Hardy's Return to Verse: Part 2--Some Critical Explorations
William W. Morgan
In part 1 of this essay, I presented an argument for a new and more complex chronology of Hardy's career-change from fiction-writer to poet. My main contentions were that Hardy's return to verse and his abandonment of fiction were neither simultaneous nor identical decisions and that the critical tendency to take them as essentially one decision has cost Hardy scholarship the opportunity to make some more subtle and interesting points about his work in the decade of the 1890's and beyond--points, for instance, about how he thought about the social functions of fiction and poetry and consequently how he may have viewed himself as a writer of each. The key factual points I tried to argue were (1) that Hardy had given himself permission to begin writing verse again (and at least to contemplate publishing it) in early 1892, just before he began the composition of Jude the Obscure, (2) that by late 1896 he had decided firmly that he would publish his older poems and begin writing new ones with publication in mind, and (3) that he did not give up fiction until well after Wessex Poems (1898) was published--that the abandonment of fiction, in other words, was gradual instead of sudden. (To review the timeline of these decisions, click here.) In this section of the essay, I want to explore just a few of the many possible critical implications that might follow from our accepting this more complex chronology of Hardy's work in the 1890's. Specifically, I want to suggest how Jude, "Wessex Heights," and Hardy's earliest public/political poems might be enriched and clarified by our seeing them in the context of a more complex chronology of his decisions about genre.
The Rhetoric of Jude
Many, perhaps most, readers of Jude the Obscure have found in the novel a boldness--some would say a rawness--of rhetoric and argument that is new in Hardy’s work. Edmund Gosse’s famous review, asking “Is it too late to urge Mr. Hardy to struggle against the jarring note of rebellion which seems growing upon him?. . . . What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?” (Gosse 269), is an early instance, and critics ever since have consistently felt a difference, something new in the novel. This newness--a willingness to be blunt, it might be called--could perhaps be typified by passages such as this one describing the young Jude’s despair at discovering how difficult it would be to learn Latin and Greek: “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world” (Jude 27). Other instances of this caustic, angry voicing in the novel may be seen in the narrator's claim that very little separated Physician Vilbert from "the quacks with capital and an organized system of advertising" (22), in his observation that Jude's burning his theological books was probably the best thing, since "in this country of true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price than waste-paper value" (228), and in his impatient meta-fictional moments such as the one that opens "Part Fifth: At Albrickham and Elsewhere":
The usual reading of this strain of challenging rhetoric in Jude is that it represents Hardy in full voice--at last saying with unfettered candor what he has believed all along but has muted in deference to the tastes of his readers and editors. Likewise, the usual reading holds that the public reaction to such candor in Jude drove Hardy to abandon fiction and return to poetry. My proposal, that before he began work on the novel he had already decided to return to writing verse but had not decided to give up fiction, offers, I think, space for a fuller and more interesting explanation: the novel was meant not just to give voice to his anger and frustration with late-Victorian social arrangements and with the restraints placed upon writers of popular fiction, but also to test the limits of public tolerance and to punish his readers and editors for the intolerance he had defensively predicted they would exhibit. Hardy knew that Jude might be his last novel (if the public reacted as he expected it might); but he was able to be confident nonetheless, since public reaction to Jude, while it might affect his future decisions about writing more fiction, would have no influence on his plans to begin writing verse once more. That decision had been made, and the work was already proceeding on its own track and under its own energy. Jude, then, was Hardy's last-ditch attempt to bring together in one novel his will to self-expression and his will to serious and responsible literary polemics. Because he had already made a provisional decision that he might try publishing verse when he began writing the novel (See entry number 5 of January, 1892), he had set himself free to say and do what he pleased. The novel may therefore be seen as a kind of impudent and defensive dare--as if Hardy the novelist were giving the public one more chance to hear him clearly.1 And when by late 1896 he concluded that they had failed to do so (as he must have expected them to do), he felt authorized to move to what had become his next strategy, one that tested the hypothesis that by writing and publishing poetry, he could maintain the integrity of his social vision and relieve himself of the pain of being mis-read.
The Topography of “Wessex Heights”
“Wessex Heights,” written in December, 1896, is usually read in very personal terms, as one of Hardy's most pained and eloquent responses to the crises in his personal and professional situation in the mid-1890's (click here to read or review "Wessex Heights"). And no doubt the poem registers in some form all the elements of that painful time: the hurt he experienced at the reception of Jude, his growing dis-satisfaction with the novel-reading public and with the novel as a form, his frustrated attraction to Mrs. Henniker, and the tensions in his marriage.2 And the various ghosts of the past as well as the "rare fair woman" can all, with varying degrees of certainty, be connected to their biographical analogues. But the "biography" in the poem has been transformed into something much richer and more resonant, and there is just a hint, in its title, first line, and general reliance on metaphors of elevation, that "Wessex Heights" achieves its transformation of biography into poetry by means of Hardy's self-conscious evocation of the imagination itself as the site at which it is possible to know "some liberty." The very word "Wessex" both suggests the realm of the imagination and signals that the poem was written with his reading public in mind--after all, if it was a purely private poem about literal hilltops, he might as well have called it “Some Heights in Southwest England.” In this poem as in the novels, “Wessex” addresses the readers of Hardy’s fiction and signifies the terrain of the imagination as much as it does the actual topography of Southwest England, since a nineteenth-century Wessex, as Hardy reminds his readers in the "General Preface to the Novels and Poems" prepared for the Wessex Edition in 1912 and more pointedly in the 1895 "Preface" to Far From the Madding Crowd, exists only in the minds of Thomas Hardy the writer and his imaginatively cooperative readers. By the time he wrote the poem, his concept of Wessex as "a partly real, partly dream-country,”3 relying upon but freely transforming the Southwest England represented on Ordinance Survey maps, was well developed and well known to readers of his fiction, and it is instructive to consider that “Wessex Heights,” by all accounts one of his finest poems, may record the "birth" of Wessex as a useful designation for the imaginative landscape of his poetry, a landscape in which the texture of his private life, like the details of the real countryside he knew and loved, could be re-made--where, just as Dorchester, by a process of gradual and loving abstraction, could become Casterbridge, so Mrs. Henniker could become "one rare fair woman" and his frustration become generosity. The imagination, in effect, has become the means of "forgiving" the real world for its failures and for freeing the poet from its most galling constraints. Hardy's willingness to transfer the concept of an imaginary landscape from his fiction to this poem in late 1896 suggests to me that "Wessex Heights" is eloquent testimony to the healing power of the imagination and one of the first poems he wrote with publication clearly in mind. But, more importantly, it suggests that the poem marks the fulfillment of his resolve, taken as long ago as early 1892, to return to the arena of the literary imagination in which he had always believed himself to be most fully and freely himself, the arena of poetry.
The Public/Political Poet
Some of Hardy's finest poems treating the relation of the private self to the public world were written during 1895 and 1896 (I am thinking of the "In Tenebris" poems, "The Dead Man Walking," and of course "Wessex Heights"), while he was contemplating the kinds of writer-audience relationships that might be possible in the role of poet. And the five or six poems--including “Zermatt: to the Matterhorn,” “A Cathedral Facade at Midnight,” and a few others--that can be dated 1897 and 1898 seem to suggest that he convinced himself he could write public verse, since they show him moving tentatively to engage publicly-known subjects and issues in ways that are entirely new. The two decisions that Hardy reached in late 1896 have made such poems possible. He has accepted the idea of public verse, and, for the first time, he is writing with publication in view and not, as had been the case before 1896, simply for his own private purposes.
Public events conspired with this new direction in Hardy's verse: on October 12, 1899, the Boer War broke out, and, in a move that was at once professionally opportunistic and morally courageous, Hardy almost immediately began to write about the war and to publish his poems in magazines and newspapers. Wessex Poems was still fresh in the memory of the poetry-reading public when "Embarcation," the first of the Boer War poems to be published, appeared in The Daily Chronicle on October 25, and this poem, like the six others he chose to publish in the periodical press during the war, must have represented both an opportunity and a risk, since Hardy's standing as a poet was new and fragile and might well have been damaged by the unpopular political position he took in his verse: his poems quietly but consistently opposed and critiqued the war effort, even while the public mood was bloodthirsty and most of the press was urging poets and journalists alike to be martial and patriotic. In these poems, especially in the moral stance they take, I see the beginnings of Hardy’s characteristic political voice, murmuring his dissent from violent and oppressive policies, and calling his readers back to basic issues of human decency.4
The decade of the 1890’s has long been recognized as a time of almost unparalleled productivity and of crucial decisions in Hardy’s personal and professional life. My argument in this essay is meant to complicate and clarify our image of the texture of Hardy’s life during this period and to suggest that we need to read the decade in a new and more complex way--first by separating his decisions about returning to poetry and abandoning fiction and then by reading Jude, “Wessex Heights” and other works of the decade within the chronology of his crucial decisions about genre. If we reconfigure our idea of Hardy’s career-change as I have suggested, we will find not only Jude and “Wessex Heights” but Tess, The Well-Beloved, two or three short stories, and a dozen or more poems re-shaping themselves, gaining resonance, and earning our admiration and wonder all over again.
Sources Cited
Gosse, Edmund. [Review of Jude the Obscure], Cosmopolis 1 (January 1896): 60-69; repr. Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970 262-70.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (World’s Classics), 1985.
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Hardy, Thomas. “Wessex Heights,” The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, II, ed. Samuel Hynes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 25-7; The Variorum Edition of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson. London: Macmillan, 1979. 319-20.
King, Kathryn R. and William W. Morgan. “Hardy and the Boer War: The Public Poet in Spite of Himself,” Victorian Poetry 17.1-2 (1979): 66-83.
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982.
Purdy, Richard Little. Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.