Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1144 page)

The further career of this young woman is not recorded, except as to one trifling detail.

‘July 4. Went to Stalbridge. Mrs. is a charming woman.

When we were looking over the church she recommended me to try a curious seat, adding, though we were only talking about the church itself, “That’s where I sat when Jamie was christened, and I could see him very well”. Another seat she pointed out with assumed casualness as being the one where she sat when she was churched; as if it were rather interesting that she did sit in those places, in spite of her not being a romantic person. When we arrived at her house she told us that Jamie really could not be seen — he was in a dreadful state — covered with hay; half laughing and catching our eyes while she spoke, as if we should know at once how intensely humorous he must appear under those circumstances. Jamie was evidently her life, and flesh, and raiment. . . . Her husband is what we call a “yopping, or yapping man”. He strains his countenance hard in smiling, and keeps it so for a distinct length of time, so that you may on no account whatever miss his smile and the point of the words that gave rise to it. Picks up pictures and china for eighteenpence worth ever so much more. Gives cottagers a new set of tea-cups with handles for old ones without handles — an exchange which they are delighted to make.

‘Country life at Sturminster. Vegetables pass from growing to boiling, fruit from the bushes to the pudding, without a moment’s halt, and the gooseberries that were ripening on the twigs at noon are in the tart an hour later.’

‘July 13. The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfilment of that hope never entirely removes.’

‘July 27. James Bushrod of Broadmayne saw the two German soldiers [of the York Hussars] shot [for desertion] on Bincombe Down in 1801. It was in the path across the Down, or near it. James Selby of the same village thinks there is a mark.’ [The tragedy was used in The Melancholy Hussar, the real names of the deserters being given.]

‘August 13. We hear that Jane, our late servant, is soon to have a baby. Yet never a sign of one is there for us.’

‘September 25. Went to Shroton Fair. In a twopenny show saw a woman beheaded. In another a man whose hair grew on one side of his face. Coming back across Hambledon Hill (where the Club- Men assembled, temp. Cromwell) a fog came on. I nearly got lost in the dark inside the earthworks, the old hump-backed man I had parted from on the other side of the hill, who was going somewhere else before coming across the earthworks in my direction, being at the bottom as soon as I. A man might go round and round all night in such a place.’

‘September 28. An object or mark raised or made by man on a scene is worth ten times any such formed by unconscious Nature. Hence clouds, mists, and mountains are unimportant beside the wear on a threshold, or the print of a hand.’

‘October 31. To Bath. Took lodgings for my father near the baths and Abbey. Met him at G.W. Station. Took him to the lodgings. To theatre in the evening. Stayed in Bath. Next day went with father to the baths, to begin the cure.’

During this year 1877 Hardy had the sadness of hearing of the death of Raphael Brandon, the literary architect whom he had been thrown with seven years earlier, at a critical stage in his own career. He also at this time entered into an interesting correspondence with Mrs. Chatteris, daughter of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, upon some facts in the life of the latter. But his main occupation at Riverside Villa (or ‘ Rivercliff’ as they sometimes called it) was writing The Return of the Native. The only note he makes of its progress is that, on November 8, parts 3, 4, and 5 of the story were posted to Messrs. Chatto and Windus for publication in (of all places) Belgravia — a monthly magazine then running. Strangely enough, the rich alluvial district of Sturminster Newton in which the author was now living was not used by him at this time as a setting for the story he was constructing there, but the heath country twenty miles off. It may be mentioned here that the name ‘Eustacia’ which he gave to his heroine was that of the wife of the owner of the manor of Ower Moigne in the reign of Henry IV, which parish includes part of the ‘Egdon’ Heath of the story (vide Hutchins’s Dorset)-, and that ‘Clement’, the name of the hero, was suggested by its being borne by one of his supposed ancestors, Clement le Hardy, of Jersey, whose family migrated from that isle to the west of England at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

On the same day he jots down:

‘November 8. Mr. and Mrs. Dashwood came to tea. Mr. Dash- wood [a local solicitor and landowner] says that poachers elevate a pan of brimstone on a stick under pheasants at roost, and so stupefy them that they fall.

‘Sometimes the keepers make dummy pheasants and fix them in places where pheasants are known to roost: then watch by them. The poachers come; shoot and shoot again, when the keepers rush out.

‘At a battue the other day lots of the birds ran into the keeper’s house for protection.

‘Mr. D. says that a poacher he defended at Quarter Sessions asked for time to pay the fine imposed, and they gave him till the next Justice-meeting. He said to Mr. D., “I shall be able to get it out of ‘em before then”, and in fact he had in a week poached enough birds from the Justices’ preserves to pay the five pounds.’

‘November 12. A flooded river after the incessant rains of yesterday. Lumps of froth float down like swans in front of our house. At the arches of the large stone bridge the froth has accumulated and lies like hillocks of salt against the bridge; then the arch chokes, and after a silence coughs out the air and froth, and gurgles on.’

‘End ofNovember. This evening the west is like some vast foundry where new worlds are being cast.’

‘December 22. In the evening I went with Dr. Leach the coroner to an inquest which was to be held at Stourton Caundell on the body of a boy. Arrived at the Trooper Inn after a lonely drive through dark and muddy lanes. Met at the door by the Superintendent of Police and a policeman in plain clothes. Also by Mr. Long, who had begun the post-mortem. We then went to the cottage; a woman or two, and children, were sitting by the fire, who looked at us with a cowed expression. Upstairs the body of the boy lay on a box covered with a sheet. It was uncovered, and Mr. Long went on with his autopsy, I holding a candle, and the policeman another. Found a clot in the heart, but no irritant poison in the stomach, as had been suspected. The inquest was then held at the inn.’

‘December 26. In literature young men usually begin their careers by being judges, and as wisdom and old experience arrive they reach the dignity of standing as culprits at the bar before new young bloods who have in their turn sprung up in the judgment-seat.’

A correspondence with Baron Tauchnitz in reference to Continental editions of his books was one of the businesses of the year-end.

Despite the pleasure of this life at Sturminster Newton Hardy had decided that the practical side of his vocation of novelist demanded that he should have his headquarters in or near London. The wisdom of his decision, considering the nature of his writing, he afterwards questioned. So in the first week of February he and Mrs. Hardy went up to look for a house, and about the middle of the month he signed an agreement for a three-years’ lease of one at Upper Tooting, close to Wandsworth Common.

‘March 5. Concert at Sturminster. A Miss Marsh of Sutton [Keinton?] Mandeville sang “Should he upbraid”, to Bishop’s old tune. She is the sweetest of singers — thrush-like in the descending scale, and lark-like in the ascending — drawing out the soul of listeners in a gradual thread of excruciating attenuation like silk from a cocoon.’

Many years after Hardy was accustomed to say that this was the most marvellous old song in English music in its power of touching an audience. There was no surer card to play as an encore, even when it was executed but indifferently well. He wrote some lines thereon entitled ‘The Maid of Keinton Mandeville’.

‘March 18. End of the Sturminster Newton idyll . . .’ [The following is written in later] ‘ Our happiest time.’

It was also a poetical time. Several poems in Moments of Vision contain memories of it, such as ‘Overlooking the River Stour’, ‘The Musical Box’, and ‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’.

That evening of March 18 a man came to arrange about packing their furniture, and the next day it was all out of the house. They slept at Mrs. Dashwood’s, after breakfasting, lunching, and dining there; and in the morning saw their goods off, and left Sturminster for London.

CHAPTER IX

LIFE AND LITERATURE IN A LONDON SUBURB

1878-1880: Aet. 37-39

Two days later they beheld their furniture descending from a pair of vans at 1 Arundel Terrace (‘The Larches’), Trinity Road, just beyond Wandsworth Common. They had stayed at Bolingbroke Grove to be near.

‘March 22. We came from Bolingbroke Grove to Arundel Terrace and slept here for the first time. Our house is the south-east corner one where Brodrick Road crosses Trinity Road down towards Wandsworth Common Station, the side door being in Brodrick Road.’

‘April — Note. A Plot, or Tragedy, should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events produced by the said passions, prejudices, and ambitions.

‘The advantages of the letter-system of telling a story (passing over the disadvantages) are that, hearing what one side has to say, you are led constantly to the imagination of what the other side must be feeling, and at last are anxious to know if the other side does really feel what you imagine.’

‘April 22. The method of Boldini, the painter of “The Morning Walk” in the French Gallery two or three years ago (a young lady beside an ugly blank wall on an ugly highway) — of Hobbema, in his view of a road with formal lopped trees and flat tame scenery — is that of infusing emotion into the baldest external objects either by the presence of a human figure among them, or by mark of some human connection with them.

‘This accords with my feeling about, say, Heidelberg and Baden versus Scheveningen — as I wrote at the beginning of The Return of the Native — that the beauty of association is entirely superior to the beauty of aspect, and a beloved relative’s old battered tankard to 120

the finest Greek vase. Paradoxically put, it is to see the beauty in ugliness.’

‘April 29. Mr. George Smith (Smith Elder and Co.) informs me that how he first got to know Thackeray was through “a mutual friend” — to whom Smith said, “Tell Thackeray that I will publish everything he likes to write”. This was before Thackeray was much known, and when he had only published the Titmarsh and Yellow- plush papers. However, Thackeray did not appear. When they at length met, Thackeray said he wished to publish Vanity Fair, and Smith undertook it. Thackeray also said he had offered it to three or four publishers who had refused it. “Why didn’t you come to me? “ said Smith. “ Why didn’t you come to me? “ said Thackeray.’

‘June 8. To Grosvenor Gallery. Seemed to have left flesh behind, and entered a world of soul. In some of the pictures, e.g. A. Tadema’s “Sculpture” (men at work carving the Sphinx), and “Ariadne abandoned by Theseus” (an uninteresting dreary shore, little tent one corner, etc.) the principles I have mentioned have been applied to choice of subject.’

‘June 16. Sunday evening. At Mr. Alexander Macmillan’s with E. He told me a story the late Mrs. Carlyle told him. One day when she was standing alone on Craigenputtock Moor, where she and Mr. Carlyle were living, she discerned in the distance a red spot. It proved to be the red cloak of a woman who passed for a witch in those parts. Mrs. Carlyle got to know her, and ultimately learnt her history. She was the daughter of a laird owning about eighty acres, and there had come to their house in her young-womanhood a young dealer in cattle. The daughter and he fell in love, and were married, and both lived with her father, whose farm the young man took in hand to manage. But he ran the farmer into debt, and ultimately (I think) house and property had to be sold. The young man vanished. A boy was born to the wife, and after a while she went away to find her husband. She came back in a state of great misery, but would not tell where she had been. It leaked out that the husband was a married man. She was proud and would not complain; but her father died; the boy grew up and was intended for a schoolmaster, but he was crossing the moor one night and lost his way; was buried in the snow, and frozen to death. She lived on in a hut there, and became the red-cloaked old woman who was Mrs. Carlyle’s witch-neighbour.’

In June he was elected a member of the Savile Club, and by degrees fell into line as a London man again. Dining at Mr. Kegan Paul’s, Kensington Square, the same summer, they met Mr. Leighton (Sir F. Leighton’s father), his daughter Mrs. Sutherland Orr, who had been in India during the Mutiny, and Professor Huxley, whom they had met before at Mr. Macmillan’s. ‘ We sat down by daylight, and as we dined the moon brightened the trees in the garden, and shone under them into the room.’ For Huxley Hardy had a liking which grew with knowledge of him — though that was never great — speaking of him as a man who united a fearless mind with the warmest of hearts and the most modest of manners.

‘July. When a couple are shown to their room at an hotel, before the husband has seen that it is a room at all, the wife has found the looking-glass and is arranging her bonnet.’

‘August 3. Minto dined with me at the club. Joined at end of dinner by W. H. Pollock, and we all three went to the Lyceum. It was Irving’s last night, in which he appeared in a scene from Richard III.; then as “Jingle”; then recited “Eugene Aram’s Dream” — (the only piece of literature outside plays that actors seem to know of). As “Jingle”, forgetting his part, he kept up one shoulder as in Richard III. We went to his dressing-room, found him naked to the waist; champagne in tumblers.’

‘August 31. to Sept. 9. In Dorset. Called on William Barnes the poet. Went to Kingston Lacy to see the pictures. Dined at West-Stafford Rectory. Went with C. W. Moule [Fellow of Corpus, Cambridge] to Ford Abbey.’