Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  Swanage was near enough to Bockhampton for Hardy to make a gesture to his family. Mary and Kate were invited over for a holiday, and to meet Emma, at the beginning of September. It was the first encounter between his sisters and his wife, an anxious moment for all of them. Again the only account comes from Emma’s diary, and again it is studiously impersonal, not mentioning their presence at all on one trip, the only evidence of which comes from Mary’s sketch book. Mary was never talkative, but her brother’s love was precious to her. Years later Emma accused her of trying to make division between her and Tom from the start, but things appear to have gone well enough in Swanage, and some sort of friendship was established. Mary was well read and well spoken, and could discuss books and poetry with Emma, and Kate was cheerful and prepared to make friends. Her letters to Emma after this are affectionate, and she was eager to be invited for further visits. Hardy took them all on a day trip to the Isle of Wight aboard a steamer, past the Needles, Ventnor and Ryde and back through the Solent, stopping at Bournemouth and reaching Swanage again by moonlight. On the last day of the visit they had what Emma described as a ‘Breakfast Picnic’ at Corfe Castle, a few miles inland. It was too far to walk, and they got into ‘Sommer’s Van, leaving Swanage at 7. with 15 people’. On the road they picked up more passengers ‘until we were 21. and were packed as close as sardines’, wrote Emma in her diary, adding ‘Sun shining carelessly and lazily.’ They took a kettle and brewed their tea on the green slopes below the ruined castle, and in the afternoon Mary and Kate said goodbye and walked off along the Wareham road with their bits of luggage. Hardy and Emma returned to Swanage on the top of the horse bus, three horses abreast, with views over the lush late-summer landscape: ‘Hedges flowing over into the wide-sided roads, growing freely into the fields behind.’29 She sounds content.

  They kept up a habit of walking daily on the shore or the cliffs, even when Hardy was working. The first instalment of Ethelberta, with dully conventional illustrations by George Du Maurier, had appeared in the Cornhill in July, and he kept going steadily, the last sent off in January. Whatever people thought of it, his reputation was growing. To his delight, a dialect narrative poem he had written ten years before, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, was published in November both in the Gentleman’s Magazine and in Appleton’s Journal in America; offending words were removed (‘her cold little buzzoms’ becoming ‘her cold little figure’) and some dialect words changed, but it was still entertaining.30 Emma made a copy of the original version, which Hardy then corrected again, giving them a chance to talk about it and share it, which meant much to her. Also in November came a favourable critical article in the French fortnightly Revue des deux mondes, one of the most influential journals in Europe.

  In the same month Hardy told an editor seeking a story from him that he intended ‘to suspend my writing – for domestic reasons chiefly – for a longer time than usual after finishing Ethelberta, which I am sorry to say is not nearly done yet’.31 Domestic reasons could have meant house hunting or a hope that Emma was pregnant. She had her thirty-fifth birthday at the end of November, and each month must have brought its private drama of expectation and disappointment, and anxiety about her age. Whatever his reasons, he had made up his mind to take a break from writing. In March they moved again, settling briefly in lodgings in Yeovil.32 Ethelberta appeared in volume form, and the Leipzig publisher Tauchnitz, who sold English-language novels all over Europe, approached Hardy for the first time with an offer for it, going on to publish editions of nearly all his books. Hardy started a new notebook in which he planned to collect source material. Like many nineteenth-century novelists, he saw newspapers as a useful repository of human-interest stories, and Emma was given another task of copying out likely stuff.

  Money was not short, there was nothing to keep them in England, and Emma loved travelling abroad. They decided to take another foreign trip in May, this time to Brussels and the Rhine-land. Before setting off for the Continent, Hardy wrote to Leslie Stephen for advice on his reading, particularly critical books. Stephen, still stunned with sorrow, sent an admirable reply: ‘if you mean seriously to ask me what critical books I recommend, I can only say that I recommend none. I think as a critic that the less authors read of criticism the better. You, e.g., have a perfectly fresh and original vein, and I think that the less you bother yourself about critical canons the less chance there is of your becoming self-conscious and cramped. I should therefore, advise the great writers – Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, &c &c, who give ideas and don’t prescribe rules.’33

  In Swanage Emma had been doing some writing of her own, a short novel which she called The Maid on the Shore.34 It is in nineteen chapters, set in north Cornwall, and the best parts of it are the descriptions, of the seashore where the country women come at low tide with panniered donkeys, collecting sand for the farmers, of the bleak moorland and ‘dreary interminable roads’, of the miserable mud cottages with dirty children and of the poor farms, each with a few fields, barn, poultry, pig, horse, cart and plough. Against this she tells an unhappy love story of two cousins, Claude and Rosabelle, who are engaged, until Claude deserts her and runs off to London with an uneducated but exotically beautiful Cornish girl he has met on the beach. After complications Rosabelle finds happiness with Claude’s quiet and steady best friend. Claude is disappointed in his love and grows ill living a hectic life in London, returns to Cornwall, falls off a cliff and dies. Emma had no gift for characterization and little idea of how to write fiction, and it would be hard for even the most determined editor to make anything of her story, but she did get it written to the end, it is reasonably coherent, and it uses what she knew of Cornish life. It is not absolutely unreadable, even if you keep hoping it will improve, and end by feeling sorry for Emma having worked so determinedly to so little effect. If she showed it to Hardy and he commented, it may have made a difficult moment for both of them.

  Hardy managed to maintain a quite spectacular anonymity well into middle age. There is not a single written description of him – or of Emma – throughout the first six years of the marriage, although his name as an author was becoming known. It is true that for a whole decade he and Emma were on the move between London, the Continent and various parts of Dorset, going from place to place, living in lodgings with landlords and ladies who would not have noticed or cared who they were, travelling, renting houses in out-of-the-way places and making few friends – none of them the sort of people who would think of writing down their impressions of the Hardys. Marriage across class boundaries was also isolating. Some of their relatives complained, not entirely without reason, that they appeared to be wandering about like tramps.35 Part of Hardy always wanted to guard his privacy. Like Ethelberta, he was unsure where he belonged and could not solve his problem by marrying into the peerage. Emma was also shy.36 Even the friendship with Leslie Stephen became inactive with Hardy’s marriage and the death of Minny, and, although the two men corresponded, they met only occasionally.37

  Hardy’s own recollections were written down fifty years afterwards. Then he approached those years with as much caution as Leslie Stephen would have recommended in his most stringent editorial mood. His second wife, acting as adviser and editor, had no interest in expanding his account of his best years with Emma, since she was hostile to her memory. A few of his notebook entries are copied into the Life, almost all worth reading. But really we know little more than where they settled and where they travelled, what Emma wrote in her diary and he in a handful of letters, almost all professional, and how his career progressed. We have to accept that he intended his personal life to be kept private except for the very occasional confession, and that the story he wanted told was what he put into his books.

  They left England on 29 May, taking the train from Liverpool Street and crossing from Harwich to Rotterdam. Emma started a new and rather disorganized diary in the back of her honeymoon one. She observed German ladies with many babies on the steamer, and that the sea is higher
than the land at Scheveningen in Holland. They took a Rhine steamer, saw Cologne (where ‘T. was angry about the brandy flask’), Coblenz and Heidelberg, Baden-Baden and the Black Forest. In Strasbourg she was ill with an ulcerated throat that was treated with the brandy and a patent medicine fetched by Hardy. From Brussels they visited the battlefield of Waterloo, where a woman brought out two baskets, one of bread, the other of skulls, with perfect teeth, before giving them cake to eat and some flowers to take away. That day they walked a long way in the heat, and the next day she noted, ‘I am still greatly fatigued and Tom is cross about it.’ At the end of the trip she wrote, ‘Going back to England where we have no home and no chosen county.’ This was on 18 June, and on the next page she was able to write ‘July 3. 1876. Riverside Villa. Sturminster Newton’. Here Hardy started work on a book that surpassed any he had yet written.

  PART THREE

  1875–1905

  11. Dreaming the Heath

  Within days of their return to England the Hardys found and agreed to rent an unfurnished house in the ancient market town of Sturminster Newton on the River Stour, spanned by a grey stone bridge built in 1500. Sturminster is in north Dorset, above the Vale of Blackmore, and a good twenty miles from Dorchester – and Bockhampton – with no direct rail connection. If Hardy was making a cautious approach to the area of his childhood home, he was not yet ready to ask Emma to settle any closer to his mother. The house they took stands at the edge of Sturminster, or rather just out of town, separated from the paved streets by an expanse of grass on which sheep are often put to graze and placed high above the river, flowing past at the bottom of a steep bank. The spot is undeniably romantic, and the site of an old mansion, but the house taken by Hardy was one of a pair of standard mid-Victorian semi-detacheds, bow-windowed and two-storeyed, built further along the bank.1 They shared a garden at the back, with a pump. There is unlikely to have been either a bathroom or indoor plumbing when they lived there. The fronts of the houses were their glory, facing west over the riverside walk, the river below and the miles of water meadows beyond. The sunsets were spectacular: ‘the west is like some vast foundry where new worlds are being cast,’ wrote Hardy one autumn evening.2 Not surprisingly he set up his study in the west-facing bedroom upstairs. The houses were known as Riverside or Rivercliff Villas – he uses both names in his letters – and were newly built, and the Hardys were the first tenants. Here the marriage got into its stride. They found a way to be happy, Hardy wrote well, and they stayed for nearly two years.

  Before they could move in they had to acquire some furniture. Bristol, they decided, was the place to do this, and off they dashed to buy ‘£100 worth of mid-Victorian furniture in two hours’.3 What he meant by ‘mid-Victorian’ was simply modern, as opposed to the ancient furniture he had grown up with. The sum he laid out was substantial, and he must have felt some pride at being able to spend so freely to make this first real home for Emma. Why they chose Bristol for furniture is a mystery. Prices may have been lower, and the transport to Dorset cheaper. One of his carpenter cousins was living there, Nathaniel Sparks, who had become a restorer of violins since their London days and was about to be married to Mary Hardy’s college friend Annie, but, since Hardy was not eager to introduce Emma to his cousins and Annie was pregnant, it seems unlikely that Nat was the draw, or that he looked them up.4

  They next had to find their first servant girl, Georgiana, who lasted only a few months, Emma giving ‘Notice to Geo’ on 13 November.5 She was replaced by Jane, the daughter of a labouring family from a nearby village, ‘said to be an old county family’ come down in the world, much liked by both Hardy and Emma.6 So they settled into the house where, as he recalled, they spent their happiest time together. Looking back later, he wrote a lucid and expressive poem about their time there. He called it ‘A Two-Years’ Idyll’:

  Yes, such it was;

  Just those two seasons unsought,

  Sweeping like summertide wind on our ways;

  Moving, as straws,

  Hearts quick as ours in those days;

  Going like wind, too, and rated as nought

  Save as the prelude to plays

  Soon to come – larger, life-fraught:

  Yes, such it was.

  The poem goes on to say how little they valued their happiness then, and how they failed to realize that what they thought of as a prelude to better things – ‘larger, life-fraught’ – was really, as it turned out, the high point of their life together. So it becomes a sorrowful poem about how easy it is to live through the best parts of life without realizing it, always looking forward, and how you regret it afterwards. It may be one of the standard poetic subjects, but Hardy writes about it in strong, unstandard phrases:

  ‘Nought’ it was called,

  Even by ourselves…

  he says bluntly, and

  What seems it now?

  Lost: such beginning was all…7

  A charm of the poem is that after you have finished it and are reduced to sadness, you can go back to the opening lines and call up the remembered delight again, of their hearts quick to be moved, of the wind characterized by Hardy’s rare and lovely use of ‘summertide’ that makes you pause to enjoy it, and of time passing speedily for happy people for whom the speed itself becomes part of the happiness.

  Another part of the happiness was that Hardy was working on a new novel, and that its theme was drawn from the deep places of his imagination. The greatness of The Return of the Native is that it is as much the work of Hardy the poet as Hardy the novelist. All his novels have elements of poetry, but this is the first in which, although he has made his concepts into fiction, essentially he is setting down a poetic dream. Leslie Stephen had urged him back to Shakespeare, and you can read The Return of the Native almost as a complement to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is the dream of a winter’s night, with witches instead of fairies, fateful journeys through difficult terrain, marriage plans which falter, and lovers who exchange their partners for no sensible reason. There is a moonlit love scene, there are fierce quarrels, and there are rustics who put on a dramatic entertainment. In good Shakespearean tradition there is also a young woman who disguises herself as a boy. Hardy shows us mats of ‘perfumed shepherds’ thyme’ to match Titania’s bank, and snakes that shed their skins; lizards, grasshoppers and glow-worms make their entrances. Venn the reddleman acts as a sort of Puck, moving rapidly about the heath to intervene in the plot, sometimes speaking in riddles as when he tells Thomasin, who believes her husband has been out to buy a horse, that he has seen him leading one, ‘A beauty, with a white face and a mane as black as night’.8 In the opening chapter Hardy suggests the element of dream when he writes that in winter the heath becomes ‘the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster’.9 Dreams, or nightmares. His tale ends in tragedy for most, with three of the principal figures caught up in flight and disaster ending in death, but he leaves a future for Thomasin and her baby daughter, and for Venn.

  All this is drawn out of an imagination inspired and nourished by memories of his native heath, where he took his first steps with his once all-powerful mother, and by other dreams and fantasies of his boyhood. The proud, intelligent mother Mrs Yeobright is made into a widow, but, like Jemima, she is fiercely ambitious for her son, Clym. He is an only child, although his cousin Thomasin is virtually a sister, and just such a quiet, steady girl as Hardy’s sister Mary. Clym is a distant version of himself, a man who has been away and returns with high-flown philosophical ideas, and who enrages his mother by falling in love with a woman she dislikes. Clym’s beloved, Eustacia, is presented as a queen of the night, mysterious, alluring and changeable, the beauty of a boy’s dreams. The scene in which she allows young Charley to hold her hand for fifteen minutes in payment for his help has more of an erotic charge than her scenes with Clym, surely because Charley is standing in for young Tommy in the
days when he yearned after inaccessible women. Charley makes her take off her glove – what good is a gloved hand to a lover? – and later he brings her presents from the heath, ‘white trumpet-shaped mosses, red-headed lichens, stone arrowheads used by the old tribes on Egdon’, trying to please her, rather as Hardy made drawings of animals to please Mrs Martin.10 And when Eustacia dies, her husband acknowledges Charley’s position as one who loved her and takes him to see her lying dead and restored to beauty.

  The quarrel between Mrs Yeobright and Eustacia – where she accuses the older woman of having set herself against her from the start, and claims to be better born, and Mrs Yeobright acknowledges that she had tried to stop her son marrying her, and rages against her audacity – is painfully realistic in its fury and bitterness. The two women are virtually tearing him limb from limb between them, each intent on taking him from her rival.11 How clearly Hardy could imagine such a quarrel between his mother and Emma, and he may even have seen it as a way of pre-empting it and warding it off. There is a good deal of magic in the book. Eustacia is held to be a witch by some of the heath dwellers, and she is partly brought down by an act of witchcraft in turn. Hardy is ambivalent about witchcraft, ‘rationally sceptical but emotionally sympathetic… both qualities exist within him,’ as Simon Gatrell has observed.12 In his first draft of the book Wildeve was called Toogood, and he was not an engineer turned publican but a herbalist, a white witch, known as Conjuror Toogood. The first draft was different in several other ways. Venn was a less solid figure; Eustacia had no foreign father, naval grandfather or girlhood in Budmouth, but had always lived on the heath. Mrs Yeobright was not socially superior to her neighbours, and Clym had been no further away than Budmouth to work. To quote Gatrell’s excellent account of the changes again, a ‘wave of gentrification… struck the text’.13 Thomasin, coming into money, is seen with no fewer than three servants at the end, which seems a little superfluous for a heath dweller, but was perhaps what Hardy had learnt a genteel household required. Many of the names were changed too, the Yeobrights starting as the Brittans and Eustacia as Avice. Interesting as these adjustments are, they are no more than incidental. They do not affect the essential nature of the book, its fervent linking of place and feeling, its quality of a poet’s dream.