by Thomas Hardy
Hicks was ahead of them in Greek, though they could beat him in Latin, and he used to ridicule their construings, often when these were more correct than his own. When cornered and proved wrong he would take shelter behind the excuse that his school-days were longer ago than theirs.
At this time the Rev. William Barnes, the Dorset poet and philologist, was keeping school next door. Knowing him to be an authority upon grammar Hardy would often run in to ask Barnes to decide some knotty point in dispute between him and his fellow-pupil. Hardy used to assert in later years that upon almost every occasion the verdict was given in his favour.
An unusual incident occurred during his pupillage at Hicks’s which, though it had nothing to do with his own life, was dramatic enough to have mention. One summer morning at Bockhampton, just before he sat down to breakfast, he remembered that a man was to be hanged at eight o’clock at Dorchester. He took up the big brass telescope that had been handed on in the family, and hastened to a hill on the heath a quarter of a mile from the house, whence he looked towards the town. The sun behind his back shone straight on the white stone fagade of the gaol, the gallows upon it, and the form of the murderer in white fustian, the executioner and officials in dark clothing and the crowd below being invisible at this distance of nearly three miles. At the moment of his placing the glass to his eye the white figure dropped downwards, and the faint note of the town clock struck eight.
The whole thing had been so sudden that the glass nearly fell from Hardy’s hands. He seemed alone on the heath with the hanged man, and crept homeward wishing he had not been so curious. It was the second and last execution he witnessed, the first having been that of a woman two or three years earlier, when he stood close to the gallows.
It had so happened that Bastow, the other pupil (who, strangely enough for an architect mostly occupied with church-work, had been bred a Baptist), became very doctrinal during this time; he said he was going to be baptized, and in fact was baptized shortly after. He so impressed young Hardy with his earnestness and the necessity of doing likewise that, though the junior pupil had been brought up in High Church principles, he almost felt that he ought to be baptized again as an adult. He went to the vicar of his parish and stated the case. The vicar, an Oxford man, seemed bewildered, and said that the only book he possessed that might help Hardy was Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, which he lent his inquirer. Finding that this learned work did not help much in the peculiar circumstances, Hardy went to the curate of another parish with whom he was acquainted. But all that the curate had was a handbook on the Sacraments of an elementary kind.
However, he got hold of as many books and notes on Paedo- baptism as he could, and though he was appalled at the feebleness of the arguments for infant christening (assuming that New Testament practice must be followed) he incontinently determined to ‘stick to his own side’, as he considered the Church to be, at some costs of conscience. The clash of polemics between the two pupils in the office sometimes reached such a pitch of clamour that the architect’s wife would send down a message from the drawing-room, which was on the first floor over, imploring them not to make so much noise. To add to the heat, two of the Dorchester Baptist minister’s sons, friends of Bastow, hard-headed Scotch youths fresh from Aberdeen University, good classics, who could rattle off at a moment’s notice the Greek original of any passage in the New Testament, joined in the controversy. But though Hardy thus found himself in the position of one against three, he fought on with his back to the wall as it were working at night at the Greek Testament to confute his opponents, and for this purpose getting a new text, Griesbach’s, that he had seen advertised as the most correct, instead of his old one, and conceding to his serious-minded disputants as much as he thought a Churchman fairly could concede — namely, that he would limit his Greek reading to the New Testament in future, giving up the heathen authors, and would show his broad-mindedness by attending a prayer-meeting in the chapel-vestry.
At half-past six on a hot August evening he entered the chapel for the meeting. Not a soul was in the building, and he waited in the dreary little vestry till the hour of appointment had passed by nearly half an hour, the yellow sun shining in on the drab paint through the skylight, through which also came the faint notes of a brass band. Just as he was about to leave at a quarter-past seven, Bastow and the minister’s sons tumbled breathlessly in, apologizing for their lateness. Cooke’s then popular circus had entered the town at the moment of the prayer-meeting, and they had all dismissed the engagement for a while, and remained for the spectacle. Hardy had known the circus entry was going to take place; but he had kept his appointment faithfully. How the meeting ended Hardy had forgotten when he related the experience.
His convictions on the necessity of adult baptism gradually wore out of him. Though he was younger than his companions he seems to have possessed a breadth of mind which they lacked; and while perceiving that there was not a shred of evidence for infant baptism in the New Testament, he saw that Christianity did not hang on temporary details that expediency might modify, and that the practice of an isolated few in the early ages could not be binding on its multitudes in differing circumstances, when it had grown to be the religion of continents.
Nevertheless it would be unjust to the Baptist minister Perkins and his argumentative family to omit from these gleanings out of the past Hardy’s remarks on their finer qualities. They formed an austere and frugal household, and won his admiration by their thoroughness and strenuousness. He often visited them, and one of the sons about his own age, not insistent on Baptist doctrines like his two brethren, was a great friend of Hardy’s till his death of consumption a year or two after. It was through these Scotch people that Thomas Hardy first became impressed with the necessity for ‘plain living and high thinking’, which stood him in such good stead in later years. Among the few portraits of actual persons in Hardy’s novels, that of the Baptist minister in A Laodicean is one — being a recognizable drawing of Perkins the father as he appeared to Hardy at this time, though the incidents are invented.
To return to the architect’s pupils. The Greek Testament had been now taken up by both of them — though it had necessitated the younger’s learning a new dialect — and Homer and Virgil were thrown aside (a misfortune to Hardy, who was just getting pleasure from these). In pursuing this study it became an occasional practice for the youths to take out their Testaments into the fields and^sit on a gate reading them. The gate of the enclosure in Kingston M&irward eweleaze, now the cricket-ground, was the scene of some of the readings. They were brought to an end by the expiry of Bastow’s term of four years as a pupil, and his departure for the office of a London architect, which, it may be mentioned, he shortly afterwards left to start in practice on his own account in Tasmania.
1860-1861
With the departure of Bastow, Hardy’s duties grew more exacting, and though, in consideration of his immaturity, the term of his pupillage had been lengthened by between one and two years, a time had arrived at which it became necessary that he should give more attention to practical architecture than he had hitherto done. Church ‘restoration’ was at this time in full cry in Dorsetshire and the neighbouring counties, and young Hardy found himself making many surveys, measurements, and sketches of old churches with a view to such changes. Much beautiful ancient Gothic, as well as Jacobean and Georgian work, he was passively instrumental in destroying or in altering beyond identification; a matter for his deep regret in later years.
Despite the greater demands of architecture upon his attention it appears that Hardy kept up his classics for some time after the departure of his fellow-pupil for Tasmania; since, in an old letter of Bastow’s, replying to Hardy from Hobart Town in May 1861, the emigrant says:
‘Really you are a plodding chap to have got through such a lot of Homer and all the rest. I am not a bit farther than I was in Dorchester; indeed, I think I have scarcely touched a book — Greek, I mean — since. I see you are trying all you
can to cut me out!’
The allusion to Homer seems to show that after his earnest Baptist-senior’s departure, and the weakening of his influence, Hardy,
St. Augustine, lapsed from the Greek New Testament back again to pagan writers, though he was rather impulsive than ‘plodding’ in is studies, his strength lying in a power of keeping going in most disheartening circumstances.
Owing to the accident of his being an architect’s pupil in a county- town of assizes and aldermen, which had advanced to railways and telegraphs and daily London papers; yet not living there, but walking in every day from a world of shepherds and ploughmen in a hamlet three miles off, where modern improvements were still regarded as wonders, he saw rustic and borough doings in a juxtaposition peculiarly close. To these externals may be added the peculiarities of his inner life, which might almost have been called academic — a triple existence unusual for a young man — what he used to call, in looking back, a life twisted of three strands — the professional life, the scholar’s life, and the rustic life, combined in the twenty-four hours of one day, as it was with him through these years. He would be reading the Iliad, the Aeneid, or the Greek Testament from six to eight in the morning, would work at Gothic architecture all day, and then in the evening rush off with his fiddle under his arm, sometimes in the company of his father as first violin and uncle as ‘cellist, to play country-dances, reels, and hornpipes at an agriculturist’s wedding, christening, or Christmas party in a remote dwelling among the fallow fields, not returning sometimes till nearly dawn, the Hardys still being traditionally string-bandsmen available on such occasions, and having the added recommendation of charging nothing for their services, which was a firm principle with them, the entertainers being mostly acquaintances; though the tireless zeal of young couples in the dance often rendered the Hardys’ act of friendship anything but an enjoyment to themselves. But young Hardy’s physical vigour was now much greater than it had been when he was a child, and it enabled him, like a conjuror at a fair, to keep in the air the three balls of architecture, scholarship, and dance-fiddling, without ill effects, the fiddling being of course not daily, like the other two.
His immaturity, above alluded to, was greater than is common for his years, and it may be mentioned here that a clue to much of his character and action throughout his life is afforded by his lateness of development in virility, while mentally precocious. He himself said humorously in later times that he was a child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was five-and-twenty, and a young man till he was nearly fifty. Whether this was intrinsic, or owed anything to his having lived in a remote spot in early life, is an open question.
During the years of architectural pupillage Hardy had two other literary friends in Dorchester. One was Hooper Tolbort, orphan nephew of one of the partners in a firm of mechanical engineers, who had an extraordinary facility in the acquisition of languages. He was a pupil of the Rev. W. Barnes, and was preparing for the Indian Civil Service. The other was Horace Moule of Queens’ College, Cam bridge just then beginning practice as author and reviewer. Walks in the fields with each of these friends biassed Thomas Hardy still further in the direction of books, two works among those he met with impressing him much — the newly published Essays and Reviews by ‘The Seven against Christ’, as the authors were nicknamed; and Walter Bagehot’s Estimates (afterwards called Literary Studies). He began writing verses, and also a few prose articles, which do not appear to have been printed anywhere. The first effusion of his to see the light of print was an anonymous skit in a Dorchester paper on the disappearance of the Aims-House clock, which then as now stood on a bracket in South Street, the paragraph being in the form of a plaintive letter from the ghost of the clock. (It had been neglected, after having been taken down to be cleaned.) As the author was supposed to be an alderman of influence the clock was immediately replaced. He would never have been known to be Hardy but for the conspiracy of a post-office clerk, who watched the handwriting of letters posted till he had spotted the culprit. After this followed the descriptive verses ‘Domicilium’, and accounts of church-restorations carried out by Hicks, which Hardy prepared for the grateful reporter of the Dorset Chronicle.
It seems he had also set to work on the Agamemnon or the Oedipus-, but on his inquiring of Moule — who was a fine Greek scholar and was always ready to act the tutor in any classical difficulty — if he ought not to go on reading scrme Greek plays, Moule’s reluctant opinion was that if Hardy really had (as his father had insisted, and as indeed was reasonable, since he never as yet had earned a farthing in his life) to make an income in some way by architecture in 1862, it would be hardly worth while for him to read Aeschylus or Sophocles in 1859 — 61. He had secretly wished that Moule would advise him to go on with Greek plays, in spite of the serious damage it might do his architecture; but he felt bound to listen to reason and prudence. So, as much Greek as he had got he had to be content with, the language being almost dropped from that date; for though he did take up one or two of the dramatists again some years later, it was in a fragmentary way only. Nevertheless his substantial knowledge of them was not small.
It may be permissible to ponder whether Hardy’s career might not have been altogether different if Moule’s opinion had been the contrary one, and he had advised going on with Greek plays. The younger man would hardly have resisted the suggestion, and might have risked the consequences, so strong was his bias that way. The upshot might have been his abandonment of architecture for a University career, his father never absolutely refusing to advance him money in a good cause. Having every instinct of a scholar he might have ended his life as a Don of whom it could be said that
He settled Hod’s business,
Properly based Oun.
But this was not to be, and it was possibly better so.
One other Dorchester young man, who has been cursorily mentioned — the pupil of Hicks’s whose time had expired shortly after Hardy’s arrival, and who then departed permanently from the West of England — may be again given a word for the single thing about him that had attracted the fresh-comer — his one or two trips to London during their passing acquaintance, and his return thence whistling quadrilles and other popular music, with accounts of his dancing experiences at the Argyle Rooms and Cremorne, both then in full swing. Hardy would relate that one quadrille in particular his precursor Fippard could whistle faultlessly, and while giving it would caper about the office to an imaginary dance-figure, embracing an imaginary Cremorne or Argyle danseuse. The fascinating quadrille remained with Hardy all his life, but he never could identify it. Being some six years the junior of this comet-like young man, Hardy was treated by him with the superciliousness such a boy usually gets from such seniority, and with the other’s departure from Dorchester he passed quite out of Hardy’s knowledge.
CHAPTER III
WORK IN LONDON
1862-1867: Aet. 21-27 A New Start
On Thursday, April 17, 1862, Thomas Hardy started alone for London, to pursue the art and science of architecture on more advanced lines. He had for some time left Bockhampton as a permanent resident, living, except at weekends, in Dorchester, either with Hicks or at lodgings; though he often sojourned at Bockhampton later on.
The Great Exhibition of that year was about to be opened, and this perhaps influenced him in the choice of a date for his migration. His only previous journey to the capital had been made with his mother in 1848 or 1849, when they passed through it on the way to and back from Hertfordshire, on a visit to a relative, as mentioned earlier. With prudent forethought he bought a return ticket for the journey, so that he might be able to travel back to Dorchester did he reach the end of his resources. After six months he threw away the unused half.
Hardy used to relate humorously that on the afternoon of his arrival he called to inquire for lodgings at a house where was employed a bachelor some ten years older than himself, whose cousin Hardy had known. This acquaintance, looking him up and down, was sceptical about hi
s establishing himself in London. ‘Wait till you have walked the streets a few weeks’, he said satirically, ‘and your elbows begin to shine, and the hems of your trousers get frayed, as if nibbled by rats! Only practical men are wanted here.’ Hardy began to wish he had thought less of the Greek Testament and more of iron girders.
However, he had at least two letters of introduction in his pocket — one from a gushing lady to Mr. Benjamin Ferrey, F.R.I.B.A., of Trinity Place, Charing Cross, an architect who had been a pupil of the elder Pugin’s, was connected with the West of England, and had designed a Dorset mansion of which Hardy’s father had been one of the builders, carrying out the work to that gentleman’s complete satisfaction. But, as usually happens, this sheet-anchor was less trustworthy than had been expected. Mr. Ferrey was civil to the young man, remembered his father, promised every assistance; and there the matter ended.
The other introduction was to Mr. John Norton of Old Bond Street, also an architect in full practice. Mr. Norton was a Bristol man, a pupil of Ferrey’s, and a friend of Hicks of Dorchester, by reason, it is believed, of their joint association with Bristol. Anyhow, Norton received young Thomas Hardy with great kindness, and, his friendship coming at the nick of time when it was needed, he proved himself one of the best helps Hardy ever had. The generous architect told him that he must on no account be doing nothing in London (Hardy looked quite a pink-faced youth even now), and arranged that he should come daily and make drawings in his office for a merely nominal renumeration whilst looking further about town. As Mr. Norton was in no real need of assistance the proposal was most considerate of him.
