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230
Thomas Hardy
Appearing in 1895, Jude was the last novel Hardy ever wrote, so far
as we know. ‘A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot
at’, as he put it, splitting an infinitive, in a diary entry of 15 April 1892.
He had already been astonished at, and soured by, the extraordinary
reception of Tess, and Jude’s was worse, the Pall Mall Gazette heading
their review ‘Jude The Obscene’, while the Bishop of Wakefield bragged
that he had thrown the book into the fire. According to his second
wife, Florency Emily Dugdale, Hardy hated even to be touched. Yet his
reticences may have been a protective persona, or mask—we note Ezra
Pound’s high estimate in his ABC of Reading, while quite independently
Virginia Woolf saw the public stance of the late Hardy as a kind of selfprotective
pose. He liked to touch his vast bevy of cats, at any rate.
Surely the man had to grow some self-protection in a culture
which constantly took offence at the reading of erotic betrayal as
prototypical of religious betrayal, and/or vice versa. In view of the
reception of his novels, to which we will return below, then, Hardy can
scarcely be called hypersensitive if he soon reverted to poetry, which
he deemed his ‘more instinctive kind of expression’. Indeed, the best
of his novels are pure prose poems.
And actually, a lot of Hardy’s reticences are what might be called
semantic hang-ups of his time (see his article ‘Candour in English
Fiction’, first published in The New Review for January, 1890). The
marvellous metaphor in Tess of the mechanical reaper making a noise
‘like the love-making call of the grasshopper’—marvellous in that the
two arms of the image comprise so much of our time—is revised for
first publication to ‘the love call of the grasshopper’. 5
As with Jane Eyre, an initial (anti-familial) breach with convention
starts out others. In Tess’s case, of course, for she is surely one
of the most charming heroines in literature, this breach of convention
is based on obeisance to another. For if it had not been for her
father’s egregious infatuation with aristocracy, Tess would never have
been urged forward by her mother in the first place (pimped by her
maternal parent would be the less polite, if more accurate, term). Flatteringly
described as ‘foolish’, her mother blames her oldest daughter
for not having got Alec to marry her, later chides her again for telling
Angel the truth about the resulting bastard (‘christened’ Sorrow, in
book form), and can still round on her at the end for not having practised
general sexual deception as a life principle—‘O, Tess, what’s the
use of your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!’