by Thomas Hardy
On the 1 st November Jude the Obscure was published.
A week after, on the 8th, he sets down:
‘England seventy years ago. — I have heard of a girl, now a very old woman, who in her youth was seen following a goose about the common all the afternoon to get a quill from the bird, with which the parish-clerk could write for her a letter to her lover. Such a first-hand method of getting a quill-pen for important letters was not infrequent at that date.’ It may be added that Hardy himself had written such love-letters, and read the answers to them: but this was after the use of the quill had been largely abandoned for that of the steel pen, though old people still stuck to quills, and Hardy himself had to practise his earliest lessons in writing with a quill.
The onslaught upon Jude started by the vituperative section of the press — unequalled in violence since the publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads thirty years before — was taken up by the anonymous writers of libellous letters and post-cards, and other such gentry. It spread to America and Australia, whence among other appreciations he received a letter containing a packet of ashes, which the virtuous writer stated to be those of his iniquitous novel.
Thus, though Hardy with his quick sense of humour could not help seeing a ludicrous side to it all, and was well enough aware that the evil complained of was what these ‘nice minds with nasty ideas’ had read into his book, and not what he had put there, he underwent the strange experience of beholding a sinister lay figure of himself constructed by them, which had no sort of resemblance to him as he was, and which he, and those who knew him well, would not have recognized as being meant for himself if it had not been called by his name. Macaulay’s remark in his essay on Byron was well illustrated by Thomas Hardy’s experience at this time: ‘ We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’
In contrast to all this it is worth while to quote what Swinburne wrote to Hardy after reading Jude the Obscure:
‘The tragedy — if I may venture an opinion — is equally beautiful and terrible in its pathos. The beauty, the terror, and the truth, are all yours and yours alone. But (if I may say so) how cruel you are! Only the great and awful father of “Pierrette” and “L’Enfant Maudit” was ever so merciless to his children. I think it would hardly be seemly to enlarge on all that I admire in your work — or on half of it. — The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise, but I will risk saying how thankful we should be (I know that I may speak for other admirers as cordial as myself) for another admission into an English paradise “under the greenwood tree”.
But if you prefer to be — or to remain — the most tragic of authors no doubt you may; for Balzac is dead, and there has been no such tragedy in fiction — on anything like the same lines — since he died.
‘Yours most sincerely,
‘A. C. Swinburne.’
Three letters upon this same subject, written by Hardy himself to a close friend, may appropriately be given here.
Letter I
‘Max Gate,
‘Dorchester,
‘November 10th, 1895.
“... Your review (of Jude the Obscure) is the most discriminating that has yet appeared. It required an artist to see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed — I ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point, the characters necessitated it, and I simply let it come. As for the story itself, it is really sent out to those into whose souls the iron has entered, and has entered deeply at some time of their lives. But one cannot choose one’s readers.
‘It is curious that some of the papers should look upon the novel as a manifesto on ‘the marriage question’ (although, of course, it involves it), seeing that it is concerned first with the labours of a poor student to get a University degree, and secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament peculiar to the family of the, parties. The only remarks which can be said to bear on the general marriage question occur in dialogue, and comprise no more than half a dozen pages in a book of five hundred. And of these remarks I state (p. 362) that my own views are not expressed therein. I suppose the attitude of these critics is to be accounted for by the accident that, during the serial publication of my story, a sheaf of “ purpose “ novels on the matter appeared.
‘You have hardly an idea how poor and feeble the book seems to me, as executed, beside the idea of it that I had formed in prospect.
‘I have received some interesting letters about it already — yours not the least so. Swinburne writes, too enthusiastically for me to quote with modesty.
‘Believe me, with sincere thanks for your review,
‘Ever yours,
‘Thomas Hardy.
‘P.S. One thing I did not answer. The “grimy” features of the story go to show the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead. The throwing of the pizzle, at the supreme moment of his young dream, is to sharply initiate this contrast. But I must have lamentably failed, as I feel I have, if this requires explanation and is not self-evident. The idea was meant to run all through the novel. It is, in fact, to be discovered in everybody’s life, though it lies less on the surface perhaps than it does in my poor puppet’s.’T. H.’
Letter II
‘Max Gate,
‘Dorchester,
‘November 20th, 1895.
‘I am keen about the new magazine. How interesting that you should be writing this review for it! I wish the book were more worthy of such notice and place.
‘You are quite right; there is nothing perverted or depraved in Sue’s nature. The abnormalism consists in disproportion, not in inversion, her sexual instinct being healthy as far as it goes, but unusually weak and fastidious. Her sensibilities remain painfully alert notwithstanding, as they do in nature with such women. One point illustrating this I could not dwell upon: that, though she has children, her intimacies with Jude have never been more than occasional, even when they were living together (I mention that they occupy separate rooms, except towards the end), and one of her reasons for fearing the marriage ceremony is that she fears it would be breaking faith with Jude to withhold herself at pleasure, or altogether, after it; though while uncontracted she feels at liberty to yield herself as seldom as she chooses. This has tended to keep his passion as hot at the end as at the beginning, and helps to break his heart. He has never really possessed her as freely as he desired.
‘Sue is a type of woman which has always had an attraction for me, but the difficulty of drawing the type has kept me from attempting it till now.
‘Of course the book is all contrasts — or was meant to be in its original conception. Alas, what a miserable accomplishment it is, when I compare it with what I meant to make it! — e.g. Sue and her heathen gods set against Jude’s reading the Greek testament; Christ-
minster academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint; marriage, no marriage; See., &c.
‘As to the “coarse” scenes with Arabella, the battle in the schoolroom, etc., the newspaper critics might, I thought, have sneered at them for their Fieldingism rather than for their Zolaism. But your everyday critic knows nothing of Fielding. I am read in Zola very little, but have felt akin locally to Fielding, so many of his scenes having been laid down this way, and his home near.
‘Did I tell you I feared I should seem too High-Churchy at the end of the book where Sue recants? You can imagine my surprise at some of the reviews.
‘What a self-occupied letter!
‘Ever sincerely,
‘T. H.’
Letter III
‘Max Gate,
‘Dorchester,
‘January 4, 1896.
‘For the last three days I have been tantalised by a difficulty in getting Cosmopolis, and had only just read your review when I received your note. My sincere thanks for the generous
view you take of the book, which to me is a mass of imperfections. We have both been amused — or rather delighted — by the sub-humour (is there such a word?) of your writing. I think it a rare quality in living essayists, and that you ought to make more of it — I mean write more in that vein than you do.
‘But this is apart from the review itself, of which I will talk to you when we meet. The rectangular lines of the story were not premeditated, but came by chance: except, of course, that the involutions of four lives must necessarily be a sort of quadrille. The only point in the novel on which I feel sure is that it makes for morality; and that delicacy or indelicacy in a writer is according to his object. If I say to a lady “I met a naked woman”, it is indelicate. But if I go on to say “I found she was mad with sorrow”, it ceases to be indelicate. And in writing Jude my mind was fixed on the ending.
‘Sincerely yours,
‘T. H.’
In London in December they went to see Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Romeo and Juliet, supping with them afterwards at Willis’s Rooms, a building Hardy had known many years earlier, when it was still a ballroom unaltered in appearance from that of its famous days as ‘Almack’s’ — indeed, he had himself danced on the old floor shortly after his first arrival in London in 1862, as has been mentioned.
When they got back to Dorchester during December Hardy had plenty of time to read the reviews of Jude that continued to pour out. Some paragraphists knowingly assured the public that the book was an honest autobiography, and Hardy did not take the trouble to deny it till more than twenty years later, when he wrote to an inquirer with whom the superstition still lingered that no book he had ever written contained less of his own life, which of course had been known to his friends from the beginning. Some of the incidents were real in so far as that he had heard of them, or come in contact with them when they were occurring to people he knew; but no more. It is interesting to mention that on his way to school he did once meet with a youth like Jude who drove the bread-cart of a widow, a baker, like Mrs. Fawley, and carried on his studies at the same time, to the serious risk of other drivers in the lanes; which youth asked him to lend him his Latin grammar. But Hardy lost sight of this featful student, and never knew if he profited by his plan.
Hardy makes a remark on one or two of the reviews: ‘Tragedy may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as subversive and dangerous; when all the while he may never have questioned the necessity or urged the non-necessity of either’
During this year 1895, and before and after, Tess of the d’Urbervilles went through Europe in translations, German, French, Russian, Dutch, Italian, and other tongues, Hardy as a rule stipulating that the translation should be complete and unabridged, on a guarantee of which he would make no charge. Some of the renderings, however, were much hacked about in spite of him. The Russian translation appears to have been read and approved by Tolstoi during its twelve months’ career in a Moscow monthly periodical.
In December he replied to Mr. W. T. Stead, editor of The Review of Reviews:
‘I am unable to answer your inquiry as to “Hymns that have helped me”.
‘But the undermentioned have always been familiar and favourite hymns of mine as poetry:
‘1. “Thou turnest man, O Lord, to dust”. Ps. xc. vv. 3, 4, 5, 6.
(Tate and Brady.) ‘2. “Awake, my soul, and with the sun.” (Morning Hymn, Ken.).
‘3. “Lead, kindly Light.” (Newman.)’ So ended the year 1895.
CHAPTER XXIII
MORE ON ‘JUDE’, AND ISSUE OF ‘THE WELL-BELOVED’
1896-1897: Aet. 55-57
Hardy found that the newspaper comments on Jude the Obscure were producing phenomena among his country friends which were extensive and peculiar, they having a pathetic reverence for press opinions. However, on returning to London in the spring he discovered somewhat to his surprise that people there seemed not to be at all concerned at his having been excommunicated by the press, or by at least a noisy section of it, and received him just the same as ever; so that he and his wife passed this season much as usual, going to Lady Malmesbury’s wedding and also a little later to the wedding of Sir George Lewis’s son at the Jewish Synagogue; renewing acquaintance with the beautiful Duchess of Montrose and Lady Londonderry, also attending a most amusing masked ball at his friends Mr. and Mrs. Montagu Crackanthorpe’s, where he and Henry James were the only two not in dominoes, and were recklessly flirted with by the women in consequence.
This year they took again the house in South Kensington they had occupied two years earlier, and gave some little parties there. But it being a cold damp spring Hardy caught a chill by some means, and was laid up with a rheumatic attack for several days, in May suffering from a relapse. He was advised to go to the seaside for a change of air, and leaving the London house in the charge of the servants went with Mrs. Hardy to lodgings at Brighton.
While there he received a request from the members of the Glasgow University Liberal Club to stand as their candidate in the election of a Lord Rector for the University: the objection to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who had been nominated, being that he was not a man of letters. Hardy’s reply to the Honorary Secretary was written from Brighton on May 16, 1896.
‘Dear Sir,
‘Your letter has just reached me here, where I am staying for a few days for change of air after an illness.
‘In reply let me assure you that I am deeply sensible of the honour of having been asked by the members of the Glasgow University Liberal Club to stand as their candidate for the Lord Rectorship.
‘In other circumstances I might have rejoiced at the opportunity. But personal reasons which it would be tedious to detail prevent my entertaining the idea of coming forward for the office, and I can only therefore request you to convey to the Club my regrets that such should be the case; and my sincere thanks for their generous opinion of my worthiness.
‘I am, dear Sir,
‘Yours faithfully,
‘Thomas Hardy.’
There they stayed about a week and, finding little improvement effected, returned to South Kensington. By degrees he recovered, and they resumed going out as usual, and doing as much themselves to entertain people as they could accomplish in a house not their own. This mostly took a form then in vogue, one very convenient for literary persons, of having afternoon parties, to the invitations to which their friends of every rank as readily responded as they had done in former years, notwithstanding the fact that at the very height of the season the Bishop of Wakefield announced in a letter to the papers that he had thrown Hardy’s novel into the fire. Knowing the difficulty of burning a thick book even in a good fire, and the infre- quency of fires of any sort in summer, Hardy was mildly sceptical of the literal truth of the bishop’s story; but remembering that Shelley, Milton, and many others of the illustrious, reaching all the way back to the days of Protagoras, had undergone the same sort of indignity at the hands of bigotry and intolerance he thought it a pity in the interests of his own reputation to disturb the episcopal narrative of adventures with Jude. However, it appeared that, further, — to quote the testimony in the Bishop’s Life — the scandalised prelate was not ashamed to deal a blow below the belt, but’ took an envelope out of his paperstand and addressed it to W. F. D. Smith, Esq., M.P. The result was the quiet withdrawal of the book from the library, and an assurance that any other books by the same author would be carefully examined before they were allowed to be circulated.’ Of this precious conspiracy Hardy knew nothing, or it might have moved a mind which the burning could not stir to say a word on literary garrotting. In his ignorance of it he remained silent, being fully aware of one thing, that the ethical teaching of the novel, even if somewhat crudely put, was as high as that of any of the bishop’s sermons — (indeed, Hardy was afterwards reproached for its being ‘too much o
f a sermon’). And thus feeling quite calm on the ultimate verdict of Time he merely reflected on the shallowness of the episcopal view of the case and of morals generally, which brought to his memory a witty remark he had once read in a Times leading article, to the effect that the qualities which enabled a man to become a bishop were often the very reverse of those which made a good bishop when he became one.
The only sad feature in the matter to Hardy was that if the bishop could have known him as he was, he would have found a man whose personal conduct, views of morality, and of the vital facts of religion, hardly differed from his own.1
Possibly soured by all this he wrote a little while after his birthday: ‘Every man’s birthday is a first of April for him; and he who lives to be fifty and won’t own it is a rogue or a fool, hypocrite or simpleton.’
At a party at Sir Charles Tennant’s, to which Hardy and his wife were invited to meet the Eighty Club, Lord Rosebery took occasion in a conversation to inquire ‘ why Hardy had called Oxford “ Christ- minster”.’ Hardy assured him that he had not done anything of the sort, ‘Christminster’ being a city of learning that was certainly suggested by Oxford, but in its entirety existed nowhere else in the world but between the covers of the novel under discussion. The answer was not so flippant as it seemed, for Hardy’s idea had been, as he often explained, to use the difficulty of a poor man’s acquiring learning at that date merely as the ‘tragic mischief’ (among others) of a dramatic story, for which purpose an old-fashioned university at the very door of the poor man was the most striking method; and though the architecture and scenery of Oxford were the best in England adapted for this, he did not slavishly copy them; indeed in some details he departed considerably from whatever of the city he took as a general model. It is hardly necessary to add that he had no feeling 1 That the opinions thus expressed by Bishop How in 189; are not now shared by all the clergy may be gathered from the following extract from an article in Theology, August 1928:
