Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  I

  They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

  Uncoffined – just as found:

  His landmark is a kopje-crest

  That breaks the veldt around;

  And foreign constellations west

  Each night above his mound.

  II

  Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

  Fresh from his Wessexhome –

  The meaning of the broad Karoo,

  The Bush, the dusty loam,

  And why uprose to nightly view

  Strange stars amid the gloam.

  III

  Yet portion of that unknown plain

  Will Hodge for ever be;

  His homely Northern breast and brain

  Grow to some Southern tree,

  And strange-eyed constellations reign

  His stars eternally. 37

  The particular significance of the year 1900 for Hardy and Emma was that it brought the thirtieth anniversary of their first meeting at St Juliot in March. A visitor to Max Gate at this time described how her mind ran on the past: ‘It is pathetic to see how she is struggling against her woes. She asserts herself as much as possible and is a great bore, but at the same time is so kind and goodhearted, and one cannot help realising what she must have been to her husband. She showed us a photograph of herself as a young girl, and it was very attractive… She says it was she who encouraged him to give up the architect’s profession.’ 38 The anniversary also prompted him to make an effort to put things on a better footing between them. His account of the process is given in a poem called ‘A Second Attempt’. It begins:

  Thirty years after

  I began again

  An old-time passion:

  And it seemed as fresh as when

  The first day ventured on:

  When mutely I would waft her

  In Love’s past fashion

  Dreams much dwelt upon,

  Dreams I wished she knew.

  He goes on to describe how he retraced his first sensations of love, its hopes and fears, then marriage and life together, and how he hoped to revive his past love. Only,

  … when I looked around

  As at the former times,

  There was Life – pale and hoar;

  And slow it said to me,

  ‘Twice-over cannot be!’

  The striking thing is that he describes a purely internal process, communing with himself and listening to ‘Life’. He is not just telling us that Life forbids a return to earlier feelings, but that Emma has become inaccessible, and real communication is no longer possible between them. 39

  There was no London Season during the war, and they did not take a London house or flat; when Hardy went to town he stayed at a Bloomsbury hotel. Gordon was now working in the Blomfield office, and Lilian was at Max Gate for long periods. In October, Emma’s sister Helen was taken ill, and she went to nurse her in Hampshire. Hardy worried about the strain on her, wrote affectionately ‘ “take it stiddy” as they say here’ and advised her on investing her sister’s money: ‘Corporation stock… is as good as anything. It pays about 3 per cent; and if you are offered more anywhere you may be sure there is some risk.’ 40 Meanwhile he had Lilian, and visits from a persistent American admirer, Rebekah Owen. He took Rebekah bicycling with Lilian, and for a nighttime tour of the rougher streets of Dorchester – Mixen Lane, in The Mayor of Casterbridge – which may have seemed rather tame to a New Yorker. Emma dashed home in November, then went back to stay with Helen to the end; she died in December. Hardy lowered the blinds at Max Gate respectfully on the day of the funeral.

  The last of the year was quiet, and he produced what became his most famous poem. It was printed in the Graphic on 29 December 1900 and was called ‘The Century’s End, 1900’, but a deleted ‘1899’ on the manuscript suggests he had written it a year before. Later he renamed it ‘The Darkling Thrush’. 41 He manages a perfect balance between his unbelief and his nostalgia for the faith in which he had been reared, and this is what gives it such wide appeal: you can respond to it from either side of the divide. He places himself in the romantic tradition by invoking Keats’s nightingale, to whom the poet listened ‘darkling’, while the bird sang with ‘full-throated ease’: Hardy’s thrush delivers a ‘full-hearted evensong / Of joy’. 42 The bleak scene is scrupulously set, the dying light of a cold country afternoon, shrivelled hedge plants and bare twigs from which comes the voice of the bird, so ecstatic

  That I could think there trembled through

  His happy good-night air

  Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

  And I was unaware.

  19. Cat, Bird, Eagle, Sphinx

  When Queen Victoria died in January 1901, a short poem by Hardy saluted her as ‘serene, sagacious, free’. She had won the heart of the world, he wrote, with ‘deeds well done’. His poem appeared in The Times. With the Boer War and the new century a transformation was taking place, the shocking novelist and out-rager of bishops emerging in a fresh light as a grand old man of English letters, confidently addressing the nation from its most respected newspaper, no longer as a novelist but as a poet.

  He remained practical about the business of selling his work, and the twentieth century prompted him to put his publishing affairs in order. The failure of Harper’s, his American-based publishers, allowed him a change of direction, and he decided to transfer all the British rights in his work to the house of Macmillan, the firm to which he had shyly and unsuccessfully submitted his first novel in 1868, and which was now headed by the shrewd Frederick Macmillan. Kipling and Wells were on their list, and they had already acquired, in 1894, the right to publish a ‘Colonial Edition’ of Hardy’s novels. A new agreement was signed early in 1902, a year in which Hardy noted that his investments had depreciated in value. He negotiated for himself with Macmillan, bargaining hard for his royalties. 1 He got 25 per cent on any of his books sold at 6 s., 20 per cent on those sold at 4 s. and 5 s., and 16½per cent on cheaper ones. 2 From now on a stately procession of Uniform Edition, Pocket Edition, Wessex Edition and Mellstock Edition kept all his prose, and his poetry as he produced it, available to the public in handsome volumes. Hardy himself had already suggested the marketing strategy of presenting his fiction as a unified series of ‘Wessex Novels’, and it worked still better when readers could collect complete sets and study a special map in each volume showing North Wessex, Mid Wessex, Lower, Upper and Outer Wessex. The many young women, mostly schoolteachers and musicians, he said, who wrote to him asking how they might return to country life could pick their location from it if they chose. Tourists came to see for themselves where Bathsheba and Tess had lived, and there was a steadily growing interest in attaching the fictional names of towns and villages to their originals. 3 This was a game Hardy enjoyed playing, sometimes insisting that the link was tenuous, at other times pointing out to favoured friends particular houses or places he had used. His friendship with Hermann Lea, farmer, builder and keen photographer, who settled in Dorset in the 1890s and became one of his bicycling companions, led to Lea’s Handbook to the Wessex Country of Thomas Hardy in 1904, and a larger guide, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, was published by Macmillan in 1913 – and reprinted in the 1960s.

  He also made the Wessexconnection with his first published collection of poetry in 1898, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. 4 It contained fifty-one poems: a third were gathered from as far back as the 1860s and were mostly written in London; others were recent. Some, but not all, have dates assigned. They are written in a great variety of styles, from the expansive ballad narrative to the intensely concentrated utterance, and they are arranged with no regard for chronology. From the 1860s, ‘Neutral Tones’ is one of the best in the volume. 5 There are four sonnets in the voice of a woman, the first a free reworking of Ronsard’s ‘Lorsque vous serez vieille’. There is a batch of run-of-the-mill historical verses, several set during the Napoleonic Wars, and a group of sprightly and entertaining Dorset ballads, ‘The Dance at the
Phœnix’, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, ‘Her Death and After’ and ‘Friends Beyond’. Personal poems crop up randomly, several easily linked with known incidents and people such as Horace Moule (‘A Confession’), Mary Hardy (‘Middle-Age Enthusiasms’) and cousin Tryphena (‘Thoughts of Phena’), the young Emma (‘Ditty’) and Florence Henniker (‘At an Inn’). 6 Emma was upset by allusions and tributes to other women and took ‘The Ivy-Wife’ to be an attack aimed at her, although it seems no more than a jeu d’esprit about a woman who tries to climb to fame by attaching herself to a series of men, destroying one of them in the process. The volume ends triumphantly with ‘I Look into My Glass’, which suggests that Hardy knew how good it was. 7 Only 500 copies were printed, and the book had a poor reception, but it was a difficult collection to review. The inclusion of his own illustrations was a distraction. They are the work of a skilful draughtsman, but some are distinctly weird, especially the drawing of a dead woman lying under a sheet accompanying the poem addressed to his late cousin Tryphena, and the blank humanoid shapes manoeuvring a coffin on a staircase to illustrate a grim architectural joke in a poem dedicated to Blomfield. You have to admire Hardy’s determination to extend his range by providing decorative drawings, but it is a relief that he did not repeat the experiment. All Hardy’s eight collections, making up something like 1,000 poems, were presented in the same jumbled way, partly divided into sections but made up of poems taken from different decades, with few signposts and no notes for the reader, and it took time for the world to see that something remarkable was in the making.

  His second collection, Poems of the Past and the Present, published at the turn of 1901 and 1902, is richer than the first. It contains ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘Wives in the Sere’, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘The Ruined Maid’, all discussed already. There are witty and elegantly constructed triolets and songs like ‘I Need Not Go’ and ‘At a Hasty Wedding’. ‘A Broken Appointment’ is here, and the three ‘De Profundis’ poems. So is ‘An August Midnight’, written at Max Gate in 1899, which reveals Hardy sitting in his study, working late as he so often did. The clock beat he hears is likely to come from the grandfather clock in the hall downstairs, the lamp is an oil lamp, and the ink is liquid from the inkwell on his desk, given to him by Mrs Henniker. A dumbledore is a cock-chafter or maybug, a large insect with a hard shell that flies about on warm summer nights in the country. Hardy’s courtesy to his animal visitors – ‘my guests’ – comes naturally to him, along with his appreciation that life is lived on different scales, and that their ‘Earth-secrets’ are as significant to them as his ink markings on the page are to him. It shows him at his most tender, at ease in what still sometimes seemed to him to be God’s creation:

  I

  A shaded lamp and a waving blind,

  And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:

  On this scene enter – winged, horned, and spined –

  A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;

  While ’mid my page there idly stands

  A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…

  II

  Thus meet we five, in this still place,

  At this point of time, at this point in space.

  – My guests parade my new-penned ink,

  Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.

  ‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why?

  They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

  Hardy’s public persona was now secure. He remained hard to know. The poet in him was developing; the man avoided intimacy. None of his friends quite fathomed him. Gosse, one of the oldest, found him ‘sphinx-like’ and ‘unrevealed’, his genius a mystery. 8 Yet, although he resented intrusions into his privacy, he accepted a surprising number of visitors and allowed himself to be much painted, photographed and drawn. Most of those who came to see him spoke of his gentleness and sensitivity, although H. G. Wells was aghast to see that the brave author of Tess and Jude was nothing more than ‘a little grey man’. 9

  In February 1901 William Archer, a friend since Hardy sent him a copy of Tess in 1892, stayed at Max Gate to conduct a formal interview, intended for publication. Hardy spent a sleepless night afterwards, worrying whether he had been guilty of ‘self-conceit’. He had not: when Archer praised the depths of his knowledge of ‘Wessex’, he modestly replied, ‘some of what you take for my knowledge may be “only my artfulness”.’ Much of their exchange was about local lore and legend, and Archer tactfully kept off family history. The one subject on which Hardy was categorical was war, still being waged in southern Africa, and on this subject he expressed a most surprising optimism about human behaviour: ‘Oh yes, war is doomed. It is doomed by the gradual growth of the introspective faculty in mankind… Not to-day, nor tomorrow, but in the fullness of time, war will come to an end, not for moral reasons, but because of its absurdity.’ 10 A year after Archer’s interview a literary journalist, Desmond MacCarthy, made the first of several visits. He found Hardy

  very small, very quiet, self-possessed and extraordinarily unassuming. I seem to remember that his laughter made no sound… a gentle eagerness which was very pleasing showed in his manner when he wanted sympathy about some point. He would instantly recoil on being disappointed. I observed in him once or twice a look, a movement, too slight to be called a wince but not unlike the almost imperceptible change one sees in a cat when a gesture has perturbed it. 11

  MacCarthy also picked up ‘a glint in his eye which one might have associated with slyness in a mindless and insensitive man’. Where he saw a cat, the artist William Rothenstein made Hardy into a bird, with ‘a small dark bilberry eye which he cocked at you unexpectedly’. 12 Another visitor found that ‘the whole face gave the impression of a bird.’ 13 And a young woman, taken by the Lord-Lieutenant of the county to one of Emma’s garden parties, liked Mrs Hardy’s ‘homely welcome’ and long table spread with jam, scones and ‘large Mad-Hatter sandwiches’, but thought the great writer himself resembled nothing so much as ‘an ancient moulting eagle, with… his bald peering head moving ceaselessly from side to side’. 14 Turning him into a bird, an animal or a sphinx was one way of dealing with his elusiveness.

  Gosse had angered Hardy when, after his good review, he spoke rudely of Jude to Hardy’s face at the Savile Club, but he was too buoyant to allow him to escape from his proprietorial friendship. Appointed librarian of the House of Lords in 1904, he was in a still better position to promote the careers and reputations of his literary friends, and he enjoyed nothing more. That summer he invited Hardy to tea at the House of Lords with the Conservative leaders Lord Salisbury and Balfour. A few months later Gosse arranged a meeting with Asquith, leader of the Liberal Party, already slightly known to Hardy, and Asquith marked Hardy down as a Liberal supporter.

  An account of Hardy in conversation at a literary gathering in 1904 comes from Arthur Benson, who had recently left a teaching post at Eton to settle in Cambridge. Benson was an expansive diarist and a shameless snob, and both his virtue and his vice appear here:

  Entered Henry James, Thomas Hardy and another… Hardy came up and sat down… looked at me, then looked away, suffused by a misty smile and I presently gathered that this was a recognition – he seemed hurt by my not speaking. I watched his seamed, pale, shy, kindly face; which yet always to me has something inherently shabby and undistinguished about it: it is the face, not of a peasant, like old Carlyle, but of a village tradesman. Then we had an odd triangular talk. Hardy could not hear what Henry James said, nor Henry James what Hardy said; and I had to try to keep the talk going. I felt like Alice between the two Queens. Hardy talked rather interestingly of Newman; he has read the Apologia & I thought he said ‘I joined the RC church for a time, but it has left no impression whatever on me now.’ Then he said very firmly that Newman was no logician; that the Apologia was simply a poet’s work, with a kind of lattice-work of logic in places to screen the poetry… Then Hardy went away wanly and kindly. 15

  In 1905 the University of Abe
rdeen proposed to confer an honorary doctorate on him. This gave him intense pleasure. It was his first degree – his and Jude’s, you might say – and soothed his pride after the long years of condescension. He travelled north in April, to be cheered by the students, spoken of in the same breath as George Eliot and Balzac, and praised for having done for Wessex what Scott did for the Borders and Highlands. The granite city was still under snow and crowded with eminent visitors assembled for the opening of a new sculpture gallery; and he was splendidly entertained by the senior members of the university with receptions, eulogies, dinners, pipers and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. While he was there, he insisted on visiting the grave of a friend from the 1870s, William Minto, who had given him a good review for Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy did not forget these things. And he gave a provocative interview to a journalist, declaring strong views on the duties of the state towards children, and that ‘illegitimacy – so far from being the blackest blot in a community – may be regarded in one aspect as a form of virtue’. 16 Among people interested in ideas, his spirits rose, and he was ready to speak out as he rarely did in Dorset or London, and on this topic he was in the forefront of a subject that was attracting attention in intellectual circles. Within two years Dr David Eder published his pamphlet The Endowment of Motherhood, arguing for state support for single mothers, and there were debates at the Fabian Society on this subject and on marriage reform. Hardy was never going to join a political association, but his views had their influence.