Read Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Online
Authors: Thomas Hardy
Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1125 page)
What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a little sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if you are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a novelist. The poetry of Hardy’s novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is at times, as in
The Return of the Native
, the chief person, or the chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?
1907.
The Biographies
THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY, 1841–1891 by Florence Hardy
Shortly after Hardy’s death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. In the year of his death, Hardy’s second wife, his former secretary Florence, published this biography, compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years. Many critics believe the biographies were mostly written by Hardy himself. It was later followed by a second biography covering Hardy’s later years and poetic output.
Florence Hardy, 1915
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTE TO ‘THE EARLY LIFE’
PART I – EARLY LIFE AND ARCHITECTURE
BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND LITERATURE
‘FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD’, MARRIAGE, AND ANOTHER NOVEL
HOLLAND, THE RHINE, AND STURMINSTER NEWTON
LIFE AND LITERATURE IN A LONDON SUBURB
LONDON, NORMANDY, AND CAMBRIDGE
PART III - ILLNESS, NOVELS, AND ITALY
A DIFFICULT PERIOD; AND A CHANGE
MAX GATE AND ‘THE WOODLANDERS’
PART IV - BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY
LONDON FRIENDS, PARIS, AND SHORT STORIES
MORE TOWN FRIENDS AND A NOVEL’S DISMEMBERMENT
OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLE AND THINGS
THE NOVEL ‘TESS’ RESTORED AND PUBLISHED
PREFATORY NOTE TO ‘THE EARLY LIFE’
Mr. Hardy’s feeling for a long time was that he would not care to have his life written at all. And though often asked to record his recollections he would say that he ‘had not sufficient admiration for himself’ to do so. But later, having observed many erroneous and grotesque statements advanced as his experiences, and a so-called ‘Life’ published as authoritative, his hand was forced, and he agreed to my strong request that the facts of his career should be set down for use in the event of its proving necessary to print them.
To this end he put on paper headings of chapters, etc., and, in especial, memories of his early days whenever they came into his mind, also communicating many particulars by word of mouth from time to time. In addition a great help has been given by the dated observations which he made in pocket-books, during the years of his novel-writing, apparently with the idea that if one followed the trade of fiction one must take notes, rather than from natural tendency, for when he ceased fiction and resumed the writing of verses he left off note-taking except to a very limited extent.
The opinions quoted from these pocket-books and fugitive papers are often to be understood as his passing thoughts only, temporarily jotted there for consideration, and not as permanent conclusions — a fact of which we are reminded by his frequent remarks on the tentative character of his theories.
As such memoranda were not written with any view to their being printed, at least as they stood, and hence are often abrupt, a few words of explanation have been given occasionally.
It may be added that in the book generally Mr. Hardy’s own reminiscent phrases have been used or approximated to whenever they could be remembered or were written down at the time of their expression viva voce. On this point great trouble has been taken to secure exactness.
Some incidents of his country experiences herein recorded may be considered as trivial, or as not strictly appertaining to a personal biography, but they have been included from a sense that they embody customs and manners of old West-of-England life that have now entirely passed away.
F. E. H.
PART I – EARLY LIFE AND ARCHITECTURE
CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND BOYHOOD
1840-1855: Aet. 1-15
June 2, 1840. It was in a lonely and silent spot between woodland and heathland that Thomas Hardy was born, about eight o’clock on Tuesday morning the 2nd of June 1840, the place of his birth being the seven-roomed rambling house that stands easternmost of the few scattered dwellings called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, Dorset. The domiciles were quaint, brass-knockered, and green-shuttered then, some with green garden-doors and white balls on the posts, and mainly occupied by lifeholders of substantial footing like the Hardys themselves. In the years of his infancy, or shortly preceding it, the personages tenanting these few houses included two retired military officers, one old navy lieutenant, a small farmer and tranter, a relieving officer and registrar, and an old militiaman, whose wife was the monthly nurse that assisted Thomas Hardy into the world. These being mostly elderly people, the place was at one time nicknamed ‘Veterans’ Valley’. It was also dubbed ‘Cherry Alley’, the lane or street leading through it being planted with an avenue of cherry-trees. But the lifeholds fell into hand, and the quaint residences with their trees, clipped hedges, orchards, white gatepost-balls, the naval officer’s masts and weather-cocks, have now perished every one, and have been replaced by labourers’ brick cottages and other new farm-buildings, a convenient pump occupying the site of the mossy well and bucket. The Hardy homestead, too, is weather-worn and reduced, having comprised, in addition to the house, two gardens (one of them part orchard), a horse-paddock, and sand-and-gravel pits, afterwards exhausted and overgrown: also stabling and like buildings since removed; while the leaves and mould washed down by rains from the plantation have risen high against the back wall of the house, that was formerly covered with ivy. The wide, brilliantly white chimney-corner, in his child-time such a feature of the sitting- room, is also gone.
Some Wordsworthian lines — the earliest discoverable of young Hardy’s attempts in verse — give with obvious and naive fidelity the appearance of the paternal homestead at a date nearly half a century before the birth of their writer, when his grandparents settled there, after his great-grandfather had built for their residence the first house in the valley.1
The family, on Hardy’s paternal side, like all the Hardys of the south-west, derived from the Jersey le Hardys who had sailed across
1 The poem, written between 1857 and 1860, runs as follows:
DOMICILIUM
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks
Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish
(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple-trees hard by.
Red roses, lilacs, variegated box
Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers
As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these
Are herbs and esculents; and farther still
A field; then cottages with trees, and last
The distant hills and sky.
Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze
Are everything that seems to grow and thrive
Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn
Stands here and there, indeed; and from a pit
An oak uprises, springing from a seed
Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.
In days bygone —
Long gone — my father’s mother, who is now
Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk.
At such a time I once inquired of her
How looked the spot when first she settled here.
The answer I remember. ‘ Fifty years
Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked
The face of all things. Yonder garden-plots
And orchards were uncultivated slopes
O’ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn:
That road a narrow path shut in by ferns,
Which, almost trees, obscured the passer-by.