Two On A Tower

This is an older rating; my current rating and reviews may be found at

this edition.

At night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense, for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the case now.

2024 review: Never before have I felt this wide a gulf between what I hoped a novel would be and what it actually is….and

Two on a Tower is a reread for me! The first time, I was so dazzled by the celestial elements that I was able to overlook and ignore the more distasteful parts, but on reread the shine is gone and I’m left with a boring novel about characters I hate with the occasional pretty passage about astronomy. Dropping my rating from 4 stars to 2 (ouch!).

The age gap bothered me in 2021, but it

really bothered me this time around. I think I truly didn’t notice how central to the romance it is: they don’t just

happen to have a significant age gap, but that’s why they get together in the first place.

Viviette remarks numerous times on how young he looks (ew!) and knows that in all likelihood this relationship will just be a passing passion for him, but tries to tie him down anyway. Swithin, for that matter, is so young and naive that he doesn’t see that he’s being taken advantage of—but not so young that I won’t hold it against him that he basically blows Viviette off when he loses interest, vows be damned. Both are also unforgivably selfish, as exemplified when they get secretly married—Swithin’s family’s house has just been destroyed and Viviette’s maid has a new baby that she doesn’t want to leave, but both of them insist on running away anyway.

That just isn’t romantic, but Hardy tries to paint it as such, with eye roll-inducing passages like

In brief, Swithin St. Cleeve shall be Lady Constantine’s Astronomer Royal; and she—and she—’ ‘Shall be his Queen.’ The words came not much the worse for being uttered only in the tone of one anxious to complete a tardy sentence.

Groan. Instead of rooting for the hero and heroine, I think I hate them both, and I hate even more that I seem to agree with Swithin’s misogynistic uncle:

I don’t think well of any woman who dotes upon a man younger than herself. To care to be the first fancy of a young fellow like you shows no great common sense in her. […] She is old enough to know that a liaison with her may, and almost certainly would, be your ruin; and, on the other hand, that a marriage would be preposterous,—unless she is a complete goose, and in that case there is even more reason for avoiding her than if she were in her few senses.

However, I can live with complicated and imperfect characters; the problem is that the character development just isn’t good enough to make them interesting.

Because what makes

Two on a Tower a two-star read this time is

how unbelievably boring it is. Since I already knew what happens in the (fairly thin) plot, the novel was mostly just a lot of drawn-out melodrama. And

wow is there a lot of it. I’d completely forgotten the fully story of Sir Constantine, which is hilariously over-the-top (

He had dropped his old name altogether, and had married a native princess, only to commit suicide, memorialized in an unintentionally hilariously graphic newspaper cartoon

), and the ending is equally silly. It’s a book that feels meaningless once it’s closed, for all the grand philosophizing that Hardy is attempting. Ultimately the “romance”

has corrupted both of them, turning them into easy liars and causing them both immense pain and unhappiness

.

Suffice to say this is coming off my almost-favorites list and banned from my re-read pile. That said, I still do think there is some gorgeous writing about the stars—Hardy does a fantastic job at verbalizing the sublime, beautiful horror of the heavens.

Some favorite passages:

It was little beyond the sheer desire for something to do—the chronic desire of her curiously lonely life—that had brought her here now.

‘Well, we will get outside the solar system altogether,—leave the whole group of sun, primary and secondary planets quite behind us in our flight, as a bird might leave its bush and sweep into the whole forest.

Now, how many do you think are brought within sight by the help of a powerful telescope?’ ‘I won’t guess.’ ‘Twenty millions. So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing is made for man.’

‘I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.’

‘It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite annihilates me.’

But the actual sky is a horror.’

‘Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky. Look, for instance, at those pieces of darkness in the Milky Way,’

‘There is a size at which dignity begins,’ he exclaimed; ‘further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe.

‘And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness, there is involved the quality of decay. For all the wonder of these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not, they are not everlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles. You see that dying one in the body of the Greater Bear? Two centuries ago it was as bright as the others.

A fog defaced all the trees of the park that morning, the white atmosphere adhered to the ground like a fungoid growth from it, and made the turfed undulations look slimy and raw.

They more and more felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung about them like a nightmare.

Ten days passed without a sight of him; ten blurred and dreary days, during which the whole landscape dripped like a mop; the park trees swabbed the gravel from the drive, while the sky was a zinc-coloured archi-vault of immovable cloud. It seemed as if the whole science of astronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies, with their motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone mathematical problem.

The eight unwatered dying plants, in the row of eight flower-pots, denoted that there was something wrong in the house.

The summer passed away, and autumn, with its infinite suite of tints, came creeping on. Darker grew the evenings, tearfuller the moonlights, and heavier the dews. Meanwhile the comet had waxed to its largest dimensions,—so large that not only the nucleus but a portion of the tail had been visible in broad day.

Under any other circumstances Lady Constantine might have felt a nameless fear in thus sitting aloft on a lonely column, with a forest groaning under her feet, and palæolithic dead men feeding its roots;

for old science was not old art which, having perfected itself, has died and left its secret hidden in its remains.

In this work of art he was represented as standing with his pistol to his mouth, his brains being in process of flying up to the roof of his chamber, and his native princess rushing terror-stricken away to a remote position in the thicket of palms which neighboured the dwelling.

Viviette was dead. The Bishop was avenged.

2021 review: 4 stars

This slightly-built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men.

“But is it—in a human sense, and apart from macrocosmic magnitudes—important?” he inquired…

I really enjoyed this, my first foray into Hardy (chosen on a whim because I couldn't resist the cover). The prose is just

gorgeous, easily some of the most beautiful I've read. And the idea of a romance between two star-crossed lovers, one of whom is a dreamy-eyed astronomer with an observatory atop an abandoned stone tower, just works for me (in concept) on every level. (Well, being Viviette's age myself, the age gap did weird me out a bit.) The beginning with the romantic conversations on astronomy and the descriptions of the tower itself was by far and away the best bit.

However, I found this book majorly lacking in character development, and, thus, in emotional impact. Swithin and Viviette are as one-dimensional as they come. This was exemplified in the fact that I still have no idea why they were in love with each other, and so didn't feel especially invested in either them or their relationship. It's really a shame, because if these characters had been more fleshed out, this novel could have easily become a favorite of mine; as it is, I liked it well enough, but it's probably not something I'll be rereading. (I hope this isn't an issue I find in Hardy's other novels—because I do plan to read more.)

Some favorite passages:

The sob of the environing trees was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze, their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums; while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally clicked in catching each other… Below the level of their summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation: pads of moss grew in the joints of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and suggestive.

…till he asked her how many stars she thought were visible to them at that moment. She looked around over the magnificent stretch of sky that their high position unfolded. “Oh—thousands—hundreds of thousands,” she said absently. “No. There are only about three thousand. Now how many do you think are brought within sight by the help of a powerful telescope?” “I won’t guess.” “Twenty millions. So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything: nothing is made for man.”

“I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.”

“The imaginary picture of the sky as the concavity of a dome whose base extends from horizon to horizon of our earth is grand, simply grand, and I wish I had never got beyond looking at it in that way. But the actual sky is a horror.”

“There is a size at which dignity begins,” he exclaimed: “further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins, further on a size at which awfulness begins, further on a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?”

For all the wonder of these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not, they are not everlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles.

“Then if, on the other hand, you are restless and anxious about the future, study astronomy at once. Your troubles will be reduced amazingly. But your study will reduce them in a singular way—by reducing the importance of everything…”

Then again the scintillations vary. No star flaps his wings like Sirius when he lies low! He flashes out emeralds, and rubies—amethystine flames and sapphirine colours in a manner quite marvellous to behold. And this is only one star! So, too, do Arcturus, and Capella, and lesser luminaries…

They plunged down to that (at other times) invisible multitude in the back rows of the celestial theatre—remote layers of constellations whose shapes were new and singular—pretty twinklers which for infinite ages had spent their beams without calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line, or being able to bestow a ray of comfort on a single benighted traveller.

The eight unwatered dying plants in the row of eight flowerpots denoted that there was something wrong in the house.

The simple fact is that the vastness of the field of astronomy reduces every terrestrial thing to atomic dimensions.

She in her experience had sought out him in his inexperience, and had led him like a child.

It was an evening of exceptional irradiations, and the west heaven gleamed like a foundry of all metals common and rare; the clouds were broken into a thousand fragments, and the margin of every fragment shone.

…the thrushes cracking snails on the garden stones outside, with the noisiness of little smiths at work on little anvils.

“…I have physical reasons for being any man’s wife,” she said recklessly.

To altered circumstances inevitably followed altered views.