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.
At the end of December in 1923, dramatist George Bernard Shaw and his wife, Charlotte, visited the Hardys; as well as Colonel T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who had enlisted earlier that year as a private soldier in the Tank Training School at Bovington under the assumed name of ‘T.E. Shaw’.Lawrence lived in a remote cottage called Clouds Hill, which lay 7 miles from Max Gate.
Anniversaries were very important to Hardy, who on 3 April 1924 recorded in his diary: ‘Mother died twenty years ago today.’ On 21 April he wrote to General John H. Morgan (lawyer and author, who had been involved in the implementation of the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of the Great War). In his letter, Hardy expressed the hope that the League of Nations (which had been inaugurated in January 1920) would offer ‘a real hope’ that ‘principalities & powers will discern more & more clearly that each personality in them stands himself to lose by war’. He thought it wrong to blame the English, either entirely, or mainly, for the current poverty in Ireland, which he believed was caused by ‘the temperament’ of that country’s people – whom he considered romantic and generous nonetheless.5
In July 1924 players from Balliol College, Oxford, arrived to perform the Greek tragedy Oresteia in the garden of Max Gate. On 31 December Hardy ‘sat up’ and heard the chimes of Big Ben on the wireless, heralding the New Year.
A deputation arrived from the University of Bristol on 15 July 1925, to confer on Hardy the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. This was the fifth university to honour him in this way. In December players from London’s Garrick Theatre gave a performance of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles in Max Gate’s drawing room.
It was clear that Hardy was enjoying a social life at Max Gate such as he had never experienced with Emma. ‘Would you care to spend Wednesday or Thursday night here?’ Florence asked Sydney Cockerell. Prior to that, said she: ‘We have promised to lunch with Dr & Mrs Head at Lyme Regis on Thursday next, & go on to tea with Lady Pinney at Racedown [House, in Dorset].’6
Hardy’s Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles was published on 20 November 1925 by Macmillan. The poems contain a medley of favourite themes: The Turnip Hoer, The Monument Maker, A Sheep Fair, The Graveyard of Dead Creeds, and so forth; the majority of them revealing Hardy in a lighter mood than heretofore. However, Emma is never far from his mind, as for instance in Last Love-Word, which ends with the couplet:
When that first look and touch,
Love, doomed us two.
In A Second Attempt he describes how:
Thirty years after
I began again
An old-time passion:
And it seemed as fresh as when
The first day ventured on:
When mutely I would waft her
In Love’s past fashion
Dreams much dwelt upon
Dreams I wished she knew.
But he realises that his ‘hot hopes’ that the relationship will progress to ‘consummation’ are only a dream, for ‘Twice-over cannot be!’ (This poem was written, according to the original manuscript, in ‘about 1900’ – four years before he first met Florence Dugdale. So did Hardy actually make another attempt to woo Emma, who he had first met thirty years previously in March 1870, or was the wooing simply a figment of his imagination? The latter proposition would seem to be the more likely.
In his poem A Poor Man and a Lady, Hardy’s feelings of inferiority surface once again, when, after a period of ‘timorous secret bliss’, the couple become divided: ‘… never a kiss Of mine could touch you’, says Hardy, whose marriage to ‘a comely woman of noble kith’ was therefore ‘not a valid thing’ (because it was loveless on her part). Other poems, such as Known Had I, Her Haunting-Ground and Days to Recollect, also reflect his remorse and regret for lost or absent love.
On 23 December 1925 Hardy remembered the tenth anniversary of his beloved sister Mary’s death in his diary: ‘She came into the world … and went out … and the world is just the same … not a ripple on the surface left.’7 This was not strictly true, for apart from anything else, Mary left for posterity some fine portraits which she had painted in oils of members of her family, without which our knowledge of them would have been that much the poorer.
On 25 December Florence recalled a previous Christmas Day, that of 1910:
when I sat here [at Max Gate] alone, & vowed that no power on earth would ever induce me to ever spend another Christmas Day at Max Gate. T.H. had gone off to Bockhampton to see his sisters, after a violent quarrel with the first Mrs T.H. because he wanted me to go to see the sisters too, and she said I shouldn’t because they would poison my mind against her.8
In January 1926 Hardy relinquished his governorship of the Dorchester Grammar School. Sitting on committees, which ‘controlled or ordained the activities of others’, had never been his favourite pastime. Instead, he preferred to be ‘the man with the watching eye’ (in other words, simply an observer of events).9
Hardy’s letter-writing continued unabated, albeit with the help of Florence, upon whom he was increasingly reliant in this respect due to his failing eyesight. Among those with whom he corresponded in 1926 were J. B. Priestley, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Gustav Holst. He also wrote to Marie Stopes (the Scottish birth-control campaigner); in fact, it was characteristic of him to associate with avant-garde women. February found him entering into correspondence regarding the condition of the bells of Stinsford church, which had fallen into a sad state of disrepair.10
In March 1926 Hardy’s sister, Katharine, accompanied Florence to a matinee performance by the Tess touring company at Bournemouth. However, Hardy himself ‘did not feel equal’ to the outing.11
In his poem He Never Expected Much, Hardy reflects on his 86th birthday, which he had celebrated on 2 June 1926. The poem begins:
Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.
The second verse of the poem contains a clear reference to Emma, showing that even now, thirteen years after her death, her treatment of him still rankled:
Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
Till they dropped underground.
And the poem ends with a voice speaking to Hardy which is reminiscent of that of his mother, Jemima, when she warned him about the ‘figure [which] stands in our path with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in’:
‘I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,’
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit’s sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.
In July 1926 Hardy confessed, in a letter to his old friend, the author Edward Clodd, his fear that ‘rational religion does not make much [head] way at present’. In fact, the ‘movement of thought’ appeared to have ‘entered a back current in the opposite direction’, which was however ‘not uncommon in human history’.12
Two months later he received an ovation at the William Barnes Theatre in Weymouth, where he was attending a dramatisation of The Mayor of Casterbridge. In November he and Florence made what was to be his last visit to the old family home at Higher Bockhampton. That same month T.E. Lawrence, of whom Hardy was immensely fond, set out for a new RAF posting in India.
Carol singers arrived at Max Gate at Christmas 1926, as was traditional, this time from St Peter’s church, Dorchester. On the 27th, the ‘devoted and masterful’ dog Wessex died. He was buried in the garden, under the trees. Wessex’s headstone, designed by Hardy himself, was inscribed with the words:
The Famous Dog
WESSEX
August 1913 – 27 Dec. 1926
Faithful. Unflinching.
Hardy also commemorated his canine friend and companion for thirteen years with a poem, in which Wessex, in his after life, is searching in vain for his master. That New Year’s Eve Hardy did not ‘sit up’ to see the New Year in.
On 2 June 1927 Hardy celebrated his 87th birthday not at home, but in Devonshire in the company of his friends, Harley Granville Barker (the actor, producer, dramatist and critic) and his wife Helen. On 21 July he laid the foundation stone of the new Dorchester Grammar School – an event which would have given one such as he, who cherished education and learning, great pleasure. In August, in company with the composer Gustav Holst, Hardy travelled to ‘Egdon Heath’ and visited Puddletown church, where his ancestors had played in the choir (‘quire’). This month and the following one brought visits to Bath, Ilminster and Yeovil, Lulworth Castle and Charborough Park.
At the end of October 1927 Hardy and Florence took a short stroll from Max Gate across the fields. However, from now on he would depend on being driven around by chauffeur in a hired car; for example, to Stinsford (to put flowers on the family graves) and to Talbothays (to see his siblings, Henry and Katharine).
On Armistice Day, 11 November 1927, the ninth anniversary of the end of the Great War, Hardy and Florence listened to the Service of Thanksgiving broadcast on the wireless from Canterbury Cathedral.13 Thursday 24 November and Sunday 27 November marked the anniversaries of the deaths of his sister Mary and Emma respectively. On the latter occasion, Hardy wore a black hat and carried Emma’s black walking stick as tokens of his mourning.
Over the years it had been Hardy’s habit to sit at his writing-table every morning at 10 a.m. If the spirit moved him, he would write; if it did not, he would find something else to do. This was a ritual which he always observed. On 11 December 1927, however, he was unable to work. On Christmas Day he wrote to (now ‘Sir’) Edmund Gosse: ‘I am in bed on my back, living on butter-broth & beef tea, the servants being much concerned at my not being able to eat any Christmas pudding.’
Hardy was attended by his doctor, Edward Weller Mann, and also by his friend, the distinguished neurologist Sir Henry Head – who could discover no specific reason for his patient’s weakness. J.M. Barrie (Scottish playwright and novelist), a friend of longstanding, also arrived from London with offers of help.14
This was a severe winter and snow lay deep on the ground. As the evening of 11 January 1928 fell, Hardy asked Florence to read him a verse from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth did’st make,
And who with Eden did’st devise the Snake;
For at the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s forgiveness give – and take!
In this, Hardy demonstrated that his relationship with the ‘Creator’ must of necessity be a two-way process; his Creator must forgive Hardy his sins, in which case Hardy would oblige by doing likewise for his Creator. Thomas Hardy died shortly after 9 p.m.