Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  The world was sliding into war again. Max Gate was put on the market, and Kate Hardy, the last of the family, bought it. When she died in 1940, she left it to the National Trust, and in 1948 the National Trust was able to acquire Hardy’s birthplace. Max Gate is now at the edge of town with busy roads close by, but Higher Bockhampton still seems remote. Visitors come from all over the world to see the two houses, and the meadows, woods, rivers and lanes that were Hardy’s home territory, and to walk the territory of his novels.

  The wrongness of the two funerals and the wretchedness of Florence’s later years bring a sombre end to any account of Hardy. They are also a reminder of how much awkwardness there was in his life. To rise out of a poor country family to a high place in literature and society took fierce willpower and intensive effort over many years, and had he not been a solitary and inward-looking boy, and remained so as a man, he might not have achieved it. It may also be that his powerful mother’s warning to her children not to marry was good advice, because, although he felt the romance of love, wanted a wife, and twice married women he desired and valued, he did not know how to be an easily companionable and loving husband. He and they suffered also from having no children, and both wives grew lonely and bitter. Even when he fell in love with Florence Henniker, he could not find a way to win her. So, while he explored the dream of love in his writing, he lived more of its disappointments and frustrations.

  Always his inner life took precedence over everything else. And from the inner life came the great panorama of the novels – books not perfectly written or plotted but full of curious and arresting perceptions, sublime moments, wilful and tragic men and women who impose themselves by their originality and their vivid human presence. There is Henry Knight hanging on to the cliff by his fingernails, while Elfride strips off her clothes in the rain to make a rope to rescue him. There is Viviette cutting a curl from the head of the sleeping boy she desires. There are the London servants leaping over the furniture in the drawing room in a silent game of cat-and-mice as their master and mistress dine with guests below. Gabriel watches the stars in the winter sky and feels the earth turn, Giles carries his apple tree like a god from the ancient world. Bathsheba appears in her red jacket and astride her horse, bending herself right back with her feet on the horse’s shoulders to avoid the low branches as she rides under the trees. There is Mrs Yeobright seeing the sunset flight of the heron before she dies, and Henchard looking at his own drowned body in the mill pool. Tess with her arms cool from the curds in the dairy, and Jude giving a voice to the despair of the working man who hears only ‘You shan’t’ when he tries for something better than what he has.

  From the inner life also came the poems with which this book began, and which make an essential part of the narrative of his life. His voice as a poet is as individual as a fingerprint, but his sense of history, his curiosity and powers of observation make him at home with a vast range of subjects, and surprises spring off the page when you look through any of his volumes. He will write about the noise of a passing car or about a station waiting room as well as about his perpetual delight in the natural world of plants growing and decaying, of weather, birds, insects, wind, moonlight, sunshine and starlight. He describes what he sees from his window, and what he fears might come into his room, and what he cannot see except in his mind’s eye, like the woman who knows that the outline of her son remains on the wall even after it has been whitewashed over. So he shows us the snails crushed under the wheels of the gun carriages at Waterloo, the southern stars above the grave of the drummer boy, the spirits of the village dead joking together, and the ghost-girl-rider he once knew and still loves.

  The poems also act as a long-running conversation with himself, in which he can ponder, argue and joke, whether about Einstein’s theories, the wit of a country girl who becomes a London prostitute or how his own death will release his wife from his old man’s querulousness:

  It will be much better when

  I am under the bough;

  I shall be more myself, Dear, then,

  Than I am now.15

  He did not take an exalted view of himself as a writer and did not mind writing occasional pieces to order, or saying that he hoped that some of his poems would earn a place in anthologies (as many have). He had, after all, learnt a great deal about poetry and how it might be written and enjoyed from the Golden Treasury presented to him when he was twenty-two by his friend Horace Moule. His modesty did not make him hesitate to take on the central themes of human experience, time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, death. He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality. He wrote honest poems, almost every one shaped and structured with its own thought and its own music. They remind us that he was a fiddler’s son, with music in his blood and bone, who danced to his father’s playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him, a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious, ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.

  1. This is the view of Dorchester – Fordington Church on the left and the water meadows in the foreground, with Grey’s Bridge over the Frome – that Hardy knew from his earliest years.

  2. Hardy’s drawing of his birthplace at Higher Bockhampton, built in 1800 by his great-grandfather for his newly married grandparents, shows it as it was in the 1890s, extended from the original two-up, two-down cottage. His earliest-known poem describes it as his grandmother remembered it:

  Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs

  And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts

  Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats

  Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers

  Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;

  So wild it was when first we settled here.

  3. and 4. Hardy’s parents are old in these earliest pictures, but they suggest his father’s easy-going nature and the powerful character of his mother, Jemima.

  5. Melbury House, the seat of the Earls of Ilchester, one of the great landowning families of Dorset, on whose favour the rural poor depended. Jemima worked as a maid for members of the family from the age of thirteen.

  6. Stinsford House, near Bockhampton, belonged to the Ilchesters. Here Jemima was a servant and the Hardy men did building work.

  7. Hardy’s first school at Lower Bockhampton. At ten he went on to school in Dorchester, and at sixteen he was articled to a Dorchester architect.

  8. The most interesting family in Dorchester was that of the Revd Moule, here on the lawn in front of his Fordington vicarage. He worked tirelessly for his poor parishioners and ran a school for boys in the vicarage, educating his seven sons, all of whom went on to universities, two becoming bishops.

  9. Horace Moule was the most brilliant of the sons and became Hardy’s friend and mentor, giving him books and encouraging him to question orthodox religion. But Horace was depressive: he drank, failed to take his exams, caused scandals and finally killed himself. He made an indelible mark on Hardy’s life, and Hardy never forgot how cruelly Horace was destroyed by forces outside his own control.

  10. Hardy aged nineteen, when he was an architectural pupil in Dorchester, studying Latin and Greek in his spare time and enjoying Moule’s friendship. Two years later he took himself to London, found architectural work, wrote poetry and took a great interest in politics and science. John Stuart Mill was his hero; he read Darwin and gave up Christianity. After five years he went home to write a radical novel, but failed to find a publisher.

  11. In 1870 Hardy was sent to north Cornwall to work on a dilapidated church at St Juliot near Boscastle. He stayed at the rectory. The garden terrace is shown here, with the rector, his wife seated, and her sister, Emma Gifford, standing. Hardy and Emma fell in love on this fi
rst visit.

  12. and 13.The Giffords were gentry but Emma was free-spirited and unconventional, and believed in Hardy as a writer from the first.

  14. Hardy’s sketch of Emma on her knees searching in the river for the glass they shared on a picnic, bottom in the air, breast clearly outlined and hair tumbling. He marked in his Bible, ‘Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant: also our bed is green.’ She had dropped the glass while rinsing it, and both bared their arms to search for it in vain. ‘No lip has touched it since his and mine / In turns therefrom sipped lovers’ wine,’ he makes her say in ‘Under the Waterfall’.

  15. Emma’s sketch of Hardy holding a flag, probably showing support for the French during the Franco-Prussian War in 1873. He was not able to visit Cornwall often, and their courtship was mostly by letter. She copied his manuscripts for him and encouraged him to persist with his writing, as he struggled to establish himself as a novelist while earning his living by architecture.

  16. and 17. Emma later destroyed their letters, but these little drawings made during their courtship were preserved, showing the summerhouse in the garden of the rectory where they sat together, ‘Boscastle Valley’ and ‘The Watercourse’ of the Valency River.

  18. A page of Emma’s honeymoon diary. Hardy left no account of his wedding, to which neither his parents nor Emma’s came, but she described the day, 17 September 1874, as ‘not brilliant, but wearing a soft, sunny luminousness; just as it should be’. And in her diary she showed her delight in France, Rouen and better still Paris, ‘charmante ville’ of ‘gay shops… gens sitting in the streets… vivants enfants… white caps of the femmes… the river and its boats… the clear atmosphere and brilliant colourings’.

  19. and 20. The house above the River Stour where Hardy and Emma enjoyed two happy years from 1876. Riverside Villas stand outside the market town of Sturminster Newton, and Hardy’s upstairs study window gave him a fine view over the Blackmore Vale (below). Here he wrote The Return of the Native, the novel he held in greatest affection. Years later he also wrote tender reminiscent poems about his life with Emma: how they went boating together, and how she would wait for him in the porch in her white muslin dress, eager for his return. ‘A Two-Years’ Idyll’ speaks of this time:

  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…

  21. Hardy has made himself look the part of the successful Victorian literary man, bearded and bewhiskered in the pattern of Dickens, Trollope, Meredith, Henry James and Wilkie Collins. The photograph is from the time of his marriage in 1874. He had published four novels during the four years of his courtship, Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far from the Madding Crowd, serialized in the Cornhill magazine and immediately popular, as it has remained ever since. His books were welcomed in America too, and he was making serious money.

  22. Leslie Stephen with his dog Troy. Stephen was the editor of the Cornhill and had commissioned Far from the Madding Crowd. His background – he had been to Eton and Cambridge, had a private income, knew everybody and was married to Thackeray’s daughter – was as different as possible from Hardy’s, but the two men took to one another. In the last year of Hardy’s life Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf made a visit to her father’s old friend and wrote an admirable description of him in her diary.

  23. The Hardys took this house in Tooting in 1878 in order to enter into London life. Hardy joined a gentlemen’s club and was invited to meet the literary lions of the day – Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold. But he became seriously ill in the winter of 1880, and after his recovery they moved back to Dorset, first Wimborne and then Dorchester.

  24. Hardy bought a piece of land outside Dorchester, designed his house and had it built by his brother. In June 1885 he and Emma moved in. At once he doubted whether it had been a wise move, and she never liked Dorset, but they lived out their lives there – only going to London every summer for the Season.

  25. The hall at Max Gate, with its grandfather clock, and the sun coming in through the drawing room. On the left is the dining room, at the back the kitchen and the bicycle room: Emma started to bicycle in 1885, taught Hardy, and they both became enthusiasts. Upstairs he wrote The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, the last two regarded as scandalous – and read all over the world.

  26. Hardy dressed for the road, with his bicycle – ‘the loveliest “Byke”… “The Rover Cob” ’.

  27. Hardy met and fell in love with Mrs Florence Henniker in 1893, as he was embarking on Jude. She was the daughter of Richard Monckton Milnes, the first Lord Houghton, an aristocrat with literary tastes, and she translated poetry and wrote and published stories. Hardy misread her charm as encouragement, hoped for a love affair and sank into gloom when she turned him down, but they remained friends, and some of his best letters were written to her.

  28. Emma Hardy in her later years, dressed up for one of her garden parties, with one of her impressive hats. ‘How she would have loved / A party today! – / Bright-hatted and gloved, / With table and tray / And chairs on the lawn…’ wrote Hardy later, but there were years of estrangement and mutual hostility as he withdrew from her. She came to dislike his writing; he preferred the company of other women; she retaliated by moving up to the attic. Her situation as a wife whose husband no longer needed her was pathetic, and, although she was mocked by many and disliked by some, there is something touching about her childlike face.

  29. and 30. Florence Dugdale, a young schoolteacher with literary tastes, wrote to Hardy asking if she might visit him in 1905. She was twenty-six to his sixty-five. He was now one of England’s leading writers and had much to offer her. He was also starved for affection and soon in love with her. It was the beginning of a semi-clandestine relationship: here they are on the beach at Aldeburgh. The situation turned to farce when Emma met and innocently befriended Florence in 1910, inviting her to Max Gate.

  31. When Emma died suddenly in 1912, Hardy was stricken with sorrow and remorse and began on a sequence of poems recalling his love for her. Florence was bitterly offended, but agreed to marry him in 1914. She liked living at Max Gate no better than Emma had done. Here she is in front of the house with Hardy and their dog Wessex, a biter, feared by everyone else but cosseted and spoilt by both of them.

  32. In 1923 it was arranged that the Prince of Wales, who was visiting his Duchy of Cornwall estates, should be given lunch at Max Gate to meet the great writer. Hardy was pleased, Florence was flustered, the Prince had not read a line of Hardy’s work, but the occasion went well, not least because Hardy liked old institutions and royalty was one. He may have reflected that his mother had watched from the roadside Princess Victoria driving by in 1833, and felt understandably proud that royalty now came to him.

  33. Hardy’s tragic novels and his picture of man’s powerlessness against the malign workings of fate gave him his reputation for pessimism, a charge he rejected, seeing himself as a realist with an eye for the ironic element in life. If he sometimes harassed his fictional characters, in life, as he aged, he laughed with friends, enjoyed the company of younger poets and other admirers, and gave his time generously to visitors, who found him spruce, lively, cheerful and vigorous, and took away an impression of charm and simplicity. He saw the funny side of old age and remained ‘a human being, not “the great man” ’.

  34. Augustus John’s portrait of Hardy was painted in 1923, showing a face carved, seamed and furrowed by a long, reflective life, ‘refined into an essence’, as T. E. Lawrence described him. ‘I don’t know whether that is how I look or not – but that is how I feel,’ said Hardy of the portrait. He had four more years to live and continued to work in his study every day, writing poems, interesting himself in every aspect of their publication, and also in theatre productions of his novels. He read widely as well. W
hen Einstein’s theories caught his attention, he jotted in his notebook: ‘Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g. E.M.F. etc. are living still in the past).’ ‘E.M.F.’ stood for Emma, Mary his dead sister and Florence Henniker, who had died earlier in the year. He approached his own death serenely, clear in his mind to the end, unwavering in his atheism, and died at home in January 1928.

  Bibliography

  UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL

  Diary of Sydney Cockerell at the British Library

  Diary of Arthur Benson and manuscript of Moments of Vision at the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge

  Manuscript of Jude the Obscure at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

  Hardy family letters held in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, together with manuscripts and other papers, drawings and photographs

  Manuscripts, drawings and photographs in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library

  Hardy and Sparks family letters held at Eton College Library

  WORKS BY HARDY

  Fiction

  Desperate Remedies 1871

  Under the Greenwood Tree 1872

  A Pair of Blue Eyes 1873

  Far from the Madding Crowd 1874

  The Hand of Ethelberta 1876

  The Return of the Native 1878