On the same day he wrote to Mrs Henniker he sent another letter to Gosse, thanking him for a review, regretting that Jude was not as good as it had been in his mind, and also suggesting that he had allowed it to take its own course: ‘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.’ 29 ‘I simply let it come’ suggests that it was dreamt as much as it was planned, and that he allowed Jude and Sue to take over the book and make their own fates. If, as this implies, he either wrote with no advance plan, or jettisoned his plan when he felt his characters taking charge, it would also help to explain some of the horrors. Many writers have said their characters take charge or take over the narrative. It may be objected that they are his inventions, the children of his brain, carrying out his wishes. But what if they are carrying out wishes he has not consciously formulated? A writer deeply engaged and absorbed in his work may surprise himself, and this may be what happened as Hardy wrote Jude, and may help to explain its unrelenting power and gloom. If the poetic dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers come to mind, where horror is part of the fabric, we should remember that Hardy said he aimed to keep his narratives ‘as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow’, and that he sometimes spoke of his poems coming to him: ‘the verses came,’ he told Arthur Benson. 30 So perhaps we can believe that the worst parts of Jude and Sue’s story also came partly unbidden, out of the place inside him where the wounds made by grief and loss and humiliation and failure had never ceased to ache.
Hardy made the standard novelists’ denial that there was anything autobiographical in the book. True, he makes Jude an orphan, taken in by a great-aunt who calls him a useless boy and says it would have been better if he had died with his parents, and this is quite different from Hardy’s experience of nurturing parents. Yet, in a memorable scene in the novel, he shows Jude looking through his straw hat as the sun shines through it and thinking, ‘If only he could prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.’ This is exactly what Hardy described as his own experience, looking through his straw hat as a child and thinking ‘that he did not wish to grow up’. 31 The power of the scene in the novel comes from Hardy’s memory of himself. The oddity is that he transposes the thought of a boy who had no conscious reason to be unhappy or to fear growing up into the mind of one who was already unhappy and had good reason to approach adult life with small enthusiasm. Hardy appears to be reinventing his childhood and making it worse. This prompts the question as to whether he had only lately learnt the facts of his own conception and birth, and become aware that he had been an unwanted child whose existence forced his parents into a marriage neither desired; or only lately brooded on the implications of this knowledge. 32 A retrospective blight cast across his life is a very Hardyesque possibility.
He also makes Jude embark on learning Latin and Greek with the idea of getting to a university and becoming an educated man, exactly as he did. Hardy’s circumstances were again more propitious, but, although he asserted that he might have attended a university in his twenties, there was always an underlying bitterness at his failure to do so. No success ever sweetened it and the force of that bitterness appears in Jude. Sue’s experiences at her teacher training college were drawn from his sisters’ grim accounts of Salisbury. More tenuously, but still clearly enough, his fluctuating relation to Sue alludes to the frustrations of his love for Florence Henniker.
Hardy did not let Emma read Jude until it was published. The hurt and humiliation of this were such that she felt free to say how much she disliked it in his presence, and to a guest at their own lunch table. She hated its attacks on the Church, to which she was so firmly attached, and on marriage, which were hard for a wife of twenty years to read. 33 But Emma’s objections were as nothing before the first onslaught of the critics, described by Hardy as ‘booing’. He knew, because he was subscribing to Durrant’s press-cutting agency. Some ridiculed; more were shocked. ‘A titanically bad book’, ‘Mr Hardy running mad in right royal fashion’, ‘dangerously near to farce’, ‘Jude the Obscene’, ‘a shameful nightmare’, ‘too deplorable a falling-off from Mr Hardy’s former achievements to be reckoned with at all’. In spite of this, many of the bad reviews conceded that Jude was also ‘manifestly a work of genius’ and, although ‘coarsely indecent’, delivered ‘from the hands of a Master’.
And very soon the praise came: ‘the most powerful and moving picture of human life which Mr Hardy has given us’, ‘the greatest novel written in England for many years’. W. D. Howells in Harper’s Weekly gave a long, carefully considered appreciation: ‘All the characters… have the appealing quality of human creatures really doing what they must while seeming to do what they will. It is not a question of blaming them or praising them; they are in the necessity of what they do and what they suffer.’ Of the most upsetting incidents in the book, Howell wrote, ‘They make us shiver with horror and grovel with shame, but we know that they are deeply founded in the condition, if not in the nature of humanity.’ 34 The Saturday Review for February 1896 ended its account by quoting from Jude’s last words and describing them: ‘That is the voice of the educated proletarian, speaking more distinctly than it has ever spoken before in English literature… There is no other novelist alive with the breadth of sympathy, the knowledge, or the power for the creation of Jude. Had Mr Hardy never written another book, this would still place him at the head of English novelists.’ 35
A letter from Swinburne, to whom he had sent a copy of Jude, gave Hardy deep pleasure: ‘The beauty, the terror, and the truth are all yours, and yours alone… The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise.’ 36 But Hardy did care, and minded very much when he heard that the Bishop of Wakefield had burnt his copy and written to the Yorkshire Post to announce the fact, as well as persuading W. H. Smith to withdraw it from their circulating library. The public took less notice of the Bishop than Hardy did, and three months after publication 20,000 copies had been sold. Scandal had brought success. All the same, he noticed that some of his acquaintances turned away rather than speak to him, and he was upset and furious when Gosse, having reviewed Jude well, told Hardy it was ‘indecent’ at the Savile Club lunch table. 37
Paradoxically, he was now assured of an income large enough to allow him to give up writing fiction. It was said that he was driven to do so by the attacks on Jude, but his own account is subtler. He maintained that he had always tried to keep close to natural life in his novels, ‘and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow’, and that he had long wanted to return to poetry proper, while being forced to earn his living through fiction. Once financially free to give up a form which he found increasingly problematical, he abandoned it. 38 It was a dramatic gesture from a novelist at the pinnacle of success, controversial but hugely admired, translated, discussed all over the Western world and rich from his royalties. In 1894 and 1896 he took an expensive house in Pelham Crescent for the Season.
There were times when Hardy could laugh at the ludicrousness of reactions like the Bishop’s, but others when he sank into gloom at the disapproval piled on him. 39 During the winter he wrote three black poems, the first with an epigraph from Psalm 102, ‘My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.’ 40 The speaker in each is suffering: in the first from a winter of the spirit – he speaks of bereavement, friends turned cold, heart and strength destroyed; in the second he decides it would be better for him not to exist, since he disturbs the breezy, optimistic world; and in the third he looks back on moments in his life when he might have died, apparently regretting that he had survived to feel the bitterness of life. All the sorrows and grievances of his life were revived in his mind and went into the poems – plus, no doubt, the miseries of Jude, of Henchard and of his grandfather Hand too. The three poems were first called ‘De Profundis’, Hardy changing the title to ‘In Tenebris’
after Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis appeared. It makes a curious link between the two men who upset England so badly in their different ways in 1895; luckily for Hardy, his offence was not a felony.
A year later, in December 1896, he wrote an autobiographical poem, ‘Wessex Heights’, in which he imagines himself standing on one of the high points in Dorset he loved to climb, where you can see for miles over the countryside. He says it is a place good for ‘thinking, dreaming, dying on’ and thinks his essential self may have been up there before his birth, and will return after his death. It offers him what he loves: solitude, silence and a wide view. Here he worries about how he has become ‘false to myself, my simple self that was, / And is not now’. He deplores the sneering and disparagements of the critics who have attacked his work; the stress of the publication of Jude is still affecting him. His anguished mood leads him to remember past loves – like ghosts – and to regret his failures in love. He feels sorry for himself, as Shelley, whom he so much admired, allowed himself to feel when he wrote, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’ in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Hardy’s poem is also written in long, finely constructed, musical lines, and Mrs Henniker is given a particularly graceful stanza:
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
Hardy’s moods shifted from one hour to the next, and he habitually worked out an emotion by writing a poem about it. The most striking words in this one are his admonition to himself about being false to ‘my simple self that was’. Yet he had never been innocent in the way that his father was (or Dick Dewy, or Gabriel Oak, or even Jude) – at least after the age of sixteen. He had been driven by ambition, determined to succeed in a society that had no connection with the heights of Wessex, to write books many people would read, to marry up, to have worldly friends, to make money – and he had done it all. Some of his gloom may have come precisely from the realization that there were not so many more heights to scale, or women to love.
Hardy worked on this poem on a December day. If he was in his study, he would be sitting in his socks, his boots or slippers always removed ‘as a preliminary to writing’. 41 He completed it with another invocation of the pleasure of being on the heights, ‘Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, / And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty’. He kept a neat desk, and a finished poem would be put carefully aside to be reconsidered. Then, slippers on again, he could go downstairs for a cup of tea and a slice of cake with Emma, before turning with renewed energy to pursue his life: a letter from a friend to be answered, a young woman writer needing his advice and encouragement, an arrangement to meet a portrait painter, plans for a trip to London. And in London, Mrs Henniker would doubtless invite him to lunch, and he would accept her invitation with pleasure.
18. A Witch and a Wife
Although Hardy joked about Jude’s reception to Mrs Henniker, saying that ‘the only people who faint and blush over it are fast men at clubs’, the furore reached into Dorset, and he noticed what he called ‘extensive and peculiar’ responses among their country neighbours, ‘they having a pathetic reverence for press opinions’. Emma also said Jude had made a difference to them ‘in the County’. 1 He did not say anything about what his family at Bockhampton made of it, merely telling Gosse that he had enjoyed a very quiet Christmas and New Year at Max Gate. It was immediately after this, in the first days of January 1896, that Emma persuaded him to try bicycling: ‘I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of – bicycling! – which my wife is making me learn to keep her company, she doing it rather well.’ 2 There was more fun when Mrs Patrick Campbell came to visit them, hoping to be allowed to play Tess in the theatre production Hardy was trying to set up; he had dramatized the book in five acts during 1894 and 1895. 3 He greeted her by getting out his fiddle and playing old English dance tunes, and she obligingly improvised her own dance steps to his music. ‘It was a sight for London Town,’ she wrote to a friend. 4 But London theatre managers were unexpectedly wary of Tess. Hardy believed they were put off by the response to Jude. 5
He was in London in February, to allow a young woman painter to finish her portrait of him, to attend Lord Leighton’s funeral – Hardy never willingly missed a funeral – and for a masked ball, a ‘most amusing experience’ he told Emma, where he and Henry James, the only unmasked men, were ‘recklessly flirted with by the women’. 6 Emma was also invited, but stayed in Dorset suffering either from eczema or shingles – if shingles, excruciatingly painful. He too, he informed her, was suffering from ‘the most fearful depression, slight headache etc.’, but he did not allow it to interfere with his multifarious activities. Lady Jeune, even though she was preparing for her daughter Dorothy’s wedding, insisted on putting him up, and he was in heavy demand. He was introduced to the brilliant American actress Elizabeth Robins, who had helped to promote Ibsen’s plays in England, and they took a long walk together; also to Violet Hunt, novelist, feminist and friend of another rising writer, H. G. Wells. He called on ‘Mrs Pat [Campbell]’ twice. He visited his investment brokers to discuss shares and bonds held by him and by Emma. He wrote excitedly to her, ‘I have seen the loveliest “Byke” for myself – it wd suit me admirably – “The Rover Cob”. It is £20! I can’t tell if I ought to have it.’ He decided he would have it. 7 Emma, rather than staying alone at Max Gate, went by herself to Worthing, to nurse her health. From there she launched an attack on Hardy’s sister Mary in the form of a letter of astonishing force and fury. The letter has survived because Mary coolly decided to hand it to the family lawyers. 8 ‘Miss Hardy,’ it began: ‘I dare you, or any one to spread evil reports of me – such as that I have been unkind to your brother, (which you actually said to my face,) or that I have “errors” in my mind, (which you have also said to me,) and I hear that you repeat to others.’ The truth was, she went on, that ‘he has been outrageously unkind to me – which is entirely your fault: ever since I have been his wife you have done all you can to make division between us; also, you have set your family against me, though neither you nor they can truly say that I have ever been anything but, just, considerate, and kind towards you all, notwithstanding frequent low insults.’
One thing the letter proves is that Emma could use her pen to good effect when she was roused. She accused Mary of describing people she disliked as mad (‘I have heard you say it of myself… And it is a wicked, spiteful and most malicious habit of yours’). She said she had been a ‘causeless enemy’ to her and pandered to Hardy’s ‘many weaknesses’ in order to secure him ‘on your side’. ‘How would you like to have your life made difficult for you by anyone saying, for instance, that you are a very unsuitable person to have the instruction of young people?’ – Mary being the headmistress of a girls’ school. It is the letter of a distressed and furious woman, and it rises to a terrific climaxin which she draws on Hardy’s own depiction of the heath and its inhabitants: ‘You are a witch-like creature and quite equal to any amount of evil-wishing and speaking – I can imagine you, and your mother and sister on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night.’
She went on to say that she proposed to tell Hardy what she had written and added, with considerable, if ungrammatical, dignity, ‘I can understand your desire to be considered cleverer than I which you may be I allow.’ These are not the words of a mad woman but of an angry one, as Mary must have seen, but – understandably perhaps – she did not respond and made no move to mend things with Emma. It was far too late for that, and the effect of the letter on her and her sister Kate was simply to encourage them in their view that Emma was mad. This seems to have been the end of any communication, written or spoken, between the Bockhampton women and the mistress of Max Gate. 9 No one from Bockhampton set foot inside Max Gate
again in Emma’s lifetime, and if any of them came face to face with her on the pavements of Dorchester, they presumably cut one another. Such situations are the dramas of provincial life. Mary’s health was poor, and Emma’s attack may well have shaken her. She was asthmatic, and, although she was only fifty-six, she retired from her position as headmistress the following spring.
Hardy was caught between the two embattled households. Whether he was shown Emma’s letter or only heard about it, he understood what it meant. He had grown up with a mother who complained ferociously and a father who took evasive action; and, since there was no question of him reading the riot act either to his wife or to his sister, he likewise took evasive action. From the spring to the autumn of 1896 he simply removed himself from Dorset, taking Emma with him. He was pleasing her, letting her feel she had won the battle, allowing everyone to calm down and protecting himself; also, conveniently, getting out of the way while builders did some work at Max Gate. He took the Pelham Crescent house again, earlier than usual, in March, installing their servants again to run it. He escorted Emma to Brighton for two weeks in May, for the good of her health and his own, and after this they remained in London well into July. The Season went by with many convivial moments. He was under no pressure to work, and he appeared to be in high spirits. They were often on the terrace at Westminster at tea-time, and in the evening at concerts given by the Continental bands that came each year to entertain Londoners at the Imperial Institute. ‘Here one evening they met, with other friends, the beautiful Mrs, afterwards, Lady, Grove; and the “Blue Danube” Waltz being started, Hardy and the latter lady danced two or three turns to it among the promenaders, who eyed them with mild surmise as to whether they had been drinking or not.’ 10 The dancing skills acquired at Almack’s and the Argyle thirty years before had come into their own. When Mrs Henniker accused him of preaching free love, he defended himself wittily, and disingenuously, claiming that ‘I hold no theory whatever on the subject, except by way of experimental remarks at tea parties.’ 11 No witnesses have come forward with accounts of his experimental remarks, but the impression he gives this summer is not of the self described in ‘Wessex Heights’ – crushed by sneering critics, disparaged by the women he meets and free only in solitude – but rather of a jolly, outgoing figure who has achieved the summit of social as well as intellectual success. The wedding of his old favourite, Lady Jeune’s daughter Dorothy, to a young politician, celebrated with much splendour at St George’s, Hanover Square, brought the Season to a cheerful close.
Thomas Hardy Page 30
