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.
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[pg 103] 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,[pg 104] 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.
