Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

  He wrote fast, worked hard and for much of the time he needed to be absorbed in his private mental world. He was in his study early at Max Gate and often late too, so that there were days when he hardly noticed her existence or anyone else’s. And even when he did notice her, he refused to give her encouragement or to help with her attempts to write, something that became more wounding when he began to show interest in other women’s writing, offered to help them and even collaborated with them. A woman friend who knew the Hardys from their Tooting days and stayed at Max Gate with them described Emma as ‘very countryfied and scatter-brained… [she] wanted to be a poet or novelist… and found it hard that no one took her literary accomplishments seriously… She had not the intellectual value nor the tact it would have needed to hold the heart of her husband against all the world, but she had loved him dearly and was a nice loveable inconsequential little lady of whom one grew very fond.’ 8 There were unkinder comments. When Robert Louis Stevenson called at Max Gate with his wife, Fanny, in 1885, she described Hardy as ‘a quite pathetic figure’, a ‘pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife – ugly is no word for it’. 9 George Gissing found her foolish, discontented and paltry when he stayed with them ten years later, but then he did not think too well of Hardy either: ‘I admire Hardy’s best work very highly, but in the man himself I feel disappointed.’ He thought he retained ‘much of the peasant’s view of life’, cared too much for lords and ladies, and did not read many books, and he was shocked that he did not know the names of the wild flowers in his own fields. 10 An American writer, Gertrude Atherton, who saw them in London in the 1890s, described Emma as ‘an excessively plain, dowdy, high-stomached woman with her hair drawn back in a tight little knot, and a severe cast of countenance’, and told a joke about the journalist T. P. O’Connor attributing the pessimistic nature of Hardy’s work to her presence in his life: it suggests the sort of gossip that went about. 11

  Emma described herself once, for an American magazine in 1892: ‘In appearance Mrs Hardy is striking: her hair is dark and slightly tinged with grey; her eyes are also dark. She is dignified and very graceful, and looks as though she might be the wife of some ecclesiastical dignitary.’ 12 There is something pathetic as well as absurd in her dream of being attached to a clergyman rather than to Hardy, the writer and freethinker, but increasingly the Church became the symbol of her social superiority over him, recalling her gentlemanly brother-in-law at St Juliot and her uncle the Archdeacon. Although Hardy often went with her to church services, she knew very well that his beliefs were unorthodox, while hers became more and more fixed in what she called ‘Low Church Protestantism’, learnt, she said, from ‘my saintly mother’. 13 Sometimes, when there were guests for lunch at Max Gate and Hardy said something that indicated he did not believe in God, she would murmur that he did not really mean what he said. In the last years of her life she wrote her own account of the ‘High Delights of Heaven’, full of exuberant imaginings that included the abolition of evil, a glance at hell and the ‘obliteration’ of those who reject salvation; ‘lost pets and martyred ones’ were to have their place in heaven as well as angels. There would be flying for all and a new body at Judgement Day, which would give the blessed ‘the joy of a healthy child’. 14 Perhaps she was thinking of being free of her lameness at last.

  In the summer of 1889 Hardy was sent a book of poetry by a woman poet, Rosamund Tomson. He wrote to thank her and presently they met at the Jeunes’. A striking beauty with large, luminous eyes, she was twenty years younger than him, with a career as a journalist and editor in the literary world. She was also a markedly emancipated woman, had already divorced one husband and married another, Arthur Tomson, a landscape painter, whom she would leave for a third in another five years. Hardy asked for her photograph, flirted with her and pursued her for ‘a season / Of love and unreason’ that ‘took me by storm,’ as he wrote later. 15 She was flattered by his interest in her and found it professionally useful, and she seems to have encouraged him enough to keep him dancing attendance. But by 1892 he decided she was merely ‘exhibiting him as an admirer’ for her own purposes and broke off the friendship ‘with considerable disgust’. 16 Emma met the Tomsons, and Hardy’s infatuation can hardly have escaped her notice. It was the first time in the fifteen years of their marriage that he had plainly shown he was attracted to another woman.

  In the 1890s there were deaths in both Hardy’s and Emma’s familes. First, in the spring of 1890 he heard of the death of his cousin Tryphena, not yet forty. They had lost touch altogether, she married to a publican in Exeter, with several children. He says he began to think about her for no reason on a London train and started a poem which became the tender ‘Thoughts of Phena’ when he heard of her death a few days later. ‘Not a line of her writing have I,’ it begins, ‘Not a thread of her hair,’ and it goes on to recall her as ‘my lost prize’. 17 He was remembering how fond he had been of his pretty cousin, the youngest of the Sparks girls, now all dead or else in Australia, and expressing a sense of loss and regret. His sister Mary kept in touch with Tryphena’s brother Nathaniel Sparks in Bristol, but Hardy had offended him by failing to attend his father’s funeral in Puddletown in December 1874, when Hardy was newly married and living in Surbiton. He did not go to Tryphena’s funeral either. 18

  Over the next few years there were more deaths in both the Hardy and the Gifford families. Emma’s mother died a year after her father, in 1891. Losing her parents made her think again about their opinions and prejudices, and especially perhaps what they had said to her about her husband. A grandfather clock and some other Gifford furniture came to Max Gate, a source of pride to Emma. There is a story that she once pointed it out to Lady Newbolt with the words, ‘These were mine, Mr Hardy’s family didn’t have any furniture like this.’ 19 Whether the story is true or not, her father’s remembered warnings and dislike of her husband may well have helped to fuel any anger he now provoked, and it was about this time she began to keep diaries in which she gave expression to her disappointment with the marriage and resentment at his behaviour. 20 About this time too Hardy changed his appearance, shaving off the beard he had worn throughout their marriage. Instead of continuing as a respectably bewhiskered Victorian, he gave himself a smooth chin and cheeks and kept only a moustache, which he waxed with dashing effect and which proclaimed him a man of the world. 21

  In November 1891 Hardy’s aunt Mary Antell died. She was the last of his mother’s sisters and the widow of John Antell, the shoemaker with radical ideas who had taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew and, frustrated by his inability to make anything of his learning, took to drink; their daughter Polly, friendly with Kate Hardy, was often at Bockhampton and sometimes kept an eye on Max Gate when Tom and Emma were away. Antell was followed in 1892 by Hardy’s father, who died in July at the age of eighty-one. He had been confined to the house and unable to see anyone outside his immediate family for several years, and his wife and daughters between them nursed him to the end. It was eighteen years since Hardy had last helped him with the cider-making, and fifteen since he had travelled from Sturminster to Bath to visit him when Mr Hardy went to have his rheumatism treated there. On the day of his death Hardy was in London, but he at once began to arrange a memorial service to be held at Stinsford Church. He also produced a leaflet, pointing out that his father had been born and died in the same house, played his violin in the church for as long as he was allowed to and possessed the virtues of Horatio, ‘A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards / Has ta’en with equal thanks’. His father’s cheerful and equable spirit meant much to him, his own being so different. He left an estate of £850 – some of it perhaps given to him by his successful son – with money to his daughters and the various small bits of property he had acquired in his working life to his widow, and after her death to his son Henry. On one of his father’s plots of land, Talbots, at West Stafford, Hardy and Henry agreed to collaborate in designin
g and building a house, with the idea that Jemima and her unmarried children could live more comfortably there than at Bockhampton. The house went up, but Jemima was unwilling to move, and the house, Talbothays, was let out. Thomas’s inheritance from his father was £5 and any piece of furniture he wanted. We don’t know what he chose, but it may have been another grandfather clock, because there were three at Max Gate.

  Two months later, Stinsford House was partly destroyed in a fire. It was where Jemima Hardy had been in service; and where before that Lady Susan O’Brien had lived for many years and employed Hardy’s grandfather to build the vault in the church for her husband and herself; and where Hardy’s father ‘when a boy chorister in the gallery of the church used to see her, an old and lonely widow, walking in the garden in a red cloak’. ‘A bruising of tender memories for me,’ wrote Hardy. ‘Met Mary in the churchyard, who had been laying flowers on Father’s grave, on which the firelight now flickered.’ 22 Although Jemima lived indomitably on, it was symbolic of the end of the era of the older Hardys.

  It was also the time of the height of the success of Tess, about to appear in a one-volume edition owing to the very great demand. Hardy went to London in September to see his happy publisher at the Café Royal. Then he travelled on to Berkshire, to the village where his father’s mother, Mary Head, had been an unhappy orphan. The village was Great Fawley, and Jude Fawley became the name he gave to the hero of his next book. It had been in his mind for several years. There is a note dated April 1888 for a short story about a young man ‘who could not go to Oxford’. 23 He had started to jot down a scheme for it in 1890, and the death of Tryphena, stirring memories of his cousins as young women, gave the germ of another element in the story. 24 The book had a long gestation. In Berkshire, Hardy noted, ‘Entered a ploughed vale which might be called the Valley of Brown Melancholy. The silence is remarkable…’ 25

  Then he was back in London to attend another funeral, that of Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, which he reported to ‘My dearest Em’. He told her he had looked into the grave as he walked past among the other literary grandees. Since he and Em had shared their pleasure in Tennyson’s poems as they fell in love in Cornwall, he knew that ‘the tender grace of a day that is dead’ would come into her mind as well as his, and he signed off ‘Yours always, Tom’ – the only time he used this form. 26 There was still a residue of the old feeling.

  17. The Terra-cotta Dress

  The next emotional lurch in Hardy’s life occurred in 1893. As often happens, it came with success. This was the year he and Emma first took a whole house for the Season, and they chose a big, handsome one at 70 Hamilton Terrace in St John’s Wood. They were there with their servants from mid April, and in May they travelled to Dublin at the invitation of the Lord-Lieutenant. He was the second Lord Houghton, and Hardy had known his father, Richard Monckton Milnes, the first Lord Houghton, who died in 1882. The Hardys stayed at the Viceregal Lodge and were welcomed by Houghton’s married sister, the Hon. Florence Henniker. Mrs Henniker had the exquisite manners of her class and a joie de vivre inherited from her father. She had grown up in a cultivated, privileged and cosmopolitan atmosphere, in Upper Brook Street in Mayfair, on the family’s Yorkshire estate and with visits to her maternal uncle, Lord Crewe. Her godmother was Florence Nightingale, whom her father had hoped to marry, and he always made much of this youngest child, encouraging her to write poetry, which she did even before she could form her letters, dictating verses to her elder sister. At her seventh birthday party Swinburne playfully proposed marriage to her. When he told Lady Trevelyan of the ‘engagement’, she expressed herself ‘only too thankful to hear that I have a chance of being saved by a virtuous attachment’. 1 Her father took her to Paris when she was sixteen and allowed her to be seated next to President Thiers at dinner at Versailles, and she was well able to hold her own, in French as well as English. At seventeen she was composing cheeky limericks about Harrow boys and young army officers: ‘There once was a youth in the Blues / Who thought he knew how to amuse / He was somewhat loquacious / And very flirtatious / That airified youth in the Blues.’ 2

  Monckton Milnes was active in politics, a patron of writers, a traveller, often abroad, President of the London Library, Foreign Correspondence Secretary to the Royal Academy, a Trustee of the British Museum, equally at ease addressing a Social Science congress and exchanging risqué letters about flagellation with Swinburne. Florence’s mother died when she was nineteen, and she acquired a reputation for being clever and rather fast. She did not marry until she was twenty-seven, in 1882. Arthur Henniker was a younger son of a Suffolk peer, an adjutant in the Coldstream Guards, with no interest in literature, although he acquired a volume of Byron as ammunition in his wooing of Florence, casting it aside after the wedding. He had to work for his living, and almost as soon as they were married he left with his regiment for Egypt, where political disturbances were threatening the safety of the Suez Canal. Florence’s father had wanted a rich husband for his daughter and was disappointed by the marriage. Three years later he died at Vichy, leaving a characteristic joke to amuse his friends: ‘My exit is due to too many entrées.’

  Florence had no children, and Henniker was more often overseas than in England, leaving her free to entertain for her brother, and to write. When she and Hardy met, she had already published two novels, Sir George in 1891 and Bid Me Goodbye in 1892. They were competently written and politely received, and a third, Foiled, came out in 1893. Hardy knew many aristocratic women, but he had never met one so congenial, so delightful, so intelligently responsive and intuitive. As soon as he and Emma were back in London after their Irish trip, he made sure he saw a great deal of Mrs Henniker. She did not put him off. They went with her sister to see Ibsen’s The Master Builder, newly translated and scandalizing the critics in much the same way as Hardy, by presenting ordinary people struggling with large emotions and tragic events. He offered to give her lessons in architectural history as a way of securing frequent meetings tête-à-tête, she accepted his offer, and they began with Westminster Abbey. He took her adventurously ‘through the pestilential vapours of the Underground’. She let him see her translations of love poems by Théophile Gautier and the melancholy Spaniard Gustavo Bécquer. He misread the charm and informality of her manner. A well-known and evidently admiring author was an intriguing figure, to be flattered and flirted with, and he allowed himself to imagine she meant more than she did. He gave her an inscribed copy of Tess, with notes allowing her to follow Tess’s wanderings in Dorset should she so wish; and of A Laodicean, with an allusion to the fact that he had just missed meeting her when writing it, by ‘an adverse stroke of fate’, when her father had invited him to Yorkshire and he had been prevented by illness. But for that, he told her, ‘you would be – a friend of 13 years standing.’ 3 Soon he was invoking Shelley’s Epipsychidion, talking of plunging into wild dissipation and hoping they would become lovers. She was interested in his friendship, and she liked him, but not enough for that. Like any lovelorn youth, he told her, ‘I sleep hardly at all, and seem not to require any.’ 4 Later she discreetly destroyed some of his early letters, but those that survive are alive, sprightly, confiding, flirtatious, frank: name-dropping apart, which he could not resist, here suddenly is a different Hardy. There is fresh energy in his poems too. ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’ (later subtitled ‘A Reminiscence: 1893’) gives a graphic glimpse of the two meeting in London, of his pleasure in her fashionable dress – a new one, which he may have thought, reasonably enough, she had put on especially for him – and of his intense desire and frustration:

  She wore a new ‘terra-cotta’ dress,

  And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

  Within the hansom’s dry recess,

  Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

  We sat on, snug and warm.

  Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

  And the glass that had screened our forms before

  Flew up, a
nd out she sprang to her door:

  I should have kissed her if the rain

  Had lasted a minute more. 5

  He keeps the tone light in the poem, but he was unabashed in scheming to be with her. When she went to Southsea in August, he persuaded her to travel from there to Winchester to visit the cathedral with him. Both arrived by train and met at the George, and he was delighted to notice that the inn people assumed this was an assignation. They were observed with ‘veiled smiles’ and supposed to be ‘more than friends’ who had ‘all resigned / For love’s dear ends’. But the poem describing the day, ‘At an Inn’, moves sharply into sorrow after its humorous start. Things were not as they seemed, and there was no kiss and no consummation of love. Florence Henniker was prepared to play, but she would go no further. She explained that her Christian beliefs would not allow her to break her marriage vows.

  To find that she, like Emma, was a conventional Christian and ready to invoke religion in defence of her marriage vows, instead of the emancipated person he had supposed her, was especially galling. This is how in his next novel she became a model for Sue Bridehead, to whom he gave the second name Florence, who liked to be loved and pursued while refusing to give any return of sexual love, and who gave up being a free spirit and turned to Christ in a hideous scene of penitence. Hardy told a friend later that he and Mrs Henniker had clasped hands beside the high altar in the cathedral, but a clasped hand is a scant offering to a man desperate for an embrace. 6

  Nine or ten poems of Hardy’s allude to his love for Florence Henniker. Most are wistful, a few desolate. It is wonderful to see him being shaken by a new subject into new adventurousness in his writing of verse. ‘A Broken Appointment’ is set at the British Museum: 7