure, that of an aged boy. He said markedly that he did not read novels; I did not say I had never read his essays,
though it would have been true, I am ashamed to think. . . . But authors are not so touchy as they are supposed to be on such matters — at least I am not — and I found him a very bright, pleasant, juvenile old man.’ At a Rabelais Club dinner a few days later he renewed acquaintance with Dr. Holmes, and with Henry James, ‘who has a ponderously warm manner of saying nothing in infinite sentences’; and also talked to George Meredith. This may possibly have been the first time he and Meredith had met since Hardy received Meredith’s advice about novel-writing; but it is not clear that it was so. At dinners elsewhere in these weeks he met Whistler and Charles Keene, Bret Harte, Sambourne, and others — most of them for the first and last time; at Sidney Colvin’s he renewed acquaintance with R. L. Stevenson, then in London; and at another house sat next to a genial old lady, Lady Camperdown, and ‘could not get rid of the feeling that I was close to a great naval engagement’.
On some music of Wagner’s listened to at a concert at this time when it was less familiar to the public than after, Hardy remarks: ‘It was weather and ghost music — whistling of wind and storm, the strumming of a gale on iron railings, the creaking of doors; low screams of entreaty and agony through key-holes, amid which trumpet- voices are heard. Such music, like any other, may be made to express emotion of various kinds; but it cannot express the subject or reason of that emotion.’
Apropos of this it may be mentioned here that, many years after, Hardy met Grieg, and in doing his best to talk about music Hardy explained that Wagner’s compositions seemed to him like the wind- effects above described. ‘I would rather have the wind and rain myself,’ Grieg replied, shaking his head.
Mrs. Procter, who was still strong enough to go out, came to the Hardys to tea, and among her stores of anecdotes told one that was amusing about Macaulay and Sydney Smith, who had dined at her house in years gone by: when Macaulay had gone she said to Sydney Smith: ‘You gave him no chance at all to talk.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Sydney Smith, ‘I gave him several opportunities — which you took advantage of.’
It was during this summer that the Hardys either began or renewed their acquaintance with Mrs. Henry Reeve and her sister Miss Gollop, whose family was an old Dorset one; and with Reeve himself, the well-known editor of the Edinburgh Review and of the famous Greville Memoirs. Notwithstanding a slight pompousness of manner he attracted the younger man by his wide experience of Continental men of letters, musicians, and princes, and of English affairs political and journalistic.
‘June 29. Called on Leslie Stephen. He is just the same or worse; as if dying to express sympathy, but suffering under some terrible curse which prevents his saying any but caustic things, and showing antipathy instead.’ [Hardy was not aware that Stephen was unwell, and growing deaf, or he would not have put in this form his impression of a man he so much liked, and who had been so much to him.]
‘Afterwards had a good talk with Auberon Herbert at Lady Portsmouth’s. He said that the clue to Gladstone’s faults was personal vanity. His niece Lady Winifred Herbert, who was present, said that politics had revealed themselves to her as a horror of late. Nevertheless she insisted that to listen to our conversation on the same horror was not an infliction.’
Mr. George Gissing, finding that Hardy was in London this summer, had asked if he might call upon him for some advice about novel-writing; which he did. Sending one of his own novels afterwards, Gissing writes at the end of June:
‘It is possible you will find The Unclassed detestable. I myself should not dare to read it now, it is too saturated with bygone miseries of every kind. . . . May I add in one word what very real pleasure it has given me to meet and speak with you? I have not been the least careful of your readers, and in your books I have constantly found refreshment and onward help. That aid is much needed now- a-days by anyone who wishes to pursue literature as distinct from the profession of letters. In literature my interests begin and end; I hope to make my life and all its acquirements subservient to my ideal of artistic creation. The end of it all may prove ineffectual, but as well spend one’s strength thus as in another way. The misery of it is that, writing for English people, one may not be thorough: reticences and superficialities have so often to fill places where one is willing to put in honest work.’
‘July 11. Met and talked to Browning at Mrs. Procter’s again, and a day or two later at Mrs. Skirrow’s, where was also Oscar Wilde, etc.
‘In Rotten Row. Every now and then each woman, however interesting, puts on her battle face.
‘In evening to bookstalls in Holywell Street known to me so many years ago.’
Hardy by this time had quite resigned himself to novel-writing as a trade, which he had never wanted to carry on as such. He now went about the business mechanically. He was in court a part of the time during which the Crawford-Dilke case was proceeding. He makes no comment on the case itself, but a general remark on the court:
‘The personality which fills the court is that of the witness. The judge’s personality during the cross-examination contracts to his corporeal dimensions merely. So do they all save that of the pervasive witness aforesaid. . . . The witness is also the fool of the court. . . . The witness’s little peculiarities supersede those of all the other personages together. He is at once king and victim.
‘As to the architecture of the courts, there are everywhere religious art-forces masquerading as law symbols! The leaf, flower, fret, suggested by spiritual emotion, are pressed into the service of social strife.’
The remainder of his spare time in London this year appears to have been spent in the British Museum Library and elsewhere, considering the question of The Dynasts.
At the end of July they returned to Max Gate, where he went on with The IVoodlanders; and in October they paid another visit to Lady Portsmouth in Devon, where they had a pleasant week, visiting local scenes and surroundings down to the kennels (Lord Portsmouth being Master of Hounds) and the dogs’ cemetery. ‘ Lord Portsmouth made his whipper-in tell Emma the story of the hunted fox that ran up the old woman’s clock-case, adding corroborative words with much gravity as the story proceeded and enjoying it more than she did, though he had heard it 100 times.’
In October the Dorset poet William Barnes died. Hardy had known him ever since his schoolmastering time in South Street, Dorchester, next door to the architect under whom Hardy had served his years of pupillage. In 1864 Barnes had retired from school- keeping, and accepted the living of Winterborne-Came-cum-Whit- combe, the rectory house being, by chance, not half a mile from the only spot Hardy could find convenient for building a dwelling on. Hardy’s walk across the fields to attend the poet’s funeral was marked by the singular incident to which he alludes in the poem entitled ‘The Last Signal’. He also wrote an obituary notice of his friend for the Athenceum, which was afterwards drawn upon for details of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography. It was not till many years after that he made and edited a selection of Barnes’s poems.
The beginning of December covers this entry:
‘I often view society-gatherings, people in the street, in a room, or elsewhere, as if they were beings in a somnambulistic state, making their motions automatically — not realising what they mean.’
And a few days later another, when going to London:
‘December 7. Winter. The landscape has turned from a painting to an engraving: the birds that love worms fall back upon berries: the back parts of homesteads assume, in the general nakedness of the trees, a humiliating squalidness as to their details that has not been contemplated by their occupiers.
‘A man I met in the train says in a tone of bitter regret that he wore out seven sets of horseshoes in riding from Sturminster Newton to Weymouth when courting a young woman at the latter place. He did not say whether he won and married her, or not; but I fancy he did.
‘At the Society of British Artists there is good technique in abundance; but ideas for subjects are lacking. The impressionist school is strong. It is even more suggestive in the direction of literature than in that of art. As usual it is pushed to absurdity by some. But their principle is, as I understand it, that what you carry away with you from a scene is the true feature to grasp; or in other words, what appeals to your own individual eye and heart in particular amid much that does not so appeal, and which you therefore omit to record.
‘Talked to Bob Stevenson — Louis’s cousin — at the Savile. A more solid character than Louis.
‘Called on Mrs. Jeune. She was in a rich pinky-red gown, and looked handsome as we sat by the firelight en tete-a-tete: she was, curiously enough, an example of Whistler’s study in red that I had seen in the morning at the Gallery.
‘To Lady Carnarvon’s “ small and early”. Snow falling: the cabman drove me furiously — I don’t know why. The familiar man with the lantern at the door. Her drawing-room was differently arranged from its method during her summer crushes. They seemed glad to see me. Lady Winifred told me she was going to be married on the 10th of January at the Savoy Chapel, with other details of the wedding. She was serious and thoughtful — I fancied a little careworn. Said she was not going to let her honeymoon interfere with her reading, and means to carry a parcel of books. Spoke of her betrothed as ‘He’ — as a workman speaks of his employer — never mentioning his name. Wants me to call my heroine “Winifred”, but it is too late to alter it.
aet. 45-46MAX GATE185
‘Talked to Lady Carnarvon about the trees at Highclere in relation to my work in hand [The IVoodlanders]. Lord C. told me he had filled several bookshelves with books all written by members of his own family — from Sir Philip Sidney, who was his mother’s mother’s mother’s, etc. brother, downwards.
‘The last time, I suppose, that I shall see friendly Winifred Herbert pouring out tea from the big tea-pot in that house, as I have seen her do so many times. Lady Carnarvon went about the room weaving little webs of sympathy between her guests.’
So came the end of 1886.
January 1887 was uneventful at Max Gate, and the only remark its occupier makes during the month is the following:
‘After looking at the landscape ascribed to Bonington in our drawing-room I feel that Nature is played out as a Beauty, but not as a Mystery. I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e., scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities — as optical effects, that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.
‘The “simply natural” is interesting no longer. The much decried, mad, late-Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art — it is a student’s style — the style of a period when the mind is serene and unawakened to the tragical mysteries of life; when it does not bring anything to the object that coalesces with and translates the qualities that are already there, — half hidden, it may be — and the two united are depicted as the All.’
‘February 4, 8.20 p.m. Finished The IVoodlanders. Thought I should feel glad, but I do not particularly, — though relieved.’ In after years he often said that in some respects The IVoodlanders was his best novel.
‘February 6. Sunday. To see my father. It was three men whom he last saw flogged in Dorchester by the Town-pump — about 1830. He happened to go in from Stinsford about mid-day. Some soldiers coming down the street from the Barracks interfered, and swore at Davis [Jack Ketch] because he did not “flog fair”; that is to say he waited between each lash for the flesh to recover sensation, whereas, as they knew from experience, by striking quickly the flesh remained numb through several strokes.’
‘February 13. You may regard a throng of people as containing a certain small minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing. So you divide them into the mentally unquickened, mechanical, soulless; and the living, throbbing, suffering, vital. In other words, into souls and machines, ether and clay.
‘I was thinking a night or two ago that people are somnambulists — that the material is not the real — only the visible, the real being invisible optically. That it is because we are in a somnambulistic hallucination that we think the real to be what we see as real.
‘Faces. The features to beholders so commonplace are to their possessor lineaments of high estimation, striking, hopeful.’
Having now some leisure, and the spring drawing near, Hardy carried into effect an idea that he had long entertained, and on Monday, March 14, 1887, left Dorchester with Mrs. Hardy for London on their way to Italy, the day before The IVoodlanders was published by the Messrs. Macmillan.
CHAPTER XV
1887: Aet. 46
The month had been mild hitherto, but no sooner had they started than the weather turned to snow; and a snowstorm persistently accompanied them across the Channel and southward beyond. They broke the journey at Aix-les-Bains, at which place they arrived past midnight, and the snow being by this time deep a path was cleared with spades for them to the fly in waiting, which two horses, aided by men turning the wheels, dragged with difficulty up the hill to the Hotel Chateau Durieux — an old-fashioned place with stone floors and wide fireplaces. They were the only people there — the first visitors of the season — and in spite of a huge fire in their bedroom they found the next morning a cone of snow within each casement, and a snow film on the floor sufficient to show their tracks in moving about. Hardy used to speak of a curious atmospheric effect then witnessed: he was surprised that the windows of the room they occupied — one of the best — should command the view of a commonplace paddock only, with a few broken rails and sheds. But presently ‘what had seemed like the sky evolved a scene which uncurtained itself high up in the midst of the aerial expanse, as in a magic lantern, and vast mountains appeared there, tantalisingly withdrawing again as if they had been a mere illusion’.
