# The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 4

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CHAPTER IV
Boyhood (1840-1856)
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an installment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its ​shades and the scene. The somber stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way.
THE portentous organ-point sounded by these superb strophes, already recognized as ranking among the noblest descriptive prose pieces in our language, may with doubled fitness accompany and echo through a recital of the earliest events in Hardy's life.
Not only does it determine the mood of The Return of the Native , not only does it reveal the prevailing spiritual tone of the whole of the Wessex Kingdom; it also suggests the dominating character of the particular terrain which first entered the vision of the poet. For it was on the very edge of a heath like Egdon that the house in which he was born was situated. It still stands there.
Puddletown Heath and Bockhampton Heath were united to make an Egdon. And it was at Higher or Upper Bockhampton, about three miles to the north of Dorchester, that Hardy's father carried on his trade of general builder for the community. Here it was that Thomas Hardy issued forth from the womb of the Heath, of Time, and of his mother, and drew in his first breath ​of the dour Wessex atmosphere, on the second day of June, in the year 1840.
Upper Bockhampton, although within walking distance of the County Capital, stood lonely, in an utter isolation that is perhaps difficult to realize adequately today. It was a small cluster of tiny cottages, set off only by the inevitable tavern. It boasted neither church, school, nor post office. No main road ran through it; there was only what remained of an ancient Roman highway—and this seldom saw much travel. Dorchester itself, not yet tapped by railway lines, was self-contained enough, although it attracted country life a-plenty at fair and festival times. But Upper Bockhampton was virgin, untouched by the steel of industrial culture, primitive, natural—in the literal sense of the word.
The low houses, most of them thrice-ancient in years and structure, seemed a harmonious part of the landscape. Likewise the people: slow-moving, clothed in weather-worn garments whose cut, like the cut of their pronouns, had scarcely changed in generations, they melted imperceptibly into the stern and darkling countryside. The roaring life of the towns was far away, apprehended here only in vague seismographic quiverings.
The Hardy house, much roomier than the surrounding structures, was still of a piece with the lonely terrain. Emerging from it, one immediately found himself in the presence of the inscrutable, timeless personality of the Heath—a part of it, in fact, and a sharer in its moods. This inevitably remained the dominating factor in Hardy's childhood. Nothing could shield him from it completely, or for long.
​Against this effect of nature, stark naked in all its repulsiveness and beauty, worked the "cultural" influence of the mother, and not entirely in vain. The prospect of a sheltered, gentle childhood greeted the baby Hardy, sunned daily in a pretty flower-garden. Pleasant, amusing folktales, artificially shorn of all traces of brutality or grotesquerie, were related to him as soon as he could understand a tale. From the servants in the house, at the same time, the growing infant probably heard or overheard the same tales in their older and coarser form, and told in the inimitable dialect which suited them so well—delicious dialect also, its employment being proscribed.
Of religion, the child likewise learned from his mother the sweet New Testament parables and the more moral of the Mosaic episodes. The latter attracted him more, being more in harmony with the sad, stern music of the Heath, which he soon learned to love more than the regimented beauty of nature under botanical cultivation. Occasionally the household journeyed in a body to Dorchester of a Sunday, to sniff the cosmopolitan air of the town and to attend divine service at St. Peter's. Here the boy encountered companions, of his own age and also somewhat older, who instilled in him the seeds of that queer pragmatic view of Scriptural authority which was peculiar to the Wessex mind. And, inasmuch as few of the Bockhampton Hardys were exactly notorious for their religious orthodoxy, these seeds were permitted to grow their heretical fruit without opposition. Still, the Christian religion, as established by the Church of England, was there; it was to be accepted, with whatever ​mental reservations one's experiences and moods might dictate.
The building-business of the father was prospering during these days. His stables were full of horses; his assignments for construction work and repair work kept him and his considerable corps of workmen busy. The elder Hardy was a man of some consequence in his own little community, assuredly. In the rambling, comfortable Hardy house, the village "quire" assembled every week to rehearse their dance tunes, rounds and carols; in this house also, the neighborly folk gathered to celebrate the recurring rural festivals; here, before the blazing hearth, they presented their traditional lyric-dramatic-choreographic bits, like the delightful O Jan! O Jan! O Jan!, the memory of which was to endure for at least fourscore years. The four-year-old child must have clapped his hands and stamped his feet with serious ecstasy at the infectious thumping strains of Nancy's Fancy. From the workmen and farm laborers and servants Hardy thus obtained impressions that no civilizing influence could ever efface—impressions that became strengthened and intensified by his daily walks along the Roman Road and by his wanderings through the unenclosed wilds.
For his mind was preternaturally active and retentive throughout his childhood years. It was like a dry sponge, which absorbed the warm, dripping color of the rustic life to which it was exposed. Nothing natural or spontaneous could escape its thirst, and nothing could fill it to the point of saturation.
With this eager, absorbent mental activity and reten​tiveness went a certain physical sluggishness and diffidence. The reason for this is not difficult to apprehend. The child Hardy of course associated with the youngsters of the hamlet. While he played with them in abandoned jollity, and while he talked with them in the utmost gravity, as children do, he lost himself in their somewhat loutish habits, manners and language. But when he sought to transplant these experiences into his home-life, as children do, he discovered to his astonishment that these were not the proper, dignified things for a Hardy to do. The father, and especially the mother, frowned on all that was rural or crude. Hardy learned that there was an invisible but rigid barrier between the life within his home and the life outside it. He had to learn to trim his sails in both places accordingly. At home he learned to affect his mother's manners; also, like Elizabeth-Jane, to say "stay where you are," instead of "bide where you be," "succeed" instead of "fay," "wild hyacinths" instead of "greggles," "suffering from indigestion" instead of "hag-rid." In the lanes and fields with his playmates, on the other hand, he soon learned to forget the glossy sheen of culture and polite education. Thus, at the age of six, Hardy was already leading a double life.
At the same time, the growing consciousness of his family's social position, although this position was itself rather indeterminate, induced in him a growing and uncomfortable shyness while associating with his childhood cronies. He drew himself away from them, spiritually, as his mother's attitude made itself felt more and more poignantly. He became merely observant at times when he should have been joining whole-heartedly in the diver​sion of the moment; he became both introspective and critical when he should have lost all consciousness of himself in play or jest. He was forced to paint in for himself a mental background of superiority; this naturally tended to induce a sense of detachment from the "inferiority" of his fellows—and tended to constitute, in itself, a kind of complex of inferiority; for the boy was thus alone, and lonely.
It is important to realize this aspect of Hardy’s childhood, for it both determined and symbolized the mood of analytical detachment coupled with sympathetic appreciation and pity which was later on to characterize his whole artistic attitude. It provides a key to at least a partial understanding of his enviable mental equipment as a transcriber of life.
At the age of eight, the boy was registered as a pupil in the Dorchester primary school. It has already been indicated that this school was originally founded by one of his Sixteenth Century Dorset ancestors, Thomas Hardy of Melcombe Eegis. Thither, at any rate, Hardy journeyed every day for a period of six years. The instruction he received was meagre enough, according to all accounts. At one time during his stay, there were no more than four pupils attending besides himself.
Of these mediocre opportunities, the youngster failed to reap any consequential advantages whatever. He turned out to be a "backward" boy, partially indolent, partially uninterested, impatient and intolerant of the extremely elementary information which the equally uninterested and harassed master attempted to impart. His mother, worried by his reluctance in progressing ​with sums and compositions, dusted off her old Latin grammar and began to give him regular training when he was twelve years old. Although his interests in books were somewhat quickened by this experiment, his regular school-work failed to show improvement; it remained poor, even when judged by the not too rigorous standards of mid-century Dorchester.
Instead of poring over his paradigms, the boy showed marked preference to listen to the excommunicated speech of the servants and villagers, and to those beloved reminiscences of his grandmother. In 1854 he left the school. It had given him nothing. Then Mrs. Hardy sniffed danger; she was determined, in spite of all, to civilize and to polish her son. After two years more of tutoring in the Roman writers, leavened with the reading of their more difficult passages in English verse-translations, the Hardys employed a French governess. From her the boy gathered a smattering of her tongue—perhaps also just a snatch of l'esprit Gaulois. For only a year, however, did this sporadic training in the accomplishments of a gentleman continue; then what has sanguinely been called the "formal education" of Hardy came to an end. It was remarkable only for its meagreness and ineffectiveness.
Jude the Obscure, that hapless boy, is thought by many to be a passionate projection of this educational phase of Hardy's early life. But even if we did not have Hardy's own word against it, this not too attractive supposition could never be held logically. Jude was depicted as eager for learning; Hardy was not. Jude perplexed and tortured himself with extremely naïve preconcep​tions as to the nature of the foreign languages; such things never really bothered Hardy. Poor predestinate Jude smarted under the cruel frustrations of his desires for academic and university attainments; there is nothing to show that Hardy ever overweeningly craved scholarly distinction.
Learning, wide and deep, was in time absorbed by the young poet; hut it was absorbed in his own way and at his own sweet will, free from discipline and even from guidance. And, as might be expected, his learning proved to be of the vivid and thoroughgoing kind that is characteristic of the man who gathers his information and pursues his inquiries outside the walls of a university. Browning was a contemporary example of the possessor of this ample and colorful variety of erudition, skilfully applied to and permeating his artistic output, just as in the case of Hardy.
If Dorchester failed to school Hardy into respect for a supervised education, it did however present him with a unique and deeper education of an entirely different kind. He was, after all, able to write; the adolescent youths and maidens of the town were not. Consequently they fell into the habit of waylaying the young student (reputed to be so terribly erudite that he even read hooks in Latin and French), and of begging him to set down on paper their correspondence. Hardy complied willingly. He became the village amanuensis. The letters he wrote out from dictation in this way were undoubtedly amatory for the most part, and the authors were chiefly the girls. It was a rare opportunity for him to study the surface of human nature under the stress of ​emotion and circumstance, and lie undoubtedly made the most of it. This education in the school of life was acquired as naturally as oxygen is acquired by breathing, and the process at first was unconscious or subconscious.
Hardy claimed to be entirely uninterested in the subject-matter which he indited; this was of course the only condition under which he could be entrusted with the precious and carefully guarded secrets of the correspondents, added to the fact that they probably considered him too young and guileless to apprehend fully the import of the glowing words he set down as they timorously whispered them into his ears. In this fond supposition they were most assuredly mistaken.
This activity again illustrates the lad's growing sympathy with the rustic heart, together with his growing critical appreciation of the machinery of the rustic mentality. Later on he beautifully capitalized these experiences of his. Reminiscential is Mother Cuxsom's remark in The Mayor of Casterbridge: "Love-letters? Then let's hear 'em, good soul . . . Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to be when we were younger? Getting a schoolboy to write 'em for us; and giving him a penny, do ye mind, not to tell other folks what he'd put inside, do ye mind?"
A remnant of Hardy's actual memories of some of these epistles is preserved in a delicious bit, found in The Hand of Ethelberta. Tipman, Lord Mountclere's valet, is writing to Mrs. Menlove, his "intended": "His lordship impressed this upon me very strong, and familiar as a brother, and of course we obey his instructions to the letter; for I need hardly say that unless he ​keeps his promise to help me in setting up the shop, our nuptials cannot be consumed."
Disillusionment of a kind, salted with humorous penetration and insight, was the great gift bestowed upon the introspective boy by this fortunate occupation. This part of his early training cannot fail to bring to mind the parallel case of Richardson, whose experience in writing model love-letters for others less gifted than himself in expressing supercharged emotions in a polite and graceful way led him to the composition of the first great English epistolary novel. Richardson, however, actually composed his perfumed screeds, while Hardy remained a mere amanuensis.
Thus Hardy passed the first sixteen years of his life: quiet, self-contained, shy, backward, aloof and generally uncomfortable when in the presence of other human beings. Drawn largely within himself, he learned to worship nature in his own peculiar fashion: to view its cosmic moods as the manifestations of an awful but indifferent Personality; to view the ferment of the same Personality in the souls and actions of men with less awe, but with added sympathy, recognizing in them the model of himself.
In 1856 his parents took thought. What were they to make of the youth? He was out of school, idle, preoccupied with himself. He had been able to cultivate but few companions. A social career was impossible, likewise was a university residence. He would inherit little or no income. Travel also was financially impracticable. To let him work with country swains of his own age, at farming or in an industry of some sort, would ​be fatal to the self-esteem and family pride of his mother. London was far off, and opportunities in that city extremely rare. The father's building-business was progressing fairly well, but not well enough to support another master. Ambition, besides, prompted the Hardys to discover some sort of stepping-stone for the advancement of their son.
Now in Dorchester there lived a Mr. John Hicks, an architect, who occasionally placed small contracts in Mr. Hardy's way. The two men talked things over one day. A country architect was a step above a country builder. Dorsetshire architecture was indeed more than a mere trade, yet it was not quite a profession or an art. Still, it was a convenient wedge with which to pierce the wall that stood across the path of ambition. It might, given a fair amount of luck, lead on to better things. And Hicks thought he might well use an apprentice. Many ecclesiastical commissions were coming his way, for it was said that churches all over the country were in sore need of "restoration."
Young Hardy, facile enough with his pencil, readily accepted the suggestion. He entered Hicks's draughting office at Dorchester. Papers of indenture were duly signed. The boy was launched into a career which was to provide him with experiences and opportunities as yet undreamed of. The first definite turn in his life had been taken.
In London, meanwhile, there was buzzing a-plenty in the civilized world which awaited the young man, still ​unconscious alike of his powers and of his destiny. In science, religion, morals, philosophy, literature and art, in everything that spelt culture, one of the most brilliant periods in several English generations had passed its climax, was resting comfortably, and was about to slip unknowingly in decline towards the tragic, explosive overthrow that Darwin was quietly preparing for it with his patient accumulation of biological data.
The fruits of the Romantic Revolt had been reaped; a fresh consciousness of the beauties of the past, of nature and human nature unadorned, unrestrained by ugly fetters, had been gained. And the dangerous sordidness, the self-consuming flames of license that had too often accompanied the Satanic outbreaks of the opening of the century had been rigidly suppressed soon after Victoria had mounted the throne.
Wordsworth, last of the great poets of the late Renascence, had reformed, been crowned, relapsed into dulness, and died. Carlyle's barbarous, infinitely repetitious thunders had dulled many ears to the faint unrestful reverberations of the pseudo-cataclysm of 1848, that continued only in a steady and soothing decrescendo. Tennyson had written In Memoriam, Browning Christmas Eve and Easter Day: cogent forces on the side of an optimistic mysticism. Dickens had ceased crying out against the fantastic squalor of industrialism and was slumming in the American backwoods, to the Londoners' intense satisfaction. George Eliot had begun to ruin her splendidly human stories with moral Positivism, imported from Paris by Lewes. Thackeray was chanting of the rippling tragic comedy on the surface of the ​gentlemanly behavior of the time, the Brontë sisters of the comic tragedy of wild and lonely lives. Matthew Arnold was mellowing the world he saw, illusory at best, through the faintly rose-hued spectacles of academic Oxford, with its Christianized classical paganism. All these attractive forces continued to function, with ever decreasing vigor.
The glories of the Victorian compromise and self-justification were all conveniently at hand, and London was properly revelling in them. Complacent contemplation of steady, undisturbing achievement was the order of the day. That complacency had but few more years to live, for all its strength and solid building upon the seemingly substantial loam of a steady view towards a good order of things.
This London, and Thomas Hardy, diligently beginning his architectural apprenticeship, were inevitably drawing together. The Spirit of the Years was observing the slow ordering of a portentous convergence of the twain.