Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  As his fame brought him rewards, the life of the Hardys as a couple lost its momentum, shrank and decayed. He did not take Emma to Aberdeen, and there were no more holidays together, either abroad or in England. She became less willing to spend time in London and found the running of a second house or flat burdensome. She began to worry about crossing the streets in town, as her eyes and her limp gave trouble, and, when she did venture there, she was sometimes ‘very languid’ and hardly went out. 17 This was how it was in 1901. In 1902 they kept away from London on account of the coronation and reduced investment income. The next year Hardy took bachelor rooms in St John’s Wood for himself, and that autumn Emma, determined to follow her own advice about separate lives, set off with her niece Lilian for Dover, crossed the Channel and settled in Calais for three weeks. It was a brave move, although it fell short of venturing as far as Paris, which she had so much enjoyed before. Hardy reacted uneasily and took himself to a London hotel, where he fell ill with influenza, returning miserably to Max Gate. He disliked being alone at home.

  Emma went to Calais again in the autumn of 1908, on her own this time, and stayed away for nearly two months, taking pleasure in French hotel life. She had a good practical reason for going then – her attic rooms were being redecorated and improved – but Hardy fussed in his letters, warning her against being friendly with strangers, ‘as you don’t know who’s who in a town through which the worst (and no doubt best) of the earth pass on their way out of our country when it gets too hot for them’. He kept her up to date with the doings of the cats and the drowning of the latest batch of kittens at Max Gate, and then suggested a return date, saying, ‘It is very dull staying here alone,’ which was perhaps what she hoped to hear; and she did return a little sooner than she had planned. Only to be affronted. Mr Asquith, as Prime Minister, offered Hardy a knighthood, an honour Englishmen traditionally accept with the excuse that they are doing so to please their wives. Hardy sent a curious reply to Asquith, expressing his warm admiration for his policies, but saying he would like to think over the proposed knighthood for a year. Although this was politely agreed to, it does not seem to have been brought up again, and Emma remained plain Mrs Hardy. She felt this as a deliberately aimed slight, especially when two years later he accepted the Order of Merit, a much more distinguished award but one that carried no ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’. The nearest she got to her wish was that among her Dorset neighbours some of the children called her ‘Lady Emma’ behind her back, in mocking tribute to her sense of her own importance. 18

  One of the activities she kept up determinedly was party-giving, and the Max Gate garden parties were a feature of every summer. There are photographs showing large groups of assembled guests, all in the thickly layered clothing favoured by the middle classes of the period, even when the thermometer soared upwards, and the women under elaborate hats. In June 1901 a journalists’ group, the Whitefriars’ Club, insisted on travelling down from London en masse to pay their respects to Hardy. There were a hundred of them, and a tent was put up in the garden to receive them. The last part of their journey was made in open carriages, and the most interesting feature of the occasion was that Hardy’s mother heard of their visit and insisted on being wheeled in her chair down Bockhampton Lane to see the carriages go past. Her daughters reluctantly agreed to her plan, and the three women waited under the trees, Mrs Hardy with a hat to keep off the sun and a rug over her knees in view of her advanced age – she was nearly ninety. She told Mary and Kate she intended to wave her handkerchief at the carriages. They said it was not the thing to do, but, as the last carriage passed, she drew out her handkerchief all the same and waved it defiantly. 19 This was perhaps what she had done when she saw Princess Victoria driven past in the 1830s, and, while a group of journalists hardly equalled a princess, they were there to honour her famous son. She was not invited to Max Gate to meet them, because Emma refused to have his family there. And why did Hardy not for once override Emma’s prohibition? Reluctance to do battle with her was probably the chief reason, but he may also have been ambivalent about bringing his admirers face to face with his old mother.

  When Jemima Hardy entertained at Bockhampton, she served tea in the garden with dough cake, raspberries and blue vinney cheese, according to one of her brother William Hand’s granddaughters, who remembered such an occasion in 1900 and described her great-aunt wearing a tight-fitting bodice of blue satin with tiny buttons down the front. The four Hardy uncles and aunts were all there, and Thomas Hardy presented the child, Lillie May, with a two-shilling piece. She came from sophisticated Weymouth, and the local children asked, ‘Towner, bain’t’ee?’ when they heard her speak. 20 Jemima’s last years were spent, as her husband’s had been, confined to the cottage at Bockhampton, served and nursed by Mary – in her sixties herself – and Kate. Early in 1904 she heard of the death of Henry Moule, whom she had known for most of his life, and decided to send a wreath to his funeral from her sickbed. Hardy described how she made one from their own meagre winter flowers with her daughters and, finding there was not enough greenery to finish it, sent one of them out in the dark with a lantern to cut more, so that it would be ready to be taken to the Moule house early in the morning. In less than a month she was dead herself. As a mother she had been powerful, rather than tender, with her dark streak of gloom and anger, but Hardy wrote to a friend, ‘I shall miss her in many ways – her powers in humorous remark, for instance, which were immediate. It took me hours to be able to express what she had at the tip of her tongue.’ He also talked of her always thinking of him as ‘her rather delicate “boy” ’ and said the gap she left was ‘wide, and not to be filled. I suppose if one had a family of children one would be less sensible of it.’ 21

  His poem ‘Shut Out That Moon’ was written this year. It speaks of the failure of love and writes a line under the past – as the death of a mother does. 22 It also draws on the imagery of the Romantic poets:

  Close up the casement, draw the blind,

  Shut out that stealing moon,

  She wears too much the guise she wore

  Before our lutes were strewn

  With years-deep dust, and names we read

  On a white stone were hewn.

  What is the moon stealing? Hearts, hopes, time, dreams, even wits: dangerous but also stealing like a lover, pleasurably. Lovers steal kisses, and the moon reminds us of the pleasures of youth, of music once made, of people known and loved who are now lying under gravestones. The poem goes on to warn against looking at the stars (‘Immense Orion’s glittering form’) as well as the moon, and against ‘midnight scents’ in the summer garden and their power to arouse feeling; and, in doing so, it becomes more of a tribute to romanticism than a warning against it. The last stanza speaks of the unromantic world, the ‘common lamp-lit room’ that prisons ‘eyes and thought’, the ‘mechanic speech’ that replaces music and lyricism and laughter. These are the prosaic, limited options of adulthood, set against youthful romantic values, and Hardy seems to suggest they are a way of dealing with the disappointments of life. He ends the poem with bitter words:

  Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,

  Too tart the fruit it brought!

  Yet Hardy himself never allowed his eyes or thought to be imprisoned or his speech to become mechanic, and if, as he suggests, romantic values lead to disappointment, the poem chiefly invokes the exquisite pleasure they give. He might appear as a bald old eagle and be unreadable as a sphinx, but he kept his direct access to the world of nature and feeling as freshly as a young man.

  Emma did not go to her mother-in-law’s funeral, any more than Hardy attended her family funerals. Soon she had her own intimations of mortality. In May 1906, while Hardy was in London, she was at Max Gate on her own for a few days. Working in the garden, she had a fainting fit. ‘My heart seemed to stop; I fell, and after a while a servant came to me.’ 23 Whatever the cause of her collapse, which does not seem to have been investigated but sounds as though it cou
ld have been a small stroke, it may have contributed to her becoming more eccentric in conversation and style. Gosse wrote a merciless description of her in the last year of her life, ‘absurdly dressed as a country lady without friends might dress herself on a vague recollection of some nymph in a picture by Botticelli’. 24 More kindly, the French portait painter Jacques Blanche caught the pathos of her appearance: ‘Nothing remained to her of the full-blooded, rosy, jovial freshness attested by those who had seen her while still young. Instead, shrunken as if age had made her smaller, she adopted a defensive shield, retaining in stereotyped form the smile of former days as if fixed for all time by a photographer.’ 25 Photographs of her in old age still show two curls emerging from the cap on her forehead, curls that had once pleased Hardy so much he gave them to Anne, the pretty heroine of The Trumpet-Major.

  Emma was surely never mad, although Mary and Kate Hardy were not the only ones to suggest she was. She was eccentric, sometimes to the point of absurdity, her conversation could be dismayingly inconsequential, but she was always able to organize her own life and activities, to make travel arrangements, to write, to run the house and to communicate with her few friends and her maids. The most disconcerting and upsetting part of her behaviour was her open display of hostility towards Hardy, her snobbish claims for her own family and her dismissal of his family as ‘peasants’. Married people are known to make covert attacks on one another in company, but Emma’s attacks were not covert. In 1909 Hardy wrote to a friend explaining that ‘my domestic circumstances… make it embarrassing for me to return hospitalities received, so that I hesitate nowadays to accept many.’ 26 The friend was the rationalist banker Edward Clodd, who regularly invited Hardy to Aldeburgh for house parties where he gathered congenial intellectuals, occasions much enjoyed by Hardy, who went without Emma.

  Her far from mad interest in the question of women’s suffrage led her to support the suffragette movement. Hardy was in general agreement with the principle, although cautious as always about making any public commitment to it. But Emma joined marches in London in 1907, went to rallies, and wrote a long and well-argued letter on the importance of women’s participation in government to the Nation in 1908. 27 The following year she resigned from the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, but purely because she disapproved of militancy; she continued her allegiance to the cause itself. She kept abreast of current affairs in other ways: sending a donation to Israel Zangwill for the Zionist movement, with a letter of support; and writing various letters to the press about the conditions endured by the children of the poor – urging better care, better food, better schools, better housing – and about specific cruelties to animals, such as circus tigers and bulls in bullfights. Less sensibly, she also submitted poems to magazines, none of them even competently written; a few were printed because she was ‘Mrs Thomas Hardy’. She lacked judgement to assess her own efforts, but this is a common fault, and she had the spirit to keep trying.

  She made friends with one of her husband’s most ardent American admirers, rich Rebekah Owen from New York, a repeated visitor to England who got herself and her sister an introduction to the Hardys in 1892 and thereafter put in frequent appearances at Max Gate. Emma was hospitable to them and kept up a correspondence with Rebekah that to a degree deflected her from bothering Hardy directly. Miss Owen was happy to accept Emma’s kindness and her confidences and at the same time to gossip about her being ‘half-cracked’ and ‘phenomenally plain’ behind her back with other Dorset acquaintances.

  When Hardy took holidays with other friends, Emma made her own arrangements. At sixty-eight she went bicycling alone round Dorset, sometimes stopping at roadside cottages for meals. She kept up her painting, her sewing and her music. She refused to become an invalid, making light of her physical problems and pains. At sixty-nine she sat down to produce Some Recollections, her best piece of writing, entirely on her own. What she could never do was to rediscover in her own mind what had made her proud of Hardy, or restore in her behaviour what had made her dear to him. And so they remained locked in mutual incomprehension.

  With the twentieth century Hardy had put novel writing behind him, and there were to be no more shockers to upset Emma or the public. Instead he devoted much of the first decade of the century to a project to which no one could take exception, a work historical and patriotic in theme, composed largely in blank verse. The Dynasts could be seen as a fitting and respectable crown to the career of a man of letters. He had for many years been turning over in his mind the idea of writing about the Napoleonic Wars. As early as June 1875, when he had taken Emma with him to visit Waterloo veterans at the Chelsea Hospital on the anniversary of the great battle, and one old soldier had put his arm round her waist and called her ‘my dear young woman’, Hardy had thought of writing ‘A Ballad of the Hundred Days. Then another of Moscow. Others of earlier campaigns – forming all together an Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815’. 28 In 1889 he was planning ‘A Drama of Kings’, and in 1896 it was to be ‘Europe in Throes’. He did some research and writing in 1897 but did not settle to steady work until 1902. What emerged from his long labours became The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama, which absorbed him until 1908. It was history but also a vehicle in which he expressed his views about human motivation, how people are driven by the Immanent Will even when they think they are making their own choices. It was published in three parts, in 1904, 1906 and 1908. It was not intended for performance – Hardy took Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as his model here – and he hoped it would be read like a novel. As it turned out, this was a vain hope, and today it is among the least read of his works.

  The scope of what he took on was ambitious: he started from the invasion scare in England in 1805, when Napoleon assembled an army on the French coast and Pitt and Sheridan clashed in the House of Commons, and covered all the main events in the European wars over the next ten years to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The best effects are the cinematic stage directions in which we are given aerial views of Europe, looking down from a great height at advancing or retreating armies moving like caterpillars across the various landscapes, and at the great land and sea battles: Trafalgar, Ulm, Jena, Austerlitz, Corunna, Talavera, the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo. They are an extraordinary feat of imagination, original and dramatic. Moving the scale from the panoramic to the minute, there is an account of the effect of battle on animal, vegetable and insect life at Waterloo which no one but Hardy could have thought of and where his poetic voice is perfectly pitched:

  The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,

  The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled;

  And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.

  The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

  But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;

  The worm asks what can be overhead…

  Trodden and bruised to a miry tomb

  Are ears that have greened but will never be gold,

  And flowers in the bud that will never bloom. 29

  These are the two best features of the vast enterprise in which Hardy asks his reader to take on nearly 300 characters, ranging from kings and emperors to common soldiers and Dorset rustics, as well as a group of presiding spirits, or ‘phantom intelligences’, who hover about commenting on the action, some sympathetically, some with irony or gleeful hostility. They are there to explicate the workings of the Immanent Will through humanity, but as celestial machinery they are feeble. Where Homer and Wagner made their gods into glorious and badly behaved beings with instantly recognizable feelings and behaviour, Hardy offers etiolated voices speaking without urgency or beauty. The demands of research and the scale of his enterprise seem to have absorbed his energy, so that when it came to writing there was little left to give life to the language. With a few exceptions like the passage above, it plods along, worthy and banal. Occasionally it becomes ludicrous. Blank verse needs a spring in it, and this has neither spring nor strength, but feebly ape
s Shakespearean historical writing:

  The hostile hatchings of Napoleon’s brain

  Against our Empire, long have harassed us,

  And mangled all our mild amenities.

  So, since the hunger for embranglement

  That gnaws this man, has left us optionless,

  And haled us recklessly to horrid war,

  We have promptly mustered our well-hardened hosts,

  And, counting on our call to the Most High,

  Have forthwith set our puissance face to face

  Against Napoleon. – Ranksmen! officers!

  You fend your lives, your land, your liberty.

  I am with you. Heaven frowns on the aggressor. 30

  It would be cruel to quote more. The first part was not received with much enthusiasm, although Max Beerbohm was fascinated by the thought that it was the ‘first modern work of dramatic fiction in which free will is denied to the characters’, set on their courses by the Immanent Will. He veered between finding it a ‘quite fugitive and negligible little piece of work’ and deciding he had been reading ‘a really great book’. He mocked gently, talking of the ‘autumnal works of great writers’ and suggesting it would have required ‘a syndicate of much greater poets than ever were born into the world, working in an age of miracles’ to carry out Hardy’s intentions. He asked himself why Hardy had written it and wished it had been in prose, yet in the end he was won over. 31

  By the time Part III appeared the critics were generally respectful, and it was greeted as ‘a great work of art’ and ‘the most notable literary achievement of the last quarter-century’ and proof of ‘undoubted genius’. 32 Hardy, now approaching seventy, had earned the right to be taken seriously. It has never been popular, however much respected, and it is quite hard to find anyone who has read it for pleasure for many years. Still, there have always been those whose love and commitment to his work have caused them to embrace The Dynasts. 33 Granville-Barker put on a dramatized version in the early years of the Great War, and there have been more adaptations for stage performance since, and for radio. A Major-General, Sir Harry Marriott Smith, who lived near Hardy in the 1920s, had bought and read it between the retreat from Mons and the landing in Gallipoli; he decided it was the greatest book written in his lifetime, because of its uncanny knowledge of how soldiers think and behave. When he asked Hardy how he knew about such things, Hardy replied, ‘Oh, well, I just knew it. I didn’t read that anywhere, I just knew it.’ Marriott Smith saw this as evidence of genius, and it is not for a civilian to argue with his opinion. 34