His explanation suggests that the ‘maid and her wight’ may not be an anonymous rustic couple but Emma and Hardy themselves, distant figures viewed through the long telescope of time, and caught for ever moving across a patch of rough working Cornish land. You can believe that he remembered the old horse, the man with the harrow and the couch-grass giving off smoke just as he had seen them, and that he saw himself at the edge of the scene, walking closely with Emma – close enough for them to exchange loving whispers. The old word ‘wight’ nudges his past self and puts him in his place, and suggests that two lovers, whether lady and gentleman or maid and wight, have the same value in the end. He thought it was among his best poems, and it has the solidity of something truly remembered and realized.15
Other memorials from that summer are the drawings they did of one another, Emma’s showing Hardy sitting on a stile with a tender, bemused expression and holding a flag (presumably a French one), sketched on 18 August. The next day he drew Emma on all fours searching for the cup lost in the river. She is deliciously dressed, hatted and curled, with her bottom sticking up, her sleeves rolled and her breasts clearly outlined. On the 22nd, the day rain ended the heat wave, he sketched Beeny Cliff, showing an indeterminate figure that must be Emma, wrapped up against the rain.16 She made tiny drawings of ‘our stone’ under the trees by the Valency River, and of the pretty summer house with its table in the rectory garden where they must have sat for shelter from sun or rain, looking out over the fields. During these three August weeks they fully acknowledged their love for one another, and when Hardy left he considered himself engaged. It had to be a private engagement. Of Emma’s family he knew only the Holders, and of his family she knew nothing unless perhaps he mentioned his sister Mary as being a schoolteacher, and Kate, still a schoolgirl. She had no money of her own – she must have managed on pocket money from her father or Holder – and Hardy had savings of only £125, of which £75 were going to be handed over to Tinsley. Whether he knew it or not, she would be thirty on her next birthday, in November. Their youth was passing, they had no prospects, and two years went by before he felt able to speak to her father about the possibility of marriage. When he left Cornwall at the end of the month, he did not know even when he would be able to see her next.
Letters kept their love going. Hardy, in a glow of remembered emotion, later compared their correspondence with the exchanges of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. One would give a great deal to hear Hardy open his heart and Emma at full voice, and there must have been many letters, given that the lovers were separated for about eleven months of each year during the four years of their wooing. Easy to imagine the bundles tied with ribbon and neatly boxed, but every one of them was destroyed; not because they could not bear the thought of profaning their love by letting them be seen, but through rage and bitterness – by Emma.
Nobody knows whether Emma ever read the jubilant lines inspired by Hardy’s first journey to Cornwall, ‘When I Set Out for Lyonnesse’. Lyonnesse was the old name he used for Cornwall; he put the date 1870 beside it but did not publish it until after her death, perhaps because it seemed too painfully ironical when he began to publish his poems in 1898.17 She is not named, although she is part of the poem. It is an incantation about magic and falling in love, coming out of freezing darkness and loneliness into a life of limitless, shining possibilities.
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
8. The True Vocation
For the next two years – 1871 and 1872 – he shuttled between Weymouth, Bockhampton, London and Cornwall. Ideas for new novels came tumbling into his head, but, although he had a few periods of concentrated writing, mostly he had to fit it into whatever spare time was left while he earned his living doing architectural jobs. He was short of money. Getting to Cornwall was difficult, and there was no question of Emma coming to him. She had no money at all, the idea of her staying with his parents was unimaginable, and unmarried ladies did not visit men. Some time in 1871 he wrote a sad sonnet, ‘The Minute before Meeting’, in which he spoke of the ‘grey gaunt days’ and ‘slow blank months’ of separation from Emma, and said he could hardly enjoy even the imminent prospect of seeing her because it was spoilt by knowing how soon they would have to part again.
His gloom was not lifted by his mother, who must have heard of Emma’s existence after his return from Cornwall in September 1870 and noticed the regular arrival of her letters. Jemima’s remark, entered in his notebook in October as the grim suggestion ‘That a figure stands in our van with an arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable’, may have been offered as a warning to him not to be too hopeful in his wooing, or in any other plans. Temperamentally he shared her bleak view of fate. Still, she was a good practical mother and looked after him while he was at Bockhampton that autumn, preparing Desperate Remedies for Tinsley. As a keen reader she must have been curious about his writing, but he says nothing about showing it to her. He may have worried about her response to his descriptions of country life, and it was said by a neighbour who knew her well that she did object to his use of local material. ‘She rather bitterly complained of his not having kept his word to her that he would confine his productions to London. “And he don’t say things right neither… He tells as how I did always come out of the front door to feed the chickens – and I never did! – I did always come out at back!” ’1
She would have noticed the sheaves of pages going off to Emma for her to copy in her neat handwriting, and perhaps minded that, and felt a sense of rivalry. Emma did the work gladly. She wrote to him of ‘This dream of my life – no, not dream, for what is actually going on around me seems a dream rather…’2 Their collaborative effort was in the publisher’s hands on 9 December, but they had no prospect of meeting for many months yet. Divided from her, unable to share his love for her with his family, or even to introduce her into it, and uncertain whether his writing would ever succeed, he read Hamlet while he waited for Tinsley’s response and marked the Prince’s words: ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart: but it is no matter!’3
There was a final tussle about terms with Tinsley, then he went to London in January 1871 and paid over the £75. This left him with a total fortune of £50. He would have to get work again once he had corrected the proofs. This at least went smoothly, and on 25 March his first published book was at last in his hands, a moment of rejoicing, surely, rapidly followed by intense anxiety, since it was also in the hands of the reviewers. His view was that The Poor Man and the Lady was a much better book, while this one was written to a formula, but it did not prevent him from hoping for a good response. It was in the usual three volumes, and there was no author’s name on the title page, only a sentence from Scott explaining that ‘the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality.’ It was not calculated to attract readers, and it was slightly misquoted: a bad start. Hardy corrected it on the copy he sent to Emma.4
He was already working on another book, cannibalizing some of the rustic scenes already written for The Poor Man and the Lady and building a simple narrative around a piece of his own family history: the conflict between the ‘string choir’ of viols and voices
his grandfather had run in Stinsford Church, and a new vicar determined to replace the choir with an up-to-date organ. It was to be called ‘The Mellstock Quire’. Wanting to get on with it, he still needed to earn and took himself to Weymouth once more, where Crickmay, busily building new villas and schools, was glad to employ him. Writing was again relegated to spare time. In April the first two reviews of Desperate Remedies lifted his spirits, praising the power of the plot, the characterization, the use of dialect and the presentation of rural life (this was ‘almost worthy of George Eliot’). After this the Spectator put in the knife, suggesting that the whole book was itself a desperate remedy for ‘ennui or an emaciated purse’ and that the unknown author had ‘prostituted’ his powers ‘to the purposes of idle prying into the way of wickedness’. ‘Here are no fine characters, no original ones to extend one’s knowledge of human nature, no display of passion except of the brute kind.’ Miss Aldclyffe was described as ‘a miserable creation – uninteresting, unnatural, and nasty’. It was the sort of attack an author never forgets, and Hardy never did forget it, any more than he developed a thick skin, as Moule urged him to in a kindly letter. Few writers do, although some brazen it out better than others. The Spectator review was long, and when he was able to look at it calmly he saw that it also contained a good deal of praise for ‘talent of a remarkable kind’, vivid powers of description and an especial skill in the presentation of country people. This was balm, and he copied out the encouraging parts.
Joy came in May, when he persuaded Crickmay to send him back to St Juliot, and he and Emma were able to exult together over the three volumes of ‘their’ book – she had after all copied most of it – and to talk about the new manuscript. In the course of the summer Hardy carried out radical changes, writing forty pages of extra material and shifting the main interest away from the tribulations of the choir to the love story.5 Emma claimed in later years that she helped and advised Hardy with his writing, while he insisted that her help was pretty well confined to making fair copies, but the alterations to ‘The Mellstock Quire’, which became Under the Greenwood Tree during the summer of 1871, suggest that in this one instance she may have influenced him, or at least that he made adjustments to suit her taste and interests. What he did was to promote the village schoolmistress, Fancy Day, from minor figure to heroine, putting her at the centre of the plot and making it a much more conventional one. The main theme of the village musicians fighting to keep their church band became humorous background material to a pastoral love story in which three rivals pursue Fancy.6 Hardy had started with his native village and his own people in mind, but he may have decided that this was not the way to introduce them to Emma, and by reducing the importance of their role he distanced them. The Shakespearean allusion in the new title, together with a subtitle, ‘A Rural Painting of the Dutch School’, distanced them further, inviting the reader to stand back and enjoy a scene framed and shaped for pleasurable contemplation.
Under the Greenwood Tree has charmed generations of readers who share Emma’s view that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the gentry and the poor. You are charmed on condition that you accept Hardy’s condescension towards his characters. His villagers are drawn sympathetically but as simpletons. He is tender towards them and gives them beautifully turned rustic dialogue, but he invites us to smile with him at their simplicity. They are comical without knowing they are. They have no hope of dealing with the new vicar effectively, because they cannot be other than deferential to his position, whatever they think of him as a man. They accept their own inferiority, and, even though he is not much brighter than any of them, his class and social status ensure that he will always win in any dispute. Hardy’s tone is judicious, avuncular, staid. Fancy Day has had more education than most of the villagers, having been to a teacher training college. The villagers see she is pretty; the reader sees that she is vain and sly, bringing a chill breath of air into the idyll. But she is sensible enough to understand that rising socially by marrying the clergyman would not make her happy, and that she would do better by sticking to her own class. Both Hardy and Emma might have found ironies here, but if they did they kept silent, as Fancy did.
There is no sense of strain in the finished narrative, and there is a joyful account of the Christmas dance in the village, where Dick woos Fancy almost without words but instead with his concentrated physical energy during a long evening of festivities, up and down the country dance sets, urging the band to keep playing and holding her tighter and tighter in his arms until – as he remembers it afterwards – she was ‘so close to me that not a sheet of paper could have been slipped between us’. They have reached a point where they understand one another’s hopes and intentions – ‘Fancy was now held so closely, that Dick and she were practically one person’ – and after this he is not likely to lose her.7
Hardy modelled Mellstock on Stinsford and Bockhampton: the Dewys live in his family home, and Mrs Dewy grills bacon at the fireplace as Mrs Hardy did; but Dick Dewy is not his father and still less is he Hardy himself. He may, however, be what one part of Hardy would have liked to have been, because he loved dancing and listed it among the great things of life:
The dance it is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
With candles lit and partners fit
For night-long revelry…8
He and Emma do not seem to have danced together. The circumstances of their courtship did not give them the occasion. Neither had a supporting community which would welcome the other into it, and, even if Helen had offered to play for them to dance in the hall at St Juliot, Emma’s lameness may have made it impossible for her.9 A different sort of gently erotic scene between Dick and Fancy, when they wash their hands in the same bowl, could have been drawn from Cornwall experience, perhaps in the conservatory, where Emma was in charge. Hardy describes Dick’s pleasure and Fancy’s awareness that the mixing of fingers was vaguely improper: ‘It being the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers under water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice one. “Really, I hardly know which are my own hands and which are yours, they have got so mixed up together,” she said, withdrawing her own very suddenly. “It doesn’t matter at all,” said Dick, “at least as far as I am concerned.” ’10
The most entertaining character in the book is Fancy’s step-mother, Jane Day, a woman who is ‘terrible deep’, as we are told by her husband. Hardy was writing just after the death of Dickens, whom he admired, and Mrs Day is his tribute to him, drawn with Dickensian exuberance. She celebrates Fancy’s wedding day by ‘ “Claning out all the upstairs drawers and cupboards, and dusting the second-best chainey – a thing that’s only done once a year. ‘If there’s work to be done I must do it,’ says she, ‘wedding or no.’ ” ’11 She appears suddenly from upstairs halfway through a meal her husband and daughter have laid out in the kitchen to lament that people would be saying ‘that Jane Day’s tablecloths be as poor and ragged as any union beggar’s’ and fetches a damask tablecloth which she unfolds and spreads by instalments, moving aside the plates and dishes as the meal goes on. After this she brings down her good cutlery, polishes it up and puts it on the table; then she takes away the teapot, cups and saucers, and brings a silver teapot and china cups. ‘ “Very strange woman, isn’t she?” said Geoffrey, quietly going on with his dinner… “Ay, she’s very quare: you’d be amazed to see what valuable goods we’ve got stowed away upstairs.”’ Mr Day’s straight-faced acceptance of her behaviour is as nicely done as Mrs Day’s advanced eccentricity. There is no one quite like her in the rest of Hardy, perhaps because she has strayed in from another writer’s imagination.
The beauty and precision of the descriptive writing is admirable, from the starlit beginning among the winter trees, each endowed with its distinct sighing voice, to the finale, when ‘the landscape appears embarrassed with the sudden weight and brilliancy of its leaves… when the apple-trees have bloomed, and the roads and orchard-grass beco
me spotted with fallen petals.’12 And from its publication on there have always been readers who go to Hardy primarily for this: a plunge into the Dorset woodlands, streams and rivers, fields and meadows, cottages and churches, soft skies and birdsong. As the British Quarterly pronounced in 1881, ‘the book is delightful because the sweet and liberal air of Dorset blows through it, because a county little known to the world beyond it, but loved well by those who are Dorset born, or have made it their home, is lovingly presented in all its pleasant aspects, its rough frank life, its genuine English language, the fair scenery of its woods and wolds.’13
An idea for another novel was already in his mind, this time a love story with a tragic theme. He thought of calling it ‘A winning tongue had he’, a line taken from the ballad ‘By the Banks of Allan Water’, in which a soldier with an eloquent tongue seduces and abandons the miller’s daughter, who dies of grief. Its setting would be north Cornwall, which would mean many happy consultations with Emma. To be involved with his work gave her a sense that she was important to him during their long separations, and he needed her encouragement. Travelling back to Dorset in early June, he had the unpleasant experience of seeing copies of Desperate Remedies being sold at a reduced price on the bookstall in Exeter Station. Any chance of getting back his £75 now seemed small. He wrote to Tinsley urging him to advertise, the first salvo in a lifelong campaign of pushing his publishers into promoting his books effectively. In Weymouth, still in Crickmay’s office, he went on working frenetically and writing whenever he could fit it in. In July he marked lines from Macbeth in his Shakespeare: ‘Things at their worst will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before.’ By August he had a finished manuscript of Under the Greenwood Tree and posted it straight off to Macmillan.
The same old game began again. Morley liked the book, commenting on the careful, natural, delicate writing and harmony of construction and treatment, but now thought Hardy should study George Sand. The firm was hesitant, keeping the manuscript but doing nothing about it. Hardy had to write to them again in October, when he was at St Juliot once more, and this time Alexander Macmillan answered with a lukewarm letter, saying they could not do it for Christmas, but ‘if you should not arrange otherwise before the spring I should like to have the opportunity of deciding as to whether we could do it for an early summer or spring book. I return the MS.’14 This was the third book he had offered Macmillan, only to be half encouraged and then effectively rejected.
Thomas Hardy Page 14
