Thomas Hardy (31 page)

On 1 January 1914 Florence told Clodd that she had given Hardy an ultimatum, that ‘if the niece is to remain here
permanently
, as one of the family … [I will] return to my own home, &
remain
there’.
¹⁸

Florence wrote to Lady Hoare in July to say: ‘I am so delighted & proud to know that you are fond of him [Hardy]. I think he really needs affection & tenderness more than anyone I know – life has dealt him some cruel blows. I am sure my husband’s sisters would be
very very
delighted to see you.’ In other words, Florence, unlike Hardy’s late wife Emma, was more than willing to welcome her husband’s relatives and friends to Max Gate.
¹⁹

On the first day of December 1914, Florence confided to Rebekah Owen: ‘You would hardly believe – but sometimes I, too, feel that awful loneliness – the feeling that there is no one much in the world who cares whether I be happy or sad. It is of all feelings the worst.’
²⁰
A few days later Florence told Rebekah, having read Hardy’s poem
Wessex Heights
(from his
Satires of Circumstance
collection): ‘It wrung my heart. It made me miserable to think that he had ever suffered so much. It was written in ’96, before I knew him.’ And, referring to Hardy’s poems in general, Florence declared:

He tells me that he has written
no
despondent poem for the last eighteen months, & yet I cannot get rid of the feeling that the man who wrote some of those poems is utterly weary of life – & cares for nothing in this world. If I had been a different sort of woman, & better fitted to be his wife – would he, I wonder, have published that volume? [
Satires of Circumstance
, published in the previous month of November].
²¹

In late 1914 Lady Hoare evidently wrote to Florence, singling out two of Hardy’s poems –
The Death of Regret
and
Wessex Heights
(both from the
Satires of Circumstance
collection) – which she used to illustrate her argument that, in Florence’s words, ‘one must not make the man responsible for what the poet writes’.
²²
In other words, Lady Hoare was making a distinction between Hardy ‘the man’ and Hardy ‘the poet’. Lady Hoare was undoubtedly hoping that her words would comfort and reassure Florence, which they did. However, in her analysis of the situation she was mistaken, for in this case, Hardy the man and Hardy the poet were one and the same.

Florence had already indicated to Lady Hoare, in a previous letter dated 6 December 1914, that in the poem
Wessex Heights
, the four women referred to by Hardy were all ‘actual women’, though only three were still alive in 1896 when the poem was written. And, of course, one of these women was Emma.

The sixth and seventh (final) verses of
Wessex Heights
read as follows:

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,

I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;

Yet my love for her in its fullness she herself even did not know;

Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,

Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,

Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,

And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

Much as Hardy would have liked to believe the sentiments expressed by him in these two verses, the reality was that he
never
succeeded in ‘letting Emma go’, even after her death; nor did he ever manage to rid himself entirely of the ghosts that haunted him in respect of her. Likewise, although in
The Death of Regret
Hardy is ostensibly writing about a person who has lost a male comrade, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this poem is also about Emma; and in its final verse Hardy is again trying to convince himself that he can live contentedly without her:

And ah, seldom now do I ponder

At the window as heretofore

On the long valued one who died yonder,

And wastes by the sycamore.

To Lady Hoare, Florence expressed her feelings of tenderness for Hardy. She sometimes felt towards her husband, she said, ‘as a mother towards a child with whom things have somehow gone wrong – a child who needs comforting – to be treated gently & with all the love possible’.
²³

On 3 December 1915 Florence told Rebekah Owen that, to her ‘great dismay’, Hardy had reverted to his former self. ‘Tom … says he feels that he never wants to go anywhere or see anyone again. He wants to live on here [at Max Gate], quite quietly, shut up in his study.’
²⁴
In January 1916 Florence, again in a letter to Rebekah Owen, referred to ‘the
awful
diary the first Mrs T.H. kept (which he burned) full of venom, hatred & abuse of him & his family’.
²⁵

On 9 December 1916 Florence described a visit to St Juliot rectory, where she and Hardy ‘had tea … with the very nice Rector [the Revd John H. Dickinson] & his sister’. She also described exploring King Arthur’s castle where the couple ‘lay for an hour or so, on the grass, in the sunshine, with sheep nibbling around us, & no other living thing – while cliffs & greenyblue sea & white surf seemed hundreds of feet below’. In other words, unlike on the first occasion, Florence appears to have enjoyed her visit to Cornwall this time.
²⁶

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses
was published by Macmillan in November 1917. Of this collection,
Logs on the Hearth
and
In the Garden
were poems written by Hardy in memory of his sister Mary. In other poems, such as
Joys of Memory
and
To My Father’s Violin
, he looks back nostalgically at the past, which to him always seems preferable to the present. Similarly, in
Great Things
, where Hardy admits to a love for ‘sweet cider’, ‘the dance’ and ‘love’ itself, he uses the past tense, as he ends with the words ‘Will always have been great things’.

The theme of
Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses
, said Hardy, was to ‘mortify the human sense of self-importance by showing or suggesting, that human beings are of no matter or appreciable value in this nonchalant universe’.
¹
This, as will be seen, was only part of the story, for there are many poems in the collection which relate, inevitably and vicariously, as always, to Emma. Had she been alive, she would undoubtedly have been just as offended by them as she had been with
Jude the Obscure
.

In 1920 publisher Vere H. Collins, during a series of discussions with Hardy at Max Gate, questioned the latter about one of his
Moments of Vision
poems, namely
The Interloper
, which he could not make sense of. It reads as follows:

There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,

And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;

I view them talking in quiet glee

As they drop down towards the puffins’ lair

By the roughest of ways;

But another with the three rides on, I see,

Whom I like not to be there!

No: it’s not anybody you think of. Next

A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream

Where two sit happily and half in the dark:

They read, helped out by a frail-wick’d gleam,

Some rhythmic text;

But one sits with them whom they don’t mark,

One I’m wishing could not be there.

No: not whom you knew and name. And now

I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,

And the guests dropping wit – pert, prim, or choice,

And the hostess’s tender and laughing face,

And the host’s bland brow;

But I cannot help hearing a hollow voice,

And I’d fain not hear it there.

No: it’s not from the stranger you once met. Ah,

Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;

People on a lawn – quite a crowd of them. Yes,

And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads;

And they say, ‘Hurrah!’

To a blithe speech made; save one, mirthless,

Who ought not to be there.

Nay: it’s not the pale Form your imagings raise,

That waits on us all at a destined time,

It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed;
²

O that it were such a shape sublime

In these latter days!

It is that under which best lives corrode;

Would, would it could not be there!

Clearly, the first verse of the poem relates to Hardy’s early visits to St Juliot in the 1870s, The ‘three folk’ in the chaise being himself, Emma and probably Emma’s sister, Helen, and the cliffs being probably those in the vicinity of nearby Boscastle. In the second verse, the ‘dwelling’ may in reality be ‘Riverside Villa’, sturminster Newton, Dorset, and the ‘stream’, the adjacent River Stour. The third verse refers to a mansion, to which Hardy and Emma have been invited for dinner – presumably after he became famous. The ‘lawn’ referred to in the fourth verse may be the one at Max Gate. All the events described in the above-mentioned poem should, for Hardy, have been happy ones. Instead, because of the presence of the unwanted stranger, they are not. But who was this stranger?

Vere H. Collins asked Hardy to explain the penultimate line: ‘What is “that under which best lives corrode”?’To which Hardy replied:

‘Madness.’

Collins: ‘In each case?’

Hardy: ‘Yes. I knew the family.’
³

When Collins suggested that Hardy give
The Interloper
a subtitle, in order to make its meaning clearer, Hardy responded (for the 1923 edition) with ‘And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home’. Said Collins: ‘When Hardy uttered that word [‘madness’] … there burst on me a revelation’ – the subtitle was a
reference to Emma
. (Hardy, of course, whatever his thoughts, would never have used the word ‘madness’ openly had Emma still been alive.) Said Collins:

This was the clue
. The Blow
,
The Blot
,
The Wound
[references to other poems of Hardy’s]; the spectre haunting that beautiful girl while she sang and played; the shadow darkening and chilling that passionate union; the lovers struck by an unexpected, unprovoked, undeserved foe; now at last I grasped what … had put an end to happiness in Hardy’s marriage and life.
⁴

And this is why Hardy ‘had tended to concentrate his attention on the tragedies and ironies in love’.
⁵
But who was ‘the interloper’ – the ‘one who ought not to be there’ and who corrodes the lives of others? The only interpretation possible is that it was a representation of Emma’s alter ego; this being seen by Hardy as a separate entity to Emma, the physical being.

From the first verse, the conclusion, extraordinary as it may seem, must be that Emma was displaying features of insanity even before Hardy married her. (He may only have recognised this with the benefit of hindsight.) And what is equally extraordinary is that he went ahead with the marriage, notwithstanding this fact. And from Hardy’s words to Collins – ‘Madness … I knew the family’ – it is clear that it was to Emma’s family that the former was referring.

Another poem which Collins mentions above is
The Blow
, In which Hardy demands to know why someone had found it necessary ‘To have hurled that stone Into the sunshine of our days!’ – the days in question being, of course, those which he and Emma had shared together. The answer was that:

No aimful author’s was the blow

That swept us prone,

But the Immanent Doer’s That doth not know,

Which in some age unguessed of us

May lift Its blinding incubus,

And see, and own:

‘It grieves me I did thus and thus!’

(This, of course, was an echo of the ‘Immanent Will’ of
The Dynasts
.)

Collins also mentions Hardy’s poem
The Wound
, a reference not to any physical wound, but to an inner hurt which he had chosen to keep to himself:

… that wound of mine

Of which none knew,

For I’d given no sign

That it pierced me through.

And when Collins talks about a beautiful girl singing and playing, he is referring to Hardy’s poem
At the Piano
:

A Woman was playing,

A man looking on;

And the mould of her face,

And her neck, and her hair,

Which the rays fell upon

Of the two candles there,

Sent him mentally straying

In some fancy-place

Where pain had no trace.

A cowled Apparition

Came pushing between;

And her notes seemed to sigh;

And the lights to burn pale,

As a spell numbed the scene.

But the maid saw no bale,

And the man no monition;

And Time laughed awry,

And the Phantom hid nigh.

This poem, of course, is again about Emma (who is known to have played the pianoforte). When Hardy is in her company he is happy, and imagines himself to be in a place where pain does not exist – and by implication, where there is only pleasure. However, a ‘phantom’ (ghost or spectre) appears and intervenes between them. Emma is unaware of the evil and woe (‘bale’) which the phantom’s presence portends, and Hardy fails to recognise its presence as a warning (‘monition’) of things to come.

In the above three poems, as Collins so rightly guessed, the ‘stone’ in the first, the ‘wound’ in the second, and the ‘cowled apparition’ or ‘phantom’ in the third, were all metaphors for Emma’s ‘madness’. Collins might also have mentioned
The Man with a Past
, where Hardy alludes to the fact that neither he nor Emma saw the ‘dart’ which was winging its way towards them; another metaphor, undoubtedly, for Emma’s insanity:

There was merry-making

When the first dart fell

As a heralding, –

Till grinned the fully bared thing,

And froze like a spell.

Like a spell.