THE HARDY SOCIETY JOURNAL
THE
HARDY
SOCIETY
JOURNAL
£4
VOL 10
No 2 SUMMER 2014
SUMMER 2014
VOL 10 No 2
A Thomas Hardy Society Publication
ISSN 1746-4617
Time well spent
ABOUT THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
The Society began its life in 1968 when, under the name ‘The Thomas Hardy Festival
Society’, it was set up to organise the Festival marking the fortieth anniversary of
Hardy’s death. So successful was that event that the Society continued its existence
as an organisation dedicated to advancing ‘for the benefit of the public, education in
the works of Thomas Hardy by promoting in every part of the World appreciation and
study of these works’. It is a non-profit-making cultural organisation with the status
of a Company limited by guarantee, and its officers are unpaid. It is governed by a
Council of Management of between twelve and twenty Managers, including a Student
Representative.
The Society is for anyone interested in Hardy’s writings, life and times, and it takes
pride in the way in which at its meetings and Conferences non-academics and academics
have met together in a harmony which would have delighted Hardy himself. Among
its members are many distinguished literary and academic figures, and many more
who love and enjoy Hardy’s work sufficiently to wish to meet fellow enthusiasts and
develop their appreciation of it. Every other year the Society organises a Conference that
attracts lecturers and students from all over the world, and it also arranges Hardy events
not just in Wessex but in London and other centres. The Hardy Society Journal, issued
twice a year, and the Thomas Hardy Journal, issued in Autumn, are free to members.
Applications for membership are welcome and should be made to: The Thomas Hardy
Society, c/o Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XA.
LITERARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE JOURNALS PUBLISHED BY
THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
Discovering more about Hardy's world is
time well spent
Hardy's Cottage & Max Gate, Dorset
Visit the charming thatched cottage where Hardy was
born and be inspired in the rooms where he wrote
several novels including 'Under the Greenwood Tree'
At Max Gate, you can explore the Victorian House that
Hardy designed, then lived and wrote in for 43 years.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wessex
Registered charity No. 205846
For details, including
opening times and
admission prices,
visit our website or
call 01297 561900
(Hardy's Cottage) or
01305 262538 (Max
Gate)
The Hardy Society Journal is published by the Thomas Hardy Society twice a year,
in Spring and Summer. Its objective is to encourage and foster lively engagement and
debate among general readers. Contributions – literary articles, reports, reviews, news,
creative writing, reproducible illustrations, etc. – are welcomed. Articles should not
normally exceed 4000 words. Book reviews are usually invited but may be volunteered.
They should normally be between 500 and 1500 words. The Editor reserves the right to
shorten letters.
The Thomas Hardy Journal is published once a year, in Autumn. More specifically
academic in content, this peer-reviewed Journal aims to be a force in international Hardy
scholarship. Articles are refereed by an Editorial Advisory Board. Contributions should
not normally exceed 8000 words.
Articles for publication in either Journal cannot be considered unless they are
submitted in both hard copy and electronic format, or as an email attachment (Word
document: double-spaced, single quotation marks, endnotes not footnotes). Please
include a short entry for the ‘Notes on Contributors’ and a return postal address.
Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by the necessary postage.
No payment is made for articles but writers have the satisfaction of publication in a
periodical of authority and repute, and they will receive two complimentary copies of
the issue in which their article appears.
Please send submissions to the Editor at The Thomas Hardy Society, c/o Dorset
County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XA, or by email to [email protected].
The deadline for the 2014 Thomas Hardy Journal is Monday 8 September 2014; for the
Spring 2015 Hardy Society Journal it is Monday 2 February 2015.
THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
(Registered Charity No.254248)
PRESIDENT
Julian Fellowes-Kitchener, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford
VICE-PRESIDENTS
The Lord Lieutenant of Dorset
The Chairman of Dorset County Council
The Chairman of West Dorset District Council
The Mayor of Dorchester
The President of the Society of Dorset Men The Director of the Dorset County Museum
The Lady Digby
Dr Ray Evans
Professor S. Fukasawa
Professor Barbara Hardy
Professor Samuel Hynes
Rt Revd William Ind
Professor Michael Irwin
Mr T. William Jesty
Mrs Vera Jesty
Mr Phillip Mallett
Professor Michael Millgate
Professor Rosemarie Morgan
Professor William W. Morgan
Professor Harold Orel
Professor Norman Page
Dr Rosemary Sumner
Mr Furse Swann
Professor Dennis Taylor
THE COUNCIL OF MANAGEMENT
Mrs Sue Clarke
Mrs Brenda Parry
Dr Jacqueline Dillion Mr Malcolm Pfaff (Treasurer)
Dr Anthony Fincham (Chairman)
Mrs Heather Shean
Mrs Helen GibsonMs Harriet Still (National
Ms Tracy Hayes (Student
Trust)
Representative)Mrs Rosemary Swann
Mrs Helen Lange (Vice-Chairman) Dr Jane Thomas
Mr Andrew Leah (Academic Director)
Mrs Marilyn Leah
Mrs Dee Tolfree
(Minutes Secretary) (Publications Officer)
Mr Phillip Mallett (EditorDr Rebecca Welshman
THS journals) (Associate Editor)
Mr Peter Mann (DorchesterMrs Patricia Withers
Town Council) (Membership Secretary)
Mr Mike Nixon (Secretary and
Publicity Officer)
Auditors: Messrs Edwards and Keeping of Dorchester
1
THE HARDY SOCIETY JOURNAL
Volume 10 Number 2
SUMMER 2014
Editor: Phillip Mallett
Copyright is maintained by all contributors. All other items are the copyright of the Thomas Hardy Society
CHAIRMAN’S NOTES
3
EDITOR’S NOTES
6
SECRETARY’S REPORT FROM CASTERBRIDGE
10
EULOGY FOR PATRICK TOLFREE
Dame Julia Cleverdon
13
NEW MEMBERS
18
REWRITING WOMEN: THOMAS HARDY, FOOD AND THE MENACE OF THE IMPURE
Emanuela Ettorre
19
THE DANGER OF NOSTALGIA: ANTI-PASTORAL TENSION IN
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
Ryan Crennen
29
THE RED GHOST AND THE NO-MOON MAN: MASCULINITY AS
OTHER IN THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Tracy Hayes
51
LESLIE STEPHEN’S BAD FIVE MINUTES IN THE ALPS
Phillip Mallett
58
POEMS85
Denise Bennett, James Lancaster, David Jones
THE HORSE WITH THE RED UMBRELLA
John Travell
88
AN EXPLORATION OF HARDY’S CHRISTMINSTER AND LARKIN’S OXFORD
James Booth
92
HARDY SOCIETY PROGRAMME 2014
101
REPORT OF THE COUNCIL OF MANAGEMENT
102
NOTICE OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
104
REVIEW106
Christopher Nicholson, Winter, reviewed by Keith Wilson
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
113
HARDY SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS AND ADDRESSES OF OFFICERS
114
ABOUT THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
IBC
2
CHAIRMAN’S NOTES
Beside the Mead of Memories,
Where Church-­way mounts to Moaning Hill,
The sad man sighed his phantasies:
He seems to sigh them still.
‘The Dead Quire’
One final time – for these are my seventeenth and, hopefully, concluding
set of Chairman’s Notes, for I plan to step down at the AGM after six
years in office – glad to pass the baton on to the capable and enthusiastic
hands of Helen Lange, our current Vice-­Chairman. At this point I really
have no more to say: my pessimistic meliorism worn thin.
For the Thomas Hardy Society, there is much to look forward to – a
full conference programme: a bevy of distinguished lecturers (excluding
current interloper), forty call-­for-­papers speakers from all around the
planet, some amazing entertainments – with a significant focus on this
anniversary of the outbreak of ‘the war to end all wars’. In addition, a wide
variety of walks and tours, reaching to all corners of Wessex – Cornwall,
Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Stourhead and a boat trip across Budmouth Bay
plus a thriving post-­graduate input, wherein must lie the future of the
THS. Hopefully, there will be time amongst this hectic programme to
stop and inspire (medical meaning = breathe in) the beauty, the peace and
the tranquillity of the West Dorset countryside.
***
Christopher Nicholson, our opening night speaker, is probably less
well-­known outside Dorset than some of his predecessors. He is coming
to talk to us about Winter – a wonderfully sensitive novel about Max Gate
in the 1920s – and the difficult triangular relationship between Hardy,
Florence and Gertrude Bugler. The novel rises far above its theoretical
basis as a work of ‘faction’ to present a beautifully subtle and sympathetic
psychological portrait of the predicament of autumnal Tom, miserable
neurotic Florence and lively young Gertie. Nicholson has managed to
penetrate so deeply beneath Hardy’s skin in this absorbing tribute, which
should be read by all those with even the slightest interest in Thomas
Hardy, his life and works.
***
There is no easy key to unlocking Hardy’s ambivalent attitude towards
war. On the one hand he had a lifelong fascination with the Napoleonic
3
Wars which found expression in both The Trumpet-­Major and his (self-­
styled) magnum opus, The Dynasts; and also his willing response to the
War Propaganda Bureau (meeting of writers 2 September 1914), for
whom he penned the jingoistic ‘Men Who March Away’ (Song of the
Soldiers). On the other hand his deeply moving War Poems of the Boer
War, and his subsequent Poems of War and Patriotism, which followed
on from ‘Men Who March Away’, are among the finest pacifist poems
in the English language, exposing the futility, the cost, of all human
conflict; and of course, a major influence on Blunden, Sassoon, Owen,
Graves – and the other better remembered poets of The Great War.
***
I have previously claimed a genetic predisposition to Hardy, inherited
from my (estranged) grand-­father Revd Frank Fincham, who was a
founder member of the Thomas Hardy Society, attending the original
festival in 1968. Although he lived to the age of ninety-­five, I merely
met him twice. It only occurred to me this year to enquire how he had
fared in The Great War. I was unsurprised and pleased to learn that he
was a Conscientious Objector. It is a sad reflection on human nature that
a century later, conflict still dominates the globe, that politicians, by-­and-­
large drawn from the ranks of those afflicted by Personality Disorders,
continue to send young men ‘to die as cattle’; and that war criminals
prosper, accumulating millions on the international lecture circuit. As
a small counter foil to these activities, the English Department of the
University of Hull is holding an international conference in September
this year, entitled ‘Objections to War: Pacifism, Anti-­interventionism and
Conscientious Objection in Literature, Theatre and Art, 1830–1918’.
***
Before I sign off from Chairman’s Notes, I must pay tribute and thanks
to all the hard-­working members of your Council of Management, who
have been an unfailing help and support during my stint as Chairman.
I’m uncertain whether members of the Society appreciate how much
work goes on behind the scenes, particularly the unsung heroes of the
Hardy Office: most especially Mike Nixon, who has dedicated so much
of his life, since becoming THS Secretary, to the Society and all things
Hardyan. I hope that I have not been too much of a pain to him too much
of the time.
***
Time hurries on: each year reaping its crop of ‘livers and diers’; amongst
the latter, we are deeply saddened by the recent loss of Patrick Tolfree,
4
a Vice-­President of the Society and a wonderfully kind and charming
Hardyan Scholar:
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?
TONY FINCHAM
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5
EDITOR’S NOTES
Like most academics, I am leery of ‘Study Guides’. However determined
the authors are that they will be used as a springboard to independent
further thought, publishers are hardly less eager to suggest that they are
an end in themselves, while those who read them forgivably hope to find
clear and simple routes to follow, with all the main landmarks duly noted:
that, after all, is what guides are supposed to offer. But, again like most
academics, when an invitation comes to write one I am loth to turn it
down, and all the more when it’s an invitation to discuss Hardy, in this
case Far from the Madding Crowd, and at length enough – 25,000 words
or so – to be able to relax and explore, rather than insist and direct.
The format for this particular series requires authors to write in
answer to questions someone coming new to the text might reasonably
ask: not, say, a section on ‘Hardy’s Wessex’, but one entitled ‘What is a
Wessex novel?’ Readers might like to consider what questions they would
ask: mine included ‘Is Boldwood mad?’ ‘Is Gabriel a hero?’ ‘Why does
Bathsheba marry Sergeant Troy?’ ‘What is the role of Nature?’ ‘How
much does Fanny suffer?’ ‘How “real” is Wessex?’ Hardest to answer,
but demanded by the series editor, was the simplest of all questions to
frame: ‘What is Far from the Madding Crowd about?’ For many readers,
it is about the education of Bathsheba Everdene, from what Henry James
described with evident distaste as ‘a young lady of the inconsequential,
wilful, mettlesome type’, to a woman with a renewed sense of social and
personal responsibility, as she gradually surrenders to the integrity and
sturdy patience of Gabriel Oak. But there is surely a streak of misogyny
in such accounts, a bias which some critics have blamed on Hardy, and
others have challenged as misreadings. I at any rate find it hard to read
the novel as a comic story of the ‘taming of the shrew’: not least because
each of the central male characters, Gabriel, Troy and Boldwood, makes
errors which either are or could be fatal – certainly far more serious than
any made by Bathsheba.
My own answer, offered as ‘provisional’, merely a ‘seeming’, is
closer to Lawrence’s brilliant if also one-­eyed and tendentious Study
of Thomas Hardy, which argues that the central subject of all Hardy’s
fiction is ‘the struggle into being’, in which ‘the first and chiefest factor
is the struggle into love and the struggle with love: by love, meaning
the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man.’ Far from the
Madding Crowd is, I suggested, ‘about love and desire: what love is, how
6
it arises, and what sustains it; what causes it to fail or disappoint, and on
what terms it permits the man and the woman to come into being.’
But ‘about’ is a stiff and ungainly word to use of a vivid and engaged
response to any novel. Not all readers have been excited by ‘good, steady
Gabriel’, as Lawrence terms him, but he voices the imperative that drives
almost all of Hardy’s major characters: ‘I shall do one thing in this life –
one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting
you till I die.’ What that means – how it feels to love and to want – is
surely the real subject of the novel. I’m not sure how to write a ‘Study
Guide’ for that.
***
Hardy famously declined ‘an invitation to the United States’, preferring
his own country, ‘scored with prints of perished hands’, to a land that
was, as Robert Frost described it, ‘artless, unstoried, unenhanced’ (‘The
Gift Outright’). In much the same mood, John Ruskin explained that he
had no wish to visit a land that had no castles. Hardy might have thought
the United States ‘unstoried’ in two senses, perhaps: both lacking in
visible layers of history, ready for excavation – no skeletons of Roman
centurions lying just beneath the surface – but also, at least for a visitor,
lacking the narrative stories that come with old association. Even mean,
ugly Marygreen has ‘associations enough and to spare’ attaching to
‘every clod and stone’: ‘echoes of songs from ancient harvest-­days, of
spoken words and of sturdy deeds.’
Other nineteenth-­century writers were happy to make the voyage,
though not always so happy with what they found. Frances Trollope’s
Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), like Dickens’s American
Notes a few years later, offended her erstwhile hosts. Matthew Arnold
lectured Americans on education and democracy, but was wary of
American forms of the latter. Oscar Wilde made a series of triumphant
appearances in various lecture halls, but his natural habitat and subject
was London. The young Rudyard Kipling married an American and
settled for a time in Vermont, but on his first visit noted with satisfaction
that San Francisco harbor could be ‘silenced by two gun boats from
Hong Kong with safety, comfort and despatch’.
Hardy, and even Ruskin, might have decided differently had they
had a glimpse of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, as
I did on a hot Memorial day just a few weeks ago. Founded in 1919
by the business man Henry Huntington, it is one of the great research
centres of the world: its holdings include the Ellesmere manuscript of
7
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a Gutenberg Bible on vellum, and a world-­
famous collection of the early editions of Shakespeare’s works, while
its art collection includes paintings by Gainsborough, Reynolds and
Constable. Unlike the British Library, it is set in extensive grounds,
which include a Japanese garden, and a recently reconstructed Chinese
garden. Strictly speaking, perhaps, they are not Japanese or Chinese, or
at least they have been shaped to please a Western vision (the desert
garden, immaculately kept, had cunningly concealed sprinklers). And
please they do, with imaginative landscaping, mini-­forests of bamboo,
a moon-­shaped bridge, and above all (to my eye) the subtle harmonies
of subdued purple acers against heavy swathes of willow, both set off by
the glint of sunlight on water. Academic life has its pressures, with its
deadlines, twelve-­hour days, and a constant eye on the league tables, but
it would be a curmudgeonly academic who could not be happy working
in or just wandering around the Huntington. Hardy (and Ruskin) ought
to have said, Yes.
***
The cover illustration for this issue shows Diggory Venn reading his
letter of rejection from Thomasin, in the early chapters of the novel. It
was drawn by Arthur Hopkins for the serial publication in Belgravia: An
Illustrated London Magazine. Time here for me to ‘’fess up’, as they say.
In the first issue of the Journal for which I was editor, I conceded that
while trying to eliminate errors I should undoubtedly be guilty of them,
and in the next issue I duly was, when I cited Belgravia as ‘A Magazine
of Fashion and Amusement’. There was indeed a magazine with that
subtitle, but as William Huntley has reminded me, it was not the one in
which Hardy published The Return of the Native. Mea culpa.
In the Preface he wrote in 1895 to Far from the Madding Crowd,
Hardy thanked the press and public which had willingly joined him in
‘the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen
Victoria; – a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and
reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who
could read and write, and National school children’. The impact of
the penny post in Victorian England, and its significance in Victorian
fiction, can hardly be overstated; but Hardy was also fascinated by the
materiality of letters, notes and messages of all kinds, whether chalked
on Christminster walls, painted in red letters on stiles, wrapped in
badly sealed packages, or, as here, stained with the signs of the owner’s
occupation. Diggory ends the novel as a dairy farmer, reddle-­
free,
8
respectably ‘white’, and no longer a bogey-­man to frighten children; but
one might imagine that the hurt of rejection, like the red marks on the
page of the letter, can never quite be washed out.
***
This issue of the Journal includes the eulogy delivered by Dame Julia
Cleverdon at the funeral in March of Patrick Tolfree, who was a long-­
standing member and Vice-­President of the Thomas Hardy Society. It
would be impertinent of me to try to add to what is said there, but I would
like to record my own warm memory of him as a man of great acumen,
kindness, and above all perfect courtesy.
PHILLIP MALLETT
Please note the submission dates included on the inside back cover
of this issue. For the 2014 Thomas Hardy Journal it is Monday
8 September; for the Spring 2015 Hardy Society Journal it is
Monday 2 February 2015. It is a great help if submissions are sent as
Word documents: double-­spaced, single quotation marks, endnotes
rather than footnotes, and ideally in Times New Roman, size 12 – all
of which make it easier to estimate the number of pages the issue
will require.
9
SECRETARY’S REPORT FROM
CASTERBRIDGE
Hardy and the London tube
If you can picture the scene, it’s a grey November, an early morning
dash for the tube at Tufnell Park, North London. A white board reporting
a delay on the line? No! It showed a copied out Hardy poem, ‘At Day-­
Close in November’. Amazing. I went on with my journey with a spring
in my step!
10
The Horse with the Red Umbrella.
Many people who have visited Dorchester will recognise this well known
café, on the corner of Trinity Street and High West Street. The building,
which once contained a theatre, had links with the actor Edmund Kean
and also with Hardy. This connection has been superbly illustrated with
a recently established mural along the length of one wall in the café. Our
President, Julian Fellowes, will be unveiling the mural at the end of May.
‘Poems that make men cry’
On my way home from Oxford after an excellent joint weekend with
the Phillip Larkin Society, I settled down to the Sunday Times and its
magazine. It was with some surprise, and considerable pleasure, that I
read a six page article featuring ‘celebrities’ naming their favourite poem
that made them cry. Sadly, the one posthumous nomination was by our
much missed Seamus Heaney, who chose ‘The Voice’, which was also
beautifully illustrated for the article. A wonderful reminder of a great
poet, and an equally great poem. Incidentally the collection, under the
above title, has become a bestseller.
Enfield Town and Hardy
Many members will of course know that Florence Hardy (née Dugdale)
lived in Enfield, and married Hardy in the parish church of St Andrew’s.
I lived (and worked) in Enfield for 30 years, and in that time I was never
aware that the local council or the people of the borough, made that
much of this interesting (to me at least!) connection. Much has changed
in Enfield since I left 12 years ago, not least the building of an impressive
shopping centre and much more besides. Paying a rare visit this year I
was surprised, and delighted, to see a new theatre had been built in the
centre of the town-­named the ‘Dugdale Theatre’! And beside this was
a new office block-­ named ‘Thomas Hardy House’! I think the people/
council of Enfield should be congratulated on acknowledging this
important literary history. A coach tour to Enfield perhaps?!
‘The Return of the Native’, an Icelandic translation
It was a particular delight earlier this year, to receive an email from
local Dorset resident, Pat Farmer, who asked if the Society would like
to have a 700+ page Icelandic manuscript, handwritten (!), written by
her Grandfather. As you would expect, I said we would be fascinated to
see the document. A couple of weeks later, Pat and her mother, Sigridur
Kristen Lister, whose husband, Snaebjorn Jonsson, had carried out this
11
labour of love, presented the manuscript to us here at the office. Not
only did Snaebjorn translate this book, but also Tess. This has since been
sadly lost. The full story was reported in the Dorset Echo in the 23 April
edition and can be viewed on their website <www.dorsetecho.co.uk/
dorchester> Both books were published in Iceland in the 1930s, Tess
going to a second printing. I’m sure we can offer a heartfelt thank you to
this amazing man on his incredible feat.
Hardy for the smartphone generation?
On the 1 April, Penguin Books announced a new edition of classic
novels, under the umbrella title Penguin Now!, which will be for
smartphone users who will be able to read these books on their phones,
but without full stops, just exclamation marks! They will also ensure that
they take out those parts that are depressing. Two examples quoted were
Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which will begin: ‘Mother died today!
Or yesterday, I don’t know!’ And in Jude the Obscure will feature the
excitable: ‘But no one came! Because no one ever does!’ I again draw
your attention to the date at the beginning of this piece.
I hope to see many of you at our Conference.
MIKE NIXON
THE THOMAS HARDY LONDON LECTURE
Thursday 6 November, 7.30pm at Birkbeck College,
Gordon Square
The London lecture this year will be given by
Dr Jacqueline M. Dillion (Harding University) and
Phillip Mallett (University of St Andrews), on the title:
‘Looking and Overlooking in Hardy’s
The Return of the Native’
12
EULOGY FOR PATRICK TOLFREE
at his Funeral in Dorchester
March 13 2014
It is a great honour to be asked by the family, led by Patrick’s devoted
wife Dee and his beloved daughter Mary, as well as his older sister Pixy,
to pay tribute to Patrick, to thank God for all that he gave to us, and for
all he did – in so many ways – to make the world a better place.
I knew Patrick’s contribution firstly through his outstanding work on
industrial relations for The Industrial Society in the 70s, working with
my late husband John Garnett. Later I worked with him as a magnificent
campaigner and editor at Business in the Community in the 80s and 90s.
He was a man of many parts, of great interests and immense scholarship,
who worked tirelessly on the projects and causes he cared about but
always with an endearing and genuine enthusiasm to hear first about the
projects and causes you cared about.
But all this striving and world changing would not have been possible
without his prop and stay, his supporter and friend, an encouraging
comforter and helpmeet in the dark days that frustrated novelists and
world changers always suffer from, and that was Dee – his beloved wife
of 49 years. She did more than anyone to take from his soul the strain and
stress. His pride and joy was his daughter Mary, her marriage to Andrew
and his four beloved grandchildren, sitting with us here in the front pew.
His grief and sustained love for his son Samuel who died in 2003 never
left him and it will be beside his grave that his ashes will rest.
All of us will have our own memories of the kindest and most gentle
man, who was interested and interesting, unselfish and considerate,
treated everyone with courtesy and attention, listened and cared about the
common weal and helped people always to find a common purpose. He
was both modest and unassuming almost to a fault, and some believed he
lacked confidence and belief in himself. Pixy, his elder sister, remembers
a child with a sunny disposition and great charm. David Hymas, his good
friend, who was at Sedbergh School with him, writes that Tollers – as
he was known – thrived in a pretty tough regime because he had the gift
of getting on with both masters and pupils, and he made friends for life
both there and at Oxford. John Curtis remembers Tollers at Oxford as a
very popular member of Worcester, hurling himself into such a hectic
round of rowing, and Scottish reeling, playing rugger and dining but
13
getting an Epsilon in German. On the final hurdle he got a respectable
Modern Languages degree which I am sure he would say was Just in
Time management.
The hundreds of loving letters that the family have received reinforce
the message that Patrick was much loved, and yet Dee believes he would
be incredulous at the response to his death. What did we love about him?
He was a pilgrim gainst all disaster. A great righter of wrongs, with
a clear sense of justice and fairness. There was always a campaign
bubbling away with Patrick: for the Museum, for the Jurassic Coast, for
productive trade union relations, for the Disability forum, for a proper
memorial to Wordsworth’s brother, whose ship the Abergavenny went
down in Weymouth Bay, for Parkinson’s, for children at the Thomas
Hardy school to know more about Hardy, for the Council to come to its
senses. The latter was a very common refrain.
He was above all a very practical idealist who kept his eyes on the
hills but his feet firmly on the ground. He was a master of the minutiae of
the detail but never forgot the compelling vision he was working towards.
He was determined and tenacious. He was clear about what needed to be
done – and was not above nudging others to play their part.
The Head of English, Hilary at the Thomas Hardy school, describes
brilliantly how Patrick got the Hardy Millenium project off the ground,
which engaged more than 1000 children, but confesses she would be
slightly nervous about opening her new email inbox as every day there
would be at least six emails from Patrick, telling her what he had done,
asking her what else he could do to help and gently reminding her of
things she had said she would do!
His real passion throughout his life, however was his writing – and
five unpublished novels await his biographers. His muse and his driving
energy in the last twenty years were devoted to Dorset and the work of
Thomas Hardy. As the secretary of the Thomas Hardy Society writes: ‘It
was obvious that Patrick’s knowledge of Hardy’s work was second to
none – and perhaps even more importantly, his understanding of it was
frankly on a different planet to most of us but he communicated what he
knew with clarity, huge enthusiasm and a dry humour none of us will
ever forget.’
Darling Dee spent a lot of time saying Do NOT start another
Hardy project without a commission but there was perhaps a quality of
otherworldliness to Patrick – perhaps the muse was more important than
the money?
14
In his early career Anthony Sampson tried to recruit Patrick to work
with him at the Observer, but Patrick turned it down because he was
very busy writing a novel. When he got the first big job in Birmingham
working for Deltal metal with a smart car, and Samuel was born, Dee
thought they might settle down and buy a little house? Patrick’s answer
was to go to Portugal for two years to teach English with the British
Council and that was where Mary was born.
In some ways he was a free and restless spirit, and as Mary says
so perceptively he sometimes seemed a mass of contradictions – kind,
gentle and interested but then anxious, self-­doubting and restless. Old
fashioned and traditional – particularly pedantic about grammar and
spelling, the position of your index finger on a fork, Sunday afternoon
shoe polishing sessions, sock and blanket darning – but in other ways he
was a true liberal and a progressive in so many ways: not at all prudish,
and keen always to welcome the children’s teenage friends and celebrate
with his own.
Ian Pearce, a colleague and friend at Business in the Community,
remembered so clearly going to see Dee and Patrick to talk over the
vintage years and being welcomed with Dee’s marvellous cooking and
several bottles of rioja. Patrick dressed up in his strikingly coloured linen
jacket and corduroy trousers would open the champagne and as the drink
flowed discourse brilliantly and knowledgeably on the Spanish Civil War,
and the abandonment of Orwell and the latest post-­Gorbachev history
books. Amazingly well read, but at times so self-­effacing and somewhat
embarrassed about the things he was so good at that one felt he was
disappointed that he hadn’t achieved more. Like my husband – who had
worked with Patrick as young blades in ICI, perhaps it was that they were
that special generation of young men who had survived the War and felt
keenly that ‘those to whom much had been given much was expected’.
His greatest professional contribution came in the sixties and seventies
at The Industrial Society, and then at Acas which harnessed his incisive
writing skills with his intellectual ability, to analyse industrial relations
problems and synthesise the answers, trying always to find a common
purpose between employers and their people. He called it finding ‘a
willing acceptance by each of the role and task of the other’, and he had
a profound influence on common sense and cooperation in some of the
toughest industries of the time.
He came to work with me in the early nineties at Business in the
Community when the Prince of Wales as President was passionately
15
anxious that we should do more to get partnerships going between
schools and businesses. Patrick was the brilliant Editor of Partnership
Points stirring up stories and illustrating case studies – working all
hours to produce an engaging monthly magazine with his printer in
Suffolk.
What shaped his life and character and caused us all to love him so?
I wonder if it wasn’t a combination of Faith and Hope and Charity. He
was a man of faith – who loved the rituals of Christmas and Easter and
thought seriously and profoundly about his beliefs. But the Faith that
shaped his character as well was the loss of his mother Faith. When he
was just 13 she died of a heart attack on a railway station. She was one
of six children born to Bishop John Wordsworth and a Mrs. Williams of
Bridehead Dorset. Faith had gone to be a missionary and then a Head
teacher in Nigeria, and married a man in the Colonial Service. After her
death and his father’s continued absence, Salome, Faith’s sister, became
a surrogate mother to Patrick and Pixy. Pixy remembers marvellous
holidays with the five Pelly cousins running wild on the heather moors
in Northumberland. And yet his daughter Mary believes the loss of his
mother cast a huge shadow over his life – and gave him perhaps the
restlessness and lack of confidence and anxiety which overshadowed him
at times.
When I asked Pixy what had shaped the character of her younger
brother, she replied , ‘That quote that he always had hanging up in the
loo.’ I retrieved it from the loo and here it is, from the ‘Epilogue to
Asolando’:
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to Wake.
He was a man who, in spite of the shadows and the occasional black
dog, never doubted clouds would break and generally found Hope and
Optimism in everything around him. Like his hero Thomas Hardy,
he found great pleasure in little things! A time to dance, and a time to
laugh, preferably with Cyder and Dancing, playing the mouth organ and
concertina, walking the fells with his lifelong friend Stephen Gorton
(whose support to Patrick and Dee as godfather to Samuel meant so
much to them both). I last saw him roaring with laughter in a howling
gale on Portland Bill and quoting Wordsworth into the wind.
16
He marched breast forward through some tough and difficult
situations. To lose a child to mental illness is perhaps the toughest thing
any parent can do. To have Parkinsons for 20 years and refuse at any time
to countenance defeat. It was typical of his courage that his response to
Parkinsons was to resolve to row the boat race course at Henley single
handed because it would give him and others hope that you should never
give up, and you should always do what you can for those less fortunate
than yourself! I remember him so well racing to the finishing line,
coached by Canford – absolutely exhausted as we cheered him on the last
length, having raised £8000, and so pleased and proud that he had rowed
the course that his Wordsworth relation had rowed in an early boat race!
So if his character was shaped by Faith – and by Hope – what then
of Charity – the greatest of these? His love for his friends, for his causes,
for the work of Thomas Hardy, for his darling family shone through in all
that he did to make the world a better place. There was a higher purpose
which drove his striving and his determination to make a difference.
And so, dearest Patrick, you have rowed the course to the very end
on Worcester oars and given it your all. While you now sleep to wake,
remember you leave a lasting legacy behind in those you have inspired
and influenced through your life’s work. You leave your loving family
and friends as well as your community enriched and emboldened by
your love and example. And as we hear Andrew read those words of
Ecclesiastes ‘There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to mourn
and a time to dance’, let us thank God for the life and example of John
Patrick Wordsworth Tolfree.
Eulogy given by Dame Julia Cleverdon
17
NEW MEMBERS
We welcome the following new members to the Thomas Hardy Society:
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Mr Derek Ballan
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Mrs Jane Cox Mrs Ava Eyre Mrs Deborah Fisher
Ms G. K. Goodman Mr Chris Green Mr Philip Jackson Mr Ian Jebbett
Janet Morgan
Mr Stephen Poulter Ms Jen Ward
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Weymouth
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OVERSEAS
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18
USA
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USA
REWRITING WOMEN: THOMAS
HARDY, FOOD AND THE MENACE OF
THE IMPURE
EMANUELA ETTORRE
The aim of this paper is to discuss the way in which in Thomas Hardy’s
narratives food acts not only as a marker of class unity, inclusion
and conviviality within rural Wessex, but also as one of the prevailing
metaphors of the destabilizing nature of femininity. If food is ‘a sign’,
as Roland Barthes observes, an organic system incorporated in a specific
culture, it is also clearly invested with plurality and polysemy, in implying
‘many social, moral, ideological values’.1 Thus, in Hardy food cannot be
identified simply with festivities, ‘local gatherings’2 or ritual practices, such
as the shearing supper in Far from the Madding Crowd with its ‘mutton-­
pies and beef, apple and rhubarb pudding, cider and ale’,3 or the Christmas
party in The Return of the Native, when after the dancing mummers are
served ‘beef and bread, cake, pastry, mead and elderwine’.4 Instead, food
transcends its nutritional connotations and is elevated to a symbolic status
in order to represent the female universe and its moral ambivalence.
In many Hardy novels food is a natural product that needs no
preparation or cooking and is often connected to womanhood and fertility
(milk), or sweetness and abundance (honey). The seductive power of the
fruits of nature is noticeably explored in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: after
leaving Marlott, Tess reaches Alec’s country-­house in ‘The Slopes’, and
during her first walk with him along the lawns and the green-­houses, he
invites her to eat strawberries. Tess’s act of eating contains a manifest
sexual allusion, and conveys the erotic potential of this ‘virginal daughter
of nature’: 5
He conducted her about the lawns, and flower-­beds, and
conservatories; and thence to the fruit-­garden and green-­houses,
where he asked her if she liked strawberries.
‘Yes,’ said Tess. ‘When they come.’
‘They are already here.’ D’Urberville began gathering
specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to her as he
stooped: and presently selecting a specially fine product of the
‘British Queen’ variety he stood up and held it by the stem to
her mouth.
19
‘No, no!’ she said quickly, putting her fingers between his
hand and her lips. ‘I would rather take it in my own hand.’
‘Nonsense!’ he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted
her lips and took it in.
They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus,
Tess eating in a half pleased, half-­reluctant state whatever
d’Urberville offered her. When she could consume no more of
the strawberries he filled her little basket with them.
(Tess: 47; italics added)
The sensual connotations of Tess’s tasting of strawberries, and the slight
complicity she manifests in her ‘half-­pleased, half-­reluctant state’ while
eating them, seem to anticipate the Chase scene, when ‘between archness
and real dismay’ (Tess: 80) she is involved in a sexual encounter with Alec
that blurs the boundary between seduction and rape. On that occasion,
the girl will lose her innocence, becoming an object to be consumed and
revelled with. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles the heroine can be identified
with a fruit of nature, and it is no accident that strawberries are here
depicted as greenhouse plants, forced to ripen early and made into a
commodity, as Tess herself is, inevitably doomed to satisfy her suitor’s
compelling needs and wants. Alec treats her as a body to be consumed
and from which pleasure is drawn, but in following the vital cycles of
nature, she is also a reproductive body when, ‘as a spouseless mother’,
she becomes ‘the parent of a nameless child’ (Tess: 104).
Tess is also a creature of the earth who while working in the fields
and harvesting the corn ‘unfastened her frock and began suckling the
child’, just like any other animal that populates Wessex, while the ‘men
who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the other end of
the field’ (Tess: 102). In this scene, founded on the primordial mystery of
maternity and dense with mythical symbolism, milk is connected to the
feminine body and its fecundity. According to Lévi-­Strauss ‘a woman is
everywhere synonymous with nature’,6 and this very nature, as opposed
to culture, is associated with raw food. In Hardy’s novel raw food, as
exemplified by milk and honey, is not simply resonant with biblical
allusions in expressing an ancient paradigm of fertility,7 it also suggests
images that are at the same time secular and sexual. When Tess works
as a milkmaid in the dairy farm of Talbothays, the rural experience
of milking and skimming is both linguistically and metaphorically
rendered in erotic terms. The jargon of the dairy farmers when indicating
the methods of butter preparation as milk rotates within the churn is
20
semantically coherent with a sexual discourse, as well as the way in which
Hardy’s narrator describes the spillage of milk out of the leads, or of the
whey out of the whey-­tub, with unavoidable connotations of a sexual
practice.8
For Tess milk is as vital as honey: her parents are also beekeepers
and, at one stage in the novel she is even compelled to make a tragic
nocturnal trip to Casterbridge to sell honey at the marketplace. These
two natural products are a form of nourishment and a means of survival
within the social environment, but at the same time they testify to Tess’s
profound affinity with nature and its fruits. Once Angel Clare discovers
her devastating secret and the guilt of her past, the first thing he rejects is
the smell of her body, connected as it is to her alimentary habits:
Often enough had he tried to reach those lips against her consent:
often had he said gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the
butter and eggs and milk and honey on which she mainly lived,
that he drew sustenance from them, and other follies of that sort.
But he did not care for them now. (Tess: 261, italics mine).
When the guilt is unveiled Tess becomes physically distasteful to Angel;
he finds no more fascination in the savour of her lips, as he is equally
disgusted by her morality, now incontrovertibly stained. Hence, food
stands as the emblem of Tess’s femininity, of her innate physicality and
instinctual nature. As Levi-­Strauss argued, ‘When the references are
feminine, the sexual code becomes latent and is concealed beneath the
alimentary code’,9 and in this instance the connection between female
sexuality and food becomes a telling example. Tess’s favourite food, like
her physicality, now devoid of its seductive power, can no longer entice
Angel; it has been transformed into something decayed and rotten.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles – as in most of Hardy’s novels and
short stories – female characters are hardly ever confined in a kitchen,
preparing tasty meals for the family. Although food is connected to
womanhood, cooking is neither an activity limited to women nor a sign
of their subordination to the male sphere; conversely, food turns out to
be one of the devices through which Hardy ‘eroticized his heroine’,10
and mainly through the employment of raw food that forms a strong
element in Tess’s identification with nature and the earth.11 If in this novel
food becomes a form of seduction and is therefore invested with sexual
significations, it is also because it is consumed privately and intimately,
because the male suitor is socially superior to the woman he is courting,
and because this food is raw.
21
Since these are the essential conditions in the parallel between food
and femininity, it is clear in The Woodlanders that Giles Winterborne will
not succeed in enticing Grace Melbury during his pitiful attempt to invite
her for dinner and cook a memorable meal. The convivial atmosphere of
the supper is soon compromised by the vulgarity of the other guests and
the unrefined way in which dinner is served by the rude domestic:
Creedle now appeared with a specially prepared stew, which he
served by elevating the little three-­legged crock that contained
it and tilting the contents into a platter on the table, exclaiming
simultaneously, ‘Draw back, gentlemen and ladies, please!’
A splash followed. Grace gave a quick involuntary nod and
blink and put her handkerchief to her face.
‘Good heavens, what did you do that for, Creedle!’ said
Giles sternly, jumping up. … He went over to Grace, and hoped
none of it had gone into her eye.
‘O no,’ she said. ‘Only a sprinkle on my face. It was
nothing.’12
Indeed, Giles’s subordinate status in relation to the Melburys is further
intensified by this disastrous meal, a meal that will turn out to be neither
an alluring action, nor a successful attempt at social affirmation. What is
clear is that Giles could never have enticed Grace by means of a clumsily
served stew, eaten in the company of her family and assorted rustics.
Furthermore, the narrator emphasizes the grotesque effect of Giles’s
courtship when, as a cook, he is equated to a diabolical creature dwelling
in some infernal recess:
Winterborne was standing in front of the brick oven in his shirt-­
sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the blazing
mass with a long-­handled, three-­pronged, Beelzebub kind of
fork, the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making
his eyes like furnaces; the thorns crackling and sputtering.
(W: 65)
In The Woodlanders food and its preparation are devoid of any seductive
effects and erotic connotations. Instead, they reinforce the distance
between Giles and his beloved as they turn him into a ludicrous and
almost pathetic character.13 Giles belongs to Wessex, and like Tess he is
a creature of the earth:14 his failure with Grace can be explained in part
by his decision to prepare this elaborate meal, in his attempt to enter the
realm of ‘culture’ rather than contenting himself with those products of
‘nature’, which are so much closer to his life and work.
22
In Jude the Obscure the paradigm of food is also rendered within the
textualization of femininity, and more precisely through the character of
Arabella Donn. She is the daughter of a pig-­breeder and is introduced
into the narrative when, together with other girls, she is washing pigs’
intestines in the running water of a stream, and in order to attract Jude as
he passes by, she throws the pizzle of a pig at him:
Jude’s walk had slackened and he was now standing quite
still … On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear,
and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung
at him, and had fallen at his feet.
A glance told him what it was – a piece of flesh, the
characteristic part of a barrow-­
pig, which the countrymen
used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other
purpose. … beside the brook, three women were kneeling,
with buckets and platters beside them containing heaps of pigs’
chitterlings, which they were washing in the running water.15
Arabella’s impudent action perfectly defines her earthy nature, her
shameless and masculine approach towards sexuality, when she tries
to seduce Jude in a virtual inversion of the Darwinian view of sexual
selection as based on ‘a constantly recurrent struggle between the males
for the possession of the females’.16 On this occasion Arabella is with
other women, and she does her best to select her male: in a courting
strategy typical of a male animal, she displays her ‘round and prominent
bosom, full lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a cochin
hen’s egg’ (JO: 33). She uses her body, as well as food, as an instrument
to allure Jude who, up to that moment, had considered women and
sex as something unconnected to his life and prospects. Food is here
represented by the innards of an animal and by the fresh pig’s blood,
which also constitute the main ingredients of the black-­pudding Arabella
will be preparing once home. This kind of meal can be connected to what
Roland Barthes calls the ‘Adamic state of nourishment’, to ‘the crudity
(rawness) of … meats’;17 but as he goes on to observe, this crudity, that
belongs to both food and language (namely, the language of the body),
is far removed from the natural: it becomes instead a category of the
pseudo-­natural and thus verges on the cultural and, more precisely, the
pornographic. As a consequence, in Jude the Obscure, Arabella’s crude
language, her ‘unvoiced call of a woman to man’ (JO: 35), is unavoidably
‘a pornographic language (hysterically miming the pleasure of love)’.18
With the washing of innards, the throwing of the pig’s penis and the
23
use of coagulated blood for preparing a meal, food conveys feelings and
assumptions that are difficult to articulate verbally and might otherwise
be considered taboo, such as Arabella’s sexual appetite and absence of
prejudice.19
Her relationship with food qualifies her as ‘a complete and substantial
female animal’ (JO: 33). Once married to Jude, on a snowy winter day, in
the absence of the man appointed to do the butchering, she is compelled
to kill a pig, and she will therefore invite her husband to collaborate: yet, a
common activity for obtaining meat becomes a cruel and inhumane action:
Arabella opened the sty-­door, and together they hoisted the
victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him
Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to
keep him from struggling.
The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage,
but the cry of despair; long-­drawn, slow and hopeless.
‘Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig
than have this to do!’ said Jude. ‘A creature I have fed with my
own hands.’
‘Don’t be such a tender-­hearted fool! There’s the sticking-­
knife – the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick
un too deep.’
‘I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it.
That’s the chief thing.’
‘You must not!’ she cried. ‘The meat must be well bled, and
to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the
meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. […] Hold
up the pail to catch the blood, and don’t talk!’
However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully
done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling
stream she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third
and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting
themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of
a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had
seemed his only friends. […]
‘It is a hateful business!’ said he.
‘Pigs must be killed.’ … Jude put the pail upright, but only
about a third of the whole steaming liquid was left in it, the main
part being splashed over the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid,
ugly spectacle – to those who saw it other than an ordinary
24
obtaining of meat. … ‘Thank God!’ Jude said. ‘He’s dead.’ (JO:
58–59)
The atrocious pig-­killing is at once literal – the novelist offered the
passage to the editor of The Animals’ Friend as it could have been
useful ‘in teaching mercy in the slaughtering of animals for the meat-­
market’ (Life and Work: 289) – and symbolic, an emblem of Arabella’s
physicality and of her moral indifference at precisely that moment when
‘[t]he discovery of the law of evolution … shifted the centre of altruism
from humanity to the whole conscious world collectively.’20 Even after
Charles Darwin had shown that animals really are our kin, Arabella has
no mercy for the pig’s suffering; she simply has to provide food for her
family, and compassion is inconceivable alongside the preservation of
the species. Similarly, she treats her obvious kin, Little Father Time, with
not much more pity than she shows for the pig. When she gets rid of
the child in ‘dispatching’ him to Jude, she justifies her action simply by
saying: ‘I would have him with me here in a moment, but he is not old
enough to be of any use in the bar […] I don’t know what to do with
him.’ (JO: 263)
Arabella exemplifies the supremacy of nature over culture, the blind
intolerance towards sentiment and the crude acceptance of the universal
and biological laws of nature. Like a savage beast forced to suppress
another animal to survive and follow the cycle of life, she unavoidably
challenges the stereotype of Victorian womanliness and masculine
assumptions of superiority. She represents carnality, the instincts of the
flesh, and her way of preparing food is clearly in conflict with Jude’s
literary passions and his ‘magnificent Christminster dream’ (JO: 36). It is
no accident that while making lard from the ‘fat of the deceased pig’ (JO:
61), she becomes furious at the sight of Jude’s books scattered on a table,
and all of a sudden she flings them away angrily, staining their covers
with the grease of the food:
‘I won’t have them books here in the way!’ she cried petulantly;
and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon the
floor.
‘Leave my books alone!’ he said. ‘You might have thrown
them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that,
it is disgusting!’ In the operation of making lard Arabella’s
hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers
consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-­covers.
(JO: 63, italics mine)
25
Arabella stains the books with the pork lard just as she smears Jude’s face
throwing the pizzle of a pig at him. She uses food – and more specifically
the meat from a pig – as a subversive device meant to destabilize him both
as a scholar and as a man, and in so doing she symbolically denies his
cultural ambitions and his masculinity. When attracting Jude by means
of a pig’s penis she adopts the part assigned to the man and therefore
inverts the typical actantial functions: male as the seducer, female as
the seduced. Arabella’s provocative action can be interpreted as a form
of physical aggression that deprives Jude of his male role as it reduces
him to a body to possess through marriage. As she reveals to one of her
friends when confessing her feelings for Jude: ‘I want him to more than
care for me; I want him to have me, to marry me! I must have him. … I
shall go mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether. I felt I should when I
first saw him.’ (JO: 44) Through the experience of physical love Arabella
entraps Jude into a marriage that is destined to destroy his expectations
and ruin his whole life.
In Jude the Obscure references to food seem to be invariably
engendered by Arabella or by other circumstances that, in any case,
involve femininity. When Jude is walking with Sue and, passionately in
love with her, feels compelled to reveal everything about his marriage to
Arabella, he chooses to do this in a place that has obvious connections
with food: he takes her to the Melchester’s market building, at the
moment in which everything is over, and the stalls are empty: ‘they
walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-­leaves, and
amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable
refuse’ (JO: 158). Food has finally become waste; as a natural product it
has lost its seductive power and is now symbolic of deterioration. In this
scene the deterioration of food is proleptic, as all human relationships in
the novel will be ruined and doomed to failure. If raw food is spoiled it
will no longer represent seduction, but only a negation of sexuality: the
remnants of rotten vegetables that lie scattered around testify to a union
with no romance, to the ideal unavoidably eroded by the real.
To conclude, in Hardy’s fiction food is not used simply to point to
labour, class and economics, as in Far from the Madding Crowd where
Gabriel Oak always knows how much things cost, or as in Tess where
swedes have to be hacked from the ground in frozen winter landscapes
and strawberries are to be cultivated in greenhouses; food is not only
an index of hospitality, community and folklore, but as exemplified in
the novels discussed here, it is related to psychological conditions and
26
specifically associated with femininity. Through different modalities and
outcomes, food becomes one of the paradigms Hardy uses to redefine the
role of women within the social and moral sphere. In a society mainly
structured upon the dictates of culture over nature, of conventional
marriage and stereotyped roles, Hardy introduces women who become
figures of dissent, either embodying traits that are usually coded
masculine or subverting the conventional Victorian values. In Hardy’s
fiction the unwonted connotations attached to food make it not simply a
symbol of tradition and continuity but, almost paradoxically, a sign of a
more disruptive representation of femininity within a rural Wessex that
cannot hold back the symptoms of modernity, this ‘contamination’.
NOTES
1
Roland Barthes, ‘The Kitchen of Meaning’, in The Semiotic Challenge
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 157. In
his essays Barthes doesn’t distinguish a dish of food from other objects such
as a ‘garment, an automobile, a gesture, a film, a piece of music, an advertising
image, a piece of furniture, a newspaper headline’, all of which, notwithstanding
their heterogeneous qualities, are signs.
2
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. George Woodcock
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988), p. 180.
3
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Suzanne B. Falck-­Yi
(Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 151.
4
Hardy, The Return of the Native, p. 198.
5
Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, eds. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell
(Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 136. Subsequent references to this edition
are given in parentheses.
6
Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. Mythologiques Volume 1
(University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 270.
7
In Exodus the Promised Land is often described as a ‘land flowing with milk
and honey’: Exodus, 3:8, Authorized King James Version.
8
The sexual connotations are well rendered when Angel Clare is working on
the churn ‘and drew the plugs for letting down the milk’ (Tess: 190); when milk is
transformed into butter: ‘the milk in the revolving churn at that moment changed
its squashing for a decided flick flack. “’Tis coming!’ cried Mrs Crick”’ (Tess:
150), as well as when Izz Huett, one of the milkmaids, is seen kissing Angel
Clare’s shadow against the wall, in the same moment in which ‘he was standing
over the whey-­tub, to let off the whey’ (Tess: 151).
9
Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 269.
10
J. B. Bullen, Thomas Hardy. The World of his Novels (London, Frances
Lincoln Limited, 2013), p. 142.
27
11
Tess’s world is a natural one, her communion with the environment extreme
as she is almost recognised as a creature of the land, on whose ‘lonely hills and
dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her
flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene’ (Tess: 97).
12
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford University
Press, 2009), p. 68. Subsequent references to this edition are given in the form
(W: 68).
13
As Phillip Mallett observes, this scene is a clear example of how in Hardy
the tragic and the comic perspectives tend to merge. Not only is Grace splashed
in the eye when Creedle tips out the food, but she ‘has her dress stained with
the oil used to shine the chairs and finds a slug on her plate – though, as Creedle
optimistically notes, it is at least “well-­boiled”’. The paradigm of food is therefore
used to reflect also the absurd condition of humanity: see Mallett, ‘Introduction’
to Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (Ware, Wordsworth Edition, 2004), p. xvi.
It is no accident that in October 1888, one year after the publication of the novel,
Hardy wrote: ‘If you look beneath the surface of farce you see a tragedy; and,
on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a
farce’ (Life and Work: 224).
14
‘He had a marvellous power of making trees grow’ and ‘there was a sort
of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or beech that he was operating on’
(W: 58).
15
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. 32–3. Subsequent references are to this edition, in the form
(JO: 32–3).
16
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, New York, Prometheus
Books, 1998), p. 220.
17
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011), p. 63.
18
Ibid.
19
On the metaphorical associations of food within contemporary and ancient
societies see Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: the
Anthropology of Eating (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980).
20
Life and Work, p. 373. This is part of a letter Thomas Hardy wrote to an
American lady in 1909, in answer to an enquiry she had made. Here the writer
condemns all cruelties inflicted on animals such as the devastating practice of
vivisection.
28
THE DANGER OF NOSTALGIA:
ANTI-­PASTORAL TENSION IN
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
RYAN CRENNEN
Although Thomas Hardy studied and worked within the tradition of
pastoral literature, there has been relatively little research done on the
importance of the pastoral in his novels. Critics occasionally investigate
Hardy’s use of the pastoral, but almost always in terms of his early
novels, especially Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding
Crowd.1 However, Tess of the d’Urbervilles has never been seriously
read with regard to pastoral criticism. While a few critics have briefly
noted Tess’s pastoral qualities, their comments tend only to highlight
its problematic status as a pastoral novel. Robert Langbaum states that
Hardy’s novels form a sort of continuum insofar as they are more or
less stable versions of the pastoral; the ‘relative stability’ of Under the
Greenwood Tree contrasts with the ‘increasing locomotion’ of Tess.2
While it is more inviting to inquire into Hardy’s straightforward uses of
the pastoral, we would be remiss to ignore a more problematic text like
Tess that often challenges pastoral conventions. Its ambivalence can help
us understand how Hardy complicates and challenges the very premise
of pastoral literature.
Critics seem unsure how to describe Tess’s relationship with the
pastoral because the novel alternates between invoking and repudiating
pastoral conventions. Their common trait is to question whether Tess
is a pastoral without attempting to provide an answer. For example,
Langbaum suggests that the novel ‘exceeds the limits of the pastoral’,
but does not specify how;3 Michael Squires writes in his book-­length
study of the pastoral novel that his ‘intention has not been to discuss
those novels which reveal only brief pastoral interludes, such as Tess of
the d’Urbervilles … but to discuss those novels that seem to be largely
pastoral’.4 But the question still remains: what is the relationship between
Tess and the pastoral?
The concept of the ‘anti-­pastoral’ allows for a new approach to this
question, one which accounts for the apparently contradictory uses of
the pastoral in the novel. Because anti-­pastoral can be generally defined
as an attack on or subversion of traditional pastoral themes and motifs,
29
to understand what is meant by ‘anti-­pastoral’ we must specify what is
meant by ‘pastoral’. There have been various definitions put forth, but
I use the term ‘pastoral’ in its classical sense, as Hardy would have
understood it. In other words, the pastoral is a literary mode that conjures
up images of love-­lorn and otiose shepherds, their musical contests, the
animals to which they attend, and the idyllic setting of Arcadia.5 These
images and motifs enjoy a long and rich literary tradition and find their
source in Greek and Latin poetry by the likes of Theocritus and Virgil.
In its broader thematic sense, the pastoral signifies an escape from
complexity to simplicity (often represented by a city/country contrast),
implied criticism of modern life, and nostalgia for a Golden-­Age past, as
symbolized in the semi-­mythical location of Arcadia.6
While the anti-­pastoral has not received the same degree of critical
attention as the pastoral itself, it is best understood as an effort to
negate or oppose these traditional themes. Because it is defined through
negation, the anti-­pastoral is a literary mode that varies depending on its
point of reference. It is implicitly a response to pastoral ideals rather than
a freestanding literary mode. Accordingly, anti-­pastoral literature tends
to oppose idealism with realism, emphasizing the hardships of rural life
and mocking the naïve attitude of its urban proponents. For example,
R. P. Draper briefly notes Tess’s anti-­pastoral qualities, stating that the
novel reveals the ‘corrupting effect of the ideal’ by contrasting Tess and
Angel’s high hopes with grim reality; the novel then becomes ‘a comment
on the deep appeal, and lasting validity, of the [pastoral] genre, and a
criticism of the false idealism it may generate’.7 Unfortunately, Draper
says no more on this point and does not investigate how the pastoral and
anti-­pastoral interact within the novel, nor the diverse and allusive ways
with which Hardy creates this tension.
In this article I argue that while Hardy intended Tess to be read in
the light of classical pastoral, his motivation was decidedly anti-­pastoral.
That is, by revealing his dissatisfaction with the concept of Arcadia,
Hardy evokes pastoral values only to overturn them. Tess thus serves as
Hardy’s refutation of the pastoral mode itself. It becomes apparent that
pastoral literature is inherently problematic and destructive, regardless of
whether it is written in ancient Greece or Victorian England. In Tess he
shows that nostalgia for Arcadia is a tragic dream, and he accomplishes
this by subtly and allusively parodying the pastoral structure of retreat,
renewal and return. Initially, Tess and Angel retreat to the Arcadian
setting of Talbothays to escape the problems of modern life. However,
30
they do not return to their old lives enlightened or renewed. At the height
of this pastoral interlude Tess and Angel suddenly become miserable, and
the remainder of the novel portrays their tragic decline. Ironically, the
characters’ own pursuit of pastoral idealism precipitates their ruin rather
than improves their condition.
To create the appearance of a traditional pastoral, Hardy subtly
draws upon and alludes to the conventions of classical authors, often
with satiric purpose. Intertextuality, a key feature of pastoral literature,
is ironically used as a way to refute pastoral ambitions. The chapters at
Talbothays are rife with allusions – explicit and implicit – to canonical
pastoral authors and themes. While writing pastoral scenes in Tess, Hardy
drew upon his knowledge of the pastoral tradition as he experienced it in
classical authors. A close examination of the classical allusions in Tess
further supports the conclusion that Hardy adopts pastoral attitudes only
to subvert them.
In order to demonstrate that Tess functions as an anti-­
pastoral,
this article traces the building tension between realism and pastoral
idealism in the novel. I first discuss the chapters preceding Tess’s arrival
at Talbothays. Here Tess suffers the disappointments of modern life
that foment her nostalgia for a better world, a desire she acts upon by
journeying to Talbothays. I then proceed to analyze the many pastoral
qualities and allusions of Tess and Angel’s experience at Talbothays, a
site which functions as the novel’s supposed Arcadian retreat. Ironically,
Talbothays encapsulates the novel’s anti-­
pastoral message, and
superficially pastoral allusions are often double-­edged. Finally, I explore
how these anti-­pastoral features culminate in the tragic post-­Talbothays
chapters. Of special interest is the novel’s ending, in which Tess’s capture
at Stonehenge symbolizes the final failure of pastoral idealism.
The first two phases of the novel commence the pastoral movement
wherein Tess experiences the complexities and problems of modern
life that she later attempts to escape for the simplicity and repose of an
idyllic sanctuary. Exploring why Tess travels to Talbothays places the
remaining phases in the context of a pastoral story arc. Once life as she
knows it becomes unbearable, Tess withdraws from society in pursuit
of a new beginning. This move represents the first shift in a pastoral
romance, which Walter R. Davis says consists of the hero’s experience
of two different worlds: ‘his entrance into “Arcady” full of the pain and
turmoil he contracted in the actual world, his experience of calm self-­
analysis in the inner pastoral circle, and his return to the outer world
31
in harmony with himself.’8 In Tess, the first two phases of the novel
accord with this structure by depicting the pain and turmoil that Tess
experiences in association with Alec d’Urberville, her family, and her
immediate society.
Initially, Tess’s life at home in Blackmoor Vale is difficult but not
unbearable. At times its natural beauty seems even idyllic. Hardy tells us
that Blackmoor is ‘an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part
untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-­painter’, where ‘the atmosphere
beneath is languorous’, and ‘with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within
the major’ (19).9 In other words, although Blackmoor is but ‘a four hours’
journey from London’, it is essentially a rural locale without urban
centres. To an outsider, it may appear that Tess already leads an idyllic
pastoral life. Indeed, it appears as such to Angel Clare, who first sees Tess
as she participates in the May Day celebration near the beginning of the
novel. Tess takes part in the traditional rural festival, ‘the local Cerealia’,
clad in a white frock, ‘in her right hand a peeled willow-­wand, and in her
left a bunch of white flowers’ (20–21). In these early descriptions, Hardy
signals Tess’s pagan associations (with the willow-­wand serving as the
phallic thyrsus), which recur through the novel and are used to tie her to
traditional pastoral conventions.
Despite this pleasant beginning, the pain and turmoil in Tess’s life
escalate when the family horse is killed and her father is taken ill, and
the subsequent encounter with Alec d’Urberville soon makes her life
unbearable. Alec, with his mercantile-­
derived fortune and adopted
surname, at first appears as a representative of sinister urban forces
encroaching upon the countryside. Having ‘made his fortune as an honest
merchant (some said money-­lender) in the North’, Alec’s father ‘decided
to settle as a country man in the South of England’ (51). Such a dichotomy
would reinforce a pastoral message. However, in an anti-­pastoral move,
Hardy hints that the natural world is also to blame for Tess’s problems.
One such hint may be found in the scene of Tess’s rape, although the
full force of Hardy’s anti-­pastoral irony is now hidden by the novel’s
textual history. Hardy was obliged to cut or rewrite certain scenes (some
of which he reinstated in subsequent editions) to satisfy the moral
scruples of the Graphic’s editor. Tess’s rape was one such objectionable
scene, and Hardy rewrote it so that Alec forces Tess into a sham marriage.
However, because Hardy resented compromising his artistic ideals, he
separately published the original version in the National Observer as
32
‘Saturday Night in Arcady’, which roughly corresponds to chapters ten
and eleven of the first edition.10 The alternate title is ironic and telling of
Hardy’s views on the pastoral: Tess’s rape literally occurs in the midst of
Arcadia (sometime anglicized as ‘Arcady’), a pastoral setting which is
traditionally a place of innocence, free from worldly trouble. As Jeremy
V. Steele notes, the ‘comparison is double-­edged, implying a lively
criticism of conventional literary notions and directing us to their origins
in flesh and blood’.11
By equating Tess’s own countryside with Arcadia, Hardy undermines
the idea that the natural world provides a refuge from civilization. While
the explicit mention of ‘Arcady’ is lost in the reconstituted novel, the
overall impact of the scene is not. Tess’s fall occurs in the midst of a
pastoral locus amoenus, a ‘beautiful place’ which Thomas G. Rosenmeyer
describes as ‘a highly selective arrangement of stage properties. . . . The
stage is set in such a way that the herdsmen may pursue their objectives,
their affections and their dreams, as easily as possible, against the smallest
number of obstacles.’12 The secluded, verdant spot to which Alec carries
Tess serves the immediate function of a locus amoenus, but its pastoral
values are completely inverted. The final description of Tess, as she rests
in a natural bower, mingles deep pathos with her pastoral repose: ‘She
was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears’ (102).
Hardy then plays up the scene’s pastoral qualities in lieu of describing the
actual violation: ‘Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above
them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which were
poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the
hopping rabbits and hares.’ The scene is thus an ironic adaptation of the
traditional locus amoenus: to apply Rosenmeyer’s definition, Alec can
easily pursue his ‘objective’ of raping Tess here without the ‘obstacle’ of
human interference. Although a city-­dweller commits the crime, Hardy
also implicates the plants and animals that are its disinterested and silent
witnesses.
After leaving Alec in disgrace, Tess continues to find solace in nature
as a remedy for social harms, and this tendency represents her growing
pastoral desire to escape to an Arcadian retreat. She hides in her room
during the day to avoid the judging eyes of the townspeople, at night
venturing into the woods, where ‘her sole idea seemed to be to shun
mankind’ (121). Tess is described as in harmony with the natural world:
Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching
the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a
33
pheasant-­laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of
Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while
she was making a distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had
been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to
the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.
In terms of natural imagery – a moonlit forest populated by rabbits and
birds – this scene closely parallels that of Tess’s rape. The operative words
here are ‘Guilt’ and ‘Innocence’, between which we are told there is ‘no
difference’. This is not to say that Tess is in fact innocent in the eyes of
nature, but that such moral categories do not apply. While collapsing this
binary obviously liberates Tess from her guilt, it also erases the notion
that nature is somehow inherently innocent. However, an amoral natural
world ceases to function as an effective pastoral retreat. In contrast to
the ‘social law’ that Tess resents, natural law vindicates her yet offers no
protection or refuge, as her previous traumatic experience in the locus
amoenus proves. Tess now confronts a Darwinian ‘law of nature’ that
does not offer the possibility of a natural retreat. However, these oblique
anti-­pastoral sentiments are lost on Tess, who instinctively embraces
pastoral ideals as a remedy for her troubles.
Given the ceaseless and escalating misery that Tess experiences in
her immediate society, it is unsurprising that she earnestly desires to
leave behind the world as she knows it. The end of the novel’s second
phase describes Tess’s attempt to retreat to Talbothays; it thus signals
the transition to the second stage of the pastoral, wherein one enters
‘“Arcady” full of the pain and turmoil he contracted in the actual world’.13
Prompted by the death of her baby, Tess feels this urge to retreat even
before she settles upon a destination. Only her motivations are clear: ‘To
escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it; and
to do that she would have to get away’ (140). The act of retreat offers
Tess a chance to assume a new identity. As Davis states, when a pastoral
character attempts to retreat into the peaceful inner-­circle of Arcadia, ‘this
action is symbolized by a pastoral disguise of the new self he assumes
upon entering the pastoral land’ (152). Accordingly, Tess assumes a new
identify with which she will enter Talbothays: ‘On one point she was
resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville air-­castles in the dreams
and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing
more’ (141). While Tess has worked as a dairymaid before, the important
addition here is ‘nothing more’. This implies that she will leave behind
34
in Marlott her painful memories and social ties. This move is effective
(perhaps too effective) insofar as she strongly impresses Angel shortly
afterward. Moreover, while Tess may banish ‘d’Urberville air-­castles’
from her dreams, pastoral air-­castles have already begun to take their
place.
Once Tess arrives at Talbothays, the novel takes a decidedly pastoral
turn. As pastoral motifs quickly multiply, it begins to appear that Tess
has in fact arrived in Arcadia. But a tension soon arises as pastoral ideals
begin to run afoul of reality. The origins of the novel’s tragic ending may
be found in these scenes, especially in the interactions between Tess and
Angel, a character attempting to enact his own pastoral retreat. However,
before analyzing the extent to which Talbothays functions as Arcadia,
it is necessary to explore the close associations between Arcadia and
Wessex more generally.
Arcadia, the traditional setting for pastorals, is an idyllic and mythic
land closely associated with conceptions of the Golden Age. As Robert
Coleman explains, it is ‘an age of peaceful anarchy and innocent ease,
sustained by the spontaneous fruits of the earth’. While it is always
located in the past, it cannot be associated with any specific time or place.
In the case of Virgil’s Eclogues, ‘it always seems a recent past, so that
we have the persistent illusion of a world that is permanently “there”,
timeless and unchanging’.14 The setting thus evokes intense nostalgia;
there is an urge to return to a better time and place – one we understand is
‘lost’, but with which we nonetheless identify. Nostalgia drives pastoral
literature: Laurence Lerner calls this urge to return to Arcadia ‘the pastoral
impulse’, adding that ‘nostalgia is the basic emotion of pastoral’.15 In a
sense, to return to Arcadia is to return home, insofar as it is considered
humanity’s ultimate place of origin.
Hardy constructed the region of Wessex to evoke Arcadia’s timeless
and placeless associations, and as Simon Gatrell reminds us, Tess ‘is
the Wessex novel’.16 Wessex was familiar to readers of Tess, insofar as
they knew that there exist many parallels between it and South-­West
England. Despite these evident similarities, Hardy strove to maintain a
dream-­like setting for his novels. In the 1895 preface to Far from the
Madding Crowd Hardy describes Wessex as ‘a partly real, partly dream-­
country’.17 In response to efforts by fans to find the locations and people
described in his novels, Hardy acknowledges his indebtedness to real
locations but registers the following protest: ‘I ask all good and idealistic
readers to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are
35
any inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside these volumes.’ Hardy
continues to define Wessex as a familiar yet unobtainable place in the
preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912. Despite their regional qualities,
the people of his novels ‘were meant to be typically and essentially those
of any and every place where “Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s
fool” – beings in whose hearts and minds that which is apparently local
should be really universal’. He again reminds the inquisitive reader ‘that
the description of these backgrounds has been done from the real – that
is to say, has something real for its basis, however illusively treated’.18
In both of these prefaces Hardy stresses the Arcadian aspect of Wessex,
which is at once real and imaginary, familiar and foreign.
Moreover, the descriptions of Talbothays closely approximate those
of Arcadia. Its first impression comes as Tess descends into the Var Vale,
literally a land of milk and honey. She finds herself in ‘the long-­sought-­
for vale, – the Valley of Great Dairies, the valley in which milk and butter
grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely . . . than at her
home – the verdant plain so well-­watered by the river Var or Froom’
(148). The theme of cornucopia and abundance increases steadily as Tess
progresses into this dreamlike setting. She stumbles upon cows, ‘their
great bags of milk swinging under them as they walked . . . Their large
veined udders hung ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like
the legs of a gipsy’s crock; and as each animal lingered for her turn to
arrive the milk oozed forth and fell in drops to the ground’ (152–53). As
in Arcadia, the land is so fertile that it literally oozes, yielding its bounty
with almost no human effort. Hardy was fond of using liquid imagery to
convey the land’s richness, especially in connection with love: ‘Amid the
oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Var Vale, at a season when the
rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was
impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The
ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings’
(210). The mythic fertility of the vale often overloads the senses of its
residents and holds them in a dream-­like state. When Angel returns from
his hometown, we are told that as ‘he began to descend from the upland
to the fat alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid
perfume of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed
therein a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the
animals, the very bees and butterflies, drowsy’ (241). Hardy has clearly
created the sense that we are looking back to a mythic and idyllic Golden
Age
36
In Talbothays, as in the forests near Marlott, Tess frequently interacts
with animals, whose central presence in the novel is a hallmark of pastoral
literature. As in the case of Theocritus’s Idylls, ‘the fact that animals
are present on the scene stamps the scene as a pastoral one’.19 Animals
and humans frequently mingle, and at Talbothays cows occasionally
become minor characters. In some of the novel’s most bucolic scenes,
Tess and Angel are literally surrounded by cows as they fall in love. Tess
first recognizes Angel while they are busy milking cows, who in turn
humorously heighten the scene’s dramatic tension. Although Tess can
hear Angel’s voice, she must wait to see him, ‘owing to his burying his
head so persistently in the flank of the milcher’ (160).
Moreover, one of the most dramatic scenes in the novel intimately
involves cows. When Angel professes his love for Tess, the ‘milchers’
are inextricably entwined in the description and action. Tess is described
as milking with her head resting sideways against the side of the cow,
‘her temple pressing the milcher’s flank’, and ‘the sun chancing to be
on the milking-­side it shone flat upon her pink gowned form, and her
white curtain-­bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo
cut from the dun background of the cow’ (212). The resulting image is a
strange amalgamation of woman and animal. Angel is so captivated with
it that he sits ‘under his cow watching her’, until at last he embraces her
as she sits milking. Angel and Tess are thus left awkwardly embracing
beneath ‘Old Pretty’. This strange ménage à trois results in Tess ‘gently
striving to free herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped’s actions,
her heart more deeply concerned with herself and Clare’ (214).
It is important to note that in the pastoral the presence of animals
often symbolizes sex. Rosenmeyer notes of the classical pastoral that, as
shepherds and animals interact, ‘the life swirl of sex is ever-­present on
the horizon, promising to spill over into the still heart of the setting. That
is the meaning of the marginal references to lecherous bucks and skittish
nannies, and equally excited men and women.’20 The reality of supervising
livestock meant dealing with animal reproduction, even if social norms
forbid open discussion of human sexuality. Part of what captivates Angel
is the action of ‘Tess’s pink hands’ on the cow’s teats, which moved ‘so
gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as if they were obeying a reflex
stimulus, like a beating heart’ (212). As in the scene of Tess’s rape in the
forest, in Talbothays Hardy uses nearby animals as symbols of human
sexuality. During these key moments in the novel, human society and the
natural world seem to merge, forming part of a larger pastoral moment.
37
In addition to the physical presence of animals in Tess, the descriptions
of the cows themselves recall those found in pastoral verse. In the Eclogues
Virgil describes cows and goats ‘swollen with milk’ (7.3) that ‘will come
here [to the pastors] through the meadows of their own volition’ (7.11).21
No action is required on the part of the pastors. In comparison, Tess and
Angel find that the Talbothays cows readily yield themselves for milking:
‘each animal lingered for her turn to arrive’ (153). As Michael Putnam
writes of Eclogue 7, we are drawn ‘into an ideal landscape where nature
grants willing benefits to the fortunate without any balancing effort on
their part’, where the livestock ‘readily bring home full udders’.22 In
the Froom Vale, as in Arcadia, rural occupations are almost devoid of
labour. Because nature readily provides what is needed, the shepherds
can dedicate themselves to amorous pursuits.
Pastoral motifs quickly cumulate as music also suffuses Tess’s
time among the animals and swains. As Rosenmeyer notes, ‘the
circumscribed status of love in the pastoral is borne out also by its close
connection with music’.23 While they tend to their flocks, Arcadian
shepherds are perpetually making music about love, usually singing
to the accompaniment of simple instruments. The love between Angel
and Tess arises in just such a context, as Angel plays sweet music while
relaxing amid the ‘Talbothays nymphs and swains’ (195). Tess first
encounters Angel in the context of music: ‘Songs were often resorted
to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed
sign of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this
request burst into melody’ (157). Angel embraces his role as a musician,
and is often found ‘strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at
a sale’ (168). Moreover, a critical moment in Tess and Angel’s budding
relationship is pervaded with music, when Tess secretly observes Angel
performing outdoors at dusk:
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation
which she had described as being producible at will by gazing
at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she
undulated upon the thin notes of the second-­hand harp, and
their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears
into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made
visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the
garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-­smelling
weed-­flowers glowed as if they would not close, for intentness,
and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound. (175)
38
This scene combines a variety of pastoral tropes; here we find the shepherd
producing his plaintive love song in the locus amoenus. Although Angel,
and not Tess, creates the music, she (like the plants) reacts in a way that
demonstrates an implicit understanding of its message. She is an active
participant in this pastoral communication, and her sensitivity to the
language of music marks her as a strongly pastoral character.
Despite the pleasant circumstances of Talbothays, Hardy reveals
that there is trouble in paradise, and his means of doing so is subtle but
unequivocal. To illustrate this with a particularly revealing example, I
would like to probe a classical allusion that occurs at a turning-­point
approximately half-­
way through the novel, shortly after Angel has
confessed his love for Tess. Angel has returned home to broach the topic
of marriage with his urbane family, who are embarrassed by his newly
acquired rustic habits. Angel, ‘now an outdoor man’, is ‘accustomed to
the profuse dapes inemptæ of the dairyman’s somewhat coarsely laden
table’ (197).24 The Latin phrase literally translates as ‘unbought feasts’.
Although this translation makes sense in this scene’s context, Hardy’s
allusions must be treated carefully because he used them frequently
and purposefully. As Marlene Springer explains in Hardy’s Use of
Allusion, his work demonstrates ‘an intricate use of abundant allusion . . .
References from [his] extensive reading were an integral part of Hardy’s
style from his first to his last published novel.’ Hardy frequently used
literary allusions, not only to add a new level of depth to his fiction, but
also to enhance the depth of his messages – ‘to clarify his intention and
to manipulate the responses of the educated reader’.25 This brief allusion
provides a convenient frame through which we can read the novel’s
tensions between realism and pastoral idealism.
The source of Hardy’s allusion is Horace’s second Epode, a complex
poem that is not a pastoral ode to country living (as it is sometimes
read), but rather an anti-­pastoral satire that wonderfully mirrors Hardy’s
depiction of Angel as a cultured gentleman with pastoral daydreams. The
majority of the poem initially appears to be a nostalgic nod to the virtues
of a pastoral lifestyle: ‘Happy is he who, like the men of old, far from the
troubles of business, cultivates his paternal fields with his own oxen, free
from any usury … who shuns the city-­center and the proud doorsteps of
influential city folk’ (1–8).26 This lucky man is thought to enjoy a way
of life quite similar to that at Talbothays: ‘in a secluded valley he gazes
out upon his wandering herds of lowing cows’ (11–12). The speaker
then reflects upon the abundance of natural foods, the beautiful scenery,
39
and the peaceful rural lifestyle that a shepherd enjoys, finally adding,
‘who amid these scenes would not forget the distressing cares which
love possesses?’ (37–38). The speaker next considers that a ‘chaste wife’
would be an excellent helpmate in such a setting: she could help out with
duties like milking (‘draining the distended udders’), and in the evening
she could prepare a simple, homegrown meal (dapes inemptas) for her
hard-­working husband (39–48).
However, the poem’s last four lines completely reverse the combined
effect of the previous sixty-­six: ‘When he had spoken thus, Alfius,
usurer and would-­be rustic, plied his financial trade in the usual fashion’
(67–70).27 Horace thus satirizes a man who pretends to be something
he never was and never will be. Furthermore, the pastoral image Alfius
creates is decidedly unrealistic. As Lindsay Watson explains, the ode ‘is
riddled throughout with distortions and downright errors’, which Horace
evidently included to expose Alfius’s delusion, and ‘Critics have often
noted the disconcerting lopsidedness of the picture which the poem
offers of country life … Instead, the tone is relentlessly idealizing.’28
The theme of idealization thus returns us to Angel, who will similarly be
disabused of his idealistic naïveté.
There are a remarkable number of corollaries between the context
of Hardy’s allusion and the scene in which it occurs. When visiting his
family, Angel reveals that he is determined to stay a rustic in Talbothays.
He extols the virtues of country living and ponders, ‘What kind of wife do
you think would be best for me, as a thrifty hard-­working farmer?’ (233).
Thinking of Tess, Angel specifies that she should be ‘pure and virtuous’,
and ‘chaste as a vestal’ (234). Moreover, ‘ought she not primarily to be
able to milk cows, churn good butter, make immense cheeses; know how
to sit hens and turkeys, and rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers
in an emergency, and estimate the value of sheep and calves?’ Angel
and Alfius envision the same, perfect wife for themselves – a chaste and
capable milk-­maid. Also, Alfius’s conception of the countryside as an
escape from the cares of love reflects Angel’s misguided preoccupation
with Tess’s virtue and chastity. Accordingly, after meeting Tess, Angel
exclaims, ‘What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid
is!’ (172)
Hardy possessed an intimate knowledge of Horace and his works,
and it is safe to say that even an apparently minor allusion to him was
not unintentional. As L. M. Findlay states, ‘Hardy’s affection for the
poetry of Horace is beyond dispute … Hardy’s fiction and the Life are
40
punctuated throughout by references drawn from the whole Horatian
canon.’29 Indeed, pastoral literature is known for being highly intertextual.
As Paul Alpers explains, ‘the pastoral poet depends on prior usages and
texts, either accommodating their grander modes to bucolic modesty,
or imitating, echoing, and adapting . . . the intertextuality of pastoral
brings poet and reader(s) together in a literary space.’30 As has been seen
throughout the Talbothays episode, Hardy echoes and adapts pastoral
conventions to fit his own purposes, and the allusion to Horace’s Epodes
is a sly but remarkable revelation of a general anti-­pastoral theme in Tess.
This satiric, intertextual character of Hardy’s classical allusions is
evident when Angel explicitly quotes Horace’s Ode 1.22 on his wedding
night, immediately before confessing his past transgressions to Tess.
‘“Integer vitae”, says a Roman poet, who is strange company for St Paul:
The man of upright life, from frailties free,
Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.’ (317)
Angel cites these lines to help explain why he feels the need to clear his
conscience, but, as in the case of ‘dapes inemptae’, the double meanings
of Horace’s poetry confound his stated intentions. The Ode, like the
Epode, is satiric, although this is not obvious at the beginning of the
poem. Because this allusion is more obvious, critics have called attention
to this tactic of Hardy. As Springer explains, ‘the ode, with its first line
frequently used out of context to support the moral life, is in its entirety
an ironic comment on just such cloistered virtue, the poet ultimately
affirming his greater reliance on a woman’s love’.31 Moreover, in his
commentary on Horace’s Epodes and Odes, Daniel H. Garrison makes
the connection between this Ode and Epode 2: where in the Epode Horace
‘gave pretty expression to the trite joys-­of-­country-­life theme’, now he
is ‘felicitous in his statement of the nothing-­can-­hurt-­the-­pure-­of-­heart
idea … This opening, in fact, sounds like a respectable Stoic precept, but
Horace gradually leads us on until we realize the nature of the joke.’32 In
Angel’s case, the irony or joke is that he uses this poem as a reminder of
the holy virtue he seeks to attain after having once ‘plunged into eight-­
and-­forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger’ (318). The poem also more
subtly implies that Angel will ultimately abandon the misguided pastoral
ideals that cause him to reject Tess and will accept his love for her. By
alluding to another of Horace’s poems in connection with Angel, Hardy
continues to undermine Angel’s naively idealistic views.
The allusion to Horace neatly summarizes the destructive pastoral
mindset that Angel adopts in his relationship with Tess, wherein (to
41
borrow Watson’s description of Alfius) he relentlessly idealizes her and
loses sight of reality. Angel persists unswervingly in this line of thought
until the hollowness of his pastoral ambitions is revealed on his wedding
night. Throughout his stint at Talbothays, Angel actively attempts to place
Tess within an imaginary pastoral context. As the pair stroll through the
pasture in the early morning, and ‘seemed to themselves … as if they
were Adam and Eve’, Angel attempts to complete the pastoral image: he
calls Tess ‘Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half-­teasingly –
which she did not like because she did not understand them’ (185–86).
Ironically, the two names Angel ascribes to Tess embody the division
between his ideals and reality: Artemis is a chaste goddess of virginity,
but also of childbirth; Demeter’s fertility is reminiscent of Talbothays,
but she is a mother who was betrayed by her child’s father (Zeus). The
implications of this polysemy are lost on Angel, and although Tess does
not comprehend his references, she chafes because she implicitly realizes
that Angel is idealizing her on some level.
By this point in the novel, it is clear that Angel is actively attempting
to construct his own pastoral fantasy with himself as swain and Tess as
the chaste object of his desires. His movement from city to countryside
is essentially a whimsical and self-­conscious act: ‘Early association
with country solitudes had bred in him an unconquerable, and almost
unreasonable, aversion to modern town life … Farming – either in
the Colonies, America, or at home – farming at any rate … that was a
vocation which would probably afford an independence’ (167–68). It is
an ideal of the country life rather than its reality that interests Angel.
While idealism by itself is not blameworthy, in Angel’s case it is an
affectation that stems from his study of pastoral literature. When he first
came to Talbothays, he spent his time ‘reading a good deal’, in addition
to strumming on his harp. One line in particular makes clear Angel’s
pastoral preoccupation: ‘He observed [Tess’s] dejection one day when
he had casually mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient
Greece’ (179). Tess attributes her dejection to Angel’s tendency to place
her in a historical and literary context: ‘Because what’s the use of learning
that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in
some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act
her part; making me sad, that’s all’ (180). As when Angel compared her
to goddesses, Tess implicitly senses that she is playing a character in
Angel’s pastoral fantasy, a move which she resists. This scene reveals an
artificial aspect of Angel’s character and interactions with Tess: he has had
42
the pastoral on his mind throughout his stay at Talbothays. His fondness
for the harp and animal husbandry are not accidental manifestations of
the pastoral; rather, they are part of a concerted effort to manufacture a
pastoral lifestyle for himself. Here he has outdone Alfius, because he is
literally attempting to live the dream. Angel’s reference to pastoral life
in ancient Greece is also another subtle signal that Hardy is consciously
adapting and playing with the pastoral tradition. This scene highlights
the problematic gap between ideals and reality, a separation upon which
the pastoral relies.
Rather than looking at Tess, Angel looks through her to his
conception of the Golden Age. Unsurprisingly, his love for Tess rests
upon shaky ground: ‘He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally
and fancifully … He had entertained no notion … that such charms as he
beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes’ (289–
90). As the novel’s happy interlude approaches its end, the deleterious
nature of Angel’s fondness for pastoral ideals is emphasized. Once Tess
confesses that she is not the supposed ‘virginal daughter of Nature’, Angel
criticizes her for failing to corroborate his pastoral preconceptions: ‘O
Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case. You were one person: now
you are another. My God – how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque –
prestidigitation as that!’ (325) The ‘prestidigitation’ in this case applies
only to Angel’s outlook, as Tess has not changed. Angel insists that his
ideals are somehow more authentic than reality, and he concludes that
Tess is less real than his pastoral caricature of her: ‘I repeat, the woman
I have been loving is not you … Another woman in your shape.’ The
narrator decisively weighs in on the source of Angel’s error: ‘Clare’s
love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability.
With these natures corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than
corporeal absence, the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently
drops the defects of the real’ (344). By exposing Angel’s fondness for
‘corporeal absence’, Hardy criticizes the fundamental pastoral element
of nostalgia, that desire to recover what is unrecoverable. It appears that
there is something wrong with the pastoral impulse itself, as a perverse
craving for nostalgia is what drives Angel to crush Tess.
Although Tess is clearly the victim in this scenario, to some extent
she is complicit in a larger desire to escape reality through pastoral ideals.
This has already been seen in her decision to leave Marlott for Talbothays.
While Angel idealizes the farmer’s life, Tess idealizes a pagan state of
nature. Angel’s idealism may be particularly artificial and harmful, but
43
it is Tess’s that firmly stamps the novel as an anti-­pastoral. If only Angel
were misguided, the story would simply return to the pastoral by positing
Tess as a representative of country values in contrast to the shallowness
of Angel’s cultivated rusticity. However, despite her reservations, Tess
cannot help but idealize Angel. As the two walk through the countryside
together at dawn, to Angel ‘She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a
soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught
the cold gleam of day from the north-­east; his own face, though he did
not think of it, wore the same aspect to her’ (185–86). Angel becomes
a ‘divine being’ in Tess’s eyes, merely because she desires him to be so
(288). However, Angel loses his idyllic appearance once he rejects Tess,
who is left to reconcile her idealization of Angel with her experience of
the real person.
Tess’s love for Angel is only an instance of her general desire to
escape from her day and age, a pastoral urge which has accompanied
her throughout the novel. Tess is attracted to Angel’s naturalistic ethical
system, as it promises her relief from the Christian ethos that dominates
her society and condemns her as a fallen woman. But what Tess really
wants is not just Angel’s approbation, but what it represents: a return
to a state of nature, a pagan prehistory wherein she can escape social
stigma. In other words, Tess desires to return to the Golden Age, and hers
is the generalized nostalgia that underlies the pastoral itself. Ironically,
while Angel pursues his pastoral ideals by escaping to the countryside,
Tess already lives in the country and idealizes a past time to which she
cannot escape. In Marlott, Tess flees society for nature. Similarly, after
she flees Talbothays, she spends a fearful night cowering in the woods;
upon waking, she was ‘ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night,
based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an
arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature’ (386). Tess
reasons that her problem is not Marlott, Talbothays, or Angel, but society
and its moral codes. However, the state of nature which she imagines
does not exist, and she cannot return to it. As in Angel’s case, pastoral
nostalgia – which initially promises relief – actually heightens her misery
and drives her to a tragic end.
It is in establishing this inevitable connection between the pastoral
impulse and tragedy that Hardy criticizes the pastoral itself, thereby
creating an antipastoral of Tess. Eleanor Leach observes that when
the pastoral verges on tragedy, ‘sometimes the pastoral world must be
rejected, and often again with sorrow, because it becomes known for
44
a wishful fiction, an illusion of something unattainable and unreal’.33
However, in Tess’s case Hardy shows what happens when the pastoral
vision is not rejected, but pursued to its bitter end.
Burdened with an insatiable nostalgia for a state of nature after
having been rejected by Angel, Tess is uprooted from Arcadia and feebly
attempts to recapture her pastoral life at Talbothays. Tess intermittently
works at other dairies, but ‘mentally she remained in utter stagnation …
Her consciousness was at that other dairy; at that other season; in the
presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there; he who, the
moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like
a shape in a vision’ (378). In other words, Tess’s ideals are rooted in her
pastoral experience at Talbothays, and Angel’s disappearance replaces
them with an intense and futile nostalgia. Regardless of her physical
circumstances, she is psychologically wedded to her illusory experience
of the pastoral.
As Tess attempts to recapture her lost golden age, she continuously
flees society, whose moral codes she believes to be the source of her
difficulties. When she runs out of money, she stubbornly pursues
agricultural work, ‘fearing towns, large houses, people of means
and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From that
direction of gentility black care had come. Society might be better than
she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had no proof of
this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its purlieus’ (381).
Tess is willing to endure the cruelest hardships so long as they present the
possibility of a pastoral life.
Tess’s situation deteriorates rapidly the more tenaciously she attempts
to escape society for a state of nature. Her nadir is at Flintcomb-­Ash,
where she is reduced to a decidedly unromantic state of nature. Flintcomb-­
Ash contrasts with Talbothays in almost every way: it is characterized by
desolation, brutality, and back-­breaking labour. If Talbothays offered an
illusory glimpse of Arcadia, the hard-­scrabble farm gives no hint that
Arcadia has ever existed. It is worth noting how Hardy inverts pastoral
animal imagery here. Instead of the personable, fertile, and domesticated
animals of Talbothays, here we learn that ‘strange birds from behind the
north pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-­Ash; gaunt
spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes
of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions’ (397). Moreover Tess
is reduced from animal overseer to beast of burden. She and Marian are
found ‘crawling over the surface of the former [earth] like flies’ (394);
45
the birds only take interest in her insofar as she uncovers ‘something
or other that these visitants relished as food’ (397). At Flintcomb-­Ash
the reciprocal human-­animal interactions found in the pastoral have
collapsed into offensive mummery, precisely at the time when Tess has
gone as far as she can in attempting to return to a state of nature.
At this point Tess’s will to escape society is finally broken, and as
she finally abandons her ideals and hope for Angel, she reunites with
Alec and travels to Sandbourne. Nevertheless, she and Angel manage to
share a final, fleeting, pastoral moment. After she murders Alec, Tess and
Angel travel together into the depths of the New Forest. Knowing that
the end is near, they make a final attempt to recapture their lost pastoral
ideals by adopting a false sense of timelessness: ‘Their every idea was
temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two children’ (526).
Stumbling across a luxurious and unoccupied mansion (a final locus
amoenus), Angel declares ‘Rest at last!’ and the two spend their last days
living for the moment and attempting to forget about society and the
outside world (528). As Tess states, ‘I am not going to think outside of
now. Why should we?’ (530) Tess and Angel attempt to reconstruct their
own Arcadia within the mansion – a timeless, pastoral inner-­circle where
they can escape the unsettling effect of nostalgia:
almost without their being aware, five days had slipped by;
in absolute seclusion, not a sight or sound of a human being
disturbing their peacefulness – such as it was. The changes of
the weather were their only events, the birds of the New Forest
their only company. By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of
any incident of the past subsequent to their wedding-­day. The
gloomy intervening time seemed to sink into chaos, over which
the present and prior times closed as if it never had been. (531)
Ironically, Tess and Angel use a modern, man-­made structure to escape
the forces of modernity. Although they are secluded in the midst of the
forest, they take shelter among the rich furnishings of the mansion,
and this contrast exposes the inadequacy of their Arcadian retreat. This
pastoral moment mimics the timeless aspect of the Golden Age, except
that it is actually ephemeral, and reality always lurks at the margins,
threatening to break in.
The culmination of the novel’s anti-­pastoral theme occurs shortly
afterwards at Stonehenge, where Tess comes closest to realizing
her pastoral dream at the very moment she is sacrificed to her ideals.
Stonehenge represents Tess’s nostalgia for a shadowy, pagan past
46
wherein she can escape social law. Driven at last from their temporary
Arcadia, Tess and Angel stumble upon the monument, which seems to
possess a strange power. ‘The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced
a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-­stringed harp’ (534).
In contrast to Angel’s second-­hand harping, Stonehenge embodies the
pastoral impulse in its primal music, which exerts an immediate effect
upon Tess:
‘It is Stonehenge!’ said Clare.
‘The heathen temple, you mean?’
‘Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the D’Urbervilles!
... Well, what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter farther
on.’
But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an
oblong slab that lay close at hand. (535)
The ruins represent the timeless source of Tess’s nostalgia which she has
been seeking throughout the novel, an Arcadian Golden Age located ‘in
a primordial past in which human anxieties had not yet surfaced’.34 She
therefore stops here, stating ‘I don’t want to go any further, Angel …
One of my mother’s people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of
it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I
am home’ (535–36). Ever since her pastoral life in Talbothays vanished,
Tess was continuously on the move – either fleeing society or pursuing a
state of nature. By returning home in this mythic sense, Tess signals the
fulfillment of her pastoral nostalgia, and the final phase of the novel is
accordingly titled ‘Fulfilment’.
However, Tess’s return also represents her own demise, for pastoral
idealism and reality are ultimately incompatible. Angel tells Tess, ‘I
think you are lying on an altar’, to which she replies, ‘I like very much
to be here … It is so solemn and lonely – after my great happiness – with
nothing but the sky above my face. It seems as if there were no folk in
the world but we two’ (536). The tragedy of this admission surfaces when
Tess inquires, ‘Did they sacrifice to God here?’ to which Angel replies,
‘No … to the sun’ (537). At this moment, Tess is marked as the sacrificial
victim to her own pastoral nostalgia, which idealized a natural pagan
existence. Tess’s fulfillment is not to be had in this world: in achieving
her ideal she loses her life. Tess and Angel seem to realize finally the
futility of their pursuit. Angel’s only request to Tess’s captors is, ‘Let her
finish her sleep!’ implying that Tess can fulfill her ideals only in dreams.
Similarly, upon finally waking, Tess states that she is ‘almost glad’ that
47
‘they have come for me … This happiness could not have lasted – it was
too much – I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise
me’; her last words are ‘I am ready’ (539). In these final moments Tess
accepts that her ideal of the pastoral, which she and Angel have been
feigning, is antithetical to the tenacious reality that always overtakes it.
By the end of Tess it is clear that there is something inherently
wrong with the pastoral, insofar as its pursuit engenders tragedy. Tess
and Angel imagine an idyllic but unattainable way of life. After catching
onto the ideal of Arcadia at Talbothays, they do not return to their lives
with a sense of renewal; rather, they suffer from an acute awareness of
the insurmountable barrier that divides the real and the ideal. In other
words, through Tess and Angel’s efforts to achieve their pastoral ideals,
the novel reveals that the pastoral fosters a tragic sense of life that is
increasingly unbearable the more it is pursued.
Given its tendency to subvert the pastoral’s fundamental themes, Tess
not only breaks the bounds of the pastoral but becomes truly anti-­pastoral.
By understanding the extent to which Hardy defies pastoral expectations,
we may gain a better appreciation of his ambivalent position as an author
of the vanishing English countryside. As Michael Millgate writes, ‘Hardy
in his mature years was rarely tempted to indulge in automatic nostalgia
for the past. He was always deeply conscious of the process of change
itself and of the many good and bad relics of earlier days and ways which
were constantly being swept away.’35 Like other pastoral authors, Hardy
wrote of the countryside for an urban audience. However, as Tess shows,
he resisted simple pastoral nostalgia and did not fall back on pastoral
conventions without subtly challenging them.
NOTES
1
For example, see Robert Y. Drake Jr., ‘The Woodlanders as Traditional
Pastoral’, Modern Fiction Studies 6.3 (1960), pp. 251–57; Michael Squires, ‘Far
from the Madding Crowd as Modified Pastoral’, Nineteenth-­Century Fiction 25.3
(1970), pp. 299–326; Harold E. Toliver, ‘Hardy’s Novels of Scene and Manners’,
in Pastoral: Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971); Robert Langbaum, ‘Hardy: Versions of Pastoral’, Victorian Literature
and Culture 20 (1992), pp. 245–72; and R. P. Draper, Thomas Hardy, Three
Pastoral Novels: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The
Woodlanders: A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
2
Langbaum, Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 248.
3
Ibid.
4
Squires, Pastoral Novel, p. 18.
48
5
See Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the
European Pastoral Lyric (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004) for a useful
breakdown of these pastoral motifs and their significance.
6
These views are often associated with William Empson, Raymond Williams,
and Renato Poggioli. Empson famously defines the pastoral as the ‘process of
putting the complex into the simple’. See Williams, The Country and the City
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) for an in-­depth exploration of the
contrast between the country and the city (and the socio-­political implications of
pastoral). Poggioli does not offer a succinct definition of the pastoral, but states
that ‘[t]he psychological root of the pastoral is a double longing after innocence
and happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration but merely
through a retreat’; The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral
Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 1.
7
R. P. Draper, ‘Hardy and the Pastoral’, Thomas Hardy Journal 14.3 (1998),
p. 53.
8
Walter Davis, ‘Masking in Arden: The Histrionics of Lodge’s Rosalynde’,
Studies in English Literature 5.1 (1965), p. 153.
9
All quotations from Tess are from Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Further
references from the novel will be included in parentheses in the text.
10
J. T. Laird, The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), p. 153.
11
Jeremy V. Steele, ‘Which Ovid in the Hay-­Shed? A Note on Tess of the
d’Urbervilles’, Notes and Queries 24 (1977), p. 431.
12
Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, pp. 186–87.
13
Davis, ‘Masking in Arden’, p. 152.
14
Robert Coleman, ‘Introduction’, Eclogues (Cambridge University Press,
1977), pp. 6–7.
15
Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (New
York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 40–41.
16
Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), p. 61.
17
Thomas Hardy, ‘Preface’, Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Robert C.
Schweik (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 5–6.
18
Thomas Hardy, ‘General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912’, Tess of
the d’Urbervilles, ed. Sarah E. Maier, 2nd ed. (Peterborough: Broadview, 2007),
pp. 398–99.
19
Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, p. 131.
20
Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, p. 133.
21
Virgil. Eclogues, ed. Robert Coleman (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
The verses are cited in parentheses in text in the following format (Ecologue.
Line).
22
Michael Putnum, Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton
University Press, 1970), p. 225.
49
23
Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, p. 85.
The textual history of this passage yields useful information. The phrase
dapes inemptae was a late addition to the text and one over which Hardy
laboured. It is present in the text of the Graphic, but it is not found in the novel’s
manuscript, where Hardy first wrote ‘the dairyman’s heavy meals’, which he then
crossed out and replaced with ‘the punctual and heavy meals’ (230). Because
Hardy eventually settled on a Latin phrase (of which there are relatively few in
the novel), we have sufficient reason to inquire as to his motivations.
25
Marlene Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion (London: Macmillan, 1983),
pp. 2–4.
26
All quotations from Horace refer to Horace, Epodes, ed. David Mankin
(Cambridge University Press, 1995). Line numbers are in parentheses in text.
Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.
27
See Lindsay C. Watson, A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes (Oxford
University Press, 2003), for this translation (p. 75).
28
Watson, A Commentary, p. 80.
29
L. M. Findlay, ‘Horace’s Carmen Saeculare and Jude the Obscure’, Notes
and Queries 24.5 (1977), p. 428.
30
Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 81.
31
Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion, p. 137.
32
Daniel H. Garrison, Horace: Epodes and Odes, A New Annotated Latin
Edition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 235.
33
Eleanor Winsor Leach, Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 46.
34
Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 21.
35
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford University
Press, 2004), p. 38.
24
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50
THE RED GHOST AND THE NO-­MOON
MAN: MASCULINITY AS OTHER IN
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
TRACY HAYES
This paper is concerned with ideas of Otherness that have yet to be
recognized by modern critics of both Hardy and gender studies. To date
examinations of the Other in literature have generally been concerned
with representations of women, or of characters whose ethnic origins
differ from that of the white, middle-­class European or American male.
Post-­colonial criticism has dwelt at length upon representations of the
‘Native’, Marxist literary theory has highlighted contextual concerns
regarding the netherworld of the poor and the working classes, and
through Queer theory attention has been paid to the marginalization of
non-­normative sexualities. However Hardy’s novels are able to be read
as representing specific liminal masculinities that can be designated as
Other, using concepts of gender arising from Victorian discourses of
evolutionary biology and psycho-­sexuality.
Freud’s theory of das Unheimliche, or the Uncanny, incorporates that
which is eerie, belonging to ‘the realm of the frightening, of what evokes
fear and dread’.1 The Otherness of the Uncanny features in Hardy’s
The Return of the Native (1878), the publication of which The Times
in November of that year described as taking the reader ‘farther from
the madding crowd than ever’.2 Hardy’s reaction was to write as his
New Year’s Thought for 1879 that ‘A perception of the FAILURE OF
THINGS to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the
intended interest, a newer and greater interest of an unintended kind’
(Life & Work: 163). Diggory Venn and Christian Cantle can be perceived
as instances of ‘the failure of things as they are meant to be’, characters
who fail to conform to the social codes governing the nineteenth-­century
society of Hardy’s contemporaries. Within this narrative Venn and Cantle
‘generate interest of an unintended kind’, occupying a position outside
the status quo; they remain other-­worldly, sublimely unfamiliar. Freud
also states that the Uncanny ‘is what one calls everything that was meant
to remain secret and hidden but has come out into the open’.3 Diggory
Venn is a reddleman by trade who lives like a gypsy on Egdon Heath,
remaining for the most part out of sight of the other denizens, he is aloof,
51
isolated, ‘not of them’.4 As a result of his trade his skin is coloured red,
the narrator informs us that ‘He was not temporarily overlaid with the
colour: it permeated him’(RN: 13); when he suddenly looms from the
darkness the folk of the Heath believe they have been visited by ‘the
Devil or the red ghost’ of Egdon folklore (RN: 34), and Timothy Fairway
refers to Venn as ‘a fiery mommet’ who gives him ‘a turn’ (ibid).
In the reddleman Hardy has created what J. O. Bailey memorably
described as a ‘Mephistophelean visitant’,5 and more recently he has
been likened by Tony Fincham to ‘a goblin in a fairytale’.6 Margaret
Higgonet writes that Venn is ‘a riddle’ (RN: Introduction, xxv), but
Sandy Cohen describes him as a Christ-­figure ‘whose reappearance and
subsequent wandering upon the heath are clouded in mystery’.7 Cohen
sees Venn as exemplifying a ‘mysterious, mystical, spectral figure’,8 the
sight of whom arouses terror in young children – ‘“The reddleman is
coming for you!” had been the formulated threat of Wessex mothers for
many generations’ (RN: 77). Jonathan Memel points out that due to his
marginal status Venn ‘seems to absorb a cluster of meanings’, yet the roles
assigned to him by others ‘reveal more of the community’s need to cast
and perpetuate judgements than they do about Venn’s character itself’.9
Such interpretations of Diggory’s character support the contention that
he is unheimlich, unknowable.
Rosemarie Morgan has written of Venn as a voyeuristic intruder
and ‘moral watchdog’ who polices the sexual behaviour of the novel’s
female characters, checking anything deemed ‘irregular’, and serving
‘no-­one’s interests but his own’.10 Though Venn is portrayed by Hardy as
opting to remain separate from the society of Egdon through his trade, he
simultaneously performs a vigilant role amongst his fellow protagonists
and it is possible to view him as omnipresent rather than voyeuristic. He
is both an integral part of the community within the text, and vital to the
well-­being of both the Heath and its inhabitants; his character acts as the
fulcrum upon which the plot revolves. John Paterson writes of Venn’s
almost ethereal omnipresence that
he appears and disappears throughout the novel … with an
uncanny rapidity that suggests the possession of magical
powers … Apparently beyond good and evil he intervenes in,
and disrupts, the normal course of human affairs with results that
cannot clearly be established as either for better or for worse.11
The narrative contains a number of instances where these interventions
and disruptions obviate the necessity for the unknowable, or Otherness;
52
as a controlling factor in stasis, Venn’s actions are a necessary element
in maintaining the equilibrium of Egdon. When Thomasin Yeobright
wishes to return home in secret after her disastrous first wedding attempt
with Damon Wildeve, Venn is there to transport her across the heath
within the confines of his van. When Wildeve through a game of dice
cheats the hapless Christian Cantle out of the money Cantle had been
sent to deliver to Thomasin by her aunt, ‘the tall crimson form of the
reddleman slowly rose from behind a neighbouring bush’ (RN: 223);
and with a few well-­placed taunting words immediately wins the money
back from Wildeve in order to deliver it to the rightful recipient. And
again, towards the conclusion of the novel when Eustacia slips and
falls into Shadwater Weir, with Wildeve plunging after her and Clym
unsuccessfully attempting a rescue, Venn arrives at the scene where he
coolly retrieves all three characters from the water, though only Clym has
survived. Each of these incidents steers the course of the plot; each being
determined by an entity who, though he remains unheimlich, Other to all
he interacts with, also remains vital to the progression of the society he
watches over.
The combination of Venn’s other-­worldly qualities – red skin, silence,
sudden appearances and uncanny harmony with the landscape of the
heath – designate him as marginal, as Other. The character of Diggory
Venn can be read as representing a liminal masculinity through which
he can act as that which he cannot express, an unheimlich figure viewed
with suspicion by his fellow protagonists, but without whom they could
not form a fully integrated society.
While sexologists such as Krafft-­Ebing were enumerating a plethora
of sexual identities outside that of a normative heterosexuality, biologists
and medical practitioners contemporary with Hardy were actively
trying to eliminate such anomalies. Martha Vicinus has written of the
hermaphrodite that this term became a ‘catch-­all descriptor of all non-­
traditional sexual people and bodies’ throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.12 Before the appearance of Darwin’s The Descent
of Man (1871) doctors still defined gender according to a doctrine
of appropriate appearance and behaviour; they ‘sought a scientific
explanation for all biological confusion’ while they clung ‘obstinately
to their belief in the two sexes/two bodies model’.13 Hermaphroditism
was considered an aberration, often leading to stigmatization and social
isolation. Here I will discuss Christian Cantle and the place he occupies
within the text as an ‘anomaly’ who does not suffer social isolation,
53
who is in fact seamlessly integrated within the novelistic community his
character inhabits.
Christian Cantle may be described as what I call an Unman, a biological
and societal construct that can be interpreted as not displaying any physical
or social characteristics particular to either gender. Freud argued that all
humans are constitutionally bisexual, as both masculine and feminine
currents exist within everyone; to this end he insists that masculinity can
never exist in a pure state.14 I posit that Hardy’s representation of Cantle
is more asexual in orientation, he occupies a sexually indeterminate
space within the masculinity spectrum. R. W. Connell suggests that
‘opposition is not just “resistance”, it brings new social arrangements
into being (however partially)’,15 and in this way Hardy’s narrative is
able to be perceived as articulating what could be regarded as an Unman
perspective. Through Cantle Hardy presents an extreme liminality that is
not only used as a yardstick by which to gauge the masculinities of the
novel’s other protagonists, and by which they may measure each other, but
also introduces instances of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ that facilitate the
deployment of new social arrangements to accommodate them.
Cantle is the Unman to Diggory Venn’s Other. References to his
marginality are prevalent throughout the story. He is, according to one
character who rejects an advance from the hapless figure, a ‘slack-­
twisted slim-­looking maphrotite fool’, a ‘faltering man with reedy hair,
no shoulders, and a great quantity of wrist and ankle beyond his clothes’
who speaks in a ‘thin gibbering voice’ (RN: 28). Emphasis is placed upon
his designation as ‘the man no woman will marry’ (ibid) due to suspicions
that he is a ‘man of no moon’ (RN: 29), a hermaphrodite. Christian was
born during the interval between an old moon and the first appearance
of a new one, which according to Egdon folklore identifies him with the
saying ‘no moon, no man’; as his character admits of himself – ‘’Tis said
I be only the rames of a man, and no good in the world at all’ (RN: 29).
But this Unman is also included as a member of the community within
the novel in his own right – ‘Wethers must live their time as other sheep,
poor soul’ (ibid), wethers being rams that have been castrated before
reaching sexual maturity.
Grant Allen, a biologist and novelist contemporary with Hardy,
argued for the pre-­eminence of biological beauty being equated with
perfection in his book Physiological Aesthetics (1877):
The heart and core of such a fixed hereditary taste for each
species must consist in the appreciation of the pure and healthy
54
typical specimen form. The ugly for every kind … must always
be (in the main) the deformed, the aberrant, the weakly, the
unnatural, the impotent.16
He goes on to say that should any society prefer ‘the morbid to the
sound’, then that race ‘must be on the high road to extinction’.17 Through
the construction of Christian’s character we can read Hardy as ranging
himself in opposition to thinkers like Allen; in The Return of the Native
Hardy demonstrates an inclusiveness directly opposed to Allen’s
eugenicist rejection of any aberration within society. While Cantle is
‘deformed’ and ‘unnatural’ by nineteenth-­century standards of biological
conformity, he is also an example of resistance to a eugenicist dialectic –
eugenicists who feared that the inclusion of the ‘morbid’ would lead to
extinction.
With reference to the masculinity assigned to Cantle’s character by
the narrator, the novel’s other protagonists periodically exhort Christian
to ‘Lift up your spirits like a man!’ (RN: 32), and his father Granfer
Cantle at times despairs of his son’s complete lack of machismo – ‘Really
all the soldiering and smartness in the world in the father seems to count
for nothing in the son’ (RN: 382). Traditional patriarchal expectations are
subverted however by one who describes himself as a ‘bruckle hit’ (ibid);
the rest of the Egdon community do not show a preference for the ‘sound’
over the ‘morbid’, Cantle is instead instructed by Timothy Fairway to
‘never pitch yerself in such a low key as that’ (RN: 382). Far from being
castigated, the ‘no-­moon man’ is in fact accepted by his fellow denizens
of the heath.
The anthropologist David Gilmore observes that in any society
where ‘real’ manhood is emphasized there are three moral injunctions
that repeatedly come to the fore, ‘an imperative triad’, which occurs
to ‘varying degrees but is common enough to suggest that manhood
is a response to specific structural and psychological deficits’.18 Thus
according to a Darwinian evolutionary/biological discourse, in order to
‘become a man’ or prove one’s masculinity one must ‘impregnate women,
protect dependants from danger, and provision kith and kin’.19 While the
character of Diggory Venn can be read as being Other within the confines
of the narrative he also displays the potential to fulfil all three requirements
of this ‘imperative triad’, the story concludes with Venn giving up his
Nomadic reddle business in order to finally marry Thomasin Yeobright.
And though he may be considered unheimlich by Freudian standards
55
this quality does not impair his character or impede his progress; he not
only survives where Eustacia Vye and Damon Wildeve perish, but goes
on to become a prosperous farmer, a demonstration of how a liminal
masculinity may prove successful within a society which marginalizes
what it cannot readily assimilate. The Unman, however, is incapable of
enacting any component of this ‘imperative triad’; Cantle’s masculinity
is repeatedly called into question by the modality contained within
the plot, yet in a direct disavowal of the nineteenth-­century eugenicist
position, Hardy places great emphasis on ensuring that this character is
both accepted and fully integrated into the text. Through these characters
Hardy represents a ‘FAILURE OF THINGS to be what they are meant to
be’, and uses them as an instance of opposition and resistance in order to
‘bring new social arrangements into being (however partially)’.
NOTES
1
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. David McLintock and Hugh Haughton
(London: Penguin Classics, 2003).
2
Florence Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 (London:
Studio Editions Ltd., 1994), p. 162.
3
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, p. 132.
4
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2005), p. 78.
5
J. O. Bailey, ‘Hardy’s “Mephistophelean Visitants”’, PMLA, 61.4, (1946),
pp. 1146–1184.
6
Tony Fincham, Hardy’s Landscape Revisited: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex in the
Twenty-­First Century (London: Robert Hale, 2010), p. 40.
7
Sandy Cohen, ‘Blind Clym, Unchristian Christian and the Redness of the
Reddleman: Character Correspondences in Hardy’s The Return of the Native’,
The Thomas Hardy Yearbook, 11, (1984), pp. 49–55, p. 52.
8
Sandy Cohen, ‘Blind Clym’, p. 53.
9
Jonathan Godshaw Memel, ‘Some Poor Gaper: Community, Identity and
Marginal Individuals in Hardy’s Fiction’, The Hardy Review, 15.1, (2013),
pp. 11–22, p. 19.
10
Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy
(London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 66–67.
11
John Paterson, ‘The Return of the Native as Anti-­
Christian Document’,
Nineteenth-­Century Fiction, 14.2, (1959), pp: 111–127, p. 119.
12
Martha Vicinus, review of Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the
Medical Invention of Sex (1998), Victorian Studies, 42.2, (1999), pp. 321–323,
p. 323.
56
13
Martha Vicinus, ibid., p. 322.
For a discussion of Freudian gender theories from a late twentieth-­century
perspective with particular emphasis upon masculinities see R.W. Connell,
Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), particularly chapter one – ‘The
Science of Masculinity’.
15
Connell, Masculinities, p. 229.
16
Quoted by Angelique Richardson, ‘Hardy and Biology’, ed. Phillip Mallett,
Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002),
p. 166.
17
Angelique Richardson, ‘Hardy and Biology’, p. 166.
18
David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 222.
19
Gilmore, Manhood in the Making, p. 223.
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57
LESLIE STEPHEN’S BAD FIVE
MINUTES IN THE ALPS
PHILLIP MALLETT
A number of critics have noticed the resemblance between the scene in
Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes in which Henry Knight clings for dear life on
the Cliff without a Name, and Leslie Stephen’s essay-­cum-­story, ‘A Bad
Five Minutes in the Alps’, in which the narrator describes a fall which
leaves him hanging from a ledge several hundred feet above a raging
torrent. Since Stephen’s essay was published in Fraser’s Magazine in
November 1872, and the two instalments recounting Knight’s ordeal
appeared in Tinsleys’ Magazine in February and March 1873, it seems
more than likely that Hardy drew on Stephen’s piece for his own literal
cliff-­hanger.
Beyond the essential situation, the most obvious similarity between
the two passages is that in each the experience of being near death, and
expecting to die, lasts long enough for Knight in the one case, and a
figure with some obvious likeness to Stephen in the other, to meditate
on their powerlessness, and the seeming insignificance of human life.
Stephen’s protagonist has left the inn where he is staying in part to shake
off his irritation, first with a sermon which seems to him at once well-­
intentioned and insincere, and then with correspondence in a periodical
about the efficacy of prayer, which he, like Stephen himself, refuses
to credit. His somewhat arrogant though not wholly unsympathetic
stance finds a parallel of sorts in Knight’s patronizing explanation
to Elfride of the nature of air currents against a cliff face. Both, that
is, might be seen as illustrating the maxim about pride coming before
a fall.
At the same time, however, both men express views about the world
and its meaning, or lack of it, that the authors broadly endorse. Knight’s
mind traverses the ages, recognising both his kinship, albeit remote, with
the fossilized trilobite which appears to be looking at him from the rock
face, and the essential difference that he possesses self-­consciousness:
even Hardy, who could imagine knowledge of ‘Earth-­secrets’ among the
insects of ‘An August Midnight’, doesn’t ascribe self-­awareness, hope
and desire to the trilobite. The protagonist of ‘A Bad Five Minutes’ raises
questions about God’s agency, the possibility of an afterlife, and the pros
58
and cons of Comtean positivism, and answers them much as Stephen
himself did (the piece was reprinted, revised and slightly extended, in
his Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking in 1873). But despite the
courage and rationalism of both protagonists, each is deceived by the
imminence of death into miscalculating how much time has elapsed
before they escape: ‘in such moments one lives fast’, reflects Stephen’s
speaker, while Hardy’s narrator notes the ‘unusual compression’ of
Knight’s experience. What Stephen describes as becoming a ‘double
character’, as both the agent in the scene and an observer of it, applies
equally to Knight, but both make mistaken or incomplete observations.
The embodied human mind in both passages is as vulnerable as it is
powerful.
Similarly, both men begin to anthropomorphize nature, against their
better judgement as men of science and education. Nature becomes ‘an
object of antipathy’ to Stephen’s hero, who develops a ‘personal dislike
to gravitation and the laws of motion’, and views a rock pinnacle as a
‘fiend’; there is perhaps some irony in Hardy’s question, in his poem ‘The
Schreckhorn (With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)’, whether ‘the eternal
essence’ of Stephen’s mind will enter and ‘haunt’ the ‘silent adamantine
shape’ that in mood and temperament he seemed to resemble. (In the
same year as the poem, 1897, Hardy noted in the Life (p. 302): ‘In spite
of myself I cannot help noting countenances & tempers in objects of
scenery: e.g., trees, hills, houses.’) Knight too finds himself slipping into
the outlook of ‘weather-­beaten West-­country folk’ who sense a ‘feline fun
in [Nature’s] tricks’, rather than the impersonal operation of intelligible
laws. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, though not in Stephen’s account, Nature
is also made female; the scene foreshadows and emblematizes Knight’s
fear of the feminine, at the very moment when Elfride, the author of
a romance, acts out the masculine part by rescuing Knight, forced
temporarily into the role of damsel in distress. Hardy’s imagination
may have taken off from Stephen’s piece, but his was the response of a
creative artist, not an imitator.
‘A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps’ shows Stephen in a relatively
relaxed and engaging mood, and suggests why he and Hardy might have
been drawn to each other, enough for Stephen to ask Hardy to act as
witness when in 1875 he renounced holy orders, in a gesture in keeping
with the essay. Stephen’s refusal here to dismiss humanity as vile and
sinful, or to see life as joyless, must have found an echo in a young author
for whom loving-­kindness was to count among the highest values; so too
59
Hardy must have admired Stephen’s determination not to lie to himself
by pretending to a faith he did not hold. Like Hardy’s own, Stephen’s
scepticism is tough-­minded but not abrasive or militant; even his denial
of the efficacy of prayer, and doubt as to whether those who professed
to believe in it really did so, is accompanied by a degree of tolerance to
those who felt the need of a faith. There is even a moment of dry humour,
in the confession that he was not even ‘at the best of times an optimist’:
Stephen was notoriously a difficult and gloomy character.
The two men had yet to meet at the time ‘A Bad Five Minutes’
appeared, but it was in the same month of November 1872 that Stephen
asked Horace Moule for Hardy’s address, and wrote asking him for a
serial for the Cornhill, of which he was the editor. Busy with A Pair of
Blue Eyes but needing to look ahead, Hardy may very well have sought
out Stephen’s most recent published work. Stephen, though already a
well-­established writer, was only eight years Hardy’s senior, and the
class and social gap between them may have seemed less important that
their shared free-­thinking attitudes. It seems possible, even probable,
that Moule’s suicide in September 1873 encouraged Hardy to think of
Stephen as a mentor, as Moule had been; as he recorded in later years,
he was ‘mentally influenced by him … deeply’ (Life and Work: 42). But
Stephen’s personal radicalism as a thinker did not extend into his role
as an editor; he was, as he said, a slave to the demands of a magazine
audience. In 1877, having chided and coached Hardy through the
writing of Far from the Madding Crowd and The Hand of Ethelberta,
he declined The Return of the Native, fearing from the outline Hardy
sent him that the story would prove ‘dangerous’. Thereafter the two
met only infrequently, though they remained on good terms. But for
some five years, during which Hardy abandoned architecture to become
a full-­time writer, and embarked on his marriage to Emma, Stephen
played a significant part in Hardy’s intellectual and even his emotional
life. ‘A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps’ suggests why he might have
done so.
The text produced here is that of the original publication, in Fraser’s
Magazine. None of the additions and amendments made when it came
out in volume form in Essays in Freethinking affects either the tone
or argument of the piece, and they have not been noted. Stephen did,
however, add a final sentence for the later version: ‘It may be as well
to say, for the credit of the noble science of mountaineering, that the
foregoing narrative is without even a foundation in fact.’
60
****
A BAD FIVE MINUTES IN THE ALPS
It was bad weather in the Alps. The valley was roofed by a level mass of
iron-­grey cloud, behind which the existence of sun and sky was matter
of faith. Trailing wreaths of mist descended white and ghost-­like through
the gorges; an uneasy wind moaned round the projecting eaves of the
little cluster of chalets that called itself a village; from every spout a
miniature waterfall leapt into the main street – little more than a cart-­
track at the best of times, and now a mere tributary to the glacier torrent
that boiled with unusual vehemence round the huge boulders in its bed.
Inside the inn the scene was not much more cheerful. It was a well-­
known centre for the tourist population, and English and Americans
had gathered in great force from remoter districts in order to spend a
Sunday after their fashion. There was scarcely standing-­room even in the
passages, where guides and their employers formed knots, discussing in
a revolutionary temper the perverse administration of the weather. The
very atmosphere was damp and sodden: the walls reeked with moisture,
and the clouds of tobacco smoke hung heavily about the heads of the
crowd, in unconscious imitation of the natural mists outside. Perhaps it
was not unfair to assume that the Anglican congregation which occupied
the dining-­room of the establishment owed something to the want of any
counter attraction. No great influence could be attributed, at any rate,
to the eloquence of the worthy clergyman who rejoiced in so fine an
opportunity for speaking a word in season. The sermon remains imprinted
on my mind, less for any intrinsic peculiarity than for a certain reason to
be presently assigned. The preacher was a benevolent and sensible man,
enjoying a holiday well earned by energetic labours at home. No one
could have given shrewder and kinder advice in any practical difficulty,
or had a keener sense of the value of clearness and truthfulness in
ordinary affairs of life. Today he treated us to the commonplace platitudes
of official rhetoric. He enlarged upon the poor old Athanasian Creed,
alternately dealing in threats of everlasting damnation and explaining
that they meant nothing unpleasant.1 The knowledge of the utter
unreality of his sentiments prevented any feeling of dislike, but it gave
me a melancholy sense of the futility of the worthy preacher’s eloquence.
Could any prodigal son of the Church satisfy his spiritual appetite with
these dry husks of obsolete speculation? Discontented and wearied, I
retired to the reading-­room and seized upon the only available literature,
in the shape of a back number or two of a highly respectable periodical.
61
There I found that a very energetic controversy was raging as to the
efficacy of prayer.2 There was something depressing in this spectacle of
sincere and religious people hunting painfully for some proof that the
God whom they professed to adore was something more than a mere
name. Here, in this remote Alpine district, the unsophisticated natives
are as yet uninfected with the epidemic of skepticism. Had I not met a
little procession praying for fine weather at a remote mountain chapel,
and apparently believing that their conduct was just as rational as if they
had been petitioning the State for a new road? Was not the village church
filled with votive offerings, with inscriptions showing how on a given
occasion the Virgin or some favourite saint had shielded a peasant from
the descent of an avalanche, or pushed aside the trunk which was falling
on his head? Here, it was plain enough, the objects of worship were real
beings, who actually interfered when they were requested, though it is
true that they have shown some reluctance to intrude themselves into the
midst of tourists from the outside world.
But this straining and special pleading of sincere believers to prove
that the central article of their faith had really some kind of intelligible
meaning, affected me unpleasantly. Would men refine so critically about
any belief which seriously touched the interests of their daily lives?
I was seized with that queer sensation of discord which sometimes
overtakes one in certain situations. I have occasionally pored over moth-­
eaten volumes of ancient learning in a dusty library till I seemed to have
passed into a dreamland of shadowy ghosts. The phantoms of old authors
long dead and buried, seemed to be evoked from the dim forgotten pages
and to be hovering around me – not perceivable by the bodily organs,
though their presence was vaguely divined by the still embodied soul.
So unearthly has seemed the borderland between the visionary and the
actual, that I have rushed out into the world of common sights and sounds
to assure myself of my continued corporal existence. But here my mind
felt the discordant jar between the past and the present in a different shape;
a real flesh and blood human being spoke; but his voice was the voice of
the dead; the outside world, as I sat in the reading-­room, was only too
tangible and concrete; my ears were full of the voices of ladies discussing
the last inn and the prospects of the weather; my toes were in danger from
the nail-­studded boots of athletic tourists, who stumped discontentedly
through the inn and framed plans for the assault of peaks and passes. The
thought came to me that I would retire to the dim mountain side, where
human nature might be forgotten, and where, perhaps, I could find some
62
breath from the dead centuries lingering amongst the eternal hills. There,
at least, I could give myself up, without interruption, to the train of
thought that had been suggested, and, like a magician in the wilderness,
summon up the ghosts of the dead to reveal their true meaning.
Actuated partly by this impulse and partly by the more vulgar motive
of acquiring an appetite for dinner, I resolved to take a stroll in spite
of the heavens. Leaving the little Babel of distracted life, I was soon
breasting a steep slope behind the village. Every tree and every blade of
grass was soaked and saturated in wet; the path was a series of puddles
rapidly connecting themselves into rivulets; the veil of rain first softened
the outlines of the houses, and then speedily blotted out the whole village
from my sight. An hour or two of resolute tramping, and I was wet to
the skin – a mere animated sponge, living on my supplies of internal
warmth. Vigorous exercise soon put a stop to all cerebral action except
that which was concentrated on finding the way – no very easy task in
the such weather.
I managed, however, to reach a little upland glen well known to me
as offering, in fine weather, a grand view of distant snow-­peaks through
the jaws of the cliffs. It was time to return, and the demon who amuses
himself by beguiling Alpine travellers suggested the memory of a certain
short cut which involved a bit of amusing scrambling.
Whilst steadily occupied in fighting my way downwards through a
steep ravine, cloven, far below, by a vicious little torrent from a lofty
glacier – how it happened I know not, for all forms of earth and grassy
slope were obliterated at a few yards by the descending showers – I
suddenly found that I had left the right track and was descending too
sharply towards the stream. At the same time I saw, or thought I saw, that
by crossing the face of a cliff for a few yards I should regain the ordinary
route. A huge buttress of black rock descended with exceeding steepness
from the ridge above to the bed of the stream below. For the most part
it was too precipitous to allow me to venture upon it; but halfway down
some horizontal fissures had provided ledges which imitated a rude and
broken pathway. Beneath and above were giddy cliffs, but I resolved,
without much hesitation, to attempt the passage. The first step or two was
easy; then came a long stride, in which I had to throw out one hand by way
of grappling-­iron to a jutting rock above. The rock was reeking with the
moisture, and as I threw my weight upon it my hand slipped, and before I
had time to look round I was slithering downwards without a single point
of support. Below me, as I well knew, at a depth of some two hundred
63
feet, was the torrent. One plunge through the air upon its rugged stones
and I should be a heap of mangled flesh and bones. Instinctively I flung
abroad arms and legs in search of strong supports; in another moment I
was brought up with a jerk. My hands now rested on the narrow ledge
where my feet had been a moment before, and one foot was propped by
some insecure support whose nature I could not precisely determine.
During the fall – it can hardly have lasted for a second – I had space
for only one thought; it was that which had more than once occurred
to me in somewhat similar situations, and might be summed up in the
single ejaculation – ‘at last!’ Expanded to greater length, it was the one
startled reflection that the experience which I had so often gone through
in imagination was now at length to be known to me in the bitter reality.
It was the single flash of emotion which – as one may guess – passes
through the brain of the criminal when the drop falls, or the signal is
given to the firing party.
I had often made my way along dangerous ridges bounded by cliffs of
gigantic height; I had clung to steep walls of ice and passed shiveringly
across profound crevasses; a partial slip in such places had given me
some faint foretaste of the sensation produced by an accident, and the
single thought – if it may be called a thought – that occurred to me was
this electric shock of colourless expectation. I call it colourless, for the
space was too brief to allow even of conscious alarm or horror. Another
half-­second, and all thought would have been summarily stopped, as it
was when I suddenly felt that I was no longer falling; the next wave
of emotion was compounded of vehement excitement and a sort of
instinctive sense that everything might depend on my retaining presence
of mind. Desperately choking back the surging emotions that seemed to
shake my limbs, I sought for some means of escape. By slowly moving
my left hand I managed to grasp a stem of rhododendron which grew
upon the ledge of rock, and felt tolerably firm; next I tried to feel for some
support with the toe of my left boot; the rock, however, against which it
rested, was not only hard, but exquisitely polished by the ancient glacier
which had forced its way down the gorge. A geologist would have been
delighted with this admirable specimen of the planing powers of nature;
I felt, I must confess, rather inclined to curse geology and glaciers.3 Not
a projecting ledge, corner, or cranny could I discover; I might as well
have been hanging against a pane of glass. With my right foot, however,
I succeeded in obtaining a more satisfactory lodgment; had it not been
for this help I could only have supported myself so long as my arms
64
would hold out, and I have read somewhere that the strongest man cannot
hold on by his arms alone for more than five minutes. I am unluckily
very weak in the arms, and was therefore quite unable to perform the
gymnastic feat of raising myself till I could place a knee upon the ledge
where my hands were straining. Here, then, I was, in an apparently
hopeless predicament. I might cling to the rocks like a bat in a cave till
exhaustion compelled me to let go; on a very liberal allowance, that
might last for some twenty minutes, or, say half an hour. There was of
course a remote chance that some traveller or tourist might pass through
the glen; but the ordinary path lay some hundred yards above my head,
on the other side of a rock pinnacle, and a hundred yards was, for all
practical purposes, the same thing as a hundred miles; the ceaseless roar
of the swollen torrent would drown my voice as effectually as a battery of
artillery; but, for a moment or two, I considered the propriety of shouting
for help. The problem was, whether I should diminish my strength more
by the effort of shouting than the additional chance of attracting attention
was worth. If the effort shortened my lasting powers by five minutes, it
would so far diminish the time during which succour could be brought
to any purpose. I had not the necessary data for calculation, and was not
exactly in a frame of mind adapted for cool comparison of figures; but a
spasm of despair kept me silent. Help in any form seemed too unlikely
to be worth taking into account; the one thing left was to live as long as
I could, though, to say the truth, five minutes’ life on such a rack was
a very questionable advantage. The vague instinct of self-­preservation,
however, survived its reason; all that I could really hope was that, by
husbanding my strength as carefully as possible, I might protract
existence till about the time when the dinner-­bell would be ringing for
my friends – a quarter of an hour away. Well, I would protract it – indeed,
at times, a thought almost emerged to consciousness that I would make
it as agreeable as might be under the circumstances; but that, I need not
say, was a thought which, however sensible, had too much of mockery in
it to be explicitly adopted. In dumb obstinacy I clung as firmly as might
be to the rocks, and did my best to postpone the inevitable crash. Yet I felt
that it was rapidly approaching, and felt it at times almost with a sense
of relief.
It is often said that persons in similar situations have seen their whole
past existence pass rapidly before them. They have lived again every
little incident of their lives which had been forgotten in ordinary states
of mind. No such vision of the past remains engraved upon my memory;
65
and yet I have a vivid recollection of the general nature of the thoughts
that jostled and crowded each other in my mind. For the most part, I
seemed to be a passive agent, utterly unable to marshal my ideas or to
exercise any choice as to the direction my speculations should take. My
will seemed to be annihilated, and I felt like a person to whom, by some
magic, the operations of another man’s mind should be thrown open for
inspection. I was at once the actor and the spectator of a terrible drama –
the last moments, for so I then supposed them to be, of a human being
under irrevocable sentence of death. My double character enabled me at
once to realise the full bitterness of my emotions, and to record them with
ineffaceable accuracy; for I still wake at times from dreams in which the
minutest incidents of that half-­hour’s agony are faithfully reproduced. At
times, a storm of bitter indignation at my own folly would hurry through
my mind, firing me to bitter outbreaks of unavailing fury. At times, nature
itself became an object of antipathy, and I felt a kind of personal dislike
to gravitation and the laws of motion. Then, painfully distinct visions
would pass before me; I would see my friends below and listen to their
conversation, or a whole picture-­gallery of incidents from my past life
would pass before me, or my imagination would suddenly make a leap
to home scenes, and to the employment which I had left for ever. Then
I should be hurried involuntarily into an attempt to bring my mind into
that state in which I had been taught to consider it proper to await death;
fragments of the sermon to which I had just listened, or of others which it
suggested, would flash across my brain, and I should be suddenly plunged
into strong speculations which at one moment seemed to be strangely
chaotic, and at another appeared to afford glimpses into previously
hidden mysteries of the universe. Useless I felt them to be, and yet by
mere force of habit I fancied that they might be of infinite importance
to mankind, and deserving of immediate publication. O. W. Holmes
somewhere describes how, as he was sinking into unconsciousness under
the influence of chloroform, he conceived himself to be suddenly inspired
with a solution of the dark riddle of the world; he wrote it down, and on
coming again to himself found the remarkable sentence ‘A strong smell
of turpentine prevails throughout.’4 Perhaps the revelations which came
to me were not much more to the purpose, but at the moment they seemed
to be of unspeakable insignificance. And then a desperate resolution not
to die would overpower all other feeling, till a consciousness that no
resolution of mine could work a miracle overwhelmed me again, and a
moment’s blankness suspended all conscious thought.
66
Let me try to express more fully some of the wild and tyrannous
imaginings that presented themselves, or rather seemed to be presented
by some external power. Perhaps I am proving myself to be but a coward
at the best. I ought to have been calm and resigned, and, without throwing
away a chance of life, to have contemplated death with equanimity. It
may be so; and yet I confess that death approaching under such a form
strikes me, to say the least, as decidedly unpleasant. Men have died before
now in a great variety of ways, and many of them incomparably more
terrible. But some more terrible forms of the great enemy are less trying
to the nerves. When the Archbishop of Paris was shot the other day, we
all admired – and very rightly – the resignation with which he followed
the footsteps of his Master.5 When his murderers were shot, and calmly
cried ‘Vive la Commune!’ at the fatal moment, we put it down to wild
fanaticism; yet, in both cases, the sufferers did only what has often been
done by many a degraded ruffian with no more symptoms of soul than a
brute beast, who simply wished to satisfy such manly instincts as were
left in him by dying game. Life, not death, is really the difficult business
to manage gracefully; and it is but a poor specimen of the breed who
cannot go off the stage with a sufficiently good air, so long as there is an
audience to applaud. But when you are in absolute solitude, when all your
faculties are still in full vigour, when the bitter cup is seen steadily and
remorselessly approaching your lips; when the tide is rising inch by inch
to overwhelm you in some closed corner, or when, as now, you are only
waiting till the strength in your arms is no longer able to counteract the
remorseless weight which seems to be dragging you down like an external
enemy, then even a brave man has a hard task before him. I claim no more
than the amount of courage which decency imperatively demands, and I
felt very uncomfortable. But, at any rate, it is a question of confession,
not of making an ornamental story. I should have liked to be a model hero
or saint; but heroism is sometimes harder than it seems to be in books.
Thus, after the first frantic search for some means of escape, a vision
came to me of the conversation which would be taking place in some
half-­hour or so, just about the time when all conversation would have
definitely ceased for me. ‘He is late for dinner,’ one well-­known voice
would be saying; and another would be replying by a mild joke which had
become a bye-­word amongst our little party, as to my prejudices about
soup. It would not be till dinner was over, and tobacco being calmly
consumed, that satisfactory excuses would be framed for my absence. I
remembered with bitterness a phrase which I had used at starting – that I
67
did not know whether I should be back for dinner – which would probably
be pressed into the service of the speaker, to suppress all anxiety for the
time. When night fell there would be a little uneasiness spring up, but it
would be agreed that I had gone to a neighbouring inn. And not until that
hypothesis was slowly exploded by facts would it occur to anyone that
it was worth while to go and look for me, for what harm could happen
to a tolerable walker in an afternoon’s stroll?6 and meanwhile, just about
the time of that facetiousness over the soup, a ghastly mass would be
rolled down the flooded stream within a few yards of the inn. I could
follow its course in imagination down the deep chasms which the waters
of centuries have hewed in the valley below, and thence to the broad river
at a day’s journey. The remains of men lost in a glacier are restored at a
distance of generations, but the torrent is a more remorseless enemy, The
disfigured fragments would hardly be worth hunting for. They were not
a pleasant object for the imagination to dwell upon. As the lady remarks
in Pope –
One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead.7
And frightful was no word to express an object which – well! I
would try to avert my gaze, and then visions more really appalling would
unroll themselves before me: scenes from old days came back, though
by what law they were selected remains unintelligible. Why should I
have vividly remembered a certain boyish atrocity – not of specially deep
hue, and, indeed, involving nothing more than an average schoolboy
falsehood? There had been something mean about it, and it had pricked
my conscience at the time, and cost intermittent fits of blushing when
accident had recalled it; yet it had long since passed out of the category
of memories capable of producing any serious emotion. Yet once more
it stood up in its old hideousness; and there, pilloried on a bare rock,
and looking forwards to a death approaching by rapid strides, I was
positively blushing for a lie told some five-­and-­twenty years before about
eating a forbidden fruit. I have, I fear, committed many less excusable
actions since; but this wretched old crime rose up and mocked at me. My
conscience, it seems, must have been tender at that early age, and the
crime had scarred it so deeply that, under this blinding light of terror, the
mark became visible in spite of all the innumerable scratches and cross-­
hatchings that had been made upon it since. Other recollections rose in
countless throngs, of all hues and dimensions; they came from school
and college days, and from maturer life; old scenes of friendship or of
danger, of triumphs and disappointments, whirled confusedly before
68
me; but running through them all, like a recurring cadence in a piece of
music, was this detestable little memory which seemed resolved to exact
the fullest expiation possible in the time. Perhaps after all it may have
been of more importance than it seemed, and the mind have been really
roused to clairvoyance by the extremity of its tension. And then would
intrude another vision more awful by far: for an instant I seemed to see
through the remorseless crags that closed me in, and far away, by a quiet
shore and under a beautiful sky, I could see some whom I loved – but,
I could still say with a desperate effort, ‘that way madness lies’;8 and,
with a fierce wrench of the faculties, I turned back to the less appalling
realities of the situation.
A puff of wind had driven aside the wreaths of mist; and high above
me I could see towering into the gloomy skies, a pinnacle of black rock.
Sharp and needle-­like it sprang from its cloud-­hidden base, and scarcely
a flake of snow clung to its terrible precipices. Only a day or two before
I had been lounging in the inn garden during a delusive sunset gleam of
bright weather, and admiring its noble proportions. I had been discussing
with my friends the best mode of assaulting its hitherto untrodden summit,
on which we had facetiously conferred the name of Teufelshorn.9 Lighted
up by the Alpine glow, it seemed to beckon us upward, and had fired
all my mountaineering zeal. Now, though it was not a time for freaks
of fancy, it looked like a grim fiend calmly frowning upon my agony.
I hated it, and yet had an unpleasant sense that my hatred could do it
no harm. If I could have lightened and thundered, its rocks would have
come down with a crash; but it stood immovable, scornful, and eternal.
There is a poetry in the great mountains, but the poetry may be stern as
well as benevolent. If, to the weary Londoner, they speak of fresh air
and healthful exercise and exciting adventure, they can look tyrannous
and forbidding enough to the peasant on whose fields they ‘void their
rheum’ – as Shakespeare pleasantly puts it10 – or to the luckless wretch
who is clinging in useless supplication at their feet. Grim and fierce, like
some primeval giant, that peak looked to me, and for a time the whole
doctrine preached by the modern worshippers of sublime scenery seemed
inexpressibly absurd and out of place.
The reflection brought back the recollection of my friends who were
about this time thinking of washing their hands for dinner. What would
my respectable friend the clergyman say to it all? He was as little a bigot
as most men; but could he resist so tempting an occasion of pointing a
professional moral? Just before my slip I had been amusing myself by
69
the reflection that an accident on Sunday afternoon, when all respectable
persons were attending divine service, would come very well into a
sermon. Now, for an instant, I heard and saw my friend in the pulpit,
really touched by the sudden disappearance, almost as it were from before
his face, of a fellow-­creature; and anxious to say nothing to injure proper
susceptibilities, and yet unable to avoid just hinting in the most delicate
way in the world at the singular coincidence. Of course, after the fashion
of his kind, he would decline to say that it was more than a coincidence.
People of good taste have given up dealing in providential judgments in
particular cases. Perhaps it is because they do not believe in them; but
that is no reason why they should not hold them out as topics for pious
consolation to those who do; and therefore the preacher, with a certain
half-­conscious complacency, would hint that though Providence had not
actually tumbled me off the rock, it had possibly arranged matters with a
view to Christian edification.
The thought suggested a whole train of more serious reflections.
Was I, in fact, going decorously through that process which I had been
accustomed to hear mentioned in sacred edifices as preparation for death?
When the Emperor Maximilian was hanging to the cliff above Innsbruck,
the people gathered below to watch for his fall; and the priests held up
the host for his edification, and went through the proper performance
for the consolation of a man in his last moments.11 Doubtless it was a
satisfaction to the Emperor. He had been drilled for many years to go
through the ceremony, and though it was not as pleasant as a coronation,
I have no doubt that, as a brave man, or even as a coward, he would
bring his mind into the proper frame. If I had been there – Protestant
as I am by education, and inclined to free-­thinking by nature, I don’t
think I should have proposed to enter into a controversy with him on the
moment, and prove that the consecrated wafer was nothing more than a
bit of bread. A great many excellent persons would, I know, have done
so, and I should highly respect their motives. When, however, a human
being has any charm or accustomed formula which steadies his faculties
at so awful a moment, perhaps it is as well not to snatch it from him too
hastily. In such mental storms the intellect has for the time abdicated its
functions, and the emotions propel a man along what mathematicians
would call the line of least resistance. He adopts the accustomed formula
just because it is accustomed. If he has been trained to use the words
of religious resignation, they come easiest to him, and he uses them,
and the bystanders admire his marvellous constancy of mind. It may
70
indicate courage, but it may also indicate the survival of an instinct after
all power of external self-­guidance has departed. Bewildered, distracted,
and for all practical purposes insane, he goes automatically through the
performance which costs the least effort of reflection.
But for me, unluckily or the reverse, no such formula was provided.
A soldier, utterly beside himself in a forlorn hope, hears the word of
command and obeys it, because it is easier than the exertion of independent
will enough to run away. He is a hero out of sheer cowardice. Napier tells
a story of an officer who, at a critical moment, lay down behind a hedge,
and whom no insults or exhortations could stir to show a touch of manly
spirit.12 The same man, he adds, was a noted duellist, and met death
soon afterwards under most appalling circumstances with a courage and
coolness which astonished all beholders. Such apparent contradictions
are common enough, and cannot always be explained. But we may guess
that in this instance it was not the danger but the responsibility that
unmanned him in the battle; it was the necessity of going back to first
principles and reasoning coolly under fire when none of the accustomed
formulas were ready at hand.
My case was something similar. No cut and dried line of thought
presented itself. My mind had been perplexed by infinite tracts, and
sermons, and controversial papers, and the result was a drifting chaos of
precedents, which whirled madly through my head without presenting
any distinct result. I asked myself, as every true Briton would ask
himself, what was the correct and gentlemanlike thing to do under the
circumstances; but no leading case started up spontaneously for my
guidance. I was thrown back upon that most important of all questions,
which we generally avoid so dexterously: What is this universe in
which we live, and what is therefore the part we should play in it? I
had, perhaps, a quarter of an hour left in which to answer that question
and a few others. Philosophers had wasted lives upon it, and my own
previous speculations had not entirely settled the point. We are content
to live in this world from hand to mouth, and to divert ourselves at each
moment by the little signposts that previous authorities have set up,
instead of referring to any general map of the world. Here, however,
there was no signpost; or rather a distracting chaos of signposts, each
saying in its own language, ‘This is the way to heaven,’ seemed to
dance before my imagination. To reason was of course impossible; but
with a rapidity unknown at other moments, each alternative seemed to
embody itself in concrete form. Forgotten frames of mind reproduced
71
themselves in quick succession and in a brief space. I had retraced stages
of intellectual development through which I had passed in former clays.
The world seemed scarcely real – except so far as pain and anxiety
were real – but a shifting phantasmagoria, in which all earthly objects
arrayed themselves in succession on the basis laid down by Protestants,
Catholics, Epicureans, Positivists, Broad Churchmen, Pantheists, and a
vast variety of sects. I could look as it were through the glasses provided
by St. Paul, Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius, Dr. Newman, Epicurus, Comte,
Thomas à Kempis, Luther, Dr. Cumming,13 and others, and adapt those
which best suited my frame of mind. The world seemed at one moment a
mere anteroom to heaven and hell; at another to be the whole accessible
universe; at one moment this life was merely the first chapter of a story
to be continued in an infinite series, and my soul an indestructible living
essence, whose misery or happiness was of unspeakable importance; at
another I found myself only as one amongst the countless multitudes of
animalculae which are crushed finally out of existence when you boil a
kettle of London water. In passing through the forest above, I had, from
sheer wantonness, struck my stick into a huge ant-­heap, and perhaps slain
half-­a-­dozen patriotic six-­legged citizens. Was my death of any more real
importance than theirs? A sort of half grotesque sorrow that I had not let
them alone just passed through my mind at the thought, though I cannot
say that the reflection added materially to my mental sufferings. But of
the thoughts which occurred to me I may say generally that I do not
report them as creditable or orthodox, but merely as characteristic of a
mind without fixed principles.
Some of these shifting visions, it must be added, made themselves
felt even at the time as mere freaks of fancy. Those, for example, for
which the sermon on the Athanasian Creed had probably served as
nucleus, excited what under other circumstances would have been a
sense of the ludicrous; seen through an atmosphere of horror, it became
fearfully grotesque. Everyone has read Jean Paul’s grand vision of the
soul waking up to find a godless world.14 A belief in immortality without
a belief in a God is a fantastic combination of opinion which could only
be used for imaginative purposes. To me, though I seemed to be sounding
all kinds of speculative depths and swaying from one creed to another
through almost untrodden regions of thought, that awful dream never
occurred. But, for an instant, a more hideous fancy presented itself. I
contemplated the possibility of awakening to find not that the highest
doctrines of theology were false, but that all its doctrines were true. I
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imagined a deity – for it would be profane to use in such a connection the
holiest word of human language – proclaiming to us miserable sinners,
‘Yes ! it is all true! Every ghastly dream which the imagination of priests
and prophets and holy ascetics has conjured up is, as they told you, but
a faint image of the reality. You, and countless millions more like you,
have been what you called good fellows; you have paid your bills, been
faithful to your wives, tolerably kind to your children, and on the whole
enjoyed life and kept on the blind side of human justice – (I believe that
this passage was a plagiarism from a sermon I had lately heard in some
chapel or cathedral) – but you have not provided yourself with the proper
passport; you have wickedly left out a clause in the Athanasian Creed;
and you cannot plead “invincible ignorance”, because you asserted,
without due examination, that the whole composition – whoever wrote
it – was presumptuous nonsense. Ten minutes’ more thought might have
saved you. As it is, you shall be burnt for ever and ever with the Devil
in hell.’
That ghastly nightmare, as I have said, only flashed on my mind from
some storehouse of dim childish fancies, and vanished like a bubble.
Yet the frame of mind to which such phantasms were congenial is
not, as probably it never will be, extinct. And surely it was a time, if
not for colouring the whole universe with horror, at least for weaning
myself from the present world. It is generally consoling to revile what
one is forced to leave; and theologians have provided a whole armoury of
appropriate terms of abuse. The world, they tell us, is a scene of misery
and revolt against the Divine will; human nature is corrupt; the heart of
man is deceitful and desperately wicked; nay, the animal creation is an
appalling gulf of apparently aimless evil. Such words, though they now
run glibly enough from the mouths of popular preachers, were once the
cry of anguish of noble natures; they were the expression of the revolt of
the pure and gentle against the dominant sensuality and tyranny of brute
force; though couched in the language of humility, they really testified
to the elevation of minds whom a sense of evils, which hardened coarser
natures, had goaded into an exaggerated repudiation of the existing order.
Was not my position calculated to give them fresh meaning? There
was I, an involuntary Stylites,15 cut off from my kind, with black rocks
frowning above me and the pitiless chasm beneath. No angelic vision was
required to announce my approaching fate. Death was coming with all
but visible strides. Nature looked savage enough, marking my sufferings
with contemptuous indifference. Seen through the mist of despair that
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was beginning to cloud my imagination, was it not easy to regard the
world through the eyes of some old hermit expiring in the solitudes of the
desert? I am not much of an optimist at the best of times,16 and it was easy
to paint man and nature in the darkest of tints. War, pauperism, stupidity
in high places, hypocrisy in those which are called holy, cowardice,
cruelty, ignorance, and general disorganisation of the very framework
of society; are not these things common enough to enable one to part
from the world without any bitter regret? Why not fold my arms, shut my
eyes, and pass contentedly from this distracted chaos, from which faith
has disappeared and order is dissolving – whither? That, unfortunately, is
the question. We – for I need not confine myself to the singular – are less
troubled to know what dreams may come,17 but whether there will be any
dreams. All respectable persons profess to believe in a future, but it is a
singularly vague one.
But another difficulty was really more invincible. The instinctive
feeling remained that I would not die with a lie on my lips. A certain
disposition to object to gratuitous falsehood was the only virtue on which
I had much been in the habit of priding myself; and I could not tell a more
direct lie than by professing disgust of the world. It always had seemed to
me a very fair sort of place as worlds go. I had regarded the dogmas about
the corruption of our nature and the vileness of humanity as amongst
those from which every spark of vitality had most completely departed.
I never heard a congregation describe itself as composed of miserable
sinners without a longing to contradict it flatly. ‘You are very decent
people,’ I wished to say, ‘and your hearts are not bad organs in their way,
though your brains might be a trifle more active. You are mechanically
repeating fragments of an old melody from which all sense has departed.’
My sponsors,18 I fear, were very officious in renouncing for me a world
which I love with all my heart. Up to that luckless step I intended to enjoy
it to the full. My digestion was in good order; and it was only at moments
of accidental disorder that I could agree with Pascal, or humble myself
after the pattern of à Kempis. I had meant to marry and have children,
and make a decent income, and – if it may be said without offence – to
drink my share of wine and enjoy good books, good cookery, and good
pictures. Nay, I fancied that I might do my share of work, and leave the
world a trifle better than I found it. I make no pretensions to be a hero, yet
I should not think such a life altogether discreditable.
However that may be, the world never looked more attractive to
me than from that perilous ledge, nor did the commonplaces about the
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worthlessness of this life, and the disadvantages of setting one’s affections
on things below, ever seem more unreal. The danger of eternal damnation
for neglect of dogmatic theology scarcely seemed more chimerical than
the danger of damnation for being an average Englishman. Long training
on cold water and bread, with a due allowance of scourgings, may train
a saint to regard death as a relief from a bed of hardships; but the old
Adam, as a Puritan would say, was still strong within me, and threatened
to stick by me till that last plunge through the air. The advice to curse
God and die came to Job from a very questionable quarter,19 and, for my
part, I would not curse even the world from which our conceptions of the
Divine nature must be derived.
Another and a manlier doctrine was at hand. The Christian phraseology
which has served to express the emotions of so many races and ages, has
naturally become plastic. It lends itself no better to the ascetic than to
the jovial preacher who avows and justifies his love for ‘women, wine,
and song’. The Christian may regard creation not as groaning under a
curse, but as the favoured garden of the Lord; the heathen gods need not
be devils in disguise, but dim reflections of the true Divinity; and the
flesh, instead of being a deadly enemy to be trampled under foot, may
be a serviceable ally, only requiring good athletic training. The preachers
of this doctrine somehow extenuate damnation till it need not shock
the tenderest nerves; and make out that the corruption of mankind, so
permanent a dogma in orthodox sermons, is only a biblical way of stating
Mr. Darwin’s doctrines. Their shibboleth consists in prefixing to every
natural object the possessive case of the Divine name, and in seeing
proof of paternal benevolence through every corner of the universe. If
in inferior hands, the doctrine takes a rather unctuous tone of almost
rollicking optimism, and tends to exalt the flesh above the spirit, it must
yet be granted that were it not in some sense a reflection of the truth, all
sunshine would die off the face of the universe. But was it available at this
moment? Could I take this cheerful view of my fate? If the leap that had
been set for me was arranged by paternal kindness, the mode in which the
kindness was manifested was, to say the least, mysterious. In that, indeed,
there could be no difficulty. The newspaper correspondents below had
found in the depth of men’s ignorance a perfectly satisfactory reason
for expecting no specific answer to prayer. I should not have expected
a white-­winged messenger from above to reach me a hand – however
convenient it would have been – partly because I never expected to work
miracles, and partly because, for anything I could say, the messenger
75
might have been better employed. Who can say positively that it would
not be better for the world at large if his neck were wrung five minutes
hence? Honest men before now have worked more mischief than knaves
by reason of their honesty. For my part, though prepared to defend my
life against individuals, I could suggest many reasons why a general
tribunal of the universe should be glad to get rid of me. The murderer
and thief who, in Parnell’s fable,20 steals gold, and strangles babies, and
drowns men, turns out to be a masquerading angel, and gives excellent
reasons for his apparent eccentricities to his perplexed companion.
Doubtless an angel who had tripped me up would justify himself – to an
impartial observer – as easily as I could justify the shooting of a wolf,
or the slaughter of a sheep. But then there is a painful ambiguity in these
arguments from mystery. What is there behind the cloud? Is it pure love
and care for individuals? According to Butler,21 ‘we make very free with
Divine goodness in our speculations’; it is by no means ‘a bare single
disposition to produce happiness’; and with somewhat amazing calmness
he asserts, after proving that the world is designed as a probationary state
for exercising of virtue, that to most men it proves a discipline of vice.
The Divine laboratory, in other words, turns out more refuse than pure
ore, and the destination of the refuse is unpleasant to contemplate. And
even if the old theological dialect be wrong, do not men of science fall in
with this view? Mr. Herbert Spencer22 pleasantly disperses our dreams of
universal benevolence of design by the case of the loathsome parasites
which torture, and, so far as we can tell, purposely torture the nobler
organisms. If the Divine goodness has made vile insects to burrow in
my tissues, can I be sure that my private convenience has been much
consulted in the arrangements of this universe? Doubtless it is pleasant to
believe otherwise, with the immortal Pangloss,23 as with modern divines
of the cheerful school. It would be pleasant to believe that I should escape
from my rock, that a grateful country would present me to-­morrow with
10,000l. a year, and my works be read on every table in England and
America. But our wishes are no logical support, though they are often
enough the real cause of our belief in their fulfilment. Is it so sure that
the solution of the great enigma is a pleasant one? In one form or other,
does not some dark misgiving underlie all our schemes, orthodox and
otherwise? Can we quite get rid of hell? Or if that is banished as an idle
dream, can I still hope for any kind of heaven? Will every man’s single
account be made to balance, or only the whole sum? May I not be part of
the refuse of the universe, a grain of the dust crushed and comminuted
76
by the working of the gigantic machinery, thrown aside with superb
indifference, and compensated neither here nor hereafter? That is what
the orthodox would think of a flea; and in the presence of Infinity, what
is the difference between a man and a flea? We are all like the unlucky
victims in Poe’s story of the Inquisition.24 The walls are remorselessly
closing upon us; and with all our doublings, and turnings, and efforts, to
see things in a different light, the same ghastly phantom of doubt haunts
all creeds. It is transformed, not annihilated.
From such comfortless thoughts I would occasionally, by a natural
reaction, seek relief elsewhere. Let the universe take care of itself, and
let me come to hard, tangible, unmistakeable facts. I am, whatever else
I may be, so much flesh and bones, worked by a certain amount of vital
force; a machine, with food for fuel, grinding out so much thought and
motion, and producing sundry chemical and mechanical changes in
surrounding objects. In half an hour more the material will be dispersed,
and the forces transformed, for neither can be lost.25 What was me will
be part of the glacier stream, or increasing the deposits on the flanks
of the mountains. The forces that once digested food will be producing
mere ferment in inanimate masses, and those which secreted thought will
be helping, it may be, to curl the mists through the gorges. There are no
hopes and no fears for the future, and I may take such comfort as I can
in the reflection that I, if I and my body are identical, am still part of the
bigger thing which we call nature.
I have known people who have professed to take pleasure in such
contemplations; for my own part, I confess that I felt as little interest
in the probability of my limbs being worked up like old paper into
a new product as in the fate of last year’s clippings from my hair or
parings of my nails. The various bits of matter that have formed part of
my system become supremely uninteresting to me when disconnected
from influence on my consciousness. Materialism of this brutal variety at
least has not yet produced any formula which is very serviceable under
such circumstances as mine. To take it into one’s mind is to knock one’s
head in imagination against a blank wall, and therefore not precisely
exhilarating. And yet it may possibly help to a thought expressed in the
nobler systems which are sometimes libellously described as materialist.
The essence of religion consists, according to some thinkers, in depressing
individualism. Why should we take such a keen interest in ourselves? Is
not heaven merely a device for protracting our selfishness beyond the
grave? Why not seek comfort in the Pantheist view? Death, let us say, is
77
merely the process by which the little barriers of personality are broken
down and we are absorbed into the world of spirit. We are such stuff as
dreams are made of, and our little lives are not worth caring for. As Omar
Khayyam puts it –
The eternal Saki from his bowl has poured,
Millions of bubbles like us, and shall pour.26
When the bubble bursts we melt into the great abyss of existence. Earthly
limitations are removed, and why should we regret so paltry a thing as
that which we call life? Or let me try to take the recipe by which our
positivist teachers would obliterate selfishness. Think of myself as a mere
atom in the great current of humanity, a drop in the vast river whose end
and origin are alike hidden in a mist which it is impossible to penetrate.
Give up the dream which tries to displace, as it were, the centre of gravity
of the universe, and to find a fixed shore beyond the boundless ocean. It
is all, let me say, a delusion. The only reality is here, though I seek to
discover it in an imaginary world. All my efforts to transcend the region
of experience break down as surely as the efforts of a bird to soar above
the universe. Grasp the sensible, and abandon the delusive mirage, which
is really but a reflection in my mind of what I see around me.
Let me see what comfort such a thought can give me. Let me reflect
that I have been an infinitesimal agent in the progress of humanity.
For the visionary future let me substitute the future of mankind. I
shall die and be forgotten; but my work will live. The impulse that has
been transmitted through me will be propagated onwards indefinitely.
Progress – that excellent if rather vague entity – will continue. The
world will go on getting a little better. The old strain of ferocity will
die out, and the influences of civilisation percolate to the furthest
corners of the masses. The Social Science Association will gradually
extend its soporific influence over the face of the world. There will be a
thorough system of drainage, and reading and writing will be universal.
Everybody will have a vote, and nobody will know how his neighbour
has voted. Instead of cutting each other’s throats, we shall cheat each
other before an international tribunal. Each man will become exactly like
his neighbour, and women be undistinguishable from men. Everything
will be exquisitely quiet, respectable, and humdrum. Theology, now
flickering, will go out, and we shall resign ourselves to the darkness.
Perhaps, indeed, the old models will be more or less restored under a new
and different name. We shall have a Pope, only in Paris instead of Rome,27
and he will preach scientific instead of theological dogmas. Providence
78
will be superseded by the ‘three bankers’ of the future; and the ancient
temples and worship will arise from their ashes, with the trifling omission
of belief in a deity. Whether such doctrines be true or false, they may, for
anything I know, supply the groundwork of the poetry and the religious
aspirations of the future. A positivist, or a negativist, or a materialist may
find some utterance for his emotions in the dialect of his sect; he may put
together some kind of raft to support him sufficiently through the stormy
passage of life. At present the edifice of his faith looks bleak and bare
enough, and is to the older creeds what a contractor’s row in London
is to a venerable cathedral; but it may be that when the scaffolding is
removed, and associations have begun to gather round its walls, it will
be a little more comforting to the naked and weary soul. It is the proper
thing to recognise the good in everything – even in lying, and much more
in a faith which errs by excess of candour. Nor is it proper, though it is
very tempting, to sneer at the prospect held out to us. The new heaven,
which is to be of this world and for the good of our descendants instead
of ourselves, may not be very attractive; but let us not deny that there is
some progress that way. It is the worst kind of scepticism to disbelieve
in man. Only one may safely deny that the contemplation is at present
calculated to produce a vehement enthusiasm.
I did not, at any rate, find myself rapt into a seventh heaven of
exaltation, from which such petty troubles as smashing my skull and
stopping the action of my heart seemed insignificant trifles. The top of
Pisgah28 is more difficult of access than the Matterhorn, and the view
of the promised land is apt to be hazy. Perhaps we are better than our
ancestors; war is not so savage as in the Roman days; our bishops may
be an improvement on the pagan pontiffs, and our modern revolutionists
superior to the early Christians. I am not very well read in history, and
I could not say dogmatically. But, at all events, the attitude in which
one looks upon modern developments is one of hoping against hope,
and trusting doggedly that some deeper current underlies the superficial
eddies. New forms of physical disease and of social corruption are
generated as certainly as old grievances are removed and old superstitions
exploded. The world is somehow egged forwards rather than backwards
by the efforts of a chaotic crowd of stupid people, each shoving blindly
towards his own point of the compass; those who accidentally push
the right way are generally as dull as their neighbours, and one is often
forced to say that but for the reformers one would be in favour of reform.
Is the satisfaction of having taken part in this confused scramble any
79
compensation for the loss of all private hopes and ambitions? We can
understand the soldier dying cheerfully when he knows that he has struck
a good blow or two on the right side; but the sense that one has done a
little mischief in this Donnybrook fair29 of a world is not very consoling,
even if you feel that your own faction is probably getting rather the best
of it. Humanity will blunder on pretty much as it did before; there will
be a skirmisher the less in the great battle, and his place will probably be
filled by a better man; and meanwhile the loss to the sufferer personally is
unmistakable. Perhaps it is conceivable that a youthful enthusiast might
die happy in the thought that he had added a new clause to the Ballot Bill,
and so helped the onward march of the world. The belief that clauses in
bills, or speeches, or sermons, or even leading articles, do an appreciable
amount of good is not very strong in me; and I cannot affect to think
that I have been more to the world than an ant to a mountain. We have
both, it may be, cleared away a little rubbish – a dead caterpillar or an
outlying bit of humbug – but I could not soothe myself with thoughts
of a ‘subjective immortality’ in the bosoms of the faithful. Humanity
was too big and distant, and too indistinctly related to me, to lift me
for one minute above the sense of that awful personal crash which was
approaching so speedily.
It was selfish, it may be; and our positivists promise to drill all that
alloy out of us in time; but I confess that the lively interest which I take
in my own welfare and that of a few relatives somehow prevented my
imagination from soaring to those empyrean heights whence all things
would be seen in their true relations and my own insignificance be realised.
And somehow or other one element of consolation seemed to be
wanting; what is that instinct which seems to require something like a
blessing to soothe the parting moment – some sense of sanctification to
soften the harsh edges of hideous facts? What is blessing, and what is
meant by sanctifying? Does the sentiment imply an instinct surviving from
an antiquated stage of thought or one lying in the deepest groundwork of
human nature? If too shadowy to grasp distinctly, it is not the less patent.
At present, rightly or wrongly, I did not feel as though the sacraments
administered by a High Priest of Humanity would do me much good.
I should not shrink from him as from a bit of diabolical witchcraft,
but perhaps I should be just a little inclined to laugh in the face of the
ministrant. Maximilian’s priest if no comfort to me would at least be
trying to satisfy a feeling for which a satisfactory expression has not yet
been found; his opiate has lost its power, but where is the new one?
80
From these and from other variations on the same theme no particular
comfort came, as indeed was hardly to be expected. Indeed, to be
candid, I suspect that a believer in any creed would have been highly
uncomfortable in my position. The one suggestion which was of some
sort of use came from a different and a very undignified source. Years
ago I had rowed and lost a race on the Thames, and there was a certain
similarity in the situations, for there comes a time in a losing race when
all hope has departed, and one is labouring simply from some obscure
sense of honour. The sinews of the arms are splitting, the back aches, and
the lungs feel as though every bloodvessel in them were strained almost
to bursting point. Whatever vital force is left is absorbed in propelling
the animal machine; no reason can be distinctly given for continuing
a process painful in a high degree, dangerous to the constitution, and
capable of producing no sort of good result; and yet one continues to toil
as though life and happiness depended upon refraining from a moment’s
intermission, and, as it were, nails one’s mind – such as is left – down to
the task. Even so the effort to maintain my grasp on the rock became to
me the one absorbing thought; this fag end of the game should be fairly
played out, come what might, and whatever reasons might be given for it.
It was becoming tempting to throw up the cards and have done with
it. Even the short sharp pang of the crash on the rocks below seemed
preferable to draining the last dregs of misery. And yet, stupidly or
sensibly, my mind fixed itself on at least holding out against time, and
discharging what seemed to be a kind of duty. All other motives were
rapidly fading from me, and one theory of the universe seemed to be
about as uninteresting as another. The play should be played out, and as
well as it could be done.30
Yet, before the end, I gave one more frantic glance at the position,
and suddenly, to my utter astonishment, a new chance revealed itself.
Could I grasp a certain projection which I now observed for the first time,
I might still have a chance of escape. But to gain it, it was necessary to
relax my hold with the right hand, and make a slight spring upwards. If
the plan had occurred to me at the first moment, it might not have been
difficult. But my strength had ebbed so far that success was exceedingly
doubtful. Still it was the one chance, and at worst would hasten the crisis.
I gathered myself up, crouching as low as I dared, and then springing
from the right foot, and aiding the spring with my left hand, I threw out
my right at the little jutting point. The tips of my fingers just reached their
aim, but only touched without anchoring themselves. As I fell back, my
81
foot missed its former support, and my whole weight came heavily on
the feeble left hand. The clutch was instantaneously torn apart, and I was
falling through the air.
The old flash of surprise crossed my mind, tempered by something
like a sense of relief. All was over! The mountains sprang upwards with
a bound. But before the fall had well begun, before the air had begun to
whistle past me, my movement was arrested. With a shock of surprise I
found myself lying on a broad bed of deep moss, as comfortably as in
my bed at home.
As my bewildered senses righted themselves, I understood it all. The
facts were simple and rather provoking. Before attempting the passage
across the rock-­face, I had just noted, though, in my hurry, I had not
imprinted the fact on my mind, that beneath my narrow ledge there was
a broader one, some ten feet lower down. The sudden alarm produced by
the slip, whilst reviving so much else, had expunged this one practically
useful memory completely and instantaneously. But now, as it came
back to me, I easily convinced myself not only that I had never been in
danger, and thus that all my agony had been thrown away, but that I had
never even done anything rash. It was rather humiliating, but decidedly
consoling, and in some sense comforting to my self-­esteem. As I slowly
picked myself up, I looked at my watch. It followed, from a comparison
of times, that I had not been stretched on the rack for more than five
minutes. Besides the obvious reflection that in such moments one lives
fast, it also followed that I might still be in time for dinner. I got on my
legs, trembling at first, but soon found that they could carry me as fast as
usual down the well-­known path. I was in time to join my friends at the
table d’hôte, joined in the usual facetiousness about the soup, and spent
the evening – for the clouds were now rolling away – in discussing the
best mode of assaulting our old friend the Teufelshorn.
NOTES
1
The statement of faith traditionally attributed to the fourth century Athanasius
of Alexandria. The preacher presumably comments on the words Et qui bona
egerunt, ibunt in vitam aeternam: qui vero mala, in ignem aeternum: Those who
have done good shall go into everlasting life; those who have done evil, into
everlasting fire.
2
Presumably Stephen refers to the debate surrounding Francis Galton’s article
on ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’, published in the Fortnightly
Review in 1872. Galton accepted the human value of prayer but denied its
82
effectiveness, pointing out that insurance companies did not adjust their premiums
for the pious, and noting that members of royal houses were shorter lived than
most people of comparable affluence, despite the prayers regularly said for their
health and long life.
3
Henry Knight is also said to be ‘a fair geologist’.
4
Oliver Wendell Homes (1809–1894), American poet and physician, reported
this experience in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, 1870, entitled
Mechanism in Thought and Morals.
5
Archbishop George Darboy was among those shot by the Communards in
Paris on 24 May 1871, reportedly blessing his executioners as he died. He had
refused to leave the city when it was besieged in the Franco-­Prussian war.
6
Stephen was in fact famous for his long tramps.
7
Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Cobham’ (1734), line 246. The speaker, Narcissa,
is being mocked for her vanity.
8
See King Lear, Act III, sc. 4, line 21.
9
Teufelshorn translates as ‘Devil’s horn’.
10
See Henry V, Act III, sc. 5, line 52.
11
Maximilian (1459–1519), Holy Roman Emperor, was buried at Innsbruck; I
can find no reference to the story of his hanging from the wall.
12
Sir William Napier (1785–1860), soldier, and author of History of the War in
the Peninsular 1807–1814.
13
The inclusion among the other more illustrious thnkers of Dr John Cumming
(1807–1881), an evangelical minister of the Church of Scotland who preached
in Covent Garden, and was the subject of a highly critical essay by George Eliot,
was perhaps intended mockingly.
14
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763–1825). Jean Paul’s spiritual
crisis in 1790, when he had a vision of his own death, is recounted in his Die
Unsichbare Loge (The Invisible Lodge, 1793), which was widely admired in the
nineteenth century.
15
St Simeon Stylites, a fifth-­century Christian ascetic, who lived for 37 years
on a small platform on top of a pillar. He is the subject of a well-­known poem by
Robert Browning.
16
There is an element of self-­
mockery here; Stephen was notoriously
gloomy.
17
See Hamlet, Act III, sc. 1, line 67 (the ‘To be or not to be’ speech)..
18
Sponsors: i.e., godparents at baptism.
19
See Job 2:9, in which Job’s wife tells him ‘Curse God, and die’.
20
Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), poet and essayist, and author of Homer’s
Battle of the Frogs and Mice.
21
Stephen quotes from Bishop Joseph Butler’s The Anthology of Religion,
Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), a much
studied work of Christian apologetics.
22
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), philosopher, evolutionary biologist, and
83
sociologist, and author of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, was one of the
authors whose influence Hardy regularly acknowledged.
23
Dr Pangloss, in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), who insists through all calamities
that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
24
Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum (1842).
25
Though the idea is ancient, the phrase ‘the law of the conservation of energy’
was first used in the 1850s.
26
Stephen quotes verse 46 of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam (1859).
27
The reference is to the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857),
whose plans for a Positivist church have affinities with the Roman Catholic
church. Comte’s elaborate plans for the transition to a Positivist society included
placing power in the hands of three bankers connected to agriculture, planning
and commerce.
28
See Deuteronomy 34: 1–4. Mount Pisgah is the peak from which Moses saw
the Promised land.
29
Donnybrook Fair, in Dublin, first held the time of King John, became
synonymous with brawling and violence. It was banned in 1855.
30
The ethos, and the sporting metaphor, are characteristic of late Victorian
ideas of manliness.
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84
POEMS
What Happened
after the hanging
when the black flag fluttered,
when Angel and Liza joined hands
and went on?
Tell me they went
to beg her body,
and held her in their arms,
stroked her hair
kissed her, as only a husband
and sister will do.
Tell me they bathed
the rope marks on her neck,
wrapped her in clean linen,
bore her home in a coffin to Marlott
where the villagers quietly came
to welcome her.
Tell me they buried her
alongside her child;
a proper funeral,
with hymns, prayers – the Parson there –
no skulking around
at the dead of night.
Tell me they didn’t have
to hack back the nettles
in that sad spot where
the suicides and drunkards go –
that her mother had kept
her grandson’s grave tidy.
Tell me they laid flowers
and erected a headstone
85
which said:
In loving memory of Tess
and her dear son Sorrow.
Tell me, tell me,
this is what happened.
DENISE BENNETT
A Family Tree
I stood outside by the apple tree
Beneath the damp November skies;
A powdery light lit up the night
I heard ecstatic children’s cries.
They were the red bonfires of time,
Glowing flames in the smoky air,
With surging, whirling, sparkling bursts
Of radiant fountains, high out there.
Though in my garden darkness reigned,
Where once upon this very night,
The same fun and laughter reaching here,
Filled family hearts with delight.
But now the sparklers’ starry lights
No longer dance around this tree,
Nor daughters’ laughing, loving calls
In carefree rapture beckon me.
Yet steadfastly, the tree remains,
A time-­worn lonely apple tree,
That bravely blossoms in the spring,
To cheer and reassure me.
Though when strangers take their places here
To look upon that springtime scene;
Will they ever know from that old tree,
What happiness there’s been?
JAMES LANCASTER
86
Limerick
Jude Fawley, an ambitious lad, Dissatisfied with what he had,
Went up to Christminster
Where Sue was a spinster,
And all his dreams went to the bad.
DAVID JONES
Soliloquy on the Sonnet
For Robert Mezey
The sonnet is a form now much despised,
Though rich in history and tradition.
Even when the poet has much revised
His text may be shunted to perdition.
Why so? We waste our time to speculate,
For everywhere evidence makes it clear
That indifference, disrespect, and hate
Combine to defeat the brave sonneteer.
What, we wonder, would the Bard himself say,
If he knew poets today try to hide
From that structure and form some even say
Doesn’t work anymore, really it’s died.
What do we most need now to make it go?
To join to rhyme and metre rhythm’s flow.
DAVID JONES
87
THE HORSE WITH THE RED
UMBRELLA
JOHN TRAVELL
This popular, and curiously named café in Dorchester, ‘The Horse with
the Red Umbrella’, on the corner of Trinity Street and High West Street,
immediately opposite the Holy Trinity Church, has recently placed a
prominent display on view to its customers, presenting the history of
the building, which once contained a theatre and had links with the actor
Edmund Kean and also with Thomas Hardy.
Edmund Kean, who went on to become famous as the greatest
tragedian of his day, and in the opinion of The Times theatre critic,
Benedict Nightingale, was probably the greatest ever English actor, was
born the illegitimate son of a part-­time actress and prostitute, in Gray’s
Inn in London on 4 November 1787. His maternal grandfather was the
playwright Henry Carey, who was himself the illegitimate son of George
Savile, the Marquis of Halifax.
Kean, whose childhood was very harsh and uncaring, made his first
appearance on stage aged four, as Cupid in Jean-­Georges Noverre’s
ballet of ‘Cymon’. When he was fourteen he obtained an engagement
to play leading parts for twenty nights in the York Theatre, appearing
as Hamlet, Hastings and Cato. He then joined Richardson’s travelling
theatre company, when accounts of his abilities reached George III, who
commanded him to perform at Windsor Castle.
Kean went on to join Saunder’s circus, where he suffered a serious
accident when he fell off a horse and broke both his legs. This left him
with painful swellings in his feet which affected him for the rest of
his life. In 1807 he played leading parts in the Belfast theatre with the
famous actress Sarah Siddons, who regarded him as ‘a horrid little man’
but found that ‘he played very, very well’, although ‘there was too little
of him to make a great actor’.
In 1808 he joined Samuel Butler’s provincial troupe and then married
Mary Chambers of Waterford, the leading actress, who bore him two
sons, one of whom became the actor Charles Kean.
In 1813 Kean was appearing in Teignmouth, where he was seen by Dr
Drury, the Headmaster of Harrow School, who promised to recommend
88
him to Mr Pascoe Grenfell and the committee of the Drury Lane Theatre
in London. In the meantime, Kean had accepted two engagements in
Barnstaple and Dorchester from Henry Lee, a well-­
known theatre
manager and impresario. Being very short of money, Kean walked from
Barnstaple into Dorchester carrying his four year old son Charles on his
back, while his wife followed in a post chaise with their seriously ill
son Howard. The first theatre on this site at 10 Trinity Street had been
built for Henry Lee in 1792 by Charles Curme, the architect son of a
local builder and it would have been in this theatre that Kean made his
life-­changing appearance in November 1813. Although the theatre was
only a third full when he made his entrance, sitting on his own in a stage
box was S. J. Arnold, the manager of Drury Lane, who had come from
London to see Kean for himself. Arnold immediately engaged Kean to
appear at Drury Lane on a three-­year contract.
Sadly, on 23 November Kean’s seriously ill son Howard died of
measles and was buried in the Holy Trinity churchyard just across the
road from the theatre. The doctor’s bill and the cost of the funeral left
Kean completely without funds, so he acted for a few more days in Lee’s
theatre and Lee then advanced him five pounds to enable him to go to
London and start his career at Drury Lane.
His first appearance in January 1814 as Shylock in The Merchant
of Venice was an overnight sensation and he went on to play the great
Shakespearean roles of Othello and Richard III. Kean’s career took off
and he became very rich but he rapidly lost his wealth in lavish and
dissolute living. He gained a bad reputation and finally lost all public
respect when 1825 he was sued for adultery in with the wife of Alderman
Cox, a prominent Dorchester citizen. Kean was ordered to pay the
deceived husband £800. His career collapsed and he died in poverty in
1833. His son Charles went on to have a highly successful and much
longer career than his father at Drury Lane’s rival theatre of Covent
Garden.
Charles Curme built a new theatre for Henry Lee on this site,
incorporating parts of the fabric of the earlier building. This theatre, first
known simply as The Dorchester Theatre, was opened on 25 February
1828, with Lee’s company presenting performances three times a week.
It then became known as The Loyalty Theatre until it finally closed in
1843, when the building was taken over by Godwin’s Glass and China
Stores and the theatre was then used as a warehouse store at the back of
the shop.
89
From left to right: The Mayor of Dorchester, Cllr Peter Mann; Proprietor, John Fiori;
Lord Julian Fellowes, President of the Thomas Hardy Society; Lady Fellowes; Secretary,
Mike Nixon.
The theatre structure remained intact until the building was sold in
1963 and was finally demolished in 1965. The High West Street frontage
of the building, which still survives, became The Horse with the Red
Umbrella Café in 1970. The explanation for this strange name has now
been forgotten but it is thought to have been the title of one of the plays
which had been performed in the theatre.
Thomas Hardy took a great interest in the history of the Dorchester
theatres and in 1897 had written three letters to the Dorset County
Chronicle about them and the association with Edmund Kean. In 1924,
when the Hardy Players were performing their production of Hardy’s
own stage adaptation of his novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and
attracting many visitors to Dorchester, John Godwin opened the theatre
to the public. Hardy brought several of his famous guests to see the
building. They all signed Godwin’s visitors’ book, which is now in the
County Museum. Hardy himself wrote the introduction to the book and
among the signatures are those of the playwright and director, Harley
Granville-­Barker; the author of Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie; the director
of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Sir Sidney Cockerell, and the
legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. At that time Lawrence was living as
a private in the Tank Corps under the name of ‘T. E. Shaw’ and always
signed himself as Shaw – and had done so in Winston Churchill’s visitors’
90
book at Chartwell. But Hardy always knew him as Lawrence and that is
the way he signed himself in Godwin’s book, probably because Hardy
was standing beside him as he wrote his name! His signature as he
signed it then is unusual and rare. The display in The Horse with the Red
Umbrella includes a photo enlargement of the signatures in Godwin’s
book.
Note: the main sources of this information are Ann Sheridan’s ‘Circuit
theatres in Dorchester and Bridport 1793–1843’, Theatre Notebook 53
(1) (1999), pp. 19–40, in the County Museum, and ‘Thomas Hardy’s
Facts Notebook’, pp. 324–330.)
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91
AN EXPLORATION OF HARDY’S
CHRISTMINSTER AND LARKIN’S
OXFORD
A Joint Conference of the Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin Societies:
St Anne’s College, Oxford, 28–30 March 2014
The sunny gardens of St Anne’s College, delicate with budding magnolia
and almond blossom, made an idyllic setting for the conference, attended
by a total of 36 delegates from both societies. After dinner on the evening
of Friday 28 March we adjourned to one of St Anne’s intimate modern
seminar rooms where Dr Timothy Hands, Master of Magdalen College
School, Oxford, delivered a lecture diffidently entitled: ‘Something
almost being said, twice: Oxford (largely) in Jude, and Oxford (much
less) in “Dockery and Son”.’ It proved an insightful, original talk,
relating Hardy’s early training with the architect Arthur Blomfield to key
locations in Jude the Obscure. Jude, Dr Hands said, ‘is partly a novel
about styles of architecture played out in the city. The characters define
themselves by their architectural views.’ The analysis was illustrated
with evocative images from Augustus Pugin’s 1836 book Contrasts, in
which the architect compared the glorious buildings of the Middle Ages
to the deplorable architecture of his own time. Despite Jude’s sincere
desire for what Pugin calls ‘a return to the faith and the social structures
of the Middle Ages’, he is, as Hardy shows with bitter irony, excluded
and oppressed at all points by the streets and buildings of Christminster,
because of his class. Intriguingly, in Jude Hardy expresses a far more
sceptical, ‘modern’ attitude towards the city of ‘dreaming spires’ and
‘lost causes’ than that of Philip Larkin. As a grammar school boy from
a comfortable background Larkin’s attitudes towards Oxford were less
conflicted than Hardy’s. Nor did he share Hardy’s complex sense of
architectural metaphor. He was very happy in the wartime city, despite
its austerities, and his Oxford has a touch of the Arnoldian romanticism
which Hardy so eloquently rejects.
The following morning, Saturday 29 March, after a breakfast buzzing
with different discussions, we moved to the Mary Ogilvie Lecture
Theatre for a lecture by Dr John Osborne, Director of American Studies
at the University of Hull, boldly entitled: ‘Philip Larkin, “The Whitsun
Weddings”, and the train journey that never was.’ In the car travelling
down from Hull on the previous day some of us from the Larkin Society
92
Jane Thomas and John Osborne reading at the Hardy/Larkin conference
Photo: James Booth
had been discussing the frustrating negotiations over the slate ellipse to
be unveiled at King’s Cross on 7 June to mark the fiftieth anniversary of
Larkin’s best-­loved volume. Now, in his familiar provocative manner, Dr
Osborne informed us that our efforts were misguided, since the journey
recorded in the poem had never taken place! What he meant by this form
of words, was that the poem’s wedding parties had been first observed,
as Larkin himself tells us, on a journey he had made one August to
Grantham, where he had changed trains to travel on to see his mother
in Loughborough. The final stage of the journey to London had been
added to the poem later, during three years of drafting and redrafting.
The ‘original’ journey was, Dr Osborne insisted, not at Whit and not
to London. This fact, he argued, gave the lie to the ‘biographicalist’
critics (‘biographist’ would be more pronounceable) who, according
to him, naively insist on a one-­dimensional Larkin concerned with the
immediate record of personal experience. Adopting the language of class
struggle he opposed against the ‘biographicalism’ of the ‘Larkinocracy’
93
an analysis based on ‘textuality’. He denounced the ‘sexing’ and ‘racing’
of poems. His ‘textual’ Larkin is not necessarily a middle class English
librarian. The narrator of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, as he ingeniously
demonstrated through literary parallels and echoes, could be a gay man,
a ‘hammy’ heterosexual, a macho ‘gynophobe’, a middle class snob, a
proto-­feminist, a jazz fan, a transatlantic observer, an African American,
an English academic in Wales, or even a continental teenage girl. Dr
Osborne’s lecture caused some head-­scratching, and for the remainder
of the conference was a constant focus of discussion among the
delegates.
After coffee we were back in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre,
listening to a spell-­binding reading by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann
Duffy. She began with the now classic dramatic monologues from The
World’s Wife, ‘Mrs Tiresias’ and ‘Mrs Midas’: ‘Now the garden was long
and the visibility poor’, but
that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from a branch – we grew Fondante d’Automne –
and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On.
She revealed that her own favourite was ‘Mrs Faustus’, because the wife
in this case is, like her husband, herself a morally dubious, overreaching
character: ‘I was as bad. / I grew to love lifestyle, / not the life.’
Faust’s will
left everything –
the yacht,
the several houses,
the Lear jet, the helipad,
the loot, et cet, et cet,
the lot –
to me.
C’est la vie.
When I got ill
it hurt like hell.
I bought a kidney
with my credit card,
then I got well.
Carol then read some of the intimately moving love poems from her
sequence Rapture. Particularly memorable was ‘Syntax’, with its
embarrassing emotional vulnerability expressed in terms of the historical
layers of poetic diction: archaic and modern:
94
I want to call you thou, the sound
of the shape of the start
of a kiss – like this, thou
– and to say, after, I love,
thou, I love, thou I love, not
I love you.
Readers of Hardy’s poetry will appreciate Duffy’s calculated clumsiness
of wording in this poem.
After lunch in the Main Hall the hardier among us pulled on our
stoutest shoes and set out on a walk, ‘Rude and Obscure: Hardy and
Larkin’s Oxford’ (ingenious titles seemed to be a leitmotiv of the week
end). The dense crowds could not obscure the breath-­taking beauty
of the city on this dazzlingly sunny afternoon. We were ably guided
by a team of three. Tony Fincham pointed out Hardy associations. He
drew our attention to the chapel of the former Radcliffe Infirmary, to
which a surviving architectural drawing by Hardy may be related; he
recalled Jude reciting the Nicene Creed to uncomprehending workmen
in the Lamb and Flag pub, and pointed out where Sue Bridehead felt her
spirit crushed by the narrow dark streets. Don Lee performed a similar
function in relation to Larkin, showing us the staircase entry where
the poet first met Kingsley Amis, and the toilet attached to the covered
Market in which some of the ‘ruder’ passages of his Jungian dream
diary are set. Our third guide, Professor Ken Fincham, provided broader
historical and architectural perspectives, pointing out what Pevsner calls
the most beautiful observatory in Europe, now standing free of clutter
against the blue sky for the first time in many years, and pointing out
the splendid allegorical statue high up on the wall of the Bodleian
courtyard showing James I presenting his works to Fame and the
University.
But Oxford, unlike the high serious Cambridge, offers a higgledy-­
piggledy mix of experiences. We were entranced by the huge expanse
of dappled lawn at the back of St John’s, seeming for the moment quite
deserted. Here the young Larkin had reflected on aesthetics: ‘What is
love? Shite. What is God? Bugger. Ah, but what is beauty? Boy, you got
sump’n there.’ Later, standing at the site of the execution of the Marian
Martyrs in Broad Street, our eyes were drawn to Anthony Gormley’s
statue atop the bookshop at the corner of the Turl which, urban myth
has it, is constantly mistaken by short-­sighted tourists for an imminent
suicide. And in the Market was Brown’s Café, still much as I remembered
95
it in 1963 with oilcloth and sauce-­bottles. Here my well-­heeled public-­
school contemporaries, rising too late for breakfast ‘in Hall’, would buy
fried bread, sausages and black pudding for a princely 2/6d. Musing
on our different historical and personal impressions our miscellaneous
group trailed down back streets to Christ Church, founded by Thomas
Wolsey, and featuring in Jude under its original name, Cardinal College.
Ken reminded us how Pugin in Contrasts had rendered the building
wholly pre-­Renaissance by excluding the odious classicism of Wren’s
Tom Tower.
Our musing meander then took us to the quiet cul-­de sac of Beaumont
Buildings off St John Street, site of the Royal Palace where Richard I is
said to have been born, and later the home of Larkin’s undergraduate
friend Diana Gollancz. We then took the canal route towards the now
gentrified Jericho. By this time some of us had flagged and faded away,
but the remainder continued our quest, drawn on by the polychrome
vision of St Barnabas, its tower modelled on that on Torcello Island,
Venice. Here Gerard Manley Hopkins would resort whenever he ‘wanted
a spiritual fling’. But would the church still be open after 5.00 p.m.? It
was! Our eyes were soothed by the slanting sunlight on muted gold-­leaf
in the sham medieval Italian interior. Hardy had worked on this church as
Blomfield’s assistant, and set a scene in Jude the Obscure here, in which
‘the crumpled, prostrate figure’ of Sue Bridehead, ‘forlornly covered in
a pile of black clothes’, is found beneath ‘the church’s levitating cross –
seemingly suspended in mid-­air by barely visible wires and swaying
gently’. And here was that very cross.
In a serendipitous moment of anarchic literary cross-­reference, an
i-­pad gave us access to Betjeman’s ‘Myfanwy in Oxford’:
Tubular bells of tall St. Barnabas,
Single clatter above St. Paul,
Chasuble, acolyte, incense-­offering,
Spectacled faces held in thrall.
There in the nimbus and Comper tracery
Gold Myfanwy blesses us all.
Gleam of gas upon Oxford station,
Gleam of gas on her straight gold hair,
Hair flung back with an ostentation,
Waiting alone for a girl friend there.
Second in Mods and a Third in Theology
Come to breathe again Oxford air.
96
As we sat around on the pews, tired and slightly awed, the words lightened
the haunted atmosphere. Betjeman, with his blithe, cosy Anglican
aestheticism and healthy appreciation of student girlhood, though writing
generations later than Hardy, evokes an Oxford still utterly indifferent to
the tragedies of such as Jude and Sue Bridehead.
As a whimsical-­sublime coda to our walk we found our way to the
hazy late afternoon vistas of St. Sepulchre’s Cemetery off Walton Street,
with its toppling headstones and overgrown paths, reminiscent of Larkin’s
beloved Spring Bank Cemetery in Hull. Here are buried Thomas Combe
of the Oxford University Press and Benjamin Jowett, Vice-­Chancellor
of the University. Our visit was rendered more enchantingly Oxonian by
two well-­spoken ‘down-­and-­outs’, who occupied the centre seats with
their dog, taking in the hazy afternoon sunshine flanked by a neat row of
lager cans. They joined diffidently in our discussion and one of them was
much impressed by Hardy’s poem This Summer and Last’, persuading
us to leave the photocopy with him. The walk had been billed as ‘approx.
5 miles’, and those of us who had stayed the course to the end can attest
it was at least that: at least.
A splendid dinner in a Seminar Room was followed, in the Tzusuki
Lecture Theatre, by a performance by Bernard Richards of ‘Kingers: An
Entertainment’. The programme notes insisted defensively: ‘This show
does not seek to argue the case for Amis as a writer: it is more concerned
to present the case of him as a sort of phenomenon. His status as a writer
will have to be argued elsewhere.’ Richards impersonated the vain,
philistine, sexist novelist with considerable panache, and the audience
was laughing and wincing by turns throughout. But it seemed painfully
obvious, to this observer at any rate, that all the original and memorable
material came in the quoted words of Philip Larkin: ‘Philip always says
…’, ‘as Philip wrote to me the other day…’ The current generation of
sixth formers discovers Larkin’s poetry with immediate recognition and
delight, almost as though there was no generation gap. In contrast, Lucky
Jim will appeal to younger reader mainly for its ‘period’ quality, though
some scenes are still very funny. Nothing else in Amis’s voluminous
oeuvre of novels and poems, will survive, except in the context of his
relationship with Larkin.
The clocks moved forward overnight and some delegates predictably
arrived late for breakfast on the morning of Sunday 30 April. The final
formal event, at 9.30, again in the Tzusuki Lecture Theatre, was a
far-­ranging lecture by Phillip Mallett, Senior Lecturer in English at
97
St Andrews: ‘Hardy, Larkin, and the Heartland of the Ordinary.’ His
title phrase came from Heaney’s poem, ‘The Journey Back’ in Seeing
Things (1991), in which the Irish poet depicts the ghost of Larkin calling
himself sadly ‘A nine to five man who had seen poetry.’ As Mallett
commented, Larkin would not have accepted this ventriloquizing. The
real Larkin had not glimpsed poetry; he had written it. In ‘The Main
of Light’ (1982) Heaney gave Larkin credit for ‘repining for a more
crystalline reality’ beneath the ‘anti-­heroic, chastening, humanist voice’,
and thus reaching moments ‘which deserve to be called visionary’. In
The Redress of Poetry (2002) he is less approving, convicting ‘Aubade’
of failing to give ‘redress’. Poetry, he argues didactically, must offer
‘more than just a print-­out of the given circumstances of its time and
place.’ It must be ‘strong enough to help’. ‘Aubade’ may be a ‘high
poetic achievement’, but its ‘vision’ is not ‘vital’ enough. It is (unlike
Heaney’s own poetry) ‘daunted by death’. (I was reminded of John
Bayley’s comment that whenever he feels really depressed he turns to
‘Aubade’.)
Charles Tomlinson takes an even more negative view, accusing
Larkin of offering a ‘stepped-­down version of human possibilities’.
Phillip Mallett cruelly tested this argument by comparing Tomlinson’s
sacramental poem ‘A Given Grace’ with Larkin’s ‘Home is So Sad’.
Tomlinson’s ‘Two cups’ afloat on the ‘mahogany pool’ of a table, though
‘common ware’ seem rare ‘reflections’:
coolness of brown
so strengthens and refines
the burning of their white
you would not wish
them other than they are —
you, who are challenged
and replenished by
those empty vessels.
As Mallett commented, the ‘grace’ given by these cups ‘is grace bought
at the expense of the human: nobody will ever drink from those cups.’
This is very much a still life: nature morte. In contrast Larkin’s pictures
and piano stool in ‘Home is So Sad’ are alive with generous empathy for
the people who have owned them:
… You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
98
Both poems use ‘you’, but Larkin seems to be speaking to the reader,
sharing his feelings; Tomlinson in contrast, seems to be speaking
to himself, even congratulating himself on his spiritual refinement.
Consequently the concluding image of ‘empty vessels’ will prompt
the sceptical reader to reflect that the poet’s high-­mindedness is itself
empty: religiose rather than spiritual. Phillip Mallett was even-­handed,
suggesting that ‘Home is So Sad’ might seem sentimental in comparison.
But it was only too apparent that Tomlinson’s poem is bloodless and
pretentious compared with Larkin’s.
The lecture then moved on to the similar critique of Hardy by
Donald Davie in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973): ‘instead of
transforming and displacing quantifiable reality’ Hardy’s poems are on
the contrary, ‘just so many glosses on that reality, which is conceived of as
unchallengeably “given” and final.’ Like Heaney’s Larkin, Davie’s Hardy
has a decent, humanist, but insufficiently transformative imagination. In
‘At Castle Boterel’ Hardy seeks to touch our emotions by claiming no
more than that he will remember Emma until the day he dies. This, to
Davie, in a patronising put-­down, is ‘touching; but hardly worth saying
at such length’. Davie feels that the ‘time of such quality’ which Hardy
presents as the transcendent factor in this poem should be ‘indestructible
in a metaphysical reality’, either because the poet’s mind will survive
the death of his body, or ‘because “quality” exists as a perception in the
Divine Mind’. Ultimately, for Heaney and Davie, Hardy and Larkin’s
poetic limitation is that they do not believe in God or an afterlife. Phillip
Mallett delicately implied that, on the contrary, true transcendence has
nothing to do with the fictions of religion or metaphysics.
Coffee was followed by an ‘Open Mike’ poetry reading. Among the
poems chosen I remember Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’ and ‘The
Self-­Unseeing’, and Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’ and ‘Morning at last:
there in the snow’. But the real surprise came with two original poems
composed by delegates themselves. John Osborne entertained us with a
brilliant meditation, recited word-­perfect from memory, on Betjeman’s
famous last words: ‘I wish I’d had more sex.’ The rhymes had something
of the subtle wit of Noel Coward or even Cole Porter. And Lianne Brooks
recited ‘An Arundel Tomb (are we there yet?)’, recounting one of those
unforgettable mishaps that so often spoil our intended epiphanies. The
eager literary tourists, having taken hours to get to Chichester, and having
parked too far off, are ‘so excited, full of wonder’ at finding themselves
at the famous tomb that they make the ‘awful blunder’ of blocking the
99
view of another visitor who snaps at them ‘Are you moving?’ and covers
up Larkin’s framed words with her guidebook.
We spent the remaining time before lunch on a Larkin Quiz
composed by Carole Collinson. The runaway winner, a team consisting
of John Osborne, Jane Thomas and Graham Chesters, was disqualified as
possessing too much combined expertise. The single winner, to no-­one’s
surprise, was Tony Fincham. Then, during lunch in the main dining hall
the frail coincidence of our conference dissolved itself amid farewells
and plans for further encounters. We dispersed to the car-­parks and the
railway station and went our separate ways.
JAMES BOOTH
Philip Larkin Society
Thomas Hardy Society
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100
HARDY SOCIETY PROGRAMME 2014
HARDY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Saturday 26 July till noon on Saturday 2 August 2014
Directed by Dr Jane Thomas (University of Hull), the Conference will
include the a mix of lectures, walks, tours, music and poetry, panel and
postgraduate sessions. Invited speakers include: —
●●
●●
●●
●●
●●
●●
●●
The Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP
Christopher Nicholson (author of Winter)
Dr Tony Fincham (THS Chair)
Helen Gibson (THS and DCM)
Tim Kendall (Exeter)
Tom McAlindon (Hull)
Sir Christopher Ricks (Warren Professor of the Humanities, Boston
University)
●● Mary Rimmer (New Brunswick)
●● John Paul Riquelme (Boston University)
●● Marion Thain (Sheffield Hallam)
The Creative Writing Workshop will be led by John Wedgwood Clarke,
who will also read from his collection Ghost Pot.
Please consult the Thomas Hardy Society website for the latest details,
where you will also find the conference booking form.
THE THOMAS HARDY LONDON LECTURE
Thursday 6 November, 7.30pm at Birkbeck College, Gordon Square
Dr Jacqueline M. Dillion and Phillip Mallett (University of St Andrews)
will lecture on ‘Looking and Overlooking in Hardy’s The Return of the
Native’
Further information about all events can be found at <http://www.
hardysociety.org>
101
REPORT OF THE COUNCIL OF
MANAGEMENT
The Managers present their Annual Report and Accounts for the year
ended 31 December 2012.
Activities
The Society’s activities continue to be, for the benefit of the public, the
advancement of education in the works of Thomas Hardy.
The Council of Management
Members of the Council of Management, who are Directors for the
purpose of company law and Trustees for the purpose of charity law,
and who served during the year and up to date of this report, are set out
on page 1. The Officers of the Society are appointed by the Council.
Members of the charitable company guarantee to contribute an amount
not exceeding £1 to the assets of the charitable company in the event of
its winding up.
Review of Activities
An eventful year, full of innovative events. We started with a weekend at
St. Juliot’s Rectory, commemorating Hardy’s first visit to Cornwall and
meeting Emma, on the 7 March 1870. Walks, lectures by Dr Rebecca
Welshman, Dr Jane Thomas and poetry readings by Costa prize winner
Christopher Reid ensured the weekend was a success. Dinner at the
Wellington Hotel and a church service at St. Juliot’s , coupled with walks
led by Tony Fincham and Sally and Chris Searle, completed an excellent
weekend. Our thanks, as ever, go particularly to Sally and Chris Searle
for their effortless hospitality.
A day in Emma’s Plymouth, in April, led by Bob Mann in the
morning and Marilyn Leah in the afternoon, gave an extra dimension to
this interesting city. Our thanks to both of them.
The Birthday weekend was its usual mix; a walk led by Derek Pride
through Hardy’s Heartland, an excellent lecture by Dr Alan Chedzoy,
the New Hardy Players on the Green, wreath-­laying at Hardy’s statue,
followed by laying a wreath at the William Barnes statue, and a buffet
supper followed by the excellent Tim Laycock and the Mellstock Band.
The Rev. John Walker was the Preacher at St. Michael’s, followed by the
laying of a wreath at Hardy’s grave. Thanks go to all those who helped
102
make the weekend a success, in particular to Sue Clarke who led the
walks to and from the church on the Sunday morning.
On 7 and 15 June we had two events as part of the ‘Hardy Country’
initiative; a barn dance at the Corn Exchange Dorchester, and ‘Poetry and
the Wessex Downs’, led by Dr Rebecca Welshman.
Another walk in September, revisiting The Woodlanders backdrop,
was led by Dr Tony Fincham, Professor Barrie Bullen and Andy Poore,
Forest Manager, starting at the Acorn Inn, which was also the venue for
our AGM later that day.
Our regular London Lecture was given by the excellent Stephen
Platten, the Bishop of Wakefield. The title of the lecture, ‘They Know
Earth-­Secrets’: Thomas Hardy and Immanence. An outstanding lecture,
which will be published in the Autumn Thomas Hardy Journal. Our
thanks to Stephen.
The 135th anniversary of publication of The Return of the Native was
celebrated by a walk on Rainbarrow, led by Jacqueline Dillion and Tony
Fincham.
Finally, as so often, ‘Going the Rounds’ happened, but was adapted
because of appalling weather. But the resulting evening was judged a
success by all. Thank you to the many people who helped make it so.
And Finally
This Society is successful because of Volunteers. Too many to thank?
Maybe! But I must thank all the members of the Council, who as a minimum
meet six times a year (seven times in a conference year!), but everyone
does so much more. Thank you to those with job titles (!), starting with
our amazing Chairman Tony Fincham, and our Vice Chairman Helen
Lange, our Treasurer Malcolm Pfaff, our Minutes Secretary Marilyn
Leah, our Journals Editor Phillip Mallett, and his Assistant Editor Dr
Rebecca Welshman, our recently appointed Membership Secretary Pat
Withers (with heartfelt thanks to Tony Daniels before); on Publications,
Dee Tolfree; again recently appointed, Student Rep. Harriet Still. Thanks
also to Heather Sheen, who has been our rock over so many years, and
Sue Clarke for her total commitment to fathoming our website/members’
requirements; and finally to the Secretary and Publicity Officer, Mike
Nixon — me! To Pauline Croft, who comes in every Tuesday without
fail, thank you; to Linda Webb who did so until very recently, thank you.
MIKE NIXON
SECRETARY
103
THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
NOTICE OF ANNUAL GENERAL
MEETING
The forty-­seventh Annual General Meeting of the Thomas Hardy Society
will be held at 11.0am on Saturday 2 August 2014 at the United Church,
South Street, Dorchester.
AGENDA
1. Apologies for Absence
2. To approve the Minutes of the 46th Annual General Meeting
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman’s Report
5. Treasurer’s Report and Accounts for 2013
6. Appointment of Accountants
7. a) Election of Managers b) Election of Treasurer
(The Articles of Association of the Society state “that at the Annual
General Meeting in every year subsequent to the Third Annual General
Meeting one third of the Managers for the time being or, if their number
is not three or a multiple of three, then the nearest one third shall retire
from office. Provided that an ex-­officio Manager shall not be liable to
retire by rotation…” For the Purposes of this Article, Local Authority
representatives are treated as ex-­officio Managers in addition to the
Treasurer. “The Managers to retire in each year subsequent to the third
Annual General Meeting shall be those who have been longest in office
since their last election….” “A retiring Manager shall be eligible for
re-­election.” )
Pursuant to these Articles the following Managers are due to retire:
Dr Jacqueline Dillion, Mr Peter Mann, *Mrs Heather Shean,
*Mrs. Rose Swann
NB: Those persons mentioned above, whose names are marked with an
asterisk, do not wish to stand for re-­election.
Since the last AGM Ms Tracy Hayes and Ms Harriet Still have been co-­
opted to the council of management and their names come before this
meeting to be confirmed.
(Other nominations for the Council of Management. The Articles of
Association of the Society state that ‘No person not being a Manager
104
retiring at the Meeting or a Member of a Local Authority nominated
under Article 28 hereof shall, unless recommended by the Council
for election, be eligible to membership of the Council at any general
meeting, unless within the prescribed time before the day appointed for
the meeting there shall be given to the Secretary in writing, by some
member qualified to be present and vote at the meeting for which such
notice is given, of his intentions to propose such person for election, and
also notice in writing signed by the person proposed, of his willingness
to be elected. The prescribed time above mentioned shall be such that,
between the date when the notice is served or deemed to be served and
the day appointed for the meeting there shall not be less than four nor
more than twenty-­eight intervening days.
‘The Annual General Meeting may elect as one of the Council of
Management a Student Council Member for a period ending at the
Annual General Meeting on or nearest to the second anniversary of such
election, or, if earlier, at a General Meeting following his or her twenty-­
fifth birthday. Such membership of the Council shall automatically
terminate if, during the said period, the Student Council Member ceases
to be a full-­time student studying for a degree at a recognised British
University.’)
9. The Society’s President and Vice-­Presidents.
10. Any Other Business
Any proposals for this meeting should be handed to the Secretary three
weeks in advance. Likewise any other correspondence in connection with
this meeting should be sent to the Secretary, c/o Dorset County Museum,
High West Street, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1XA
105
REVIEW
Winter, by Christopher Nicholson (London: Fourth Estate, 2014). ISBN
978-0-­00-751607-­0. 247 pp. £14.99
Christopher Nicholson set himself a challenging task in attempting to
translate into fiction the contradictory and confused emotional turmoils
of the relationship between Florence and Thomas Hardy and the young
amateur actress Gertrude Bugler during the troubled Max Gate winter
of 1924–25. The broad outlines of what happened will almost certainly
be familiar to readers of this review. Bugler, Hardy’s choice to play the
title role in his own adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles as staged
in Dorchester in November 1924 by the Hardy Players, was, despite
her lack of dramatic training, also his preference when negotiations
began for a professional London production. From the perspective of
the delighted Bugler, arrangements seemed to be unfolding smoothly,
notwithstanding a somewhat heated exchange of letters with Florence
about the social niceties that should govern visits by young married
women to upper-­middle-­class married couples. But then she received a
visit at her home in Beaminster from a near-­hysterical Florence, begging
her to reconsider her involvement in the project and outlining all the
objections to it, foremost among which were the threat to Hardy’s health
that would be occasioned by his insistence on journeying to London to
see a performance and the possibility that his overt admiration for Bugler
would cause gossip. Since gossip had already been rife among some of
the Hardy Players, most notably those older members of the group who
felt resentful of the media attention being given to its ‘star’, Florence’s
concerns may not have been entirely without foundation, although their
mode of expression was certainly extravagant to a fault. In the face of
Florence’s entreaties, overwhelmed by their intensity, Gertrude withdrew
from the negotiations.
There is probably less left to uncover about this painful (at least for
Florence and Gertrude) sequence of events than journalistic creativity
has on occasion tried to suggest. Gertrude Bugler’s own recollections,
initially published more than fifty years ago as the inaugural pamphlet in
the Toucan Press monograph series and elaborated in many subsequent
interviews, provide the most reliable first-­hand account, though interest
in what occurred has been piqued again in recent years by the appearance
of the memoirs of her younger sister, Norrie Woodhall. Even eighty
years after the fact, Norrie remained as unforgiving as Gertrude herself
106
had been of what she saw as the destruction by Florence – an ‘insanely
jealous woman’ – of Gertrude’s ‘dream’ of a professional stage career
(see Norrie’s Tale [2006], p. 34).
When stories worth the telling accrete around a public figure,
particularly one as protective of his privacy as Hardy, the inevitable
lacunae left after even the most assiduous attempts to probe the past lie
temptingly open to the allure of sensation. To the extent that the realities
informing the fraught situation faced by the three principals in this late-­
life Hardyan mini-­drama are speculatively recoverable, the most plausible
conclusions are the following: that Hardy was, perhaps to an unwise
degree, admiring and protective of this young actress who so uncannily
matched his mental picture of Tess, the heroine to whom he still felt the
greatest imaginative attachment; that Florence, under the burden of her
own ill-­health, depression, and responsibility for nursing a frail husband
through his ninth decade, over-­reacted to Hardy’s liking for Gertrude;
and that Gertrude herself, however flattered by the admiration she had
elicited from England’s most famous living writer, had not the slightest
idea, until the Florentine dam burst, of the effect she could unwittingly
be having on either Hardy or Florence, removed as they were by age and
eminence from the domestic realities of her own young life.
A few caveats should act as restraints on too credulous an advance into
the dense emotional reaches now conjured up by novelistic imagination.
Whatever the nature and extent of Hardy’s responses to Gertrude Bugler,
the catalyst, as Nicholson indicates, for their intensification in 1924–5
was surely Tess. Hardy had, after all, known of Gertrude for eleven years
(since her debut with the Hardy Players as Marty South in the 1913
production of The Woodlanders), yet it was only with her performance as
Tess that his interest in her became potentially disruptive to the domestic
harmony of Max Gate. Furthermore, while Gertrude’s Tess-­mediated
image also informed a few late poems explorative of romantic opportunity
lost through the vagaries of temporal circumstance (occasioning in
Florence, far more obsessively than in Hardy himself, absurd fantasies of
their literal elopement), this was a recurrent and life-­long Hardyan motif
that didn’t require the attractions of a Gertrude Bugler to find articulation
in his writing. And as for the destruction of a promising acting career
by an unstable Florence Hardy (the same Florence who went to some
pains a few years later to smooth Gertrude’s path to a starring role in
a professional production of Tess), the overwhelming likelihood is that
if Florence Hardy had never existed, little difference would have been
107
made to Gertrude Bugler’s prospects of ongoing professional success.
Both her own domestic circumstances and the unforgiving distinctions
between talent as measured on the amateur stage and talent as measured
professionally would have arbitrated against fulfilment of what surely
would have remained merely a ‘dream’.
The successful translation into fiction of this shadowy episode is
inevitably reliant on a novelist’s ability to breathe convincing imaginative
life into concealed emotions and mismatched designs whose ramifications
weren’t fully known or understood even by those directly caught up in
them. These core affective absences bring both freedoms and constraints,
and in attempting such conflation of biography with fiction, Nicholson’s
novel takes many risks – some with fact, some with plausibility, and
some, perhaps, with good taste.
Whether readers experience uncomfortable intimations that what
is under way here might better have been left undone will inevitably
depend on individual judgment about how long a passage of time needs
to pass to render the fictionalizing of episodes in real lives acceptably
non-­invasive. There are still many people around who knew Gertrude
Bugler well, some of whom will have decided opinions about how she
might have reacted to a novelist using her life in this way; her sister
Norrie, whose anger with Florence is glancingly mentioned in the novel,
died little more than two years ago; her daughter, Diana, cast here in an
emotive babyhood role, still lives in Beaminster. One wonders whether
these proximities gave Christopher Nicholson pause as he fantasized into
fiction the supposed thoughts, emotions, and words of his three principal
characters.
And what strangely inflated words so many of them are. Given the
rhetorical tenor of much of this novel, there is an obtrusive irony in the
fact that one of the recurrent observations made in negative criticisms
of Hardy Player productions was that dialogue and performance style
were stilted and melodramatic. This is certainly the dismissive view of
Gertrude Bugler’s acting expressed by Nicholson’s version of Florence
Hardy. Yet here is a representative example of the fictional Florence’s
own quite astonishing speech, rendered all the more strained by the
supposed situation – these thoughts are being confided to the faithful dog
Wessex ‘in a low conspiratorial voice’:
‘She is really not beautiful, is she? She may be striking, but
beautiful … And there is something almost hysterical about her
acting, I promise you, Wessie, if only you could see it. It is good
108
that the reviews are good, though I wish they could have been
more honest. The trouble is that it encourages him, that is the
trouble. Why do the reviewers write such falsehoods? Do they
have no sense of shame? It doesn’t bother me; after all, what is
it to me, I am his wife, if he chooses to believe the reviews what
is it to me? But she is not the most beautiful woman in Dorset!
She is the wife of a common butcher! She associates with raw
meat, hatchets, blood and gore, where is the beauty in that?’
(66–7)
Fortunately, no attempt is made to convey Wessie’s response to this sotto
voce unburdening, which as a soliloquizing of the flow of Florence’s own
troubled mind comes uncomfortably close to the stiltedness and bathos
she identifies in her imagined rival’s stage delivery.
This happens with such frequency in Winter that one is tempted to
wonder whether what becomes Florence’s most distinctive voice was
intended as deliberate rather than accidental irony, a meta-­fictional ploy
in which she is herself in the novel the histrionic ham that she vengefully
thinks of Gertrude as being on the stage. This, for example, is part of an
extended sequence in which she fantasizes about possible futures for her
relationship with Hardy. In the last of these projections, her on-­going
argument with him about the need to cut back the claustrophobia (and in
her own mind disease) inducing Max Gate trees generates visions of her
apocalyptic night-­time assault on them:
This tree … is a member of the vegetable kingdom; this tree
cannot feel. I, on the other hand, am a human being: I feel! I
speak! I cry! I suffer! Do not ignore me! This is how I feel! Hear
my anguish: I am a human being! The tree sways, hanging by
a sinew; I give a last chop and stand back to watch it fall. As it
does so, blood erupts from the inside of its trunk and sprays me
in a crimson cloud. I do not care. I rejoice in this tree’s death.
The night has gone; an angry dawn is breaking in the eastern
sky. I look up; he is at his bedroom window, staring at the fallen
tree, blood dripping from its stump. I hold up my crimson hands.
‘Heartless man!’ I shout. ‘Look what I have done! Behold! It is
you who have driven me to this, with your poems to her! Do you
understand now?’ (160–1)
It is difficult to know how to take such excess, as any sense of the real
Florence is flattened beneath the parodic overkill of this grand guignol
characterization.
109
Although present in this narrative as little more than another focus for
Florence’s resentment, Emma Hardy fares not much better. This is the
brief exchange encapsulating the disagreement between her and Hardy
over the question of a move back to London:
‘I must ask you to change your mind, Thomas,’ she had stated
in a peremptory tone.
‘If by that you mean that we should move back to London, I
cannot,’ was the reply.
‘Then,’ said she, ‘you are no longer the man I married.’ (18)
That’s what Harry Tilley, the Hardy Players director, might well have
conceived of as a natural curtain line, with the artfully choreographed
pause before the verb-­subject inversion as the ominous prelude to that
devastating indictment – or what would have seemed devastating on the
boards of the Adelphi Theatre in the 1860s.
While many of the problems with characterization in this novel
derive from Nicholson’s unsure command of plausible speech patterns,
others are a function of his attempts to imagine into existence areas of
his subjects’ lives that are well beyond his (or anyone else’s) knowledge
or his faculty to evoke. This is Florence speculating about Hardy’s
intimacies with Emma:
Lying here I wonder what the first wife did. How active was
she? Did she stay silent or utter sounds, either voluntary or
involuntary? The vision of them rises before me in the darkness,
she with her waxy uneven flesh, he with his scrawny legs,
exchanging kisses and caresses on this very bed; they writhe (a
horrible word) and her fat thighs widen as he pushes into her. A
repulsive expression of greedy pleasure spreads over her face.
What is this? I am not jealous. I refuse to be even slightly jealous
of something that perhaps never happened, a lurid concoction of
my imagination. (51).
Most of Nicholson’s evocations of Florence are conveyed through
similarly lengthy passages of self-­questioning and self-­dramatization that
are rarely allowed to escape from the tyrannical coils of the first-­person
pronoun: the soliloquy-­speak of the self-­obsessed. This may, of course,
be Nicholson’s actual sense of Florence as a personality. But surely that
doesn’t remove the need, if that personality is to be convincingly realized
in fiction, for the author to step outside it for long enough to see it whole
and in plausible exchange with others, freed, however briefly, from its
internal obsessions and the inadequacies of its own expressive powers.
110
Among the more lurid concoctions of Nicholson’s own imagination
is a scene given Hardy to remember – while in ruminative mood, after a
relaxing bath and with Florence reading to him from Dryden’s translation
of Virgil’s Georgics. It is ‘a vision of the bay at Ringstead,’ and of himself
and a young Emma sitting on a rock ‘[g]azing over a milky sea’ as
he slid his hand up one of her legs and slowly toyed with her
sex while she unbuttoned his flies and gently caressed his penis.
The waves came in, broke, sent little frills of bubbling lace over
the pebbles, a gull or two floated by, and their mutual pleasure
grew until both were on the point of ecstasy. What a moment
that had been, beyond anything he could ever have dared to put
in a novel! (219)
The nature of the failure of a narrative moment like this goes beyond
the innate difficulty of rendering sexual response fictionally and relates
directly to the task Nicholson has set himself by making his novel a
fictional biography, or biographical fiction, or whatever amalgam of two
very different genres this is designed to be. On the one hand it is impossible
to divorce the Hardy of the fiction from the actual man, especially since
the novel relies so heavily on biographical specificity. This is not Hardy
at a remove, as, say, the Edward Driffield of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes
and Ale is. This is Hardy plain, with a vast quantity of contextual detail
directed towards convincing readers that they are indeed being presented
with a reasonable facsimile of the historical figure. But on the other
hand, it’s difficult to imagine the real Hardy into this scene – not because
something along these lines couldn’t have happened (though there are no
grounds for assuming that it did) but because the writing is so inadequate
to the moment here, in its arid phrasing and the cursorily and carelessly
sketched in components of the scene: ‘toyed with her sex’, ‘waves came
in, broke’, ‘a gull or two’ (or three or four), ‘point of ecstasy’, and then
that final nudging exclamation mark (although admittedly, Hardy’s resort
to screech marks is positively restrained in comparison with their use
by the permanently frenzied Florence). The free indirect discourse that
lumbers Hardy with these verbal banalities is simply irreconcilable with
the sensibility of the man we think we know.
Thus willing suspension of disbelief is hard to command when reading
this novel, an impediment that finally has little to do with the fact-­based
resistances it provokes – the many minor hesitations that, like the shaking
scenery that feeds Florence’s contempt for the Hardy Players, disrupt the
even tenor of our reading. Did T. E. Lawrence, 48 years Hardy’s junior,
111
really call him ‘Tom’? Can the 36-­year-­old Lawrence, all five foot five
of him, really be termed ‘a tall young man’? Could Gertrude really have
ruminated in the 1960s on the unfortunate traffic-­noise incursions near
Max Gate made by the Dorchester bypass, opened in the 1980s? Such
minor nods are the unavoidable lot of the historical novelist. Much more
damaging is the difficulty of reconciling, in any way beyond the simply
circumstantial, the characters on display here with our sense of how
Florence and Thomas Hardy would have thought, felt, or spoken.
KEITH WILSON
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112
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
James Booth was formerly Head of English at the University of Hull.
He is the author of Philip Larkin: Writer and of Philip Larkin: the Poet’s
Plight, as well as editor of New Larkins for Old: Critical Essays.
Ryan Crennen received his Master’s degree in English Literature at
the Pennsylvania State University. He currently lives in the Dominican
Republic where he is a community literacy promoter for the United
States Peace Corps.
Emanuela Ettorre teaches English Literature at the Gabriele d’Annunzio
University of Pescara-­Chieti. She is the author of La Specchia e la
clessidra: Uno studio della narrative di Thomas Hardy, and of numerous
articles on Hardy, Trollope and Gissing. She recently published a
translation of three short stories by Hardy, titled L’immaginazione di una
donna.
Tracy Hayes is a PhD student at the Open University, writing a thesis
which investigates masculinities within Hardy’s novels. She has
previously published articles on Hardy in various journals, as well as
presented a number of conference papers. She is the new Post-­Graduate
Student Representative for the Thomas Hardy Society.
Phillip Mallett is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
St Andrews, a Vice-­President of the Thomas Hardy Society, and since
2008 Editor of the Society’s Journals. His Oxford World’s Classics
edition of Under the Greenwood Tree, and an edited collection of essays
on Thomas Hardy in Context for Cambridge University Press, were both
published in 2013.
The Rev. Dr John Travell FRSA is a long-­standing member of the Hardy
Society, and Chaplain to the Society of Dorset Men.
Keith Wilson is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa.
In addition to a monograph, Thomas Hardy on Stage, and two edited
collections of essays on Hardy, he is the editor, with Michael Millgate, of
Volume 8 of Hardy’s Collected Letters.
113
THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS
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st
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CHOSEN POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY Edited and Annotated by James Gibson
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114
DVD: A Winter Journey TV Tess
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POSTAGE AT COST
115
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ADDRESSES OF OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY
The Secretary: Mr Mike Nixon, The Old Coach House, 114 Sutton
Road, Sutton Poyntz, Dorset DT3 6LW
Tel +44 (0)1305 837331 e-mail: [email protected]
The Editor of The Thomas Hardy Journal: Phillip Mallett, School of
English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL
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All officers of the Society can be contacted at: The Thomas Hardy Society
c/o Dorset County Museum Dorchester Dorset. DT1 1XA
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Office hours are 2.00–4.00pm, Monday to Thursday; answer-phone at
other times.
The website of the Thomas Hardy Society is www.hardysociety.org
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
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116
Time well spent
ABOUT THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
The Society began its life in 1968 when, under the name ‘The Thomas Hardy Festival
Society’, it was set up to organise the Festival marking the fortieth anniversary of
Hardy’s death. So successful was that event that the Society continued its existence
as an organisation dedicated to advancing ‘for the benefit of the public, education in
the works of Thomas Hardy by promoting in every part of the World appreciation and
study of these works’. It is a non-profit-making cultural organisation with the status
of a Company limited by guarantee, and its officers are unpaid. It is governed by a
Council of Management of between twelve and twenty Managers, including a Student
Representative.
The Society is for anyone interested in Hardy’s writings, life and times, and it takes
pride in the way in which at its meetings and Conferences non-academics and academics
have met together in a harmony which would have delighted Hardy himself. Among
its members are many distinguished literary and academic figures, and many more
who love and enjoy Hardy’s work sufficiently to wish to meet fellow enthusiasts and
develop their appreciation of it. Every other year the Society organises a Conference that
attracts lecturers and students from all over the world, and it also arranges Hardy events
not just in Wessex but in London and other centres. The Hardy Society Journal, issued
twice a year, and the Thomas Hardy Journal, issued in Autumn, are free to members.
Applications for membership are welcome and should be made to: The Thomas Hardy
Society, c/o Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XA.
LITERARY CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE JOURNALS PUBLISHED BY
THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
Discovering more about Hardy's world is
time well spent
Hardy's Cottage & Max Gate, Dorset
Visit the charming thatched cottage where Hardy was
born and be inspired in the rooms where he wrote
several novels including 'Under the Greenwood Tree'
At Max Gate, you can explore the Victorian House that
Hardy designed, then lived and wrote in for 43 years.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wessex
Registered charity No. 205846
For details, including
opening times and
admission prices,
visit our website or
call 01297 561900
(Hardy's Cottage) or
01305 262538 (Max
Gate)
The Hardy Society Journal is published by the Thomas Hardy Society twice a year,
in Spring and Summer. Its objective is to encourage and foster lively engagement and
debate among general readers. Contributions – literary articles, reports, reviews, news,
creative writing, reproducible illustrations, etc. – are welcomed. Articles should not
normally exceed 4000 words. Book reviews are usually invited but may be volunteered.
They should normally be between 500 and 1500 words. The Editor reserves the right to
shorten letters.
The Thomas Hardy Journal is published once a year, in Autumn. More specifically
academic in content, this peer-reviewed Journal aims to be a force in international Hardy
scholarship. Articles are refereed by an Editorial Advisory Board. Contributions should
not normally exceed 8000 words.
Articles for publication in either Journal cannot be considered unless they are
submitted in both hard copy and electronic format, or as an email attachment (Word
document: double-spaced, single quotation marks, endnotes not footnotes). Please
include a short entry for the ‘Notes on Contributors’ and a return postal address.
Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by the necessary postage.
No payment is made for articles but writers have the satisfaction of publication in a
periodical of authority and repute, and they will receive two complimentary copies of
the issue in which their article appears.
Please send submissions to the Editor at The Thomas Hardy Society, c/o Dorset
County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XA, or by email to [email protected].
The deadline for the 2014 Thomas Hardy Journal is Monday 8 September 2014; for the
Spring 2015 Hardy Society Journal it is Monday 2 February 2015.
THE HARDY SOCIETY JOURNAL
THE
HARDY
SOCIETY
JOURNAL
£4
VOL 10
No 2 SUMMER 2014
SUMMER 2014
VOL 10 No 2
A Thomas Hardy Society Publication
ISSN 1746-4617