Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses was published by Macmillan in November 1917. Of this collection, Logs on the Hearth and In the Garden were poems written by Hardy in memory of his sister Mary. In other poems, such as Joys of Memory and To My Father’s Violin, he looks back nostalgically at the past, which to him always seems preferable to the present. Similarly, in Great Things, where Hardy admits to a love for ‘sweet cider’, ‘the dance’ and ‘love’ itself, he uses the past tense, as he ends with the words ‘Will always have been great things’.
The theme of Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, said Hardy, was to ‘mortify the human sense of self-importance by showing or suggesting, that human beings are of no matter or appreciable value in this nonchalant universe’.1 This, as will be seen, was only part of the story, for there are many poems in the collection which relate, inevitably and vicariously, as always, to Emma. Had she been alive, she would undoubtedly have been just as offended by them as she had been with Jude the Obscure.
In 1920 publisher Vere H. Collins, during a series of discussions with Hardy at Max Gate, questioned the latter about one of his Moments of Vision poems, namely The Interloper, which he could not make sense of. It reads as follows:
There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,
And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;
I view them talking in quiet glee
As they drop down towards the puffins’ lair
By the roughest of ways;
But another with the three rides on, I see,
Whom I like not to be there!
No: it’s not anybody you think of. Next
A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream
Where two sit happily and half in the dark:
They read, helped out by a frail-wick’d gleam,
Some rhythmic text;
But one sits with them whom they don’t mark,
One I’m wishing could not be there.
No: not whom you knew and name. And now
I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,
And the guests dropping wit – pert, prim, or choice,
And the hostess’s tender and laughing face,
And the host’s bland brow;
But I cannot help hearing a hollow voice,
And I’d fain not hear it there.
No: it’s not from the stranger you once met. Ah,
Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;
People on a lawn – quite a crowd of them. Yes,
And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads;
And they say, ‘Hurrah!’
To a blithe speech made; save one, mirthless,
Who ought not to be there.
Nay: it’s not the pale Form your imagings raise,
That waits on us all at a destined time,
It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed;2
O that it were such a shape sublime
In these latter days!
It is that under which best lives corrode;
Would, would it could not be there!
Clearly, the first verse of the poem relates to Hardy’s early visits to St Juliot in the 1870s, The ‘three folk’ in the chaise being himself, Emma and probably Emma’s sister, Helen, and the cliffs being probably those in the vicinity of nearby Boscastle. In the second verse, the ‘dwelling’ may in reality be ‘Riverside Villa’, sturminster Newton, Dorset, and the ‘stream’, the adjacent River Stour. The third verse refers to a mansion, to which Hardy and Emma have been invited for dinner – presumably after he became famous. The ‘lawn’ referred to in the fourth verse may be the one at Max Gate. All the events described in the above-mentioned poem should, for Hardy, have been happy ones. Instead, because of the presence of the unwanted stranger, they are not. But who was this stranger?
Vere H. Collins asked Hardy to explain the penultimate line: ‘What is “that under which best lives corrode”?’To which Hardy replied:
‘Madness.’
Collins: ‘In each case?’
Hardy: ‘Yes. I knew the family.’3
When Collins suggested that Hardy give The Interloper a subtitle, in order to make its meaning clearer, Hardy responded (for the 1923 edition) with ‘And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home’. Said Collins: ‘When Hardy uttered that word [‘madness’] … there burst on me a revelation’ – the subtitle was a reference to Emma. (Hardy, of course, whatever his thoughts, would never have used the word ‘madness’ openly had Emma still been alive.) Said Collins:
This was the clue. The Blow, The Blot, The Wound [references to other poems of Hardy’s]; the spectre haunting that beautiful girl while she sang and played; the shadow darkening and chilling that passionate union; the lovers struck by an unexpected, unprovoked, undeserved foe; now at last I grasped what … had put an end to happiness in Hardy’s marriage and life.4
And this is why Hardy ‘had tended to concentrate his attention on the tragedies and ironies in love’.5 But who was ‘the interloper’ – the ‘one who ought not to be there’ and who corrodes the lives of others? The only interpretation possible is that it was a representation of Emma’s alter ego; this being seen by Hardy as a separate entity to Emma, the physical being.
From the first verse, the conclusion, extraordinary as it may seem, must be that Emma was displaying features of insanity even before Hardy married her. (He may only have recognised this with the benefit of hindsight.) And what is equally extraordinary is that he went ahead with the marriage, notwithstanding this fact. And from Hardy’s words to Collins – ‘Madness … I knew the family’ – it is clear that it was to Emma’s family that the former was referring.
Another poem which Collins mentions above is The Blow, In which Hardy demands to know why someone had found it necessary ‘To have hurled that stone Into the sunshine of our days!’ – the days in question being, of course, those which he and Emma had shared together. The answer was that:
No aimful author’s was the blow
That swept us prone,
But the Immanent Doer’s That doth not know,
Which in some age unguessed of us
May lift Its blinding incubus,
And see, and own:
‘It grieves me I did thus and thus!’
(This, of course, was an echo of the ‘Immanent Will’ of The Dynasts.)
Collins also mentions Hardy’s poem The Wound, a reference not to any physical wound, but to an inner hurt which he had chosen to keep to himself:
… that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I’d given no sign
That it pierced me through.
And when Collins talks about a beautiful girl singing and playing, he is referring to Hardy’s poem At the Piano:
A Woman was playing,
A man looking on;
And the mould of her face,
And her neck, and her hair,
Which the rays fell upon
Of the two candles there,
Sent him mentally straying
In some fancy-place
Where pain had no trace.
A cowled Apparition
Came pushing between;
And her notes seemed to sigh;
And the lights to burn pale,
As a spell numbed the scene.
But the maid saw no bale,
And the man no monition;
And Time laughed awry,
And the Phantom hid nigh.
This poem, of course, is again about Emma (who is known to have played the pianoforte). When Hardy is in her company he is happy, and imagines himself to be in a place where pain does not exist – and by implication, where there is only pleasure. However, a ‘phantom’ (ghost or spectre) appears and intervenes between them. Emma is unaware of the evil and woe (‘bale’) which the phantom’s presence portends, and Hardy fails to recognise its presence as a warning (‘monition’) of things to come.
In the above three poems, as Collins so rightly guessed, the ‘stone’ in the first, the ‘wound’ in the second, and the ‘cowled apparition’ or ‘phantom’ in the third, were all metaphors for Emma’s ‘madness’. Collins might also have mentioned The Man with a Past, where Hardy alludes to the fact that neither he nor Emma saw the ‘dart’ which was winging its way towards them; another metaphor, undoubtedly, for Emma’s insanity:
There was merry-making
When the first dart fell
As a heralding, –
Till grinned the fully bared thing,
And froze like a spell.
Like a spell.
Innocent was she,
Innocent was I,
Too simple we!
Before us we did not see,
Nearing. Aught wry –
Aught wry!
It is difficult to be precise about when exactly the penny first dropped and Hardy realised that Emma was insane (or ‘mad’, as he called it). This is because works of his which allude to Emma’s insanity were written subsequent to the events which they describe, and therefore with the benefit of hindsight. Nevertheless, by the time he came to write The Interloper, which was published in late 1917, her ‘madness’ was a fact of which he was certain beyond all doubt.
Of other poems in Moments of Vision, Honeymoon Time at an Inn undoubtedly relates to Hardy’s own honeymoon. The poem begins ominously:
At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
The moon was at the window-square,
Deedily brooding in deformed decay …
From whence, the atmosphere deteriorates even further:
Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber,
Where lay two souls opprest,
One a white lady sighing, ‘Why am I sad!’
To him who sighed back, ‘Sad, my Love, am I!’
Suddenly, a ‘pier-glass’ (large, elongated mirror) comes crashing down from the ‘mantel’ and lies shattered on the floor. This, for the lady (Emma), was a portent of ‘long years of sorrow’ for herself and her new husband (Hardy).
You Were the Sort that Men Forget begins:
You Were the Sort that Men Forget;
Though I – not yet! –
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret.
You’d not the art – you never had
For good or bad –
To make men see how sweet your meaning,
Which, visible, had charmed them glad.
You would, by words inept let fall,
Offend them all,
Even if they saw your warm devotion
Would hold your life’s blood at their call.
In other words, although in Hardy’s eyes Emma had some excellent qualities, she had a habit of offending everybody, because in his view, her finer qualities were not discernible to them.
In The Glimpse, Hardy reveals how the memory of Emma continues to haunt him, even after her death:
She sped through the door
And, following in haste,
And stirred to the core,
I entered hot-faced;
But I could not find her,
No sign was behind her.
‘Where is she?’ I said:
“Who?” they asked that sat there;
“Not a soul’s come in sight.”
‘A maid with red hair.’
“Ah.” They paled. “She is dead.
People see her at night,
But you are the first
On whom she has burst
In the keen common light.”
It was ages ago,
When I was quite strong:
I have waited since, – O,
I have waited so long!
Yea, I set me to own
The house, where now lone
I dwell in void rooms
Booming hollow as tombs!
But I never come near her,
Though nightly I hear her.
And my cheek has grown thin
And my hair has grown gray
With this waiting therein;
But she still keeps away!
There are more poems on the theme of lost love and bereavement, which resound with words and phrases such as ‘my own heart nigh broke’, ‘sorrowwrung’ and ‘mourn’, and it requires but little discernment on the reader’s part to realise that, as so often is the case, it is about Emma that Hardy is really writing.
In Moments of Vision, Hardy also reveals his morbid side with his references to ‘death’, ‘mournful mould’ (of one deceased), ‘tombs’ and ‘vaults’. This brooding side of his nature cannot entirely be attributed to his failed marriage, for it will be remembered that on his honeymoon he insisted on paying a visit to the Paris morgue. The remainder of the poems deal with such subjects as war and patriotism.
It is now obvious why Hardy chose the title Moments of Vision for this collection of poems, for what the title really means is ‘Now I see Emma more clearly for what she really was’. In other words, Hardy had now come to a full realisation of the true state of mind of his late wife Emma (which he may well have previously been in denial about), even though he lacked the medical knowledge and expertise to make the ‘diagnosis’. Likewise, the title of the poem’s predecessor, Satires of Circumstance, translates to ‘Behold, here I have satirised my unhappy life with Emma’, and Time’s Laughingstocks translates to ‘Time has made me a laughingstock’.
In January 1918 Hardy gave his opinion on the subject of pessimism – something of which he had often been accused. Said he: ‘My motto is, first correctly [to] diagnose the complaint … and ascertain the cause; then set about finding a remedy if one exists.’6 As for the subject of poetry, its glory, he said, lay ‘in itslargeness, admitting among its creators men of infinite variety’.7
In February Florence wrote to Sydney Cockerell (director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) in respect of a biography of Hardy which she was currently working on:
T.H. declares that he would never write an autobiography, the mere idea – or suggestion – annoys him. It would be a thousand pities if the MS were burned now. The safest plan is to say as little as possible about it until the thing is completed – as far as we are able to complete it.8
(The outcome was that The Early Life of Thomas Hardy and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, both by Florence Emily Hardy, were published in 1928 and 1930 respectively by Macmillan.)
Hardy was now aged 77, and it is a measure of his fame and popularity that in the spring of 1918, such eminent people as Lady Ilchester and Lady Londonderry came to visit him at Max Gate. In June 1918, with the Great War still in progress, he gave a chilling view of what future wars would be like. This one was horrible enough, but would be ‘merciful in comparison’, bearing in mind that ‘scientific munition-making is only in its infancy’.9 The war ended at 11 a.m. on 11 November of that year.
Hardy signed a petition in February 1919 in support of ‘the reconstitution of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people’. In May he was ‘destroying papers [presumably letters and diaries] of the last 30 or 40 years’ which, he said, ‘raise ghosts’.10
On his birthday, 2 June, he took Florence and his sister Katharine by car to visit one of his favourite places, Salisbury. Soon afterwards, Siegfried Sassoon arrived at Max Gate with a birthday present: a volume of the poems of some fifty living poets, intended as a ‘tribute’.11 Hardy confessed to Florence Henniker that he would care more about his birthdays if with every succeeding one he could see ‘any sign of real improvement in the world. All development [was] of a material & scientific kind’, but despite this, ‘scarcely any addition to our knowledge is applied to objects philanthropic or ameliorative’.12
On 10 August 1919 Florence wrote to Louise Yearsley (whose surgeon husband, Macleod, four years previously had performed an operation on her nose), to say:
I have to go to Town [London] to see a Miss [Lilian] Gifford – niece of the first Mrs T.H. She has gone off her head, poor thing, & been put in an asylum, & I am going to see her as my husband is really not fit for the journey [in] this weather. He is rather attached to her as she lived here as a child for some years – & she has stayed with us from time to time since we were married. She was always a most difficult person to live with – but now I understand that the poor woman could not really help her trying ways & temper.13
[The institution mentioned is the London County Council’s Claybury Asylum, to which, as previously mentioned, Lilian had been committed.]
It is to Florence’s credit that she was prepared, in all the circumstances, to make this visit to ‘poor Lilian’, as she now described Emma’s niece. Florence wrote to Sydney Cockerell to tell him about her visit. Said Florence: ‘I did not perceive any particular symptom of insanity [this statement being a measure of Florence’s fair-minded attitude towards Lilian], but the doctor and the medical superintendent assured me that she was insane.’ And she went on to tell Cockerell how, when she was at Claybury, she had met Lilian’s brother Gordon, who ‘told me that he and his wife [Violet] had had a dreadful time with her [during] the last few years’. Gordon told Florence that Lilian had regarded his wife Violet, a mere dressmaker, as someone ‘not fit to associate’ with her; that there had been ‘continual scenes and unkindness … and that absurd obsession about the grandeur of the Gifford family’.
Finally, the medical superintendent had told Florence that ‘from what he knew of the case, she [Lilian] can never have been quite sane’. (It is likely, of course, that had the doctor examined Emma, he would have reached the same conclusion.) Lilian was evidently very unhappy at Claybury, for she begged Florence to ‘take her out’. However, this Florence was unable to do without the consent of the authorities.14
In September 1919 Florence complained to Sydney Cockerell that Hardy ‘has just paid £10 for altering the tomb of the first Mrs T.H. and yet he will not buy himself a thread of clothing and he upsets himself about trifles of household expenditure involving only a few pence’.15
Hardy continued to demonstrate his endless fascination with the legal system by attending (with Florence) the Dorchester Assizes. On 18 November, the birthday of Thomas Hardy II, he visited his late father’s grave. In December he opened the Bockhampton Reading Room and Club, which would be that village’s memorial to the fallen. In his speech on that occasion, he reminisced about the ‘poor-houses’, where parish paupers were accommodated before the workhouses were built.
A letter sent by Hardy to Emma’s cousin, Charles Edwin Gifford, in early November 1919, shows that the author’s old sparkle had returned, after lying dormant for so many decades. Gifford had apparently sent Hardy congratulations for his 80th birthday – prematurely as it transpired, for this date would not be reached until 2 June 1920. Replied Hardy:
Many thanks for your congratulation. But it is rather amusing that, though I have been 80 in America for several years, & am now called 80 in England, I shall not really be 80 till the middle of next year, when people will doubtless begin to say: ‘How many more times is that Hardy going to be fourscore!’16
On 27 December 1919 Florence stated that she and Hardy had visited Talbothays (the home of Hardy’s siblings) two days previously on the afternoon of Christmas Day.17 In May 1920 she said that ‘on Sundays we nearly always go to see his [Hardy’s] brother & sister’.18 That December, following a visit to Max Gate by the mummers, Florence declared that ‘Miss Bugler looked prettier than ever in her mumming dress. T.H. has lost his heart to her entirely, but as she is soon getting married I don’t let that cast me down too much.’19 (This was a reference to Gertrude Adelia Bugler, born in 1897, amateur actress of Dorchester.)
On 30 December Florence informed Louise Yearsley that ‘we have had a rather lively Christmas in one way & another – so many people having desired to pay their “respex” to T.H. I estimate that between 50 and 60 people have been in this house since Christmas Day.’What a contrast this was to the era of Emma.20
In April 1921 Florence generously acknowledged how Emma, in her lifetime, had helped Hardy with his work: ‘Emma did indeed frequently copy for him any pages that had many alterations. She liked doing it.’21
Accolades now followed, thick and fast. In February 1920 Hardy was in Oxford to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, and also to see a performance of The Dynasts by the university players. In March he was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. April saw Hardy visiting London for the last time, when he and Florence attended Harold Macmillan’s wedding to Lady Dorothy Cavendish at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Macmillan’s grandfather, Daniel (with brother Alexander), had founded the publishing firm of that name (which had published a number of Hardy’s works), and his father, Frederick, was its chairman. The month of May saw Hardy at Exeter with Florence and Katharine, attending a service at the cathedral and calling on friends. In a letter to author and critic Harold Child, he admitted to being ‘most averse to anything like an “interview”, and have been for many years’.22
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 2s 6d 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.’28