Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1138 page)

It was at this time, too, that he saw the last of St. Juliot Church in its original condition of picturesque neglect, the local builder laying hands on it shortly after, and razing to the ground the tower and the north aisle (which had hitherto been the nave), and the transept. Hardy much regretted the obliteration in this manner of the church’s history, and, too, that he should be instrumental in such obliteration, the building as he had first set eyes on it having been so associated with what was romantic in his life. Yet his instrumentality was involuntary, the decision to alter and diminish its area having been come to before he arrived on the scene. What else could be done with the dilapidated structure was difficult to say if it had to be retained for use. The old walls of the former nave, dating from Norman or even earlier times, might possibly have been preserved. A north door, much like a Saxon one, was inadvertently destroyed, but Hardy made a drawing of it which is preserved in the present church, with his drawings of the highly carved seat-ends and other details that have disappeared. Fortunately the old south aisle was kept intact, with its arcade, the aisle now being adapted for a nave.

It wlas at this church that occurred his humorous experience of the buider’s view of the old chancel-screen. Hardy had made a careful drawing of it, with its decayed tracery, posts, and gilding, marking thereon where sundry patchings and scarfings were to be applied. Reaching the building one day he found a new and highly varnished travesty of the old screen standing in its place. ‘Well, Mr. Hardy,’ replied the builder in answer to his astonished inquiries, I said to myself, I won’t stand on a pound or two while I’m about it, and I’ll give ‘em a new screen instead of that patched-up old thing.’

PART II – NOVELS - TO ILLNESS

CHAPTER VI

FIRST THREE BOOKS

1870-1873: Aet. 30-33

He must when in London have obtained from Tinsley the MS. of Desperate Remedies-, for during the autumn of this year 1870 there were passing between him and Miss Gifford chapters of the story for her to make a fair copy of, the original MS. having been interlined and altered, so that it may have suffered, he thought, in the eyes of a publisher’s reader by being difficult to read. He meanwhile wrote the three or four remaining chapters, and the novel — this time finished — was packed off to Tinsley in December. However, a minute fact seems to suggest that Hardy was far from being in bright spirits about this book and his future at this time. On the margin of his copy of Hamlet the following passage is marked with the date, ‘December 15, 1870’:

‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart: but it is no matter!’

Tinsley wrote his terms again, which for some unaccountable reason were worse now than they had been in the first place, an advance of £75 being demanded; and the following is a transcript of Hardy’s letter to the publisher on these points, at the end of December:

‘I believe I am right in understanding your terms thus — that if the gross receipts reach the costs of publishing I shall receive the £75 back again, and if they are more than the costs I shall have £75, added to half the receipts beyond the costs (i.e., assuming the expenditure to be £100, and the receipts £200, I should have returned to me £75+ £50 = £125).

‘Will you be good enough to say, too, if the sum includes advertising to the customary extent, and about how long after my paying the money the book would appear.’

This adventurous arrangement by the would-be author, who at that date had only £123 in the world, beyond what he might have obtained from his father — which was not much — and who was virtually if not distinctly engaged to be married to a girl with no money except in reversion after the death of relatives, was actually carried out by him in the January following (1871): when, being in London again, he paid the £75 over to Tinsley in Bank of England notes (rather, as it seemed, to Tinsley’s astonishment, Hardy said) and retired to Dorset to correct the proofs, filling up leisure moments not by anything practical, but by writing down such snatches of the old country ballads as he could hear from aged people. On the 25th March the book was published anonymously in three volumes; and on the 30th he again went to his Weymouth lodgings to lend Mr. Crickmay more help in his church-restorations.

On April 1 Desperate Remedies received a striking review in the Athenaum as being a powerful novel, and on April 13 an even better notice in the Morning Post as being an eminent success. But, alas, on the 22nd the Spectator brought down its heaviest-leaded pastoral staff on the prematurely happy volumes, the reason for this violence being mainly the author’s daring to suppose it possible that an unmarried lady owning an estate could have an illegitimate child.

‘This is an absolutely anonymous story’, began the review: ‘no assumption of a nom-de-plume which might, at some future time, disgrace the family name, and still more the Christian name, of a repentant and remorseful novelist — and very right too. By all means let him bury the secret in the profoundest depths of his own heart, out of reach, if possible, of his own consciousness. The law is hardly just which prevents Tinsley Brothers from concealing their participation also.’

When Moule, whom Hardy had not consulted on the venture, read the reception of the novel by the Spectator he wrote a brief line to Hardy bidding him not to mind the slating. After its first impact, which was with good reason staggering, it does not seem to have worried Hardy much or at any rate for long (though one of the personalities insinuated by the reviewer, in clumsy humour, that the novel must have been ‘a desperate remedy for an emaciated purse’, may well have been galling enough). And indeed about this time he noted down: ‘Strictly, we should resent wrongs, be placid at justice, and grateful for favours. But I know one who is placid at a wrong, and would be grateful for simple justice; while a favour, if he ever gained one, would turn his brain.’ He remembered, for long years after, how he had read this review as he sat on a stile leading to the eweleaze he had to cross on his way home to Bockhampton. The bitterness of that moment was never forgotten; at the time he wished that he were dead.

But that humorous observation was not seriously disturbed in him is shown by what he entered immediately after:

‘End. of April. At the dairy. The dog looks as if he were glad that he is a dog. The cows look at him with a melancholy expression, as though they were sorry they are cows, and have to be milked, and to show too much dignity to roll in the mulch as he does. . . . The dairymaid flings her feet about the dairy floor in walking, as if they were mops.’

Anyhow, in May he enjoyed another visit to Cornwall. But in returning therefrom the day after his birthday in June he received a fresh buffet from circumstance in seeing at Exeter Station Desperate Remedies in Messrs. Smith and Son’s surplus catalogue for sale at zs. 6d. the three volumes, and thought the Spectator had snuffed out the book, as it probably had done.

Although this was a serious matter for a beginner who had ventured on the novel £75 out of the £123 he posesssed, one reason for the mitigation of his trouble may well have been that the powerfully, not to say wildly, melodramatic situations had been concocted in a style which was quite against his natural grain, through too crude an interpretation of George Meredith’s advice. It was a sort of thing he had never contemplated writing, till, finding himself in a corner, it seemed necessary to attract public attention at all hazards. What Meredith would have thought of the result of his teaching was not ascertained. Yet there was nothing in the book — admittedly an extremely clever novel — to call for such castigation, which, oddly enough, rather stultified itself by certain concessions on the nameless author’s ability. Moreover he was surprised some time later by a letter from the reviewer, a stranger — whether dictated by pricks of conscience, an uneasy suspicion that he had mistaken his man, or otherwise, is unknown — showing some regret for his violence. Hardy replied to the letter — tardily and curtly enough at first, it is true — but as it dawned upon him that the harm had been done him not through malice but honest wrongheadedness he ceased to harbour resentment, and became acquainted with his critic, the Spectator reviewing him later with much generosity.

During June and July he marked time, as it were, by doing some more Gothic drawings for Crickmay, though in no very grand spirits, if we may judge from a marginal mark with the date ‘July 1871’ in his Shakespeare, opposite the passage in Macbeth:

Things at their worst will cease, or else climb upward

To what they were before.

Later in the summer he finished the short and quite rustic story entitled Under the Greenwood Tree. A Rural Painting of the Dutch School — the execution of which had arisen from a remark of Mr. John Morley’s on The Poor Man and the Lady, that the country scenes in the latter were the best in the book, the ‘ tranter’ of The Poor Man and the Lady being reintroduced.

The pages of this idyll — at first intended to be called The Mell- stock Quire but altered to Under the Greenwood Tree because titles from poetry were in fashion just then — were dispatched to the Messrs. Macmillan some time the same autumn, and in due course Hardy received from them a letter which, events having rendered him sensitive, he read to mean that the firm did not wish to have anything to do with his ‘Rural Painting of the Dutch School’, although they said that’ they felt strongly inclined to avail themselves of his offer of it’; hence he wrote to them to return the MS. This was an unfortunate misunderstanding. It was not till its acceptance and issue by another publishing-house the year after that he discovered they had never declined it, and indeed would have been quite willing to print it a little later on.

They had taken the trouble to enclose when writing about the tale the opinion of the ‘accomplished critic’ to whom they had submitted it, the chief points of which may be quoted here:

‘The work in this story is extremely careful, natural, and delicate, and the writer deserves more than common credit for the pains which he has taken with his style, and with the harmony of his construction and treatment. It is a simple and uneventful sketch of a rural courtship, with a climax of real delicacy of idea. ... I don’t prophesy a large market for it, because the work is so delicate as not to hit every taste by any means. But it is good work, and would please people whose taste was not ruined by novels of exaggerated action or forced ingenuity. . . . The writer would do well to shut his ears to the fooleries of critics, which his letter to you proves that he does not do.’

However, deeming their reply on the question of publishing the tale to be ambiguous at least, he got it back, threw the MS. into a box with his old poems, being quite sick of all such, and began to think about other ways and means. He consulted Miss Gifford by letter, declaring that he had banished novel-writing for ever, and was going on with architecture henceforward. But she, with no great opportunity of reasoning on the matter, yet, as Hardy used to think and say — truly or not — with that rapid instinct which serves women in such good stead, and may almost be called preternatural vision, wrote back instantly her desire that he should adhere to authorship, which she felt sure would be his true vocation. From the very fact that she wished thus, and set herself aside altogether — architecture being obviously the quick way to an income for marrying on — he was impelled to consider her interests more than his own. Unlike the case of Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, no letters between the couple are extant, to show the fluctuation of their minds on this vital matter. But what happened was that Hardy applied himself to architectural work during the winter 1871-72 more steadily than he ever had done in his life before, and in the spring of the latter year again set out for London, determined to stifle his constitutional tendency to care for life only as an emotion and not as a scientific game, and fully bent on sticking to the profession which had been the choice of his parents for him rather than his own; but with a faint dream at the back of his mind that he might perhaps write verses as an occasional hobby.

The years 1872 and 1873 were pre-eminently years of unexpectedness. Having engaged to give some help to Mr. T. Roger Smith, a well-known London architect and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, he speedily found himself on his arrival in the first-named year assisting Professor Smith in designing schools for the London School Board, which had then lately come into existence, public competition between architects for such designs being arranged by the Board from time to time. Hardy had no sooner settled down to do his best in this business than he met in the middle of a crossing by Trafalgar Square his friend Moule, whom he had not seen for a long time. Moule, a scholar and critic of perfect taste, firmly believed in Hardy’s potentialities as a writer, and said he hoped he still kept a hand on the pen; but Hardy seems to have declared that he had thrown up authorship at last and for all. Moule was grieved at this, but merely advised him not to give up writing altogether, since, supposing anything were to happen to his eyes from the fine architectural drawing, literature would be a resource for him; he could dictate a book, article, or poem, but not a geometrical design. This, Hardy used to say, was essentially all that passed between them; but by a strange coincidence Moule’s words were brought back to his mind one morning shortly after by his seeing, for the first time in his life, what seemed like floating specks on the white drawing-paper before him.

For some reason or other at this date — a year after its publication — he wrote to his publishers to render an account of their transactions over Desperate Remedies, which he had once before requested, but had not been very curious upon; for though the Saturday Review had brought the volumes to life after their slaughter by the Spectator, he quite supposed he had lost on the venture both his time and his money. By return of post Tinsley Brothers rendered the account, showing that they had printed 500 copies of the novel in three volumes, and sold 370, and enclosing a cheque for £60, as being all that was returnable to him out of the £75 paid as guarantee — after the costs and the receipts were balanced, no part of the receipts being due to him.