Thomas Hardy (21 page)

Given that for Hardy his ‘well-beloved’ no longer resided in his wife Emma, and had migrated, then two of the likely candidates for its new embodiment were Florence Henniker, and the beautiful Lady Agnes Grove, author and daughter of General and the Honourable Mrs Pitt-Rivers.
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Former acquaintance of Hardy and member of the original ‘Hardy Players’, Norrie Woodhall, Treats such a notion that Hardy was unfaithful to Emma with incredulity and disdain.
⁵
Nevertheless, the effort of controlling his emotions and (thwarted) desires was a truly superhuman one. Stoical is perhaps the word that describes him best. He had made his marriage vows and he would stick to them, come what may, and at whatever the cost to his own well-being.

In January 1897 Hardy wrote to Edward Clodd in scathing terms of how ‘theology’ had been responsible for the arrest of ‘light and reason’ for 1,600 years. So-called ‘Christianity’, he said, with its ‘terrible, dogmatic ecclesiasticism’, had ‘hardly anything in common’ with the ‘real teaching of Christ’.
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That same month he wrote to Florence Henniker expressing his admiration for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Of all the men whom he (Hardy) would like to meet ‘in the Elysian fields’, he would choose Shelley, not only for his ‘unearthly, weird, wild appearance & genius’, but for his ‘genuineness, earnestness, & enthusiasms on behalf of the oppressed’. Truly, Hardy believed himself to be a kindred spirit of that great poet.
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In 1897 the Hardys departed from their usual routine of renting accommodation in London, and instead opted to stay at Basingstoke, 50 or so miles away, and commute to the capital every few days. In June, the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, they travelled to Switzerland to escape the crowds. On their return they visited Wells and its cathedral, the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, and Salisbury, where they attended a service in the cathedral.

Hardy’s prodigious efforts on the literary front did not prevent him from taking a keen interest in local architectural affairs. In September he was advising architect Hugh Thackeray Turner on necessary repairs and maintenance to the tower of East Lulworth church, and in October on the re-thatching and re-flooring of the White Horse Inn at Maiden Newton.
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Hardy visited the latter site on a bicycle, and having therefore incurred no expenses, informed Turner that no repayment for his services was necessary. The writer Rudyard Kipling joined Hardy for some of his cycling excursions; the latter having purchased a new Rover Cob bicycle.
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The following year, 1898, saw Hardy, now aged 58, travelling ever further afield on his bicycle, visiting such places as Bristol, Gloucester and Cheltenham, sometimes in company with Emma – who also cycled – and at other times with his brother Henry. Often he would take his bicycle part of the way on the train. The advantage of possessing a bicycle, for literary people he said, was that they could travel a long distance ‘without coming in contact with another mind – not even a horse’s’, and in this way there was no danger of dissipating one’s mental energy.
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That February he wrote an amusing letter to Elspeth Thomson (sister of the artist Winifred Hope Thomson), thanking her for her ‘charming Valentine’ which made him feel young again. He said: ‘I can just remember the time when written Valentines were customary – before people became so idle as to get everything, even their love-making, done by machinery!’
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In April Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse to tell him of a local belief, ‘still held in remote parts hereabout’, that in the early hours of every Christmas morning, the farm cattle kneel down (as if in prayer).
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The same month, an amusing letter was sent by Hardy to his sister Katharine. Ever one for a good story, he had enquired of a London ‘omnibus conductor’ how it was that young women, who rode their bicycles recklessly into the midst of traffic, did not meet with accidents? Came the reply: ‘Oh, nao [no]; their sex pertects [sic] them. We dares not drive over them, wotever they do; & they do jist wot they likes … No man dares to go where they go.’
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In May Hardy went to see the body of Mr Gladstone, the former prime minister, which lay in state in Westminster Hall, close to the Houses of Parliament ‘where his voice had echoed for 50 years’.
¹⁴
In July, in a letter to Florence Henniker, he described a visit to Gloucester Cathedral, where the Perpendicular style of architecture was invented. ‘You can see how it grew in the old [medieval] masons’ minds,’ he said. In September he informed Florence that some Americans, who used to rent a house and 700 acres of shooting near Coniston in the Lake District, did so not in order to shoot, ‘but
to keep the birds from being shot
– a truly charming intention’.
¹⁵

A letter to William Archer, critic and journalist, revealed Hardy’s total disillusionment with the critics. In his attempt, he said, ‘to deal honestly & artistically with the facts of life’, he was liable ‘to be abused by any scamp who thinks he can advance the sale of his paper by lying about one’.
¹⁶
In a witty ending to a letter to Edmund Gosse in December, Hardy advanced the view that Gosse’s poems lacked ‘the supreme quality of their author being dead’ or ‘starving in a garret’ – the implication being that if this were the case, the poems would be better appreciated.
¹⁷
Whoever said that Hardy lacked a sense of humour?

In December 1898 a volume of fifty or so of Hardy’s
Wessex Poems
were published by Harper & Brothers. In the main, they were written either in the 1860s, or more recently, after a long interval. They were generally well received; some were about the Napoleonic era, others were drawn from Wessex life. However, the most interesting were those which gave insight into Hardy’s state of mind during this period.

In a large proportion of the poems which Hardy wrote the theme is lost love. Did he conjure up such poems out of nowhere? Or were they, as with his novels, based on real-life experiences? If so, then whose experiences were they: those of relatives, friends or acquaintances? Given the depth of feeling expressed by him in such poems, and their great number which runs into not tens, but
hundreds
, then this is hardly feasible. What
is
feasible is that virtually all of them allude to Emma, and this being the case, they reveal that his relationship with her was the stuff of which nightmares are made. For example, in
Neutral Tones
he refers to having learnt, since his youth, ‘keen lessons that love deceives’. In
Hap
he specifically mentions ‘suffering’ and ‘love’s loss’, and finds himself wondering if some divine power is the cause of it:

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh:

‘Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’

In
At an Inn
Hardy longs to put the clock back to a time (presumably) when he and Emma were in love:

As we seemed we were not

That day afar,

And now we seem not what

We aching are.

O severing sea and land,

O laws of men,

Ere death, once let us stand

As we stood then.

In
To Outer Nature
he reveals that the real-life Emma and what he originally imagined her to be were two completely different things:

Show thee as I thought thee

When I early sought thee …

And then declares sorrowfully:

Thy first sweetness,

Radiance, meetness,

None shall re-awaken.

In
Revulsion
, however, not only does all hope appear to have been extinguished, but it has been replaced by a sense of overwhelming bitterness and disillusionment:

Let me then never feel the fateful thrilling

That devastates the love-worn wooer’s frame,

The hot ado of fevered hopes, the chilling

That agonizes disappointed aim!

So I may live no junctive law fulfilling,

And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.

In fact, the very title of the poem sums up Hardy’s sentiments at this time. Finally, in
I Look Into My Glass
, Hardy, who is now elderly, expresses the fervent wish that his heart (that is, his desires and longings) had shrunk, in the same way that his aged ‘wasting skin’ had.

The depth of sentiment expressed in these poems, and the repetitive and obsessional nature of their themes, leads to the inexorable conclusion that in them, the tormented Hardy is expressing his deepest sentiments with regard to his failed relationship with Emma.

In London as usual with Emma, in the spring of 1899, Hardy continued to fraternise with the literary set, and met with the poet A.E. Housman for the first time. That October he was present in Southampton on the occasion of the departure of troops for the South African War, and saw similar preparations being made by the battery stationed at Dorchester. These events inspired him to write several poems.

In June Hardy wrote from London to his sister Katharine, asking her to remember to instruct the local carpenter to erect a cupboard outside the door of the bedroom at Max Gate that used to be his study, and enclosed a diagram showing exactly where this cupboard should be located.
¹⁸
He was now writing frequently to Florence Henniker. In July he complained to Florence that one of the problems with life in the country was the unavailability of good music. In October he told her (referring to the South African War) how he deplored the fact that civilised nations had learnt no other way of settling disputes than ‘the old and barbarous one’. In November he sent her his newly composed sonnet entitled
Departure
– referring to the soldiers leaving Southampton docks, bound for South Africa.
¹⁹

The coming of the new century in 1900 saw Hardy as energetic as ever: cycling from Max Gate all the way to Portland Bill and back in one day – a distance of 20 miles, up hill and down dale. That February he expressed to Florence Henniker how he was enjoying studying the strategy and tactics of the current war, but also his horror at the fate of Boer general Piet Cronje, whose army, including its womenfolk, was currently trapped in a river bed (by British forces), and whose animals were being ‘mangled’.
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In July Hardy apprised William Earl Hodgson, journalist and author, of his view that the (British) constitution ‘has worked so much better under queens than kings’, and recommended that ‘the Crown should [therefore], by rights descend from woman to woman’.
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(So much for any notion which might be entertained that Hardy had an inherent bias against women.) In October he expressed the opinion to Florence Henniker that the ‘present condition of the English novel, is due to the paralysing effect of English criticism on those who would have developed it’.
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He also enquired whether she had heard from her father, the colonel, currently serving in South Africa with the British army.