Thomas Hardy (9 page)

The story centres around two friends, who unbeknown to one another fall in love with the same woman. The one, Stephen Smith, is an architect (as, of course, was Hardy) who is sent to Cornwall to work on the restoration of a church. Here he meets Elfride Swancourt, daughter of the parson, and falls in love. This, of course, is Hardy himself, reliving, Vicariously through ‘Smith’, his own journey to Cornwall and his first meeting with Elfride (Emma). Furthermore, Smith’s father (like Hardy’s) is a stonemason who lives not in Dorset, but near to Elfride’s home.

Smith’s friend, Henry Knight, also an admirer of Elfride, is a writer, reviewer, barrister and Smith’s former mentor. Knight is therefore reminiscent of Hardy’s friend Horace Moule, who in 1862 was admitted to the Middle Temple. This begs the question, if ‘Smith’ represents Hardy, and ‘Knight’ represents Moule, did Moule in real life also fall in love with Emma? The answer is no. In fact, Moule and Emma never met.
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Another parallel between the novel and Hardy’s own life may be that, just as Smith was at pains to conceal the fact that he formerly had a lover, so Hardy may have been anxious lest Emma find out about his own former attachment to his cousin Tryphena Sparks. As for Elfride’s mortification at Knight’s scathing review of a ‘novelette’ which she has written, this is surely a reflection of Hardy’s hurt at having his own works criticised and rejected.

In
A Pair of Blue Eyes
, Hardy beguiles the reader with the elegance of his prose and the richness of his vocabulary. For example, here are to be found words like ‘diaphanous’ and ‘parallelepipedon’. There are delightful descriptive passages, such as when candlelight falls on Elfride and transforms her hair ‘into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola’. He also makes skilful use of imagery, as when Smith ‘drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail’; ‘Time closed up like a fan before him’; ‘one ray was abstracted from the glory about her head’; and ‘feet’ played about under Elfride’s dress ‘like little mice’. (It takes but little discernment to realise that these references to the hair and feet of Elfride were inspired by Emma.)

There are references in the novel which reveal just how familiar Hardy was with the authors Shakespeare and Catullus; with the Psalms; with painters Holbein and Turner; with Raphael’s
Madonna della Sedia
, and with ‘Dundagel’ (the ancient name for the Cornish village of Tintagel). He also demonstrates his attention to detail, as for example when he is describing the so-called ‘cliff without a name’ (near ‘Castle Boterel’ – Boscastle), which he compares to others such as Beachy Head, St Aldhelm’s, St Bee’s, and the Lizard. And he is aware of the significance to the earth’s history of fossils, and in particular a type known as ‘trilobites’.

That Hardy is in touch with the land and its people – as is to be expected from one born in the country and steeped in its ways – is revealed when he writes of how ‘labouring men’ are able to tell the time of day ‘by means of shadows, winds, clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know the existence of …’

He is familiar with ‘hydatids’ – a disease of sheep caused by tapeworm larvae which affects the animals’ brains and causes them to walk ‘round and round in a circle continually’. The elegance of his style is shown by this description of the sea:

And then the waves rolled in furiously – the neutral green-and-blue tongues of water slid up the slopes, and were metamorphosed into foam by a careless blow, falling back white and faint, and leaving trailing followers behind.

He also writes in an informed way about such places as Naples, Greece, Berlin, and even India, despite not having visited them.

There is to be found much humour and wit in
A Pair of Blue Eyes
. For example, in English history it is a well-known fact that there were only two King Charles’ – I and II. However, the driver of the dog-cart in which Smith is travelling believes that there was also a King Charles III. To which Smith replies sceptically: ‘I don’t recollect anything in English literature about Charles the Third.’ When the driver goes on to mention a Charles the Fourth, Smith retorts: ‘Upon my word, that’s too much!’

‘Why?’ asks the cab driver, after all, ‘there was a George the Fourth, wasn’t there?’

After the death of Lady Luxellian, wife of the squire, the mourning letters are seen to have ‘wonderful black rims … half-an-inch wide’. Was this too excessive, asks inn proprietor Martin Cannister dryly? Was it really possible for people to feel grief to the extent of ‘more than a very narrow border’?

These two examples alone are sufficient to demonstrate Hardy’s keen sense of humour; but did he ever laugh? Writer, critic and acquaintance of his, Desmond MacCarthy, affirms that he did laugh, but that ‘his laughter made no sound. As is usual with subtle people, his voice was never loud, and a gentle eagerness, which was very pleasing, showed his manner when he wanted sympathy about some point.’

On the other hand, says MacCarthy, Hardy ‘would instantly recoil on being disappointed’.
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Another acquaintance of Hardy’s, Dorset-born publisher Sir Walter Newman Flower, states that when Hardy was amused, ‘A happy smile would flick across his face like a flash of summer lightning. He would inwardly chuckle: he would relate a humorous happening he had known, and rejoice in it.’
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In any novel the plot is of fundamental importance, so how, in
A Pair of Blue Eyes
, did Hardy craft the story so as to keep the reader interested, right up until the final page? The answer lies in the character of Knight, who in many ways is similar to his creator. Knight is a man animated by ‘a spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism’, whose imagination had been ‘fed … by lonely study’, and whose emotions had been ‘drawn out … by his seclusion’. Knight’s ‘introspective tendencies’ have ‘never brought himself much happiness’. As for Elfride, the object of Knight’s desire, his inflexibility demands that he should be ‘the first-comer’. In other words, she should have had no other lovers prior to him, for he simply cannot tolerate an ‘idol’ who is ‘secondhand’. Surely this is precisely how Hardy saw himself in respect of Emma.

Conflict, of course, is at the heart of all novels, and it is to be found in
A Pair of Blue Eyes
when Knight begins to suspect that he is not, in fact, Elfride’s first love. There are clues along the way which alert Knight as to this possibility. Elfride is in the company of Knight when she rediscovers an earring which had previously been lost when in the company of Smith. This earring had been given to her by a lover to whom she had been informally engaged. Knight and Elfride later find themselves in a cemetery, sitting together on a tombstone, when he discovers that this is the tomb of Felix Jethway, Elfride’s first love.

Elfride says she would like to give Knight ‘something to make you think of me during the autumn at your chambers’. When he suggests a particular potted dwarf myrtle tree of hers, she demurs, and presents him with a different one; whereupon he guesses that the tree which he had originally chosen was given to her by a former lover.

Knight recognises a likeness to Elfride in faces drawn by his friend, Smith, as designs for proposed images of saints and angels to be created in stained glass. Finally, Felix Jethway’s mother sends Knight a letter telling him the full story of Elfride’s previous attachments, including the one to Smith. Again, Hardy is using ‘Knight’ to reflect his own feelings – in this case, feelings of anxiety and jealousy, for (as will be seen) he was aware that Emma had at least one suitor in Cornwall before he himself arrived on the scene.

The final twist-in-the-tail comes when Knight and Smith find themselves journeying together from London to Cornwall, each to claim Elfride for his own; not realising that the coffin containing her dead body is also travelling with them.

A Pair of Blue Eyes
gives the author the opportunity of presenting some of his own personal views about women. It is his opinion, for example, that Smith’s ‘failure to make his hold [on Elfride’s heart] a permanent one was [because of] his too timid habit of dispraising himself’ to her, because such self-denigrating behaviour on his part ‘inevitably leads the most sensible woman in the world to undervalue him who practises it. Directly domineering [of the woman] ceases in the man, snubbing begins in the woman.’ Hardy also states that it is an ‘unfortunate fact the gentler creature [the woman] rarely has the capacity to appreciate fair treatment from her natural complement [her male spouse]’.

Suppose for a moment that what Hardy is really doing here is voicing his own thoughts in regard to Emma. He feels that he is not appreciated, and wonders if instead of being self-deprecating to her, which gives her the opportunity to snub him, he should be more assertive, in which case she might have more respect for him. It also implies that Emma has adopted the same supercilious attitude to Hardy as her father has done. And suppose that Hardy was of the same opinion as ‘Knight’, who regards women as something of an unknown quantity, and declares it to be a ‘trick’ to read truly ‘the enigmatic forces at work in women at given times’.

Hardy’s criticisms are not reserved only for the female sex. ‘What fickle beings we men are!’ says Knight to Smith. ‘Men may love strongest for a while, but women love longest.’

The difficulties encountered by one who falls in love with another from a higher social class, and the consequent feelings of social superiority or inferiority which the rigid class structure existing in Hardy’s day could engender, was a theme which would occupy Hardy greatly throughout his life. This was an issue which he had addressed in his first (unpublished) novel,
The Poor Man and the Lady
. Perhaps it was Hardy’s youthful infatuation with the aristocratic Julia Martin that had first put the idea into his head that he might one day marry a ‘lady’. And when, three years later, he met Emma Gifford, the issue would confront him head on. ‘Fancy a man not being able to ride!’says Elfride scornfully to Smith, when he sorrowfully confesses that he does not go horse riding. (Emma rode a pony called Fanny, whereas Hardy himself did not ride.)

‘Did you ever think what my parents might be, or what society I originally moved in?’ enquires Smith of Elfride, before revealing to her that his father is a ‘cottager and working master mason’. ‘That is a strange idea to me,’ Elfride replies, ‘but never mind, what does it matter? I love you just as much.’

To Elfride’s father, the Revd Swancourt, however, it
does
matter. Says Swancourt, scornfully, on discovering his daughter’s attachment to Smith: ‘He a villager’s son; and we, Swancourts, connections of the Luxellians. What shall I next invite here, I wonder?’ If his daughter were to marry Smith, then even though he was an architect, Elfride would always be known thereafter as ‘the wife of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a London professional man’. In Swancourt’s experience, it was always the ‘drawback’ and ‘not the compensating factor’ which was talked of in society.

The Revd Swancourt’s reservations were confirmed when he observed that Smith did not care about ‘sauces of any kind’. Said he: ‘I always did doubt a man’s being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes.’ After all, did not the presence of an ‘unedified palate’ indicate ‘the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart’? Why, the Revd might have lavished a bottle of his ‘[18]40 Martinez’ – of which he had only eleven bottles left – on ‘a man who didn’t know it from eighteenpenny’.

As for Elfride’s stepmother, she is obliged to rebuke Elfride for using the word ‘gentlemen’ in what she considers to be the wrong context. ‘We have handed over “gentlemen” to the lower middle class, where the word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial tea parties,’ said she haughtily. It was now ‘Ladies and MEN’, always! Again, in reality, these voices are those of Emma’s father John Gifford and his wife.

Why did Hardy choose to include such details of his personal life in a novel? Partly because this was his modus operandi, but also out of anger. He had asked Emma’s father, in all good faith, for the hand of his daughter, and instead of being welcomed into the Gifford family, John Gifford had chosen to humiliate him. So how could Hardy express his disgust? Through his writings, where not he but his fictitious character, Stephen Smith, becomes the victim of social snobbery. And Hardy was determined to have the novel published, come what may, even if this meant offending Emma, who would inevitably read it, if she had not done so already.

To summarise, the idea that Hardy used
A Pair of Blue Eyes
as a debating chamber in which to mull over his own private thoughts about women in general, and Emma in particular, and the problems attendant on who falls in love with a person of higher social standing, may at first appear fanciful; but as the novel progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that this is
exactly
what he is doing.

The first instalment of
A Pair of Blue Eyes
appeared in
Tinsley’s Magazine
in September 1872, and in May 1873 the novel was published by Tinsley Brothers in three volumes.