Thomas Hardy (36 page)

By bringing the artist into direct and lonely confrontation with the ultimate existential question, whether to live or to die, depression may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery that lies at the very heart of the ‘tragic and timeless’ art that they aspired to produce.
⁴

How, it may be asked, does this apply to Hardy? There is no doubt that for the greater part of his marriage to Emma, Hardy suffered from depression; also, that he had a preoccupation with the subject of death – whether that of a relative, a friend, a family pet, or even a complete stranger, such as those whom he encountered in the various mortuaries which he visited. Additionally, he was an explorer of questions of existentialism in the broadest sense, such as why are we here, what is our purpose, what is the meaning of life, how can life’s tragedies be explained? This begs the question, was it Hardy’s depression which led him to address the ‘ultimate existential question’, as Schildkraut implies is the case with other artists (again, to use the word in its broadest sense)?

The editorial referred to above draws attention to a question posed by psychiatrist N.J.C. Andreasen, who wondered whether, if American poet Sylvia Plath had taken anti-depressants, would the ‘confessional power’ of her
Arid
poems have been lessened in any way?
⁵
And Schildkraut, et al., affirm that the existence of ‘powerful treatments now available for depression [pose] serious questions for both the clinician and the artist’. For Hardy the implication is, therefore, that had modern-type anti-depressants been administered to him for his depression, then this would have led to the instant extinguishing of his creative spirit.

Hardy was the chronicler, par excellence, of a way of life which has now largely disappeared. As the lives of his heroes and heroines are played out, beneath the surface lurk the great questions and conundrums with which he, and countless others before and since, have wrestled during their lifetimes: religion; the class system; the law; man’s place in the universe, and the paradoxical contrast between the loyalty and steadfastness of human beings on the one hand, and their fickleness on the other. But most of all he deals with the subject of love, and the death of love – no person being better qualified to write about this subject than he.

The characters portrayed both in Hardy’s novels and in his poems are as fresh and colourful today as they were when he first sketched them. To us they are living creatures, as they were to him. However, his works can only be fully appreciated by recognising that in so many ways, their struggle was also his struggle – that of Hardy, the man behind the mask. So much that he wrote has an inner meaning, and deciphering it has been akin to solving a cryptic crossword. Doubtless, many more clues remain to be discovered.

Note: All material from Michael Millgate (ed.),
Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy
, and from Michael Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Volumes 1–7, is reproduced by kind permission of Oxford University Press.

1.  Florence Hardy to Howard Bliss, 10 January 1931, in Michael Millgate (ed.),
Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy
, p. 312.

2.  Before destroying Emma’s diaries after her death, Hardy first read them aloud to his second wife, Florence.

3.  Bertie Stevens, gardener at the Hardys’ Dorchester home, Max Gate, describes how ‘Mrs [Florence] Hardy herself burnt … baskets full of the letters and private papers that I had carried down from the study. It was a devil of a clear out. I never knew so much stuff come out of a room or such a burn up. My impression was she did not want any of the letters or papers to be seen by anyone and she was very careful to destroy every one of them.’ In Martin Seymour-Smith’s
Hardy
, p. 834.

4.  Florence Henniker, for example.

5.  Millgate (ed.),
Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy
, Foreword, p. xi.

6.  Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 2, p. 54.

1.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, pp. 14–15.

2.  Michael Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 3, p. 235.

3.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 8.

4.  J. Stevens Cox,
Thomas Hardy: Materials for a Study of his Life, Times and Works
, No 14.

5.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 3.

6.  Thomas Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree
, Notes, 6, p. 43.

7.  Evelyn Hardy,
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography
, p. 17.

8.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 21.

9.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 15.

10.  Ibid., p. 13.

11.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., pp. 8–9.

12.  Ibid., p. 12.

13.  Ibid., pp. 13–14.

14.  Ibid., p. 11.

15.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 13.

16.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 15.

17.  Thomas Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree
, Preface.

18.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 7.

19.  Mr King remains unidentified.

20.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 19.

21.  Ibid., p. 28.

22.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 19.

23.  Ibid., p. 16.

24.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 19.

25.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 16.

26.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 35.

27.  Ibid., p. 39. George Payne Rainsford James was a novelist and historian.

28.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 5. (Florence Hardy states, in the Prefatory Note to her biography of her husband, that Hardy himself had agreed that ‘the facts of his career should be set down’; so clearly Florence’s account of his life was sanctioned by him.)

29.  ‘Efts’ means eels.

1.  Evelyn Hardy,
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography
, p. 39.

2.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 25.

3.  Sir Newman Flower,
Just as it Happened
, pp. 91–2.

4.  Evelyn Hardy, op. cit., p. 41.

5.  Ibid.

6.  Michael Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 7, p. 5.

7.  Thomas Hardy,
Notebook
, I, p. 32.

8.  Timothy Hands,
Thomas Hardy and Stinsford Church
, p. 6.

9.  Desmond MacCarthy,
Memories
, pp. 108–9.

10.  Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 1, pp. 1–2.

11.  J. Stevens Cox,
Thomas Hardy: Materials for a Study of his Life, Times and Works
, No 11.

12.  Millgate, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 3.

13.  Ibid., p. 6.

14.  Desmond Hawkins,
Hardy, Novelist and Poet
, p. 24.

15.  Millgate, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 7.

16.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 153.

17.  Millgate, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 8.

18.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 58.

19.  Ibid., pp. 61–2.

20.  Ibid., p. 63.

21.  Ibid., p. 65.

1.  Emma Hardy,
Some Recollections
, p. 4.

2.  Ibid., p. 6.

3.  Ibid., p. 14.

4.  Census, Cornwall, 1861. John Attersoll Gifford’s name does not appear on the Law List – the Directory of Courts and Offices, Barristers, Solicitors, Magistrates, Coroners, etc. – after the year 1851, indicating that from that year onwards he was no longer practising his profession. Information kindly supplied by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

5.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., p. 30.

6.  Memorial tablet in memory of Emma Gifford, designed by Hardy for the church of St Juliot and erected in 1913.

7.  Kenneth Phelps, ‘Thomas Hardy and St Juliot Church’,
Thomas Hardy Year Book
, No 5 (St Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1976), pp. 31–2.

8.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., p. 33.

9.  Ibid.

10.  Ibid., p. 34.

11.  Ibid., p. 31.

12. 
Desperate Remedies
, Chapter 8.

13.  Robert Gittings,
Young Thomas Hardy
, Chapter 21.

14.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 76.

15.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., p. 34.

16.  Ibid., p. 35.

17.  Ibid., p. 37.

18.  Ibid.

19.  ‘Re-opening of St Juliot Church near Camelford’, in Kenneth Phelps, ‘Thomas Hardy and St Juliot Church’,
Thomas Hardy Year Book
, p. 31.

20.  Ibid., p. 33.

21. 
Royal Cornwall Gazette
, Saturday 27 April 1872, p. 6.

22.  Vere H. Collins visited Hardy at Max Gate in December 1920.

23.  Vere H. Collins,
Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate
, p. 26.

24.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., p. 10.

25.  Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 3 July 1913, Brotherton Library Collection, University of Leeds.

26.  William Charles Eldon Serjeant of the 5th Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, who was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892.

27.  Thomas Hardy to Harold Child, 11 February 1919, in Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 5, p. 295.

28.  Evelyn Hardy & F. B. Pinion,
One Rare Fair Woman: Thomas Hardy’s Letters to Florence Henniker,
1893
–
1922, p. 179.

29.  Thomas Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 28 January 1918, in Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, p. 246.

30.  Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 24 October 1915. By kind permission of Colby Special Collections, Miller Library, Waterville, Maine, USA.

1.  Michael Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 2, pp. 131–3.

2.  Ibid., p. 54.

3.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 96.

4.  Desmond MacCarthy,
Memories
, p. 111.

5.  Sir Newman Flower,
Just as it Happened
, p. 94.

6.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 93.

7.  Ibid., p. 96.

1.  Michael Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 1, p. 31.

2.  Millgate,
Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy
, p. 46.

3.  Emma Hardy,
Diaries
, 1874–76 (Dorset County Museum), p. 12.

4.  Ibid., p. 32.

5.  Sir Newman Flower,
Just as it Happened
, p. 91.

6.  Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 1, p. 33.

7.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., p. 56.

8.  Margaret Newbolt (ed.),
The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt
, pp. 121–2.

9.  Millgate (ed.),
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy
, Vol. 1, p. 37.

10. 
The Hand of Ethelberta
, Preface.

11.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 106.

12.  Emma Hardy, op. cit., pp. 65–6.

13. 
The Hand of Ethelberta
, Preface.

14.  Carl J. Weber,
Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square
, p. 68.

15.  Emma Hardy, op. cit.

16. 
The Return of the Native
, 4:7.

1. 
The Trumpet Major
, Chapter 16.

2.  Evelyn Hardy,
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography
, p. 176.

3.  Michael Millgate,
Thomas Hardy: A Biography
, p. 215.

4.  Thomas Hardy,
Notebook
, I, p. 61.

5.  The Bible, Book of Revelation, 3:14.

6.  ‘They [Emma Gifford’s family] had nearly secured a farmer [as a husband for Emma] when T.H. [Hardy] appeared.’Florence Emily Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 24 October 1915. By kind permission of Colby College, Miller Library, Waterville, Maine, USA.

7.  Thomas Hardy’s Prayer Book, Trustees of the Hardy estate, deposited in Dorset County Museum.

8.  Cornwall Census, 1871.

9.  Denys Kay-Robinson,
The First Mrs Thomas Hardy
, p. 19.

10.  Emma Hardy,
Some Recollections
, p. 36.

11.  Information kindly supplied by the Revd Robert Thewsey, priest-in-charge of the Boscastle group of churches.

12.  Evelyn Hardy,
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography
, p. 178.

13.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 154.

14.  Ibid., p. 157.

15.  Richard H. Taylor (ed.),
The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy
, p. 35.

16. 
Longman’s Magazine
, Vol. 2, 1883, pp. 252–67.

17.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 312.

1.  Florence Emily Hardy,
The Life of Thomas Hardy
, p. 169.

2.  Ibid., p. 170.

3.  Ibid., p. 171.

4. 
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, Preface.

5.  Florence Emily Hardy, op. cit., p. 196.