Thomas Hardy (12 page)

When Ethelberta brings her brothers, Dan and Sol – who are builders – up from the country to her London home, Sol chastises her for ‘creeping up among the useless lumber of our nation that’ll be the first to burn if there comes to a flare’. Perhaps here Sol had in mind the French Revolution of 1789 and the purging of the aristocracy which followed it. Sol’s words may also be a reflection of Hardy’s own strength of feeling and indignation towards the upper classes, as portrayed in his first (unpublished) novel
The Poor Man and the Lady
, and an indication that such sentiments of his have by no means been quenched.

Despite the presence of her brothers, Ethelberta, in her new position as the wife of Lord Mountclere, feels both estranged from her own kith and kin, and also disloyal to them on this account. Here, Hardy is once again articulating his own particular problem, viz. that of a person such as himself migrating from a lower social class to a higher one, such as that occupied by Emma.

This is also a story about ‘town’ versus ‘country’; written by one who has decided to abandon living in London in favour of living in the countryside, and having tasted both, there is no doubt which of the two Hardy prefers. This is not least because in his experience, country people are the more loyal, honest, generous and colourful; as well as being healthier.

In March 1875 George Smith, head of Smith, Elder & Co., accepted
The Hand of Ethelberta
for serialisation in the
Cornhill Magazine
. For Hardy, the work represented a complete departure from what he had previously written, and he admitted that the ‘migratory circumstances’ of the novel (a reference to the many different locations in which the action takes place) ‘were deemed eccentric’ on its first publication.
¹³

This was not one of the most successful of Hardy’s novels: for of all his talents, writing satire was not one of them. So what had persuaded him to depart from a winning formula and ‘forsake the farm for the drawing room’? According to Hardy’s American acquaintance and admirer, Rebekah Owen, this was because of the adverse criticism that
Far from the Madding Crowd
had received.
¹⁴

In the year following his marriage to Emma, Hardy wrote a curious poem entitled
We Sat at the Window
. It is dated ‘Bournemouth 1875’, and its second and final verse reads as follows:

We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,

For I did not know, nor did she infer

How much there was to read and guess

By her in me, and to see and crown

By me in her.

Wasted were two souls in their prime,

And great was the waste, that July time

When the rain came down.

A second poem, which is equally curious, and which was written in the same year at Durlston Head near Swanage, is entitled
To a Sea Cliff
. Its final verse reads thus:

He slid apart

Who had thought her heart

His own, and not aboard

A bark, sea-bound …

That night they found

Between them lay a sword.

Both these poems, which portray deep unhappiness on the part of ‘me’ in the first and ‘he’ in the second, were written when Hardy was on vacation with Emma. What did the poems mean? Given Hardy’s propensity for incorporating details of his personal life into his writings, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that they refer to him and Emma. But could it really be true that all his hopes and dreams in respect of his ‘love from Lyonnesse’ had evaporated so soon? And why did Hardy choose the particular word ‘sword’ to describe the divide? Was this a word which had some special significance? The answer to these questions would be revealed by Hardy himself over the course of the succeeding decades.

By the time
The Hand of Ethelberta
was published, in April 1876, Hardy and Emma had moved to lodgings in Yeovil, Somerset, while they sought more permanent accommodation. In May they travelled once more to the Continent: this time to Holland, and to Germany where the cathedrals of Cologne and Mainz proved to be of great interest to the 36-year-old architect-turned-writer. As for Emma, her diary records that she paid great attention to the religious paintings of the ‘masters’ in the ‘Picture Gallery at Antwerp’ and to the religious iconography on display in the local churches.
¹⁵

On 3 July 1876 Hardy and Emma found lodgings at ‘Riverside Villa’ which overlooked the River Stour at Sturminster Newton; here they would remain for almost two years. It was at ‘Riverside Villa’ that Hardy wrote poems and allowed his fertile imagination to be fired by the local legends, superstitions and folklore of the region – his fund of knowledge, of course, for further stories. That Christmas of 1876 they stayed at Bockhampton, and this was evidently the first time that Hardy’s parents met Emma.

On Coronation Day 1877 (28 June) – marking the coronation of Queen Victoria thirty-nine years previously – there was a holiday with games and dancing. In October Hardy visited Bath, where he was joined by his father Thomas II, who had travelled up from Dorchester by train. They went to the theatre and Thomas II ‘took the waters’, which they both hoped would alleviate the rheumatic condition from which he was suffering. That December, true to form, Hardy accompanied the local coroner to an inquest on a boy who was believed to have been poisoned, which in the event proved not to have been the case.

Meanwhile, the couple’s hopes for a child remained unfulfilled; a fact made more poignant when they discovered that their former maidservant – who had eloped with her lover – had herself become pregnant.

It was at Sturminster Newton that Hardy wrote his next novel,
The Return of the Native
, set on the great and mysterious Egdon Heath on the periphery of which lay the Hardys’ family home at Bockhampton. Hardy’s description of the heath is one of the most wonderfully evocative passages in the English language:

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heath-land which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

The story concerns Eustacia Vye, a 19-year-old who lives with her grandfather on the heath, which she says is ‘my cross, my shame, and will be my death’. Her desire is ‘To be loved to madness’ for only this will ‘drive away the eating loneliness of her days’.

Eustacia has formed a romantic attachment to Damon Wildeve, a failed engineer who is now an innkeeper. Wildeve, however, has agreed to marry not her, but Thomasin who lives with her aunt, Mrs Yeobright. Thomasin is also loved by Diggory Venn, the reddleman (one who deals in red ochre – a pigment used by farmers in preparing sheep for market). With Thomasin’s interests at heart, Venn intervenes, unselfishly, to persuade Eustacia to relinquish her hold on Wildeve in order that the latter may marry Thomasin without impediment – which he does:

Dismissing his regrets Venn determined to aid her [Thomasin] to be happy in her own chosen way. That this way was, of all others, the most distressing to himself, was awkward enough: but the reddleman’s love was generous.

Mrs Yeobright’s son Clym now returns from Paris where he has been in the employment of a diamond merchant. Dissatisfied with this work, he proposes to give it up in favour of a more worthy, though less well paid occupation: that of becoming ‘a schoolmaster to the poor and ignorant [at] Budmouth [Weymouth], to teach them what nobody else will’.

Eustacia now turns her attention to Clym, whom she sees as a future husband, but perhaps more importantly, as a passport to a more romantic life. ‘To be your wife and live in Paris would be heaven to me,’ she says. Clym’s mother disapproves, not only of her son abandoning his career to become a teacher, but also of his growing attachment to Eustacia, who is commonly believed to be a witch. Despite his mother’s opposition, Clym leaves home and he and Eustacia marry. As a result, Clym becomes estranged from his mother.

Subsequently, Clym begins to suffer from failing eyesight which necessitates him abandoning any idea of teaching and forcing him to become a humble cutter of furze (gorse, which was used for fuel). For Eustacia, this means the end of any dream she might have had of escaping the boredom of the heath.

Wildeve, although he has since become a married man, has by no means abandoned his attachment to Eustacia. When he calls on her at her home, while Clym is asleep and therefore unaware of his presence, there is a knock at the door. It is Clym’s mother, who has decided to seek reconciliation with her son. But Clym does not awaken and Eustacia chooses not to answer the door, even though she is aware who is there. On the way home, Mrs Yeobright is bitten by an adder and dies, but before she does so, she tells a small boy, Johnny Nunsuch, That she is ‘a broken-hearted woman, cast off by her son’.

Eustacia tries to conceal the whole occurrence from Clym but he discovers the truth;whereupon she returns to her grandfather. After a period of time, Clym writes a letter to Eustacia proposing that they reunite, but it arrives too late: Eustacia has already fled with Wildeve.

Wildeve is drowned, however, while trying to rescue Eustacia from a stream near a weir, while Clym and Venn – both of whom are also involved in the attempted rescue – survive. Finally, the now-widowed Thomasin marries Venn, the faithful reddleman, who has watched and waited patiently as events have unfolded. Says she, ‘he has been kinder to me than anybody else’, and therefore, ‘I must marry him if I marry anybody’. And this she does, notwithstanding the fact that, in her words, Venn was not quite ‘gentleman enough’.

The Return of the Native
contains descriptions of local topography and customs, both of which were dear to Hardy, including the ancient tumulus of Rainbarrow; a chorus of rustic musicians; and the ‘mummers’ (play actors), who from time immemorial had re-enacted epic plays like
St George
, featuring such characters as The Turkish Knight, The Doctor and The Valiant Soldier for the amusement of the local populace. There were also allusions to witchcraft, as when Eustacia was stabbed with a needle by Susan Nunsuch on the occasion of Thomasin’s wedding.

A criticism made of
The Return of the Native
was that the primary aim in life of its heroine, Eustacia, appeared to be to gratify her sensual passions. True, she did, and her attempt to achieve such gratification is a fundamental part of the story.

In the character of Venn (as with that of Gabriel Oak in
Far from the Madding Crowd
), Hardy reaffirms his belief that in the battle to win a prospective partner, qualities such as loyalty, steadfastness and kindness deserve to prevail.

Mrs Yeobright describes Eustacia as one who is ‘lazy and dissatisfied’ and in no way a suitable partner for her son Clym. And he, for his part, bitterly regrets the pain which he has caused his mother by marrying her. ‘If my mother were reconciled to me and to you I should, I think, be happy quite,’ says Clym to Eustacia. ‘Something must be done to heal up this ghastly breach between my dear mother and myself.’ Hardy subsequently refers to the ‘chasm in their lives which Clym’s love for Eustacia had caused’.
¹⁶
This, of course, begs the question: was Hardy’s mother Jemima similarly pained by her son’s marriage to Emma, and did Hardy himself feel regret or even guilt on this account? And did he, like Clym Yeobright, long for reconciliation with his mother before it was too late? If so, then perhaps this reconciliation came when Hardy and Emma spent the Christmas of 1876 with his parents at their home at Bockhampton.