The Life of Thomas Hardy

Apology

APOLOGY

IN putting together this biographical account it has been my hope to place at the disposal of Thomas Hardy’s readers some material which may add a certain amount of richness to those profound emotional experiences which are created by a sympathetic perusal of his imaginative works. I have purposed to accomplish this by means of description—of the man personally, with his simple human likes and hates; of his interesting ancestry; of his surroundings; of his experiences. Among the last I have included purely intellectual, purely artistic events and influences, as well as superficial, physical happenings.

This will indicate that the following pages include some account—even some comparative study—of Hardy’s books; possibly to the annoyance of those who seek in a "life" a complete divorcement from criticism, and a concentration on the sensational possibilities of the subject’s career.

There is, therefore, little "spice," and perhaps too little "story," in this book. For this lack there are several contributory causes: There was very little "story" in Hardy’s life. Very meagre information, regarding even that little, is possessed even by Hardy’s intimates. Hardy is at this moment still alive; to tell too much, even if one could, would be indelicate, impertinent.

Hardy was a man whose chief occupation was writing. He simply sat down and wrote. Other things which he did are unimportant, except in so far as they affected his writings. As far as his masterpiece, The Dynasts, is concerned, for instance, it is far more important to realize what Æschylus wrote in the Sixth Century B. C. than it is to know whether Hardy dipped his pen in black ink or lavender ink. Still, I admit that if I had discovered him writing, let us say, with a quill on pink paper, I would have retailed the observation here with great unction.

To read any author without prejudice is impossible, even for the dispassionately scientific literary chemists in the graduate schools of our universities. I have therefore not hesitated to exhibit mine. I have already shown my strong preference for Hardy’s poetry. Other examples of bias will be noticed. Many readers will disagree with me here and there. But to anticipate such disagreements would be to emasculate a largely personal record, such as this.

E. B.

New York, December, 1924

Chapter I: Wessex Twilight (November, 1923)

THE LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY

CHAPTER I

Wessex Twilight (November, 1923)

IT is difficult to think of Thomas Hardy without thinking of a definitely circumscribed portion of the English countryside. And yet, when reading his novels, lyrics and dramas, one cannot help noting how universally they apply to all that is most intense in human life, how vividly they image the tragedy of human existence everywhere on our little grey planet.

Like the Athenian dramatists who found in their tiny Mediterranean peninsula a cosmic mirror wherein the whole panorama of what is richest, direst, best, worst, deepest, most colorful in the minds and actions of humanity might be discovered and artistically presented, Hardy has found in the southwestern corner of his Island all the ingredients for a complete literary picture of his time—and, in many senses, of all times.

This, in itself, is not remarkable.

What is remarkable is that Hardy, while making his discovery, has in his creative work achieved such an epic sweep, has so masterfully welded together observation, passion and form, that he has become perhaps the outstanding literary figure of his time. Few people will now quarrel with this assertion as an extravagance.

One significant indication of its validity is the truth of the converse of our first observation, namely, that the Hardy-country has colored Hardy’s work. For it is equally true that Hardy’s work has indelibly colored his country, for all succeeding times and peoples. He has made a new thing of the district. He has not merely changed its name from Dorsetshire to "Wessex"; he has changed its very character, even for its inhabitants. He has made it known to many who would never have been aware of its existence otherwise. Finally, he has made it the medium by which the whole subjective world of his readers has been transfigured.

Parallelisms between Hardy and the Greeks have already been pointed out many times. Here is a new one: Agamemnon is more real today than Alcibiades; mythical Ilium more real than political Corinth. In the same way, Casterbridge and Henchard are already more real to us than Dorchester and its Mayor, whoever he may happen to be.

A "Life of Thomas Hardy," in order to fulfill its function of explaining how the man and his influence are what they are, must find facts to account, among others, for these two things: first, for Hardy’s strange effect on the country; second, for the sway exerted over the world of letters by this man-made realm.

It will be necessary, then, to realize and to present Hardy in his true setting, to transcribe accurately the impression that he produces personally, to add to this an imaginative immersion into the quality of the land of "Wessex," finally to show how the combination and interaction of these atmospheres has affected the mental world of men.

Thus a little picture must precede our ordered chronological explanation: a picture of a mind suffusing a geographical district, recreating it and driving it out into many communities by means of the instruments of literary art.

We begin, therefore, with such a picture, by way of prologue to the proper biographical history.

* *

The train has rumbled past Wimborne, Poole, Wareham. A glass of heavy port at the Dorchester station takes the chill out of the dismal November journey. Now a brisk cut eastward, damp fields rolling up from below you, a dull aluminum sky pressing down from above, over fences and stiles, up the Wareham Road, and into the shadowy, rustling grove at "Max Gate." You stand under a little portico and knock. A shaggy, untidy ball bounds around the corner, knocks itself against your knees, barking unreasonably. A female voice from within:

"Wessie! Wessie! Are you misbehaving again!"

At length you are admitted, your impedimenta disposed of. Mrs. Hardy, dark, small, preoccupied: "The dog is a nuisance . . . Still unused to callers . . . Loves attention . . . Mr. Hardy will be glad to see you. He will not write autographs. He has had some unfortunate ex- periences with, interviewers. Still, there are many visitors. Miss Amy Lowell has been here, and Mr. Clement Shorter, and Mr. Dudley Field Malone, an American—who is Mr. Malone?"

Wessie tries so furiously to eat wood out of the fireplace that he is at length led away, struggling, whining.

The room is dim, furnished plainly, low-ceiled. There is a portrait of Shelley on the wall.

Meanwhile Hardy has come down. He is small, somewhat stooped; grave and kindly in manner. Deep-set brooding eyes look out from a framework of wrinkled parchment. They look out dispassionately; yet they dominate.

He wears a fuzzy sweater beneath a thick grey-green suit.

"People at last seem to be discovering the curious charms of this part of the country. Even on dull days like this, I daresay, one can love it."

His voice is even, vibrant, slightly high-pitched, with a strange questioning inflection to each cadence. It makes everything he chooses to say seem somehow tentative, unfinal.

"Granville Barker and his wife are thinking of settling around here. The lovely dignity of the countryside leaves its photograph on the people, you know. I've become convinced that climate really makes character. I'm sure your terrible, harsh West Virginia mountain country is really responsible for the overwhelming multiplied tragedy which you call your 'poor white' population. America is a tragic country; its tragedy is reflected in the countenances and manners of even the visitors who pass through England. But we get only vague inklings of the basis of it, such as the periodic outcropping of your Negro problems and other racial difficulties. I am too old ever to fathom this; I can only feel it vaguely, like a faint echo of a cataclysm on another star.

"I can't even always fathom quite the charm of the ancient church musicians about here. They serenaded me with some old tunes the other evening. That sort of thing carries me back to the fifties—even to the forties. I'm old enough to remember the gaudy Napoleonic military uniforms, with their long flapping tails. Their fascination has been a lasting thing. Dashing uniforms give me pleasant sensations."

Slightly inconsecutive is the Hardy discourse, but quietly dynamic. Sometimes the gears of memory actually slip for a moment. Minor characters in certain of the Wessex novels, for instance, have become quite submerged.

About other things there are flashes which brilliantly, electrically illuminate the fading past. At the mention of Swinburne, "I loved Atalanta," he confesses, simply. "I used to walk from my lodgings near Hyde Park to the draughting office every morning, and never without a copy of the first edition of the Poems and Ballads sticking out of my pocket. It was a borrowed copy ... If I'd only bought it at the time, it would be worth many guineas today.

"Tennyson and Browning both lived near me. For two years I read only poetry—no prose, except the newsprints—a curious obsession! Well, I still believe poetry to be the very essence of literature ... No editors even touched my verse for many years. Oh, yes, I sent much of it out; it invariably came back. And I destroyed a good deal of it."

Luncheon is announced and served by trim maids. There is cider—"Sweet cyder is a great thing,"—one remembers the swinging lyric of life-love. The conversation veers.

"You have some mighty promising poets in America. Who is Louis Untermeyer? I'm very fond of his verse. It's keen. But he's not a rebel, is he? I don't fancy revolutionaries. I never moved in revolutionary circles, even in the sixties and seventies when Darwin set London aflame. Blomfield, my architectural master, was a clergyman's son, you see. I liked the artists best. I liked the quiet galleries.

"We've just been reading Dreiser's Genius. What does one think of it?"

Mrs. Hardy, serving the custard and plum-pie: "We think it ought to be suppressed—really!"

Hardy holds up a finger: "Not because it's immoral. It may not be. But because there's no excuse for a writer's deliberate abandonment of any kind of form. One prefers—expects—some sort of structure, not a mere heap of bricks, no matter how excitingly red they may be. . . .

"Yes—perhaps I shouldn't carp. The clergy burned poor Jude in a public bonfire. . . ."

Mrs. Hardy has retired as the whiskey-and-soda begins to be sipped. Wessie romps in as the door swings to. Hardy carefully slices up bits of cheese and feeds them to the poodle.

"Worst of all, people have often tried to identify me with Jude. That's an impertinence, don't you think? Jude, anyway, is the least autobiographical of all my novels. Where they seem most autobiographical, they are least so. This is generally true of imaginative writing. I remember being struck at one time by a description of an execution in France, in one of Arnold Bennett's novels. It seemed to strike so clearly the note of truth and reality. Later I discovered that Bennett had never even seen a guillotine.

"Young Springrove, in Desperate Remedies, was actually drawn from life, it is true—but not from my life. It was a youth I once knew quite well. He's now dead, poor fellow. ..."

You find yourself back in the drawing-room. Hardy continues chatting amiably. He takes down from his shelves a heavy volume, turns the pages abstractedly. You venture to admire a Hardy portrait, facing the Shelley on the opposite wall.

"We like that one," says Mrs. Hardy, detached, half-dreamily. "Another used to hang there. We tired of it. One day Mr. Hardy tore it up."

Mr. Hardy allows himself a twitch of a smile, although he continues to look elsewhere.

"Now here," he observes, proffering the book, "is a fellow who has written about me with some enthusiasm. Only he has gone to my novels instead of to Who's Who for his facts. He's been impertinent in spots, you see. We've corrected him; I've penciled some notes in his margins. Perhaps you'd care to look over them, if you're interested."

A quaint preoccupation, this.

The notes have been set down with a fine, careful pencil. The characters are beautifully formed. You look as though you'd like to copy the remarks. Mrs. Hardy fetches you a sheaf of paper. Here are a few of the items you scratch off:

The birthplace of T. H. was not a humble cottage; it was (and is) a low, but rambling and spacious house with a paddock and (till lately) large stablings.

This is impertinent

Primary school 8th to 10th year only—see Who's Who.

He knew the dialect as a boy, but was not permitted to speak it—it was not spoken in his mother's house, but only when necessary to the cottagers, and by his father to his workmen, some 6 or 12.

First to London & the suburbs, then from place to place—Somerset & the Rhine, etc., then Sturminster-Newton, then London several years, then Wimborne. 3 or 4 months every year to London for nearly 30 years, in flats & houses rented for the season.

Hardy stands and watches you silently as you turn the leaves. He has lit a cigarette, holds it in steady fingers, puffs meditatively. He opens a glass china cupboard, takes out a small painted porcelain model of a vine-covered, thatch-roofed house. A curious bit. Whatever can it be used for? Then he tells you that it's a reproduction in miniature of his birthplace. You can get one, he says, for one-and-six at the curio shop in East High Street, just above St. Peter's. Hardy feels strongly about that house. He was not born in a Lincoln log-cabin.

The talk shifts around, somehow, to the teaching of English writing. Can writing be taught? Hardy thinks so. He wants to know why they don't teach the writing of verse. It's the best method of learning how to handle words and sentences, he says, even if one's final object is the writing of clear and vivid prose.

"I never wanted to write prose novels at all. I was forced to manufacture my novels; circumstances compelled me to turn them out. All the time I composed verse. I wrote verse for years, long before I thought of writing prose. Lyrical activity was essential for my existence—and The Dynasts was crying for materialization, crying to be born, for many years. I wrote it because I had to, because of orders from within. It really wanted to come out in one burst, like a lyric—but the flesh is weak; I had to do it in three parts. . . .

"Max Beerbohm's burlesque of The Dynasts in his Christmas Garland gave me plenty of amusement. It's the cheerfulest parody on anything of mine that I've ever seen. I like Max. . . .

"Was it really difficult to get the earlier editions of The Dynasts in America? I'd heard something of the sort. If that ever happens again, do write me and I'll see what can be done about it. There's now a convenient pocket edition. I've only one copy, or I'd let you take it with you . . . It can be read on a railway journey. . ."

We are outside in the garden. Max Gate is covered with ivy leaves. It is a solid, unbeautiful, four-square house, but it squats there with a quaint dignity.

"I had some German prisoners working for me out here in the garden during the early days of the war. Nice fellows. The villagers used to gather around late in the day and talk to them, although it wasn't officially permitted. They got on together very well. The Germans happened to speak some particular variety of Saxon dialect; our people spoke their own country-tongue, a direct descendant of King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon, as William Barnes pointed out.

"Now a remarkable thing happened. The Wessex Old English and this Low German were so similar that there was almost perfect understanding between the two groups.

"When I noticed this, I went inside and composed a sonnet. It was printed in the newspapers shortly afterwards, and created something of a storm. Patriotic people didn't like it. But the facts of philology and the real bonds between people of the same race are stronger than a temporary war-fever. I daresay few people remember the sonnet now, or consider it an amazing thing if they do."

You happen to remember it. It is called The Pity Of It:

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like "Thu hist," "Er war,"

"Ich woll," "Er sholl," and by-talk similar, Even as they speak who in this month's moon gird At England's very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying, "Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

"Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly."

What an Argive curse is here! What an ardent vengeance and pity! What an ardent meliorist is this aged man!

This thought colors your next utterances.

"No," says the poet. "I am not."

Mrs. Hardy takes her leave. She has vanished to look after her brood of chickens.

"I am not interested in Mrs. Hardy's chickens. And really, you must not ever call me ‘ardent' about anything. I am not. I am as indifferent as I find it possible to be. I wish you success, however. Good-day."

* *

Amazing, curious visit! A physically feeble man, more than eighty-three years old. But keen-witted, with a strange, slippery logic to cover an enigmatic personality. A memory but fitfully illuminated, and in unexpected places. A touch of common simplicity, a strain of common nobility. An unflinching grip on reality, and a sentiment that trembles at the touch of things.

An aura surrounds Max Gate, a twilight aura that suffuses the district and its people. One feels it even outside Wessex, of course, even before one treads the Wes- sex soil. One feels it in New York and in London and Paris; one hears its quiverings in scraps of talk, in the strange wistful twist with which people force themselves, quasi-incredulously, to speak of the material reality of the Wessex poet. "Wessex" lives: the novels, the lyrics, The Dynasts, The Queen of Cornwall, but that Wessex domain is the creation of a mere man who sat down to put mere words to paper. This man has now achieved a spiritual tyranny over what could be, before his time, only the after-life of the old Kingdom of Alfred the Great. Wessex the idea, the Wessex of the mind, that is to say the real Wessex, is now Thomas Hardy's own. To one who has surrendered to the experience of this idea, the physical southwest English county known as Dorsetshire has passed out of existence.

* *

Well, you walk back into Dorchester. (No one will mistake you if you call it Casterbridge). You pause to look into the window of a stationery shop. The usual photographic post cards are displayed for sale. But they don't show "real" places at all. They are, for the most part, captioned and sold as illustrations to the Hardy novels and poems. Few sets for Dorchester, but many sets for The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. The aura is not merely "literary." Not even the natives consider their own countryside as something real. Their familiar places have little to do with ponderable matter; the “real” people who now go to and fro in them are only phantoms. These places are real only in so far as they are the places where Clym Yeobright and Tess Durbeyfield rejoiced a little and suffered much. Thomas Hardy is a wizard who has enchanted the land, turned it into something which has no longer an objective existence. Its imaginative, subjective reality is so much stronger.

All this is of course just a mood, and perhaps a deceptive one. All the same, it's there; and being felt, it's real. And in the years to come, you may reflect, Wessex might indeed partake of a magic comparable in quality to that enjoyed by Stratford-on-Avon. It has already drained away some of the glamor of the Lakes.

Just see how you react to that drove of sheep trotting across the fair grounds, followed by a shaggy dog and a shepherd with his tall crook. He's not just a shepherd. He's Gabriel Oak. The Dorchester fair grounds are not just fair grounds. They are the place where Henchard sold his wife.

There are children, released from school, playing in a field. Black birds soar over their heads, flutter down and settle on the meadows. The birds are rooks. Where is the boy Jude with his clacker, to scare them away for Farmer Troutham?—and to be so terribly attacked, both by the brutal farmer and by still more brutal Weltschmerz?

Here are Maumbry Bings, the grassy Roman amphitheatre, surrounded by gnarled oaks, symbolic of the relentless tread of Fate. Here Michael Henchard kept tryst with his Susan, and here you, as well as Henchard (as the villagers tell you) may still, on occasion, glimpse the shades of Vespasian's legions at dusk.

Near by is the London and Southwestern railway station; it is half-real. It links Wessex with the hinterland: Southampton and London. Standing without humor in a barren lot, it represents the antenna, the tentacle of scientific civilization, piercing the land of high romance. You think of the disheartening "progress" pictured in The Well Beloved.

You wander down the street again. The name hoarded above a draper's shop catches your eye. It is "Henry Knight." Instantly you are looking into Elfride's blue eyes. They are anxious, terror-stricken. Knight is hanging, clinging to the sheer face of the ghastly towering Cliff Without A Name. Wind and rain lash him grimly, bent on destroying him. He can hold out but a little longer. The eyes of a fossil in the rock survey him malignantly. . . .

It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death . . .

Time closed up like a fan before him . . .

Pitiless nature had then two voices . . .

The sea would have been a neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer; it was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow white border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall and its edging. . . .

That adventure took place on the rugged coast, not many miles from this street. Doesn't it smack more strongly of reality than these woolens and linens in orderly array at the draper's?

You've reached the center of the town. Here is St. Peter's Church. A "grizzled church," built over the site of the Roman temple here at "Durnovaria"—a "grizzled church whose massive square tower rises unbroken into the darkening sky," a Perpendicular sanctuary, just as it was in the days of King John.

Outside is the statue of William Barnes, Rector of Winterbourne, the ghostly father of Hardy the poet and philologer—"an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee breeches and buckled shoes with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout stick in his hand." The inscription:

ZOO NOW I HOPE HIS KINDLY FEACE IS GONE TO FIND A BETTER PLEACE; BUT STILL WI' VO'K A-LEFT BEHIND HE'LL ALWAYS BE A-KEPT IN MIND

Within the church is the Hardy Chapel, housing two cold stone effigies, reclining mailed warriors, cross-legged knights with belt, spurs, sword, shield, helmet, all of heroic proportions. Their arms are no longer visible on their shields. Time has worn away the paint from the massive granite.

A step down the street is the Dorset County Museum. Relics of many races and civilizations in the large hall inside: a Roman tiled pavement set in the floor, flint axeheads from the Stone Age. British, Danish and Saxon weapons, a map showing the location of many and various mounds. But you don't think of the Battle of Brunanburh, nor of the fleeing King and the spider's web, nor of the legend of the burnt griddle-cakes. You think of The Moth Signal on Egdon Heath:

Then grinned the ancient Briton From the tumulus treed with pine: "So, hearts are thwartly smitten In these days as in mine!"

In a case under a glass cover rests a bound manuscript, held open by rubber bands. The letters are inked with care. You read:

CHAPTER XXIX

At this hour Lucetta was bounding along the road to Port Breedy just as Elizabeth had announced. That she had chosen for her afternoon walk the road along which she had returned to Casterbridge three hours earlier in a carriage was curious—if anything should be called curious in concatenations of phenomena wherein each is known to have its accounting cause.

Darkness has fallen by the time you emerge into the cold air. You are stopping at the King's Arms Hotel. Its "spacious bow window" still "projects into the street over the main portico," just as it did when Donald Farfrae, the caroling Scotsman, inquired for "a respectable hotel more moderate than this."

You hurry to your room. You have ordered a fire to be lighted, and find your quarters swimming in smoke. You open the window. Both smoke and heat fly out. But that doesn't matter. You descend, dine, and join the crowd heading for the Corn Exchange. Hardy's "first real play" goes on the boards tonight. He has entrusted his Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall to the Hardy Players, humble Dorset mummers. The local doctor will be Tristram, a pretty little shop-assistant will put on the robes and chaplet of Iseult of the White Hands. In the "cast" are also a greengrocer, a solicitor's clerk, a saddler, a master-brewer.

Inside the old Exchange is the audience, simple country people for the most part, seated under the oak ceiling, flanked by green-painted Gothic arches—the very scene of the Casterbridge Mayor's spectacular downfall. A local musical band, the Frampton Family Orchestra (Framptons have been mayors of the town), scrapes away on fiddles and viols, discoursing old country tunes and lively dances, for all the world like the antique Mellstock Choir. Humble folk all, here, except for a few well-fed squires whose motors are parked outside, and a sprinkling of dinner-jacketed London critics.

A microphone dangles from the ceiling in front, ready to spread the atmosphere of the evening across all England through the etheric pulsations of the British Broadcasting Company. The critics for the two-penny papers, the photographers, the microphone, seem, in a sense, to be intruders, just as you did, perhaps, when you visited the old hangman's cottage, when you trod the narrow winding lanes that brought you to the shallow Froom River and the one-time haunts of the furmity-woman.

Mrs. Hardy has come in, but not Hardy himself.

All your reflections are interrupted when the Frampton musicians suddenly silence their fiddling. The lights are switched off—on, and off again, with the customary indecision of an amateur first-night stage electrician. A projection-machine hisses and sputters fitfully in the rear, a wavering circle of eerie green light at last finds the center of the curtain and rests there. The curtain parts, a bearded figure in a brown shroud appears in the shadows of the aperture. It begins to speak, in stiff, declamatory fashion. . . .

"There’s old Tilley!" cries a woman.

But old Tilley becomes Hardy’s Merlin in a moment, with his words,

We come, at your persuasive call, To raise up, in this modern hall A tragedy of dire duress That vexed the land of Lyonesse. . . .

Now the "muffled shades of dead old Cornish men and women" chanting, in dragged monotone, the choral induction, as they advance and take up their stations before the proscenium. Then, as the lights disclose an exact replica of Hardy’s own design for the interior of Tintagel Castle, appear the characters in the most pathetic episode in the great Arthurian legend, best beloved theme of every English poet. Again the story of Queen Iseult and her white-handed namesake, of King Mark, of Sir Tristram, child of Fate.

Your feeling is Greek. It was thus that Sophocles presented to an audience of his countrymen his own re-working of their great legendary inheritances. Here is Hardy’s tragic epos.

The play opens in this manner, lives for three quarters of an hour, closes again like a flower, the chanters receding as they advanced, Merlin once more appearing, reciting the brief epilogue, and vanishing.

And what of you, with this impression freshly added to those you brought along with you? Well—the critics who immediately disappear Londonwards, back to the fashionable oriental glitter of Flecker's Hassan (only the faithful Clement Shorter remains for a second performance), will not be slow to point out, rightly, that here was given no great sweep of emotion such as a reading of The Dynasts gives, no thrill like the melodramatic thrill of The Return of the Native, or of Tess, or of Jude.

Superficial explanations of this are of course not lacking. You have learned to expect the superhuman from Hardy. And here was an amateur performance, no better, no more skilful than the usual, apart from the merits of the tragedy itself. The mind of the audience has been continually distracted by the creaking and the groaning of the stage-machinery: the audible promptings, the ill-fitting costumes with unsightly bumps on tighted male knees, the mumbled delivery of the lines, the total lack of fire and passion, the unintelligibility of the chorus's declamations, the stiff and unreal attitudes and gestures, the bad imitations of "acting." Here was neither the charming naivete of the Irish Players, nor the practiced, polished emotion of the great metropolitan actors.