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  The chief criticism of Hardy’s technique as a novelist usually falls upon his use of coincidence, melodrama and fateful accidental meetings. He is said to overload the dice. Now the question of melodrama in Victorian life and fiction is not anything like as simple as it looks—I discuss this point later in dealing with Mrs. Gaskell’s novels about industrial unrest—but certain distinctions must be made. For example, the accidental meetings of Jude with his first wife after they have parted for years seem to me not only artistically permissible but, given Hardy’s method, artistically desirable. We happen nowadays to be less interested than he in the irony of circumstance; our irony is altogether satirical. By it we disparage our characters personally because we are criticising their standards and behaviour. In Hardy there is no personal disparagement. He hates no one, disapproves of very few people. The disparagement—and it is all the more true and shattering because of this—comes not from a superior author but from the triviality of the circumstances in which people live. An Agricultural Show, the mere changing of trains at a junction, may start the poison in high human feeling. We are mocked by things; things themselves are but the expression of “It”. We rightly object to this kind of coincidence in the cheap romantic literature of wishes, in them the convention is mechanical and worn out. In Hardy, on the other hand, coincidence is far from being the unreal literary trick of a commercial story-teller; such mechanism falls naturally into place in his mechanistic philosophy.

  Far indeed from suffering from coincidence Hardy is the master of coincidence. He is its master because he is the master of the movement of people. What are the scenes we most vividly remember? They are, I think, the journeys. The whole burden of the story weighs upon them. The tragic idea of people circling further and further from the crux of their fate and yet mile by mile coming inescapably nearer to it. is very familiar; Hardy fills in the provincial detail of this conception. Again, it is not tragic feeling which is his subject, but the burden of feeling. At a high moment like the murder of the children in Jude, Hardy completely fails to convince or move us, and this is not only because the whole episode is too much in itself; the failure owes something to the fact that in the preceding pages which describe how Jude and Sue are turned out of one lodging after another in Christminster, either because they are unmarried or because they have noisy children, Hardy has described something far more real, more fated and more significant.

  As so many Victorian novels do, Jude suffers at crucial moments from the intervention of the author. “The poor fellow,” we are told, “poor Jude”, “honest Jude”, and so on. When a novelist pities a prig he is usually writing about himself and Jude walks stiffly and bookishly to his doom. Cynical critics have pointed out that if Jude had been born a little later he would have gone to Ruskin College and the whole tragedy would not have happened. This is a nonsensical criticism. There is a tragedy of the desire for knowledge. Hardy’s analysis of the phases of Jude’s intellectual development and disillusion is masterly and only fails when he makes Jude die with the bells of Remembrance Day at Christminster in his ears. That is as bad as the lovers kissing under the gibbet where ten years later one of them will be hanged. The reason, to my mind, why the book fails, is that part of it is a tract on the marriage laws. It would have been perfectly fitting for Jude to be ruined by two women, one a sensual slut and the other a fey, half-sexed coquette posing as a creature of fastidious higher nature, without dragging the marriage laws in. Hardy was at his worst in attacking convention, because his interests were so narrow. What are his tragedies? Love stories only, the enormous Victorian preoccupation with sex. He seems never to have outgrown the tantalisation, the frustration which the Sue Brideheads brought down upon their husbands, making them expert, as only the true Puritan can be, on the pathetic subject of female vanity. So obsessed, the Victorians could never turn easily from sex to other dramas around them—as Zola could turn to the mines and the soil, Balzac to money, Dickens to the farces and tragedies of the law. The attack upon convention is one of the great bores of the late Victorian period, for all the attackers except Shaw thought they could get rid of conventions without altering the basis of the kind of society which produced them.

  A Curate’s Diary

  A writer’s humiliations come at every hour of the day and one of the greatest is the common failure of professional authors to write an interesting diary. Most of them try. The thing looks so easy, so indolent a labour, so casual and go-as-you-please. No shape to torture, no plot to drive one mad, no scheme to follow. One looks out of the window with an empty mind and lets the day pour in its news like the varieties of light coming in from the garden. Or so it seems. Yet, let the professional writer compare his jottings with those of the famous diarists. Let him look at Amiel or Pepys, Woodforde or Evelyn, and the discrepancy is shattering. Why such a coarseness of texture, such a failure in intimacy, even such an absence of newsiness? Obviously diary writing is not an affair of the idle moment, not a spare-time occupation. It must be a life-work, one’s only literary work, one of the constant domestic arts like gossip, cookery or gardening which leave little mind for anything else. The diary is indeed the revenge of the secretive and of the failures upon the public self-importance of the world of letters. A mere schoolmaster, a piffling clergyman, an official limpet, may jump at once to permanent fame without the agony of an author’s vanity.

  And of course without an author’s rewards. The one consolation to the regular professionals is that no diarist reaches fame in his own lifetime. He sows but he does not reap. We have had a recent example of this poetic injustice in the case of the Reverend Kilvert. We cannot know what this shy, gracious and strangely ecstatic Victorian curate would, have thought if he had known that the eyes of the public would one day swarm like flies over the three volumes of his private diary. Perhaps he would have been pleased and had half hoped to be read. For it seems very doubtful that a man, who takes an obvious trouble to write well, should do so entirely for himself. There must be, one feels, a limit to the satisfactions of self-love; and Kilvert had that Victorian sense of duty or responsibility which would give him the need of an object for his daily record. He was very much aware of recording history, if only with a small “h” and he cannot have been so different from his contemporaries who lived in a society so set and with such an air of eternity about its conventions, practices and beliefs, that they regarded themselves as a kind of communal phenomenon. That sense of belonging to a society is one which has been lost in the last thirty years—hence the awful fuss we make about it to-day when we try to set down our beliefs, speaking of it as something distant, revolutionary, Utopian—and it was that sense which made Kilvert an historian.

  Diary writing is the most private of the arts. It is not really surprising therefore that the Wiltshire and Radnorshire curate should have stopped writing before his marriage. In any case he could not have experimented in the difficult task of combining diary keeping with marriage, for he died a month later. Privacy was going. For some time he had been too busy with marriage preparations to write many of those long lyrical entries of the earlier pages. We feel indeed that a phase had finished. Kilvert had given the best of himself and though his death was tragically sudden, he died, from a literary point of view, at the right time—at one of the two or three right times which a talented man has in his life.

  What would marriage and family life have done to the innocent ardours of this susceptible bachelor? A difficult time, we suspect, awaited the lyrical idealist who was put in “a state of continual bewitchment” (as Mr. Plomer, his editor, says), and “emotional upheaval” by every female he met, child, girl or young woman. A wife might not have understood this “strange and terrible gift of stealing hearts and exciting such love” which was an instinct of his rapturous nature. And how rapturous it was! The little deaf and dumb girl who flings her arms round him makes him cry out, “I have been loved; no one can take this from me”. An Irish girl sends him into ecstasy with her play-acting on a tra
in journey. There are Ettie and “the wild, mad trysts in the snow”. There is a procession of girls and girl children with “glorious” hair or “glorious” eyes and hosts of chaste but exciting kissings, as if his heart were a spring day. We love by the book and Kilvert had read his Tennyson; but it is the special triumph of Kilvert’s sincerity that he has conveyed and made credible his kind of feeling to a generation whose notions of love are totally alien to those of a bubbling young mid-Victorian curate:

  How delightful it is in these sweet summer evenings to wander from cottage to cottage and from farm to farm exchanging bright words and looks with the beautiful girls at their garden gates and talking to the kindly people sitting at their cottage doors or meeting in the lane when their work is done. How sweet it is to pass from house to house welcome and beloved everywhere by young and old, to meet the happy loving smile of the dear children at their evening play in the lanes and fields and to meet with no harsher reproach than this. “It is a longful while since you have been to see us. We do all love to see you coming and we do miss you sorely when you are away.”

  We have lost the art of rendering pure sentiment and the feeling for such a tenderness as Kilvert’s. Echoes of the stage clergyman—“the deah children”—run mocking along the lines as we read a passage like that. But Kilvert’s Diary might be called the revenge of the comic curate. His sensibility and dignity show up the Edwardian horseplay at the expense of the clergy for the dated boorishness it is. When we contrast the note and rhythm of our lives with those of Kilvert’s we see there is more than a change of fashions between the generations. We perceive with a shock that it is we who are unnatural because we do not live within the walls of a long period of civilisation and peace. It is we who are the abnormal, distorted people: creatures of a revolutionary age who of all human types are the most passagery, and least characteristic, the most ill-fitting and bizarre.

  Towards the end of his short life Kilvert was in Wiltshire acting as curate to his father. An account of Kilvert’s father who kept a school during his son’s earliest childhood, is to be found in Augustus Hare’s autobiography. Hare wrote: “at nine years old I was compelled to eat Eve’s apple quite up; indeed the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was stripped absolutely bare: there was no fruit left to gather”. Was Kilvert’s prolonged and limpid innocence the result of some early check of horror? There is one incident in the third volume which catches the prying eye of the modern reader and which makes him hesitate about that innocence. There would be no hesitation but for the fact that Kilvert’s virginal innocence is phenomenal. At 38 it is a major feat of clerical sublimation. The incident concerns a village girl who had become hopelessly disobedient and uncontrollable. She had been reasoned with, prayed over, punished without result. There was nothing for it, Kilvert said, but formally and solemnly to give her a good whipping and he offered to do it for the parents. The offer was refused but it was agreed to allow him to be present. There may be nothing in it. Kilvert records it exactly as he records any other village happening; but it gives one a shock, for he had no cruelty in his nature. The shock does not arise from the act alone. What shakes us is that, charmed by the Victorian felicity, we had forgotten for a moment the price the Victorians paid for their ignorance of themselves.

  There was nothing spinsterly in Kilvert; his sensibility is masculine, or as the Victorians would have said “manly”. After Wiltshire Kilvert went to the Border country once more where he was always happiest. He responded to the lively imaginative and courteous Welsh people. The Border country provides many of his best characters. In Wiltshire the comedy is heavier. There was the row about Mrs. Prodgers, for example; there was the campaign which raged between the vicar and the squire about the harmonium. And then so many of those little girls who jumped up to kiss the curate would suddenly die. The diary form lends itself even better than the novel or the short tale to rounding off character, for life is always adding its felicitous afterthought. Where art is selective and one-sided, the diary dips its net daily and brings out what is there. Take the Prodgers incident. Mrs. Prodgers was one of those pushful, fecund and importunate parishioners who bring their umbrellas down with a firm tap on every vicarage doorstep. She came from Kingston St. Michael, a village where droll things were always happening, and caused a lot of tittering when she insisted that she and the little Prodgers should be used as models in the design of the new stained-glass window for the church. “Suffer the little children” was the subject, and Mrs. Prodgers had edged her brood of sufferers well into the foreground of the picture. Doubly immortal Mrs. Prodgers to be done both by Kilvert and by stained glass. In a few lines there is the essence of a life-story. It is not worth more, it is not worth less. Outside a stained-glass window, a diary note is the perfect place for her. And then the Squire. He illustrates the aptitude of the diary form for collecting fragments day by day, for catching each day’s contribution to the jig-saw of human character. The novelist must summarise, theorise and jump to conclusions; the diarist can take the more leisurely course of letting the character out piecemeal, as he makes himself. A vicar-baiter and a tyrant, the Squire ordered the tenor to be turned out of the choir and so spoiled the singing, but opposed “with strong language” the proposal to introduce a harmonium. “Distant from music” was one woman’s description of him. “He apprehended”, he said, “a chronic difficulty in finding someone to play the instrument.” The Kilverts won, but the Squire wouldn’t pay a penny. That is not the end of the Squire. His portrait is perfected a few days later in the midst of a later and very affecting description of a child’s funeral. Kilvert, familiar with rural sorrow and intensely observant, had a perceptiveness uncommon in literature. We see the mother’s distracted face, her cries of guilt and helplessness, her hard, despairing eye. And then the afternoon sun shines in the church and the birds begin to sing as if in honour of the dead child and Kilvert, as he reads the service, catches sight of the Squire through the window. He is dressed in a white hat and a drab suit, dashing fussily across the churchyard and putting his stick into the grave to see that it is the right depth. Things must be done properly.

  Kilvert has always these completing realistic touches so that a scene is never made top-heavy with the emotion it arouses. His eye and ear are acute; they seem always to be roving over the scene and to hit upon some sight or word which is all the more decisive for having the air of accident. And in literature, to convey the chance effects of life without being bizarre is everything. So he goes on his walking tours, has his holidays in Sussex, the Isle of Wight, marks his catalogue at Burlington House, loses his easy heart, preaches, consoles the sick, collecting the odd but never isolating it from the stream of living in the manner of the caricaturist. An old lady—you could meet her in the town if you wanted—was parachuted over the cliff hanging from her umbrella in a gale and alighted unhurt. Another “grasped at vacancy” on the cellar stairs and fell to the bottom; the trouble began when her husband at the top explained that she couldn’t have done so because you can’t grasp at vacancy—a grotesque bit of domestic argument. An old man on his deathbed says, “It is hard work dying,” and a fine farmer wrecked by illness in middle life says sadly, “I shall never again be a big man like you with your strong body.” These things are too sharp when detached from Kilvert’s context; in that, they are the windows of a way of rural life which is far from gone, though curates go no more to drink whey with dairymaids or dance Roger de Coverley at picnics with the prettiest girls of the parish.

  Kilvert’s account of his visit to Priscilla Price shows him at his dramatic best. The old lady was 77 and could remember the coronation of George IV. She lived with her step-daughter, a woman turned 50 who was an idiot. They were an astonishing pair, for the idiot added a touch of frightening parody to the picture. They were drinking tea in their cottage when Kilvert found them. What an excellent short story they make:

  “Ar Tader, Ar Tader!” cried the idiot. “She means ‘Our Father’,” explained the stepmo
ther. “She has been wanting to see the clergyman, the gentleman that says ‘Our Father’.” Prissy detailed to me the story of an illness she had suffered, illustrated by a dramatic performance by the idiot as a running accompaniment. Occasionally in addition to the acting of the details of the illness, the bursting of a blood vessel, the holding of the head of the invalid, and yelling to the neighbours for help, the idiot roared out an affirmative or negative according to the requirements of the tale. “The blood spouted up,” said Prissy. “Yes,” thundered the idiot. “She held my head,” explained Prissy. “Yes,” roared the idiot. “There was no one here but her,” said Prissy. “No”! shouted the idiot. “They say that Mr. Davies heard her crying for help as far as Fine Street,” declared Prissy. “Yes!” asseverated the idiot with a roar of pride and satisfaction. “She had to run out into the deep snow,” said the stepmother. The idiot stepdaughter measured the depth of the snow upon her thigh.