Thomas Hardy (16 page)

In the novel’s preface, Hardy explains that the book is principally concerned with ‘the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle [of] how [a couple are] to find a basis for their sexual relation[ship]’. But why did Hardy use the word ‘sexual’ – an excessively daring one by the standards of the time – when he might have preferred, instead, ‘matrimonial relationship’? From one of the foremost wordsmiths of the day, this surely was no accident, and use of the word ‘sexual’ undoubtedly reflected his own preoccupation with the subject.

In the preface to
The Woodlanders
, Hardy explains how a problem may arise when a person ‘feels some second person to be better suited to his or her tastes than the one with whom he has contracted to live’. This may be viewed on the one hand as the ‘depravity’ of an ‘erratic heart’. But on the other hand, no thinking person, concerned with the question of ‘how to afford the greatest happiness to the units of human society during their brief transit through this sorry world’, would be content to let the matter rest here. How are these statements to be interpreted, as far as Hardy’s own personal life is concerned?

Hardy had fallen in love with Emma, perhaps at first sight; he had returned from Lyonnesse with ‘magic’ in his eyes; he had courted her over four and a half long years, and now here he is in the preface to The Woodlanders, and only a dozen years after his wedding, admitting in so many words that he regrets the whole affair and wishes that he had married somebody else. (It should be stressed that whatever Hardy’s thoughts were about other women, he remained faithful to Emma all his life.)

Finally, in the preface to the novel, Hardy makes mention of the religious aspect of marriage. Is it to be seen as a divinely sanctioned ‘covenant’ – ‘What God hath joined together’ – or simply as a secular ‘contract’ between two people?

The story of
The Woodlanders
begins with estate-owner Mrs Charmond demanding to have the locks of hair of Marty South – a poor girl who is assistant to Giles Winterborne, cider-maker and forester. Her objective is to make a wig out of it for herself. Straight away, an upper-class person is behaving as if she owns the body, if not the soul, of one whom she considers to be beneath her.

Timber merchant George Melbury has a daughter, Grace, to whom he has provided a good education. Giles Winterborne is devoted to Grace, and it has always been assumed that one day the two of them will marry. However, Grace’s father intervenes and tells her that she is worthy of someone better, ‘a man who can take you up in society, out into the world’.

An incident which reveals Hardy’s impish sense of humour occurs when Giles invites the Melburys to a ‘gathering’, at which Grace discovers a slug in her ‘leaves of winter-green’. When the guests have departed, Giles’ servant reassures his master that the slug was well cooked. Says he: ‘I warrant him well boiled. God forbid that a live slug should seed on any plate of victuals that’s served by Robert Creedle!’

Edred Fitzpiers arrives on the scene to take up the position of local doctor. When Giles forfeits some properties which he owns and becomes less eligible on this account, Melbury points his daughter in the direction of Dr Fitzpiers.

Mrs Charmond’s carriage and Giles’ waggon meet head to head in the lane. When Giles is unable to reverse, Mrs Charmond sees this as insubordination and spitefully announces that she intends to demolish his cottage as part of a road-widening scheme – another typical example, to Hardy’s mind, of the callous behaviour of which the upper classes are capable. (
The Woodlanders
also contains a detailed description of man traps: spring-loaded devices made of iron, designed with teeth to lacerate the flesh and crush the bones; they were used by gamekeepers on country estates to catch poachers. Although the use of such devices had largely died out by the mid-nineteenth century, Hardy would have seen them as yet another example of oppression – barbaric brutality, in fact – by those who should have known better.)

Grace and Fitzpiers duly marry, but when he tells her that it is not appropriate for them, as a couple, to associate with such lowly people as her brothers, she tells her father that she feels the doctor is ashamed ‘of us, of me’. When Grace discovers that Fitzpiers is a liar, and that he has been philandering with Mrs Charmond, she and her father realise that the marriage has been a great mistake. However, Melbury doubts that his daughter will be permitted to divorce Fitzpiers because, says he: ‘Your husband has not been cruel enough. The law will leave you as Mrs Fitzpiers, ‘till the end of the chapter [her life].’

Here, Hardy shows his distaste for legal statutes which condemn those such as Grace to lives of misery.

Fitzpiers accompanies Mrs Charmond to the Continent. When he returns, looking for Grace, she leaves home and flees to Giles’ hut. Giles, mindful of her reputation as a married woman, spends several nights sleeping outdoors in the open, whereupon he succumbs to a sickness and dies. He is mourned by Grace, and by Marty South who also loved him. At Grace and Fitzpiers’ final meeting, the doctor, now contrite, asks Grace what she feels for him. ‘Nothing’ is the answer.

Hardy completed
The Woodlanders
on 4 February 1887 and recorded in his diary that he felt relieved at having done so.
¹⁵
This relief surely reflects the fact that, vicariously through the characters of the novel, he has brought the problems of his own marriage out into the open, which is a catharsis for him. And as his emotions finally boil over, what he writes – albeit in measured tones – is an expression of frustration, anger, bitterness and regret, engendered in him by years of marriage to Emma.

Surprisingly, and despite all their differences, Hardy and Emma left Dorchester on 14 March 1887 for London, en route to Italy. Here, they visited the cathedrals of Pisa and Milan, the Colosseum in Rome and the graves of the poets Shelley and Keats; all indicative of Hardy’s reverence for both good architecture and poetry. Venice was the city which he appears to have enjoyed the most. In Florence they visited the tomb of Elizabeth Browning, poet and wife of Robert, who had died in 1861. They also visited Lucy Baxter, daughter of Hardy’s former mentor, the late William Barnes, who had settled in Florence after her marriage.

Emma, in her (surviving) diaries, reveals some of the tensions which existed between herself and Hardy at this time. Referring to her husband, she says: ‘Tom very vexed. Dyspeptic before and worse now’ – ‘Tom has taken another little stroll by himself ’ – ‘Tom … had an altercation [with the father of a family] about seats’ (this was on the train journey from Italy to Paris, where Emma admitted to siding with the father of the family in question against her husband). When she says, ‘Little shoe-black [presumably a reference to a child whose job it was to polish the shoes of visitors] persistent at Forum [in Rome] Sunday morning, [I] broke my umbrella beating him off ’, this may be construed as the sign of her contempt for what she described as the ‘working orders’. Hardy, no doubt, would have been horrified and disgusted by her behaviour in this respect.
¹⁶

Back in London in the spring of 1887, Hardy and Emma trod the well-known path to society gatherings, and again met the poet Robert Browning, with whom they discussed their recent holiday in Italy. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee took place on 28 June and they went to see the procession which included vast numbers of royalty.

In August 1887, in a letter to Edmund Gosse, Hardy told of the weeks and months of ‘despondency’ which he had experienced ‘in byegone years’, the most recent bout being ‘several years ago’. This he attributed to his ‘stomach’ and eating habits, but alluded to the fact that other factors may have been involved. In the autumn, Hardy was toying with ideas for plots for his forthcoming epic drama,
The Dynasts
. Meanwhile, his reading of the poets and the Classics continued unabated.

In the spring of 1888, Hardy and Emma again sojourned in London before returning to Paris; this time to the Salon, to the races at Longchamps, and to an exhibition of drawings and paintings by French writer Victor Hugo.
¹⁷
On their return, Hardy called upon Lady Portsmouth and, being always one with an eye for a pretty female face or figure, remarked upon how well her ladyship’s ‘black, brocaded silk’ fitted her.

On 4 May 1888 Hardy’s
Wessex Tales
– a collection of short stories – was published by Macmillan. They included
The Three Strangers
, in which the hangman meets his victim-to-be (an escaped convict) in a shepherd’s cottage;
The Withered Arm
, where a woman invokes magic to cure a malady; and
A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four
, where Napoleon (with whom Hardy was always fascinated) is engaged in a reconnaissance of the Wessex countryside. In
The Distracted Preacher
Hardy makes use of anecdotes told to him by his grandfather, Thomas I, in regard to smuggling on the ‘Wessex’ coast.

In mid-July Hardy and Emma return to Dorchester, where Hardy makes a note of interesting stories he has heard for possible inclusion in future novels. Examples include the tale of a man who took ‘casts of the heads of executed convicts’, and that of a young lady who got married wearing ‘a dainty pair of shoes’ – these shoes had been previously thrown at her by another man, a shoemaker, whose love she had spurned; he had made them for her as a present.

In London in 1889 Hardy was fascinated by Turner’s use of light at an exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Academy. He also compared the techniques of Botticelli and Rubens in their depiction of the ‘flesh’, Vis-à-vis the ‘soul’; the fact that both these men were portrayers of the female form par excellence would not have been wasted on him. As always, he and Emma attended church services, concerts, plays and, of course, society events.

In a letter to poet and essayist John Addington Symonds in April, Hardy asks ‘whether we ought to write sad stories, considering how much sadness there is in the world already’. He concludes that the justification for doing so is that ‘the first step towards cure of, or even relief from, any disease (is) … to understand it’. This may then provide an escape from the worst forms of sadness in real life.
¹⁸
This may be interpreted to mean that for Hardy, the writing of novels and poems with a sad theme acted as a catharsis in respect of his unhappy life with Emma.