ralph pite
because he had seen others fall into them. When the Franco-Prussian War broke
outin the summer of 1870, he was working in London for the architect Raphael
Brandon (1817–77), in his offices in St Clement’s Inn, ‘an old-world out-of-the-way
corner’,^12 as Hardy later described it. Brandon seemed to have escaped from the
business of self-promotion and self-advancement that Hardy disliked in London’s
architectural world, but his serenity vanished in the face of war. The conflict proved
to be ‘a cause of much excitement to Brandon’, who bought all the papers and
read them avidly, including the ‘leading articles on the war’. Hardy’s close friend
Horace Moule had written many of these, and he too became feverishly involved
in this foreign conflict. In 1865, Moule gave Hardy a copy of theThoughts of the
Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, inscribing it with a quotation from the book: ‘This
is the chief thing: Be not perturbed: for all things are according to the nature of
the universal.’ Plainly, though, Moule and the other-worldly Brandon were both
highly perturbed by the outbreak of war; for a while Hardy was as well. He grew,
he said later, ‘as excited’ as his friends and visited the Waterloo veterans in Chelsea
Hospital, though what he found there disappointed him: ‘tattered banners mended
with netting and...the old asthmatic and crippled men’.^13
Later in the 1870s, Moule and Brandon committed suicide—Moule in 1873,
Brandon four years later—and the rest of Hardy’s life was troubled by their fate. It
was not so much that war had revealed the shallowness of their stoicism, or simply
that their excitement in 1870 glamorized the violence of imperial might (ignoring
the ‘old asthmatic and crippled’ veterans), although Hardy’s later writings show
that he was alert to both these possible mistakes. Instead, Brandon and Moule
typified for Hardy the danger of not finding an equivalent to the heroic endeavour
supplied to warriors by battle. His friends’ vicarious involvement in the 1870–1
war was unhealthy, because it compensated for the drifting uncertainty of their
own lives. Brandon’s kindliness masked a despairing sense of failure, after the
eminence he had attained in the 1840s, and Moule’s career was running into the
sand, amidst increasingly frequent depressive and alcoholic episodes.^14 War became
the intoxicating and terrifying reminder of what you had failed to achieve in your
civilian life, if you were someone like Brandon or Moule, so that, in turn, war
fever became a kind of denial—an immersion in struggle to disguise your own
acquiescence.
Hardy consistently presented himself as an unambitious person, stoical, fatalistic,
and disinterested, and he took Moule’s quotation from Marcus Aurelius as his motto
in life. Yet not only was he far more driven and energetic than this image suggests
(^12) Hardy,TheLifeandWorkofThomasHardybyThomasHardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London:
Macmillan, 1984), 81. 13
14 Ibid. 82. See Millgate,Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, 84.
Hardy, who knew Edmund Gosse well, notices in his friends the unexpected jingoistic fervour
that Gosse observed in his father during the Crimean War and recorded inFather and Son(1907), a
book that Hardy read.