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, and 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
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. –
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindess’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
– I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?
It must have caused a pang of remorse to Mrs Henniker when she read it, if not in 1893 when it was written, then in 1902 when it was published. She was not a heartless woman by any means. Her stories, which tend towards the pathetic, show great sympathy for the unhappy and the unfortunate. The first story in her collection Outlines, published in 1894 and dedicated to ‘To my friend Thomas Hardy’, is a sad, sentimental piece called ‘A Statesman’s Lapse’. The central figures are a distinguished politician with an invalid wife and three children, and his wife’s young cousin, Aileen. The climactic scene takes place in the country, beside the Thames: he has gone to see his son’s future housemaster at Eton, taking Aileen with him.
As by a lightning flash was revealed to this man and this woman an enchanted country untrodden as yet by the feet of either. Side by side they had unknowingly passed through the fateful gate. When they should retrace their steps the summer would be over in the land whence they came, the skies a chill expanse, the world a colourless plain. Yielding to an overmastering impulse, Gaspard Fludyer drew his companion towards him and kissed her, once only, on her cheek. She turned pale. Then he took her hand in his; and pressed first the fingers, then the little pink palm to his lips. She turned her head away, and he saw that she was crying. ‘Aileen – forgive me – I had no right to kiss you. But it is for once only – one little miserable caress for a whole lifetime! Think of that, my child, and don’t be angry with me. It will never be again.’
She trembled from head to foot. He passed her hand within his arm, and they walked silently back, out of their solitude, away from their dying dream, into the discord of life once more.
Mr Fludyer and Aileen part for ever. The passage gives an idea of her tone as a writer, which found admirers in her day. It is just possible that the story relates to a scene between the author and Hardy. He may have thought it did and enjoyed the idea of a secret literary link. He praised it, urging her to make it the title story and call the whole collection ‘A Statesman’s Lapse’ – advice she did not take. 8
In September she was away in Ireland and then at her uncle Lord Crewe’s. Hardy was ‘a trifle chilled’ to hear that she was reading passages from his letters aloud to the house party, and he ‘much regretted having sent the effusive ones’. ‘I lost confidence in you somewhat,’ he told her. 9 Nothing could have made plainer the difference between his feeling for her and hers for him. She seemed to be showing him off as a conquest, just as Mrs Tomson had done. This time Hardy could not bring himself to break off the friendship and, having stated his objection, by the end of the letter had written himself back into being her friend again.
In October they were collaborating on a story, ‘The Spectre of the Real’. It was Hardy’s idea, and the plot, involving a woman who believes herself to be a widow and is about to marry again when her husband reappears, was his, as was most of the narrative. He consulted her – as he had once consulted Emma – about womanly details: ‘please insert in pencil any details that I have omitted, and that would only be known to a woman.’ 10 He was now using a hired typist, Miss Tigan, rather than Emma, to make copies of his work, something that was likely to upset her, given everything else she could observe of his behaviour, movements and fluctuating moods. To cheer herself, perhaps, Emma borrowed or hired a horse and took to riding again. 11 She need not have felt too much literary jealousy at least. ‘The Spectre of the Real’ is a poor story, with a large element of Grand Guignol. It took a year to be published in a magazine and was reprinted by Mrs Henniker in a collection of her own work in 1896, when it got a drubbing from the critics. The Spectator called it gruesome and repulsive, and proof that Hardy was not a ‘judicious literary counsellor’. 12
Accepting that he could hope for nothing more than friendship, Hardy worked assiduously at being a useful friend. He recommended her work to a magazine editor, who took one of her stories. He badgered the same editor to get a review of Outlines, ending his letter cynically, ‘This is log-rolling, is it not?’ Then he wrote an anonymous puff of her work in another magazine. 13 While this was going on, Emma began to interest herself in the suffrage cause and complained that Hardy’s interest in women’s suffrage was ‘nil’ and that he cared only about the women he invented. 14 At the same time Hardy, with protean energy, was engaged in writing Jude, and some of Emma’s bitterness was provoked by the fact that, whereas throughout their marriage he had consulted her, asked her to copy pages and showed her or read to her from each novel in progress, now for the first time he did none of this. 15 Instead he was discussing it with Mrs Henniker. He had started writing it about the time of their Winchester assignation, and when it was published he wrote to her. ‘My hesitating to send “Jude” was not because I thought you narrow – but because I had rather bored you with him during the writing of some of the story, or thought I had.’ 16 He had also asked her opinion at an early stage about the naming of the heroine, and she can’t have failed to notice that he added her name to Sue’s.
Things settled down. A steady friendship was established on both sides; they continued to take an interest in each other’s work and to exchange letters, his more freely expressed and entertaining than any others he wrote. 17 She went to Emma’s parties in London, and in 1896 she introduced Hardy to her husband. Hardy decided to like him. Three years later, when Major Arthur Henniker was setting off for Africa to fight the Boers, Hardy wrote him a letter with the rather curious declaration that he regarded him as ‘the most perfect type of the practical soldier that I know’. He had received many glamorous photographs of Mrs Henniker. Now he asked her to let him have a photograph of the Major, in uniform, and told her, ‘he is to be framed with our other celebrities.’ 18
In September 1895 Hardy fell half in love with another younger married woman, Agnes Grove. It was a less consuming experience than his love for Mrs Henniker and helped to distract him from it. Mrs Grove was born into an interesting family, her father General Pitt-Rivers, her grandfather Lord Stanley of Alderley, and her husband a good-natured country baronet who called her ‘my little pepper pot’ for her advanced views and determined character. Her brilliant aunt Kate died young, leaving a baby son, Bertrand Russell. Mrs Grove was in her thirties, with a brood of children, and was also set on becoming a writer on social questions, among them women’s suffrage. The Hardys were invited to the Pitt-Rivers’ for the week in September when they gave their annual open-air dance in Wiltshire. A warm night, soft grass and a full moon, with extra light provided by hundreds of lanterns strung in the trees, offered a magical setting, and Hardy and Agnes led a country dance together. He was as entranced as a child by the experience, and perhaps it was something boyish about him that made her allow him to hold her hand when they sat out together, listening to the music while others danced on. 19 Since Lady Jeune’s daughters were her cousins, he was quite at ease with her, and she had the confidence of a beautiful aristocratic woman of the world. She was also astute enough to see that her literary ambitions might be advanced by a friendship with Hardy.
For him it was not so much a matter of replacing Mrs Henniker as adding another name to his pantheon. He needed a muse, the position Emma had once filled but did so no longer. Ideally his muse should also be his mistress – as Mary Godwin became Shelley’s – and there is no doubt he longed to take hold of a woman and make her his own in defiance of the rules of the Church and conventional society. But Mrs Henniker had taught him a lesson by her cool, definite withdrawal from anything more than flirtation, and he had to settle for admiring beautiful women, taking his inspiration from them, accepting their flattery when offered without considering its motives too closely, helping them where he could, and taking pleasure in being with them, talking with them and, if he was lucky, getting a hand to hold. He was now fifty-five years old. When he looked at himself he was dismayed by what he saw: his hair receding and thinning, and his skin showing the creases of age. Yet his eyes remained bright, and he still aspired to a youthful look: the moustache with long twirled points carefully maintained, extended across each side of his face, announcing, I can be dashing and dangerous when I choose to be.
His muses did not inspire him to flights of love, but there is one near-perfect short poem in which he talks about appearing old and feeling young:
I look into my glass
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide. 20
Although God appears in the first stanza, death in the second and Time in the last, there is nothing portentous here. There is not a spare word either. His skin is wasting (and by suggestion also wasted, with no lover to caress it). He feels distress at other hearts not responding to his. If only his own were cooler, he could remain as calm as his coming death will one day make him – but it is not cool. Time has stolen his youth – like Milton’s ‘Time, the subtle thief of youth’ – but only a part of it, and the last two lines expand into a burst of feeling. The fragile frame shaken suggests a flight of birds alighting on a tree, full of life, energy and song. And the ‘throbbings’ are not only the beating of his heart, they are also the sensations of the flesh. It is not cool evening for him at all but sultry midday. When you finish reading the poem, you see that it is about sexual desire, and that it declares he is not old, but a man who aches to express his love through his body.
During this period he was also in the middle of writing Jude the Obscure. Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again. I think Hardy intended this, although he expressed surprise at the response of his earliest critics. The 1890s were the decade of Decadence; 1894 saw the scandalous trials and conviction of Oscar Wilde, with all the hysteria they engendered. Jude was seen by many as another attack on sound English moral values, and it was found intensely shocking when it appeared in November 1895: the serial version had preceded book publication and was, as usual, bowdlerized to an idiotic degree. But Jude is still distressing to read. If the Book of Job was partly its model, it was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress. And, although it told a different story from Hardy’s first, rejected, novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, it returned to the theme of a penniless young man with ambitions and radical ideas, and showed that Hardy’s anger had never been extinguished. Jude Fawley is orphaned, village bred, intelligent and aspiring, and he is repeatedly knocked off course as he tries to go forward in life. First there is his poverty, and the fact that he has no home or supporting community. There is no one to help him or advise him when he needs help and advice. Then there is the distraction of sexual desire, and the trap of marriage to an uncongenial wife. There is the indifference of the educational establishment to people of his class. Then the torment of meeting and loving a clever, congenial young woman, his cousin Sue, who would be a good life companion for him but that she is a tease, wanting to be loved while sexually unarousable, and emotionally a masochist, so that, although she does love him in her comradely way, she is prepared to leave him for a man she finds physically loathsome. The only sexual release available to Jude is with the wife of his youth, with whom he has nothing in common. Towards the end of the book, he says, ‘There is something external to us which says, “You shan’t!” First it said, “You shan’t learn!” Then it said, “You shan’t labour!” Now it says, “You shan’t love!” ’ 21 It is his own summary of his experience of life.
Jude’s great-aunt has warned him from the first against marriage, saying the family history showed the Fawleys were not meant for it. He learns that his own mother committed suicide after separating from his father, and he makes an early unsuccessful attempt at suicide himself. On top of this Hardy piles bad luck, malign coincidence and then horror, when Jude’s son hangs his little half-brother and sister and then himself. That he intended the horror to hit his readers hard is plain from the manuscript, where there was originally only one younger child to be killed; a second child was added at a later stage. This is a clear instance of Hardy ‘coercing his plots’ and piling on the agony. Seeing it in the manuscript gives the reader who finds it pause, because it suggests a degree of relish. Hardy is saying, ‘Look! Look how bad things can be! Even as horrible as this!’
But most readers have not consulted the manuscript, and Jude does not impress only by shocking. It speaks sense about the painful difficulties of life for the poor and intellectually aspiring who have lost their roots in any place and their faith in any god. When Ruskin College was founded in Oxford for working men some years later, people wrote to Hardy saying it should be called after Jude, something he was rightly proud of. 22 The book also offers an interesting corrective to any idea that the countryside is inherently cheering or consoling, by giving an unrelieved view of the dark side of rural life. There are no lush meadows and rivers, no great medieval barns as in Far from the Madding Crowd. Jude is seen first in a bleak and dreary upland Berkshire village in which many of the old cottages have been pulled down; even the ancient church has been replaced by an ugly modern one. In the process, the graves of the village forebears have also been destroyed, leaving the villagers without any record of the past. As a small boy Jude works for a farmer scaring birds in a vast upland field: ‘How ugly it is here!’ he thinks; and he is sorry for the birds, and troubled by the law of nature that makes cruelty to one creature kindness to another. There are no Wordsworthian lessons or inspirations here. His dream of becoming a student at Oxford is unattainable. He is trapped into marriage, too young and without love, and the marriage fails. Later he is broken by Sue, the woman he loves who is all nervous intelligence without sexual warmth. He becomes an itinerant stonemason, walking or taking trains from place to place, carrying a few possessions, never able to settle or make a secure life for himself, never finding true friends, turning to drink to forget his misery. In many ways his experience forecasts the brutality of life a century later, when economic migrants wander the earth, having lost their natural support systems of family and home, and encountering incomprehension, hardship, hostility and often early death. When Jude has lost everything he cares for, and the last dregs of his self-respect, he deliberately seeks his own death by exposing himself to cold and soaking rain.
Hardy told Florence Henniker the book was ‘addressed to those into whose souls the iron of adversity has deeply entered at some time of their lives’. 23 He added that it was not a novel with a purpose and not a manifesto against marriage, as many critics took it to be, and he insisted that it was simply a story of ‘two persons who, by a hereditary curse of temperament, peculiar to their family, are rendered unfit for marriage, or think they are’. This point is made several times in the book. Warning words are spoken by Jude and Sue’s great-aunt Drusilla, who tells Jude, ‘The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s summat in our blood.’ 24 Later she tells Sue, ‘Ah – you’ll rue this marrying as well as he!… All our family do.’ 25 After her funeral, the two cousins talk about her idea again. ‘ “She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?” murmured Sue. “Yes. Particularly for members of our family… She said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy ones.” ’ 26 And Aunt Drusilla turns out to be horribly right, whatever the reason. Whether Hardy wanted us to believe in hereditary curses of temperament, or was describing a piece of witchlike rural superstition, is not clear. The most likely explanation is that, as with the witchcraft in The Return of the Native, his position was somewhere between belief and unbelief. In his own life, the person who warned her children against marriage was his mother, who advised all her children against it and told them to look after each other instead – advice disobeyed only by Thomas. 27 Neither the spirit in which she gave such advice nor her reason for giving it was ever disclosed, but by the time he came to write Jude part of him at any rate may have been ready to think his mother had been right.
He told Mrs Henniker in the same letter that he believed he had written ‘a novel which “makes” for humanity more than any other I have written’. 28 It is true that Jude, boy and man, is drawn with a sympathy that makes readers like him, and feel the unfairness and anguish of his repeated disappointments. All the same, there is something of the manifesto about the book. Its determined grimness suggests that Hardy set out to shock and horrify people to force them to take notice of the things he found detestable in society. In Tess it had been the double standard and the general view that a woman once ‘fallen’ could not redeem herself. In Jude it was the class system’s denial of education and opportunity to the intelligent poor, and the resulting wastage, as well as the problems and pain of dealing with failed marriages.
On the same day he wrote to Mrs Henniker he sent another letter to Gosse, thanking him for a review, regretting that Jude was not as good as it had been in his mind, and also suggesting that he had allowed it to take its own course: ‘It required an artist to see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed – I ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point, the characters necessitated it, and I simply let it come.’ 29 ‘I simply let it come’ suggests that it was dreamt as much as it was planned, and that he allowed Jude and Sue to take over the book and make their own fates. If, as this implies, he either wrote with no advance plan, or jettisoned his plan when he felt his characters taking charge, it would also help to explain some of the horrors. Many writers have said their characters take charge or take over the narrative. It may be objected that they are his inventions, the children of his brain, carrying out his wishes. But what if they are carrying out wishes he has not consciously formulated? A writer deeply engaged and absorbed in his work may surprise himself, and this may be what happened as Hardy wrote Jude, and may help to explain its unrelenting power and gloom. If the poetic dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers come to mind, where horror is part of the fabric, we should remember that Hardy said he aimed to keep his narratives ‘as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow’, and that he sometimes spoke of his poems coming to him: ‘the verses came,’ he told Arthur Benson. 30 So perhaps we can believe that the worst parts of Jude and Sue’s story also came partly unbidden, out of the place inside him where the wounds made by grief and loss and humiliation and failure had never ceased to ache.
Hardy made the standard novelists’ denial that there was anything autobiographical in the book. True, he makes Jude an orphan, taken in by a great-aunt who calls him a useless boy and says it would have been better if he had died with his parents, and this is quite different from Hardy’s experience of nurturing parents. Yet, in a memorable scene in the novel, he shows Jude looking through his straw hat as the sun shines through it and thinking, ‘If only he could prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.’ This is exactly what Hardy described as his own experience, looking through his straw hat as a child and thinking ‘that he did not wish to grow up’. 31 The power of the scene in the novel comes from Hardy’s memory of himself. The oddity is that he transposes the thought of a boy who had no conscious reason to be unhappy or to fear growing up into the mind of one who was already unhappy and had good reason to approach adult life with small enthusiasm. Hardy appears to be reinventing his childhood and making it worse. This prompts the question as to whether he had only lately learnt the facts of his own conception and birth, and become aware that he had been an unwanted child whose existence forced his parents into a marriage neither desired; or only lately brooded on the implications of this knowledge. 32 A retrospective blight cast across his life is a very Hardyesque possibility.
He also makes Jude embark on learning Latin and Greek with the idea of getting to a university and becoming an educated man, exactly as he did. Hardy’s circumstances were again more propitious, but, although he asserted that he might have attended a university in his twenties, there was always an underlying bitterness at his failure to do so. No success ever sweetened it and the force of that bitterness appears in Jude. Sue’s experiences at her teacher training college were drawn from his sisters’ grim accounts of Salisbury. More tenuously, but still clearly enough, his fluctuating relation to Sue alludes to the frustrations of his love for Florence Henniker.
Hardy did not let Emma read Jude until it was published. The hurt and humiliation of this were such that she felt free to say how much she disliked it in his presence, and to a guest at their own lunch table. She hated its attacks on the Church, to which she was so firmly attached, and on marriage, which were hard for a wife of twenty years to read. 33 But Emma’s objections were as nothing before the first onslaught of the critics, described by Hardy as ‘booing’. He knew, because he was subscribing to Durrant’s press-cutting agency. Some ridiculed; more were shocked. ‘A titanically bad book’, ‘Mr Hardy running mad in right royal fashion’, ‘dangerously near to farce’, ‘Jude the Obscene’, ‘a shameful nightmare’, ‘too deplorable a falling-off from Mr Hardy’s former achievements to be reckoned with at all’. In spite of this, many of the bad reviews conceded that Jude was also ‘manifestly a work of genius’ and, although ‘coarsely indecent’, delivered ‘from the hands of a Master’.
And very soon the praise came: ‘the most powerful and moving picture of human life which Mr Hardy has given us’, ‘the greatest novel written in England for many years’. W. D. Howells in Harper’s Weekly gave a long, carefully considered appreciation: ‘All the characters… have the appealing quality of human creatures really doing what they must while seeming to do what they will. It is not a question of blaming them or praising them; they are in the necessity of what they do and what they suffer.’ Of the most upsetting incidents in the book, Howell wrote, ‘They make us shiver with horror and grovel with shame, but we know that they are deeply founded in the condition, if not in the nature of humanity.’ 34 The Saturday Review for February 1896 ended its account by quoting from Jude’s last words and describing them: ‘That is the voice of the educated proletarian, speaking more distinctly than it has ever spoken before in English literature… There is no other novelist alive with the breadth of sympathy, the knowledge, or the power for the creation of Jude. Had Mr Hardy never written another book, this would still place him at the head of English novelists.’ 35
A letter from Swinburne, to whom he had sent a copy of Jude, gave Hardy deep pleasure: ‘The beauty, the terror, and the truth are all yours, and yours alone… The man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise.’ 36 But Hardy did care, and minded very much when he heard that the Bishop of Wakefield had burnt his copy and written to the Yorkshire Post to announce the fact, as well as persuading W. H. Smith to withdraw it from their circulating library. The public took less notice of the Bishop than Hardy did, and three months after publication 20,000 copies had been sold. Scandal had brought success. All the same, he noticed that some of his acquaintances turned away rather than speak to him, and he was upset and furious when Gosse, having reviewed Jude well, told Hardy it was ‘indecent’ at the Savile Club lunch table. 37
Paradoxically, he was now assured of an income large enough to allow him to give up writing fiction. It was said that he was driven to do so by the attacks on Jude, but his own account is subtler. He maintained that he had always tried to keep close to natural life in his novels, ‘and as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow’, and that he had long wanted to return to poetry proper, while being forced to earn his living through fiction. Once financially free to give up a form which he found increasingly problematical, he abandoned it. 38 It was a dramatic gesture from a novelist at the pinnacle of success, controversial but hugely admired, translated, discussed all over the Western world and rich from his royalties. In 1894 and 1896 he took an expensive house in Pelham Crescent for the Season.
There were times when Hardy could laugh at the ludicrousness of reactions like the Bishop’s, but others when he sank into gloom at the disapproval piled on him. 39 During the winter he wrote three black poems, the first with an epigraph from Psalm 102, ‘My heart is smitten, and withered like grass.’ 40 The speaker in each is suffering: in the first from a winter of the spirit – he speaks of bereavement, friends turned cold, heart and strength destroyed; in the second he decides it would be better for him not to exist, since he disturbs the breezy, optimistic world; and in the third he looks back on moments in his life when he might have died, apparently regretting that he had survived to feel the bitterness of life. All the sorrows and grievances of his life were revived in his mind and went into the poems – plus, no doubt, the miseries of Jude, of Henchard and of his grandfather Hand too. The three poems were first called ‘De Profundis’, Hardy changing the title to ‘In Tenebris’ after Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis appeared. It makes a curious link between the two men who upset England so badly in their different ways in 1895; luckily for Hardy, his offence was not a felony.
A year later, in December 1896, he wrote an autobiographical poem, ‘Wessex Heights’, in which he imagines himself standing on one of the high points in Dorset he loved to climb, where you can see for miles over the countryside. He says it is a place good for ‘thinking, dreaming, dying on’ and thinks his essential self may have been up there before his birth, and will return after his death. It offers him what he loves: solitude, silence and a wide view. Here he worries about how he has become ‘false to myself, my simple self that was, / And is not now’. He deplores the sneering and disparagements of the critics who have attacked his work; the stress of the publication of Jude is still affecting him. His anguished mood leads him to remember past loves – like ghosts – and to regret his failures in love. He feels sorry for himself, as Shelley, whom he so much admired, allowed himself to feel when he wrote, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’ in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Hardy’s poem is also written in long, finely constructed, musical lines, and Mrs Henniker is given a particularly graceful stanza:
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
Hardy’s moods shifted from one hour to the next, and he habitually worked out an emotion by writing a poem about it. The most striking words in this one are his admonition to himself about being false to ‘my simple self that was’. Yet he had never been innocent in the way that his father was (or Dick Dewy, or Gabriel Oak, or even Jude) – at least after the age of sixteen. He had been driven by ambition, determined to succeed in a society that had no connection with the heights of Wessex, to write books many people would read, to marry up, to have worldly friends, to make money – and he had done it all. Some of his gloom may have come precisely from the realization that there were not so many more heights to scale, or women to love.
Hardy worked on this poem on a December day. If he was in his study, he would be sitting in his socks, his boots or slippers always removed ‘as a preliminary to writing’. 41 He completed it with another invocation of the pleasure of being on the heights, ‘Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, / And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty’. He kept a neat desk, and a finished poem would be put carefully aside to be reconsidered. Then, slippers on again, he could go downstairs for a cup of tea and a slice of cake with Emma, before turning with renewed energy to pursue his life: a letter from a friend to be answered, a young woman writer needing his advice and encouragement, an arrangement to meet a portrait painter, plans for a trip to London. And in London, Mrs Henniker would doubtless invite him to lunch, and he would accept her invitation with pleasure.