Abstract
One of the obvious characteristics of Hardy’s Complete Poems is its enormous variety of ‘feelings and fancies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances, and at various dates. It will probably be found, therefore, to possess little cohesion of thought or harmony of colouring…. I do not greatly regret this,’ Hardy continued in his preface to Poems of the Past and the Present. ‘Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.’
As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature; yet the result is no mere photograph, but purely the product of the writer’s own mind. (Life, 153)
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Notes
Blackmur, ‘The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy’, Southern Review 6 (1940), pp. 22–3.
In ‘A Critic’s Job of Work’, Blackmur contrasts imagination and thought: ‘The tragic character of thought … is that it takes a rigid mold too soon; chooses destiny like a Calvinist, in infancy’ (Form and Value in Modern Poetry [New York: Anchor, 1952], p. 343). For Hardy, this tragic plot also applies to imaginative experience.
Hopkins, letter to Alexander Baillie, 14 January 1883, A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1966), p. 177.
Literary Notebooks II, 201. The full quotation, from William James’s ‘Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism’, A Pluralistic Universe (London: Longmans, 1909), p. 244, is: ‘We live forward, we understand backward, said a Danish writer [Kierkegaard?]; and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem.’ James’s lecture begins by discussing the Zeno paradox as an example of the inability of concepts to mirror process.
Life, 352: the ‘German author’ to whom Hardy attributes the statement is Börne. Cf. Literary Notes I, 218. I assume this is Ludwig Börne, 1786–1837, German political writer and satirist, whom Hardy quotes in The Well-Beloved i, 9, p. 51.
For somewhat similar approaches to intellectual history through images, cf. Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961) and Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).
John Combs, ‘Cleaving in Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain”’, CEA Critic, 37 (November 1974), 22–3, discusses Hardy’s line: ‘This creature of cleaving wing.’ ‘The two basic — and exactly opposite — meanings of cleave create an ambiguity perfect for this poem’s purposes,’ i.e. cleaving as dividing the water, cleaving as adhering to the iceberg. Once the pattern is realised by the ship, the ship is destroyed. William Hyde has a brief note on ‘Hardy’s Spider Webs’, Victorian Poetry, 8 (1970), 265–8.
C. J. P. Beatty’s introduction to The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy, ed. Beatty (Philadelphia: Macmanus, 1966) notes many details of Hardy’s architectural career and many specific technical connections between this notebook and architectural currents of the time. I have tried to treat some of the wider dimensions of the topic and to add additional information.
Frank Jenkins, ‘The Victorian Architectural Profession’, Victorian Architecture, ed. Peter Ferriday (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964). Hardy occasionally refers to the opposition between the artistic amateur and narrow professional: for example, in Desperate Remedies, II, 2, p. 22.
Eastlake, p. 352. The original edition has been reprinted with an introduction by J. Mordaunt Crook (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).
According to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘High Victorian Gothic’, Victorian Studies, I (1957), 47–71, High Victorian Gothic thrived because of ‘the informality — not to say the amateurishness — of architectural education in Britain. This encouraged personal discipleship and the cultivation of individual expression rather than the continuation, as in France, of an established official tradition’ (p. 50).
Writings, 147, 273 (where Orel tracks down the apparent reference. William Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism, A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 13–15. Hardy quotes from a Rossetti poem in Literary Notes II [79]. In a letter of 1906, Hardy notes that Rossetti had rechristened a painting ‘Two on a Tower’ after the appearance of Hardy’s novel: cf. R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy Memorial Exhibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), p. 14.
On the emphasis on design in the 1850s and 1860s cf. Raymond Watkinson, Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design (London: Studio Vista, 1970), pp. 129–30. Also cf. Robert Peters, ‘Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Use of Integral Detail’, Victorian Studies 5 (1962), 289–302. Peters discusses the duality in Victorian aesthetics, ‘the particular on the one hand, the encompassing whole on the other, and the difficulties of maintaining these in a meaningful aesthetic tension’ (p. 302). Peters cites the detailed notebooks of Dobell, Hunt, Hopkins; Ruskin’s descriptions of clouds and vegetable forms; Browning’s oak-worts, honeycombs, finches, etc.; Tennyson’s Arthurian detail; Meredith’s nature passages; Rossetti’s mannered sonnets; Swinburne’s vignettes like the boar scene in Atalanta in Calydon; Arnold’s flower stanzas. Kristine Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1973), notes that Ruskin, like Walpole before him, emphasised surface pattern in the arts (pp. 8–9). She quotes Ruskin on his ‘love of all sorts of filigree and embroidery …’ (p. 47). John Unrau, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin (University of Toronto, 1978) argues persuasively that Ruskin’s notion of ornament involves larger structural considerations, that for Ruskin minute surface ornament should be ideally consistent with the large-scale composition of the building (cf. p. 67 and passim).
Ruskin, Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn (London: Allen, 1903–12), vol. 15, pp. 115–16.
In his own idiosyncratic way, William Barnes expressed many of these aesthetic assumptions in his ‘Thoughts on Beauty and Art’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 4 (1861), 126–37: ‘Again, the beauty of a species is the full revelation of God’s forming will — as, in an ash-tree, is shown the forming of one stem, with limbs, boughs, and twigs, of still lessening sizes.’ This essay may have influenced Hopkins’s fragment on ‘Ash-Boughs’.
Eastlake, p. 352. At the same time, according to Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), Blomfield was a traditionalist and did not share the Victorian anxiety about the need to find a new style. ‘Such a thing as the creation of a new style would, he thought, be so complete a falsification of all history and all analogy that he advised his audience to disabuse their minds of any such expectation. In architecture, at least, if nothing else, the development theory was the true one, and that development would have to be gradual, and, to a certain extent, almost unconscious’ (p. 145).
‘Music Books Painting and Drawings’, Reel 10, Original Manuscripts, includes plans for a church, beautiful drawings of a transept and stair railings, plans for an extensive town house, designs for ornamental hinges (some of which seem to reflect the designs in Owen Jones), eight lovely designs for pew ends, and the original plans for Max Gate. The church design has been reproduced and discussed by Beatty in ‘A Church Design by Thomas Hardy’, Thomas Hardy Yearbook, 4 (1973–4), pp. 66–72. The University of Texas has twenty additional drawings: cf. Ann Bowden, ‘The Thomas Hardy Collection’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, 7 (Summer 1962), 6–14, for a Hardy drawing of a tower window.
Cf. Blunden’s description of his visit in The Great Victorians, ed. H. Massingham (New York: Doubleday, 1933), p. 222. In The Hand of Ethelberta, Hardy associates Pugin’s principles with ‘the true and eternal spirit of art’ (38, p. 329). Also cf. Life, 38.
Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1962, 3rd edition, p. 185).
Life, 357. A beautiful photograph of the south transept can be found in Timothy O’Sullivan’s Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 26. An illustration of the transept, by H. Emrich, was also included with the first publication of ‘The Abbey Mason’ in Harper’s Magazine 126 (December 1912), pp. 21–4. Illustration 3 is adapted from English Cathedrals, introd. Martin Hürlimann (New York: Viking, 1961), revised edition, 103.
One guidebook, Edmund Foord’s Cathedrals (London: Dent, 1925) cannot accept the truth of the historical record attributing the south transept to Wygmore’s period.
Paley’s Manual, 3rd edition, p. 11; Brandon’s Analysis, p. 4. Reel 10, Original Manuscripts, includes several pages of tracings from Paley’s mouldings. Rickman’s description is in Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England, published in 1817: cf. Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literature Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 507. The first division into phases had apparently been made by Thomas Warton (Frankl, p. 497).
Life, 357. John Harvey, Gothic England (London: Batsford, 1948), 2nd edition, argues persuasively that the architect was William Ramsey, the king’s chief mason at the Tower of London, who designed St Paul’s chapter house and adapted the transept in a similar manner: ‘The Gloucester work, adjacent to a royal castle in Ramsey’s charge, and built around the tomb of the martyred Edward II, is too closely akin to the design of St. Paul’s Chapter House and cloister arcades for this to be a matter of coincidence’ (p. 51).
Reproduced nicely in Evelyn Hardy, Thomas Hardy (London: Hogarth, 1954), p. 224 (facing). See Illustration 4.
Writings, 215; On such ‘associationism’ and Ruskin’s promotion of it, cf. George Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). It is interesting to parallel Hardy’s response to old Gothic with Hawthorne’s: cf. Maurice Charney, ‘Hawthorne and the Gothic Style’, New England Quarterly, 34 (1961), 36–49.
Hardy was ambivalent about the success of Scott’s restorations. In his Wessex Poems drawing of Salisbury Cathedral, Hardy draws the interior of the nave ‘with Sir Gilbert Scott’s iron screen still there to add mystery and depth to the choir and sanctuary’, as Sir John Betjeman interprets the picture in ‘Hardy and Architecture’, The Genius of Thomas Hardy, ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p. 150. In later years Hardy wrote to Henry Newbolt: ‘My interest in Salisbury Cathedral … has lasted ever since 1860…. At that time the interior, as arranged by Wyatt, was still untouched by Scott, the organ being over the screen. The result was that a greater air of mystery and gloom hung over the interior than does now, and it looked much larger from the subdivision’. Quoted in Newbolt, My World as In My Time (London: Faber, 1932), p. 286.
Life and Art by Thomas Hardy, ed. Ernest Brennecke (New York: Greenberg, 1925), p. 137.
Rookwood (London: Dent, 1931), III, 2, p. 174.
In his preface to A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy describes the way crude Gothic art harmonised with the wild Cornwall coastline. He places the story at a time of church-restoration which he associates with the attempt to ‘restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled’. ‘Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts, whose emotions are not without correspondence with these material circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.’ Other influences of architecture on Hardy’s descriptions of nature and character in the novels have been well discussed by Josef Hartmann, Architektur in den Romanen Thomas Hardy’s (Pöppinghaus, 1934).
Hunt, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1886), p. 740.
C. W. Saleeby quotes this famous definition in ‘The Apostle of Evolution’, Academy 65 (12 December 1903), 673–4, a review from which Hardy quotes another part in Literary Notes II [173].
Appleman, ‘Darwin, Pater, and a Crisis in Criticism’, 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, ed. Appleman, Madden, and Wolff (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1959).
Stewart M. Ellis, ‘Thomas Hardy’; Some Personal Recollections’, Fortnightly Review, 123 (1928), 393–406; Ellis, Mainly Victorian (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 110. Carl Weber, ‘Ainsworth and Thomas Hardy’, Review of English Studies, 17 (1941), 193–200, cites some parallels but others are more striking. The storm and lightning scene in Far from the Madding Crowd was possibly influenced not only by the storm scene in Rookwood but by the Fire of London scene in Old Saint Paul’s (V, 3). The last two pages of the story portion of Windsor Castle, where Henry views the Round Tower and waits for the signal of Anne Boleyn’s execution, has several similarities to the end of Tess. Interestingly Hardy mentions Windsor Castle in the Life, 25, in the context of Tess and the damsels he had known in his youth. Another execution scene occurs at the end of Hugo’s Notre Dame. The Scottish Cavalier (London: Colburn, 1850, 3 Vols.) may have sown hints for several scenes in Hardy’s mind. The description of the malignant portraits of Lady Barbara and others in Lady Grizel’s castle (I, pp. 61–2) forecasts the portraits of the d’Urberville ladies at Wellbridge in Tess. Grant’s trio, Walter, Lilian, and Lord Clermistonlee closely parallel Clare, Tess, and Alec d’Urberville. Clermistonlee seduces Lilian into marriage by maligning the absent Walter. The novel also ends with an execution. In vol. 2, p. 184, Grant describes the grotesque visage of a fountain vomiting water while Walter and Lilian pledge their futile vows: compare ‘The Gurgoyle: its Doings’ in Far from the Madding Crowd. The scene of Scottish soldiers leaving for England (ii, 224) may have been the germ of The Trumpet-Major. Chapter 4 of The Scottish Cavalier is entitled ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’. For later scenes using moon-lit Gothic silhouettes, also cf. I, 99; ii, 83–7, 290 (a dawn scene).
These details are taken from various guidebooks, most notably Homan Potterton’s A Guide to the National Gallery (London: Trustees, n.d.), and from David Robertson’s Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). The South Kensington Museum opened in 1857.
Smart, ‘Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy’, Review of English Studies, N.S. 12 (1961), 262–80. Pinion, A Hardy Companion, pp. 193–200. Günther Wilmsen, Thomas Hardy als impressionistischer Landschaftsmaler (Marburg: G. H. Nolte, 1934) lists many Impressionist nature scenes in Hardy. Interestingly, Wilmsen’s most frequent example is A Pair of Blue Eyes which Tennyson admired (Letters II, 296; IV, 288, 291; V, 282). Smart notes the influence of Impressionist colour theory (pp. 268, 278). Also cf. Life, 184: ‘The impressionist school is strong. It is even more suggestive in the direction of literature than in that of art.’ Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Athlone, 1974) is also good on the painterly scenes in the novels. Norman Page, Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1977) discusses the connection between Hardy’s novels and Victorian genre painting (pp. 64–89).
Abate Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, trans. Thomas Roscoe (London, 1828), 6 volumes; revised in three volumes (London: Bohn, 1847) which I am citing here. Some of Hardy’s notes are direct quotations, others close paraphrases, others summaries made in Hardy’s own terms after he read Lanzi’s sections. For quotes or paraphrases, cf. Hardy on Cimabue (Lanzi i, 42), Da Vinci (I, 126), Luca Giordano (II, 56), Giorgione (ii, 133), Mazzuola (ii, 406), Domenichino (III, 86). The observation Hardy adds to Lanzi’s treatment of Correggio takes some elements from Lanzi (especially II, 389–91) but amounts to a new apercu: ‘An ideal beauty with not so much of heaven as in Raphael, yet surpassing that of nature, but not too lofty for our love’. The source of Hardy’s notes for the other schools of painting still needs to be identified.
Life, 206. The painting is reproduced by Fanny Hering, Gérôme: The Life and Works (New York: Cassell, 1892), p. 24 (facing). See Illustration 6. Hardy has an intriguing entry for 1888 in the Life, p. 208: ‘At the Salon. “Was arrested by the sensational picture called ‘The Death of Jezebel’ by Gabriel Guays [sic], a horrible tragedy, and justly so, telling its story in a flash.”’ A letter to me from René Le Bihan, curator of the musée de Brest, reports: ‘Cette toile a hélas disparu dans l’anéantissement de notre musée en 1941 et nous n’en conservons ici aucune trace ni photographiée ou gravée ou dessinée.’ Monsieur Bihan notes that the painting — ‘La mort de Jezabel’ by Julien Gabriel Guay — was exhibited in the Exposition Universelle of 1889. I have found no reproduction in guidebooks for the Exposition or for the Salons of the period. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knows of a reproduction or has some memory of this painting.
Boldini: ‘The Morning Stroll.’ The only reproduction I have found is a small plate in Carlo Ragghianti and Ettore Camesasca’s L’Opera Completa di Boldini (Milan: Rizzoli Editore, 1970), No. 22 D. The original is ‘in collezione nordamericana non identificata’. Cf. Illustration 8.
Most of Strang’s etchings are reproduced in William Strang: Catalogue of His Etched Work 1882–1912 (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1912) and the Supplement (1923). They are described in David Strang’s William Strang: Catalogue of His Etchings and Engravings (University of Glasgow, 1962). ‘The Crucifixion’ is Plate 664. ‘The End’, singled out ‘for its force’ in Laurence Binyon’s preface to the Supplement is Plate 139 and is also reproduced in F. Newbolt’s Etchings of William Strang (London: Newnes, 1907). See Illustration 10. Hardy cut out a review of Strang’s etchings (cf. Chapter 3, p. 110) which may have influenced his later opinion. Strang’s portraits of Hardy are dated as follows: 1893 ‘Portrait of Thomas Hardy’, Catalogue No. 200, etching. This portrait was apparently finished in 1892 (Purdy, Letters, p. 284) and used as the frontispiece for Lionel Johnson’s The Art of Thomas Hardy (London: Mathews and Lane, 1894). It was widely reproduced between 1895 and 1898 in the journals listed in the A.L.A. Portrait Index. Cf. Frontispiece and Letters VI, 140. 1893_Pencil sketch for the above painting. In the Dorset County Museum. 1893 ‘Thomas Hardy’, National Portrait Gallery 2929, oil painting. Reproduced as the frontispiece for Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel and One Rare Fair Woman, ed. Hardy and Pinion. 1894 ‘Portrait of Thomas Hardy’, Catalogue No. 227, etching. Reproduced in Desmond Hawkins, Hardy: Novelist and Poet (London: David and Charles, 1976), p. 132 (facing). 1896 ‘Portrait of a Man’, Catalogue No. 268, etching. This resembles the previous etchings, and is identified as Hardy’s portrait by Laurence Binyon in his prefatory essay to the Supplement, p. xix. 1910 ‘Portrait of Thomas Hardy O. M.’, Catalogue No. 517, dry point etching. Cf. Frontispiece. 1910 ‘Thomas Hardy’, Fitzwilliam Museum No. 733, pencil drawing, dated 26 September 1910. Exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1911; cf. Letters IV, 210. 1910 ‘Thomas Hardy’, Windsor Castle Inv. 13737, drawing. ‘In September he sat to Mr. William Strang for a sketch-portrait, which was required for hanging at Windsor Castle among those of other recipients of the Order of Merit’ (Life, 350–1). See Illustration 9. 1919 ‘Thomas Hardy’, Catalogue No. 703, engraving on copper. Used as the frontispiece of the Mellstock edition of Hardy’s works. Cf. Frontispiece. 1919 ‘Thomas Hardy’, National Portrait Gallery 1922, pencil drawing. Reproduced as the frontispiece of the Later Years, and later as the frontispiece to E. R. Southerington’s Hardy’s Vision of Man (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971); also in Hawkins’s Hardy: Novelist and Poet, p. 153 (facing). 1920 ‘Thomas Hardy’, Catalogue No. 710, engraving on copper based on the above drawing. Indeed these last three portraits seem practically identical. One is used as the frontispiece of William Rutland’s Thomas Hardy (London: Blackie and Son, 1938). The Later Years also reproduces a 1910 Strang drawing of Florence Hardy, p. 160 (facing) (unaccountably dated 1918), reproduced by Gittings, The Older Hardy (see Letters IV, 12; V, 12) (Plate 12). Strang also did famous portraits of Tennyson, Stevenson, Kipling, and others: cf. Binyon, William Strang (New York: Keppel, 1904). According to the DNB, Strang first made a name as ‘an etcher of imaginative compositions, in which homeliness and realism, sometimes with a grim or fantastic element, were subdued to fine design and severe drawing’. The best bibliographies on Strang are in the Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler (Leipzig, 1967) and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Index to Art Periodicals.
Influencing these gestalt transitions in Hardy may have been Schopenhauer and his version of the Platonic cave. Hardy’s discovery of the complex inner-outer pattern is like Schopenhauer’s discovery of the ‘Will’ in the self and the world. The following passage is taken from Hardy’s copy of On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. Mme Karl Hillebrand (London: 1897), p. 317: In the Grotto of Pausilippo, darkness continues to augment as we advance towards the interior; but when once we have passed the middle, day-light again appears at the other end and shows us the way; so also in this case: just at the point where the outwardly directed light of the understanding with its form of causality, gradually yielding to increasing darkness, had been reduced to a feeble, flickering glimmer, behold! we are met by a totally different light proceeding from quite another quarter, from our own inner self, through the chance circumstance, that we, the judges happen here to be the very objects that are to be judged. Hardy was also influenced by the gestalt effect in Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (as the dying man makes the transition from life to death, the ‘casement slowly grows a glimmering square’) and Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ ode: the light of vision fades into the light of common day. Most suggestive to Hardy were perhaps the framing images used in Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, 11. 8–9 and 217. Pursuing his vision, the scholar must ‘[c]ross and recross the strips of moon-blanch’d green’.
Hardy also knew well Jeremy Taylor’s exploration of the Jeremiah theme in Holy Living and Dying: cf. Chapter 1, pp. 5–6. For Hardy’s markings in his Bible, cf. Kenneth Phelps, Annotations by Thomas Hardy in His Bibles and Prayer Book (Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1966).
Lowes, ‘Two Readings of Earth’, Essays in Appreciation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), p. 125.
Hopkins may have been influenced by a passage in Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little brooks, whose quivering surfaces were braided along their centres, and folded into creases at the sides; or, where the flow was more rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white froth, which rode on in undisturbed serenity’ (6, p. 46). Compare ‘Inversnaid’. In October 1886, Hopkins wrote Bridges: ‘How admirable are Blackmore and Hardy! … Do you know the bonfire scenes in the Return of the Native and still better the sword-exercise scene in the Madding Crowd, breathing epic? or the wife-sale in the Mayor of Casterbridge (read by chance)?’ In November 1887, Hopkins again wrote Bridges: ‘It is in modern novels that wordpainting most abounds…. Wordpainting is, in the verbal arts, the great success of our day.’ Hopkins seems to be thinking primarily of Hardy here for in May 1888, he writes Coventry Patmore: ‘I lately read Blackmore’s last book…. I am a devoted admirer of his descriptions, his word-painting, which is really Shakesperian. Otherwise this book is disappointing…. Hardy is a finer man.’ Cf. Letters … to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), revised impression, pp. 239, 267; Further Letters…, ed. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 2nd edition, p. 390. The serial publication of The Return of the Native was illustrated by Hopkins’ brother, Arthur (Purdy, 25). In the novel, Hardy describes the heron which Mrs Yeobright watches: it …flew on with his face toward the sun. He had come dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and lining of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver. Up in the zenith where he was seemed a free and happy place, away from all contact with the earthly ball to which she was pinioned; and she wished that she could arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he flew then, (Iv, 6, p. 343) Should not this passage be added to the list of probable influences on ‘The Windhover’? Another possible influence on Hopkins’s poem was the two paragraphs beginning, ‘All by the hedge ran a little stream’, in Lorna Doone, Chapter xxxv III. This passage is also remarkably similar to the one quoted above from Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy greatly admired Blackmore’s book and noted parallels between the two novels (Letters I, 37–8).
Cf. Eastlake, Gothic Revival, p. 132, for a summary of the theory. A more recent discussion is W. D. Robson-Scott’s The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), especially pp. 5, 27. Ruskin’s discussion is in The Stones of Venice II, vi, ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Hartmann, Architektur, pp. 59–60, cites twelve other such images in Hardy’s novels.
Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London: Archon, 1962), p. 259; also cf. p. 252. The pattern image is also used in Ian Gregor’s The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber, 1974).
While Pugin’s towns are largely imaginary, he may himself have been thinking of this ancient capital of King Alfred and the home of Arthur’s Round Table. In the second edition of Contrasts (1841), Pugin added two illustrations, one of contrasting poorhouses, and the other of contrasting towns. The ancient poorhouse is evidently modelled after St Cross Hospital in Winchester (noted by Nikolaus Pevsner in Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon, 1972], p. 106). The new poorhouse is practically identical with the prison which dominates the contrasting town of 1840. Other details in the contrasting towns are similar to details in views of Winchester which I have seen in guidebooks, though I am not native enough to know how unique these details are. The Gothic architecture of Winchester is, however, generally more Norman than Pointed: if Pugin was thinking of Winchester, he ‘improved’ it. If Pugin gave Hardy the idea of viewing Winchester in this contrasting way, nevertheless many of Hardy’s specific details — especially the broad tower and Norman windows of the cathedral, the tower of the hospice (a reference to St Cross’s with its Norman chapel attached), and certain details of the prison built in 1848 — are drawn from Winchester rather than Pugin. There are a few discrepancies between Hardy’s picture and Winchester: St Thomas’s (now the Hampshire Record office) has only one spire, and the roofs of the prison are pitched. Mr F Liesching, Governor, HM Prison, Winchester Hants, kindly sent me information on the prison and its prospect. There is also some doubt whether the prospect could ever have been seen as Hardy described it. Hermann Lea, in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (London: Macmillan, 1913), written over a twenty-year period and with occasional advice from Hardy himself, notes that the prospect was obscured — ‘at least … when the present writer was there — by trees which have grown up in later years’ (p. 31). In my own visit to Winchester, and after scaling a forty-foot tower on the grounds of Montgomery of Alamein nearby, I found it unlikely that Hardy could literally have seen his prospect from the first milestone (labelled ‘1 to West Gate Winton’) on Romsey Road. The brow of a broad and heavily treed hill would have to have been closely shaved. Even then, the cathedral points more or less toward the milestone so that the ‘immense length’ of the nave could not well be seen. An important passage in A Laodicean (I, 2, pp. 11–13) suggests tht Hardy was well aware of Pugin’s Contrasts. Somerset views a Baptist chapel: ‘The chapel had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not well be exceeded…. Being just then en rapport with ecclesiasticism … he could not help murmuring, “Shade of Pugin, what a monstrosity!”’ In Pugin’s Contrasts, the ‘Baptist Chapel’, number 8 in the New Town, has replaced ‘St. Edmunds’, number 10 in the Old Town. In Real Conversations, p. 49, Hardy regrets ‘that Winchester did not remain, as it once was, the royal, political, and social capital of England’. London, by contrast, is ‘so monstrously overgrown’. Pugin’s identifying numbers are very hard to discern in the published version, though I think I have made out all except number 15, the ‘Socialist Hall of Science’, in the town of 1840. I have correlated the published version with Pugin’s original version which is reproduced by Phoebe Stanton, Pugin (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 90–1. The ‘Socialist Hall’ in the original version becomes Mr Evans Chapel in the published version. In turn, Mr Evans Chapel becomes the New Christian Society (which is not mentioned in the original). The left-most portion of the long industrial mill is labelled Messrs. Toppings Workhouse in the original; it seems to be unlabelled in the published version though Kenneth Clark says that the right-most portion is the ‘Socialist Hall of Science’ (The Gothic Revival, p. 186). If this architectural drawing is indeed one of England’s most famous, it is remarkable that Pugin’s labels have never been clearly identified. Many are wrongly identified by Clark. On Pugin’s plate, therefore, I have juxtaposed clearer numbers placed just under the pictures in vertical alignment with what seem to be Pugin’s numbers.
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Taylor, D. (1989). The Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry. In: Hardy’s Poetry, 1860–1928. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20253-9_2
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