by Thomas Hardy
‘November 17. Poem. We [human beings] have reached a degree of intelligence which Nature never contemplated when framing her laws, and for which she consequently has provided no adequate satisfactions.’ [This, which he had adumbrated before, was clearly the germ of the poem entitled ‘The Mother Mourns’ and others.]
‘December 23. There is what we used to call “The Birds’ Bedroom” in the plantation at Bockhampton. Some large hollies grow among leafless ash, oak, birch, etc. At this time of year the birds select the hollies for roosting in, and at dusk noises not unlike the creaking of withy-chairs arise, with a busy rustling as of people going to bed in a lodging-house; accompanied by sundry shakings, adjustings, and pattings, as if they were making their beds vigorously before turning in.
‘Death of old Billy C at a great age. He used to talk enthusiastically of Lady Susan O’Brien [the daughter of Lord Ilchester, who excited London by eloping with O’Brien the actor, as so inimitably described in Walpole’s Letters, and who afterwards settled in the Hardys’ parish as before mentioned]. — “She kept a splendid house — - a cellarful of home-brewed strong beer that would a’most knock you down; everybody drank as much as he liked. The head- gardener [whom Billy as a youth assisted] was drunk every morning before breakfast. There are no such houses now! On wet days we used to make a point of working opposite the drawing-room window, that she might pity us. She would send out and tell us to go indoors, and not expose ourselves to the weather so reckless.”‘ [A kind- hearted woman, Lady Susan.]’V
On the eve of the New Year 1884 Hardy planted some trees on his new property at Max Gate, Dorchester, and passed part of the January following in London, where he saw Henry James, Gosse, and Thornycroft, and talked to Alma-Tadema about the Anglo- Roman remains he was finding on the site of his proposed house, over which discovery Tadema was much excited, as he was painting, or about to paint, a picture expressing the art of that date.
‘February. “Ye shall weep and mourn, and the world shall rejoice.” Such shows the natural limitation of the Christian view when the Christians were a small and despised community. The widened view of nowadays perceives that the world weeps and mourns all round. — Nevertheless, if “the world” denotes the brutal and thoughtless merely, the text is eternally true.’
‘James S — — [the quaint old man already mentioned, who worked forty years for Hardy’s father, and had been a smuggler], once heard a hurdlemaker bet at the “Black Dog”, Broadmayne, that he would make a hurdle sooner than the other man (not a hurdler) could pull one to pieces. They put it to the test, and the hurdlemaker won the stakes.
‘When trees and underwood are cut down, and the ground bared, three crops of flowers follow. First a sheet of yellow; they are primroses. Then a sheet of blue; they are wild hyacinths, or as we call them, graegles. Then a sheet of red; they are ragged robins, or as they are called here, robin-hoods. What have these plants been doing through the scores of years before the trees were felled, and how did they come there?’
‘March. Write a novel entitled Time against Two, in which the antagonism of the parents of a Romeo and Juliet does succeed in separating the couple and stamping out their love, — alas, a more probable development than the other!’ [The idea is briefly used in The Well-Beloved.]
March or April. ‘Every error under the sun seems to arise from thinking that you are right yourself because you are yourself, and other people wrong because they are not you.
‘It is now spring; when, according to the poets, birds pipe, and (the householder adds) day-labourers get independent after their preternatural civility through the frost and snow.’
‘April 26. Curious scene. A fine poem in it:
‘Four girls — itinerant musicians — sisters, have been playing opposite Parmiter’s in the High Street. The eldest had a fixed, old, hard face, and wore white roses in her hat. Her eyes remained on one close object, such as the buttons of her sister’s dress; she played the violin. The next sister, with red roses in her hat, had rather bold dark eyes, and a coquettish smirk. She too played a violin. The next, with her hair in ringlets, beat the tambourine. The youngest, a mere child, dinged the triangle. She wore a bead necklace. All wore large brass earrings like Jews’-harps, which dangled to the time of the jig.
‘I saw them again in the evening, the silvery gleams from Saunders’s [silver-smith’s] shop shining out upon them. They were now sublimed to a wondrous charm. The hard face of the eldest was flooded with soft solicitous thought; the coquettish one was no longer bold but archly tender; her dirty white roses were pure as snow; her sister’s red ones a fine crimson: the brass earrings were golden; the iron triangle silver; the tambourine Miriam’s own; the third child’s face that of an angel; the fourth that of a cherub. The pretty one smiled on the second, and began tq play ‘In the gloaming’, the little voices singing it. Now they were what Nature made them, before the smear of “civilization” had sullied their existences.’ [An impression of a somewhat similar scene is given in the poem entitled ‘Music in a Snowy Street’.]
‘Rural low life may reveal coarseness of considerable leaven; but that libidinousness which makes the scum of cities so noxious is not usually there.’
‘June 2. At Bockhampton. My birthday — 44. Alone in the plantation, at 9 o’clock. A weird hour: strange faces and figures formed by dying lights. Holm leaves shine like human eyes, and the sky glimpses between the trunks are like white phantoms and cloven tongues. It is so silent and still that a footstep on the dead leaves could be heard a quarter of a mile off. Squirrels run up the trunks in fear, stamping and crying “chut-chut-chut!”‘ [There is not a single squirrel in that plantation now.]
The following letter was written to Hardy on his birthday:
‘Burford Bridge, ‘Box Hill, ‘ June 2, 1884.
‘What a good day this was for Anne Benson Procter, when Thomas Hardy was born! She little knew what stores of delightful reading she would owe to the Baby of 1840.
‘If she could write an Ode — or, even worse, a Sonnet!
‘He has something to be thankful for. He must haveKread the verses — and he is so good and kind that he would have praised them.
‘We go home on Wednesday next, having been here for ten days — sitting by the fire, for the summer comes slowly up this way.
‘Your old admirer,
‘Anne B. Procter.’
‘June 3. The leaves are approaching their finished summer shape, the evergreens wear new pale suits over the old deep attire. I watered the thirsty earth at Max Gate, which drank in the liquid with a swallowing noise. In the evening I entered Tayleure’s Circus in Fordington Field for a short time during the performance. There is a dim haze in the tent, and the green grass in the middle, within the circular horse-track, looks amazingly fresh in the artificial light. The damp orbits of the spectators’ eyes gleam in its rays. The clowns, when “off”, lounge and smoke cigarettes, and chat with serious cynicism, and as if the necessity of their occupation to society at large were not to be questioned, their true domestic expression being visible under the official expression given by the paint. This sub-expression is one of good-humoured pain.’
Hardy seems to have had something of a craze for circuses in these years, and went to all that came to Dorchester. In one performance the equestrienne who leapt through hoops on her circuit missed her footing and fell with a thud on the turf. He followed her into the dressing-tent, and became deeply interested in her recovery. The incident seems to have some bearing on the verses of many years after entitled ‘Circus-Rider to Ringmaster’.
They were in London part of June and July, and among other places went to an evening party at Alma-Tadema’s, meeting an artistic crowd which included Burne-Jones; and to another at Mrs.
Murray Smith’s with Mrs. Procter, where they met again Matthew Arnold, whom Hardy liked better now than he did at their first meeting; also Du Maurier; also Henry James ‘with his nebulous gaze’. Mrs. Procter, though so old, ‘swam about through the
crowd like a swan’.
Of Madame Judic’s acting in Niniche, Hardy says, ‘This woman has genius. The picture of the pair of them — Judic and Lassouche — putting their faces side by side and bumping each other in making love, was the most comic phase of real art I ever saw. . . . And yet the world callsa great actress.’
‘July 14. Assizes. Dorchester — The Lord Chief Justice, eminent counsel, etc., reveal more of their weaknesses and vanities here in the country than in London. Their foibles expand, being off their guard. A shabby lad on trial for setting fire to a common, holds an amusingly familiar conversation with the C. J. (Coleridge) when asked if he has anything to say. Witnesses always begin their evidence in sentences containing ornamental words, evidently prepared beforehand, but when they get into the thick of it this breaks down to struggling grammar and lamentably jumbled narrative.’
‘August 14. Strolling players at Dorchester in the market-field. Went to Othello. A vermilion sunset fell on the west end of the booth, where, while the audience assembled, Cassio, in supposed Venetian costume, was lounging and smoking in the red light at the bottom of the van-steps behind the theatre: Othello also lounging in the same sunlight on the grass by the stage door, and touching up the black of his face.
‘The play begins as the dusk comes on, the theatre-lights within throwing the spectators’ and the actors’ profiles on the canvas, so that they are visible outside, and the immortal words spread through it into the silence around, and to the trees, and stars.
‘I enter. A woman plays Montano, and her fencing with Cassio leaves much to the imagination. Desdemona’s face still retains its anxiety about the supper that she had been cooking a few minutes earlier in the stove without.
‘Othello is played by the proprietor, and his speeches can be heard as far as to the town-pump. Emilia wears the earrings I saw her wearing when buying the family vegetables this morning. The tragedy goes on successfully, till the audience laughs at the beginning of the murder scene. Othello stops, and turning, says sternly to them after an awful pause: “Is this the Nineteenth Century?” The conscience-stricken audience feel the justice of the reproof, and preserve an abashed silence as he resumes. When he comes to the pillow-scene they applaud with tragic vehemence, to show that their hearts are in the right place after all.’
August 16. Hardy took a trip to the Channel Islands from Wey. mouth with his brother. They went to Guernsey, Jersey, and Sark and at one of the hotels found that every man there except themselves was a commercial traveller. As they seemed so lonely they were allowed to dine with these gentlemen, and became very friendly with them. Manners at the dinner-table were highly ceremonious: ‘ Can I send you a cut of this boiled mutton, Mr. PresidentV ‘ No, thank you, Mr. Vice. May I help you to beef?’ At the end of dinner: ‘ Gentlemen, you can leave the table.’ Chorus of diners: ‘ Thank you, Mr. President.’
Conversation turned on a certain town in England, and it was defined as being a ‘warm place’. Hardy, who had lived there, was puzzled, and said he had not noticed that it was particularly warm. The speaker scarcely condescended to reply that he did not understand the meaning they attached to the word.
Off and on he was now writing The Mayor of Casterbridge; but before leaving London he agreed with the Macmillans to take in hand later a story of twelve numbers for their magazine, no time being fixed. It came out two years later under the title of The Woodlanders.
‘October 20. Query: Is not the present quasi-scientific system of writing history mere charlatanism? Events and tendencies are traced as if they were rivers of voluntary activity, and courses reasoned out from the circumstances in which natures, religions, or what-not, have found themselves. But are they not in the main the outcome of passivity — acted upon by unconscious propensity?’
‘November 16. My sister Mary says that women of the past generation have faces now out of fashion. Face-expressions have their fashions like clothes.’
During the general election about this time Mr. John Morley wrote to Hardy from Newcastle:
‘Your letter recalls literature, art, and sober reason — visitants as welcome as they are rare in the heats of electioneering.’ And a few days later he heard from Professor Beesly, who had been beaten at the Westminster poll: ‘I suppose there is not a more hopeless seat in England. We might have made head against its Toryism alone, or the clergy, or the Baroness’s legitimate influence from her almsgiving of old date there (it being her special preserve), or the special tap of philanthropy turned on for the Occasion. But all united were much too strong for us. ... I return to my work in much contentment.
Leslie Stephen (like Hardy himself, quite outside politics) wrote the same week: ‘I am glad to have got that book off my hands, though any vacuum in my occupations is very soon filled up (not that my nature abhors it!) and though in many ways I am very ill- satisfied with the result. However I meant well, and I can now begin to forget it.’
‘December 4. A gusty wind makes the raindrops hit the windows in stars, and the sunshine flaps open and shut like a fan, flinging into the room a tin-coloured light. . . .
‘Conjuror Mynterne [of whom mention has already been made],
when consulted by Patt P(a strapping handsome woman), told her that her husband would die on a certain day, and showed her the funeral in a glass of water. She said she could see the bearers moving along. She made her mourning. She used to impress all this on her inoffensive husband, and assure him that he would go to hell if he made the conjuror a liar. He didn’t, but died on the day foretold. Oddly enough she never married again.’
‘December 31. To St. Peter’s belfry to the New-Year’s-Eve ringing. The night-wind whiffed in through the louvres as the men prepared the mufflers with tar-twine and pieces of horse-cloth. Climbed over the bells to fix the mufflers. I climbed with them and looked into the tenor bell: it is worn into a bright pit where the clapper has struck it so many years, and the clapper is battered with its many blows.
‘The ringers now put their coats and waistcoats and hats upon the chimes and clock and stand to. Old John is fragile, as if the bell would pull him up rather than he pull the rope down, his neck being withered and white as his white neckcloth. But his manner is severe as he says “Tenor out?” One of the two tenor men gently eases the bell forward — - that fine old E flat [?] (probably D in modem sharpened pitch), my father’s admiration, unsurpassed in metal all the world over — and answers, “Tenor’s out”. Then old John tells them to “Go!” and they start. Through long practice he rings with the least possible movement of his body, though the youngest ringers — strong, dark-haired men with ruddy faces — soon perspire with their exertions. The red, green, and white sallies bolt up through the holes like rats between the huge beams overhead.
‘The grey stones of the fifteenth-century masonry have many of their joints mortarless, and are carved with many initials and dates.
On the sill of one louvred window stands a great pewter pot with a hinged cover and engraved: “For the use of the ringers 16 — ”‘ [It is now in the County Museum.]
In the early part of the next year (1885) Hardy accepted a longstanding invitation to Eggesford by his friend Lady Portsmouth, whither he was to bring his work and continue it as if at home, but Mrs. Hardy was unable to accompany him. He found her there surrounded by her daughters, and their cousin Lady Winifred Herbert, afterwards Lady Burghclere; making altogether a lively house-party, Lady Portsmouth apologizing for its being mostly composed of ‘better halves’. Hence, though the library was placed at his disposal, and entry forbidden, that his labours should not be interrupted, very little work indeed was done while he stayed there, most of the time being spent in driving about the villages with his hosts and walking in the Park. Lord Portsmouth he found to be ‘a farmer-like man with a broad Devon accent. He showed me a bridge over which bastards were thrown and drowned, even down to quite recent times.’ Lady Dorothea, one of the daughters, told him of some of the escapades of her uncle Auberon Herbert �
�� whom Hardy afterwards got to know very well — one of the most amusing being how he had personated a groom of his father’s at a Drawing-room, and by that trick got to see a flame of his who was to be there. Altogether they were an extraordinarily sympathetic group of women, and among other discussions was, of course, one on love, in which Lady Camilla informed him that ‘a woman is never so near being in love with a man she does not love as immediately he has left her after she has refused him’.
‘Lady P. tells me she never knew real anxiety till she had a family of daughters. She wants us to come to Devonshire and live near them. She says they would find a house for us. Cannot think why we live in benighted Dorset. Em would go willingly, as it is her native county; but alas, my house at Dorchester is nearly finished.’
‘Easter Sunday. Evidences of art in Bible narratives. They are written with a watchful attention (though disguised) as to their effect on their reader. Their so-called simplicity is, in fact, the simplicity of the highest cunning. And one is led to inquire, when even in these latter days artistic development and arrangement are the qualities least appreciated by readers, who was there likely to appreciate the art in these chronicles at that day?
‘Looking round on a well-selected jhelf of fiction or history, how few stories of any length does one recognize as well told from begin ning to end! The first half of this story, the last half of that, the middle of another. . . . The modern art of narration is yet in its infancy.
