A LITERARY NOTE: THOMAS HARDY AND WILLIAM BARNES
Thomas Hardy is a Dorset man both by birth and residence. He was born on
2nd June 1840, in a pretty, thatched cottage in the hamlet of Higher
Bockhampton. If one takes the London road out of Dorchester, a walk of a
mile and a turn to the right will lead to the village of Stinsford;
passing this hamlet and keeping to the road which crosses Kingston Park,
a turn to the left breaks on to Higher Bockhampton. The house stands on
the edge of Thorncombe Wood, skirting Bockhampton Heath, but Hardy has
told us that within the last fifty years the wood enclosed the house on
every side.
Come into this old-world dwelling itself. The living-room is grey and
white and dim. Ivy peers in at the open windows set deep in the thick
walls. The floor is grey and shining, stone-flagged; the ceiling
cross-beamed with rich old oak; the fireplace wide and deep, and the
whole building covered with a fine roof of thatch. Here the earlier
years of the novelist were spent, here the aroma of the earth and woods
invaded his heart when it was young. The environment helped to feed the
long, long thoughts of the boy and gave him the image of the beginning
of man living in the woods in the darkness, outwitting the wolves. It
was here in the cradle of nature that Hardy first gained his minute
knowledge of nature, and learnt how life and the meaning of life must be
linked with place and the meaning of place. As in old Greek drama the
chorus was directed to the audience at certain stages, so does Hardy
turn the place spirit upon the progress of the story at certain moments
with a vital bearing upon the action. He sees, as only the artist can
see, how all the world is interwoven, and how the human spirit cannot be
divorced from the plain course of nature without pity and disaster. To
Hardy's delicate subtlety of mind in perceiving the right values of
character and environment we owe the tremendous effect of certain great
scenes: the selection of Woolbridge House, the antique and dismal old
home of the Turbervilles, for the scene of Tess's confession; the
thunderstorm during which Oak saved his beloved Bathsheba's ricks; the
mist that rolled wickedly over the cart conveying Fanny Robin's body
from the workhouse, and produced the horrible drip-drip-drip on the
coffin while the drivers caroused in an inn; the strange scene where
Wildeve, "the Rousseau of Egdon," and the travelling ruddleman dice for
Mrs Yeobright's money by the light of glow-worms. The delineation of
Norcombe Hill at the commencement of _Far from the Madding Crowd_ sets
the key to which the theme of the story must always return after many
delightful changes, and the vivid account of the lonely monarchy of the
shepherd's night with his sheep, and the opulent silence when "the roll
of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement" show the power and
relentless grip of Hardy's work. Incidentally, also, with what
fascinating detail does he introduce Bathsheba Everdene to the reader,
so that we at once perceive what a curious blend of joyfulness, pride,
astuteness and irresponsibility she would gradually develop as the years
pass on--witness the little incident at the toll-gate, where, seated on
the top of the loaded wagon, she refused to concede his rightful pence
to the aggrieved turnpike-keeper.
[Illustration: Bingham's Melcombe
(_Ten miles north-east of Dorchester_)
A LOVELY DORSET MANOR-HOUSE]
The name of Hardy is very frequently encountered in Dorset, but the
novelist's family is commonly said to be of the same blood as Nelson's
Hardy. That Hardy's family possessed the sprightliness and resource of
the Dorset people there can be little doubt, and this fact is
accentuated by an anecdote concerning Hardy's grandfather, told by Mr
Alfred Pope, a member of the Dorset Field Club, at a meeting of the
society. About a century ago Mr Hardy's grandfather was crossing a
lonely heath one midnight in June when he discovered he was being
followed by two footpads. He rolled a furze faggot on to the path, sat
down on it, took off his hat, stuck two fern fronds behind his ears to
represent horns, and then pretended to read a letter, which he took from
his pocket, by the light of the glow-worms he had picked up and placed
round the brim of his hat. The men took fright and bolted on seeing him,
and a rumour soon got abroad in the neighbourhood that the devil had
been seen at midnight near Greenhill Pond.
At the age of seventeen Hardy was articled to an ecclesiastical
architect of Dorchester named Hicks, and it was in pursuance of this
calling that he enjoyed many opportunities of studying not only
architecture, but also the country folk, whose types he has been so
successful in delineating. Architecture has deeply coloured all his
work, from _Desperate Remedies_ to _Jude the Obscure_. The former of
these stories (in which, as it will be remembered, three of the
characters are architects practising the miscellaneous vocations of
stewards, land surveyors and the like, familiar to architects in
country towns) appeared in 1871, signed only with initials. It was
followed in the next year by _Under the Greenwood Tree_, and at this
date Hardy departed from architecture (in which he had distinguished
himself so far as to be a prize-winner at a Royal Society's
competition). In 1873 _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ appeared, and in 1874 _Far
from the Madding Crowd_ ran through the _Cornhill_. It was the first of
his books to be published in yellow-backed form, which was then a sign
that the novel had reached the highest point of popularity.
His first novel, _The Poor Man and the Lady_, was never published, and
probably never will be, having been suppressed at Hardy's own request,
although accepted for publication on the advice of George Meredith. But
it was not long before he had finished a second story, _Desperate
Remedies_, which first saw the light through the agency of Tinsley
Brothers in 1871.
His first published article appeared without signature in _Chambers's
Journal_, on 18th March 1865, entitled, "How I Built Myself a House,"
and was of a semi-humorous character. But previous to this Hardy had
written a considerable amount of verse, all of which, with the exception
of one poem, _The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's_, was unfortunately
destroyed. This Wessex ballad appeared, bowdlerised, in _The
Gentleman's Magazine_ in November 1875. The ballad was first reproduced
in its original form at the end of Mr Lane's bibliography, together with
the novelist's biographical note on his friend and neighbour, the Rev.
William Barnes, the Dorset poet, contributed to _The Athenæum_ in
October 1886. Of Mr Hardy's remaining contributions to periodical
literature in other directions than fiction I need, perhaps, only
mention his paper on "The Dorset Labourer," published in _Longmans'_ in
July 1893.
_The Trumpet Major_ was published in 1881, and the next novel was _A
Laodicean_, which appeared originally in _Harper's Magazine_.
"The writing of this tale," says Mr Hardy in the new preface to the
book, "was rendered memorable, to two persons at least, by a tedious
illness of five months that laid hold of the author soon after the story
was begun in a well-known magazine, during which period the narrative
had to be strenuously continued by dictation to a predetermined cheerful
ending. As some of these novels of Wessex life address themselves more
especially to readers into whose soul the iron has entered, and whose
years have less pleasure in them now than heretofore, so _A Laodicean_
may perhaps help to wile away an idle afternoon of the comfortable ones
whose lines have fallen to them in pleasant places; above all, of that
large and happy section of the reading public which has not yet reached
ripeness of years; those to whom marriage is the pilgrim's Eternal City,
and not a milestone on the way."
Hardy's next novel, _Two on a Tower_, was published in three volumes in
1882. Four years elapsed before Mr Hardy's tenth novel, _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_, made its appearance, though his story of _The Romantic
Adventures of a Milkmaid_, which came out in _The Graphic_ Summer Number
in 1883, was reprinted in book form in America in 1884. _The
Woodlanders_ came next, this time through Messrs Macmillan, who
published it in 1887 in three volumes. _Wessex Tales_, in two volumes,
appeared in 1888, though the stories had been making their appearance in
various periodicals since 1879.
In 1891 came _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, which took the reading and
criticising world by surprise. Hardy became explicit and charged the
collective judgment of society with being shallow and contrary to the
laws of nature. He dashed aside the conventions and proclaimed a
"ruined" girl a "pure woman," and made definite charges against the code
of society, which, in the belief that it was contending against
immorality, was all the while destroying some of nature's finest and
most sensitive material. Hardy does not preach, but there is more than
a dramatic situation in Angel Clare's confession to Tess on the night of
their wedding, for he shows the hopelessness of any justice coming to
the "fallen" girl. Even if Tess had been faultless, all her faith,
devotion, love and essential sweetness would have been given to an
unjust and sinful man. The whole situation is summed up in the
conversation which follows Angel Clare's confession of an
"eight-and-forty hours'" dissipation. Hardy shows (and endorses) that it
was quite right that Tess, with her natural, unsophisticated
intelligence, should look upon her loss of virginity out of wedlock as a
thing to be regretted and also a thing to be forgiven--just as the same
event in Angel Clare's life:
"Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours or more so."
"It can hardly be more serious, dearest."
"It cannot--oh no, it cannot." She jumped up joyfully at the hope. "No,
it cannot be more serious, certainly," she cried, "because 'tis just the
same!"
For life and light and movement it would be hard to surpass Chapter
XXVIII. of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where Sergeant Troy's skilful
and dazzling exhibition with a sword bewilders Bathsheba and ends in
that unpropitious, fugitive kiss.
It is a curious fact that, although Hardy's novels are such a true
living influence, there are many people who feel that as a poet he has
somehow just failed to hit the mark. But he himself regards his verse as
the most important part of his work, and a section of his readers look
upon it as the most distinctive English poetry of the past twenty years.
In some quarters his poems are received with that curiosity which is
awarded to a man of genius who breaks out freakishly with some strange
hobby. People might look upon Rudyard Kipling with just such curiosity
if he invited his friends to inspect his latest experiments in fretwork.
However, to those of us who have followed his lyric poems and his
supreme achievement, _The Dynasts_, it seems a well-nigh inexplicable
phenomenon that much of his poetry should have passed into the limbo of
forgotten things. Is there something wrong with his poems, or unusual
about them? There is certainly a puzzling quality in his work. When his
_Wessex Poems_ were published in 1899 the reviewers, in a chorus,
decided that it was "want of form" which weakened his verse, and it is
interesting to read how _Literature_ summed up his position as a poet:
"Here is no example of that positive inability to write well in verse
which has marked several great prose writers, such as in Carlyle and
Hume; nor of that still more curious ability to write once or twice
well, and never to regain the careless rapture, as in Berkeley and
Chateaubriand. The phenomenon is a strongly marked and appropriate
accent of his own, composing (so to speak) professionally in verse, able
to amuse and move us along lines strictly parallel with his prose, and
yet lacking something. This is not a case like George Eliot's, where the
essence of the writer's style evaporates in the restraint of verse.
Never was Mr Hardy more intensely and exclusively himself than in 'My
Cicely.' Yet is this a complete success? Much as we admire it, we cannot
say that it is.
"'And by Weatherbury Castle, and therence
Through Casterbridge bore I
To tomb her whose light, in my deeming,
Extinguished had He,'
is not quite satisfactory. Why? Simply and solely because the form is
grotesque. Here is the colour of poetry but not its sound, its essence
but not its shape.
"It might seem only right that in the face of a volume of verse so
violent and rugged as _Wessex Poems_ we should protest that this is not
the more excellent way of writing poetry. At the same time, every man
must preserve his individuality, if he has one to preserve, as Mr Hardy
assuredly has; and we have no reason to suppose that it is the desire of
the author of 'The Peasant's Confession' to found a school or issue a
propaganda. On the contrary, it is far more likely that he has put forth
his Wessex verses with extreme simplicity and modesty, not asking
himself in what relation they stand to other people's poetry. As a
matter of fact, the _Wessex Poems_ will probably enjoy a double fate.
They will supply to lovers of emotional narrative verse several poetic
tales which they will lay up in memory among their treasures; and in
time to come professors of literary history, when observing the
retrogression of an imaginative period, and when speaking of Lydgate, of
Donne, of the Spasmodists here, of the Symbolists in France, will
mention Mr Hardy also as a signal example of the temporary success of a
violent protest against the cultivation of form in verse."
But critics of discrimination are now beginning to discover that Thomas
Hardy's poems do not lack the qualities which give poetic form a true
balance. He fails to achieve popularity as a poet, they argue, because
the "concentrated and unpalatable expression of his philosophy proves
too disagreeable to those who seek relief from life in literature," and
because the first shock of the grinding harshness of his peculiar style
"is a barrier against the recognition of his merits." Certainly he makes
no direct appeal to the ear of the reader. But on reading his lyric
poems a second time--some of which, it must be admitted, must assuredly
offend those who have unbounded faith in the human soul, whether from
the standpoint of the Church or otherwise--the first grotesqueness of
effect wears off, leaving at times a clear-cut and bitter touch that it
would seem impossible to improve upon. It is true we find among the
youthful poems some of great gloom and sadness, but it is well to bear
in mind when making an estimate of Hardy's work and personality that
certain natures express their thoughts in unusual ways. It is all the
time wrong to assume that Hardy does not perceive anything else in life
but a bitter and hopeless procession, just because his eloquence is
always keener upon perceiving tragedy. It is true, he himself has
confessed, that he shares with Sophocles the conviction that "not to be
born is best"; but at the same time the spirit which moves always under
the surface of his poetry tells us that man, being born, must make the
best of life, and _especially_ do what he can to ease the burdens of
his fellow-men. After his moments of depression he finds his own
consolations. He takes a great pleasure in the trivial little objects
and customs of rustic life--those simple things that are best of all,
and his poem _Afterwards_ is a good example both of his measured and
harmonious style, and of his "dark, unconscious instinct of primitive
nature-worship":
"If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come
to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at
the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that Winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?"
The reader instinctively pictures Hardy as a morose, grim, cynical
man--but he is really anything but that. From all accounts Hardy is
mirrored in the whimsical and deep mirth that is so intermixed in the
rustic characters in his novels. "It is too often assumed," says the
capricious and tiresome Ethelberta--April-natured Hardy would call
her--"that a person's fancy is a person's real mind.... Some of the
lightest of rhymes were composed between the deepest fits of dismals I
have known."
Some years ago _The English Illustrated Magazine_ printed an account of
a visit paid by a cyclist to Hardy at his Dorchester home. Authentic
pictures of Hardy are so scarce that I venture to draw on this
interview:
"The picture he presented was, for the moment at least, all-satisfying;
there was more than nervousness in the strangely harassed-looking face,
with the most sensitive features that I had ever seen. The deep-set eyes
were troubled, but there was no mistaking their fearless courage. I knew
that I was looking at a man whose soul was more ravaged than ever his
careworn features were with the riddle of life and the tragedy of it,
and yet a soul utterly self-reliant, for all the shyness of the outward
man.
"I attempted no compliments, and asked him instead why he was so
pessimistic a writer, why he wrote at once the most beautiful and the
most dreadful of stories, and why he had not shown us far more often
than he has done a picture of requited love, or of requited love that
was not victimised at once by some pitiless act of fate.
"Mr Hardy had not sat down himself, but had stood by the fireplace,
with his white hands holding the lapels of his old-fashioned tweed coat.
"We were on better terms in a moment, as Mr Hardy replied, his voice
curiously halting, but not as if he was in any doubt of his sentiments.
It seemed a mixture of irony and diffidence.
"'You are a young man,' he said. 'The cruelty of fate becomes apparent
to people as they grow older. At first one may perhaps escape contact
with it, but if one lives long enough one realises that happiness is
very ephemeral.'
"'But is not optimism a useful and sane philosophy?' I asked him.
"There's too much sham optimism, humbugging and even cruel optimism,' Mr
Hardy retorted. 'Sham optimism is really a more heartless doctrine to
preach than even an exaggerated pessimism--the latter leaves one at
least on the safe side. There is too much sentiment in most fiction. It
is necessary for somebody to write a little mercilessly, although, of
course, it's painful to have to do it.'"
That is what we must do if we wish to move on the higher ideal of
philosophical speculation as Hardy explains it. He points out that there
is something in a novel that should transcend pessimism, meliorism or
optimism, and that is the search for truth:
"So that to say one view is worse than other views without proving it
erroneous implies the possibility of a false view being better or more
expedient than a true view; and no pragmatic proppings can make that
_idolum specus_ stand on its feet, for it postulates a prescience denied
to humanity."
Charges of pessimism Hardy dismisses as the product of the
chubble-headed people who only desire to pair all the couples off at the
end of a novel and leave them with a plentiful supply of "simply
exquisite" babies, hard cash and supreme contentment.
As I have hinted before, the face and the wealth of the earth are a
constant joy to Hardy, and he has great admiration for the Dorset
rustics--those sprack-witted, earthy philosophers who have won support
for his novels even in circles where his ideals of life are not in
favour. He enthusiastically follows the ways and works of nature in
which man co-operates. One instantly calls to mind Winterborne, the
travelling cider-maker in _The Woodlanders_, as an instance of this: "He
looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to
wheat colour, his eyes blue as cornflowers, his sleeves and leggings
dyed with fruit stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples,
his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that atmosphere
of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable
fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards."
The above is a prose-poem which is worthy to stand beside Keats' _Ode to
Autumn_.
* * * * *
William Barnes was born at Rushay, near Pentridge, a village about four
miles from Cranborne, in the north-east of the county, on the Wiltshire
border, and in the heart of the Vale of Blackmore, the beauties of which
he was never tired of extolling in his gentle poems enriched with his
native dialect. His mother was a woman of good education and refined
tastes, and he attended an endowed school at Struminster, where the
classes were composed of boys and girls and conducted in the American
way. On leaving school he entered a solicitor's office in the same town,
but at the age of eighteen he removed to Dorchester. In 1823 he went to
Mere, in Somerset, where he worked as a schoolmaster for four years in
loneliness. At this time he married Miss Julia Miles, and after an
additional eight years at Mere he returned to Dorchester, where teaching
was still his profession. One might almost say that Dorchester was his
spiritual birthplace, for here his genius began to attract more than
local attention, and here he grew into the hearts of the people so
deeply that when he passed away all wished to preserve his memory in the
form of a public statue. Barnes was one of the secretaries of the Dorset
Field Club. His most earnest wish was to enter the Church, and from St
John's College, Cambridge, he was ordained by the Bishop of Salisbury in
1847, and became pastor of Whitcombe. He fell on troublous days and
passed through a labyrinth of trials--sickness, death and sordid money
embarrassments. Only once did he allow his pent-up humours of
discouragement to break loose. One day he came in to his family with a
sheaf of correspondence in which letters from duns were accompanied by
others containing warm eulogy of the poet. "What a mockery is life!" he
exclaimed; "they praise me and take away my bread! They might be putting
up a statue to me some day when I am dead, while all I want now is leave
to live. I asked for bread and they gave me a stone," he added bitterly.
At about this time he was awarded a Civil List pension of seventy pounds
a year, while the gift of the living of Came relieved him of the anxiety
over money matters. The happiest days of his life were spent at Came,
and here he followed with great diligence his one hobby--the Anglicising
of the Latinised English words in our vocabulary, which he called
speech-lore.
He wrote two books on this subject, called _Redecraft_ and
_Speechcraft_. In his preface to _Speechcraft_ he announced it as "a
small trial towards the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon
speech and the ready teaching of it to purely English minds by their own
tongue." It was his fancy to replace all foreign and derived words with
words based on Saxon roots. The following are selected from his glossary
of Latinised words, with their Saxon equivalents facing them:--
Accelerate to on-quicken.
Accent word-strain.
Acoustics sound-lore.
Aeronaut air-farer.
Alienate to un-friend.
Ancestor fore-elder.
Aphorisms thought-cullings.
Botany wort-lore.
Democracy folkdom.
Deteriorate worsen.
Equilibrium weight-evenness.
Equivalent worth-evenness.
Foliate to leafen.
Initial word-head.
Thomas Hardy's note on the genius of his dead friend is a generous
estimate: "Unlike Burns, Béranger, and other poets of the people, Barnes
never assumed the high conventional style, and he entirely leaves alone
ambition, pride, despair, defiance, and other of the grander passions
which move mankind, great and small. His rustics are as a rule happy
people, and very seldom feel the sting of the rest of modern
mankind--the disproportion between the desire for serenity and the power
of obtaining it. One naturally thinks of Crabbe in this connection, but
though they touch at points, Crabbe goes much further than Barnes in
questioning the justice of circumstance. Their pathos, after all, is the
attribute upon which the poems must depend for their endurance; and the
incidents which embody it are those of everyday cottage life, tinged
throughout with that 'light that never was,' which the emotional art of
the lyrist can project upon the commonest things. It is impossible to
prophesy, but surely much English literature will be forgotten when
_Woak Hill_ is still read for its intense pathos, _Blackmore Maidens_
for its blitheness, and _In the Spring_ for its Arcadian ecstasy."
In 1896 he published a copy of _Early English and the Saxon English_. In
this he traces both Angles and Saxons. It was his idea that the ancient
dykes which cut up so much of our land were delved by them to mark their
settlements rather than to use in the case of warfare. He also sturdily
asserted that the Britons were accomplished road-makers before the
Romans came, and that the Romans merely improved roads already existing.
The poem of _Woak Hill_ is based on a Persian form of metre called _The
Pearl_, because the rhymes are supposed to represent a series of beads
upon a rosary. The pearl, or sequence of assonance, is shown in the
second word in the last line of each stanza:
"When sycamore-trees were a-spreading
Green-ruddy in hedges
Beside the red dust of the ridges
A-dried at Woak Hill,
I packed up my goods all a-shining
With long years of handling
On dusty red wheels of a waggon
To ride at Woak Hill.
The brown thatchen roof of the dwelling
I then were a-leaving
Had sheltered the sleek head of Mary
My bride at Woak Hill.
But now for some years her light footfall
'S a-lost from the flooring.
Too soon for my joy and my children
She died at Woak Hill.
But still I do think that in soul
She do hover about us
To ho' for her motherless children,
Her pride at Woak Hill.
So lest she should tell me hereafter
I stole off 'ithout her
And left her uncalled at house-ridden
To bide at Woak Hill,
I call'd her so fondly, with lippens
All soundless to others,
And took her with air-reaching hand
To my side at Woak Hill.
On the road I did look round, a-talking
To light at my shoulder,
And then led her in at the doorway,
Miles wide from Woak Hill.
And that's why folk thought, for a season,
My mind were a-wand'ring
With sorrow, when I were so sorely
A-tried at Woak Hill.
But no; that my Mary mid never
Behold herself slighted
I wanted to think that I guided
My guide from Woak Hill."
Barnes saw the pathos in the joy of utter physical weariness of a
labourer, and one of his finest poems depicts a cottage under a swaying
poplar:
"An' hands a-tired by day, were still,
Wi' moonlight on the door."
He always has that deep, quiet craving for the hearth, the fire, the
protecting thatch of a cottage, which gives his work a pathetic touch. I
think sometimes that Barnes must have been nearer to being cold,
homeless and tired at times than is generally understood.