by Thomas Hardy
In reply to an inquiry from an editor he wrote:
‘No: I do not intend to answer the article on The Well-Beloved. Personal abuse best answers itself. What struck me, next to its mendacious malice, was its maladroitness, as if the writer were blinded by malignity. . . . Upon those who have read the book the review must have produced the amazed risibility I remember feeling at Wilding’s assertions when as a youth I saw Foote’s comedy of The Liar. . . . There is more fleshliness in The Loves of the Triangles than in this story — at least to me. To be sure, there is one explanation which should not be overlooked: a reviewer himself afflicted with “sex mania” might review so — a thing terrible to think of.’
Such were the odd effects of Hardy’s introduction of the subjective theory of love into modern fiction, and so ended his prose contributions to literature (beyond two or three short sketches to fulfil engagements), his experiences of the few preceding years having killed all his interest in this form of imaginative work, which had ever been secondary to his interest in verse.
A letter from him to Swinburne was written about this time, in which he says:
‘I must thank you for your kind note about my fantastic little tale [ The Well-Beloved], which, if it can make, in its better parts, any faint claim to imaginative feeling, will owe something of such feeling to you, for I often thought of lines of yours during the writing; and indeed, was not able to resist the quotation of your words now and then.
‘And this reminds me that one day, when examining several English imitations of a well-known fragment of Sappho, I interested myself in trying to strike out a better equivalent for it than the commonplace “Thou, too, shalt die”, etc., which all the translators had used during the last hundred years. I then stumbled upon your “Thee, too, the years shall cover”, and all my spirit for poetic pains died out of me. Those few words present, I think, the finest drama of Death and Oblivion, so to speak, in our tongue.
‘Believe me to be ‘Yours very sincerely,
‘Thomas Hardy.’
‘P.S. — I should have added that The Well-Beloved is a fancifu exhibition of the artistic nature, and has, I think, some little foundation in fact. I have been much surprised, and even grieved, by a ferocious review attributing an immoral quality to the tale. The writer’s meaning is beyond me. T. H.’
PART II - VERSE, TO THE END OF ‘THE DYNASTS’
CHAPTER XXIV
COLLECTING OLD POEMS AND MAKING NEW
1897-1898: Aet. 57-58
The misrepresentations of the last two or three years affected but little, if at all, the informed appreciation of Hardy’s writings, being heeded almost entirely by those who had not read him; and turned out ultimately to be the best thing that could have happened; for they wellnigh compelled him, in his own judgment at any rate, if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect, to abandon at once a form of literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form of it which had always been more instinctive with him, and which he had just been able to keep alive from his early years, half in secrecy, under the pressure of magazine writing. He abandoned it with all the less reluctance in that the novel was, in his own words, ‘gradually losing artistic form, with a beginning, middle, and end, and becoming a spasmodic inventory of items, which has nothing to do with art’.
The change, after all, was not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper, and as more specifically understood, that is, stories of modern artificial life and manners showing a certain smartness of treatment. He had mostly aimed at keeping his narratives close to natural life and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow, and had often regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still.
Nevertheless he had not known, whilst a writer of prose, whether he might not be driven to society novels, and hence, as has been seen, he had kept, at casual times, a record of his experiences in social life, though doing it had always been a drudgery to him. It was now with a sense of great comfort that he felt he might leave off further chronicles of that sort. But his thoughts on literature and life were often written down still, and from his notes much of which follows has been abridged.
He had already for some time been getting together the poems 291
which made up the first volume of verse that he was about to publish. In date they ranged from 1865 intermittently onwards, the middle period of his novel-writing producing very few or none, but of late years they had been added to with great rapidity, though at first with some consternation he had found an awkwardness in getting back to an easy expression in numbers after abandoning it for so many years; but that soon wore off.
He and his wife went to London as usual this year (1897), but did not take a house there. After two or three weeks’ stay they adopted the plan of living some way out, and going up and down every few days, the place they made their temporary centre being Basingstoke. In this way they saw London friends, went to concerts at the Imperial Institute (the orchestra this season being the famous Vienna band under Edouard Strauss), saw one or two Ibsen plays, and the year’s pictures. Being near they also went over the mournful relics of that city of the past, Silchester; till in the middle of June they started for Switzerland, thus entirely escaping the racket of the coming Diamond Jubilee, and the discomfort it would bring upon people like them who had no residence of their own in London.
All the world, including the people of fashion habitually abroad, was in London or arriving there, and the charm of a lonely Continent impressed the twain much. The almost empty Channel steamer, the ease with which they crossed France from Havre by Paris, Dijon, and Pontarlier to Neuchatel, the excellent rooms accorded them by obsequious hosts at the hotels in Switzerland, usually frequented by English and American tourists, made them glad they had come. On the actual day, the 20th, they were at Berne, where they celebrated it by attending a Jubilee Concert in the Cathedral, with the few others of their fellow-countryfolk who remained in the town. At Interlaken the comparative solitude was just as refreshing, the rosy glow from the Jungfrau, visible at three in the morning from Hardy’s bedroom, seeming an exhibition got up for themselves alone; and a pathetic procession of empty omnibuses went daily to and from each railway train between shops that looked like a banquet spread for people who delayed to come. They drove up the valley to Grindelwald, and having been conveyed to Scheidegg, walked thence to the Wengern Alp — overlooking the scene of Manfred — where a ljaby had just been born, and where Hardy was more impressed by the thundering rumble of unseen avalanches on the immense Jungfrau immediately facing than by the sight of the visible ones.
The next day, or the next following, The Times account of the celebration in London of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee reached Hardy’s hands, and he took it out and read it in the snowy presence of the maiden-monarch that dominated the whole place.
It was either in the train as it approached Interlaken, or while he was there looking at the peak, that there passed through his mind the sentiments afterwards expressed in the lines called ‘The Schreck- horn: with thoughts of Leslie Stephen’.
After a look at Lauterbrunnen, the Staubbach, the Lake and Castle of Thun, they stopped at the Hotel Gibbon, Lausanne, Hardy not having that aversion from the historian of the Decline and Fall which Ruskin recommended. He found that, though not much might remain of the original condition of the building or the site, the remoter and sloping part of the garden, with its acacias and irregular contours, could not have been much changed from what it was when Gibbon haunted it, and finished his history. Accordingly his recaller sat out there till midnight on June 27, and imagined the historian closing his last page on the spot, as described in his Autobiography:
‘It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, o
r covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.’
It is uncertain whether Hardy chose that particular evening for sitting out in the garden because he knew that June 27th was Gibbon’s date of conclusion, or whether the coincidence of dates was accidental. The later author’s imaginings took the form of the lines subjoined, which were printed in Poems of the Past and the Present.
LAUSANNE
In Gibbon s old garden: 11-12 p.m.
June 27, 1897
A spirit seems to pass,
Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand:
He contemplates a volume in his hand,
And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.
Anon the book is closed,
With ‘It is finished!’
And at the alley’s end
He turns, and when on me his glances bend
As from the Past comes speech — small, muted, yet composed.
‘How fares the Truth now? — Ill? —
Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
‘Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:
“Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth “?’1
1 The quotation is from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the passage running as follows: ‘Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch, as the sunbeam; though this ill hap wait on her nativity, that she never comes into the world, but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth; till Time, the midwife rather than the mother of truth, have washed and salted the infant and declared her legitimate.
From Lausanne, making excursions to Ouchy, and by steamer to Territet, Chillon, Vevey, and other places on the lake, they afterwards left for Zermatt, going along the valley of the Rhone amid intense heat till they gradually rose out of it beside the roaring torrent of the Visp. That night Hardy looked out of their bedroom window in the Hotel Mt. Cervin, and ‘ Could see where the Matterhorn was by the absence of stars within its outline’, it being too dark to see the surface of the mountain itself although it stood facing him. He meant to make a poem of the strange feeling implanted by this black silhouette of the mountain on the pattern of the constellation; but never did, so far as is known. However, the mountain inspired him to begin one sonnet, finished some time after — that entitled ‘ To the Matterhorn ‘ — the terrible accident on whose summit, thirty-two years before this date, had so impressed him at the time of its occurrence.
While walking from Zermatt with a Russian gentleman to the Riffel-Alp Hotel, whither Mrs. Hardy had preceded him on a pony, he met some English ladies, who informed him of the mysterious disappearance of an Englishman somewhere along the very path he had been following. Having lunched at the hotel and set his wife upon the pony again he sent her on with the guide, and slowly searched all the way down the track for some clue to the missing man, afterwards writing a brief letter to The Times to say there was no sign visible of foul play anywhere on the road. The exertion of the search, after walking up the mountain-path in the hot morning sun, so exhausted his strength that on arriving at Geneva, whither they went after leaving Zermatt, he was taken so ill at the Hotel de la Paix that he had to stay in bed. Here as he lay he listened to the plashing of a fountain night and day just outside his bedroom window, the
casements of which were kept widely open on account of the heat. It was the fountain beside which the Austrian Empress was murdered shortly after by an Italian anarchist. His accidental nearness in time and place to the spot of her doom moved him much when he heard of it, since thereby hung a tale. She was a woman whose beauty, as shown in her portraits, had attracted him greatly in his youthful years, and had inspired some of his early verses, the same romantic passion having also produced the outline of a novel upon her, which he never developed.
While he was recovering at Geneva Mrs. Hardy found by chance the tomb of an ancestor who had died there. But of Geneva, its lake, Diodati, Montalegre, Ferney, and the neighbourhood, he merely remarks: ‘ These haunts of the illustrious! Ah, but they are gone now, and care for their chosen nooks no more!’
Again in London in July he expressed views on scenery in the following letter:
To the Editor of the ‘Saturday Review’
‘Sir, — I am unable to reply to your inquiry on “The Best Scenery I know”. A week or two ago I was looking at the inexorable faces of the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn: a few days later at the Lake of Geneva with all its soft associations. But, which is “best” of things that do not compare at all, and hence cannot be reduced to a common denominator? At any given moment we like best what meets the mood of that moment.
‘Not to be entirely negative, however, I may say that, in my own neighbourhood, the following scenes rarely or never fail to delight beholders:
‘1. View from Castle Hill, Shaftesbury.
‘2. View from Pilsdon Pen.
‘3. New Forest vistas near Brockenhurst.
‘4. The River Dart.
‘5. The coast from Trebarwith Strand to Beeny Cliff, Cornwall.’
From London he returned to Max Gate, and with Mrs. Hardy wandered off to Wells Cathedral, and onwards to Frome and Longleat, whence after examining the library and the architecture he proceeded to Salisbury, a place in which he was never tired of sojourning, partly from personal associations and partly because its graceful cathedral pile was the most marked instance in England of an architectural mention carried out to the full.
‘August 10, Salisbury. Went into the Close late at night. The moon was visible through both the north and south clerestory windows to me standing on the turf on the north side. . . . Walked to the west front, and watched the moonlight creep round upon the statuary of the fagade — stroking tentatively and then more and more firmly the prophets, the martyrs, the bishops, the kings, and the queens. . . . Upon the whole the Close of Salisbury, under the full summer moon on a windless midnight, is as beautiful a scene as any I know in England — or for the matter of that elsewhere.
‘Colonel T. W. Higginson of the United States, who is staying at the same hotel as ourselves, introduced himself to us. An amiable well-read man, whom I was glad to meet. He fought in the Civil War. Went with him to hunt up the spot of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham, whose spirit is said to haunt King’s House still.’
After revisiting Stonehenge he remarks:
‘The misfortune of ruins — to be beheld nearly always at noonday by visitors, and not at twilight.
‘August 10, continued. “The day goeth away . . . the shadows of the evening are stretched out ... I set watchmen over you, saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet. But they said, We will not hearken. Therefore hear, ye nations. ... To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.” Passages from the first lesson (Jer. vi.) at the Cathedral this afternoon. E. and I present. A beautiful chapter, beautifully read by the old Canon.’
‘August 13. All tragedy is grotesque — if you allow yourself to see it as such. A risky indulgence for any who have an aspiration towards a little goodness or greatness of heart! Yet there are those who do.’
‘August 15. It is so easy nowadays to call any force above or under the sky by the name of “God” — and so pass as orthodox cheaply, and fill the pocket!’
In September he passed a few pleasant days in bicycling about the neighbourhood with Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who had an idea just at that time that he would like to buy a house near Weymouth. They found a suitable house for sale at Rodwell, commanding a full view of Portland Roads; but difficulties arose when inquiries were made, and Mr. Kipling abandoned the idea.
Bicycling was now in full spirit with the Hardys �
� and, indeed,
with everybody — and many were the places they visited by that means.
‘October 10. Am told a singularly creepy story- — absolutely true, I am assured — of a village girl near here who was about to be married. A watch had been given her by a former lover, his own watch, just before their marriage was prevented by his unexpected death of consumption. She heard it going in her box at waking on the morning of the wedding with the second lover, though it had not been touched for years.
‘Lizzy D[the monthly nurse who had attended at Hardy’s birth] told my mother that she walked eighteen (?) miles the day after her own baby was born. . . . She was an excellent nurse, much in demand; of infinite kindheartedness, humour, and quaintness, and as she lived in a cottage quite near our house at Bockhampton, she as it were kept an eye upon the Hardy family always, and being her neighbour gave my mother the preference in clashing cases. She used to tell a story of a woman who came to her to consult her about the ghost of another woman she declared she had seen, and who “troubled her” — the deceased wife of the man who was courting her.
‘“How long hev’ the woman been dead?” I said.
‘“Many years!”
‘“ Oh, that were no ghost. Now if she’d only been dead a month or two, and you were making her husband your fancy-man, there might have been something in your story. But Lord, much can she care about him after years and years in better company!”‘
To return to 1897. Nothing more of much account occurred to Hardy during its lapse, though it may be mentioned that Jude, of which only a mutilated version could be printed as a serial in England and America, appeared in a literal translation in Germany, running through several months of a well-known periodical in Berlin and Stuttgart without a single abridgement.
