Thomas Hardy (32 page)

Innocent was she,

Innocent was I,

Too simple we!

Before us we did not see,

Nearing. Aught wry –

Aught wry!

It is difficult to be precise about when exactly the penny first dropped and Hardy realised that Emma was insane (or ‘mad’, as he called it). This is because works of his which allude to Emma’s insanity were written subsequent to the events which they describe, and therefore with the benefit of hindsight. Nevertheless, by the time he came to write
The Interloper
, which was published in late 1917, her ‘madness’ was a fact of which he was certain beyond all doubt.

Of other poems in
Moments of Vision
,
Honeymoon Time at an Inn
undoubtedly relates to Hardy’s own honeymoon. The poem begins ominously:

At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,

The moon was at the window-square,

Deedily brooding in deformed decay …

From whence, the atmosphere deteriorates even further:

Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber,

Where lay two souls opprest,

One a white lady sighing, ‘Why am I sad!’

To him who sighed back, ‘Sad, my Love, am I!’

Suddenly, a ‘pier-glass’ (large, elongated mirror) comes crashing down from the ‘mantel’ and lies shattered on the floor. This, for the lady (Emma), was a portent of ‘long years of sorrow’ for herself and her new husband (Hardy).

You Were the Sort that Men Forget
begins:

You Were the Sort that Men Forget;

Though I – not yet! –

Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness

Adds to the strength of my regret.

You’d not the art – you never had

For good or bad –

To make men see how sweet your meaning,

Which, visible, had charmed them glad.

You would, by words inept let fall,

Offend them all,

Even if they saw your warm devotion

Would hold your life’s blood at their call.

In other words, although in Hardy’s eyes Emma had some excellent qualities, she had a habit of offending everybody, because in his view, her finer qualities were not discernible to them.

In
The Glimpse
, Hardy reveals how the memory of Emma continues to haunt him, even after her death:

She sped through the door

And, following in haste,

And stirred to the core,

I entered hot-faced;

But I could not find her,

No sign was behind her.

‘Where is she?’ I said:

“Who?” they asked that sat there;

“Not a soul’s come in sight.”

‘A maid with red hair.’

“Ah.” They paled. “She is dead.

People see her at night,

But you are the first

On whom she has burst

In the keen common light.”

It was ages ago,

When I was quite strong:

I have waited since, – O,

I have waited so long!

Yea, I set me to own

The house, where now lone

I dwell in void rooms

Booming hollow as tombs!

But I never come near her,

Though nightly I hear her.

And my cheek has grown thin

And my hair has grown gray

With this waiting therein;

But she still keeps away!

There are more poems on the theme of lost love and bereavement, which resound with words and phrases such as ‘my own heart nigh broke’, ‘sorrowwrung’ and ‘mourn’, and it requires but little discernment on the reader’s part to realise that, as so often is the case, it is about Emma that Hardy is really writing.

In
Moments of Vision
, Hardy also reveals his morbid side with his references to ‘death’, ‘mournful mould’ (of one deceased), ‘tombs’ and ‘vaults’. This brooding side of his nature cannot entirely be attributed to his failed marriage, for it will be remembered that on his honeymoon he insisted on paying a visit to the Paris morgue. The remainder of the poems deal with such subjects as war and patriotism.

It is now obvious why Hardy chose the title
Moments of Vision
for this collection of poems, for what the title really means is ‘Now I see Emma more clearly for what she really was’. In other words, Hardy had now come to a full realisation of the true state of mind of his late wife Emma (which he may well have previously been in denial about), even though he lacked the medical knowledge and expertise to make the ‘diagnosis’. Likewise, the title of the poem’s predecessor,
Satires of Circumstance
, translates to ‘Behold, here I have satirised my unhappy life with Emma’, and
Time’s Laughingstocks
translates to ‘Time has made me a laughingstock’.

In January 1918 Hardy gave his opinion on the subject of pessimism – something of which he had often been accused. Said he: ‘My motto is, first correctly [to] diagnose the complaint … and ascertain the cause; then set about finding a remedy if one exists.’
⁶
As for the subject of poetry, its glory, he said, lay ‘in itslargeness, admitting among its creators men of infinite variety’.
⁷

In February Florence wrote to Sydney Cockerell (director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) in respect of a biography of Hardy which she was currently working on:

T.H. declares that he would never write an autobiography, the mere idea – or suggestion – annoys him. It would be a thousand pities if the MS were burned now. The safest plan is to say as little as possible about it until the thing is completed – as far as we are able to complete it.
⁸

(The outcome was that
The Early Life of Thomas Hardy
and
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy
, both by Florence Emily Hardy, were published in 1928 and 1930 respectively by Macmillan.)

Hardy was now aged 77, and it is a measure of his fame and popularity that in the spring of 1918, such eminent people as Lady Ilchester and Lady Londonderry came to visit him at Max Gate. In June 1918, with the Great War still in progress, he gave a chilling view of what future wars would be like. This one was horrible enough, but would be ‘merciful in comparison’, bearing in mind that ‘scientific munition-making is only in its infancy’.
⁹
The war ended at 11 a.m. on 11 November of that year.

Hardy signed a petition in February 1919 in support of ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people’. In May he was ‘destroying papers [presumably letters and diaries] of the last 30 or 40 years’ which, he said, ‘raise ghosts’.
¹⁰

On his birthday, 2 June, he took Florence and his sister Katharine by car to visit one of his favourite places, Salisbury. Soon afterwards, Siegfried Sassoon arrived at Max Gate with a birthday present: a volume of the poems of some fifty living poets, intended as a ‘tribute’.
¹¹
Hardy confessed to Florence Henniker that he would care more about his birthdays if with every succeeding one he could see ‘any sign of real improvement in the world. All development [was] of a material & scientific kind’, but despite this, ‘scarcely any addition to our knowledge is applied to objects philanthropic or ameliorative’.
¹²

On 10 August 1919 Florence wrote to Louise Yearsley (whose surgeon husband, Macleod, four years previously had performed an operation on her nose), to say:

I have to go to Town [London] to see a Miss [Lilian] Gifford – niece of the first Mrs T.H. She has gone off her head, poor thing, & been put in an asylum, & I am going to see her as my husband is really not fit for the journey [in] this weather. He is rather attached to her as she lived here as a child for some years – & she has stayed with us from time to time since we were married. She was always a
most
difficult person to live with – but now I understand that the poor woman could not really help her trying ways & temper.
¹³

[The institution mentioned is the London County Council’s Claybury Asylum, to which, as previously mentioned, Lilian had been committed.]

It is to Florence’s credit that she was prepared, in all the circumstances, to make this visit to ‘poor Lilian’, as she now described Emma’s niece. Florence wrote to Sydney Cockerell to tell him about her visit. Said Florence: ‘I did not perceive any particular symptom of insanity [this statement being a measure of Florence’s fair-minded attitude towards Lilian], but the doctor and the medical superintendent assured me that she
was
insane.’ And she went on to tell Cockerell how, when she was at Claybury, she had met Lilian’s brother Gordon, who ‘told me that he and his wife [Violet] had had a dreadful time with her [during] the last few years’. Gordon told Florence that Lilian had regarded his wife Violet, a mere dressmaker, as someone ‘not fit to associate’ with her; that there had been ‘continual scenes and unkindness … and that absurd obsession about the grandeur of the Gifford family’.

Finally, the medical superintendent had told Florence that ‘from what he knew of the case, she [Lilian] can never have been quite sane’. (It is likely, of course, that had the doctor examined Emma, he would have reached the same conclusion.) Lilian was evidently very unhappy at Claybury, for she begged Florence to ‘take her out’. However, this Florence was unable to do without the consent of the authorities.
¹⁴

In September 1919 Florence complained to Sydney Cockerell that Hardy ‘has just paid £10 for altering the tomb of the first Mrs T.H. and yet he will not buy himself a thread of clothing and he upsets himself about trifles of household expenditure involving only a few pence’.
¹⁵

Hardy continued to demonstrate his endless fascination with the legal system by attending (with Florence) the Dorchester Assizes. On 18 November, the birthday of Thomas Hardy II, he visited his late father’s grave. In December he opened the Bockhampton Reading Room and Club, which would be that village’s memorial to the fallen. In his speech on that occasion, he reminisced about the ‘poor-houses’, where parish paupers were accommodated before the workhouses were built.

A letter sent by Hardy to Emma’s cousin, Charles Edwin Gifford, in early November 1919, shows that the author’s old sparkle had returned, after lying dormant for so many decades. Gifford had apparently sent Hardy congratulations for his 80th birthday – prematurely as it transpired, for this date would not be reached until 2 June 1920. Replied Hardy:

Many thanks for your congratulation. But it is rather amusing that, though I have been 80 in America for several years, & am now called 80 in England, I shall not really be 80 till the middle of next year, when people will doubtless begin to say: ‘How many more times is that Hardy going to be fourscore!’
¹⁶

On 27 December 1919 Florence stated that she and Hardy had visited Talbothays (the home of Hardy’s siblings) two days previously on the afternoon of Christmas Day.
¹⁷
In May 1920 she said that ‘on Sundays we nearly always go to see his [Hardy’s] brother & sister’.
¹⁸
That December, following a visit to Max Gate by the mummers, Florence declared that ‘Miss Bugler looked prettier than ever in her mumming dress. T.H. has lost his heart to her entirely, but as she is soon getting married I don’t let that cast me down
too
much.’
¹⁹
(This was a reference to Gertrude Adelia Bugler, born in 1897, amateur actress of Dorchester.)

On 30 December Florence informed Louise Yearsley that ‘we have had a rather lively Christmas in one way & another – so many people having desired to pay their “respex” to T.H. I estimate that between 50 and 60 people have been in this house since Christmas Day.’What a contrast this was to the era of Emma.
²⁰

In April 1921 Florence generously acknowledged how Emma, in her lifetime, had helped Hardy with his work: ‘Emma did indeed frequently copy for him any pages that had many alterations. She liked doing it.’
²¹

Accolades now followed, thick and fast. In February 1920 Hardy was in Oxford to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, and also to see a performance of
The Dynasts
by the university players. In March he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. April saw Hardy visiting London for the last time, when he and Florence attended Harold Macmillan’s wedding to Lady Dorothy Cavendish at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Macmillan’s grandfather, Daniel (with brother Alexander), had founded the publishing firm of that name (which had published a number of Hardy’s works), and his father, Frederick, was its chairman. The month of May saw Hardy at Exeter with Florence and Katharine, attending a service at the cathedral and calling on friends. In a letter to author and critic Harold Child, he admitted to being ‘most averse to anything like an “interview”, and have been for many years’.
²²