by Thomas Hardy
‘Dining at the Milnes-Gaskells’, Lady Catherine told me that the Webbs of Newstead have buried the skulls that Byron used to drink from, but that the place seems to throw “a sort of doom on the family”. I then told her of the tragic Damers of the last century, who owned Abbey property, and thought she rather shrank from what I said; I afterwards remembered to my dismay that her own place was an Abbey.’ Hardy, however, found later that this was only a moment’s mood, she being as free from superstitions as any woman.
‘July 19. Note the weight of a landau and pair, the coachman in his grey great-coat, footmen ditto. All this mass of matter is moved along with brute force and clatter through a street congested and obstructed, to bear the petite figure of the owner’s young wife in violet velvet and silver trimming, slim, small; who could be easily carried under a man’s arm, and who, if held up by the hair and slipped out of her clothes, carriage, etc. etc., aforesaid, would not be much larger than a skinned rabbit, and of less use.
‘At Mary Jeune’s lunch to-day sat between a pair of beauties.
Mrs. A. Gwith her violet eyes, was the more seductive; Mrs.
R. Cthe more vivacious. The latter in yellow: the former in pale brown, and more venust and warm-blooded than Mrs. C,
who is large-eyed, somewhat slight, with quick impulsive motions, and who neglects the dishes and the coffee because possessed by some idea.’ At another luncheon or dinner at this time ‘the talk was entirely political — of when the next election would be — of the probable Prime Minister — of ins and outs — of Lord This and the Duke of That — everything except the people for whose existence alone these politicians exist. Their welfare is never once thought of.’
The same week: ‘After a day of headache, went to I’s Hotel to supper. This is one of the few old taverns remaining in London, whose frequenters after theatre-closing know each other, and talk across from table to table. The head waiter is called William. There is always something homely when the waiter is called William. He talks of his affairs to the guests, as the guests talk of theirs to him. He has whiskers of the rare old mutton-chop pattern, and a manner of confidence. He has shaved so many years that his face is of a bluish soap-colour, and if wetted and rubbed would raise a lather of itself. . . . Shakespeare is largely quoted at the tables; especially “ How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot? “ Theatrical affairs are discussed neither from the point of view of the audience, nor of the actors, but from a third point — that of the recaller of past appearances.
‘Old-fashioned country couples also come in, their fathers having recommended the tavern from recollections of the early part of the century. They talk on innocently-friendly terms with the theatrical young men, and handsome ladies who enter with them as their “husbands”, after the play.’
They annexed to their London campaign this year a visit to Sir Brampton and Lady Camilla Gurdon at Grundesburgh Hall, Suffolk — a house standing amid green slopes timbered with old oaks. The attraction was its possession of the most old-fashioned and delightful — probably Elizabethan — garden with high buttressed walls that Hardy had ever seen, which happily had been left unimproved and unchanged, owing to the Hall having been used merely as a farmhouse for a century or two, and hence neglected. The vegetables were planted in the middle of square plots surrounded by broad green alleys, and screened by thickets and palisades of tall flowers, ‘so that one does not know any vegetables are there’.
Hardy spent a good deal of time in August and the autumn correcting Tess of the d’Urbervilles for its volume form, which process consisted in restoring to their places the passages and chapters of the original MS. that had been omitted from the serial publication. The name ‘Talbothays’, given in the diary, was based on that of a farm belonging to his father, which, however, had no house on it at that time.
In September he and his wife paid a visit to his friend Sir George Douglas at Springwood Park, in fulfilment of a long promise, passing on their way north by the coastline near Holy Isle or Lindisfarne, at that moment glowing reddish on a deep blue sea under the evening sun, with all the romance of Marmion about its aspect. It was the place which he afterwards urged Swinburne to make his headquarters, as being specially suited for him — a Northumbrian — an idea which Swinburne was much attracted by, though he owned that ‘to his great shame’ he had never been on the isle. They had a very charming time in Scotland, visiting many Scott scenes, including Edie Ochiltree’s grave, and one that Hardy had always been anxious to see — Smaylho’me Tower — the setting of the ‘Eve of St. John’ — a ballad which was among the verse he liked better than any of Scott’s prose. At Springwood they met at dinner one evening old Mr. Usher, aged eighty-one, who had known Scott and Lady Scott well, and whose father had sold Scott the land called Huntley Burn. He said that when he was a boy Scott asked him to sing, which he did; and Scott was so pleased that he gave him a pony. When Hardy wondered why Lady Scott should have taken the poet’s fancy, Mr. Usher replied grimly, ‘She wadna’ ha’ taken mine!’
They finished this autumn visit by a little tour to Durham, Whitby, Scarborough, York, and Peterborough. At the last- mentioned place the verger ‘ told us of a lady’s body found in excavating, of which the neck and bosoms glistened, being coated with a species of enamel. She had been maid of honour to Catherine of Arragon who lies near. ... In the train there was a woman of various ages — hands old, frame middle-aged, and face young. What her mean age was I had no conception of.’
‘October 28. It is the incompleteness that is loved, when love is sterling and true. This is what differentiates the real one from the imaginary, the practicable from the impossible, the Love who returns the kiss from the Vision that melts away. A man sees the Diana or the Venus in his Beloved, but what he loves is the difference.’
‘October 30. Howells and those of his school forget that a story must be striking enough to be worth telling. Therein lies the problem — to reconcile the average with that uncommonness which alone makes it natural that a tale or experience would dwell in the memory and induce repetition.’
Sir Charles Cave was the judge at the Dorset assizes this autumn, and Hardy dined with him and Mr. Frith his marshal while they were in the town. Cave told him, among other things, that when he and Sir J. F. Stephen, also on the bench, were struggling young men the latter came to him and said a man was going to be hanged at the Old Bailey, jocularly remarking as an excuse for proposing to go and see it: ‘ Who knows; we may be judges some day; and it will be well to have learnt how the last sentence of the law is carried out.’
During the first week in November the Rev. Dr. Robertson Nicoll, editor of the Bookman, forwarded particulars of a discussion in the papers on whether national recognition should be given to eminent men of letters. Hardy’s reply was:
‘I daresay it would be very interesting that literature should be honoured by the state. But I don’t see how it could be satisfactorily done. The highest flights of the pen are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life, while the natural tendency of a government would be to encourage acquiescence in life as it is. However, I have not thought much about the matter.’
As the year drew to a close an incident that took place during the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a serial in the Graphic might have prepared him for certain events that were to follow. The editor objected to the description of Angel Clare carrying in his arms, across a flooded lane, Tess and her three dairymaid companions. He suggested that it would be more decorous and suitable for the pages of a periodical intended for family reading if the damsels were wheeled across the lane in a wheel-barrow. This was accordingly done.
Also the Graphic refused to print the chapter describing the christening of the infant child of Tess. This appeared in Henley’s Scots Observer, and was afterwards restored to the novel, where it was considered one of the finest passages.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles; a Pure Woman faithfully Presented was published complete abo
ut the last day of November, with what results Hardy could scarcely have foreseen, since the book, notwithstanding its exceptional popularity, was the beginning of the end of his career as a novelist.
THE LATER YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY, 1892–1928 by Florence Hardy
Hardy’s wife Florence published this second biography following the success and eager reception of the first. Now, critics believe both biographies were mostly written by Hardy himself.
Hardy and his second wife Florence
CONTENTS
PART 1 - ‘TESS’, ‘JUDE’, AND THE END OF PROSE
CHAPTER XX
THE RECEPTION OF THE BOOK
CHAPTER XXI
VISITS AND INTERMITTENT READING
CHAPTER XXII
ANOTHER NOVEL FINISHED, MUTILATED, AND RESTORED
CHAPTER XXIII
MORE ON ‘JUDE’, AND ISSUE OF ‘THE WELL-BELOVED’
CHAPTER XXIV
COLLECTING OLD POEMS AND MAKING NEW
CHAPTER XXV
‘WESSEX POEMS’ AND OTHERS
CHAPTER XXVI
‘POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT’, AND OTHERS
CHAPTER XXVII
PART FIRST OF ‘THE DYNASTS’
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE REMAINDER OF ‘THE DYNASTS’
CHAPTER XXIX
DEATHS OF SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH
CHAPTER XXX
THE FREEDOM OF THE BOROUGH
CHAPTER XXXI
BEREAVEMENT
CHAPTER XXXII
REVISITINGS, SECOND MARRIAGE, AND WAR WRITINGS
CHAPTER XXXIII
PART IV - LIFE’S DECLINE
CHAPTER XXXIV
REFLECTIONS ON POETRY
CHAPTER XXXV
POETICAL QUESTIONS: AND MELLSTOCK CLUB-ROOM
CHAPTER XXXVI
‘THE DYNASTS’ AT OXFORD; HON. DEGREE; A DEPUTATION; A CONTROVERSY
CHAPTER XXXVII
SOME FAREWELLS
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE LAST SCENE
NOTES BY F. E. H.
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
APPENDIX III
PART 1 - ‘TESS’, ‘JUDE’, AND THE END OF PROSE
Florence Hardy, several years after her husband’s death
CHAPTER XX
THE RECEPTION OF THE BOOK
1892: Aet. 51-52
As Tess of the d’Urbervilles got into general circulation it attracted an attention that Hardy had apparently not foreseen, for at the time of its publication he was planning something of quite a different kind, according to an entry he made:
‘Title: — “Songs of Five-and-Twenty Years”. Arrangement of the songs: Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music to have precedence.’
However, reviews, letters, and other intelligence speedily called him from these casual thoughts back to the novel, which the tedious- ness of the alterations and restorations had made him wear.y of. From the prefaces to later editions can be gathered more or less clearly what happened to the book as, passing into great popularity, an endeavour was made by some critics to change it to scandalous notoriety — the latter kind of clamour, raised by a certain small section of the public and the press, being quite inexplicable to the writer himself.
Among other curious results from the publication of the book was that it started a rumour of Hardy’s theological beliefs, which lived, and spread, and grew, so that it was never completely extinguished. Near the end of the story he had used the sentence, ‘The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess’, and the first five words were, as Hardy often explained to his reviewers, but a literal translation of Aesch. Prom. 169: MaKapiov 7rpvravis. The classical sense in which he had used them is best shown by quoting a reply he wrote thirty years later to some unknown critic who had said in an article:
‘Hardy postulates an all-powerful being endowed with the baser human passions, who turns everything to evil and rejoices in the mischief he has wrought’; another critic taking up the tale by adding: ‘ To him evil is not so much a mystery, a problem, as the wilful malice of his god.’
Hardy’s reply was written down but (it is believed), as in so many cases with him, never posted; though I am able to give it from the rough draft:
‘As I need hardly inform any thinking reader, I do not hold, and never have held, the ludicrous opinions here assumed to be mine — which are really, or approximately, those of the primitive believer in his man-shaped tribal god. And in seeking to ascertain how any exponent of English literature could have supposed that I held them I find that the writer of the estimate has harked back to a passage in a novel of mine, printed many years ago, in which the forces opposed to the heroine were allegorized as a personality (a method not unusual in imaginative prose or poetry) by the use of a well-known trope, explained in that venerable work, Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, as “one in which life, perception, activity, design, passion, or any property of sentient beings, is attributed to things inanimate”.
‘Under this species of criticism if an author were to say “Aeolus maliciously tugged at her garments, and tore her hair in his wrath”, the sapient critic would no doubt announce that author’s evil creed to be that the wind is “a powerful being endowed with the baser human passions”, etc., etc.
‘However, I must put up with it, and say as Parrhasius of Ephesus said about his pictures: There is nothing that men will not find fault with.’
The deep impression produced on the general and uncritical public by the story was the occasion of Hardy’s receiving strange letters — some from husbands whose experiences had borne a resemblance to that of Angel Clare, though more, many more, from wives with a past like that of Tess, but who had not told their husbands, and asking for his counsel under the burden of their concealment. Some of these were educated women of good position, and Hardy used to say the singular thing was that they should have put themselves in the power of a stranger by these revelations (their names having often been given, though sometimes initials at a post-office only), when they would not trust persons nearest to them with their secret. However, they did themselves no harm, he would add, for though he was unable to advise them, he carefully destroyed their letters, and never mentioned their names, or suspected names, to a living soul. He owed them that much, he said, for their trust in his good faith. A few, too, begged that he would meet them privately, or call on them, and hear their story instead of their writing it. He talked the matter over with his friend Sir Francis Jeune, who had had abundant experience of the like things in the Divorce Court, where he presided, and who recommended him not to meet the writers alone, in case they should not be genuine. He himself, he said, also got such letters, but made it a rule never to notice them. Nor did Hardy, though he sometimes sadly thought that they came from sincere women in trouble.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles was also the cause of Hardy’s meeting a good many people of every rank during that spring, summer, and onwards, and of opportunity for meeting a good many more if he had chosen to avail himself of it. Many of the details that follow concerning his adventures in the world of fashion at dinner-parties, crushes, and other social functions, which Hardy himself did not think worth recording, have been obtained from diaries kept by the late Mrs. Hardy.
It must be repeated that his own notes on these meetings were set down by him as private memoranda only; and that they, or some of them, are reproduced here to illustrate what contrasting planes of existence he moved in — vibrating at a swing between the artificial gaieties of a London season and the quaintnesses of a primitive rustic life.
Society remarks on Tess were curious and humorous. Strangely enough, Lord Salisbury, with whom Hardy had a slight acquaintance, was a supporter of the story. Also: ‘ The Duchess of Abercorn tells me that the novel has saved her all future trouble in the assortment of her friends. They have been almost fighting across her dinner-table over Tess’s character. What she now says to them is “ Do you support her or not? “ If t
hey say “ No indeed. She deserved hanging. A little harlot!” she puts them in one group. If they say “Poor wronged innocent!” and pity her, she puts them in the other group where she is herself.’ He was discussing the question thus with another noble dame who sat next him at a large dinner-party, when they waxed so contentious that they were startled to find the whole table of two-and-twenty silent, listening to their theories on this vexed question. And a well-known beauty and statesman’s wife, also present, snapped out at him: ‘ Hanged? They ought all to have been hanged!’
‘Took Arthur Balfour’s sister in to dinner at the Jeunes’. Liked her frank, sensible, womanly way of talking. The reviews have made me shy of presenting copies of Tess, and I told her plainly that if I gave her one it might be the means of getting me into hot water with her. She said: “ Now don’t I really look old enough to read any novel with safety by this time!” Some of the best women don’t marry — perhaps wisely.’
‘April 10. Leslie Ward, in illustration of the calamities of artists, tells me of a lady’s portrait, life-size, he has on his hands, that he was requested by her husband to paint. When he had just completed the picture she eloped with a noble earl, whereupon her husband wrote to say he did not want the painting, and Ward’s labour was wasted, there being no contract. The end of the story was that the husband divorced her, and, like Edith in Browning’s “Too Late”, she “married the other”, and brought him a son and heir. At a dinner the very same evening the lady who was my neighbour at the table told me that her husband was counsel in the case, which was hurried through, that the decree might be made absolute and the remarriage take place before the baby was born.’
