In August, after making a flying visit to his mother, and observing that her face looked smaller, he set off on another prolonged holiday with Emma. They were to be away for eight weeks, and she took her bicycle with her, although he had not yet had time to master fully his Rover Cob. They toured the Midlands, Malvern, Worcester, Warwick and Stratford-upon-Avon, and looked at Reading, in which town Hardy knew that his father’s mother had lived almost a hundred years earlier. Their next destination was the Continent, but Emma was knocked off her bicycle by another cyclist at Dover. She had no serious injuries but needed to rest in bed, so they decided to stay put for a fortnight. During this time they read Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ together, which he marked with their joint initials and the date, ‘Sept. 1896 – T.H./E.L.H.’. September was the month of their wedding anniversary – the twenty-second – which would have prompted both of them to think of the past and make an effort to revive old feelings.
The next part of their tour was to be made in Belgium, where ‘le véloze de Madame’ aroused interest among staff of the railways on which they travelled from town to town, Ostend, Bruges, Brussels, Namur, Dinant, Liège. In Brussels they went sentimentally to the hotel they had stayed in twenty years before, in 1876, ‘for association’s sake’, but found it had ‘altered for the worse since those bright days’. 12 Hardy wanted to make another visit to the field of Waterloo. Emma sensibly pleaded exhaustion – she could scarcely take her vélo across the battlefield – and he went on his own. On 2 October he walked from the English line, along the Charleroi Road, to the French, and was struck by how close the fighting lines were to one another. His mind was working on the idea of a drama about the Napoleonic Wars, in which the battlefield of Waterloo would figure. For the moment it was to be called ‘Europe in Throes’, and he imagined it on a large scale.
Then it was time to end their long break from Dorset and go home. He had shown that, for all his devotion to his mother and his sisters, he would not take their side against his wife. Similarly, while he admired – even adored – the elegance of Mrs Henniker and Agnes Grove, and delighted in their crisp worldly conversation, they did not make him despise Emma’s muslins and ribbons and hats like collapsing birthday cakes. Nor did they prevent him from reading and discussing other writers’ works with her. The sharing of ‘Dover Beach’ was only one example. She was reading Ibsen assiduously early in 1897, and they went to performances of his plays together that spring. In 1903 they both enjoyed Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, as he told Mrs Henniker, saying they had been arguing about what happened to James’s characters, ‘and find we have wholly conflicting opinions thereon’. 13 Emma also tackled some difficult books on her own. One was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, read daily over a long period ‘with my morning cup of tea’ and finally abandoned with the comment ‘queer morals’: it is an account of high-minded illicit love and a nobly complaisant husband. Another was Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which she read in a French translation and found ‘powerful but unpleasant too’. 14 She also puzzled over Yeats’s ‘The Shadowy Land’ [The Shadowy Waters]. 15 Her responses were simple, but she was prepared to make an effort.
Hardy supported her in many ways during the 1890s. For example he was consistently kind to her nephew and niece. Gordon Gifford became a semi-permanent guest at Max Gate while he went to school in Dorchester. Lilian, red-cheeked, pretty and, although silly, liked by Hardy, was there for long periods too. They made a fuss of her, and in 1898 gave her ‘the desire of her heart, a “bike” ’. 16 Gordon showed enough aptitude to be sent to Paris as part of his education, and Hardy himself then gave him some training. In 1899 Hardy arranged for Gordon to be taken into the Blomfield architectural office, enabling him ultimately to work as an architect for the London County Council. This was a strikingly generous and helpful assumption of responsibility for the children of her brother, who had decided that Gordon had weak lungs and whose best idea for his son had been to find a gentleman living in Switzerland to whom he might become a companion. 17 Hardy also backed Emma strongly in her work for animal rights, and a few months after their return from abroad in 1896 she held an anti-vivisection meeting at Max Gate.
During 1895 and 1896 the house was enlarged: both front rooms were extended, a new kitchen was put in behind the old one – which became the bicycle room – and a warren of service rooms were added at the back. Extra rooms were also added in the attic. Emma began to use one of these as a daytime retreat, and Hardy moved to a new study. There was still no bathroom: neither thought it a necessary innovation, preferring to have the water for their basins and hip bath carried up and down stairs by the maids. The next improvement was to the garden, where a swing was installed and the lower lawn relaid, so that croquet and tennis could be played. This was in the winter of 1899. 18
Here, then, was a hugely successful, worldly, enlightened Victorian husband behaving generously to his wife. But hurt and anger simmered inside Emma. She could not forgive him for no longer consulting her about his work, for refusing to encourage her in her efforts to write, for failing to help her find an agent or a publisher, as he did for his women friends, and for his barely concealed attachments to them. She made up her mind that it was his rejection of Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of all this bad behaviour. The diaries she kept in which she expressed her anger against him gave her a private outlet for her grievances, but she went further, making herself look foolish by inflating them and insisting that she was superior to him in birth, education, manners and even talents, and giving the impression that she did not value his achievements as a writer. 19 Visitors were embarrassed, and Hardy himself responded increasingly with silence and withdrawal when they were at Max Gate, making his study his refuge. He was often there in the evening as well as during the day.
Yet there was another jaunt abroad together in 1897, when they toured Switzerland energetically in June, having decided to miss the racket of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London. Emma kept a holiday diary again, not as lively as her Italian one, although she liked the Genevan musical boxes, the Alpine flowers and the glaciers, and noted with pleasure how she ate some snow to cool herself after a long upward trek. In Lausanne they stayed in the Hotel Gibbon, and Hardy, realizing that its terrace garden was the exact place and 27 June the very day on which Edward Gibbon had finished his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 110 years before, was inspired to a poem. He imagined the spirit of Gibbon, formal in pose, grave and grand, flecked with light from the lamps beyond the acacia trees on the terrace, asking, ‘How fares the Truth now? – Ill?’ – and proceeding to answer himself in the affirmative. Hardy makes Gibbon invoke Milton, deliberately ranging himself alongside the fearless truth-tellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Later that summer he and Emma went on a bicycle tour to Wells, Longleat, Frome and Salisbury, where they attended Evensong together several times, Hardy unable to resist the lure of the cathedral service. 20 His enthusiasm for bicycling was now fully as great as hers, and he was ‘gradually getting to climb a fairly steep hill’. 21 He agreed to inspect the White Horse Inn at Maiden Newton, the village where his mother had worked when she was young, and told the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, for whom he looked at it, that they owed him ‘no expenses in travel worth mentioning, the visits having been made on a bicycle’. 22 He also took Kipling, whose company he enjoyed in spite of disapproving of his imperialist ideas, on a bicycling expedition to search for a house near Weymouth. When Kipling said he would like to build on the top of the Ridgeway, Hardy explained to him that any house there would be shaken by the guns firing off Portland, and Kipling replied that he would particularly like that. But no house was bought or built. 23 From time to time one or other of the Hardys fell off their machines and sprained or scraped themselves, but they both kept up their bicycling well into the next century.
March 1897 saw the publication of one further novel, a revised version of the ser
ial he had written hastily in 1891 for Harper’s, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. 24 It was now renamed The Well-Beloved. By Hardy’s own account it is unlike his other novels in being ‘frankly fantastic’, built around a single idea. It centres on a sculptor, Jocelyn Pierston, who falls repeatedly in love with girls or women who seem to embody his ideal, only to find they soon lose whatever it was that had attracted him. He is always recognizing what he calls his well-beloved, but, ‘Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of [the well-beloved]… Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable.’ 25 One of Pierston’s friends advises him never to marry, another more cynically recommends marrying ‘the first nice woman you meet. They are all alike.’
The book can be read as an account of the impossibility of finding satisfaction in human love, each of us dreaming of a perfect love, pinning the dream on one person after another because (of course) no one can embody it. It is the creed of the romantic, not of the respectable family man, and neither subject nor tone was calculated to appeal to Emma, and her only known comment on it is that she did not like it. Although there is no trace of autobiography in The Well-Beloved, it is unmistakably an apologia pro vita sua. Hardy is not justifying the waywardness of the male who is helpless in giving and withdrawing romantic love, he is simply describing the condition as he has experienced it – with a bow to Shelley, who lived it before him. 26 Proust found it ‘very beautiful’, because he thought it approached what he himself was attempting, but, although there is a fascination in the book, it is in the idea, not in the telling. Pierston himself is so faintly sketched as to be a shadow rather than a man, and his women are fainter still. For the book to be interesting, they would have to have been made substantial, like Bathsheba or Sue. Hardy also excludes any suggestion that the love is sexual, making Pierston a still dimmer figure, and making his loss of interest in each of them almost entirely painless to both parties.
Whether you find the idea as compelling as Proust did and regard the book as a triumph of modernism, or take it as a mildly original exercise without much force, depends on what you look for in fiction. If you want Dorset scenery and customs, the descriptions of Portland and its inhabitants are well worth reading. Hardy’s fiction is never dull, and there are some strong and surprising paragraphs about London life too. Here, for instance, is Pierston fighting his way through a society hostess’s crush with Swiftian relish for the unpleasantness of the experience: ‘After ten minutes given to a preoccupied regard of shoulder-blades, back hair, glittering headgear, neck-napes, moles, hairpins, pearl-powder, pimples, minerals cut into facets of many coloured rays, necklace clasps, fans, stays, the seven styles of elbow and arm, the thirteen varieties of ear; and by using the toes of his dress-boots as coulters with which he ploughed his way’. 27 Written straight from Mrs Jeune’s drawing room, no doubt.
Pierston is looking for an ideal, or perhaps a goddess, and his response to the new moon in the sky suggests he worships as a pagan wherever he finds beauty: ‘In a crowd secretly, or in solitude boldly, he had often bowed the knee three times to this sisterly divinity on her first appearance monthly, and directed a kiss towards her shining shape.’ 28 Hardy may be imagined doing the same, offering his tribute to the goddess who is always changing, always beautiful and always inaccessible. The book turned out to be prophetic. Pierston, looking through old photographs, comes on one of an early love whom he now thinks dead. The effect on him is that ‘He loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life… the times of youthful friendship with her, in which he had learnt every note of her innocent nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionate attachment, embittered by regret beyond words.’ 29 Hardy seems to be seeing ahead to 1912 when precisely this process would be enacted, following Emma’s death, and he would find himself in thrall to her, dead and inaccessible, as he had not been for many years in life.
For the living Emma, The Well-Beloved was another insult to be borne. In August 1899 she was asked for her advice on marriage by Elspeth Thomson, who, with her sister, a painter, had been on friendly terms with the Hardys for some time. Elspeth had just married Kenneth Grahame, the children’s author. Their wooing had been conducted in baby-talk, and he turned out to be more set in his bachelor ways than she had expected. Hence her appeal to Emma. Elspeth may have suspected that Hardy was not an ideal husband either. In any case Emma seized on the opportunity to lay out her own disappointments in marriage, say what she thought of Hardy’s behaviour and cast herself as an ideal wife, inexplicably undervalued. ‘I can scarcely think that love proper, and enduring, is in the nature of men… and at fifty, a man’s feelings too often take a new course altogether. Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, and he wearies of the most perfect, and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life. Of course he gets over it usually, somehow, or hides it, or is lucky!’
She went on to lament interference from in-laws and suggested that ‘keeping separate a good deal’ was a way of dealing with crises. This was sensible enough, and it was advice she was putting into practice herself. She went on with a grim warning to expect ‘little neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may have set your heart on’. And more: ‘If he belongs to the public in any way, years of devotion count for nothing.’ At the end of her letter she acknowledged that happy marriages do exist, but usually when both partners are Christians. 30 Mrs Grahame accepted the advice about keeping separate, although she hardly needed it. 31
Emma presented Hardy with a Bible that summer of 1899, intended to rekindle his Christian faith. Later in the year, pursuing her interest in women’s suffrage, she wrote her name in a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the great feminist texts, which included, although she probably failed to realize it, some strongly anti-clerical passages. The tragicomedy pursued its course. During that year she moved out of the marital bedroom: ‘I sleep in an Attic – or two!… My boudoir is my sweet refuge and solace – not a sound scarcely penetrates hither. I see the sun, and stars and moon rise.’ 32 During the next year she made notes for a novel in which divorce looms, because the hero is so indifferent to his wife that he never looks at her. Meanwile Hardy, ever unpredictable, was inspired to write a poem called ‘Wives in the Sere’, distinguished by the acuteness and tenderness of its observation:
Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.
But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her. 33
In October 1899 the rumbling dispute between the Dutch settlers in southern Africa and the British, fired by imperial ambitions, broke out into war. Hardy was no imperialist, but he had grown up in a barracks town, watched soldiers in the streets, and observed the arrivals and departures of regiments as part of everyday life since his childhood, when he had also pored over his grandfather’s illustrated military magazines. He could not help being curious about war. He went to watch the regiments leaving Dorchester, and bicycled to Southampton – fifty miles there and back – to see the troops embarking for southern Africa. He told Mrs Henniker that he took pleasure in tactics and strategy, as in a game of chess, but that the human side horrified him – horrified, and fascinated too. 34 He struggled with the philosophical question as to h
ow wars began, and how men became willing to embark on mass slaughter. Meeting Henry Moule, he suggested that Buddhism might be more effective than Christianity in promoting peace. Moule, a good Christian who thought the Boers were in the wrong, was shocked. 35 Emma took the view that ‘the Boers fight for homes and liberties – we fight for the Transvaal Funds, diamonds and gold… Why should not Africa be free, as is America?… Well, we gabble all day long about this war.’ 36
In the first months of the war Hardy produced a series of poems, meditations on the feelings of departing men and wives left behind, the putting up of the lists of killed and wounded outside the War Office in December 1899, and what the souls of the slain might ask and conclude about the relative merits of military glory and quiet domestic life. They are workmanlike and agreeably idiosyncratic. In one, he imagines himself meeting the souls of slain soldiers flying home and hearing them ask how they are remembered; they divide into two groups for ever, the loved, whose spirits return home, and the unloved, who plunge into darkness. In another, a Colonel reflects that ‘the Girl I leave behind me’ is now a grandmother and that she suffers much more than the young wives. One short poem, ‘The Dead Drummer’, rises to sublimity. It comes through Hardy’s observation that a country boy, for whom the stars he has grown up with and seen every night are an integral part of his experience, would be disconcerted by the strangeness of the southern sky; it was a response to Hardy’s hearing that a Dorset drummer boy had been killed in Africa. In the poem he gives the boy the pejorative name of Hodge, as applied to the lumpish and ignorant peasant: ‘Drummer Hodge’. He goes on, with exquisite courtesy, to offer him a perfectly shaped elegy.
Thomas Hardy Page 31
