The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
The Architect (1856-1863)
JOHN HICKS of Dorchester was, by all accounts, a rather colorless individual. A dubious fortune, nevertheless, was smiling upon him at this time. As a country architect, he could have hoped for little besides general farmhouse repair work, with now and then the job of designing a new building of a more or less standardized pattern. Chance brought him something better. It directed his efforts into ecclesiastical channels.
A veritable architectural mania was sweeping through the western counties of England. Parsons, squires and bishops were regarding their crumbling sanctuaries with dissatisfaction and alarm. The old stone and wood was slowly succumbing to the gnawing tooth of Time. Towers and floors were becoming shaky and unsafe, altar screens were fading and wearing out, churchyard monuments were tumbling over.
All this dilapidation was to be summarily "restored." Towers were to be torn down and rebuilt, altar screens were to be replaced, churchyards were to be renovated. A furious restoration-movement gripped everybody.
Unfortunately, a policy of thoroughgoing replacement was generally adopted and followed, instead of one of mere preservation of the remains of old art. Neo-Gothic styles, of a particularly atrocious variety imported directly out of Germany, were then in fashion. Down came the priceless old walls, traceries and carvings, to he replaced by hideous modern travesties of the genuine mediæval article. The mutilation of the ancient churches was terrific, brutal, heartless.
Vandalism of this kind filled Hicks's tin money-boxes and kept his staff of assistants and apprentices busy. They were dispatched out into the country, to sketch, measure and survey. Copying the designs of the old churches down to the last exact and particular detail was of course wonderful training for a young man with artistic inclinations. Hardy made the most of it. Indeed, if he had been financially independent and had had the desire and the liberty to study art when, where and how he chose, he could not have employed his time to better advantage. Many of the things he copied were shortly afterwards demolished.
Here is a picture of the young apprentice at work, as the novelist reconstructed it some years later:
The sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring and copying the chevroned doorway—a bold and quaint example of a transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English village church. . . .
He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old workers whose trick he was endeavoring to acquire six hundred years after the original performance had ceased and the performance passed into the unseen. By means of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into the fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing, that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were also a sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other mathematical instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he returned to the doorway to copy another as before.
Hardy lived to repent rather bitterly this ignorant and innocent sharing of his in the abominable "movement." He publicly lamented it many years later, when he addressed the General Meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, on June 20, 1906. He looked back with shame and horror upon the wanton wrecking of venerable chronicles in stone, and discussed the feasibility of effecting some sort of compromise between the practical and poetically minded persons: between the users and the musers.
He told several interesting anecdotes in connection with the exposition of his reaction to the architectural practices of 1860. There were, for instance, two brothers, who returned to their native village after an absence of many years. They visited their old church, and were soon engaged in a heated argument concerning the position of the family pew—an argument terminated only by Hardy’s explanation of the removal of an entire arch, upon which one of them remarked, "Then I'm drowned if I'll ever come into the paltry church again, after having such a paltry trick played upon me."
Tampering with the headstones both inside the churches and outside in the churchyards was a practice that particularly excited Hardy’s indignation; and it excited his imagination, too. He told of the removal of the monumental stone from over the grave of a venerable vicar who had abjured women, and of its erection over the remains of a fashionable actor and his wife, while their stone was put in place of his. Future disinterment would make things rather awkward for the old vicar, although the actor, as Hardy remarked, would probably enjoy the situation, having been a comedian.
Continuing in a more serious vein, Hardy declared: "Unhappily it was oftenest the headstones of the poorer inhabitants—purchased and erected in many cases out of scanty means—that suffered the most in these ravages. It is scarcely necessary to particularize among the innumerable instances in which headstones have been removed from their positions, the churchyard levelled, and the stones used for paving the churchyard walks, with the result that the inscriptions have been trodden out in a few years."
The poet's emotional reaction to the same situation was dramatically expressed through a lyric included in Poems of the Past and the Present. It is called The Levelled Churchyard:
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wretched memorial stones!
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
"I know not which I am!"
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!
And if our names remain,
[1]They pave some path or p-ing place
Where we have never lain!
But dreads the final Trumpet,
Lest half of her should rise herself,
And half some local strumpet!
From smoothings of Thy sward,
From zealous Churchmen’s pick and plane
Deliver us, O Lord! Amen!
Hardy learned to scorn the "heathen apathy" of the parsons and parishioners alike with regard to these wilful and stupid deletions of the artistic and associative treasures under their care. He derived small comfort from the reflection that some had been unwittingly preserved through the "happy accident of indifferentism in these worthies."
Here is the manner in which the novelist received the hint for his memorable scene of Jude’s gilding of the Ten Commandments: "I remember once going into the stonemason's shed of a builder's yard, where, on looking around, I started to see the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, staring emphatically from the sides of the shed. 'Oh, yes,' said the builder, a highly respectable man, 'I took 'em as old material under my contract when I gutted St.-Michael-and-All-Angels, but I put 'em here to keep out the weather: they might keep my blackguard hands serious at the same time, but they don’t.' A fair lady with a past was once heard to say that she could not go to morning service at a particular church because the parson read one of the Commandments with such accusatory emphasis: whether these had been degraded to the condition of old materials and were taken down owing to kindred objections one cannot know."
The most memorable section of the reminiscential address, and the one that showed how Hardy’s intense poetic vision could be applied to the commonest and simplest of objects, was his contemning of the barbarous practice of cutting off the "cannons" of church bells wherever a bell-peal was remounted. "I was passing," he said, "through a churchyard where I saw standing on the grass a peal of bells just taken down from the adjacent tower and subjected to this treatment. A sight more piteous than that presented by these fine bells, standing disfigured in a row in the sunshine, like cropped criminals in a pillory, as it were ashamed of their degradation, I have never witnessed among inanimate things."
Throughout the address, while viewing with dismay the necessity for the destruction or removal of old materials in the decaying sections of ancient buildings, Hardy insisted on the preservation of the original form and ornamentation of the structure; for, he remarked, "This is indeed the actual process of organic nature herself, which is one of continuous substitution. She is always discarding the matter, while retaining the form."
Nor was this particular lecture the only tribute which Hardy paid towards the end of his life to his earliest architectural experiences. A still later memory is preserved in his famous letter of October 7, 1914, to the English press on the bombardment of the Cathedral at Rheims. After discussing the patent impossibility of an entirely adequate renewal of all the damaged portions of the edifice (inasmuch as some of them dated from the Thirteenth Century, Gothic architecture of that period being now an unpracticed art), and after deploring the losses which the window, in particular, had suffered, he went on to say:
"Moreover their antique history was a part of them, and how can that history be imparted to a renewal? When I was young, French architecture of the best period was much investigated, and selections from such traceries and mouldings as those at Rheims were delineated with the utmost accuracy, and copied by architects' pupils—myself among the rest. It seems strange, indeed, now that the curves we used to draw with such care should have been broken as ruthlessly as if they were a cast-iron railing replaceable from a mould."
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Hardy did not devote all his energies to his architectural work, particularly in the early years of his indentures, attractive as he discovered his technical studies of Gothic art to be. He was already inclining towards the attractions of literature, poetry in particular. The charms of his native Dorset seemed to be intensified by his intimate acquaintance with its landmarks, and seemed to cry for expression in meter and rhyme.
He actually composed much verse during this period, but destroyed most of it subsequently. None of it has been offered to public inspection, and only one of these poems ever saw print. This was a set of verses called Domicilium, an expression of the powerful effect exerted by his natural environment over his childhood and early youth. It was composed and worked over between 1857 and 1860. Twenty-five copies of it were printed in the form of a seven-page booklet on April 5, 1916, by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode for Clement Shorter, and were distributed privately. The piece has been guarded with intense (and somewhat ridiculous) jealousy. Some day, perhaps, it will be possible to compare it with that beautiful section of Wordsworth's Prelude which was originally entitled The Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth.
Tentative sketches for essays and tales were also set down by the student at this time. But when news of these ventures into a precarious and questionable field came to the ears of Mr. Hicks and the elder Mr. Hardy, the youth was informed in no uncertain terms that he was to apply himself with stern exclusiveness to architecture, under pain of the instant withdrawal of his sustenance. One may be sure that his mother had little to do with this peremptory command.
Hardy was in those days, however, an obedient boy. Besides, the threat to throw him entirely upon his own resources was something of a deterrent to unremunerative literary endeavors. He acquiesced, abandoned literature temporarily, and applied himself with more or less strictness to his official work until the end of his indentures. The discipline did him no harm, as later events amply proved. Hardy, one suspects, was never too proud of his Domicilium.
His tastes for learning, however, began to emerge as his unsuccessful schooldays faded into the past. With some avidity he resumed the study of Latin and began to puzzle over the Greek. The influence of the ancient Hellenic language and literature was from this time on to manifest itself in overweening measure over his work. Fortunately, he soon found in one of the young pupils of Mr. Hicks another ambitious amateur classical scholar. Together the two youths pored over their texts, assisting each other with the vocabulary, constructions and renderings. These studies, started in 1857, ceased in 1860.
Hardy had now passed his twenty-first birthday, and was rapidly learning to appreciate the value of some of the permanent artistic compensations in life: classical literature, Gothic architecture, nature reflected in English poetry.
There are hints of several important friendships formed by Hardy as he approached manhood: with a London man of letters, a temporary sojourner in Dorset, who possibly instilled in the youth his first ambition to create original literature, a person perhaps reflected in the character of Henry Knight of A Pair of Blue Eyes; and with a number of young men who had designs of entering the Non-Conformist clergy, and with whom Hardy studied the New Testament in Greek while he argued with them in behalf of the Anglican doctrines and ritual. Possible reflections of this episode might be discovered in the student Somerset’s delicious technical defence of Infant Baptism as recorded in A Laodicean, or in Jude's attempted study of H KAINH ΔIAθHKH. As biographical data, however, most of this material lies too patently in the realm of pure conjecture. For the present it must remain there, inasmuch as Hardy has evidently never seen fit to supply inquirers with a detailed and authoritative account of any such personal influences.
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In 1862 Hardy was at last released from his bondage to Hicks. He left the Dorchester office and set out for London. As a nine-year-old, he had already had a few glimpses of the city in a rare visit there with his parents, but he had seen little of it since. He now carried with him an introduction to Arthur Blomfield, who held the reputation of being a "good restorer," and a master of the Revived Gothic. This Blomfield was at the time a man of thirty-two, and had just achieved the dignity of the position of President of the Architectural Association. Later he became the official architect to the Bank of England and the designer of the law courts branch in Fleet Street. He was knighted in 1889.
Hardy became Blomfield's assistant, receiving instruction from him in London and traveling all over the country to see that restoration work was carried out with as little vandalism as possible.
Sir Gilbert Scott was another Gothic "expert" of the period, and Hardy enrolled himself as one of his disciples. Sir Gilbert instituted peripatetic lectures for his classes of students, conducting them through Westminster Abbey and other historical edifices of London. Scott was an enthusiast, but scarcely an expert, and certainly not an artist. Frequently his pupils showed more knowledge and discernment than he did himself; Hardy was later able to recollect, with some glee, amusing instances of such discomfitures of his Master.
With all this student-experience, it may seem strange that Hardy never achieved anything resembling success in actual architectural endeavors. As a matter of fact, he never formally completed his technical training; never set up his own office; never practiced his early profession in earnest. He never designed a house for anyone, so far as is generally known, except for himself.
At the same time, this training and these experiences were by no means wasted. All the virtues of the architectural point of view are in evidence in his literary work. Throughout his life as a writer, the mind of the architect can be discerned at work. It is almost as much in evidence near the close of his career as it is at its beginning.
Not only do architects and architecture play a large part in many of the novels and poems, but it is almost certain that Hardy's very strong feeling for form was fostered by this early preoccupation with the problems of material design. This it was, eventually, that kept The Dynasts from falling to pieces despite its colossal scheme and scope: and it was this that made his tiniest lyrics almost invariably assume what is felt to be their inevitable metrical forms. The novels also, despite their Shakespearean management of events in time and space, always were molded within a singularly closely knit unity of action. Their structure has frequently enough been called "architectonic." Irrelevancy in the matter of design is one fault that can never be charged against Hardy by the most hostile stretch of a critic's imagination. His early studies of architecture may not be entirely responsible for his impeccability in this most important sphere, but they undoubtedly made of him a more conscious artist in the field of literary craftsmanship than he would have been without them. From first to last his work showed an instinctive and highly developed feeling both of proportion and of decorative beauty. Beauty, that is to say, in the earlier Greek sense—a sense in which the two notions of "beauty" and "order" were conceived as identical, and in which the same word, κόσμος, was employed to express both.
The architectural atmosphere naturally served to add a large amount of its distinctive color to Hardy’s work. In Desperate Remedies, for instance, the three principal characters are all architects. The rather colorless Owen Graye's apprenticeship at Creston may possibly have been suggested by the author's own experiences under Mr. Hicks. Æneas Manston, the architect-steward, is the first example of a rather rare type in Hardy: the almost undiluted villain. The character and the experiences of the hero, Edward Springrove, on the other hand, seem to reflect not only Hardy’s earlier experiences, but even his permanent artistic opinions. There are so many points of resemblance between this earliest of heroes and what one knows about the early career of the writer, that one is sorely tempted to believe that we here have unmistakable autobiographic notes, in spite of Hardy's later assertions that an old and defunct acquaintance supplied the bases for this character. The truth seems to be that he drew partially from his own experiences, partially from those of his friend, and mingled them together with purely fictitious material to build up his protagonist.
Springrove, we learn, is the son of a commoner, but widely read and keenly appreciative of art, of a melancholy turn of mind, about twenty-six years of age, untidy in personal appearance, a Shakespeare enthusiast, and a writer of "disillusioned" verses. All of these things might have been said of Hardy in 1866.
Owen describes Springrove as follows:
"He seems a very nice fellow indeed; though of course I can hardly tell to a certainty as yet. But I think he's a very worthy fellow; there's no nonsense in him, and though he is not a publicschool man he has read widely, and has a sharp appreciation of what's good in books and art. In fact, his knowledge isn't nearly so exclusive as most professional men's."
"That's a great deal to say of an architect, for of all professional men, they are, as a rule, the most professional."
"Yes; perhaps they are. This man is rather of a melancholy turn of mind, I think." . . .
"He is a man of very humble origin, it seems, who has made himself so far. I think he is the son of a farmer, or something of the kind. . . . He's about six-and-twenty, no more. . . . He is rather untidy in his waistcoat, and neckties, and hair."
"How vexing!" . . . it must be to himself, poor thing."
"He's a thorough bookworm—despises the pap-and-daisy school of verse—knows Shakespeare to the very dregs of the footnotes. Indeed he's a poet himself in a small way."
Of more interest than the rather idle question of the partial survival of the real Hardy in Springrove are the latter's opinions on architecture, art, and life, which sound remarkably like what we should expect from Hardy:
"He says that your true lover breathlessly finds himself engaged to a sweetheart, like a man who has caught something in the dark. He doesn't know whether it is a bat or a bird, and takes it to the light when he is cool to learn what it is. He looks to see if she is the right age, hut right age or wrong age, he must consider her a prize. Some time later he ponders whether she is the right kind of prize for him. Right kind or wrong kind, he has called her his, and must abide by it. After a time he asks himself, ‘Has she the temper, hair, and eyes I meant to have, and was firmly resolved not to do without?' He finds it all wrong, and then comes the tussle—"
"Do they marry and live happily?"
"Who? Oh, the supposed pair. I think he said—well, I really forget what he said."
"That is stupid of you," said the young lady with dismay.
"Yes."
"But he's a satirist—I don't think I care about him now."
"There you are just wrong. He is not. He is, as I believe, an impulsive fellow who has been made to pay the penalty of his rashness in some love-affair."
The sentiments here ascribed to Springrove might have been Hardy's own in his early years, but hardly the experiences with which the youthful architect-philosopher is credited. But when we recall Hardy's subsequent abandonment of architecture for verse, and of verse for fiction, particular interest is aroused by Springrove's defence of bis own somewhat similar fluctuation. The following passage may throw light upon Hardy's professional artistic opinions:
"I must go away to-morrow . . . to endeavor to advance a little in my profession in London. . . . But I shan't advance."
"Why not? Architecture is a bewitching profession. They say that an architect's work is another man's play."
"Yes, but worldly advantage from an art doesn't depend upon mastering it. I used to think it did; hut it doesn't. Those who get rich need have no skill at all as artists."
"What need they have?"
"A certain kind of energy which men with any fondness for art possess very seldom indeed—an earnestness in making acquaintances, and a love for using them. They give their whole attention to the art of dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve up in conversation. . . . Then, like Cato the Censor, I shall do what I despise, to he in fashion. . . . Well, when I found all this out that I was speaking of, whatever do you think I did? From having already loved verse passionately, I went on to read it continually; then I went rhyming myself. If anything on earth ruins a man for useful occupation, and for content with reasonable success in a profession or trade, it is a habit of writing verses on emotional subjects, which had much better be left to die from want of nourishment."
"Do you write poems now?" she said.
"None. Poetical days are getting past with me, according to the usual rule. Writing rhymes is a stage people of my sort pass through, as they pass through the stage of shaving for a beard, or thinking they are ill-used, or saying there's nothing in the world worth living for."
Whether Hardy eventually gave up architecture because of similar disillusionment as to the actual relation of merit to material success, is an interesting, but not a particularly momentous question. What Springrove says of the writing of poetry is of more importance. Hardy, like Springrove, wrote many verses "on emotional subjects" in his twenty-sixth year. This was probably the most fruitful year of his "early period." It may also be true that this poetic activity "ruined him for a useful occupation." But he never passed completely through the stage of poetizing as did Springrove. The whole passage contains enough of the real truth of the matter to make it very interesting, but hardly enough, taken by itself, to form a sound basis for an estimate of the writer's real position.
Similar problems present themselves when we turn to the other novel in which architecture plays a dominating role. In following through the experiences of George Somerset in A Laodicean, from the time when he is at first encountered sketching Gothic ruins for restoration purposes, the reader is puzzled to know just where the personal recollections of the author leave off and where pure invention begins. Is the first chapter of the book to be considered as sincere criticism, autobiography, or mere fiction? It is undoubtedly all of these things, but to what proportionate degree cannot be determined. The hero is presented as a young man who takes "greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of opinion," who had grown enthusiastic over Palladian and Renaissance when the French-Gothic mania was at its height, who finally, quite bewildered on the question of style, concluded "that all styles were extinct, and with them all architecture as a living art." Then follows this somewhat puzzling passage, which seems, however, really to represent Hardy in his own person:
Somerset was not old enough at that time to know that, in practice, art had at all times been as full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that ideal perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust with his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hint from his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession he might have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset junior then awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed back to his dusty drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view of regularly starting in practice on the first day of the following January.
The significance of this may perhaps be heightened by the observation that Somerset is also said to have "suffered from the modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man of his age," and that there were “years when poetry, theology, and the re-organization of society had seemed matters of more importance to him than a profession which should help him to a big house and income, a fair Deiopeia, and a lovely progeny." One must of course be extremely careful in basing conclusions on points of comparison between the rather meagrely known facts in the life of Hardy and the colorful figures and careers of his characters. But the general drift of the "architectural" sections of his works of fiction undoubtedly indicates that his fundamental theory of the absolute equality and ultimate unity of all the arts was clearly reflected in an ineradicable vein of all-embracing eclecticism.
Just as he could appreciate all styles of painting, so did he display fondness for the most violently contrasted schools of architecture. In like manner, when we follow his tastes in literature, we shall find them ranging from Gibbon and Voltaire to Newman and Matthew Arnold; from the Bible and Wordsworth to Æschylus and Swinburne.
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Keenly as Hardy realized the beauties and potential values of his architectural studies, as he walked along the streets of the metropolis during the year 1862, he felt a growing need at this time for the thorough academic training which he had never received. He accordingly cast about for some opportunity to build upon his scant knowledge of the general arts and sciences. King's College, in the University of London, happened to be offering evening classes particularly for ambitious young men who found themselves in Hardy's position. He therefore attended these classes faithfully for some time, adding materially to his mental equipment and emerging in the end with more than a fair scholarly endowment, as his later work was to demonstrate.
It was around this time also that Hardy began his wanderings through the art museums and picture galleries of the town. He rapidly acquired the invaluable ability to lose all consciousness of himself when yielding to the influence of an effective work of art. The impressions thus gained he retained in a memory startlingly photographic. He began, then, to realize that art was more than mere craftsmanship, that its ultimate value lay largely in the emotion and feeling that vitalized, as by a miracle, the product which permeated the senses of its audience.
Upon this realization, coming with the freshness and vividness of a novelty, followed a natural desire: the desire to express it in as direct a way as possible. Hardy was beginning to sense his limitations as a pencil or brush-artist, and to feel more and more distinctly the appeal of literary composition. His temperament was strongly reflective or philosophical; he was forming the habit of analysing his reactions, and of squaring them with general concepts created out of experiences and self-education. Thus he began to harbor the ambition of becoming an art-critic, and maintained this ambition for many weeks. To this end he studied intensively all the schools of sculpture and painting that he saw represented in Victorian London.
It was not until he had evolved a complete theory of art, which included the worlds of all the Muses, and until he had absorbed a vast store of useful images that had their life in these worlds, that he finally abandoned his dream of becoming an art-expositor for the press. The theories he formed in 1862, however, were destined to unify and to add vitality to all his subsequent life and work.
The most compact expression of his fundamental idea of the essential unity of all the arts was set down some five-and-twenty years later, in his poem, The Vatican—Sala Delle Muse:
I sat in the Muse's Hall at the raid of the day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.
She looked not this nor that of those beings divine,
But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine;
With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,
A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.
"Regarded so long, we render thee sad?" said she.
"Not you," sighed I, "but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning one.
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.
"Today my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?"
—"Be not perturbed," said she. "Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one; those, too, are the same."
—"But my love goes further—to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,
The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim—
I sway like a river-weed as the ripples run!"
—"Nay, wight, thou sway'st not. These are but phases of one;
"And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be—
Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!"
That Hardy's faith in the transcendent one-ness of all art was to remain more than mere theory may be shown in its application throughout his writings. He frequently invoked assistance which could be supplied only by a most intimate knowledge of painting, sculpture, architecture, music and the dance, in re-creating for his readers certain very characteristic images and ideas. For instance, in the following description of the second Avice Caro's voice in The Well-Beloved, the desired effect is achieved by a strange mingling of the ideas associated with music, speech and plastic art:
The charm lay in the intervals, using that word in its musical sense. She would say a few syllables in one note, and end her sentence in a soft modulation upwards, then downwards, then into her own note again. The curve of sound was as artistic as any line of beauty ever struck by his pencil—as satisfying as the curves of her who was the World's Desire.
Since Hardy accepted whole-heartedly the notion that all of the arts should he viewed but as varying aspects of one unchanging idea, it is not at all remarkable that we find him displaying a genuine interest in them all, and a considerable practical knowledge of them as well. His point of view is very rarely that of the mere dilettante. Looking upon the art of poetry (in its more comprehensive sense—that of Dichtung or literary creation) as but one of many means of expressing life and thought, he never hesitated to call in the aid of any of the other arts when a suitable occasion for doing so arose. His rather eclectic early self-training gave him a comprehensive and lasting sympathy with many forms of imaginative expression.
Throughout the Wessex novels one can find a lavish—perhaps too lavish—use of the information and terminology of the art-connoisseur. In Desperate Remedies, Mrs. Leat stretches out "a narrow bony hand that would have been an unparalleled delight to the pencil of Carlo Crivelli," and Manston's face is tinged with "the greenish shades of Corregio’s nudes." In Under the Greenwood Tree the members of the Mellstock choir “advanced against the sky in flat outline which suggested some processional design on Greek or Etruscan pottery," and in A Pair of Blue Eyes "gaslights glared from butchers' stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild coloring of Turner's later pictures." One can continue through all the novels, collecting references of this kind. Thus, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, we find mentioned Nollekens, Holbein, Kneller, Lely, Greuze, Guido; in Far from the Madding Crowd, Terburg, Douw, Danby, Poussin, Ruysdael, Hobbema, and the following splendid example of art in description: "The strange, luminous semi-opacities of fine autumn afternoons and eves intensified into Rembrandt effects the few yellow sunbeams which came through the holes and divisions in the canvas, and spirited like gems of gold dust across the dusky blue atmosphere of haze pervading the tent, until they alighted in inner surfaces of cloth opposite and shone like little lamps suspended there." In The Return of the Native we find Dürer, Raffaello, Somerset, Perugino, Sallaert and Van Alsloot; in Jude, Del Sarto, Reni and Sebastiano.
Whether or not the man of letters availed himself of a quite legitimate source of assistance in creating mental pictures by these means, and whether or not Hardy could be justified in assuming that his audiences would be possessed of a knowledge of and enthusiasm for the great achievements in the other arts equal to his own, are questions that need not be debated in a biographical sketch. It may, however, be noted that if one fully accepts the implications of the Hall of Muses poem quoted above, then one will at least sympathize and understand Hardy's procedure, even if he does not exactly enjoy it or wholly agree with it.
Of far greater importance than this practice of Hardy's is the pictorial or photographic point of view that he assumed when he created his astonishing word-pictures. This aspect of his art was perhaps given its strongest emphasis in A Pair of Blue Eyes, wherein one finds Endelstow House thus visualized:
The dusk had thickened into darkness while they conversed, and the outline and surface of the mansion gradually disappeared. The windows, which had before been like black blots on a lighter expanse of wall, became illuminated, and were transfigured to squares of light on the general dark body of the night landscape as it absorbed the outlines of the edifice into its gloomy monochrome.
The attitude of the trained artist can also be observed in the picture of the singing Elfride, the changing scenes of the journey to St. Leonard's, the tremendous description of the cliff, and in the most telling glimpse of Knight and Elfie which the reader gets through the eyes of Stephen Smith.
The example last named deserves quo tation as a model of the employment of the painter's eye by the artificer of words:
They entered the Belvedere. In the lower part it was formed of close woodwork nailed crosswise, and had openings in the upper by way of windows.
The scratch of a striking light was heard, and a bright glow radiated from the interior of the building. The light gave birth to dancing leaf-shadows, stem-shadows, lustrous streaks, dots, sparkles, and threads of silver sheen of all imaginable variety and transcience. It awakened gnats, which flew towards it, revealed shiny gossamer threads, disturbed earthworms. Stephen gave but little attention to these phenomena, and less time. He saw in the summer-house a strongly-illuminated picture.
First, the face of his friend and preceptor, Henry Knight, between whom and himself an estrangement had arisen, not from any definite causes beyond those of absence, increasing age, and diverging sympathies.
Next, his bright particular star, Elfride. The face of Elfride was more womanly than when she had called herself his, but as clear and healthy as ever. Her plenteous twines of beautiful hair were looking much as usual, with the exception of a slight modification in their arrangement in deference to changing fashion.
Their two foreheads were close together, almost touching, and both were looking down. Elfride was holding her watch, Knight was holding the light with one hand, his left arm being round her waist. Part of the scene reached Stephen's eyes through the horizontal bars of woodwork, which crossed their forms like the ribs of a skeleton.
Knight's arm stole still further round the waist of Elfride.
"It is half-past eight," she said in a low voice, which had a peculiar music in it, seemingly born of a thrill of pleasure at the new proof that she was beloved.
The flame dwindled down, died away, and all was wrapped in a darkness to which the gloom before the illumination bore no comparison in apparent density. Stephen, shattered in spirit and sick to his heart's centre, turned away.
Hardy's use of pictorial and plastic art in his literary work is a subject that can hardly be exhausted in a short study. Any reader will be able to find almost innumerable evidences of the artist's mind behind the pencil of the story-teller and poet. For our present purpose it will suffice finally to mention two of the more striking of these instances that appear in his later work. In The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid the life of the Baron is described as "a vignette, of which the central strokes only were drawn with any distinctness, the environment shading away to a blank." And art-terminology skilfully applied to natural changes appears in this excerpt from The Woodlanders:
To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an old painting restored.
Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months. Angles were taking the places of curves, and reticulations of surfaces—a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander.* *
*
It is not very generally known that Hardy actually loved to dabble in drawing and painting, merely for his own amusement. Ideas which were later clothed in verse or prose frequently presented themselves to him at first as pictures, and were first set down actually as pen-and-ink or pencil drawings. A large quantity of these curious compositions gradually accumulated.
A number of them were offered to public inspection when the Wessex Poems first appeared, in 1898, illustrated by the author. These illustrations are striking and memorable—frequently no more than the barrenest sketches, they produce effects which sometimes become more deeply engraved in the mind than the lyrics which they illustrate.
One recalls a teeming landscape, seen shrunkenly through a huge pair of spectacles; a pair of moths, alighting upon an hour glass; a coffin being carried down a flight of steps by curious, naked, primitive Greek, male figures; a couple conversing in a Gothic cathedral, unconscious of the bone-filled vaults underneath them, shown in an architect's "elevation"; a sheeted female figure, lying on a bier; the lights of a town, blinking strangely through a pitch-black night; a Napoleonic infantryman, stalking along a hard and narrow Dorset highway, through the bleak, chilled country, a profile-sketch of Bonaparte.
Naturally these pictures do not in themselves spell greatness; they are, it is true, conceived with a preternaturally sharp vision, but executed without very much feeling for finish or for superficial effectiveness. They sometimes almost border on the ridiculous or childish, but are saved by an abiding sense of dignity, even in the grotesque. They form an illuminating commentary on the many-sidedness of an artist who was interested in a variety of things, but who forced himself to concentrate on but a few of these interests. And when he concentrated, he achieved greatness.
* *
*
In 1863 Hardy made his greatest efforts to succeed in the actual business of architecture. For a time he put aside all temptations to venture into the attractive byways he was discovering at every turn, and bent steadily over his drawing-board, his rules and compasses, his specifications. This application soon bore fruit.
The Architectural Association for design selected one of his efforts for particular recognition, and awarded him the annual prize. Stimulated by this success, Hardy prepared a technical essay to be entered in the competition for the medal and the ten-pound prize offered by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The subject he chose was The Application of Coloured Bricks and Terra Cotta to Modern Architecture. The monograph was at length completed, and mailed forthwith, under the suggestive motto "Tentavi quid in eo genere possem." The award was shortly afterwards announced. Hardy had won the medal—but not, alas, the financial award that usually went with it. The judge's report read as follows:
"The author of the essay has scarcely gone sufficiently into the subject proposed, and that portion referring to moulded and shaped bricks has scarcely been noticed. The essay, as far as it is written, is a very fair one, and deserves the medal, but, for the above reason, we cannot recommend that the supplementary sum of £10 be given with it.
This not uncommon manner of dealing with youthful aspirations in London was enough to nettle and discourage a young architect of more devotion, perseverance and determination than Hardy. It marked his high-water point as a designer, nevertheless. He gradually abandoned his technical studies from this time on, although he continued his jaunts over the country with Blomfield at intervals during the few succeeding years. He found himself now ready to yield to the more and more enticing siren strain of poetry—and also, perhaps, to the unruly philosophical voices of the times, which, since 1859, had been penetrating with a crescendo-movement into the hearts of even such self-contained lives as Hardy's. Intellectual and spiritual movements which had been blazing away over his head now began to settle upon his spirit—disturbing and arousing it more and more to the necessity of looking upon the fermenting humanity about him with increased interest and sympathy.
- ↑ This line was, in 1919, amended to read: "They pave some path or porch or place."