Thomas Hardy (33 page)

On 2 June 1920, the occasion of Hardy’s 80th birthday, he received a deputation from the Society of Authors, which organisation included John Galsworthy, whose works Hardy greatly admired. Those who sent congratulatory messages included the king, the prime minister, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and the Lord Mayor of London.
²³

By November Hardy was expressing a view with which many will identify: that the name ‘English’, as the name of this country’s people, should be insisted upon, and not ‘the vague, unhistoric, and pinchbeck title of “British”’.
²⁴
In December he modestly described his philosophy merely as ‘a confused heap of impressions, like those of a bewildered child at a conjuring show’.
²⁵

That Christmas, the carol singers came to Max Gate, as was the tradition; the mummers also visited, and gave a performance of the
Play of Saint George
. The fact that Hardy ‘sat up’ to see the New Year in may perhaps indicate a more contented, if not happier, frame of mind.

The death of Charles Moule occurred on 11 May 1921, the last of the Revd Henry Moule’s seven sons. In June Hardy and Florence travelled to Sturminster Newton for a performance of
The Mellstock Quire
in the castle ruins. In July a company arrived in Dorchester preparing to make a film of
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. That same month Hardy attended morning service at Dorchester’s church of St Peter, and he opened a bazaar in aid of the Dorset County Hospital.

Hardy may have exchanged his bicycle for a motor car, but in other respects he displayed great energy. For example, he remained a prodigious letter-writer. Those with whom he corresponded included friends, eminent authors, poets, members of the Macmillan family, distinguished university academics, members of the Gifford family, plus inquisitive media correspondents anxious for him to explain aspects of the behaviour of his characters, and to reveal the locations where his novels were set.

Late Lyrics and Earlier
was published by Macmillan in May 1922. However, some of the poems in this collection – as the title implies – had been written several years prior to this date. In Hardy’s words:

Owing to lack of time, through the necessity of novel-writing for magazines, many of the poems [in this and in other collections] were temporarily jotted down to the extent of a stanza or two when the ideas occurred, and put aside till time should serve for finishing them – often not till years later … This makes it difficult to date those not dated in the volumes.
²⁶

In the Preface to
Late Lyrics and Earlier
, Hardy expressed his disappointment that the proposed revisions to the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer had not been ‘in a rationalistic direction’; According to his wife, Florence, from that time onward ‘he lost all expectation of seeing the Church [as] representative of modern thinking minds’.
²⁷
(In the event, the revisions to which he referred were rejected by the House of Commons in 1927, and again in 1928.)

The fact that the poems included in this volume, unlike many of their predecessors, are less morbid, and display less nostalgia for years past, indicates that Hardy had now become somewhat less dissatisfied with life. Some of them, in fact, are quite jolly; for example,
Weathers
:

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,

And so do I …

Hardy’s new lease of life is entirely attributable to the presence of Florence. Nonetheless, the past and Emma were never far from his thoughts. In
Faintheart in a Railway Train
Hardy speaks of a lost opportunity to introduce himself to a ‘radiant stranger’ – female, of course – encountered on a station platform. In
The West-of-Wessex Girl
he regrets that the subject of the poem was ‘never … squired’ by him. Judging by the mention Emma’s home town, and that the two never had a romantic relationship, the subject is almost certainly Emma.

The very title of
If It’s Ever Spring Again
indicates that for Hardy, those early, happy times in which he spent courting Emma will not come again. In
Two Serenades
, written, poignantly, one Christmas Eve, he complains that Emma is indifferent to his overtures of love:

But she would not heed

What I melodied

In my soul’s sore need –

She would not heed.

So that finally:

Sick I withdrew

At love’s grim hue …

In
The Rift
, Hardy refers to ‘those true tones – of span so brief!’ – in other words, to what he remembers as the true Emma, before her ‘old gamut [musical note ‘G’] changed its chime’. After this:

So sank I from my high sublime!

We faced but chancewise after that,

And never I knew or guessed my crime …

Hardy could not understand why Emma had changed, and wondered if he was to blame for that change; but if so, in what way?

In a poem entitled, ironically,
Side by Side
, the terrible consequences of Hardy’s and Emma’s union become apparent when the ‘estranged two’ meet one day, by chance, at church, and find themselves sharing the same pew:

Thus side by side

Blindly alighted,

They seemed united

As groom and bride,

Who’s not communed

For many years –

Lives from twain spheres

With hearts distuned.

In
Read by Moonlight
he (Hardy) reads the last letter which Emma had written to him, the last of many such ‘missives of pain and pine’. In
A Gentleman’s Epitaph on Himself and a Lady, Who were Buried Together
, Hardy appears to anticipate his own death and burial next to his late wife Emma. In the poem, Hardy discloses that although the ‘Lady’ was and would be his companion forever, she was also a person whom he did not really know:

Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,

Between us, nor thrill;

We’d never a husband-and-wife time,

For good or for ill.

Nevertheless, the fact that he loved Emma is borne out by the poem
The Woman I Met
, where he declares:

Well; your very simplicity made me love you

Mid such town dross

Till I set not Heaven itself above you,

Who grew my Cross.

And yet:

… despite how I sighed for you;

So you tortured me, who fain would have died for you!

Finally, in
Fetching Her
, he is in total and absolute despair, as he agonises with himself over whether it might have been better had he not:

… pulled this flower

From the craggy nook it knew,

And set it in an alien bower;

But left it where it grew!

What of Hardy’s relationship with the household staff at Max Gate? Opinions are mixed. His chauffeur, Harold Voss, says that he never saw Hardy in a temper. He was a ‘real gentleman’ who was ‘never flurried’ but always calm. On the other hand, Hardy’s gardener, Bertie Stephens, who managed the 1-acre garden, conservatory, greenhouse and paddock singlehanded, says: ‘At no time did Hardy express any appreciation or give any praise for anything that was done.’ Hardy could also ‘get into a bit of a mood’ and be ‘irritable’. Hardy’s barber, W.G. Mills of Dorchester, states that his client never gave a tip, or a Christmas present, but instead was always ‘very close with his money’. His cook, Mrs A. Stanley, describes Hardy’s trousers as being so worn that they had ‘fringes’ at their bottoms. ‘He was too mean to buy himself a decent pair.’When, on Boxing Day, she generously gave the postman 2
s
6
d
on behalf of the family, Hardy refused to reimburse her the money on the grounds that ‘Dorchester people never give tips’.

Hardy’s cleaner, Margaret Male, says that Hardy would never acknowledge people who worked for him if he passed them in the street. She attributed this to his shyness. Hardy’s parlour maid, Miss Ellen E. Titterington, says that although Hardy gave the maids at Max Gate ‘quiet little smiles as he passed them on the stairs, he never passed the time of day with them, unless it was to talk about the weather’. If she put too much coal on the fire, he would take it off again. Nevertheless, she was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘The memory of his early days when he was poor,’ she said, ‘must have remained with him and influenced his behaviour.’
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In May 1922 Hardy visited his old home at Higher Bockhampton and was distressed to see that both house and garden had become shabby through lack of care. July brought visits from Florence Henniker, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and E.M. Forster. In August he cycled with Florence to visit his brother, Henry, and sister, Katharine, at Talbothays Lodge.

In August 1922 Florence reported: ‘T.H. Is really wonderfully well. Yesterday he cycled to Talbothays and did it well, not even feeling tired afterwards.’
¹

In November Florence, who was now answering Hardy’s letters on his behalf, wrote to Lady Josephine Sackville, who had requested that Hardy autograph some books for her. The answer was that yes, Mr Hardy was prepared to do so, but only on payment of the fee of half a guinea for each one; the sum of which would be forwarded to the Dorset County Hospital.
²

The tenth anniversary of Emma’s death fell on 27 November 1922, and he and Florence marked the occasion by placing flowers on her tomb and on the tombs of other members of the Hardy family.

On 4 April 1923 Florence Henniker died, bringing to an end her thirty-year friendship with Hardy. In May Hardy was visited by the poet Walter de la Mare and Max Beerbohm (the caricaturist and author) and his wife Florence. In June the Hardys visited Oxford and stayed two nights at Queen’s College (which made him an Honorary Fellow), calling on the way at Fawley in Berkshire, where his maternal grandmother had lived the first thirteen years of her life as an orphan. In July Hardy was invited to Dorchester to meet the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), who was there to open a new drill hall for the Dorset Territorial Army, after which the prince was entertained to luncheon by the Hardys at Max Gate. The following month Hardy explained why he objected to ‘anything like an interview for press purposes’. It was because he had been the victim of ‘so much fabrication and misrepresentation in the past’.
³

In September 1923 Florence said that Hardy had told her ‘he would have welcomed a child when we married first, ten years ago, but now it would kill him with anxiety to have to father one’.
⁴

The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall
, a poetic, one-act play for mummers, was published by Macmillan on 15 November 1923. Swinburne had already written a romance in couplets on the subject in 1882, but now Hardy himself had brought back to life the legendary tale of Tristram, who falls in love with Queen Iseult of Ireland, but actually marries her namesake, Iseult of Brittany.