Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  A maid showed him to his room upstairs, with a window looking over the steep valley and hills rising beyond, not another building in sight. The house was comfortable. Emma presided over their evening meal. He explained his train journey with its four changes, a knight’s move, she called it, which is indeed what it looks like on the railway map. Her description pleased him, and he did not forget it. After the meal her sister Helen, Mrs Holder, came down to meet him and took him to speak to the rector in his room. Later the two sisters entertained him at the piano, both singing popular songs. It was what they did on most evenings, although Emma was also a reader, and had ambitions as a writer too.

  They had grown up in Devon in a conventional, provincial, respectable world. Their father was a lawyer and a keen Tory; they had an uncle in the Church and another who was a bank manager; other men in the family were schoolmasters. Emma looked with interest at Hardy, because he had lived in London, where she had never been, although they had a brother there now, Walter, who worked for the Post Office. She had passed her first twenty years happily in Plymouth, with an affectionate mother who allowed all her children freedom to run about and clamber on the rocky seashore, even Emma, who was born with a condition that made her slightly lame, though it did not greatly trouble her.4 She was sent to a school run by two maiden ladies, daughters of an army officer; lessons were in the mornings only and French was well taught. Partly from school, more perhaps from her father, who had literary tastes, she acquired a taste for poetry and for writing herself. Like most well-brought-up young ladies she also learnt to draw and to paint watercolour landscapes and to play the piano. There was much music at home, her father being a violinist – like Hardy’s, although Hardy probably kept that to himself – and the children were encouraged to sing part songs. There were dancing lessons too, and parties and dances, Plymouth being full of young naval and army officers; whether Emma danced is not clear. It was a city well endowed with libraries, concerts and a theatre, and she enjoyed her life there and had many friends. A girl with pink cheeks, a generous amount of curly hair and a look of being in full bloom, she was known to her friends, who liked to give one another flower names, as ‘the peony’.

  Emma’s father, being the eldest in his family and his mother’s favourite, persuaded her to support him and his family out of her income so that he could give up his work as a solicitor and live a life of leisure. So far he is a figure who could have appeared in one of Jane Austen’s later novels. Unfortunately his leisure was enlivened by spectacular drinking bouts. During one of these he put on a marathon Shakespearean performance for the family. They chose to regard it as an achievement of sorts, evidence of his taste and knowledge, but his behaviour put a strain on them all. Then, when Emma’s grandmother died, it was discovered that she had been spending her capital to keep them. There was very little money left, and the family was forced to move to Cornwall, where life was cheaper. They settled down to a restricted existence outside Bodmin, a quieter, duller place than Plymouth.

  The three sons were educated for the professions, but there was no money for anything else. Helen and Emma each worked for six months as a governess and found that quite enough. Then Helen became a companion to an old lady living in Tintagel, and she, meeting Emma and observing her limp, generously gave her a mare to get about on. The mare was named Fanny. Her father taught her to ride Fanny with a side saddle and showed her how to manage a long riding habit with the proper elegance. Riding became her passion, and she was off, cantering about Cornwall on her own, happily and fearlessly. Apart from the limp she was a strong, well-built young woman: in old age she told a friend that, as a girl, she was supposed to be getting consumption, ‘but the doctor said with my width and shape of chest it was quite impossible.’ 5When Helen was thirty she received a proposal of marriage from a clergyman, the Revd Cadell Holder. He was sixty-five and had been a widower for many years – he had a grown-up son and grandchildren living in Cornwall – and he was now gamely taking up a new living at St Juliot, where he felt he would need support. It was not a romantic match but served the purposes of both well. He got a young wife, and she got a cheerful, gentlemanly old husband and became mistress of a comfortable and attractive, if isolated, rectory. It had been built only a few years earlier, in 1847, as part of the Church’s crusade against the spread of Nonconformity, and they had made a good job of it. Holder, born in Barbados in 1803, came of a family with sugar plantations there; he had been sent to England to study at Oxford and, as he was thought to be delicate, went into the Church. The West Indian connection was useful, the patron of St Juliot, who appointed him to the living, being Richard Rawle, who had taught for many years in Barbados and was soon to be consecrated Bishop of Trinidad. Rawle was a Cornishman by birth and owned land around St Juliot. He was childless, and it was he who had raised the income of the benefice and was partly funding the restoration of the church, turning up in person when it was reopened.6

  Holder and Helen were married in 1867, and Emma was invited to live with them in the rectory. Emma’s biographer suggests that he must have appeared to be marrying both sisters, but it was a usual enough arrangement in days of large families, and perhaps he did like the idea of a brace of young wives. Emma was only twenty-six, and she said Helen was always disposed to be jealous of her, but they kept one another company, and there was plenty of room at the rectory, and enough to do in the parish. They had a man in charge of the stables to look after Fanny, the other horses and the basket carriage. A romantic garden dropped away from the flagged terrace along the back of the house, part of it enclosed to make a greenhouse, and fruit and vegetables were grown in a large walled enclosure. By the time Hardy came to St Juliot they were well settled in; but there were few visitors to such a remote spot, and those who came were very welcome.

  Hardy was there to work, of course, and he spent the whole of his first day at the church. It was a short walk from the rectory, standing quite by itself above the meadows falling steeply away to the Valency River below. In the churchyard were ancient Celtic crosses and modest gravestones marking the mostly short lives of the local people, and the first event in the morning of the day he worked there was a funeral, a single bell being tolled on the ground. All the five bells had been brought down from the tower, already condemned as unsafe. The church building, small and dilapidated as it was, contained a decrepit but fine carved wooden screen and pew ends with poppies, which Hardy drew. He went back to the rectory for lunch, returned to the church, and finished his survey and notes that evening. The next day he was driven by Emma, with Mrs Holder for company, along the narrow lanes through Boscastle and Tintagel village to the Penpethy slate quarry to look at the materials to be used in the restoration work on the church. The slates were greenish, and in 1925 Hardy published a poem called ‘Green Slates’, with the note ‘Penpethy’, recalling Emma standing in the quarry.7

  On his third day he and Emma went out with no chaperone to the cliffs, she on horseback. And now he first became aware of another Emma, and his imagination was stirred by the discovery of this different creature as she rode along the cliffs with the Atlantic breakers crashing in below, the March wind blowing processions of clouds across the sky, black-faced Beeny Cliff jutting out to sea before them and the sea stretching away to the limitless west. She rode so well that she and Fanny were like one animal, and she sometimes told people pertly, ‘I prefer my mare to any husband.’8 She was wonderfully bold, careless of heights or weather, and even claimed to enjoy the feeling of rain running down her back and her hair floating in the wind. Sometimes, she told him, she dismounted to clamber down the rocks and explore the seal caves below. Hardy knew the Dorset cliffs well, but this was a fiercer, wilder coast. The landscape spoke to something in her, and she believed that ‘no summer visitors can have a true idea of its power to awaken heart and soul.’ Her response to her surroundings, her high spirits as she cantered along the cliff tops, and her freedom to wander about alone as she pleased, and unchaperoned, made
her unlike the established pattern of wellbehaved, timid, clinging Victorian girlhood. Hardy had read enough of the Romantic poets to see her as a spirit of the chasms and wild places, with her floating hair and her look of la belle dame. She could take on all the roles – a spirit yet a woman too – and she became for him the spirit of delight itself.9

  In his pocketbook the brief notes he made that day trail away, helped along by Tennyson: ‘On the cliff… “The tender grace of a day”, etc. The run down to the edge. The coming home…’ They talked about the poetry they liked, and she learnt that the blue paper sticking out of his breast pocket was not an architectural note but a poem of his own. At some point he told her that he had the manuscript of a novel in the hands of a publisher, and she confessed that she too jotted down ideas and hoped to write a novel, and to publish it. In the afternoon they walked down the valley with Helen to Boscastle, ‘E. provokingly reading as she walked.’ Then ‘evening in the garden; music later in the evening.’ Hardy noted the names of some of the ballads they sang, ‘The Elfin Call’ and ‘Let Us Dance on the Sands’. When he left before dawn on 11 March – he had to be driven the sixteen miles to the nearest railway station at Launceston again – it was Emma who made sure the servants were up in time, sat with him as he took his candlelit breakfast and went out into the damp garden with him to say goodbye. Both knew that something had happened in those few days which might lead to more. They agreed to write to one another. Hardy’s poem ‘At the Word “Farewell” ’ tells us how he parted from her with a kiss:

  Even then the scale might have been turned

  Against love by a feather,

  – But crimson one cheek of hers burned

  When we came in together.10

  It is easy to see what she liked about him. He was a stranger from a larger world. He was a man in charge of architectural work he understood thoroughly and dealt with authoritatively – a change from her idle, blustering father and valetudinarian brother-in-law, the two men she knew best. He had a neat figure and a sensitive face that could be eager and intent, or close up entirely when he chose to withdraw into himself. When he was with her, the eagerness was drawn out, and she bloomed like a flower in response: this is the mechanism of falling in love. On that they had much to build, laughing together and exchanging views on their common passion, literature, and their common wish to become writers. Whether she was likely to achieve that or not, he could see her as someone who could help and advise him with his writing.

  The long slog back to Dorset gave him plenty of time to think about Emma on the one hand, and on the other to return to fretting over Macmillan and their response to Desperate Remedies. Back in Weymouth he worked on his plans for St Juliot Church. The bad news arrived in the post soon enough, on 5 April: Macmillan was rejecting the unfinished Desperate Remedies as too sensational. Another failure, another humiliation to be made light of or hidden from his family, and now also to tell his Cornish correspondent. He could not endure the idea of a second rejection from Chapman & Hall also, so, although it was their reader, Meredith, who had advised him to write a well-plotted novel, he sent it immediately to Tinsley Brothers, a firm known to have lower standards. Another wait. The daily detail of these transactions shows just how agonizing they must have been. On 2 May, Hardy’s other life surfaced, as his plans for St Juliot Church were approved by Crickmay; and on 3 May, William Tinsley wrote saying he would consider publishing Desperate Remedies but thought there should be alterations to the manuscript. On 5 May he laid out his terms. They were steep. Hardy was to contribute the large amount of £75 towards the cost of publication, to cover losses. He might recoup some or all of it – or lose it all. Hardy agreed to this, and, on 9 May, Tinsley proposed an edition of 500 copies, subject to the book being revised and completed to his satisfaction.

  Hardy now moved to London to get on with rewriting, taking lodgings in Kensington, at 23 Montpelier Street, off the Brompton Road, a better address than he had yet settled in. He kept afloat by taking on odd architectural jobs, for Blomfield, and for an architect called Raphael Brandon, whom he admired and whose picturesque chambers in Clement’s Inn, off the Strand, he observed carefully, storing up the details for future use.11 With Brandon he discussed the outbreak of war between France and Germany in July, and with Horace Moule too, who was in London again, coaching for the Indian Civil Service examinations. They saw a good deal of one another. Moule made no secret of his low opinion of the Tinsleys as publishers, but Hardy was set on his arrangement with them. He also told Moule about his Cornish trip and Miss Gifford. He had never confided in him about a friendship with a woman before. What made it possible was that for the first time she was a mentionable person from Moule’s world, the daughter of a solicitor, living in a country rectory, well read and able to discuss his work with him. He was not only corresponding regularly with her but sending her books to read, and he could imagine that she and Moule might find something in common, and look forward to their meeting.

  In June he had his thirtieth birthday in London. It meant little to him, his heart being in Cornwall. He could have visited his cousin Martha, who had just given birth to twins, and Tryphena was at her training college in Stockwell, but if he saw either he made no record of the meetings. In July news of other cousins came to his mother in the shape of a tiny letter, just four inches wide, bearing a Canadian stamp. It was from Louisa Sharpe, the eldest daughter of his Aunt Martha, last seen in Hitchin in 1849, when they were children. Louisa reminded the Hardys that Thomas had written to them for his mother in 1858, not long ‘before my dear mother’s death’ who had been ‘sleeping so long in the grave’. Louisa knew that sending her letter was a sort of ‘castle in the air’, but she still hoped to hear from them. She expected it to be two months before she could. She added, ‘I think I can remember you and Thomas but it is almost like a dream.’ Her neat, wistful letter, posted in Medina, East Nissouri, Ontario, seems to have gone unanswered.12 Perhaps Jemima put it aside for Tom to deal with later, but he was not much at home. London held him, and his mind was still further away, in Cornwall, and on his exchanges of letters with Emma, and the plans they were making for him to return to St Juliot. There he would have more time to work on his book. Emma offered to help with the fair copy. None of this could be explained at Bockhampton, where Emma’s name had not yet been mentioned.

  The Holders had invited Hardy to return to St Juliot for a summer holiday, and on 8 August he was there. Emma’s brown winter dress, the only one he had seen, had been put away, and she appeared in blue: ‘the original air-blue gown’ was a sight he never forgot. They were very happy. ‘August. Cornwall. The smoke from a chimney droops over the roof like a feather in a girl’s hat. Clouds, dazzling white, retain their shapes by the half hour, motionless, and so far below the blue that one can almost see round them,’ wrote Hardy in his notebook. The weather was hot, the sun shone and they explored the coast and the countryside together: the lush Valency Valley, with its river bubbling down to the port at Boscastle; the tidal sands at Trebarwith, where women gathered seaweed and collected sand, loading it on to their donkeys in panniers; and the ruins of Tintagel on its bare island, where they narrowly avoided being locked in. At the same time they were exploring each other, finding out each other’s tastes, enjoying the long hours in each other’s company, often unaccompanied. She was so living, he thought.13 He was physically enthralled by her; after he left he wrote her initials against ‘The Song of Solomon’ in his Bible: ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.’ They picnicked by the Valency, and Emma lost the glass they had drunk from; Hardy sketched her on her knees trying to find it in the river, in vain. It had disappeared for ever, like a magic cup lost in an old story.

  There was something else. Emma remembered a particular word he had used when she wrote her memoir later: ‘We grew much interested in each other and I found him a perfectly new subject of
study and delight and he found a “mine” in me, he said.’14 What he meant by calling her a mine was that she gave him material for his writing. He learnt from her exactly what it was like to be a young woman in her situation, and he could feed it into his fiction. He had already tried using the voices of women he was involved with in poems such as the ‘She, to Him’ sonnets, and now he had something more valuable: direct access to her life and feelings. He could ask her questions, study her, watch her movements and her manners, listen to her laughing, scolding and boasting, hear her confessions, her dreams and her stories, observe what made her smile and what upset her. He was in love with her, there was no doubt of that, but she was also a precious commodity – a ‘mine’, as he so frankly told her, a seam of gold for a writer who knew he had to study the market.

  As the month went by they heard of the French defeat by the Germans at Sedan and the capitulation of Napoleon III. It was the biggest military encounter in Western Europe since 1815. Hardy wrote his poem ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’ during a later war, in 1915, but he explained then that it was inspired by his memory of walking in Cornwall after getting the news of the defeat of the French in 1870.

  I

  Only a man harrowing clods

  In a slow silent walk

  With an old horse that stumbles and nods

  Half asleep as they stalk.

  II

  Only thin smoke without flame

  From the heaps of couch-grass;

  Yet this will go onward the same

  Though Dynasties pass.

  III

  Yonder a maid and her wight

  Come whispering by:

  War’s annals will cloud into night

  Ere their story die.