The Bibliotaph, and Other People Part 5

'I can't say I've noticed it particular much,' said the hollow-turner blandly.

'Well,' continued Upjohn, not disconcerted, 'she has. All women under the sun be prettier one side than t'other. And, as I was saying, the pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending.

I warrent that whether we were going with the sun or against the sun, uphill or downhill, in wind or in lewth, that wart of hers was always toward the hedge, and that dimple toward me. There was I too simple to see her wheelings and turnings; and she so artful though two years younger, that she could lead me with a cotton thread like a blind ham; ... no, I don't think the women have got cleverer, for they was never otherwise.'

IV

These men have sap and juice in their talk. When they think they think clearly. When they speak they express themselves with an energy and directness which mortify the thin speech of conventional persons. Here is Farfrae, the young Scotchman, in the tap-room of the Three Mariners Inn of Casterbridge, singing of his ain contree with a pathos quite unknown in that part of the world. The worthies who frequent the place are deeply moved. 'Danged if our country down here is worth singing about like that,' says Billy Wills, the glazier,--while the literal Christopher Coney inquires, 'What did ye come away from yer own country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?' Then it occurs to him that it wasn't worth Farfrae's while to leave the fair face and the home of which he had been singing to come among such as they. 'We be bruckle folk here--the best o' us hardly honest sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and G.o.d-a'mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill 'em with. We don't think about flowers and fair faces, not we--except in the shape of cauliflowers and pigs' chaps.'

I should like to see the man who sat to Artist Hardy for the portrait of Corporal Tullidge in _The Trumpet-Major_. This worthy, who was deaf and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the head by a piece of sh.e.l.l at Valenciennes in '93. His left arm had been smashed. Time and Nature had done what they could, and under their beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical rattle-box. People interested in Corp'el Tullidge were allowed to see his head and hear his arm. The corp'el gave these private views at any time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt to bore him a little. His fellows displayed him much as one would a 'freak' in a dime museum.

'You have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven't ye, corp'el?'

said Anthony Cripplestraw. 'I have heard that the way they mortised yer skull was a beautiful piece of workmans.h.i.+p. Perhaps the young woman would like to see the place.'

The young woman was Anne Garland, the sweet heroine of the story; and Anne didn't want to see the silver plate, the thought of which made her almost faint. Nor could she be tempted by being told that one couldn't see such a 'wownd' every day. Then Cripplestraw, earnest to please her, suggested that Tullidge rattle his arm, which Tullidge did, to Anne's great distress.

'Oh, it don't hurt him, bless ye. Do it, corp'el?' said Cripplestraw.

'Not a bit,' said the corporal, still working his arm with great energy. There was, however, a perfunctoriness in his manner 'as if the glory of exhibition had lost somewhat of its novelty, though he was still willing to oblige.' Anne resisted all entreaties to convince herself by feeling of the corporal's arm that the bones were 'as loose as a bag of ninepins,' and displayed an anxiety to escape. Whereupon the corporal, 'with a sense that his time was getting wasted,'

inquired: 'Do she want to see or hear any more, or don't she?'

This is but a single detail in the account of a party which Miller Loveday gave to soldier guests in honor of his son John,--a description the sustained vivacity of which can only be appreciated through a reading of those brilliant early chapters of the story.

Half the mirth that is in these men comes from the frankness with which they confess their actual thoughts. Ask a man of average morals and average attainments why he doesn't go to church. You won't know any better after he has given you his answer. Ask Nat Chapman, of the novel ent.i.tled _Two on a Tower_, and you will not be troubled with ambiguities. He doesn't like to go because Mr. Torkingham's sermons make him think of soul-saving and other bewildering and uncomfortable topics. So when the son of Torkingham's predecessor asks Nat how it goes with him, that tiller of the soil answers promptly: 'Pa'son Tarkenham do tease a feller's conscience that much, that church is no holler-day at all to the limbs, as it was in yer reverent father's time!'

The unswerving honesty with which they a.s.sign utilitarian motives for a particular line of conduct is delightful. Three men discuss a wedding, which took place not at the home of the bride but in a neighboring parish, and was therefore very private. The first doesn't blame the new married pair, because 'a wedding at home means five and six handed reels by the hour, and they do a man's legs no good when he's over forty.' A second corroborates the remark and says: 'True.

Once at the woman's house you can hardly say nay to being one in a jig, knowing all the time that you be expected to make yourself worth your victuals.'

The third puts the whole matter beyond the need of further discussion by adding: 'For my part, I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything. You've as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties, and even better. And it don't wear your legs to stumps in talking over a poor fellow's ways as it do to stand up in hornpipes.'

Beings who talk like this know their minds,--a rather unwonted circ.u.mstance among the sons of men,--and knowing them, they do the next most natural thing in the world, which is to speak the minds they have.

There is yet another phase of Hardy's humor to be noted: that humor, sometimes defiant, sometimes philosophic, which concerns death and its accompaniments. It cannot be thought morbid. Hardy is too fond of Nature ever to degenerate into mere morbidity. He has lived much in the open air, which always corrects a tendency to 'vapors.' He takes little pleasure in the gruesome, a statement in support of which one may cite all his works up to 1892, the date of the appearance of _Tess_. This paper includes no comment in detail upon the later books; but so far as _Tess_ is concerned it would be critical folly to speak of it as morbid. It is sad, it is terrible, as _Lear_ is terrible, or as any one of the great tragedies, written by men we call 'masters,'

is terrible. _Jude_ is psychologically gruesome, no doubt; but not absolutely indefensible. Even if it were as black a book as some critics have painted it, the general truth of the statement as to the healthfulness of Hardy's work would not be impaired. This work judged as a whole is sound and invigorating. He cannot be accused of over-fondness for charnel-houses or ghosts. He does not discourse of graves and vaults in order to arouse that terror which the thought of death inspires. It is not for the purpose of making the reader uncomfortable. If the grave interests him, it is because of the reflections awakened. 'Man, proud man,' needs that jog to his memory which the pomp of interments and aspect of tombstones give. Hardy has keen perception of that humor which glows in the presence of death and on the edge of the grave. The living have such a tremendous advantage over the dead, that they can neither help feeling it nor avoid a display of the feeling. When the lion is buried the dogs crack jokes at the funeral. They do it in a subdued manner, no doubt, and with a sense of proprieties, but nevertheless they do it. Their immense superiority is never so apparent as at just this moment.

This humor, which one notes in Hardy, is akin to the humor of the grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, but not so grim. I have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would have been matter for Hardy's pen. There are few scenes in his books more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault of the Luxellians, when John Smith, Martin Cannister, and old Simeon prepare the place for Lady Luxellian's coffin. It seems hardly wise to p.r.o.nounce this episode as good as the grave-diggers' scene in _Hamlet_; that would shock some one and gain for the writer the reputation of being enthusiastic rather than critical. But I profess that I enjoy the talk of old Simeon and Martin Cannister quite as much as the talk of the first and second grave-diggers.

Simeon, the shriveled mason, was 'a marvelously old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would not stay in position.' He talked of the various great dead whose coffins filled the family vault. Here was the stately and irascible Lord George:--

'Ah, poor Lord George,' said the mason, looking contemplatively at the huge coffin; 'he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when one is a lord and t'other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He'd clap his hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familiar and neighborly as if he'd been a common chap. Ay, 'a cussed me up hill and 'a cussed me down; and then 'a would rave out again and the goold clamps of his fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of bra.s.s, while I, being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liken en sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height, I'd think in my inside, "What a weight you'll be, my lord, for our arms to lower under the inside of Endelstow church some day!"'

'And was he?' inquired a young laborer.

'He was. He was five hundred weight if 'a were a pound. What with his lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t'other'--here the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that caused a rattle among the bones inside--'he half broke my back when I took his feet to lower en down the steps there. "Ah," saith I to John there--didn't I, John?--"that ever one man's glory should be such a weight upon another man!" But there, I liked my Lord George sometimes.'

It may be observed that as Hardy grows older his humor becomes more subtle or quite dies away, as if serious matters pressed upon his mind, and there was no time for being jocular. Some day, perhaps, if he should rise to the dignity of an English cla.s.sic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' and 'unhealthy.'

That he is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is gra.s.s. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or much work. Many who have not taken up permanent residence beneath the roof of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann are occasional guests. Then there is that great ma.s.s of pessimism which is the result, not of thought, but of mere discomfort, physical and super-physical. One may have attacks of pessimism from a variety of small causes. A bad stomach will produce it. Financial difficulties will produce it. The light-minded get it from changes in the weather.

That note of melancholy which we detect in many of Hardy's novels is as it should be. For no man can apprehend life aright and still look upon it as a carnival. He may attain serenity in respect to it, but he can never be jaunty and flippant. He can never slap life upon the back and call it by familiar names. He may hold that the world is indisputably growing better, but he will need to admit that the world is having a hard time in so doing.

Hardy would be sure of a reputation for pessimism in some quarters if only because of his att.i.tude, or what people think is his att.i.tude, toward marriage. He has devoted many pages and not a little thought to the problems of the relations between men and women. He is considerably interested in questions of 'matrimonial divergence.' He recognizes that most obvious of all obvious truths, that marriage is not always a success; nay, more than this, that it is often a makes.h.i.+ft, an apology, a pretense. But he professes to undertake nothing beyond a statement of the facts. It rests with the public to lay his statement beside their experience and observation, and thus take measure of the fidelity of his art.

He notes the variety of motives by which people are actuated in the choice of husbands and wives. In the novel called _The Woodlanders_, Grace Melbury, the daughter of a rich though humbly-born yeoman, has unusual opportunities for a girl of her cla.s.s, and is educated to a point of physical and intellectual daintiness which make her seem superior to her home environment. Her father has hoped that she will marry her rustic lover, Giles Winterbourne, who, by the way, is a man in every fibre of his being. Grace is quite unspoiled by her life at a fas.h.i.+onable boarding school, but after her return her father feels (and Hardy makes the reader feel) that in marrying Giles she will sacrifice herself. She marries Dr. Fitzspiers, a brilliant young physician, recently come into the neighborhood, and in so doing she chooses for the worse. The character of Dr. Fitzspiers is summarized in a statement he once made (presumably to a male friend) that 'on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time.'

His flagrant infidelities bring about a temporary separation; Grace is not able to comprehend 'such double and treble-barreled hearts.' When finally they are reunited the life-problem of each still awaits an adequate solution. For the motive which brings the girl back to her husband is only a more complex phase of the same motive which chiefly prompted her to marry him. Hardy says that Fitzspiers as a lover acted upon Grace 'like a dram.' His presence 'threw her into an atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over.' Afterward she felt 'something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced.'

But this same story contains two other characters who are unmatched in fiction as the incarnation of pure love and self-forgetfulness. Giles Winterbourne, whose devotion to Grace is without wish for happiness which shall not imply a greater happiness for her, dies that no breath of suspicion may fall upon her. He in turn is loved by Marty South with a completeness which destroys all thought of self. She enjoys no measure of reward while Winterbourne lives. He never knows of Marty's love. But in that last fine paragraph of this remarkable book, when the poor girl places the flowers upon his grave she utters a little lament which for beauty, pathos, and realistic simplicity is without parallel in modern fiction. Hardy was never more of an artist than when writing the last chapter of _The Woodlanders_.

After all, a book in which unselfish love is described in terms at once just and n.o.ble cannot be dangerously pessimistic, even if it also takes cognizance of such hopeless cases as a man with a chronic tendency to fluctuations of the heart.

The matter may be put briefly thus: In Hardy's novels one sees the artistic result of an effort to paint life as it is, with much of its joy and a deal of its sorrow, with its good people and its selfish people, its positive characters and its Laodiceans, its men and women who dominate circ.u.mstances, and its unhappy ones who are submerged.

These books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous, sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them; and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as irony G.o.d has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of concealing that fact either. He is of such ample intellectual frame that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear foolish. I find a measure of Hardy's mind in pa.s.sages which set forth his conception of the preciousness of life, no matter what the form in which life expresses itself. He is peculiarly tender toward brute creation. In that paragraph which describes Tess discovering the wounded pheasants in the wood, Hardy suggests the thought, quite new to many people, that chivalry is not confined to the relations of man to man or of man to woman. There are still weaker fellow-creatures in Nature's teeming family. What if we are unmannerly or unchivalrous toward them?

He abounds in all manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.' Such books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed to be given away at holiday time to acquaintances who are too important to be put off with Christmas cards, and not important enough to be supplied with gifts of a calculable value.

One must praise the immense spirit and vivacity of scenes where something in the nature of a struggle, a moral duel, goes on. In such pa.s.sages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an athlete's garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ is an ill.u.s.tration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in handling the sword--weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake fas.h.i.+on, is another example. Still more brilliant is the gambling scene in _The Return of the Native_, where Wildeve and Diggory Venn, out on the heath in the night, throw dice by the light of a lantern for Thomasin's money. Venn, the reddleman, in the Mephistophelian garb of his profession, is the incarnation of a good spirit, and wins the guineas from the clutch of the spendthrift husband. The scene is immensely dramatic, with its accompaniments of blackness and silence, Wildeve's haggard face, the circle of ponies, known as heath-croppers, which are attracted by the light, the death's-head moth which extinguishes the candle, and the finish of the game by the light of glow-worms. It is a glorious bit of writing in true bravura style.

His books have a quality which I shall venture to call 's.p.a.ciousness,'

in the hope that the word conveys the meaning I try to express. It is obvious that there is a difference between books which are large and books which are merely long. The one epithet refers to atmosphere, the other to number of pages. Hardy writes large books. There is room in them for the reader to expand his mind. They are distinctly out-of-door books, 'not smacking of the cloister or the library.' In reading them one has a feeling that the vault of heaven is very high, and that the earth stretches away to interminable distances upon all sides. This quality of largeness is not dependent upon number of pages; nor is length absolute as applied to books. A book may contain one hundred pages and still be ninety-nine pages too long, for the reason that its truth, its lesson, its literary virtue, are not greater than might be expressed in a single page.

s.p.a.ciousness is in even less degree dependent upon miles. The narrowness, geographically speaking, of Hardy's range of expression is notable. There is much contrast between him and Stevenson in this respect. The Scotchman has embodied in his fine books the experiences of life in a dozen different quarters of the globe. Hardy, with more robust health, has traveled from Portland to Bath, and from 'Wintoncester' to 'Exonbury,'--journeys hardly more serious than from the blue bed to the brown. And it is better thus. No reader of _The Return of the Native_ would have been content that Eustacia Vye should persuade her husband back to Paris. Rather than the boulevards one prefers Egdon heath, as Hardy paints it, 'the great inviolate place,'

the 'untamable Ishmaelitish thing' which its arch-enemy, Civilization, could not subdue.

He is without question one of the best writers of our time, whether for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his lively farce called _The Hand of Ethelberta_. He can write dialogue or description. He is so excellent in either that either, as you read it, appears to make for your highest pleasure. If his characters talk, you would gladly have them talk to the end of the book. If he, the author, speaks, you would not wish to interrupt. More than most skillful writers, he preserves that just balance between narrative and colloquy.

His best novels prior to the appearance of _Tess_, are _The Woodlanders_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_, _The Return of the Native_, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. These four are the bulwarks of his reputation, while a separate and great fame might be based alone on that powerful tragedy called by its author _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.

Criticism which glorifies any one book of a given author at the expense of all his other books is profitless, if not dangerous.

Moreover, it is dangerous to have a favorite author as well as a favorite book of that favorite author. A man's choice of books, like his choice of friends, is usually inexplicable to everybody but himself. However, the chief object in recommending books is to make converts to the gospel of literature according to the writer of these books. For which legitimate purpose I would recommend to the reader who has. .h.i.therto denied himself the pleasure of an acquaintance with Thomas Hardy, the two volumes known as _The Woodlanders_ and _The Return of the Native_. The first of these is the more genial because it presents a more genial side of Nature. But the other is a n.o.ble piece of literary workmans.h.i.+p, a powerful book, ingeniously framed, with every detail strongly realized; a book which is dramatic, humorous, sincere in its pathos, rich in its word-coloring, eloquent in its descriptive pa.s.sages; a book which embodies so much of life and poetry that one has a feeling of mental exaltation as he reads.

Surely it is not wise in the critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the idols of the reading world, it would seem that the office of public Jeremiah should be continued rather from courtesy than from an overwhelming sense of the needs of the hour.

A READING IN THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS

One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock.

Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,--his poetry surely could not make this impression,--but rather that the popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Sh.e.l.ley's preface to the _Adonais_, the Keats whose story is written large in the world's book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes.

Nay, more, it embarra.s.ses them. To find themselves guilty of having pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow) alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader, with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to his first dip into the letters.

The legendary Keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fas.h.i.+on of legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when the sentence was first penned, that 'a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.' Among the many readers of good books, there will always be some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the facts of Keats's history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think that the poet's sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when they are tired of reading _Endymion_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve of St.

Agnes_ in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very robust young maker of poetry will prove refres.h.i.+ng.

The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity pa.s.sing by, and have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of reality, for example, does one get in reading that 'Wordsworth went rather huff'd out of town'! One is not in the habit of thinking of Wordsworth as capable of being 'huffed,' but the writer of the letters feared that he was. All of Keats's petty anxieties and small doings, as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the man. One learns how he 'went to Hazlitt's lecture on Poetry, and got there just as they were coming out;' how he was insulted at the theatre, and wouldn't tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like her father, only 'her father had more color than the engraving;' how he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window, 'and had just begun on the jellies;' how indignant he was at being spoken of as 'quite the little poet;' how he sat in a hatter's shop in the Poultry while Mr.

Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron's 'last flash poem,' _Don Juan_; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appet.i.te, as if he 'had been measured for it;' how he dined with Horace Smith and his brothers and some other young gentlemen of fas.h.i.+on, and thought them all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value than all the 'recollections' of all his friends put together. In their breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the impression one gets of him in Haydon's account, 'lying in a white bed with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself.' This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him, but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told f.a.n.n.y Keats, 'when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like Larks to me.... I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily as a Pen'orth of Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.'