Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  In the first reviews several critics pointed out that Hardy had won his battle against the editors and circulating libraries triumphantly. Tess marked ‘a distinct epoch in English fiction’, wrote one, and ‘Mrs Grundy and her numerous votaries must, for a time at least, hide their heads in shame.’32 It was greeted as a tragic masterpiece, ‘brave and clear-sighted’, ‘one of those books which burn themselves in upon the soul’, full of ‘subtlety and a warm and live breathing naturalness’, a book that ‘permanently enlarged the boundaries of one’s intellectual and emotional experience’.33 Tess herself was seen as a Shakespearean creation and the greatest character in recent fiction: ‘She seizes one at once and never looses her hold.’34

  It was sneered at too, by critics of both sexes, for its ‘terrible dreariness’, its inauthentic picture of country life, its failure of good taste and lack of intellectual cultivation, its jarring defects of style, its ‘succulence’, i.e., insistence on Tess’s physical beauty, and its stagey characters and general unpleasantness. Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James exchanged private letters in which they shared their dislike of the book. Stevenson wrote,

  Tess is one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu books I have yet read… no earthly connexion with human life or human nature; and to be merely the unconscious portrait of a weakish man under a vow to appear clever, or a rickety schoolchild setting up to be naughty and not knowing how… Not alive, not true was my continual comment as I read; and at last – not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth.

  To which James, who had previously given some faint praise to the book, excused himself for it and replied, ‘I grant you Hardy with all my heart, and even with a certain quantity of my boot-toe… oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of “sexuality” is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author’s reputation for style.’35 No one has ever claimed that the book is perfectly written or constructed, or without clumsiness, but it glows with the intensity of his imagination; and Tess’s capacity to arouse visceral distaste in some and profound affection and admiration in others is a measure of the sexual power he built into his heroine. To Irving Howe, one of Hardy’s best and fairest critics, she is his ‘greatest tribute to the possibilities of human existence, for Tess is one of the greatest triumphs of civilization: a natural girl’.36

  It was said that Tess divided families and broke up friendships. Dinner parties had to be rearranged to take account of the warring opinions. And it sold and sold. This, and the effects of the passing of the US Copyright Act in 1890, made Hardy seriously rich. He was able to buy two houses in Dorchester, one for his sisters, both now teaching there, and one as an investment. It also meant that in 1893 he and Emma could for the first time take a whole house for the London Season, moving all their staff to St John’s Wood with them. His social ascent continued. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club, from whose balcony he and Emma watched the German Emperor William II progress through London. He moved in the highest circles, and his fame brought him some amusements. Regarded now as an expert on social problems, he was invited by Millicent Fawcett, a leader of the women’s movement, to write a story for working boys and girls, warning them of the dangers of treating love lightly. He excused himself, saying that to do it properly demanded clear, direct talk, which he knew the public would not tolerate. He went on, ‘The other day I read a story entitled “The Wages of Sin”… expecting to find something of the sort therein. But the wages are that the young man falls over a cliff, and the young woman dies of consumption – not very consequent, as I told the authoress.’37 He smiled again when Arthur Balfour, speaking at a fund-raising dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, gave it as his opinion that literature was in decline and there were now no writers of great merit alive. Hardy was among the guests, who were mostly writers; and noted that not much money was subscribed.38

  Even as Tess was published, Hardy was already at work on another serial promised to Tillotson the year before, a light-hearted story called The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, in which he imagines one man falling in love, at the ages of twenty, forty and sixty, with a woman, her daughter and her granddaughter. He intended it only as a serial, but later rewrote and published it as The Well-Beloved.39 In 1892 he also produced the most haunting of his short stories, ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, in which a demonic travelling musician steals the love of a girl away from her country sweetheart, abandons her and returns years later to steal their child.40 It is a small masterpiece, crackling with energy. And he had another book planned. This one would crown his thirty-year career as a novelist, and also cut it off for good.

  16. Tom and Em

  As he worked up to his most powerful fictional attack on conventional views of religion and marriage, in his private life he remained conventional and conservative. At Max Gate they took The Times, gave employment to two maids, a cook and a gardener, and kept to regular habits. Hardy did not smoke and drank very moderately. Although he venerated Shelley and said the poet was the person he would most like to meet from the past, there was never any question of him behaving as Shelley had towards his wife Harriet, who was simply abandoned when he decided she was uncongenial. For all the disappointments of their marriage, the Hardys conducted it with great decorum for many years. They took frequent holidays together, in England, in Scotland and on the Continent. They entertained and made visits together, giving ambitious luncheon parties in London and garden parties in the late summer at Max Gate. They read together, and went to concerts and the theatre together. They even went to church together, both in London and in the country. Hardy agreed to have two of the children of Emma’s brother Walter Gifford, Gordon and Lilian, for occasional holidays at Max Gate within a year of settling there. 1 The arrangement may have been set up to please Emma, but he grew fond of them too and became a notably kind uncle. Their own childlessness remained a sorrow to both of them.

  An equal devotion went to their many cats, and they mourned the death of their dog Moss together: some of the tenderness they failed to give one another went to the pets, providing an alternative form of bonding. Up to the mid 1890s he was still writing to her as ‘My dearest Em’ or ‘My dearest Emmie’, and in 1895 he sent her a letter from London urging her to come and join him and saying he was ‘lonely and dismal’ without her. They shared a bedroom and a bed for twenty-five years, which may have been a comfort to them both; it is, however, possible to withdraw into celibacy in the marital bed. Once Emma gave up hoping for a child, she may have become a reluctant participator, but it was not until 1899 that she moved herself upstairs to a bedroom in the attic. Hardy always had an eye for women, on the bus (‘in their fluffy blouses’ he wrote), in the street, at the music hall, at dinners and crushes. 2 He made notes about their appearance, found many attractive, and at the end of the 1880s he began to fall noticeably in love.

  Yet he always admired the Bathsheba side of Emma, wonderfully displayed when, at the age of fifty-five, she learnt to ride a bicycle. She showed great spirit and energy, and persuaded Hardy to learn to bicycle too. They both became enthusiasts, and her initiative opened up their lives significantly. To Emma, with her lameness, the bicycle was a substitute horse, and she even talked about going for a canter. It makes you wonder why he had never bought her a horse at Max Gate. She had a special green velvet bicycling suit made to match her first bicycle, which was green and known as ‘The Grasshopper’. Later she acquired a blue one, with matching blue costume. People laughed at her in Dorchester, but Hardy saw the point. The English roads were rough and dusty, but they were also empty, the stagecoach having long disappeared and the motor-car not yet arrived, and so they had the best bicycling ever enjoyed, and after they had mastered their machines were able to cover many miles together. In August 1899 they rode for seventeen miles by moonlight after a harvest festival at Turnworth, arriving home at midnight – and this was only the return journey. By then they were both fifty-nine, and Hardy said he could d
o forty to fifty miles a day, and Emma almost as much. 3 It suggests camaraderie and shared enjoyment, because it is difficult to keep up a quarrel or a sulk as you pedal along country roads.

  Meanwhile, in March 1887, after finishing The Woodlanders and accepting the 1,000 guinea advance for Tess which he later paid back, he carried Emma off to Italy for six weeks. Once again she kept a holiday diary, a vivid, disorganized, enthusiastic and entertaining record that began on 14 March, when they set off from Max Gate in an east wind that turned into a snowstorm. Thick fog and driving snow greeted them at the coast. ‘It seemed the height of madness to start. Tom went below, I stayed on deck.’ Intrepid Emma. In France their train took them to Paris, then to Dijon, where they had an excellent five-course dinner. ‘Paid six francs each. Tom very vexed. Dyspeptic before and worse now.’ On into the mountains of Savoy, deep snow and tunnels, then Turin and Genoa, where ‘Our Hotel Smith quite full, turned out to be Germans and Americans.’ Where Hardy noticed the marble palaces and the washing lines strung between the houses, Emma was overwhelmed by the colours of Genoa.

  Bright colours everywhere, house[s] yellow, salmon colour very often, sometimes pink. A jammed sensation, on account of the narrowness of the street & great height of houses, palaces[,] continually views of narrow streets, going uphill or downhill, looking like gullies, figures passing in brilliant colours… We drove up hill, catching peeps of the sea between the high houses and winding slowly up to the crest of the hill where we got out and a sight burst upon our view which I shall never forget – the whole city lay before us, and the sea – the Mediterranean beyond the houses. I never saw such a superb city.

  She has less to say about Florence, where William Barnes’s daughter Lucy Baxter had arranged for them to stay in the old Trollope villa, now run as a pension, and they did the usual round of sightseeing. Her first impression of Rome was that the ‘large fashionable shops and people and carriages give it the appearance of an ordinary city. disappointing.’ But this soon changed: ‘stupendous ruins of the Palatine hill and the Forum overpowering – quite easy to realize the life in rooms where the decorations were still distinct.’ She picked up a piece of marble on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter. They drove about and took the omnibus but mostly walked, determined to get to know Rome properly. Hardy regretted that the ancient ruins had recently been tidied up, the thickly growing shrubs, flowers and foliage Shelley had liked so much removed. They visited the English Cemetery to see his grave and Keats’s, Emma noting the sad inscription, the violets on the graves and the crimson camellias in flower. Hardy picked some violets and sent them to Gosse; Emma welcomed ‘2 nice letters for Tom about Woodlanders’, one from Gosse.

  One day, as they walked down opposite sides of a narrow street near the Capitol, three thieves closed in on Hardy, Emma shouted a warning and rushed at the thieves ‘with her usual courage’, he wrote, driving them away. In the Capitol Museum she studied the Venus and described her with charming precision: ‘her hand touches her right thigh, fingers being spread out naturally both little toes crumpled under as if she had worn boots.’ They succumbed to weariness, fever and colds from time to time, and had to move from a hotel with bugs to the Hotel Allemagne in the Piazza di Spagna, where she admired the ‘scarlet carpet, white fore-post [sic] iron bedstead covered with muslin curtains’, and he could look out at the house where Keats died. She wrote, ‘Looked at Ruins over again today. Feel we know the Forum and Colosseum. Shops in narrow streets are always square holes in wall with no wood work… no doors, always open for vegetable & provisions.’

  Then back to Florence, which now seemed like home: ‘the Arno, today a lovely blue – with a dash of opal in it, below sparkling and foaming over rocks like a Devonshire river.’ On the other hand, ‘old frescoes are horrid entre-nous (note-book and I).’ Tom went off on his own to see Siena, then both of them to Venice on 12 April, his thoughts on the poetry of Browning, Shelley and Byron. They had no idea that Henry James was travelling in the opposite direction on the same day, leaving Venice for Florence, where he wrote his great story The Aspern Papers, inspired by what he had heard of Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra and closer to Shelley than anyone in his circle. She had died only eight years before. So these two writers, each acutely sensitive to the literary associations of the places they were visiting, passed each other unawares. James had been staying with a rich American friend, Mrs Bronson, who lived in the Casa Alvisi on the Grand Canal, opposite the Salute Church, and returned a few weeks later to stay with the super-rich Daniel Curtis of Boston and his English wife in their still more princely Palazzo Barbaro. These were the same people to whom Hardy carried letters of introduction, no doubt from Robert Browning.

  Emma wrote, ‘T.H. cross at finding we are not on Grand Canal.’ ‘T.H. has taken letters of Int: to the ladies – Very disappointing for me – (For the best always).’ The last phrase seems to indicate forgiveness and understanding. In any case she soon met the ladies, Mrs Bronson and Mrs Curtis, the daughter of an English admiral, and was entertained by both families. Emma had nothing to say about them personally, malapropped the names of their palazzi into Barbarossi and Casa Vecchia, and boldly summed up the decor at Mrs Bronson’s as ‘Well furnished Maple style – and with Liberty combined and Venetian ornaments thrown in.’ She could have been right, of course, and intended to be rude, since Maple’s furniture was generally known to be for ‘monied nobodies’, only Liberty’s for the discerning.

  Otherwise she rose to Venice with enthusiasm. ‘The whole city makes one feel fantastic, or beyond. Romantic. You are in a planet, where things are managed differently, or you are gone to the bottom of the sea, and this is a phantom city, or you are simply dreaming.’ She noticed that ‘None of the Campaniles quite perpendicular. Numerous buildings out of it – walls are all or nearly all in the narrow alleys in a bulging state, & crumbling, many timbers rotting.’ And she gives a graphic impression of a night trip along the canals:

  Resting[,] the gondola is quite motionless. Stars innumerable and very bright. Then gliding into the narrow canals, though lighted here and there – seems dark and dangerous and very dark places continually beyond, and to pass, shoot under narrow bridges, the gondolier shouting a warning note before he turns sharply round each corner – prime or stati, according as he goes in opposite direction – if he goes stati he calls ‘left’ to the other who may be coming. Nobody comes generally – but he shouts each time.

  In Milan, they went up to the roof of the cathedral, where Emma admired the ‘marvellous profusion of marble statues and decorations, flying buttresses, crocketted pinnacles and marble steps’ and then felt frightened and descended rapidly while Hardy remained, thinking about Napoleon. She went shopping alone and bought a necktie for Henry Hardy – the only present she mentions – then confidently summoned an open carriage, told the driver to take her to the principal churches and managed to get round five or six. She and Hardy were on the evening train for Lucerne, via Como and St Gothard (‘Cascades and mountains’), and so to Paris and home.

  It had been their most ambitious holiday, fulfilling his wish to follow in the steps of Shelley and Keats, and he was pleased to have done so; but, although he was inspired to a handful of poems, his responses to the cities they visited and the landscapes through which they travelled were muted. Emma’s diaries, naive and scatty as they are, breathe an intense enjoyment and are worth the short time it takes to read them. She was curious, observant and ready to explore. They allow you a glimpse of what had first caught Hardy’s fancy. Her social ineptitude may have exasperated him, and by her own account they were not always the best of friends, but they came back in good spirits. They proceeded at once to enjoy the London Season, and on 21 June he took her to view the Queen’s Golden Jubilee procession from the windows of the Savile Club.

  Holidays, and London, distracted them from the discontents of their marriage. In Dorset they loomed larger. She had seen herself from the start as his literary compan
ion and helpmeet, and she did a great deal of dogged work for him, copying manuscripts and looking through old papers for stories that might be useful to him. But she had always wanted to become a writer herself, and as the years passed she infuriated him by dropping remarks that suggested she had played a part in his creative process. She talked of ‘our books’ and of ‘emendations’ she had made to his work. 4 His resentment was understandable, although he might have done better to make a joke of it. Alfred Pretor, a Cambridge scholar who became their friend and Emma’s correspondent and consoler, went so far as to assure her that ‘there is a general and most widespread belief… that you help, and can compose passages, in the writing of the books.’5 Since there is no textual evidence that she composed any passages, it looks as though Pretor was chiefly concerned to soothe her. Hardy did on one occasion give her credit for suggesting a scene, when he was speaking to an interviewer about Tess putting on the jewels from Angel’s godmother, and said, ‘I think I must tell you that was an idea of Mrs Hardy’s.’ 6 Still, she resented his failure to make any formal acknowledgement of the hard work she put in for him. The manuscript of The Woodlanders showed so many pages fair-copied in her hand that Hardy felt obliged to apologize to its purchaser. 7 A dedication would have cost Hardy nothing and meant a great deal to her. He did not choose to put dedications to his books.