Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1164 page)

‘16. Dr. Walter Lock, Warden of Keble, Oxford, called. “Tess”, he said, “is the Agamemnon without the remainder of the Oresteian trilogy.” This is inexact, but suggestive as to how people think.

‘Am glad I have got back from London and all those dinners: — London, that hot-plate of humanity, on which we first sing, then simmer, then boil, then dry away to dust and ashes!’

‘Easter Sunday. Was told a story of a handsome country-girl. Her lover, though on the point of matrimony with her, would not perform it because of the temper shown by her when they went to buy the corner-cupboard and tea-things, her insistence on a different pattern, and so on. Their child was born illegitimate. Leaving the child at home she went to Jersey, for this reason, that a fellow village girl had gone there, married, and died; and the other thought that by going and introducing herself to the widower as his late wife’s playmate and friend from childhood he would be interested in her and marry her too. She carried this out, and he did marry her. But her temper was so bad that he would not live with her; and she went on the streets. On her voyage home she died of disease she had contracted, and was thrown into the sea — some say before she was quite dead. Query: What became of the baby?’

He notes that on the 27th of the month his father, away in the country, ‘went upstairs for the last time’. On the 31st he received a letter from his sister Mary on their father’s illness, saying that it being of a mild lingering kind there was no immediate hurry for his return, and hence he dined with Lady Malmesbury on his birthday, June 2nd, in fulfilment of a three weeks’ engagement, before returning to Dorchester. This, however, he did the next day, arriving at his house just when his brother had come to fetch him.

He found his father much changed; and yet he rallied for some weeks onward.

In the town one day Hardy passed by chance the tent just erected for Sanger’s Circus, when the procession was about to start. ‘Saw the Queen climb up on her lofty gilt-and-crimson throne by a step- ladder. Then the various nations personified climbed up on theirs. They, being men, mounted anyhow, “No swearin’!” being said to them as a caution. The Queen, seated in her chair on the terrestrial globe, adjusts her crimson and white robes over her soiled satin shoes for the start, and looks around on Hayne’s trees, the church- tower, and Egdon Heath in the distance. As she passes along the South-walk Road she is obliged to duck her head to avoid the chestnut boughs tearing off her crown.’

‘June 26. Considered methods for the Napoleon drama. Forces; emotions, tendencies. The characters do not act under the influence of reason.’

‘July 1. We don’ t always remember as we should that in getting at the truth, we get only at the true nature of the impression that an object, etc., produces on us, the true thing in itself being still, as Kant shows, beyond our knowledge.

‘The art of observation (during travel, etc.) consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part — even the infinitesimal part. For instance, you are abroad: you see an English flag on a ship-mast from the window of your hotel: you realise the English navy. Or, at home, in a soldier you see the British Army; in a bishop at your club, the Church of England; and in a steam hooter you see Industry.’

He was paying almost daily visits to his father at this time. On the 19th his brother told him the patient was no worse, so he did not go that day. But on the 20th Crocker, one of his brother’s men, came to say that their father had died quietly that afternoon — in the house in which he was born. Thus, in spite of his endeavours, Hardy had not been present.

Almost the last thing his father had asked for was water fresh drawn from the well — which was brought and given him; he tasted it and said,’ Yes — that’s our well-water. Now I know I am at home.’

Hardy frequently stated in after years that the character of Horatio in Hamlet was his father’s to a nicety, and in Hardy’s copy of that play his father’s name and the date of his death are written opposite the following lines:

‘Thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,

A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards

Hast ta’en with equal thanks.’

He was buried close to his father and mother, and near the knights of various dates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with whom the Hardys had been connected.

‘August 14. Mother described to-day the three Hardys as they used to appear passing over the brow of the hill to Stinsford Church on a Sunday morning, three or four years before my birth. They were always hurrying, being rather late, their fiddles and violoncello in green-baize bags under their left arms. They wore top hats, stick- up shirt collars, dark blue coats with great collars and gilt buttons, deep cuffs and black silk “stocks” or neckerchiefs. Had curly hair, and carried their heads to one side as they walked. My grandfather wore drab cloth breeches and buckled shoes, but his sons wore trousers and Wellington boots.’

In August they received at Max Gate a long-promised visit from Sir Arthur Blomfield, who had taken a house a few miles off for a month or two. Contrary to Hardy’s expectations Blomfield liked the design of the Max Gate house. The visit was a very pleasant one, abounding in reminiscences of 8 Adelphi Terrace, and included a drive to ‘ Weatherbury’ (Puddletown) Church and an examination of its architecture.

‘August 31. My mother says she looks at the furniture and feels she is nothing to it. All those belonging to it, and the place, are gone, and it is left in her hands, a stranger. (She has, however, lived there these fifty-three years!)’

‘August. I hear of a girl of Maiden Newton who was shod by contract like a horse, at so much a year.’

‘September 4. There is a curious Dorset expression — “tankard- legged”. This style of leg seems to have its biggest end downwards, and I have certainly seen legs of that sort. My mother says that my Irish ancestress had them, the accomplished lady who is reputed to have read the Bible through seven times; though how my mother should know what the legs of her husband’s great-great-grandmother were like I cannot tell.

‘Among the many stories of spell-working that I have been told, the following is one of how it was done by two girls about 1830. They killed a pigeon, stuck its heart full of pins, made a tripod of three knitting needles, and suspended the heart on them over a lamp, murmuring an incantation while it roasted, and using the name of the young man in whom one or both were interested. The said young man felt racking pains about the region of the heart, and suspecting something went to the constables. The girls were sent to prison.’

This month they attended a Field-Club meeting at Swanage, and were introduced to ‘old Mr. B, “the King of Swanage”. He had a good profile, but was rougher in speech than I should have expected after his years of London — being the ordinary type of Dorset man, self-made by trade, whenever one of the county does self-make himself, which is not often. . . . Met Dr. Yeatman, the Bishop of Southwark [afterwards of Worcester]. He says the Endi- cotts [Mrs. J. Chamberlain’s ancestors] are a Dorset family.’

‘September 17. Stinsford House burnt. Discovered it to be on fire when driving home from Dorchester with E. I left the carriage and ran across the meads. She drove on, having promised to dine at Canon R. Smith’s. I could soon see that the old mansion was doomed, though there was not a breath of wind. Coppery flames were visible in the sun through the trees of the park, and a few figures in shirt-sleeves on the roof. Furniture on the lawn: several servants perspiring and crying. Men battering out windows to get out the things — a bruising of tender memories for me. I worked in carrying books and other articles to the vicarage. When it grew dark the flames entered the drawing and dining rooms, lighting up the chambers of so much romance. The delicate tones of the wall-painting seemed pleased at the illumination at first, till the inside of the rooms became one roaring oven; and then the ceiling fell, and then the roof, sending a fountain of sparks from the old oak into the sky.

‘Met Mary in the churchyard, who had been laying flowers on Father’s grave, on which the firelight now flickered.

‘Walked to Canon Smith’s dinner-party just as I was, it being too late to change. E. had preceded me there, since I did not arrive until nine. Dinner disorganized and pushed back between one and two hours, they having been to the fire. Met Bosworth Smith [Harrow master], who had taken E. to the fire, though I saw neither of them. Late home.

‘I am sorry for the house. It was where Lady Susan Strangways, afterwards Lady Susan O’Brien, lived so many years with her actor- husband, after the famous elopement in 1764, so excellently described in Walpole’s Letters, Mary Frampton’s Journal, etc.

‘As stated, she knew my grandfather well, and he carefully heeded her tearful instructions to build the vault for her husband and later herself, “just large enough for us two”. Walpole’s satire on her romantic choice — that “a footman were preferable” — would have missed fire somewhat if tested by time.

‘My father when a boy-chorister in the gallery of the church used to see her, an old and lonely widow, walking in the garden in a red cloak.’

‘End of September. In London. This is the time to realise London as an old city, all the pulsing excitements of May being absent.

‘Drove home from dining with Mcllvaine at the Cafe Royal, behind a horse who had no interest in me, was going a way he had no interest in going, and was whipped on by a man who had no interest in me, or the horse, or the way. Amid this string of compulsions reached home.’

‘October. At Great Fawley, Berks. Entered a ploughed vale which might be called the Valley of Brown Melancholy. The silence is remarkable. . . . Though I am alive with the living I can only see the dead here, and am scarcely conscious of the happy children at play.’

‘October 7. Tennyson died yesterday morning.’

‘October 12. At Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey. The music was sweet and impressive, but as a funeral the scene was less penetrating than a plain country interment would have been. Lunched afterwards at the National Club with E. Gosse, Austin Dobson, Theodore Watts, and William Watson.’

‘18. Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle, and of the sad fact that the best of parents could do no better for me. . . . Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!’

‘October 24. The best tragedy — highest tragedy in short — is that of the worthy encompassed by the inevitable. The tragedies of immoral and worthless people are not of the best.’

‘December. At the “Empire” [Music-Hall]. The dancing-girls are nearly all skeletons. One can see drawn lines and puckers in their youngflesh. They should be penned and fattened for a month to round out their beauty.’

‘December 17. At an interesting legal dinner at Sir Francis Jeune’s. They were all men of law but myself — mostly judges. Their stories, so old and boring to one another, were all new to me, and I was delighted. Hawkins told me his experiences in the Tich- borne case, and that it was by a mere chance that he was not on the other side. Lord Coleridge (the cross-examiner in the same case, with his famous, “Would you be surprised to hear?”) was also anecdotic. Afterwards, when Lady J. had a large reception, the electric-lights all went out, just when the rooms were most crowded, but fortunately there being a shine from the fire we all stood still till candles were brought in old rummaged-up candlesticks.’

CHAPTER XXI

VISITS AND INTERMITTENT READING

1893: Aet. 52-53

1 January 13. The Fiddler of the Reels (short story) posted to Messrs. Scribner, New York.’

‘February 16. Heard a curious account of a grave that was ordered (by telegraph?) at West Stafford, and dug. But no funeral ever came, the person who had ordered it being unknown; and the grave had to be filled up.’ This entry had probably arisen from Hardy’s occupation during some days of this winter in designing his father’s tombstone, of which he made complete drawings for the stonemason; and it was possibly his contact with the stonemason that made him think of that trade for his next hero, though in designing church stonework as an architect’s pupil he had of course met with many.

‘February 22. There cannot be equity in one kind. Assuming, e.g., the possession of £1,000,000 sterling or 10,000 acres of land to be the coveted ideal, all cannot possess £1,000,000 or 10,000 acres. But there is a practicable equity possible: that the happiness which one man derives from one thing shall be equalled by what another man derives from another thing. Freedom from worry, for instance, is a counterpoise to the lack of great possessions, though he who enjoys that freedom may not think so.’

‘February 23. A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We tale-tellers are all Ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests (in other words, the hurrying public) unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman.

‘The whole secret of fiction and the drama — in the constructional part — lies in the adjustment of things unusual to things eternal and universal. The writer who knows exactly how exceptional, and how non-exceptional, his events should be made, possesses the key to the art.’

‘April. I note that a clever thrush, and a stupid nightingale, sing very much alike.

‘Am told that Nat C’s good-for-nothing grandson has “turned ranter “ — i.e. street-preacher — and, meeting a girl he used to carry on with, the following dialogue ensued:

He: “ Do you read your Bible for your spiritual good?”

She: “Ho-ho! Git along wi’thee!”

He: “ But do you, my dear young woman?”

She: “Haw-haw! Not this morning!”

He: “ Do you read your Bible, I implore?”