Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  They change to a high new house,

  He, she, all of them – aye,

  Clocks and carpets and chairs

  On the lawn all day,

  And brightest things that are theirs…

  Ah, no; the years, the years;

  Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

  Hardy is thinking through the past and feeling for new ways of looking at it, as in ‘The Change’, in which he asks himself whether he understood what really went on at St Juliot – ‘who was the mocker and who the mocked when two felt all was well?’ – and what happened between them and changed Emma’s love:

  O the doom by someone spoken,

  O the heart by someone broken,

  The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me.

  His own death was also in his mind now, and in ‘Who’s in the Next Room?’ he catches sight of it:

  ‘Who’s in the next room? – who?

  I seemed to see

  Somebody in the dawning passing through,

  Unknown to me.’

  ‘Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly.’…

  ‘Who’s in the next room? – who?

  A figure wan

  With a message to one in there of something due?

  Shall I know him anon?’

  ‘Yea he; and he brought such; and you’ll know him anon.’

  The collection presents the essence of Hardy’s life during the years in which he wrote them, an old man with a lively brain and a transforming imagination at work. Great stores of intellectual and emotional vitality are required to be able to write like this, and Hardy put all his seven decades of experience to work. In almost every poem, as Philip Larkin said, ‘there is a little spinal cord of thought and each has a little tune of its own’. 38 Here is the short, sharp ‘Heredity’, pared of any superfluous word and pointing out something no one else had seen:

  I am the family face;

  Flesh perishes, I live on,

  Projecting trait and trace

  Through time to times anon,

  And leaping from place to place

  Over oblivion.

  The years-heired feature that can

  In curve and voice and eye

  Despise the human span

  Of durance – that is I;

  The eternal thing in man,

  That heeds no call to die.

  ‘The Oxen’ is Hardy’s musing at Christmas on his lack of faith and his regret for it, a poem even the most hardened unbeliever is likely to respond to. Entirely unlike any other in the collection, ‘In a Waiting Room’ goes into a scene so modern that we are reminded that Hardy was a contemporary of D. H. Lawrence. It describes a dirty railway waiting room with flyblown pictures of ocean liners on the wall and on the table a New Testament in which someone has scribbled his petty accounts in the margins. A soldier and his haggard wife come in, clearly to say their farewells. Rain is clattering on the skylight. Enter into this gloom the couple’s two children, who laugh and point to the pictures of the ‘lovely ships that we, / Mother, are by and by going to see!’ They are confident that ‘the band will play, and the sun will shine!’ The children’s words are enough to ‘spread a glory through the gloom’. That is it – we are left with the glory. These are, incidentally, some of the very few joyful children in Hardy, on their way to Australia, it seems, for a new life. Did Hardy hope to have a child of his own even now? It is possible, since he told Florence years later that he would have welcomed one then. 39

  His old friend Gosse had reservations about the marriage to Florence. ‘What distresses me is that he should so soon experience the misfortunes of an old man who marries a young and ambitious wife,’ he wrote to another friend. 40 He might have had more confidence in Hardy’s ability to put his work as a poet before everything else.

  22. A Friend from Cambridge

  The war meant that they now rarely went to London, there being no Season, little entertaining and small chance of seeing Mrs Henniker, Lady St Helier or Gosse. Then, because Hardy wanted their visits to Aldeburgh during Emma’s lifetime to be effaced from the record, he decreed that there were to be no more, even when they were married; when he heard that Clodd was writing his memoirs, he made Florence warn him off any mention of their visits and threatened retaliatory measures if he did. 1 Clodd revealed nothing, but, not surprisingly, the friendship faded. There were no other holidays, which could be blamed on the war; but the fact was Hardy no longer wanted to go away.

  The gaps left in his life – and in Florence’s – were filled by a new friend, the ebullient Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Cockerell had a tigerish energy in pursuing men and women he admired, and was also an obsessive collector. He had started with shells as a boy and progressed to medieval manuscripts, books and paintings. He had to leave school and go into the family coal business, rather than to a university, but kept up his intellectual interests. Bouncing his way into the affections of Octavia Hill, he helped her with her housing projects for the poor, then set his sights on John Ruskin, charmed him and was invited to travel with him in France. Then he took on William Morris, whose assistant he was for many years, acting as Secretary to the Kelmscott Press, becoming virtually part of the Morris family and after the death of Morris giving unstinted support to Mrs Morris and her daughters. 2 He took friendship seriously. As a young man he was a socialist, and all his life an atheist. He was also an obsessive diarist, writing down in unvarying thin green notebooks the activities and encounters of each day, although he lacked any gift of characterization or self-presentation, so that the description of him as ‘a blameless Pepys’ is sadly astray. 3 You long for him to expand his narrative but have to be grateful for what you get, and, since he was Hardy’s friend for seventeen years and visited Max Gate many times, he does give an impression of its atmosphere and routines, and every now and then something unexpected and even precious is jotted down, between the precisely noted weather and train times.

  Cockerell had been appointed director of the Fitzwilliam in 1908 at the age of forty. By his own account, ‘I found it a pigstye; I turned it into a palace.’ He had to overcome opposition, especially as he was not a Cambridge man, but he quickly became one of the most active and influential figures in the university. He brought in Sunday opening, prevailed on the King and the Duke of Devonshire to lend prints from their collections on a regular basis, started the ‘Friends of the Fitzwilliam’ scheme (the first of its kind in Britain) and began to acquire modern literary manuscripts. It was in the hope of persuading Hardy to let him have a manuscript that he wrote to him in 1911. Amazingly, he confessed after Hardy’s death that he had read none of his novels at the time, ‘though I read them all later’. 4 This makes him seem more like a bounder than a scholar, and there were always two sides to Cockerell, the red-hot enthusiast and the cool fixer.

  In spite of his ignorance of Hardy’s work he made such a good impression on his first visit to Max Gate that Hardy got out almost all the manuscripts he could lay his hands on and agreed with him immediately on a plan to divide the spoils among the British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen (which had given him a degree), Birmingham, Manchester, Dorchester, Windsor and Boston or New York. Cockerell felt that Hardy was shy about writing to curators and librarians, so volunteered to do so on his behalf. In gratitude, Hardy presented him with the manuscript of ‘The Three Strangers’, one of his best stories, a valuable gift. 5 Cockerell made sure too that the manuscript of Jude the Obscure, the most famous of his novels, went to the Fitzwilliam. It was an astounding transaction between a successful writer and a man he was meeting for the first time, but Cockerell knew how to charm and how to pitch his demands, and Hardy was unaware of the value of what he was giving away, and not apparently interested.

  It seems odd in a man who dealt sharply with publishers in his financial dealings with them, but he had already given Clement Shorter the manuscript of The Return of the Native as a way of thanking
him for getting his manuscripts bound, and he never showed any sign of regretting what he had done – not even when he found he could sell the manuscript of The Woodlanders for £1,000 to an American collector in the early 1920s. 6 He also told Gosse that, having no children and enough money for his wants, he did not regard the value of the manuscripts. 7

  Cockerell did not meet Emma on this first visit, and he had nothing to say about her on the second, in June 1912, when he brought his wife, Kate, with him, beyond that both Hardys were very nice, and he especially unassuming, and that Hardy expressed his admiration for Shaw’s plays, and for Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. 8 At the end of the year he noted again in his diary that they had spent ‘a delightful afternoon with Thomas Hardy and his wife’ – adding, with characteristic brevity, ‘(since dead)’. 9

  Cockerell’s enthusiasm and air of authority, his knowledge of libraries and museums, and his years with Morris all went to win Hardy’s trust. There was also his position at Cambridge, which opened up the possibility of connections with the university Hardy had once thought of applying to. And indeed Cockerell soon repaid Hardy’s generosity by putting forward his name for an honorary degree at Cambridge. He seems to have tried and failed in 1912, but within months of Emma’s death, in February 1913, the offer came. The Vice-Chancellor who tended the invitation was the Revd Alexander Donaldson, an evangelical Christian who had taught at Eton for thirty years and was now Master of Magdalene, but there is no doubt that Cockerell was the man responsible. 10 Hardy was asked to come to Cambridge to receive his doctorate in June. His sister Mary, remembering he had thought of applying to study at Cambridge in the 1860s, wrote to congratulate him: ‘Now you have accomplished it all with greater honour than if you had gone along the road you then saw before you.’ 11

  The Cockerells put him up, and Sydney, who loved to arrange such things, prepared a programme of pleasures. There was dinner at Jesus, where he was a Fellow, and to which he had invited A. E. Housman at Hardy’s request. After dinner they went to see an undergraduate production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with the all-male cast expected at Cambridge, although possibly not by Hardy, who spoke of ‘that man Oscar Wilde’ and delighted in pretty actresses. 12 The next day there was lunch at Magdalene. ‘Hardy chattered away very gaily… and seemed in a chirpy mood,’ wrote Benson, who had contributed a pallid appreciation of his writing to the Cambridge Magazine without mentioning his poetry. 13 At the degree ceremony Hardy received a great ovation, and in the evening they dined at Trinity, where the Master spoke fittingly of Hardy. There was a reception at Trinity Lodge lasting late into the evening, at the end of which Cockerell escorted his very happy guest back to his house. 14 The third day took in the Fitzwilliam and lunch at Peterhouse. Hardy’s simplicity and charm was generally admired in Cambridge and the whole visit judged a great success. 15

  A week later both Sydney and Kate Cockerell took up Hardy’s invitation to stay at Max Gate, where they found that ‘Miss Florence Dugdale, Thomas Hardy’s very nice secretary and kinswoman, had assisted him in preparing everything for our comfort, and we were very kindly received.’ 16 Their fellow guest was the artist William Strang, a high-spirited man with a fund of good stories to tell. Hardy responded with stories of his own, and there was laughter all evening. It seems to have been the jolliest weekend ever recorded at Max Gate. No one wanted to go to church on Sunday, and they walked to see the grave of William Barnes and then across the water meadows to Stinsford. In the evening there was laughter again, Hardy and Strang exchanging more stories. On Monday, Florence took them to see Hardy’s birthplace at Bockhampton. They left with a copy of The Dynasts and spent the next few days reading it respectfully and visiting sites associated with Tess.

  If Cockerell records more hilarity than most visitors to Max Gate, it was perhaps because he helped to provoke it. He had given Hardy one part of his heart’s desire at Cambridge, and Hardy’s high opinion of him never wavered. Nor did Cockerell’s assiduity. He worked at the friendship, writing and visiting Max Gate often, always delighted by Hardy’s conversation and sending presents of books chosen to interest him, among them biographies of Morris and of an earlier Thomas Hardy, the radical shoemaker of the 1790s. In November, Hardy was invited to Cambridge for a second celebration when Magdalene College made him an honorary Fellow. There had been some anxiety about his being described in the Cambridge Magazine as ‘the celebrated Atheist’ by a young Fellow of the college, ‘that ass Ogden’ (Benson’s description of C. K. Ogden, editor of the magazine), because the Master had planned a religious service, but everything went smoothly, and it was during this visit that Hardy told Benson about the poems he had written following Emma’s death. 17 Benson in turn showed Hardy the new college building he was responsible for, intended for his own use and then for the college after his death. It was just being finished and had a private dining room with a minstrels’ gallery, stained glass brought from Austria and fine stone work. The young I. A. Richards, then an undergraduate, remembered Hardy’s reaction to the building: while others admired, he went up and put his hand on the stone work and then smelt it – the gesture of a stonemason, thought Richards. 18

  Cockerell wanted to turn Hardy’s thoughts to writing his memoirs, and he began to press him at least to give him a list of important dates in his life, to which Hardy responded by setting Florence to type diary entries from his notebooks, as well as Emma’s recollections of her girlhood as she set them down in 1911. Florence wrote to Cockerell to tell him about the ‘longish manuscript which Mr Hardy wants to send you – an account of Mrs Hardy’s early life, together with extracts from Mr Hardy’s own diary note-books’. 19 Hardy’s next visit to Cambridge was made in May 1914. By now he and Florence were married, and this time she went with him. They stayed at the University Arms, Cockerell again took charge of everything, and there was another round of feasts for the men, while, this being Cambridge, ‘Mrs H supped with Kate.’ 20 Hardy saw Housman again and met Lowes Dickinson. Florence was, however, invited to lunch at Magdalene and subjected to Benson’s scrutiny. He saw ‘a shy, rather comely, youngish woman but with very ugly hands and feet… Hardy was very spruce & gay & had enjoyed himself here – he said it was wonderfully delightful to find himself really at home in a little academical body. They seemed happy together – I lent him the car for the afternoon.’ 21 They took the car to Girton, where they had tea with the Mistress, E. E. Constance Jones, a philosopher about to publish The Three Great Questions (An Outline of Private and Public Duty). Miss Jones had learnt her Greek from Coleridge’s granddaughter Edith, a link which must have delighted Hardy. 22

  His remark about being at home in a little academical body clearly came from his heart, the courtesy, ceremony, friendship and conversation offered in Cambridge being enjoyable in themselves but also supplying a balm for all the years in which he had felt isolated and slighted. Benson saw that he greatly appreciated ‘being one of a society’, and it seemed likely he would become a regular visitor. In August 1914 any chance of that was knocked out. The war put an end to all feasting and celebrations in the universities, as their young men went off to fight, and when peace came Hardy was nearly eighty and no longer inclined to travel. This time fate defeated him conclusively, and he never made another visit to Cambridge.

  He did, however, subscribe to the Cambridge Magazine, the remarkable publication edited by ‘that ass Ogden’, which ran throughout the war, raising its circulation to over 20,000 readers by allocating half its space to reports from the foreign press, not all of them sympathetic to the British. In 1916 he allowed Ogden to publish an advertisement in The Times quoting Hardy’s praise: ‘I read the Magazine every week, and turn first to the extracts from Foreign Newspapers, which transport one to the Continent and enable one to see England bare and unadorned – her chances in the struggle freed from distortion by the glamour of patriotism.’ 23 And when the magazine’s policy got it into trouble, Hardy joined Gilbert Murray, Quiller-Couch, Arnold Bennett, Jan
e Harrison and others in a letter of support. 24 The Cambridge Magazine continued publication, and Hardy made plain his dislike of narrow, simple-minded nationalism.

  The war settled into its long and hideous pattern, devouring the young men all over Europe. Hardy expected it to drag on. As early as the spring of 1915 he wrote to Mrs Henniker that he thought it most probable ‘that it will last till one of the combatants is exhausted and sues for peace without being beaten, or till one or more country is bankrupt, or starved, or till there is a revolution in Germany… I hardly think it will end by the sheer victory of one side or the other in the field.’ He believed that England was ‘innocent for once… the war began because the Germans wanted to fight.’ 25 By now there were between 2,000 and 3,000 German prisoners held in the Dorchester camp. He noticed with amusement that the Kaiser was being moved at Madame Tussaud’s ‘from the Royal group to the Chamber of Horrors’. 26 He also wrote ‘The Pity of It’, about how the English and the Germans were ‘kin folk kin tongued’: