Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  labourers were no better than toads under a harrow… We labourers had no lack of lords and master. There were the parson and his wife at the rectory. There was the squire, with his hand of iron overshadowing us all. There was no velvet glove on that hard hand, as many a poor man found to his hurt. He brought it down on my father because he would not sign for a small loaf and a dear one… At the sight of the squire the people trembled.12

  Arch was recalling his own family’s experiences in Warwickshire, but the power of squire and parson over the poor was much the same in all rural areas.

  This is not the world as described in Far from the Madding Crowd. How much does it matter? Not much more than Shakespeare’s Arden representing no real part of France. Although Hardy has been read as a realist, he was not producing documentaries but writing fiction, and in this instance romantic fiction. He himself wrote, in his preface to the edition of 1912, that it was ‘partly real, partly dream-country’. His characters and scenes are conjured out of his imagination. There is poverty, cold, hunger, the workhouse and early death in its pages, but not for the labourers, only for Fanny, who has dropped out of the community. There are setbacks, notably for Gabriel Oak, who thinks seriously of emigrating, as so many were doing, Hardy’s cousins among them; but he is able to overcome his problems through patience, diligence and love. There is no harsh squire, and what is heard of the vicar from his parishioner Jan Coggan is more favourable than you might expect from Hardy. Coggan is explaining why he will not desert church for chapel: ‘when every one of my potatoes were frosted our Parson Thirdly were the man who gave me a sack for seed, though he hardly had one for his own use, and no money to buy ’em. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t have had a tatie to put in my garden. D’ye think I’d turn after that?’13

  In his determination to succeed, Hardy set out to write a novel of rural life that would please Leslie Stephen and the readers of the Cornhill. A grim picture of destitution and rage against oppression would not have done so. The Poor Man and the Lady had failed to find a publisher, so a novel devoted to the plight of the Dorset labourers and to the landowners and parsons who oppressed them was not likely to fare any better. Hardy made his chorus of villagers content with their lot, and their lot on the whole easy. He also made them comical, but at the same time he was anxious that they should not be seen entirely as figures of fun and asked his publishers to make sure the illustrator understood that the ‘rustics, although quaint, may be made to appear intelligent, & not boorish at all’.14 He knew he was treading a fine line, risking disloyalty to his own people by presenting a version of them intended to amuse educated readers. His uncles and cousins might remain blissfully ignorant, but his mother was another matter. The question of loyalty would be taken up in his next novel, The Hand of Ethelberta.

  Some of the most striking passages in Far from the Madding Crowd are again the meticulous observations of the natural world. One describes standing on a hillside in midwinter, with a clear sky above, when the different colours of the stars are perceptible and the ‘kingly brilliance of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueuxshone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this – the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement… whatever its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding.’15 This can be written only from personal experience, and allows us to think of Hardy taking a wintry night walk from Bockhampton, riding the world and sensing its roll eastward.

  In another passage he writes of the splendour of buildings like the ancient barn used for sheep shearing:

  The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves and diagonals, was far nobler in design because more wealthy in material than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches… One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, its kindred in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time… the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout, a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up… So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in harmony with the barn.16

  Hardy takes the barn as his text to give us his credo concerning functionalism, architecture and the value of continuity. His words were true and powerful when he wrote them, but sadly they have become historical and melancholy for us, now that barn and labourers have both lost their function.

  Only occasionally are there weak pages where Hardy falls into a plod, for example giving Sergeant Troy a flat introductory chapter headed ‘The New Acquaintance Described’. An editor might have protested, but Leslie Stephen accepted the three pages of prosing, and their dullness is quickly redeemed by the next chapters showing Troy in action, first in conversation and then with his sword. Once read, the scene in the hollow among the ferns where he woos Bathsheba by outlining and enclosing her body with his dazzling sword play is never forgotten. Here Hardy the poet is at work, conjuring up a perfect metaphor for seduction, his imagination allowing him to be Troy as he slices off a curl and spits a caterpillar on Bathsheba’s bosom, and also to be Bathsheba, shedding a help-less stream of tears when Troy kisses her and leaves her. As J. M. Barrie wrote, making up for earlier critics’ dismissal, fifteen years after the book’s publication,

  He does not draw a male flirt to show that the species are contemptible, but because there are male flirts; nor are the two terrible scenes, Fanny’s death and Bathsheba opening the coffin, introduced to warn womankind against the Troys… Never until Troy was shown at work had we learned from fiction how such a being may mesmerize a bewitching and clever woman into his arms. Many writers say their Troys do it, but Mr Hardy shows it being done.17

  Hardy worked steadily through the summer. In September he planned to walk over the heath to the annual sheep fair at Wood-bury Hill to pick up some local colour for his book. The fair was an ancient one, held over a week every autumn above the small town of Bere Regis, and Hardy thought nothing of taking on the twenty-six miles there and back on foot in the heat on the Sunday. Three days later, on 24 September, he heard from the Moule family that Horace was dead. His body was to be brought back from Cambridge to Fordington for the funeral.

  He had cut his own throat, unable to face the cycle of depression and drinking in which he was caught. Anyone who has witnessed severe depression at close quarters knows how the sufferer is driven to prefer death to life on the terms on which he has to live it. No further explanation seems necessary for Horace Moule’s final action. Feeling himself to be in crisis, he had summoned his brother Charles to Cambridge. It was still the long vacation, when the town was relatively empty. Charles came at once, and they sat talking in Horace’s rooms in Queens’ for three hours that evening. Then Horace, saying he felt ill, took himself to bed in the adjoining bedroom, while Charles remained in the outer sitting room, writing. He became aware of a noise, went into the bedroom and found his brother covered in blood. His first thought was that he must have burst a blood vessel. He ran to the porter’s lodge and asked them to send for a doctor. When he got back to his brother, Horace said, ‘Easy to die,’ and ‘Love to my mother.’ They were his last words, and they have a touch of sublimity. The doctor found that he had cut his own throat, and when a nurse came she discovered the open razor he had used. Charles was able to arrange an inquest the next day, and presumably through his evidence a verdict of ‘suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity’ was returned. It meant Horace could be buried in a churchyard.

  It is a terrible story. How much of it was made plain to Hardy at first is not known, but the bare fact of the death was bad enough. The funeral was fixed for 26 Septemb
er, and the day before he went out and sat on a weir on the River Frome, looking up at Fordington churchyard, where the newly dug grave had been prepared, not in the central part but in a side area a good way from the church. The spot is a beautiful one, high above the green open countryside and the river below, where Hardy sat that day. Years later he wrote a poem, ‘Before My Friend Arrived’, describing how he had looked up at the ‘towered church on the rise’ and made a drawing of the mound of white chalk taken from the ground to make the grave. Today the grave is covered in primroses in spring, and the Moule parents lie alongside their brilliant and unhappy son. Mrs Moule lost her sight in the year he died and followed him to the grave four years later.

  Never again would Hardy have a friend who held his heart so wholly, and his last lesson was that death might be irresistible. Another wound was made that would never quite heal. But Hardy did not allow grief to distract him from his work. On 30 September he was able to send Leslie Stephen several further chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd and an outline of more. Stephen was so pleased with what he read that he offered Hardy £400 for the serial rights, twice what Tinsley had paid for A Pair of Blue Eyes. In October he asked if he might start running it in the Cornhill earlier than planned, in January 1874. Hardy agreed to this, although he knew it meant the early chapters would be appearing months before he could possibly finish the book, and he would be writing to close deadlines again. He also knew now that he could do it. Tinsley was pressing for another serial. Meanwhile A Pair of Blue Eyes had been published in book form in America in July and began to run serially in New York from September. All this brought money, and money brought the prospect of marriage closer. Although Emma’s parents were now out of the picture since she had broken with them, there was still his mother to be reconciled to the idea. That autumn he helped his father with the cider-apple gathering from the huge old trees in the garden: ‘it was the last time he ever took part in a work whose sweet smells and oozings in the crisp autumn air can never be forgotten by those who have had a hand in it.’18 The two men were on good terms, and his father on his own would no doubt have accepted Hardy’s bride whoever she was, but Jemima was a strong-minded woman, and in this matter she had made up her mind. Miss Gifford was not the right wife for her son. She was not a Dorset girl, she was well born but penniless – poor gentry was the worst of all worlds – and she was too old. For the moment Miss Gifford was still tucked away in St Juliot.

  In December, Hardy went to London to meet Leslie Stephen for the first time. Having misunderstood an invitation to lunch, he called at his house in South Kensington – 8 Southwell Gardens – at a different time of day.

  He welcomed me with one hand, holding back the barking ‘Troy’ [a collie] with the other. The dog’s name I, of course, had never heard till then, and I said, ‘That is the name of my wicked soldier-hero.’ He answered caustically: ‘I don’t think my Troy will feel hurt at the coincidence, if yours doesn’t.’ I rejoined, ‘There is also another coincidence. Another Leslie Stephen lives near here, I find.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he’s the spurious one.’19

  Hardy decided to like him when he explained that he had played as a child with his nurse in the fields near his present house, all now being built over. ‘I felt then that I liked him, which at first I had doubted. The feeling never changed.’20 Stephen was the same age as Horace Moule, with a similar if more achieved educational background, and in one way he stepped easily into Moule’s role as mentor and critic, and with real power of literary patronage; but, although he returned Hardy’s liking, he did not have Moule’s charm.

  Leslie Stephen’s fame today rests largely on being the editor of the original Dictionary of National Biography and the father of Virginia Woolf, but in 1873 he had not yet embarked on the first project or attached himself to the mother of his renowned daughter. In fact, he was married to Thackeray’s daughter Minny, and her sister Anny shared their house. Hardy remembers meeting both sisters at lunch the day after his first call on Stephen, and how they sat over the fire, the ladies wrapped in shawls against the cold, and talked about Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, the Bible and Voltaire. The Stephens gave a dinner for Hardy later, described in a letter by Minny Stephen to her sister, who was away on the Isle of Wight. Minny said, ‘the evening was a wild chaos. I tried to drown my cares in drink but it only affected my feet and not my head. Mr Hardy is a very damp young man and dampness I abominate.’21 No doubt Hardy was nervous and trying too hard, faced with a daughter of the great Thackeray. Her remark was snobbish: a gentleman is not damp.

  Stephen was as dry as a gentleman should be. He was very tall, his mouth and chin were concealed within a fuzz of whiskery hair, and above this was a long, prominent nose and shrewd, small eyes. His world was as different from Hardy’s as it could be. Everything Hardy had to struggle for, mostly in vain, had been given to him: education, leisure, congenial friends and colleagues, the confidence that comes from knowing your family belongs among the intellectual elite of England. It was natural for them to send their sons to Eton and Cambridge, and at Cambridge Stephen had become a Fellow of his college, charged with the intellectual and moral guidance of the young gentlemen coming up from their public schools. He was an enthusiastic rowing coach, famous for his thirty-mile walks, and he relished the bachelor rituals of college life. He had taken holy orders, as was expected, and it had needed courage for him to acknowledge that he could no longer believe in the Christian doctrine he was supposed to uphold, and to leave his comfortable college and launch himself at the age of thirty into the choppy waters of literary journalism. Still, he knew almost everybody who mattered in London, had a small private income, was able to live in Kensington with his mother and continued to enjoy regular visits to his college, even drawing his stipend until his marriage in 1867. His chief passion was mountaineering in the Alps, and he was able to indulge it pretty often.

  He had been settled in London for ten years when Hardy met him and editing the Cornhill for the last two, at a salary of £500 a year. The proprietor, George Smith, was a friend. It was a magazine intended for middle-class, middle-brow families, and it avoided politics, religion and anything that might offend. ‘Thou shalt not shock a young lady’ was the first commandment the editor had to enforce.22 Stephen commissioned good writers and wrote articles himself, but he did not make a success of it, and the circulation fell steadily under his editorship. Hardy knew nothing of this, of course, only that Thackeray had edited the Cornhill and that it had a great reputation. He found that Stephen was a conscientious editor, but that he took his obligation to forestall any possibility of giving offence to lady readers to heart. In March he wrote anxiously to Hardy, ‘Troy’s seduction of the young woman will require to be treated in a gingerly fashion, when, as I suppose must be the case, he comes to be exposed to his wife? I mean that the thing must be stated but that the words must be careful – excuse this wretched shred of concession to popular stupidity; but I am a slave.’23 In April he followed this up with ‘I have some doubts whether the baby is necessary at all… perhaps if the omission were made it might be restored on republication… should somehow be glad to omit the baby.’24 Fanny’s baby, and the climactic scene in which Bathsheba discovers it in the coffin, was duly cropped for the Cornhill. Different views have been taken of how much Stephen minded making a change which damaged the book as badly as this one, but he was under pressure from Grundian complaints, and he can be given the benefit of the doubt. It remained exasperating for Hardy, who restored the passage for book publication and pointed out to Stephen that The Times singled out for praise the passage that had been cut. Stephen replied impatiently, ‘I spoke as an editor, not as a man. You have no more consciousness of these things than a child.’25 Hardy may have reflected privately that Stephen had written in 1873, ‘The one duty which at the present moment seems to be of paramount importance, is the duty of perfect intellectual sincerity’ and ‘Let us think freely and speak plainly, and we shall have the highest satisfaction
that man can enjoy.’26 On the other hand, Hardy understood that he was still an apprentice writer and wrote to Stephen in the course of discussing cuts, ‘for the present circumstances lead me to wish merely to be considered a good hand at a serial.’27

  After Hardy’s meetings with Stephen and his family in December 1873 he went to Cornwall for a Christmas visit. He had kept the title of Far from the Madding Crowd secret from Emma, in order to surprise her, he explained, and it was only as he was leaving in January that she saw the first instalment in the Cornhill. It was presented anonymously, as all its serials were, but it was evidence of his literary success, and the auguries for their being able to marry were now good. At the same time he had retreated from discussing or sharing his work with her. She may have enjoyed the surprise of the title, but she must also have noticed that this time she had been excluded from the process of choosing it. Hardy’s view of how helpful she could be with his work was not quite the same as hers. Later in the year she wrote to him with a touch of sadness, ‘My work, unlike your work of writing, does not occupy my true mind much… Your novel seems sometimes like a child, all your own and none of me.’28