Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  CHAPTER IX

  LIFE AND LITERATURE IN A LONDON SUBURB

  1878-1880: Aet. 37-39

  Two days later they beheld their furniture descending from a pair of vans at 1 Arundel Terrace (‘The Larches’), Trinity Road, just beyond Wandsworth Common. They had stayed at Bolingbroke Grove to be near.

  ‘March 22. We came from Bolingbroke Grove to Arundel Terrace and slept here for the first time. Our house is the south-east corner one where Brodrick Road crosses Trinity Road down towards Wandsworth Common Station, the side door being in Brodrick Road.’

  ‘April — Note. A Plot, or Tragedy, should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events produced by the said passions, prejudices, and ambitions.

  ‘The advantages of the letter-system of telling a story (passing over the disadvantages) are that, hearing what one side has to say, you are led constantly to the imagination of what the other side must be feeling, and at last are anxious to know if the other side does really feel what you imagine.’

  ‘April 22. The method of Boldini, the painter of “The Morning Walk” in the French Gallery two or three years ago (a young lady beside an ugly blank wall on an ugly highway) — of Hobbema, in his view of a road with formal lopped trees and flat tame scenery — is that of infusing emotion into the baldest external objects either by the presence of a human figure among them, or by mark of some human connection with them.

  ‘This accords with my feeling about, say, Heidelberg and Baden versus Scheveningen — as I wrote at the beginning of The Return of the Native — that the beauty of association is entirely superior to the beauty of aspect, and a beloved relative’s old battered tankard to 120

  the finest Greek vase. Paradoxically put, it is to see the beauty in ugliness.’

  ‘April 29. Mr. George Smith (Smith Elder and Co.) informs me that how he first got to know Thackeray was through “a mutual friend” — to whom Smith said, “Tell Thackeray that I will publish everything he likes to write”. This was before Thackeray was much known, and when he had only published the Titmarsh and Yellow- plush papers. However, Thackeray did not appear. When they at length met, Thackeray said he wished to publish Vanity Fair, and Smith undertook it. Thackeray also said he had offered it to three or four publishers who had refused it. “Why didn’t you come to me? “ said Smith. “ Why didn’t you come to me? “ said Thackeray.’

  ‘June 8. To Grosvenor Gallery. Seemed to have left flesh behind, and entered a world of soul. In some of the pictures, e.g. A. Tadema’s “Sculpture” (men at work carving the Sphinx), and “Ariadne abandoned by Theseus” (an uninteresting dreary shore, little tent one corner, etc.) the principles I have mentioned have been applied to choice of subject.’

  ‘June 16. Sunday evening. At Mr. Alexander Macmillan’s with E. He told me a story the late Mrs. Carlyle told him. One day when she was standing alone on Craigenputtock Moor, where she and Mr. Carlyle were living, she discerned in the distance a red spot. It proved to be the red cloak of a woman who passed for a witch in those parts. Mrs. Carlyle got to know her, and ultimately learnt her history. She was the daughter of a laird owning about eighty acres, and there had come to their house in her young-womanhood a young dealer in cattle. The daughter and he fell in love, and were married, and both lived with her father, whose farm the young man took in hand to manage. But he ran the farmer into debt, and ultimately (I think) house and property had to be sold. The young man vanished. A boy was born to the wife, and after a while she went away to find her husband. She came back in a state of great misery, but would not tell where she had been. It leaked out that the husband was a married man. She was proud and would not complain; but her father died; the boy grew up and was intended for a schoolmaster, but he was crossing the moor one night and lost his way; was buried in the snow, and frozen to death. She lived on in a hut there, and became the red-cloaked old woman who was Mrs. Carlyle’s witch-neighbour.’

  In June he was elected a member of the Savile Club, and by degrees fell into line as a London man again. Dining at Mr. Kegan Paul’s, Kensington Square, the same summer, they met Mr. Leighton (Sir F. Leighton’s father), his daughter Mrs. Sutherland Orr, who had been in India during the Mutiny, and Professor Huxley, whom they had met before at Mr. Macmillan’s. ‘ We sat down by daylight, and as we dined the moon brightened the trees in the garden, and shone under them into the room.’ For Huxley Hardy had a liking which grew with knowledge of him — though that was never great — speaking of him as a man who united a fearless mind with the warmest of hearts and the most modest of manners.

  ‘July. When a couple are shown to their room at an hotel, before the husband has seen that it is a room at all, the wife has found the looking-glass and is arranging her bonnet.’

  ‘August 3. Minto dined with me at the club. Joined at end of dinner by W. H. Pollock, and we all three went to the Lyceum. It was Irving’s last night, in which he appeared in a scene from Richard III.; then as “Jingle”; then recited “Eugene Aram’s Dream” — (the only piece of literature outside plays that actors seem to know of). As “Jingle”, forgetting his part, he kept up one shoulder as in Richard III. We went to his dressing-room, found him naked to the waist; champagne in tumblers.’

  ‘August 31. to Sept. 9. In Dorset. Called on William Barnes the poet. Went to Kingston Lacy to see the pictures. Dined at West-Stafford Rectory. Went with C. W. Moule [Fellow of Corpus, Cambridge] to Ford Abbey.’

  ‘September 20. Returned and called on G. Smith. Agreed to his terms for publishing The Return of the Native.’

  Shortly after he wrote to Messrs. Smith and Elder:

  ‘I enclose a sketch-map of the supposed scene in which The Return of the Native is laid, copied from the one I used in writing ihe story; and my suggestion is that we place an engraving of it as frontispiece to the first volume. Unity of place is so seldom preserved in novels that a map of the scene of action is as a rule quite impracticable. But since the present story affords an opportunity of doing so I am of opinion that it would be a desirable novelty.’ The publishers fell in with the idea and the map was made.

  A peculiarity in the local descriptions running through all Hardy’s writings may be instanced here — that he never uses the word ‘Dorset’, never names the county at all (except possibly in an explanatory footnote), but obliterates the names of the six counties, whose area he traverses in his scenes, under the general appellation of ‘ Wessex’ — an old word that became quite popular after the date of Far from the Madding Crowd, where he first introduced it. So far did he carry this idea of the unity of Wessex that he used to say he had grown to forget the crossing of county boundaries within the ancient kingdom — in this respect being quite unlike the poet Barnes, who was ‘Dorset’ emphatically.

  Mrs. Hardy used to relate that during this summer, she could not tell exactly when, she looked out of a window at the back of the house, and saw her husband running without a hat down Brodrick Road, and disappearing round a corner into a by-street. Before she had done wondering what could have happened, he returned, and all was explained. While sitting in his writing-room he had heard a street barrel-organ of the kind that used to be called a ‘harmoniflute’, playing somewhere near at hand the very quadrille over which the jaunty young man who had reached the end of his time at Hicks’s had spread such a bewitching halo more than twenty years earlier by describing the glories of dancing round to its beats on the Cre- morne platform or at the Argyle Rooms, and which Hardy had never been able to identify. He had thrown down his pen, and, as she had beheld, flown out and approached the organ-grinder with such speed that the latter, looking frightened, began to shuffle off. Hardy called out, ‘What’s the name of that tune?’ The grinder — a young foreigner, who could not speak English — exclaimed trembling as he stopped, ‘Quad-ree-ya! quad-ree-ya!’ and pointed to the index in front of the instrument. Hardy looked
: ‘Quadrille’ was the only word there. He had till then never heard it since his smart senior had whistled it; he never heard it again, and never ascertained its name. It was possibly one of Jullien’s — then gone out of vogue — set off rather by the youthful imagination of Hardy at sixteen than by any virtue in the music itself.

  ‘October 27. Sunday. To Chelsea Hospital and Ranelagh Gardens: met a palsied pensioner — deaf. He is 88 — was in the Seventh (?) Hussars. He enlisted in 1807 or 1808, served under Sir John Moore in the Peninsula, through the Retreat, and was at Waterloo. It was extraordinary to talk and shake hands with a man who had shared in that terrible winter march to Coruna, and had seen Moore face to face.

  ‘Afterwards spoke to two or three others. When an incorrigible was drummed out of barracks to the tune of the Rogue’s March — (as my father had told me) — all the facings and the buttons were previously cut from his uniform, and a shilling given him. The fifes and drums accompanied him only just beyond the barrack-gates.

  ‘In those days if you only turned your eye you were punished. My informant had known men receive 600 lashes — 300 at a time, or 900, if the doctor said it could be borne. After the punishment salt was rubbed on the victim’s back, to harden it. He did not feel the pain of this, his back being numbed by the lashes. The men would hold a bullet between their teeth and chew it during the operation.’

  The Return of the Native was published by Messrs. Smith and Elder in November, The Times’ remark upon the book being that the reader found himself taken farther from the madding crowd than ever. Old Mrs. Procter’s amusing criticism in a letter was: ‘ Poor Eustacia. I so fully understood her longing for the Beautiful. I love the Common; but still one may wish for something else. I rejoice that Venn [a character] is happy. A man is never cured when he loves a stupid woman [Thomasin]. Beauty fades, and intelligence and wit grow irritating; but your dear Dulness is always the same.’

  ‘November 28. Woke before it was light. Felt that I had not enough staying power to hold my own in the world.’

  On the last day of the year Hardy’s father wrote, saying that his mother was unwell, and that he had ‘drunk both their healths in gin and rhubarb wine, with hopes that they would live to see many and many a New Year’s day’. He suggested that they should come ere long.

  ‘1879. January New Year’s thought. A perception of the FAILURE of THINGS to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind.’

  The poem ‘A January Night. 1879’ in Moments of Vision relates to an incident of this new year (1879) which occurred here at Tooting, where they seemed to begin to feel that ‘ there had past away a glory from the earth’. And it was in this house that their troubles began. This, however, is anticipating unduly.

  ‘January 30. 1879. In Steven’s book-shop, Holywell Street. A bustling, vigorous young curate comes in — red-faced and full of life — the warm breath puffing from his mouth in a jet into the frosty air, and religion sitting with an ill grace upon him.

  ‘“Have you Able to Save?”

  ‘Shopman addressed does not know, and passes on the inquiry to the master standing behind with his hat on: “Able to Save?”

  “‘I don’t know — hoi! (to boy at other end). Got Able to Save? Why the devil can’t you attend!”

  ‘“What, Sir?”

  ‘“Able to Save/”

  ‘Boy’s face a blank. Shopman to curate: “ Get it by to-morrow afternoon, Sir.”

  ‘“And please get Words of Comfort.”

  ‘“ Words of Comfort. Yes, Sir.” Exit curate.

  ‘Master: “Why the h don’t anybody here know what’s in stock?” Business proceeds in a subdued manner.’

  ‘February i. To Dorchester. Cold. Rain on snow. Henry seen advancing through it, with wagonette and Bob [their father’s horse], to the station entrance. Drove me to Bockhampton through the sleet and rain from the East, which shaved us like a razor. Wind on Fordington Moor cut up my sleeves and round my wrists — even up to my elbows. The light of the lamp at the bottom of the town shone on the reins in Henry’s hands, and showed them glistening with ice. Bob’s behind-part was a mere grey arch; his foreparts invisible.’

  ‘February 4. To Weymouth and Portland. As to the ruined walls in the low part of Chesil, a woman says the house was washed down in the November gale of 1824. The owner never rebuilt it, but emigrated with his family. She says that in her house one person was drowned (they were all in bed except the fishermen) and next door two people. It was about four in the morning that the wave came.’

  ‘February 7. Father says that when there was a hanging at Dorchester in his boyhood it was carried out at one o’clock, it being the custom to wait till the mail-coach came in from London in case of a reprieve.

  ‘He says that at Puddletown Church, at the time of the old west- gallery violin, oboe, and clarionet players, Tom Sherren (one of them) used to copy tunes during the sermon. So did my grandfather at Stinsford Church. Old Squibb the parish-clerk used also to stay up late at night helping my grandfather in his “prick-noting” (as he called it).

  ‘He says that William, son of Mr. Sthe Rector of W,

  became a miller at OMill, and married a German woman whom he met at Puddletown Fair playing her tambourine. When her husband was gone to market she used to call in John Porter, who could play the fiddle, and lived near, and give him some gin, when she would beat the tambourine to his playing. She was a good-natured woman with blue eyes, brown hair, and a round face; rather slovenly.

  Her husband was a hot, hasty fellow, though you could hear by his speech that he was a better educated man than ordinary millers.

  ‘G. R. (who is a humorist) showed me his fowl-house,

  which was built of old church-materials bought at Wellspring the builder’s sale. R.’s chickens roost under the gilt-lettered Lord’s Prayer and Creed, and the cock crows and flaps his wings against the Ten Commandments. It reminded me that I had seen these same Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, and Creed, before, forming the sides of the stone-mason’s shed in that same builder’s yard, and that he had remarked casually that they did not prevent the workmen “cussing and damning” the same as ever. It also reminded me of seeing the old font ofChurch, Dorchester, in a garden, used as a flower-vase, the initials of ancient godparents and Churchwardens still legible upon it. A comic business — church restoration.

  ‘A villager says of the parson, who has been asked to pray for a sick person: “His prayers wouldn’t save a mouse”.’

  ‘February 12. Sketched the English Channel from Mayne Down.

  ‘I am told that when Jack Ketch had done whipping by the Town Pump [Dorchester] the prisoners’ coats were thrown over their bleeding backs, and, guarded by the town constables with their long staves, they were conducted back to prison. Close at their heels came J. K., the cats held erect — there was one cat to each man — the lashes were of knotted whipcord.

  ‘Also that in a village near Yeovil about 100 years ago, there lived a dumb woman, well known to my informant’s mother. One day the woman suddenly spoke and said:

  ‘“A cold winter, a forward spring, A bloody summer, a dead King” j ‘She then dropped dead. The French Revolution followed immediately after.’

  ‘February 15. Returned to London.’

  ‘April 5. Mary writes to tell me that “there is a very queer quire at Steepleton Church. It consists only of a shoemaker who plays the bass-viol, and his mother who sings the air.”‘

  ‘June 9. To the International Literary Congress at the rooms of the Society of Arts. Met M. de Lesseps. A few days afterwards to the Soiree Musicale at the Hanover Square Club, to meet members of the Literary Congress and the Com^die Frangaise: A large gathering. The whole thing a free-and-easy mix-up. I was a total stranger, and wondered why I was there: many others were total strangers to everybody else; sometimes two or three of these total strangers would fraternize from very despair. A little old Frenchm
an, however, who bustled about in a skull cap and frilled shirt, seemed to know everybody.’

  ‘June 21. With E. to Bosworth Smith’s, Harrow (for the weekend). In the aviary he has a raven and a barn owl. One ridiculously small boy was in tails — he must have been a bright boy, but I forgot to ask about him. One of the boys in charity-tails could have eaten him.

  ‘Bos’s brother Henry the invalid has what I fear to be a churchyard cough [he died not so very long after]. His cough pleases the baby, so he coughs artificially much more than required by his disease, to go on pleasing the baby. Mrs. H. S. implores her husband not to do so; but he does, nevertheless, showing the extraordinary nonchalance about death that so many of his family show.

  ‘In chapel — which we attended — the little tablets in memory of the boys who have died at school there were a moving sight.

  ‘Sunday night we went with Bos, to the boys’ dormitories. One boy was unwell, and we talked to him as he lay in bed, his arm thrown over his head. Another boy has his room hung with proof engravings after Landseer. In another room were the two Ks of Clyffe. In another a big boy and a little boy — the little boy being very earnest about birds’ eggs, and the big boy silently affecting a mind above the subject, though covertly interested.’

  ‘27. From Tooting to Town again. In railway carriage a too statuesque girl; but her features were absolutely perfect. She sat quite still, and her smiles did not extend further than a finger-nail’s breadth from the edge of her mouth. The repose of her face was such that when the train shook her it seemed painful. Her mouth was very small, and her face not unlike that of a nymph. In the train coming home there was a contrasting girl of sly humour — the pupil of her eye being mostly half under the eyelid.’

  It was in this year that pourparlers were opened with Leslie Stephen about another story for the Cornhill; and Hardy informed him that he was writing a tale of the reign of George III; on which Stephen remarks in respect of historical novels: