Abstract
In 1917 Hardy defined his central aesthetic principle, that of the exhumed emotion:
I believe it would be said by people who knew me well that I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred. For instance, the poem entitled ‘The Breaking of Nations’ contains a feeling that moved me in 1870, during the Franco — Prussian war, when I chanced to be looking at such an agricultural incident in Cornwall. But I did not write the verses till during the war with Germany of 1914, and onwards. Query: where was that sentiment hiding itself during more than forty years? (Life, 378)
This well-known passage is often assumed to show that Hardy’s poetry does not change, that a poem of 1914 is a simple reflection of an 1870 event, and that neither the memory nor the poetic sensibility has changed much in forty-four years. In fact, the memory of an experience goes through several stages, both literary and personal. A review of 1915 in Hardy’s collection noted that ‘mere memories in Mr. Hardy put to shame the actualities of most poets’ (Nation, 4 February). Hardy underlined the sentence. The actuality of Hardy’s memories is not, however, the actuality of an instant impression or instant photograph. Rather their actuality comes from long cultivation in the mind, from being, in Middleton Murry’s phrase, ‘the culmination of an experience’. Hardy’s career is deceptively static because his advance in awareness coincides with a regression into memories which are eventually seen in their final form and matured significance. Hardy’s central interest is in what happens to an old emotion which lies hidden for years and is then exhumed in all its paradoxical freshness.
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Notes
Land and Water, 13 December 1917, and Westminster Gazette, 8 December 1917. Hardy wrote his replies in the margins of the columns of the latter. The word ‘stalk’ has continued to be controversial: cf. Marsden, p. 150; also James Southworth, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 153.
The work seems to make conscious use of A Pair of Blue Eyes: cf. Reginald Snell, ‘A Self-Plagiarism by Thomas Hardy’, Essays in Criticism, 2 (1952), 114–17. In 1923, the year he finished the Queen of Cornwall, Hardy said A Pair of Blue Eyes was his favourite novel: Roy McNutt, ‘A Visit to Mr. Thomas Hardy’, Dalhousie Review, 6 (1926), 51–5.
Jacqueline Bratton’s The Victorian Popular Ballad (London: Macmillan, 1975) reveals that the term ‘ballad’ covers many more types and inter-relationships than I have distinguished here. Good discussions of Hardy’s ballads can be found by Douglas Brown, Paul Zietlow, Jean Brooks, and others, but their insights still need to be integrated with Bratton’s historical research. In his Life, p. 359, Hardy quotes from an important article on the ballad, ‘Modern Developments in Ballad Art’, Edinburgh Review, 213 (1911), 153–79. Hardy quotes the article’s opening statement on the difficulty of classifying poems. The article then notes the wide use of the term ‘ballad’ as a description of story-telling poems, certain verse metres, songs, non-narrative lyrical ballads, etc.
Lawrence, Letters, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938), p. 429.
The poem has an unhappy likeness to Hardy’s personal situation. During the early 1900s Emma Hardy’s mental disturbance grew and expressed itself as a regressive nostalgia for her girlhood. When Hardy read her Recollections shortly after her death, he was profoundly affected by her description of her Cornwall days and shared this throe of the past in his love elegies. Thus, ‘The Satin Shoes’ describes the bride: ‘From her wrecked dream, as months flew on, / Her thoughts seemed not to range.’ And the narrator concludes by repeating the poem’s second stanza, conventional there but strangely insistent when repeated: ‘Yet she was fair as early day …’ (334). An important letter by Hardy on Emmas ‘aberration’ and ‘childlike’ character is quoted by Henry Gifford, ‘Thomas Hardy and Emma’, Essays and Studies, 19 (London: Murray, 1966), p. 117.
Lawrence, Letters, p. 474; Woolf, quoted in Blunden, Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 173; CP, 548, 538. Also see Blunden’s testimony in 1922, ‘Thomas Hardy’, The Great Victorians, ed. H. Massingham (New York: Doubleday, 1933), p. 222; Felkin in 1919, p. 32; Hamlin Garland in 1923, Afternoon Neighbours (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 92; at least four such witnesses are cited by D. F. Barber, ed., Concerning Thomas Hardy (London: Skilton, 1968), pp. 98, 85, 128, 118. Edith Wharton’s testimony is very similar but I cannot discover the date of her visit: A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton, 1934), pp. 215–16. In a letter of 1923, Hardy said he suffered from an ‘overclouding’ of his mind: Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 4. In 1919, Florence Hardy noted: ‘He forgets things that have happened only a day or two before … though of course the memory of his early life is miraculous’ (Friends of a Lifetime, p. 302).
Friends of a Lifetime, p. 284; Alfred Noyes, Two Worlds for Memory (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), p. 148; Queen of Cornwall, pp. 40, 69, 77.
Stephen, ‘Dreams and Realities’, Fortnightly Review, 30 (1878), p. 348.
Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 1, summarising the OED account. Of all the traditions associated with Hardy, the tradition of the grotesque is the most difficult to define. A good bibliography of works on the grotesque was distributed at the 1977 MLA section, ‘The Form and Function of the Comic Element in Twentieth-Century Grotesque’, led by Rainer Sell, PMLA, 92 (1977), 1134.
Margot Northey attempts a brief summary of the relationship between the terms, ‘Gothic’ and ‘grotesque’, in her introduction to The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 1976). Two strong recent trends in modern criticism, studies in the grotesque and studies of the Gothic novel, seem unaware of each other’s existence. Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Barker, 1957), touches on the relationship between Gothic architecture and the Gothic novel. It is interesting that Hardy’s formative years were characterised by the greatest of the Gothic revivals and the most active critical discussion of the term ‘grotesque’.
Hardy later read Symonds’s ‘Caricature, the Fantastic, the Grotesque’, in Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London: Chapman, 1890). Symonds (in 1890) sees the grotesque as a combination of the distortion of caricature and the ideality of fantasy. The fantastic is produced by the ‘excited imagination’ showing its ‘independence of fact and external nature’. ‘The grotesque is a branch of the fantastic’, with an element of caricature added. An example was medieval Teutonic art: ‘The free play of the Northern fancy ran over easily into distortion, degradation of form, burlesque.’ Earlier, in The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders, Hardy had shown his interest in the grotesque images of Norse mythology.
Bagehot, Literary Essays, vol. 2, Collected Works, ed. N. St John-Stevas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 359, 354. Bagehot also associates grotesque art with the imperfect nature of the universe: ‘It deals … not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she has happened to become’ (p. 353). Bagehot (and Browning) may have influenced Hardy’s description of the ‘Unfulfilled Intention’ in The Woodlanders (7, p. 59): ‘The leaf was deformed … the taper was interrupted,’ etc. Five paragraphs later, Hardy describes the woodlanders’ walking-sticks, wrought into monstrous vegetative corkscrew shapes ‘by the slow torture of an encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy’. Bagehot may have also influenced Hardy’s earlier statement in the Life, p. 124: ‘A perception of the failure of things to be what they are meant to be, lends them … a new and greater interest ….’
The grotesque in Hardy’s fiction has been widely noted but by no means exhaustively treated. Richard Carpenter, ‘Hardy’s Gurgoyles’, Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (1960–1), 223–32, is a good summary of some of the grotesque images in the novels. Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardy, also gives many illustrations. On Hardy’s use of Gothic elements, with a brief reference to the grotesque, cf. James Scott, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1963), 363–80; S. F. Johnson, ‘Hardy and Burke’s Sublime’, Style in Prose Fiction, ed. Harold Martin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Also cf. J. O. Bailey, ‘Hardy’s Mephistophelian Visitants’, PMLA, 61 (1946), 1146–84; Emma Clifford, ‘The Child: The Circus: And Jude the Obscure’, Cambridge Journal, 7 (1954), 531–46; Albert Guerard, Thomas Hardy (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1964), passim. Also cf. Smart, ‘Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy’, p. 269.
CP, 30; Real Conversations, p. 37; Barber, Concerning Thomas Hardy, p. 107; Friends of a Lifetime, p. 305; Life, pp. 427–8, 440–1. On the subject of Hardy and ghost folklore, see Firor, Folkways in Thomas Hardy (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), Chapter 3; Pinion, A Hardy Companion, pp. 152–61; J. O. Bailey, Thomas Hardy and the Cosmic Mind (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1956), pp. 4–5.
Life, p. 287; The Well-Beloved, ii, 6, p. 93; iii, i, p. 150; iii, 7, p. 202; Life, p. 286. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, p. 214, reproduces the original conclusion of the novel. In Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy associates a grotesque image with a similar psychological discovery. Chapter 46 opens with the image of gurgoyles and their grotesque desecration of Fanny’s grave: this is the setting for Troy’s discovery that the ‘illusion’ of his invincibility had long since been undermined and that nature had circumvented his sentimental gesture: ‘A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course.’ After Proust read The Well-Beloved, he reported in 1909: ‘I have just read something very beautiful which unfortunately resembles what I am doing (only it is a thousand times better) …. It doesn’t even lack that slight touch of the grotesque which is an essential part of all great works.’ Letters, trans. Mina Curtiss (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 204. Hardy’s exploration of ‘exhumed emotion’ and Proust’s exploration of involuntary memory have striking similarities. Indeed, the publication dates of the volumes of A La Recherche (1913–27) closely parallel the publication dates of Hardy’s last five volumes of poetry (1914–28). By 1926 Hardy realised the close connection between Proust and the theme of The Well-Beloved (cf. above, Chapter 1, p. 55); whether he realised other connections, like that which Proust readers notice in ‘Under the Waterfall’ (probably written in 1913 when Proust’s first volume of A la Recherche was published), is unknown. Both men explore the surprising power and ‘cruel anachronism’ (Beckett, Proust [New York: Grove, 1931], p. 28) which memory represents. But for Proust the anachronism can be overcome and the past recaptured. While Hardy is attracted by this possibility, his more characteristic position is that the past can only be ‘exhumed’ and is thus essentially grotesque. L. A. Bisson makes good connections between the two novelists in ‘Proust and Hardy, Incidence or Coincidence’, Studies in French Language, Literature and History, ed. Mackenzie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 24–34.
William Strang: Catalogue, No. 311: see Illustration 17. Roger Bodart, Antoine Wiertz (Anvers: Sekkel, 1949), No. 13. Hardy may also have been aware of the symbolist movement in art in the 1890s, and its exploration of dream and nightmare: cf. Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists (London: Phaedon, 1973).
Friends of a Lifetime, p. 287; Felkin, p. 27. In 1909 Hardy had related another dream: ‘I am pursued, and I am rising like an angel up into heaven, out of the hands of my earthly pursuers …. I am agitated and hampered, as I suppose an angel would not be, by — a paucity of underlinen.’ Reported by Violet Hunt, / Have This To Say: The Story of My Flurried Years (New York: Boni, 1926), p. 76; also cf. Bailey, p. 259.
These differences are very difficult to formulate and would have to be based on the writers’ ultimate assumptions about will and world. Michael Steig follows Freud’s lead in ‘Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29 (1970), 253–60: ‘in the grotesque the threatening material is distorted in the direction of harmlessness without completely attaining it.’ This theory tends to be in the tradition of Ruskin’s ignoble grotesque, where the caricaturist deliberately distorts reality, rather than the sublime grotesque, where reality overwhelms the visionary. The former might be illustrated in Browning’s wilful and partly playful distortions; the latter might be illustrated in Hardy’s lyric grotesques which are beyond play and signify the point where the mind has lost control of its world. Lee Byron Jennings remarks on a perennial confusion in discussions of the grotesque, namely ‘the difficulty of distinguishing between the depiction of a chaotic world and the willful production of chaos for other reasons’. The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 158.
Thomson, The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose, ed. William Schaefer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 314: ‘A Lady of Sorrow.’ Cf. Hardy, Literary Notes I, 208.
Stephen, ‘War’, Cornhill Magazine, 37 (1878), 478–89; ‘Dreams and Realities’, p. 345.
Tolstoy, ‘Bethink Yourselves!’ trans. V. Tchertkoff and I.F.M., The Times (27 June 1904), pp. 4–5.
Herbert Read, quoted by Arthur Lane, An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), p. 69.
Vivian de Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry: 1880–1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), fifth edition, p. 121.
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 175.
The TLS article to which Hardy refers in Life, p. 373 (cf. below, p. 132) claimed that the Prussian victory in 1870 affected ‘their whole conception of the nature of life’, tempted them to militarism and war romance, and was thus a major factor in the coming of the First World War. I. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War: 1763–1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) is a good account of the apprehensiveness, propaganda, chauvinism, idealism, and caricatures which lead to war. It begins: ‘In the early summer of 1871 an anonymous story [George Chesney’s ‘Battle of Dorking’ in Blackwood’s] about a successful German invasion of the United Kingdom alarmed the nation….’ Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight (New York, Coward-McCann, 1965), Chapter 2, discusses the fear of foreign invasion which was felt after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. When the Great War finally came, Sassoon said, looking back at the summer of 1914: ‘It seemed almost as if I had been waiting for this thing to happen.’ Quoted by Lane, p. 87.
French Revolution, ii, 3, vii. In Signs of the Times in 1829, Carlyle had written: ‘How often have we heard, for the last fifty years, that the country was wrecked, and fast sinking.’ But the sense of apprehensiveness perhaps takes on a new intensity in the Victorian period: W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (London: Allen, 1964), says that the Victorian ‘would have appreciated a painting of the urchin hurrying up the avenue with the fatal telegram, What Does It Say? or What Will Happen Now?’ (p. 30). Charles Kingsley’s reaction is quite common: ‘I cannot escape that wretched fear of a national catastrophe, which haunts me night and day.’ Cf. Margaret Thorp, Charles Kingsley (Princeton University Press, 1937), p. 125. Blunden, a fine war poet, was sensitive to this dimension in Hardy: ‘Before his death Hardy, with something like the additional sense of a master mariner in a fog, was constrained to think that he had been dreaming; he knew in his own way that there was a fresh and appalling disaster ahead’ (Thomas Hardy, p. 257).
Gosse, ‘War and Literature’, Inter Arma (New York: Scribner, 1916), p. 3.
Geoffrey Harpham, ‘The Grotesque: First Principles’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 34 (1975–6), p. 463.
Orel, The Final Years of Thomas Hardy, 1912–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 129.
Hardy and Pinion, One Rare Fair Woman, pp. 85, 92, 99; Orel, Final Years, p. 130; Hardy and Pinion, p. 99; M. van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 55, 74, and passim; CP, 64, 44.
Hardy’s attitude to Schopenhauer seems curiously ambivalent. On three widely separate occasions, in 1902, 1914, and 1922, he includes Schopenhauer in a list of philosophers he respects: Life, p. 315; CP, ‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier; Friends of a Lifetime, p. 280. Yet when Helen Garwood sent Hardy her thesis on the subject, her delight at receiving a reply from the master himself must have been tempered by its contents: ‘My pages show harmony of view with Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Hume, Mill, and others, all of whom I used to read more than Schopenhauer’: cf. Pinion, Hardy Companion, p. 106. In a letter of 1909, Gosse said that Hardy ‘n’admet pas que Schopenhauer ait exercé une influence sur son oeuvre’: quoted by F. A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy Penseur et Artiste (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1911), p. 499. In 1920, Gosse repeated his assertion, as quoted in the Literary Review section of the New York Evening Post, 3 (9 September 1922), p. 18: ‘To this day he is very slightly and superficially acquainted with the writings of Schopenhauer.’ On Hardy’s notations from Schopenhauer’s works, cf. Wright, pp. 39–56. On Hardy and Schopenhauer, also see Gittings, The Older Hardy, p. 114.
Cf. David Thatcher, Nietzsche in England 1890–1914 (University of Toronto Press, 1970) and Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (Leicester University Press, 1972). Attacks on Nietszche followed the lead of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, translated in 1895, a critique of fin de siècle writers which attacked Nietzsche for his megalomania and mysticism. His books, Nordau said, are ‘a succession of disconnected sallies, prose and doggerel mixed…. rarely are a few consecutive pages connected by any unity of purpose or logical argument’ (Thatcher, p. 28). A few works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, had been translated in 1896; The Genealogy of Morals appeared in translation in 1899, Beyond Good and Evil in 1907.
Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920 (New York: Viking, 1946), Chapters 6–7, pp. 96, 104.
Letter to Arthur Symons, 13 September, quoted in Colby Library Quarterly, 4 (1956), 115–16. In 1916 Hardy wrote Henry Newbolt that he had read Newbolt’s heroic account of the Battle of Mons and congratulated himself on being able to keep down ‘boyishness in relishing it’; Letters V, 189. I assume Hardy is referring to the account which would appear in Newbolt’s Tales of the Great War (London: Longmans, 1917). Newbolt was ‘the leading exponent of the public school soldier’ (van Wyk Smith, p. 57). In 1922 Hardy noted a crowning irony, that the romantic image of Napoleon may have been a prime influence on German militarism: ‘What a Nemesis for the French nation!’ (Life, p. 418).
Wright, p. 15, notes Hardy’s annotation in Dryden — Absolom and Achitophel, 1. 752. For a related idea, cf. ‘What is Militarism’, above, p. 132. For a later explication of this Orwellian irony, cf. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952): ‘In an age when war is peace, and peace is war, a few definitions will be in order …’ (p. 171). Voegelin has beautifully expressed the central insight of Hardy’s war vision. The last two sentences may remind readers of Hardy’s ‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier: With radical immanentization the dream world has blended into the real world terminologically; the obsession of replacing the world of reality by the transfigured dream world has become the obsession of the one world in which the dreamers adopt the vocabulary of reality, while changing its meaning, as if the dream were reality…. As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be entirely moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect. The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. The interpretation of moral insanity as morality, and of the virtues of sophia and prudentia as immorality, is a confusion difficult to unravel, (pp. 167–70) ‘No one … can predict what nightmares of violence it will take to break the dream’ (p. 173).
Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study’, written in 1886 and included in Science and Hebrew Tradition (1893). Lang reviewed the essay in ‘The Witch of Endor and Professor Huxley’, Contemporary Review, 66 (1894), 165–76.
Ashley Library Catalogue, vol. 10, letter of 27 February, insert between pp. 126–7. Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Blackwood, 1902).
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© 1989 Dennis Taylor
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Taylor, D. (1989). Hardy’s Apocalypse. In: Hardy’s Poetry, 1860–1928. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20253-9_3
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