Stephen Gard delves into Thomas Hardy’s multi talents.
Did you, tucked beneath his chin, to his bowing
Guide the homely harmony
Of the quire
Who for long years strenuously –
Son and sire –
Caught the strains that at his fingering low or higher
From your four thin threads and eff-holes came outflowing
‘To my Father’s Violin’, Thomas Hardy
Some know Thomas Hardy, poet. More know Thomas Hardy, novelist. Few know Thomas Hardy, architect. How many know Thomas Hardy, musician?
Hardy’s earliest memory was of his father presenting him with a toy accordion. It was the perfect instrument for small fingers to explore ‘homely harmony’ and to start another Hardy on the journey to music-making, for father and grandfather were parish players, chiefly, though not exclusively, for St Michael’s Church, in the Dorset Village of Stinsford.
Young Thomas Hardy soon learned to play the violin, the family instrument of choice, and ‘Hardy the Third’ joined ‘Hardy the First’ and ‘Hardy the Second’, accompanying the choir at St Michael’s.
Stinsford occasions of public amusement were made jollier by Hardy minstrelsy. In the ballrooms of the great houses they danced ’til dawn to Hardy strains. On Christmas nights the Hardy players led a company of waits (street singers of Christmas carols) around the freezing Stinsford streets, concluding with a hearty supper in the Hardy home. The Hardys were stonemasons by trade. They expected and accepted no payment for their music-making, it was their gift to fellow citizens.
He was of ecstatic temperament, extraordinarily sensitive to music, and among the endless jigs, hornpipes, reels, waltzes, and country-dances that his father played of an evening in his early married years, and to which the boy danced a pas seul in the middle of the room, there were three or four that always moved the child to tears, though he strenuously tried to hide them.
This passage is from Thomas Hardy’s biography, which appeared in 1928, the year of his death. Ostensibly the work of his second wife Florence, the book was, in fact, largely written by himself. What we read is what Hardy knew of Hardy.
His first employment was as apprentice to an architect – another creative calling. Hardy was a prize-winning student, keen on the design, renovation, and particularly the conservation of church buildings. This urge to preserve was inherited from the elder Hardy men, who transcribed all the old tunes they heard or played. These manuscript scores are in the collection of the Dorset History Centre. Hardy the Third delighted in playing from these pages.
Music informed and infused all Thomas Hardy’s writing. Reuben and William Dewey, characters in his first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) are sketches of the Hardy elders, and Thomas Hardy later recalled, ‘It is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago.’ For Hardy also strove in all his writings to preserve the culture of those days and places, in the face of the late-Victorian rage for modernity.
Music also gave rhythm and sonority to Hardy’s verse; composers readily set his stanzas to music. Benjamin Britten’s song-cycle Winter Words (opus 52) comprises eight Hardy poems, of which ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ reveals Hardy’s use of pulse drawn from a physical fact – the slow-moving wheels striking the gaps in the rails, rattling over points; the rhythm broken and unsettling.
In the band of his hat the journeying boy
Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the
Lamp’s sad beams
Like a living thing.
Hardy’s poetic aesthetic held that a too-insistent rhythm was bad art. This principle derived from his architectural training, where ‘a cunning irregularity is of much worth’. Hence the deliberate disruption of metre in the ‘Great Western’. So stochastic a technique did not fox a modern composer like Britten, though it might have vexed a Parry or Stamford Villiers.
Similarly, but in a literary sense, hear the chattering waters in Hardy’s ‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’; the device is known as onomatopoeia:
Reticulations creep upon the slack stream’s face
When the wind skims irritably past,
The current clucks smartly into each hollow place
That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier’s sodden base;
The floating-lily leaves rot fast.
A glimpse from his days accompanying Stinsford waits:
Through snowy woods and shady
We went to play a tune
To the lonely manor-lady
By the light of the Christmas moon.
We violed till, upward glancing
To where a mirror leaned,
We saw her airily dancing,
Deeming her movements screened;
…
She had learnt (we heard when homing)
That her roving spouse was dead;
Why she had danced in the gloaming
We thought, but never said.
A simple poetic form, much preferred by amateur versifiers (ballad metre; Shakespeare’s Bottom called it ‘eight and six’) suggests village folk ‘Who strum without passion/ For pence, in the snow!’
‘Seen by the Waits’ touches on other themes running through Hardy’s writings: unhappy marriage, the women who endure such marriages and the strenuous life of the rural poor. ‘Ruined Maid’ has the jaunty lilt of a ballad sung by a street musician; a catchpenny tune ground out of a barrel organ:
‘O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?’ —
‘O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?’ said she.
— ‘You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!’ —
‘Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’ said she.
Hardy’s first marriage ended in an estrangement he regretted for the remainder of his life. His bittersweet view of music, courtship and wedlock are all present in ‘The Fiddler’:
The fiddler knows what’s brewing
To the lilt of his lyric wiles:
The fiddler knows what rueing
Will come of this night’s smiles!
He sees couples join them for dancing,
And afterwards joining for life,
He sees them pay high for their prancing
By a welter of wedded strife.
In later years when he was a successful novelist and a critically acclaimed poet Thomas Hardy’s diaries reveal a more sophisticated and easier life than his tradesmen ancestors had known, though music is as evident as ever.
March 5. Concert at Sturminster. A Miss Marsh sang ‘Should he upbraid’, to Bishop’s old tune. She is the sweetest of singer – thrush-like in the descending scale, and lark-like in the ascending drawing out the soul of listeners in a gradual thread of excruciating attenuation like silk from a cocoon.
March 7: Saw Mrs. Holder. The meal. Talk. To Mr. Holder’s room. Returned downstairs. Music.
March 9: Music in the evening. The two ladies sang duets, including ‘The Elfin Call’, ‘Let us dance on the sands’, etc. …
March 10: In the afternoon I walked to Boscastle … the overshot mill: E. provokingly reading as she walked; evening in garden; music later in evening.
In London Hardy met with George Meredith, with R L Stevenson, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Bret Harte, figures not often encountered during his youth in the village of Stinsford. Of Walter Pater, Hardy said ‘His manner is that of one carrying weighty matters without spilling them.’ And Henry James, ‘has a ponderously warm manner of saying nothing in infinite sentences’.
Music, as ever, wove its golden thread through Hardy’s life and letters. He wrote after attending a concert of Wagner’s music:
It was weather and ghost music – whistling of wind and storm, the strumming of a gale on iron railings, the creaking of doors; low screams of entreaty and agony through key-holes, amid which trumpet-voices are heard. Such music, like any other, may be made to express emotion of various kinds; but it cannot express the subject or reason of that emotion.
When Hardy, in an encounter with Edvard Grieg, repeated his response to Wagner, Grieg muttered, ‘I would rather have the wind and rain’.
From his wife’s diary, in Hardy’s later years:
November 3. While he was having tea to-day, [Hardy] said that whenever he heard any music from Il Trovatore, it carried him back to the first year when he was in London and when he was strong and vigorous and enjoyed his life immensely. He thought that Il Trovatore was good music.
November 4. At tea [Hardy] said that he had been pleased to read that day an article by the composer Miss Ethel Smyth, saying that Il Trovatore was good music. He reminded me of what he said yesterday.
And with a link to literature and Hardy’s love of the old rustic ways:
October 7. Tennyson died yesterday morning.
October 12. At Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey. The music was sweet and impressive, but as a funeral the scene was less penetrating than a plain country interment would have been.
A small dissonant note was sounded when Hardy himself died in January 1928. He had wished to be laid to rest with his first wife, Emma, at Stinsford, in a private burial. Others believed his literary fame had earned him a place, and not merely a plaque, in Poet’s Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey. The result was two funerals; Hardy’s heart was interred at Stinsford, his ashes in the Abbey.
Cinematographers of the British Pathé Company depicted these events in a shaky monochrome montage. Some moments at Stinsford: priest in fluttering surplice bears a small casket, followed by a dozen mourners among villagers sober in sub-fusc, hat to chest; at Westminster, Britain’s élite, in topper and cloche – G B Shaw in Homburg – push through a press of blank-faced pedestrians.
Those cameras gathered no sound; it seems Thomas Hardy departed in silence. A fine irony for one who, from the youngest age, delighted in, made, and even inspired music.
The silence of the grave inspired Hardy’s ‘To My Father’s Violin’, with which we started and with which I conclude.
He must do without you now,
Stir you no more anyhow
To yearning concords taught you in your glory;
While, your strings a tangled wreck,
Once smart drawn,
Ten worm-wounds in your neck,
Purflings wan
With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con
Your present dumbness, shape your olden story.