Thomas Hardy (22 page)

In the same month of October, Emma heard that her widowed sister Helen, now resident at Lee-on-Solent in Hampshire, had fallen ill. Emma left Max Gate immediately to go and care for her. Two months later, however, Helen died at the age of 63.

In April 1901 Hardy is to be seen mourning the death of a favourite cat which was ‘mutilated by the mail train’, even though the railway line was quarter of a mile distant from the house. This was Hardy’s own cat – the first he had ever had – and he blamed himself for allowing it to stay out at night.
²³

A literary society called the Whitefriars Club did Hardy the honour of visiting him at his home in May. His mother, who was now aged 88, got to hear of the visit and was taken by her daughters, Mary and Katharine, In her wheelchair to view the carriages as they conveyed the society’s members to Max Gate. How proud she must have felt of her now famous son.
²⁴

In November Hardy remarked that the army had taken possession of part of his beloved Egdon Heath – a place which until now ‘has lain untouched since man appeared on the earth’.
²⁵

Hardy’s
Poems of the Past and Present
was published in November 1901 by Harper & Brothers of New York. The poems cover a variety of subjects: war, other writers and poets (in particular Shelley and Keats), flowers, birds, Rome, Switzerland, and there is one humorous poem entitled
The Ruined Maid
. Just as many of the happenings described in Hardy’s novels had their root in his own experiences, so the same pattern emerges in his poems, where his main preoccupation is his fraught relationship with Emma. And because the couple’s problems remain unresolved, the outpouring of plaintive poems never ceases. (This continued to be the case, even after Emma’s death.)

A poem which sheds light on Hardy’s tortured mental state is
How Great My Grief
:

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Since first it was my fate to know thee!

– Have the slow years not brought to view

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Nor memory shaped old times anew,

Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee

How great my grief, my joys how few,

Since first it was my fate to know thee?

Here, Hardy is complaining that although he has displayed love and kindness towards his wife, he feels that this has not been appreciated. Nevertheless, he has decided to accept his fate, despite the fact that the passage of the ‘slow years’ has brought no amelioration of his grief.

Similarly, in
I Said to Love
, he writes on the subject of love as follows:

It is not now as in old days

When men adored thee and thy ways …

And continues:

I said to him,

‘We now know more of thee than then;

We were but weak in judgement when,

With hearts abrim,

We clamoured thee that thou would’st please

Inflict on us thine agonies!

Having implied that it had been a misjudgement on his part to marry Emma, Hardy goes on to refer to ‘iron daggers of distress’, but says, resignedly, ‘We are too old in apathy’ to fear any further threats from ‘Love’. The inference is quite clear. Hardy once longed for love, but is now totally disillusioned with the hand that fate has dealt him.

In
To Lizbie Browne
he laments the fact that he once lost the subject of the poem as a lover:

When, Lizbie Browne,

You had just begun

To be endeared

By stealth to one,

You disappeared

My Lizbie Browne.

And he continues:

You were a wife

Ere I could show Love,

Lizbie Browne.

In other words, soon after his meeting with her, Lizbie had gone off and married somebody else. In real life, Lizbie Browne is alleged to be the beautiful, red-headed daughter of a gamekeeper, who was known to Hardy in his youth. As for the inference of the poem, it is obvious. Hardy, In retrospect, feels that it was she he should have married. Instead, he let her slip, when he should have ‘coaxed and caught’ her, ‘ere you [she] passed’.

The poem
A Broken Appointment
, from his
Poems of the Past and Present
collection, for once relates not to Emma, but to Florence Henniker. In it, he describes himself as a ‘time-torn man’. This raises the question: what were the likely adverse effects on the mental and physical health of one such as Hardy, who endured years of marital disharmony and enforced sexual abstinence? In a paper entitled ‘How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence’, Chris M. Wilson and Andrew J. Oswald of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany, reviewed approximately 100 research papers on the subject, written between 1981 and 2005.

In regard to the possible benefits of marriage, Wilson and Oswald noted the following findings:

Marriage is a source of emotional and instrumental support. Emotional help seems to reduce the incidence of depression and mental illness, and may provide an important buffer against stress. Marriage can also enhance feelings of attachment and belonging, which are thought to affect mental health.
²⁶
Individuals who value the permanence and importance of marriage have a larger reduction in depression and suffer more from marriage dissolution.
²⁷
Marital harmony is associated with much better sleep, less depression and fewer visits to the doctor.
²⁸
The married have higher levels of emotional support.
²⁹

The authors also point to the large number of studies which show that marriage increases longevity, and ‘the longer the duration of a marriage the greater the gain’.
³⁰
Conversely:

Marital break-up has a large depressive effect. Compared to those continually married, the continually separated/divorced show significantly lower levels of mental health. A transition from marriage to separation or widowhood increases depression and unhappiness.
³¹

(Hardy’s marriage had effectively ‘broken up’, and he lived an increasingly separate life from Emma, albeit under the same roof. Therefore, he falls into the latter category.)

In regard to sexual intercourse, the study showed that: ‘Married people have much more sex than other groups. Sexual activity is strongly and monotonically correlated with happiness. So more sex may be one reason why marriage raises psychological well-being.’
³²

Wilson and Oswald summarised the vast volume of literature which they reviewed as follows:

Marriage makes people far less likely to suffer psychological illness.

Marriage makes people live much longer.

Marriage makes people healthier and happier.

Both men and women benefit, though some investigators have found that men gain more.

These gains are not merely because married people engage in less risky activities.

Marriage quality and prior beliefs can influence the size of the gains.
³³

The authors also point to the fact that human beings with good friendship networks (including friendship with their respective spouses) can repel the simple common cold.
³⁴
This suggests that marriage has a positive effect on the ability of the immune system to function well.

Wilson and Oswald’s study merely confirms the obvious benefits to well-being of a loving and caring relationship (and this would undoubtedly apply equally well whether within marriage or without), even though the physiological basis of this is not fully understood. What
is
known is that during orgasm, experienced during sexual intercourse, endorphins are released which create a feeling of euphoria, and also have an analgesic effect. (Endorphins are substances produced by the pituitary gland which are related to the opiate morphine.) It should be noted that endorphins are also released during strenuous or prolonged physical exercise, such as cycling. Hardy was a keen cyclist and this activity was therefore undoubtedly beneficial to his health and well-being, even if it in no way compensated him for enforced sexual abstinence.

Additionally, it is known that being in an unhappy relationship creates excessive stress, which, in turn, may lead to tiredness, tension headaches, increased susceptibility to infections, high blood pressure and peptic ulcers, as well as anxiety, tearfulness, irritability, insomnia, loss of appetite and lassitude. One way of obviating such stress would be to remove its cause, which for Hardy would have meant seeking a divorce from Emma and embarking on a new relationship. This, however, he felt unable to do, for reasons already discussed. Alternatively, it might have helped him to discuss his feelings with loved ones and friends, but as Emma did not welcome them into her home, this avenue was denied to him. As for consulting his doctor about his undoubted depression, there is no record that he ever went so far as to do this.

The fact that Hardy became more and more depressed during his marriage to Emma is reflected in his writings. Compare, for example, the happy scenes portrayed in
Under the Greenwood Tree
(written in 1871, three years prior to his marriage to Emma), with the harrowing and heart-rending scenes portrayed in
Jude the Obscure
(written in the seventeenth and eighteenth years of his married life). But was his physical health also affected adversely?

As his letters confirm, Hardy suffered continually with head colds and rheumatism, whether in London or in Dorset, and also with dyspepsia; though whether this was stress related cannot be said with certainty.

The reason why, at Max Gate, Hardy was never visited by his parents, siblings or other relatives, and only seldom by his friends, was evidently that Emma did not welcome them there. According to Hardy’s acquaintance Sir Newman Flower, matters came to a head one day when Hardy, returning from a walk, discovered that a young relative – one of the very few who had managed to gain access to Max Gate and was staying there at Hardy’s invitation – had been ‘sent away’ (by Emma) for no apparent reason. This, for Hardy, was the very last straw. He decided to spend his future home life in his study, and to this end he consulted a builder, with a view to having a stairway constructed which would lead directly to it from the garden. This would thus obviate the need for him to pass through the main part of the house. From now on: ‘He would have all his meals in his room. He would live there.’
¹

On New Year’s Eve 1901, Hardy made a profound statement in respect of how an individual should determine his own philosophy of life. ‘
Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience
,’ was his advice. It was impossible, he admitted, for a person to avoid using the ‘terms and phraseology’ of earlier philosophers, but nonetheless, ‘if he values his own mental life’, then he should ‘avoid adopting their theories’. Years of labour could be avoided by working out one’s philosophy for oneself. Hardy’s opinion, as far as he himself was concerned, was that it was best to adopt a pessimistic standpoint, for this was the only view of life in which one can never be disappointed. And, ‘Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, [then] when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play’.
²

In February 1902 Hardy lamented the fact that ‘theological lumber’ was still being allowed to discredit religion. If the Church were to replace ‘the doctrines of the supernatural’ by ‘reverence & love for an ethical ideal’, then the great majority of thinking people who hitherto had been ‘excluded by the old teaching would be brought back into the fold, & our venerable old churches & cathedrals would become the centres of emotional life that they once were’.
³

That April of 1902, Hardy wrote to Alderman Dr Elias Kerr, physician of Dorchester, to complain that visitors to the town were unable to find various streets and ‘spots’ on account of their names having been changed. Hardy put forward various suggestions as to how this matter could be rectified. They included the use of inscribed stone tablets to mark the former sites of The Old Theatre; the Gallows; the Romano-British burial ground; the Franciscan Friary and Dorchester Castle.
⁴