The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
Origins (1360-1772)
IT was around tlie year 1360 that two young Norman gentlemen, brothers, of the landed family Le Hardi or Le Hardy, gathered together their portable effects and sailed across the twenty-four-mile strait that separates the Island of Jersey from the French coast. What force it was that impelled them to leave their lovely Normandy and to migrate to the lonely Channel Isle, only forty-five square miles in area, it is difficult to determine at this date. Behind them in the Duchy they left some property and possessions, which were subsequently lost to their descendants by reason of their steady allegiance to the English crown in the wars and tumults which followed. One would like to think that they were enticed away from their inherited wealth and power by the poetic lure of the cliff-skirted birthplace of the mediaeval romancer Wace, that they were drawn irresistibly by the glitter of the Arthurian Legend. But one will never know.
The French branch of their family, at any rate, continued to flourish without them. Two centuries later the poetry in the Hardy blood seems to have flowered forth in Paris, when one Alexandre Hardy, author of six hundred plays, won the unofficial title of "Father of French Tragi-comedy."
Contemporary of Richelieu and Shakespeare, he became the first self-appointed educator of the Gallic taste. He presented evidence of an ambitious literary outlook in his Les Chastes et Loyales Amours de Theagene et Cariclee, a tragi-comedy in no less than eight "days" or dramatic poems—an entertaining precursor of The Dynasts, in its magnitude, at least.
To return to Jersey. Of the two immigrant Le Hardys, only one managed to make his mark in the world—if having one's name preserved in historical records can properly be called making one's mark. This was Clement Le Hardy. He had married a sister of one Sir William Lalague, or Lulazin, who brought him a dowry of "a corn rent of one quarter." He retained his ancestral Norman coat of arms, and founded the central line of Jersey Hardys, which still flourishes today. He was made a magistrate, a Jurat, of the island, in 1381.
There ensues a gap of over a century, during which little is known of the Hardys, except that the office of island Jurat was passed down from father to son without interruption. But it was a stirring century for Jersey. The island had long ago sworn allegiance to King John of England. The French, however, naturally considered it their own: was it not a good hundred miles removed from Portland Bill? In 1404 they descended in force upon the disputed territory, but were promptly repulsed. Then came the Wars of the Roses. Queen Margaret, consort of Henry VI, in order to win for the King the support of the Seneschal of Normandy, the Comte de Maulevrier, promised him the islands as his reward. Maulevrier accordingly attacked Jersey and captured Mont Orgueil, the ancient fortress, built on the site of a Roman encampment. He held a portion of the island from 1460 until 1465, but failed to consolidate his position, being opposed by Sir Philip de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen. In 1467, Sir Richard Harliston, Vice Admiral of England, drove out the last of the Norman invaders. The long-suffering islanders thereupon decided to forestall the future use of their homesteads as battleground for any war that might come along. Accordingly, they presented their view of the matter to King Edward IV, who communicated it to Pope Sixtus IV at Rome. Shortly afterwards the Pope issued a Bull of Anathema against all who should thereafter molest the islands. Thus they remained "neutral" until 1689.
Meanwhile the Hardy family had succeeded in establishing its influence in Jersey, taking advantage of all the scuffling, and waxing to a certain mightiness. We hear of another Clement Le Hardy, great-grandson of the first, evidently a resourceful, headstrong and powerful individual. His house, in 1480 or thereabouts, was one of the largest and best on the island. All its windows were secured by iron gratings, in order to frustrate the frequent attacks of unorganized Norman freebooters who in war times delighted to make razzias upon the property of the islanders. The outer doors were double, of prodigious thickness, and studded with huge nails. It was situated at St. Martin. Early in the last century it was sold by a Sir Thomas Hardy and was subsequently demolished.
And now the atrocities of Richard III were driving many noble Englishmen across the Channel and into northern France. Great numbers of these fugitive gentlemen passed through Jersey. Clement Le Hardy, associating with them, had formed his own opinions of Richard. Now Henry, Earl of Richmond, of the houses of Gaunt and Lancaster, Pretender to the throne and later Henry VII, had fled from England and was gathering adherents in Brittany.
In 1483 the Duke of Buckingham rose against the King, and Henry decided it was time for him to strike his blow for the crown. He embarked with his retainers. But a storm arose, and his fleet was scattered. The Severn overflowed its banks, to the complete discomfiture of Buckingham. The venture failed completely.
Henry's ship, driven out of its course and separated from the rest of his fleet, sighted the Jersey coast. The Earl landed, alone and unprotected. He found his way to the house at St. Martin, and begged Le Hardy for shelter until he could obtain leave from the French King to re-enter his dominions. Clement offered him all the hospitality at his command, entertained him boldly in spite of Richard's orders for his apprehension, which were published in the island, accompanied by anathemas and threats—not to be too lightly regarded at the time.
Hardy eventually conducted the Earl safely to the Norman shore, at considerable hazard to his own life. As Richmond took his leave of his staunch retainer on the French beach, he gave him his ring as an earnest of future favors, with the words, "Sic—donec—" ("Thus —until—"). These words now form one of the mottoes on the Le Hardy arms.
Two years later Henry tried again, this time aided by France. He landed at Milford Haven, defeated Richard at Bosworth, and was crowned at Westminster in 1486. Strangely enough for a monarch, he remembered his ring and his promise to his benefactor in Jersey. In 1488 he appointed Clement Le Hardy to be Lieutenant-Governor of the island under Matthew Baker, granted him the Seigneurie de Meleche, and vested him with the office of Chief Magistrate, or Bailiff, for life.
Clement had a son named John. This John was not to be held at home in Jersey, even in the midst of the honors which descended upon the family by reason of his father's bravery and generosity. Like his great-great-grandfather, he was attracted to the north. He may also have felt irked by the physical restrictions of his island home.
And so it happened that John Le Hardy migrated to England, with his wife and children, shortly after his father's elevation. He took up his residence vers l'ouest, as the records say, and is reported to have settled somewhere in the valley of the Frome River, perhaps at Toller Wilme. He was the first of the Dorset or "Wessex" Hardys.
Meanwhile the Jersey family carried on the traditions of the great Clement. As adventurous islanders these Le Hardys continued to distinguish themselves, particularly in foreign military service, down to the present day. Their arms were in the last century borne by Lt. Col. Charles Francis Le Hardy of His Majesty's Indian Army. They are
Sable, on a chevron between three escallops, or, as many griffins' heads of the field. Quartering: Azure, a chevron, or, between three cinquefoils, argent, for De Beauvoir: Gules, three escallops, or, a crescent for difference, for Dumaresq: and Gules, three escallops, or, a fleur-de-lis, for difference, for Dumaresq. Impaling: Argent, three leaves, vert, for Irving.
Crest: A dexter arm, embowed, in armour, gauntlet, ppr., garnished, or, holding a griffin's head, as in the arms.
Mottoes: Sic Donec. (Above the crest), Le hardy ne querre pas querelle.
John's descendants on the English mainland were many. One line consisted of a long succession of naval heroes. A monument to Sir Thomas Hardy, Kt., Rear-Admiral of the Blue, was erected on the south side of the great entrance in Westminster Abbey by the Rev. Clement Le Hardy, M. A., Rector of St. Peter's. Its inscription reads, in part, as follows:
Near the West door of the Choir, lieth interr'd the body of Sir Thomas Hardy, Kt., who died the 16th of August, 1732, in the 67th year of his age; and, according to the directions of his will, was buried in the same grave with his wife, who died the 28th of April, 1720. . . .
He was bred in the Royal Navy from his youth, and was made a Captain in 1693. In the expedition to Cadiz, under Sir George Rook, he commanded the "Pembrook," and when the Fleet left the Coast of Spain to return to England, he was order'd to Lagos Bay where he got Intelligence of the Spanish Galleons being arrived in the Harbour of Vigo, under convoy of 17 French Men-of-War, commanded by Mons. Chateau Renaud, upon which he sail'd immediately in quest of the English Fleet, and notwithstanding he had been several days separated from it, by his great Diligence and judgment he joyn'd it, and gave the Admiral that intelligence which engag'd him to make the best of his way to Vigo, where all the forementioned Galleons and Men-of-War, were either taken or destroyed. After the success of that Action, the Admiral sent him with an account of it to the Queen, who order'd him a considerable Present, and Knighted him; some years afterwards he was made a Rear-Admiral, and receiv'd several other marks of Favour and Esteem from Her Majesty and from her Royal Consort, Prince George of Denmark, Lord High Admiral of England. . . .
Greatest of the whole Hardy naval line, perhaps, was Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Bart., of the Portisham branch of the Dorsetshire section of the family. He was Lord Nelson's flag-captain on board the Victory at Trafalgar, and was in close personal attendance upon the Admiral on the occasion of his tragic death in the midst
of the battle. The scene has received superb poetic treatment in The Dynasts. Here is a more matter-of-fact, but touching enough version, taken from the diary of Joseph Farrington:
He said he had conversed with Captn. Hardy of the Victory, who told him that from long habit of walking the deck together, His Steps and those of Lord Nelson were of equal length; that they were walking together (on October 21) & had reached the end of the quarter deck when Lord Nelson stopped & turned suddenly for some purpose; that He proceeded two steps more and turning saw his Lordship fallen on the deck, and two sailors supporting Him; that He went up to his Lordship and expressed his hope that he was not wounded mortally; that Lord Nelson said His back was broke; that then they carried Him down to the cockpit. . . .
Captain Hardy, immortalized by his share in this event, was later made Vice-Admiral, G. C. B., and First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.
The main English branch of the family eventually gravitated towards London. It was lately represented worthily by the noted antiquary, Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, son of Major Bartholomew Price Hardy, and author of A Catalogue of the Lords Chancellors, Keepers of the Great Seal, Masters of the Rolls and Officers of the Court of Chancery.
Less distinguished than the Jersey, military, naval or London Hardys were those scions of the original John Le Hardy who elected to remain in the neighborhood of the Frome Valley. They preferred the simple delights of a quiet, secure existence in the well-wooded, lush countryside, to tumult, the chatter of guns, intrigue and overweening honors. Such a one was the Thomas Hardy who lived in Melcombe Regis, a small hamlet north of Dorchester and east of Cerne Abbas, towards the end of the Sixteenth Century. He was a man of merely local importance, and is commemorated by a tablet in St. Peter's Church in Dorchester, as a benefactor to the borough, to which he bequeathed a yearly sum of £50 for charitable purposes. Before he died, in 1599, he had founded the primary school in the Dorset capital.
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The significance of even so brief a journey as this through the complex ramifications of an ancient family may perhaps be disputed with a considerable show of reason. But in Hardy's case such a procedure has a certain importance. He has frequently been called a "man of the people," and his sympathetic penetration into the delicious workings of the peasant's mind has often been attributed to the fact that his ancestry ramified endlessly through simple illiterate "Hodges." This is untrue. The Hardys have always been, and still are, a class apart from what W. S. Gilbert called "the common country folk" of an "insipid neighborhood." The complete genealogy of the main limbs of the family can be set down only by means of an elaborate and imposing table; only a minute fraction of that great tree has been indicated here. And our Thomas Hardy has always been intensely alive to the quality of the blood of his fathers.
Superficially, this tribal consciousness has cropped out in The Trumpet-Major and in The Dynasts, in both of which his kinsman (although not his direct ancestor) Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy appears as a dramatis persona. Sir Thomas was a Dorset man; he was a Napoleonic hero: these things in themselves would be sufficient to endear him to the Wessex poet. But above all, he was a relative, a Hardy. As such, he was rated glorification, almost deification. The death of Nelson and the attendance of Sir Thomas is in The Dynasts portrayed in a series of scenes which stand out as unforgettably thrilling, superlatively pathetic and beautiful even in a framework which is itself full of incomparable thrill, beauty and pathos. They are a monumentum aere perennius, a perhaps undeservedly lasting tribute, to the memory of the gallant officer, whose share in the picture was, after all, fundamentally passive. They are the result of a very definite fermentation, for several decades, of varied feelings: love of military pomp and glitter, attachment to the soil over which dead Hardys had pridefully stalked, unavoidable interest in a namesake, deep-seated aristocratic arrogance, perhaps only semi-conscious, but doubtless intensified by enforced comparative lowliness.
Still more superficial indications of this can easily be found in Hardy's directly expressed opinions of the Wessex underlings. Certainly he never writes of them as one of them, particularly in his frankly detached, if sympathetic, article, The Dorsetshire Labourer. He examines their reactions with the disinterested feelings of a chemist making a quantitative analysis.
Nor did he ever see anything in his parents to permit him to identify himself with the tillers and villagers. The "Wessex dialect," although recognized as a language with claims to legitimacy perhaps superior to those of London English, was nevertheless strictly verboten within the walls of his birthplace.
It is of course true, and Hardy has himself frankly admitted, that his own immediate forbears were no longer personages of great importance, even locally. His father's own particular line had suffered something of a tragic fall from high estate perhaps analogous to the deterioration of the D'Urbervilles in the novel. This point, however, must not be pressed too weightily. Hardy has repeatedly warned biographers against the dangerous and "impertinent" procedure of identifying him or his associates too closely with the figures of his imagination, tempting and half-truthful as this may often be. It must be done very gingerly, if at all. One must remember the posthumous evil it has wrought in the past upon the fame of Sappho of Lesbos and Will Langland of Shropshire.
Hardy's father, for instance, had decidedly not fallen as low as old Durbeyfield, the town drunkard. Nor can he in any way be related to the plebeian father of Stephen Smith of A Pair of Blue Eyes, a character actually suggested to Hardy by a workman in his father's employ. Tragic feeling may run through the family, but it cannot be the instinctive fatalism of the peasant. Hardy's so-called "pessimism" is emphatically of the intellectual and heroic type, born of physical comfort and reflective thought. His immediate relatives, it is true, had to work in order to exist; sometimes even the women. His sister at one time taught school in Dorchester. Yet there is no reason to suppose that, as a group, these Hardys longed for past ease and a vast share of fleshpots and affluence, consoling themselves finally with an acquiescent and renunciative determinism.
The poet's father was a master-builder by trade, employing about ten men on an average, and lived in circumstances that may fairly be called prosperous. He was able, at any rate, to afford special efforts for the early education of his son. A Joseph Poorgrass knows nothing of French governesses. That, in point of culture, the builder belonged to the extremely modest class of which the band of church-musicians in Under the Greenwood Tree is representative, is an indefensible thesis. Hardy has found occasion to resent with some bitterness this erroneous assumption, prevalent sometimes even among his intimates. The Norman blood of Clement the elder has been stirred to a cruel ebullience under certain circumstances.
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Her people were the Swetmans and the Childses, two groups which have often intermarried, and have for centuries lived only in the neighborhood of Melbury Osmond, the "King's Hintock" of Hardy's "Wessex," a picturesque old village on the plateau which spans the Frome Valley and the Vale of Blackmoor. Here the proliferation of life streams upwards from the rich soil with unquenchable vigor.
While the Hardys adhered to their ruffle-sleeved King during the Civil Wars, the Swetman and Childs families were stanch Parliamentarians and Roundheads. They were energetic small landholders, self-sufficient, independent, occasionally even defiant, of the surrounding Lords of the Manors. They may be traced with certainty as far back as 1635; beyond that the ancestral lines are somewhat blurred.
The old Swetman house in Melbury Osmond was in later times the only pre-Elizabethan structure in the neighborhood; its windows were mullioned in the Sixteenth Century manner. It was later sold. Hardy himself, in The Duke's Reappearance, has related a characteristic family tradition connected with this dwelling. At the time of Monmouth's Rebellion, one Christopher Swetman lived there, as head of the family. A man of some spirit, he was secretly in sympathy with the cause of the Duke. The night following Monmouth's defeat, a cloaked and spurred gentleman, a mud-spattered cavalier, knocked at Christopher's door. He declined to disclose his identity, but Christopher respected his incognito and gave him shelter, even as the fleeing Henry of Richmond had been sheltered by Clement Le Hardy. But the unfortunate Duke found it impossible to resist the charms of the pretty Swetman daughters. Honest Christopher discovered him making love to one of them in the garden and ordered him to be on his way. A few days later news came that Monmouth was apprehended and beheaded in the Tower, but not before Swetman had observed a mysterious figure removing the hidden Ducal trappings from his cupboard. It was thus that the Swetmans, because of their bourgeois horror for courtly customs, missed what was perhaps an opportunity to rise in the world similar to the one which came to the Jersey Hardys in the Fifteenth Century. That tradition, according to Hardy, has been handed down from Swetman to Swetman for more than two hundred years, although the Childs family also lays claim to it.
Hardy's grandmother was born in 1772 and lived until 1857. Thus, until he was seventeen years old, the poet had the advantage of sitting at this ancient's lady's feet and listening to many an obscure legend, humorous or pathetic, from her lips. For she was, by all accounts, a storehouse of local stories and pictures, and not at all averse to retailing them. Her garrulity, if such it was, served Hardy well in his later efforts to create living images in prose and verse of the swiftly vanishing color of his Dorset environment. For he retained in his extraordinary memory many of the impressions she gave him. Many years later he was able to recall them distinctly. In 1902, for instance, he wrote the stanzas One We Knew, in which they came freshly to the fore:
"The Triumph," "The New-Rigged Ship"—
To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,
And in cots to the blink of a dip.
On carpet, on oak, and on sod;
And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing,
And the figures the couples trod.
And where the bandsmen stood,
While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted
To choose each other for good.
Of the death of the King of France;
Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte's unbounded
Ambition and arrogance.
Along the southern strand,
And how each night brought tremors and trepidations
Lest morning should see him land.
As it swayed in the lightning flash,
Had caught from the neighboring town a small child's shrieking
At the cart-tail under the lash . . .
We seated around her knees—
But rather as one who sees.
So far that no tongue could hail:
Past things retold were to her as things existent,
Things present but as a tale.
Edmund Gosse, in his interesting essay, The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy (included in his collection called Some Diversions of a Man of Letters), has gone so far as to hazard the guess that Hardy actually acquired his "dangerous insight into the female heart" from his grandmother's penetrating interpretations of the tales she recounted. He may be right. Some may indeed think it hardly likely that the good woman could have see fit to disillusion a youngster of ten or fifteen by repeating to him homely instances and illustrations of Francis the First's notorious epigram:
Femme souvent varie—
Fol est cil qui s'y fie.
Even if she had been such a grim-hearted grandmother as deliberately to sow the seeds of distrust and misogynism in the trusting, ingenuous mind of a child, one may imagine, it may still seem impossible that the deeply rooted cynicism of the young writer—a cynicism which almost invariably made feminae mutahiles of his early heroines—could have begun to germinate at such a tender age. And yet—one must remember what curious pranks, to our thinking, our ancients in their eighties can sometimes play. They live in a world apart; their standards are often more flexible, more ethically "enlightened" and "progressive" than those of the most ardent youthful anarchs and iconoclasts.
If his grandmother thus provided the raw materials for his cold X-ray studies of character under the bombardment of environment and circumstance, it was Hardy’s mother who stimulated his earliest impulses to translate them into artistic entities. This mother was a woman who had found it possible to add immeasurably to her perhaps meagre experience of life by losing herself in the perusal of what was best in the literature of the past. She indulged a taste for the classical Latin poets, notably Virgil, and for French romances and tragedies. She was ambitious in a literary way.
There can be little doubt that that ambition, in a lady of her circumstances and position, was not untouched by a bit of literary snobbishness. Her artistic polish could be little more than a patina on the surface of her personality, and her enthusiasm for Horace, Catullus and the English Cavalier poets could scarcely reach down deeply enough to disturb her subsoil of simple yeoman sentiment and idealism.
The sharp hatred of class prejudice, also, that acrid distaste for polite society which permeates The Hand of Ethelherta, is just the type of social liberalism that almost invariably accompanies the "literary" flair of the ardent amateur—and this trait in the novelist is distinctly traceable to the elder Mrs. Hardy. It is, in these days, a reliable indication of the worshipper-from-afar of the belles-lettrist. In this case it was founded on the deepest basic sympathy with the sturdy franklin-class, on an understanding of Hodge and his country that had its roots in inherited feelings rather than in acquired syllogisms. The country yeomanry has been called the backbone of the English nation's character. Although this observation has been repeated so often as to become an article of the British Credo, there is nevertheless some truth in it.
Late in his life the poet enshrined the more tender aspects of his spiritual debt to his mother in the poem called The Roman Road (included in his Time's Laughingstocks):
As the pale parting-line in hair
Across the heath. And thoughtful men
Contrast its days of Now and Then,
And delve, and measure, and compare;
Helmed legionaries, who proudly rear
The Eagle, as they pace again
The Roman Road.
Haunts it for me. Uprises there
A mother's form upon my ken,
Guiding my infant steps, as when
We walked that ancient thoroughfare,
The Roman Road.
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The combination of these two inherited planes, each with its own particular breadth as well as restriction, enabling the poet to view and to criticise his world objectively while experiencing it to the full subjectively, has had a mighty share in making Hardy the full-dimensioned genius he is.
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But the necessary third dimension, to provide body, solidity, and the feel and flavor of genuine reality to the quality of Hardy's poetic, is perforce discoverable only in his environment. That "Wessex" which first determined him, only to be itself determined later on by the child of its moods, demands a very particular consideration on the part of the biographer. The fourth dimension, finally (Time, or Chance, or "Crass Casualty") naturally follows in the sequel of events.