The genius of Thomas Hardy is multi-faceted; each facet reflecting his brilliance as a diamond reflects the light. His literary and classical allusions are drawn from his immense mental ‘data-base’ of knowledge, laid down in his mind after years of sustained and devoted study. Stories collected by him on his journey through life, from personal observation, newspaper articles and conversations with others – whether amusing or macabre – were stored away, to be woven (sometimes years later) into the tapestry of his novels, and retold with all the rustic wit and wisdom of the true countryman. His prose is exquisite. His empathy with underprivileged people is universally recognised, and millions identify with the struggles of the characters in his novels.
During the lifetime of Thomas Hardy, publisher Vere H. Collins was one of the very few people to suspect, and have the fact confirmed by Hardy himself, that some of Hardy’s writings – notably his poem The Interloper – contained coded messages which revealed insights into his personal life. Nevertheless, neither Collins nor those who have studied the life of Hardy since his death have realised the full extent to which this is true.
The challenge has been to discover the hidden meanings contained in the works of this shy and secretive man. One may imagine him sitting in his study at Max Gate after the great schism when he decided to live a separate life from Emma, albeit under the same roof. By now, all his romantic dreams have been irrevocably shattered, and he is experiencing all the symptoms of a bereaved person: denial, numbness and unreality, followed by extreme sadness, anxiety and loneliness.1
However, because of his shyness he tends to keep his thoughts to himself, rather than to confide in others. But he must have some outlet for his emotions, so he chooses to express himself in the best way that he knows – on paper, where he simply cannot resist alluding to his increasingly problematical relationship with Emma. This is a catharsis for him. And not only that, it provides him with a motivation to portray scenes in which his characters experience and wrestle with the same problems as he does.
Hardy’s writings reveal the immense torment and grief which attends one whose life is a living hell, on account of the fact that his spouse is mentally deranged. And this, of course, explains why his latter novels and poems are so sad and introspective, while his early writings are full of joy, humour and romance.
In his writings, Hardy reveals how Emma’s delusions manifested themselves. They also reveal how he himself was largely in denial about Emma (although he did go so far as to admit that she suffered from delusions); he preferred stubbornly to cling to the original image which he had formed in his mind of her, instead of recognising the reality of the situation. Hardy’s works show that he wrestled with his problems in vain, and failed to find an answer as to why Emma, this beautiful woman whom he once adored, failed to reciprocate his feelings, and, in particular, why she refused to consummate the sexual side of their relationship (even though, at least in the early years of their marriage, she was prepared to be a friend to him).
After a bereavement, the surviving partner may, as Hardy did after Emma’s death, experience ‘overwhelming waves of yearning for the dead person [and] feel guilt that they failed to do enough for the deceased’ during his or her lifetime. Finally, however, these symptoms subside, and he or she is able to recall ‘the good times shared with the deceased in the past’.2 Not so for Hardy, for even after Emma’s death in November 1912, his grief continued unabated. Although Emma now rested in peace in Stinsford churchyard, for him there would be no closure. He became obsessed with his late wife; she occupied almost his every wakeful moment, and anguished, grief-stricken poems about her – in one disguise or another – continued to issue forth from him for another eighteen years; right up until the time of his own death in January 1928.
In the face of Emma’s increasing mental dysfunction, Hardy displayed loyalty and forbearance, steadfastness and stoicism, to an almost superhuman degree, and it is truly amazing that he remained on cordial terms with his wife for as long as he did. But suppose for a moment that he had married a jovial, loving, caring, well-adjusted and outward-looking person. Would a contented Hardy have been equally inspired to produce works as profound as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Dynasts, and a host of love poems? Probably not, for it is likely that his particular brand of creative genius had, of necessity, to be born out of pain. Therefore, perhaps posterity has something to thank Emma for after all. (In this, Hardy was not alone, for the same might be said of John Keats, Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, Charles Dickens, Edward Thomas and the Great War poets, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few. It may also be said of painters, such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and of musicians such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Frédéric Chopin.)
In 1994, in an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry, American psychiatrist Joseph J. Schildkraut, and his colleagues, attempted to shed more light on the relationship between mood (or what psychiatrists call ‘affect’) and creativity.3 In their study of a small cohort (fifteen in all) of mid-twentieth-century painters of the New York School, they noted that: ‘Over 50% of the 15 artists in this group had had some form of psychopathology, predominantly mood disorders and preoccupation with death.’ And they concluded with these words:
By bringing the artist into direct and lonely confrontation with the ultimate existential question, whether to live or to die, depression may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery that lies at the very heart of the ‘tragic and timeless’ art that they aspired to produce.4
How, it may be asked, does this apply to Hardy? There is no doubt that for the greater part of his marriage to Emma, Hardy suffered from depression; also, that he had a preoccupation with the subject of death – whether that of a relative, a friend, a family pet, or even a complete stranger, such as those whom he encountered in the various mortuaries which he visited. Additionally, he was an explorer of questions of existentialism in the broadest sense, such as why are we here, what is our purpose, what is the meaning of life, how can life’s tragedies be explained? This begs the question, was it Hardy’s depression which led him to address the ‘ultimate existential question’, as Schildkraut implies is the case with other artists (again, to use the word in its broadest sense)?
The editorial referred to above draws attention to a question posed by psychiatrist N.J.C. Andreasen, who wondered whether, if American poet Sylvia Plath had taken anti-depressants, would the ‘confessional power’ of her Arid poems have been lessened in any way?5 And Schildkraut, et al., affirm that the existence of ‘powerful treatments now available for depression [pose] serious questions for both the clinician and the artist’. For Hardy the implication is, therefore, that had modern-type anti-depressants been administered to him for his depression, then this would have led to the instant extinguishing of his creative spirit.
Hardy was the chronicler, par excellence, of a way of life which has now largely disappeared. As the lives of his heroes and heroines are played out, beneath the surface lurk the great questions and conundrums with which he, and countless others before and since, have wrestled during their lifetimes: religion; the class system; the law; man’s place in the universe, and the paradoxical contrast between the loyalty and steadfastness of human beings on the one hand, and their fickleness on the other. But most of all he deals with the subject of love, and the death of love – no person being better qualified to write about this subject than he.
The characters portrayed both in Hardy’s novels and in his poems are as fresh and colourful today as they were when he first sketched them. To us they are living creatures, as they were to him. However, his works can only be fully appreciated by recognising that in so many ways, their struggle was also his struggle – that of Hardy, the man behind the mask. So much that he wrote has an inner meaning, and deciphering it has been akin to solving a cryptic crossword. Doubtless, many more clues remain to be discovered.