Abstract
Hardy seems to have been much more communicative about Jude in his private correspondence than about any of his earlier novels. At the same time as he was writing the letters to Gosse published in Later Years (40–43), he was expressing precisely similar views to some of his other friends : on November 10, 1895, for example, he wrote not only to Gosse but to Mrs Henniker and Edward Clodd, stressing again and again, as he was to do in subsequent letters, that although he regarded Jude as a work which “makes for morality”, it was not a manifesto upon the marriage question, nor did it advocate a programme of any kind.1 As he told Sir George Douglas ten days later : “The marriage question was made the vehicle of the tragedy, in one part, but I did not intend to argue it at all on its merits. I feel that a bad marriage is one of the direst things on earth, & one of the cruellest things, but beyond that my opinions on the subject are vague enough.”2
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Notes
Anon., ‘Thomas Hardy’s Wessex’, Bookman, 1 (1891), 26.
Barrie, ‘Thomas Hardy: The Historian of Wessex’, Contemporary Review, 56 (1889), 59.
The implied reservation about Jefferies as a novelist seems to have been shared by Hardy himself: see W. M. Parker, ‘My Visit to Thomas Hardy’, Cornhill, 66 (1929), 155.
Gissing to Algernon Gissing, September 22, 1895, quoted in Purdy, ‘George Gissing at Max Gate, 1895’, Yale University Library Gazette, 17, iii (1943), p. 52. Cf. Archer, ‘Real Conversations. II— With Mr. Thomas Hardy’, p. 529: ‘The town-bred boy will often appreciate nature more than the country boy, but he does not know it in the same sense. He will rush to pick a flower which the country boy does not seem to notice. But it is part of the country boy’s life. It grows in his soul—he does not want it in his buttonhole.’
Martin, ‘Thomas Hardy and the Rural Tradition’, Blackfriars, 30 (1949), 255. In The Secret People: English Village Life After 1750 (London, 1954), Martin mentions Hardy among the ‘cynical traditionalists’ (p. 35) but seems to accept without serious qualification (pp. 17–19) the social evidence offered by the novels.
Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Haven, 1960), pp. 20–21.
Interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, quoted in James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–102 (New York, 1968), p. 255.
Faulkner, The Hamkt (New York, 1940), p. 207.
Drake, ‘The Woodlanders as Traditional Pastoral’, Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (1960), 251–257.
Faulkner, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York, 1965), p. 120.
Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henrylames (New York, 1961), p. 85; for James’s review, see ‘Achievement’, section 1, n. 18.
The point is elucidated in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1883 (London, 1962), p. 355.
Bainton, ed., The Art of Authorship (London, 1890), pp. 320–321.
Garland, Afternoon Neighbours: Further Excerpts from a Literary Log (New York, 1934), p. 88.
Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1966), I, 265.
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1953), pp. 93–94.
Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words (London, 1923), p. 241. For an interesting discussion of her analysis, see David Lodge, Language of Fiction, pp. 164–176.
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© 1994 Michael Millgate
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Millgate, M. (1994). The End of Prose. In: Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379534_27
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