Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Hardy’s defence is made weaker because there are other examples in his fiction of people suffering from exceptionally bad luck – luck so bad that it looks as though it has been willed, by the gods, or fate, or possibly by the author. For example, when the young Jude falls into despair at the difficulty of learning Latin and Greek, ‘he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born.’ This is a reasonable account of a sensitive boy’s reaction to severe disappointment, but Hardy continues, ‘Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him… But nobody did come, because nobody does.’10 I have put the last words in italics because this is not a true account of life. Hardy is not only coercing his plot, he is generalizing falsely. There are times when nobody comes, but there are also times when somebody does come. For example, Hardy himself had been helped to learn, not only by schoolmasters but also by Horace Moule and William Barnes, and encouraged by his architectural masters, and he had made other friends who read the classics with him for pleasure. A good many people had come along for him. Jude is not Hardy, of course, but, in so far as he represents Hardy’s own unfulfilled wish to go to a university, he is put through a very much worse experience than anything Hardy went through. This is part of what made even Hardy’s friend Gosse ask in his review, ‘What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?’11 Part of the answer might be that he was writing at a time when Britain seemed to be permanently and bitterly divided into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor.12

  Hardy made a case for his insistence on ‘the tragical conditions of life’ in a letter to John Addington Symonds, written while he was working on Tess. ‘I often begin a story with the intention of making it brighter and gayer than usual; but the question of conscience soon comes in; and it does not seem right, even in novels, to wilfully belie one’s own views. All comedy, is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it.’13 It is hard to believe that any of Hardy’s late, gloomy novels could have started off with comic intentions. Henchard restored to prosperity and dandling Elizabeth-Jane’s grandchildren, Tess happily married to Angel, Jude getting his BA at Oxford – such ideas are an insult to the characters as he drew them. And can he really have believed that the study of tragedy in fiction might be ‘the means of showing how to escape the worst forms of it… in real life’?14 He was too much of an artist to think girls might be warned off bounders by reading Tess, or married women deterred from quarrelling with their mothers-in-law and leaving their husbands by reading The Return of the Native. His novels spoke for themselves, and he was not at his best producing theoretical justifications for them.

  Neither Hardy nor anyone else has explained where his black view of life came from. I have suggested that something in his constitution made him extraordinarily sensitive to humiliations, griefs and disappointments, and that the wounds they inflicted never healed but went on hurting him throughout his life. In a sense too he never got over his own loss of Christian belief, which removed hope. He was always defensive about it, so much so that when his friend Frederic Harrison attacked him for his pessimism in 1919, saying that the gloom in his poetry was ‘not human, not social, not true’, and that it sorted ill with Hardy’s long, happy and well-rewarded life, Hardy reacted by ending his friendship with Harrison.15 Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times. While he was working on The Woodlanders he was reading Hegel and noted, ‘philosophers seem to start wrong; they cannot get away from a prepossession that the world must somehow have been made to be a comfortable place for man.’16 Years later, when he came to write The Dynasts, he wrote of the Immanent Will, a morally indifferent force that controls events without awareness of what it is doing (like a machine):

  The Will has woven with an absent heed

  Since life first was; and ever will so weave.

  This at least works better than the idea of a malign President of the Immortals. Later still he said he saw the Cause of Things as ‘neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral’.17 At the same time, atheist or agnostic as he was – he was not sure which – he could never quite get away from the Christian God. In his poem ‘God’s Education’ he suggests that ‘God’ has something to learn from man and accuses him of cruelty; God thinks about this and says it is a new idea for him.18 Hardy took some of his pessimism from Schopenhauer, who saw the world as malignant, God and immortality as illusions, and the extinction of the human race through chastity as an end to be sought: best of all not to be born. Yet he was always too imaginative to follow any one philosopher consistently. ‘This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences [meaning human beings],’ he noted in 1889. ‘Other planets may, though one can hardly see how.’19 In his own life, however, he did not entirely give up on locating happiness, however grim the messages he put out.

  In 1891, when he was working on the proofs of Tess, he wrote to a friend, Henry Rider Haggard, whose ten-year-old son had just died, expressing ‘sympathy with you both in your bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’20 Did Hardy really believe this? And even if he did, could he not see that it was not the thing to say to the parents of a newly dead ten-year-old, for whom they must have planned and desired a long and happy future? What was in Hardy’s mind as he wrote this letter? Was he trying out an idea or just being awkward? Was Schopenhauer’s recommended preference for non-existence being offered as a tonic? And did he look at Mrs Jeune’s daughters and privately hope they too might die before they grew up? Surely not. He had enough imagination to write feelingly about a mother grieving over her dead daughter in ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’.21 Haggard was tough enough to take the letter in silence. He may have understood that Hardy’s ability to believe several conflicting things at once meant he sometimes expressed himself strangely.

  And behaved strangely. His idea that death was preferable to life led him into playing a game in which he imagined he was already dead. He describes it in a note made in 1888 after a conversation with Leslie Stephen’s sister-in-law Anny Ritchie (née Thackeray):

  if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.22

  The idea that you could get past death and still want to pay morning calls is more fanciful than morbid, and you wonder what he supposed the views of a ghost might be. He took things a stage further in a poem written in 1896, ‘The Dead Man Walking’, in which, with a passionate gloom, he described himself as having become ‘a corpse-thing’ that only seemed to be walking, talking and smiling – really, he was dead.23 This is a poem in which he brings up the losses and disillusionments of the past. Death came on in stages, he says, first from seeing how men lived and losing his youthful enthusiasm, then from the loss of his friend – Moule – and members of his family. It culminates in a bitter reference to finding ‘my Love’s heart kindled / In hate of me’, which sounds like a reference to a quarrel with Emma. What is interesting is that he sees himself being killed progressively by these bad experiences, but, although the idea of a living corpse is horrible, it reads like an ingenious exercise, too ingenious to be painful. Hardy was of course abundantly alive in 1896, but, as at almost any time in his life, he could plunge suddenly into misery and blackness, and follow up a grim fancy of death to see just how far he could take it.

  He could also use his sense of the world’s random cruelty to make a masterpiece. To read Tess is an emotio
nal experience; to write it must have been an overwhelming one. Hardy said later that ‘he had put too much feeling into it to recall it with pleasure.’ To another friend he wrote at the time of its publication, ‘I am glad you like Tess – though I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me.’24 To a third he confessed that he had lost his heart to Tess as he wrote about her.25 There is no missing this in his descriptions of her physical presence: her ‘diapason-stopt voice’ which, mysteriously, ‘will never be forgotten by those who knew her’ (a stopt diapason is an organ note); her warmth of ‘a sunned cat’ after she has been lying down; her arms fresh from crumbling curds at the dairy, as cold and damp as a new-gathered mushroom; her eloquent dark eyes whose colour defies naming; or ‘the brim-fulness of her nature’ breathing from her. Whether formed from memory or dream, she was palpable to him. He saw her, and felt the movements of her inner being. Here she is reviving after disaster: ‘some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.’26 The ‘invincible instinct towards self-delight’, a perfect phrase to describe something we instantly recognize in certain people, and especially the young, was something Hardy himself possessed in very small measure, which may be why he saw and valued it so highly in Tess.

  He was exact when he said a novel is not an argument but an impression, and this novel lives through its impressions of Tess and the landscapes through which she moves.27 He watches her, and sometimes he is her, giving her thoughts which are recognizably cast in his own mode: for instance, when she thinks of the past and how, ‘whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.’ The ‘grassed down’ is a pure Hardy image. Again, reflecting on anniversaries and birthdays, she suddenly thinks that one day must be the day of her death, ‘a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?’28 The idea, quaint and slightly sinister, bears the marks of being one of Hardy’s own, taken out of his store to be given to Tess.

  Hardy places her in a sequence of settings, so that she appears at times an emblematic figure as she moves through the seasons of the year with their appropriate countryside activities, like a figure in a series of paintings. She is seen dancing on the green in her white dress in spring, then reaping in the fields with the villagers and sitting down to feed her baby among them; she is at the dairy in summer, where everything in nature is lush and the milkmaids abandon themselves to the open air of the meadows ‘as a swimmer to the wave’; then she is at winter work in colourless fields, with other labouring girls crawling over the surface like flies as they pick swedes under a white sky. She stumbles into the pheasant shoot and shelters among wounded birds whose plight mirrors hers. She is threshing when a new machine sets a diabolical pace of work. And finally she is at the secret house when she and Angel share their few days of bliss.

  Tess’s name is embedded in the consciousness even of people who have never read the book, but it did not start as ‘Tess’. Hardy’s particular care in naming his characters often led him to change them in the course of writing, and the evolution of her name can be tracked in the manuscript. In the early stages he tried out three names, Love, Cis and Sue. She was Love Woodrow, Cis Woodrow or Sue Woodrow; occasionally Sue Troublewell or Sue Troublefield. In July 1889 he suggested ‘The Body and Soul of Sue’ as a title for the work in progress. Then she transmutes to Rose-Mary or Tess: Tess Woodrow or Rose-Mary Troublefield. Turberville makes a first appearance, and ‘Too Late, Beloved!’ is a possible title in August 1889. At this point he thinks of making the villain, till then named Hawnferne, take the ancient name of Turberville: Alec is being woven into a wider pattern. Tess Troublefield appears next and transmutes into Tess Durbeyfield. When Hardy saw that Durbeyfield could be traced back to the noble D’Urbervilles, giving him a central theme for the book, he wrote a new first chapter, the dazzling scene beginning ‘ “Goodnight, Sir John”’, in which Tess’s drunken and shiftless father is told of his Norman blood by the local clergyman with an interest in genealogy. It must have been the moment when he knew he was on exactly the right track with the book. This was in November 1889.

  Throughout much of this time Hardy was in negotiations with editors. He used the book not only to tell a story close to his heart but to fight a battle, and the long-drawn-out business of how it was written, revised, cut, restored and revised again shows how important the battle was to him. In September 1889 he cancelled his original agreement with Tillotson’s syndicated fiction firm, rather than make the changes they asked for, thereby losing the 1,000 guineas he was to have been paid. He then offered it to two magazines, fully expecting them to reject it, and used their letters objecting to its frankness when writing his essay ‘Candour in English Fiction’, published in January 1890. In this he accused magazine editors and circulating-library managers of standing in the way of good novel-writing by their prudery. ‘If the true artist ever weeps it probably is… when he first discovers the fearful price he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language – no less a price than the extinction, in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader, of sympathetic belief in his personages.’ He had suffered from bowdlerizing editors throughout his writing career, and he was determined to have Tess published as he wanted it and to ‘demolish the doll of English fiction’ at last.29

  To do this he adopted a complicated strategy which involved producing a heavily cut and changed text for serialization. He accepted that in the version published by the Graphic Tess should go through a mock marriage instead of being raped, and that she should have no baby; and that Angel, instead of carrying the milkmaids through the flooded stream, should wheel them in a barrow. In Harper’s Bazaar the changes were less severe, although anything likely to offend Christian readers was removed. And in order to have time to negotiate his way through all the work this would involve, he set Tess aside in the autumn of 1889 and switched his attention to writing something entirely different. This was a collection of linked historical stories about titled women – A Group of Noble Dames – intended to make another major serial for the Graphic and Harper’s. These, and his essay ‘Candour in English Fiction’, kept him fully occupied through the winter and spring. Meanwhile the manuscript of Tess lay on the shelf. Nothing shows so clearly how much he regarded himself as a craftsman, able to turn out sixlight pieces of fiction to order while he was in the middle of a quite different and much more serious sort of book. The Noble Dames stories, not much more than light reading, were delivered in May 1890, just before his fiftieth birthday. At the end of June he was told that they too would need to be bowdlerized: although the editor was not worried by the references to illegitimate births in noble families, the directors of the Graphic objected to them strongly. ‘Here’s a pretty job! Must smooth down these Directors somehow I suppose,’ wrote Hardy in his notebook, and promptly did so.30

  While he attended to this, he was in London for the Season as usual. That year he entertained himself by going to music halls and also to police courts, low-life entertainments to vary the high life. Emma had to leave London in July when her father died, and she went to Portsmouth for the funeral. Hardy stayed away. He could hardly have gone with her, since the family had never accepted him as Emma’s husband. He was restless, and in August he took his brother Henry to Paris to show him the sights. They included a visit to the Moulin Rouge to see the can-can performed. What either of them made of the dancing girls he does not say, but they were two men on the loose, free to do as they pleased. He and Henry got on well as holiday companions, and you wonder whether they sometimes spoke dialect together and laughed more freely than they could when the women – mo
ther, sisters and wife – were there. It was the first time he had been to France without Emma.

  Back at Max Gate, Tess was waiting as well as Emma. He settled to work again and was able to deliver the ‘finished’ Tess– i.e., the copy expurgated for serialization – in December; he was correcting the proofs in the new year of 1891. This version appeared in the Graphic from July. Meanwhile he arranged for the separate publication in other magazines of two of the sections that had been cut, one of them being Tess’s christening of her baby. While he restored the rest of the cuts for book publication, he did more revision, including the last-minute addition of a subtitle, ‘A Pure Woman’, on the title page. This was undoubtedly intended to be a red rag to the delicate-minded, and they complained bitterly.

  The first edition, in three volumes, finally appeared in November 1891, with new publishers, Osgood, McIlvaine, Americans who had set up in London. The 1,000 copies sold out quickly. Another 16,000 were sold during 1892. As further editions followed, Hardy, always reluctant to allow that any of his work was finished, did more revising. The complicated history of the text accounts for some of the unevenness in the writing, but at the same time it allowed him to reconsider and enrich the book. In America three different versions of Tess came out in three years. As late as 1912 he was still making changes, cutting down Tess’s use of dialect in favour of more standard English. Not surprisingly, textual studies of Hardy have kept scholars busy. So have arguments about his intentions. Did he withhold information about Tess’s rape, or seduction, because he was not a realist but a modernist, deliberately introducing ambiguity to represent the ambiguities in Alec’s intention and Tess’s response? To challenge the standard Victorian response to a fallen woman? Or to nudge the reader into seeing how relative all values and judgements are in such matters?31 Tess has provoked many such questions and stood up bravely under the massive weight of critical discourse that has been piled on it.