Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1134 page)

An opportunity of trying the experiment, at any rate, was afforded by the arrival of a communication from Mr. Hicks, his old instructor in architecture, asking if he could recommend him any good assistant accustomed to church-restoration, as he was hampered by frequently suffering from gout. Hardy wrote that he would go himself, and at the latter part of July (1867) went down to Dorchester, leaving most of his books and other belongings behind him at Westbourne Park, which included such of his poems in manuscript as he had thought worth keeping. Of these the only ones not ultimately destroyed were consigned to darkness till between thirty and forty years after, when they were printed — mainly in IVessex Poems, though several, that had been overlooked at first, appeared in later volumes. Among the earliest were ‘Amabel’, ‘Hap’, ‘In Vision I Roamed’, ‘At a Bridal’, ‘Postponement’, ‘A Confession to a Friend’, ‘Neutral Tones’, ‘Her Dilemma’, ‘Revulsion’, ‘Her Reproach’, ‘The Ruined Maid’, ‘Heiress and Architect’, and four sonnets called ‘She, to Him’ (part of a much larger number which perished). Some had been sent to magazines, one sonnet that he rather liked, which began ‘Many a one has loved as much as I’, having been lost, the editor never returning it and Hardy having kept no copy. But most had never been sent anywhere.

It should be mentioned that several months before leaving London he had formed an idea of writing plays in blank verse — and had planned to try the stage as a supernumerary for six or twelve months, to acquire technical skill in their construction — going so far as to make use of an introduction to Mark Lemon, the then editor of Punch, and an ardent amateur-actor, for his opinion on this point. Nothing, however, came of the idea beyond the call on the genial editor, and on Mr. Coe, the stage-manager at the Haymarket under Buckstone’s lesseeship, with whom he had a conversation. The former rather damped the young man’s ardour by reminding him that the elder Mathews had said that he would not let a dog of his go on the stage, and that he himself, much as he personally liked the art of acting, would rather see a daughter of his in her grave than on the boards of a theatre. In fact almost the first moment of his sight of stage realities disinclined him to push further in that direction; and his only actual contact with the stage at this time was his appearance at Covent Garden as a nondescript in the pantomime of ‘The Forty Thieves’, and in a representation of the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race — this having come about through the accident of the smith who did the ironwork for the pantomime being the man who executed some of Blomfield’s designs for church metal-work, and who made crucifixes and harlequin-traps with equal imperturbability. More than forty years were to elapse before Hardy trod the same boards again — this time at rehearsals of the Italian Opera by Baron Frdddric d’Erlanger, founded on Tess of the d’Urhervilles.

aet. 21-27work in london55

‘End ofDec. 1865. To insects the twelvemonth has been an epoch, to leaves a life, to tweeting birds a generation, to man a year.’

Notes of 1866-67

‘A certain man: He creeps away to a meeting with his own sensations.’

‘He feels himself shrink into nothing when contemplating other people’s means of working. When he looks upon their ends he expands with triumph.’

‘There is no more painful lesson to be learnt by a man of capacious mind than that of excluding general knowledge for particular.’

‘The defects of a class are more perceptible to the class immediately below it than to itself.’

‘June 6. Went to Hatfield. Changed since my early visit. A youth thought the altered highway had always run as it did. Pied rabbits in the Park, descendants of those I knew. The once children are quite old inhabitants. I regretted that the beautiful sunset did not occur in a place of no reminiscences, that I might have enjoyed it without their tinge.’

‘June 19. A widely appreciative mind mostly fails to achieve a great work from pure far-sightedness. The very clearness with which he discerns remote possibilities is, from its nature, scarcely ever co-existent with the microscopic vision demanded for tracing the narrow path that leads to them.’

‘July 13. A man’s grief has a touch of the ludicrous unless it is so keen as to be awful.’

‘Feb. 18. Remember that Evil dies as well as Good.’

‘April 29. Had the teachings of experience grown cumulatively with the age of the world we should have been ere now as great as God.’

CHAPTER IV

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND LITERATURE

1867-1870: Aet. 27-30

End of Summer 1867

A few weeks in the country — where he returned to his former custom of walking to the Dorchester architect’s office from his mother’s house every day — completely restored him. He easily fell into the routine that he had followed before, though, with between five and six years superadded of experience as a young man at large in London, it was with very different ideas of things.

Among the churches for restoration or rebuilding that Hicks had in hand, or in prospect, was one which should be named here — that of the parish of St. Juliot in Cornwall — for which remote spot Mr. Hicks set out one day to report upon the said building, shortly after Hardy had gone back to help him. Hardy noticed the romantic name of the church and parish — but had no idea of the meaning it would have for him in aftertime.

An effect among others of his return to the country was to take him out of the fitful yet mechanical and monotonous existence that befalls many a young man in London lodgings. Almost suddenly he became more practical, and queried of himself definitely how to achieve some tangible result from his desultory yet strenuous labours at literature during the previous four years. He considered that he knew fairly well both West-country life in its less explored recesses and the life of an isolated student cast upon the billows of London with no protection but his brains — the young man of whom it may be said more truly than perhaps of any, that ‘save his own soul he hath no star’. The two contrasting experiences seemed to afford him abundant materials out of which to evolve a striking socialistic novel — not that he mentally defined it as such, for the word had probably never, or scarcely ever, been heard of at that date.

So down he sat in one of the intervals of his attendances at Mr.

Hicks’s drawing-office (which were not regular), and, abandoning verse as a waste of labour — though he had resumed it awhile on arriving in the country — he began the novel the title of which is here written as it was at first intended to be:

THE POOR MAN AND THE LADY

A Story with no Plot

Containing some original verses

This, however, he plainly did not like, for it was ultimately abridged to

THE POOR MAN AND THE LADY

By the Poor Man

And the narrative was proceeded with till, in October of this year (1867), he paid a flying visit to London to fetch his books and other impedimenta.

Thus it happened that under the stress of necessity he had set about a kind of literature in which he had hitherto taken but little interest — prose fiction; so little indeed, that at one of the brief literary lectures, or speeches, he had occasionally delivered to Blomfield’s pupils in a spare half-hour of an afternoon, he had expressed to their astonishment an indifference to a popular novelist’s fame.

1868. January 16 and Onwards We find from an entry in a note-book that on this date he began to make a fair copy of the projected story, so that all of it must have been written out roughly during the five preceding months in the intervals of his architectural work for Hicks. In the February following a memorandum shows that he composed a lyric entitled ‘A Departure by Train’, which has disappeared. In April he was reading Browning and Thackeray; also taking down the exact sound of the song of the nightingale — the latter showing that he must have been living in sylvan shades at his parents’, or at least sleeping there, at the time, where nightingales sang within a yard of the bedroom windows in those days, though they do not now.

On June 9 he enters, ‘Finished copying MS.’, and on the 17th is recorded at some length the outline of a narrative poem on the Battle of the Nile. It was never finished, but it shows that the war with Napoleon was even then in his mind as material for poetry of some sort.

On July 1 he writes down — in all likelihood after a time of mental depression over his work and prospects:

‘Cures for despair:

‘To read Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”.

“„ Stuart Mill’s “Individuality” (in Liberty).

„ „ Carlyle’s “Jean Paul Richter”.’

On July 17 he writes: ‘Perhaps I can do a volume of poems consisting of the other side of common emotions’. What this means is not quite clear.

On July 25 he posted the MS. of The Poor Man and the Lady to Mr. Alexander Macmillan, and now being free of it, lent some more help to Mr. Hicks in his drawings for church-restorations, reading the Seventh Book of the Aeneid between whiles.

‘August 12. A reply from Macmillan on the MS.’

The letter was a very long and interesting one, and is printed in full in the Letters of Alexander Macmillan. The well-known publisher begins by stating that he had read the novel ‘with care, and with much interest and admiration, but feeling at the same time that it has what seem to me drawbacks fatal to its success, and what I think, judging the writer from the book itself, you would feel even more strongly, to its truthfulness and justice’.

He then went into particulars of criticism. ‘The utter heartless- ness of all the conversation you give in drawing-rooms and ballrooms about the working-classes has some ground of truth, I fear, and might justly be scourged as you aim at doing; but your chastisement would fall harmless from its very excess. Will’s speech to the working men is full of wisdom. . . .

‘Much of the writing seems to me admirable. The scene in Rotten Row is full of power and insight. . . . You see I am writing to you as a writer who seems to me, at least potentially, of considerable mark, of power and purpose. If this is your first book I think you ought to go on. May I ask if it is, and — you are not a lady, so perhaps you will forgive the question — are you young?

‘I have shown your MS. to one friend, whose judgment coincides with my own.’

The opinion of the friend — who was Mr. John Morley — was enclosed. He said that the book was ‘A very curious and original performance: the opening pictures of the Christmas-eve in the tranter’s house are really of good quality: much of the writing is strong and fresh’. But he added as to its faults that ‘the thing hangs too loosely together’, and that some of the scenes were wildly extravagant, ‘so that they read like some clever lad’s dream’. He wound up by saying, ‘If the man is young he has stuff and purpose in him’.

It was perhaps not usual for a first haphazard attempt at fiction to receive such close attention from so experienced a publisher as Mr. Macmillan, and so real a man of letters as Mr. Morley. However, Hardy seems to have done little in the matter during the autumn, beyond rewriting some of the pages; but in December he paid a flying visit to London, and saw Mr. Macmillan.

The substance of the interview was that though The Poor Man and the Lady, if printed, might create a considerable curiosity, it was a class of book which Macmillan himself could not publish; but if Hardy were bent on issuing it he would probably have no difficulty in doing so through another firm, such as that of Chapman and Hall. The young man, it is assumed, was so bent, for Mr. Macmillan gave him an introduction to Mr. Frederick Chapman, and Hardy called on the latter with the MS. under his arm. He makes a note on December 8 that he had been to see Chapman, adding: ‘I fear the interview was an unfortunate one’. He returned to Dorchester, leaving the MS. in Mr. Chapman’s hands, and this brought the year to an unsatisfactory close — so far as it affected Hardy’s desire to get into print as the author of a three-volume novel, since he could not do so as a poet without paying for publication.

In the midst of these attempts at authorship, and the intermittent preparation of architectural drawings, Hardy found time to read a good many books. The only reference discoverable includes various plays of Shakespeare, Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann in six volumes, Thackeray, Macaulay, Walt Whitman, Virgil’s Aeneid (of which he never wearied), and other books during his interval of leisure.

The following note, amongst others, occurs in his pocket-book this autumn:

‘The village sermon. If it was very bad the parish concluded that he [the vicar] wrote it himself; if very good, that his wife wrote it; if middling, that he bought it, so that they could have a nap without offending him.’ What parish this refers to is unknown.

There is also another note, some days later:

‘How people will laugh in the midst of a misery! Some would soon get to whistle in Hell.’

1869

Presumably it was the uncertainty of his position between architecture and literature, and a vague sense of ominousness at getting no reply (so far as can be ascertained) from Messrs. Chapman and Hall, that led Hardy to London again during the January of the new year.

Suggestions that he should try his hand at articles in reviews were made to him by Mr. Macmillan, and also by the critic of his manuscript, Mr. Morley, with whom he got acquainted about this time, Morley offering him an introduction to the editor of The Saturday Review. But Hardy was not so much in want of a means of subsistence — having always his father’s house to fall back upon in addition to architectural jobs which were offered him readily by Blomfield and other London architects — as of a clear call to him which course in life to take — the course he loved, and which was his natural instinct, that of letters, or the course all practical wisdom dictated, that of architecture.

He stayed on in London lodgings, studying pictures at the South Kensington Museum and other places, and reading desultorily, till at last a letter did arrive from Chapman and Hall. On his calling at their address in Piccadilly Chapman was in the back part of the shop, and on Hardy’s joining him said with nonchalance, ignoring Hardy’s business, ‘You see that old man talking to my clerk? He’s Thomas Carlyle.’ Hardy turned and saw leaning on one elbow at the clerk’s desk an aged figure in an inverness cape and slouched hat. ‘Have a good look at him,’ continued Chapman. ‘You’ll be glad I pointed him out to you some day.’ Hardy was rather surprised that Chapman did not think enough of Thomas Carlyle to attend to his wants in person, but said nothing.