Although Hardy joked about Jude’s reception to Mrs Henniker, saying that ‘the only people who faint and blush over it are fast men at clubs’, the furore reached into Dorset, and he noticed what he called ‘extensive and peculiar’ responses among their country neighbours, ‘they having a pathetic reverence for press opinions’. Emma also said Jude had made a difference to them ‘in the County’. 1 He did not say anything about what his family at Bockhampton made of it, merely telling Gosse that he had enjoyed a very quiet Christmas and New Year at Max Gate. It was immediately after this, in the first days of January 1896, that Emma persuaded him to try bicycling: ‘I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of – bicycling! – which my wife is making me learn to keep her company, she doing it rather well.’ 2 There was more fun when Mrs Patrick Campbell came to visit them, hoping to be allowed to play Tess in the theatre production Hardy was trying to set up; he had dramatized the book in five acts during 1894 and 1895. 3 He greeted her by getting out his fiddle and playing old English dance tunes, and she obligingly improvised her own dance steps to his music. ‘It was a sight for London Town,’ she wrote to a friend. 4 But London theatre managers were unexpectedly wary of Tess. Hardy believed they were put off by the response to Jude. 5
He was in London in February, to allow a young woman painter to finish her portrait of him, to attend Lord Leighton’s funeral – Hardy never willingly missed a funeral – and for a masked ball, a ‘most amusing experience’ he told Emma, where he and Henry James, the only unmasked men, were ‘recklessly flirted with by the women’. 6 Emma was also invited, but stayed in Dorset suffering either from eczema or shingles – if shingles, excruciatingly painful. He too, he informed her, was suffering from ‘the most fearful depression, slight headache etc.’, but he did not allow it to interfere with his multifarious activities. Lady Jeune, even though she was preparing for her daughter Dorothy’s wedding, insisted on putting him up, and he was in heavy demand. He was introduced to the brilliant American actress Elizabeth Robins, who had helped to promote Ibsen’s plays in England, and they took a long walk together; also to Violet Hunt, novelist, feminist and friend of another rising writer, H. G. Wells. He called on ‘Mrs Pat [Campbell]’ twice. He visited his investment brokers to discuss shares and bonds held by him and by Emma. He wrote excitedly to her, ‘I have seen the loveliest “Byke” for myself – it wd suit me admirably – “The Rover Cob”. It is £20! I can’t tell if I ought to have it.’ He decided he would have it. 7 Emma, rather than staying alone at Max Gate, went by herself to Worthing, to nurse her health. From there she launched an attack on Hardy’s sister Mary in the form of a letter of astonishing force and fury. The letter has survived because Mary coolly decided to hand it to the family lawyers. 8 ‘Miss Hardy,’ it began: ‘I dare you, or any one to spread evil reports of me – such as that I have been unkind to your brother, (which you actually said to my face,) or that I have “errors” in my mind, (which you have also said to me,) and I hear that you repeat to others.’ The truth was, she went on, that ‘he has been outrageously unkind to me – which is entirely your fault: ever since I have been his wife you have done all you can to make division between us; also, you have set your family against me, though neither you nor they can truly say that I have ever been anything but, just, considerate, and kind towards you all, notwithstanding frequent low insults.’
One thing the letter proves is that Emma could use her pen to good effect when she was roused. She accused Mary of describing people she disliked as mad (‘I have heard you say it of myself… And it is a wicked, spiteful and most malicious habit of yours’). She said she had been a ‘causeless enemy’ to her and pandered to Hardy’s ‘many weaknesses’ in order to secure him ‘on your side’. ‘How would you like to have your life made difficult for you by anyone saying, for instance, that you are a very unsuitable person to have the instruction of young people?’ – Mary being the headmistress of a girls’ school. It is the letter of a distressed and furious woman, and it rises to a terrific climaxin which she draws on Hardy’s own depiction of the heath and its inhabitants: ‘You are a witch-like creature and quite equal to any amount of evil-wishing and speaking – I can imagine you, and your mother and sister on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night.’
She went on to say that she proposed to tell Hardy what she had written and added, with considerable, if ungrammatical, dignity, ‘I can understand your desire to be considered cleverer than I which you may be I allow.’ These are not the words of a mad woman but of an angry one, as Mary must have seen, but – understandably perhaps – she did not respond and made no move to mend things with Emma. It was far too late for that, and the effect of the letter on her and her sister Kate was simply to encourage them in their view that Emma was mad. This seems to have been the end of any communication, written or spoken, between the Bockhampton women and the mistress of Max Gate. 9 No one from Bockhampton set foot inside Max Gate again in Emma’s lifetime, and if any of them came face to face with her on the pavements of Dorchester, they presumably cut one another. Such situations are the dramas of provincial life. Mary’s health was poor, and Emma’s attack may well have shaken her. She was asthmatic, and, although she was only fifty-six, she retired from her position as headmistress the following spring.
Hardy was caught between the two embattled households. Whether he was shown Emma’s letter or only heard about it, he understood what it meant. He had grown up with a mother who complained ferociously and a father who took evasive action; and, since there was no question of him reading the riot act either to his wife or to his sister, he likewise took evasive action. From the spring to the autumn of 1896 he simply removed himself from Dorset, taking Emma with him. He was pleasing her, letting her feel she had won the battle, allowing everyone to calm down and protecting himself; also, conveniently, getting out of the way while builders did some work at Max Gate. He took the Pelham Crescent house again, earlier than usual, in March, installing their servants again to run it. He escorted Emma to Brighton for two weeks in May, for the good of her health and his own, and after this they remained in London well into July. The Season went by with many convivial moments. He was under no pressure to work, and he appeared to be in high spirits. They were often on the terrace at Westminster at tea-time, and in the evening at concerts given by the Continental bands that came each year to entertain Londoners at the Imperial Institute. ‘Here one evening they met, with other friends, the beautiful Mrs, afterwards, Lady, Grove; and the “Blue Danube” Waltz being started, Hardy and the latter lady danced two or three turns to it among the promenaders, who eyed them with mild surmise as to whether they had been drinking or not.’ 10 The dancing skills acquired at Almack’s and the Argyle thirty years before had come into their own. When Mrs Henniker accused him of preaching free love, he defended himself wittily, and disingenuously, claiming that ‘I hold no theory whatever on the subject, except by way of experimental remarks at tea parties.’ 11 No witnesses have come forward with accounts of his experimental remarks, but the impression he gives this summer is not of the self described in ‘Wessex Heights’ – crushed by sneering critics, disparaged by the women he meets and free only in solitude – but rather of a jolly, outgoing figure who has achieved the summit of social as well as intellectual success. The wedding of his old favourite, Lady Jeune’s daughter Dorothy, to a young politician, celebrated with much splendour at St George’s, Hanover Square, brought the Season to a cheerful close.
In August, after making a flying visit to his mother, and observing that her face looked smaller, he set off on another prolonged holiday with Emma. They were to be away for eight weeks, and she took her bicycle with her, although he had not yet had time to master fully his Rover Cob. They toured the Midlands, Malvern, Worcester, Warwick and Stratford-upon-Avon, and looked at Reading, in which town Hardy knew that his father’s mother had lived almost a hundred years earlier. Their next destination was the Continent, but Emma was knocked off her bicycle by another cyclist at Dover. She had no serious injuries but needed to rest in bed, so they decided to stay put for a fortnight. During this time they read Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ together, which he marked with their joint initials and the date, ‘Sept. 1896 – T.H./E.L.H.’. September was the month of their wedding anniversary – the twenty-second – which would have prompted both of them to think of the past and make an effort to revive old feelings.
The next part of their tour was to be made in Belgium, where ‘le véloze de Madame’ aroused interest among staff of the railways on which they travelled from town to town, Ostend, Bruges, Brussels, Namur, Dinant, Liège. In Brussels they went sentimentally to the hotel they had stayed in twenty years before, in 1876, ‘for association’s sake’, but found it had ‘altered for the worse since those bright days’. 12 Hardy wanted to make another visit to the field of Waterloo. Emma sensibly pleaded exhaustion – she could scarcely take her vélo across the battlefield – and he went on his own. On 2 October he walked from the English line, along the Charleroi Road, to the French, and was struck by how close the fighting lines were to one another. His mind was working on the idea of a drama about the Napoleonic Wars, in which the battlefield of Waterloo would figure. For the moment it was to be called ‘Europe in Throes’, and he imagined it on a large scale.
Then it was time to end their long break from Dorset and go home. He had shown that, for all his devotion to his mother and his sisters, he would not take their side against his wife. Similarly, while he admired – even adored – the elegance of Mrs Henniker and Agnes Grove, and delighted in their crisp worldly conversation, they did not make him despise Emma’s muslins and ribbons and hats like collapsing birthday cakes. Nor did they prevent him from reading and discussing other writers’ works with her. The sharing of ‘Dover Beach’ was only one example. She was reading Ibsen assiduously early in 1897, and they went to performances of his plays together that spring. In 1903 they both enjoyed Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, as he told Mrs Henniker, saying they had been arguing about what happened to James’s characters, ‘and find we have wholly conflicting opinions thereon’. 13 Emma also tackled some difficult books on her own. One was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, read daily over a long period ‘with my morning cup of tea’ and finally abandoned with the comment ‘queer morals’: it is an account of high-minded illicit love and a nobly complaisant husband. Another was Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which she read in a French translation and found ‘powerful but unpleasant too’. 14 She also puzzled over Yeats’s ‘The Shadowy Land’ [The Shadowy Waters]. 15 Her responses were simple, but she was prepared to make an effort.
Hardy supported her in many ways during the 1890s. For example he was consistently kind to her nephew and niece. Gordon Gifford became a semi-permanent guest at Max Gate while he went to school in Dorchester. Lilian, red-cheeked, pretty and, although silly, liked by Hardy, was there for long periods too. They made a fuss of her, and in 1898 gave her ‘the desire of her heart, a “bike” ’. 16 Gordon showed enough aptitude to be sent to Paris as part of his education, and Hardy himself then gave him some training. In 1899 Hardy arranged for Gordon to be taken into the Blomfield architectural office, enabling him ultimately to work as an architect for the London County Council. This was a strikingly generous and helpful assumption of responsibility for the children of her brother, who had decided that Gordon had weak lungs and whose best idea for his son had been to find a gentleman living in Switzerland to whom he might become a companion. 17 Hardy also backed Emma strongly in her work for animal rights, and a few months after their return from abroad in 1896 she held an anti-vivisection meeting at Max Gate.
During 1895 and 1896 the house was enlarged: both front rooms were extended, a new kitchen was put in behind the old one – which became the bicycle room – and a warren of service rooms were added at the back. Extra rooms were also added in the attic. Emma began to use one of these as a daytime retreat, and Hardy moved to a new study. There was still no bathroom: neither thought it a necessary innovation, preferring to have the water for their basins and hip bath carried up and down stairs by the maids. The next improvement was to the garden, where a swing was installed and the lower lawn relaid, so that croquet and tennis could be played. This was in the winter of 1899. 18
Here, then, was a hugely successful, worldly, enlightened Victorian husband behaving generously to his wife. But hurt and anger simmered inside Emma. She could not forgive him for no longer consulting her about his work, for refusing to encourage her in her efforts to write, for failing to help her find an agent or a publisher, as he did for his women friends, and for his barely concealed attachments to them. She made up her mind that it was his rejection of Christian doctrine that was at the bottom of all this bad behaviour. The diaries she kept in which she expressed her anger against him gave her a private outlet for her grievances, but she went further, making herself look foolish by inflating them and insisting that she was superior to him in birth, education, manners and even talents, and giving the impression that she did not value his achievements as a writer. 19 Visitors were embarrassed, and Hardy himself responded increasingly with silence and withdrawal when they were at Max Gate, making his study his refuge. He was often there in the evening as well as during the day.
Yet there was another jaunt abroad together in 1897, when they toured Switzerland energetically in June, having decided to miss the racket of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London. Emma kept a holiday diary again, not as lively as her Italian one, although she liked the Genevan musical boxes, the Alpine flowers and the glaciers, and noted with pleasure how she ate some snow to cool herself after a long upward trek. In Lausanne they stayed in the Hotel Gibbon, and Hardy, realizing that its terrace garden was the exact place and 27 June the very day on which Edward Gibbon had finished his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 110 years before, was inspired to a poem. He imagined the spirit of Gibbon, formal in pose, grave and grand, flecked with light from the lamps beyond the acacia trees on the terrace, asking, ‘How fares the Truth now? – Ill?’ – and proceeding to answer himself in the affirmative. Hardy makes Gibbon invoke Milton, deliberately ranging himself alongside the fearless truth-tellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Later that summer he and Emma went on a bicycle tour to Wells, Longleat, Frome and Salisbury, where they attended Evensong together several times, Hardy unable to resist the lure of the cathedral service. 20 His enthusiasm for bicycling was now fully as great as hers, and he was ‘gradually getting to climb a fairly steep hill’. 21 He agreed to inspect the White Horse Inn at Maiden Newton, the village where his mother had worked when she was young, and told the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, for whom he looked at it, that they owed him ‘no expenses in travel worth mentioning, the visits having been made on a bicycle’. 22 He also took Kipling, whose company he enjoyed in spite of disapproving of his imperialist ideas, on a bicycling expedition to search for a house near Weymouth. When Kipling said he would like to build on the top of the Ridgeway, Hardy explained to him that any house there would be shaken by the guns firing off Portland, and Kipling replied that he would particularly like that. But no house was bought or built. 23 From time to time one or other of the Hardys fell off their machines and sprained or scraped themselves, but they both kept up their bicycling well into the next century.
March 1897 saw the publication of one further novel, a revised version of the serial he had written hastily in 1891 for Harper’s, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. 24 It was now renamed The Well-Beloved. By Hardy’s own account it is unlike his other novels in being ‘frankly fantastic’, built around a single idea. It centres on a sculptor, Jocelyn Pierston, who falls repeatedly in love with girls or women who seem to embody his ideal, only to find they soon lose whatever it was that had attracted him. He is always recognizing what he calls his well-beloved, but, ‘Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of [the well-beloved]… Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable.’ 25 One of Pierston’s friends advises him never to marry, another more cynically recommends marrying ‘the first nice woman you meet. They are all alike.’
The book can be read as an account of the impossibility of finding satisfaction in human love, each of us dreaming of a perfect love, pinning the dream on one person after another because (of course) no one can embody it. It is the creed of the romantic, not of the respectable family man, and neither subject nor tone was calculated to appeal to Emma, and her only known comment on it is that she did not like it. Although there is no trace of autobiography in The Well-Beloved, it is unmistakably an apologia pro vita sua. Hardy is not justifying the waywardness of the male who is helpless in giving and withdrawing romantic love, he is simply describing the condition as he has experienced it – with a bow to Shelley, who lived it before him. 26 Proust found it ‘very beautiful’, because he thought it approached what he himself was attempting, but, although there is a fascination in the book, it is in the idea, not in the telling. Pierston himself is so faintly sketched as to be a shadow rather than a man, and his women are fainter still. For the book to be interesting, they would have to have been made substantial, like Bathsheba or Sue. Hardy also excludes any suggestion that the love is sexual, making Pierston a still dimmer figure, and making his loss of interest in each of them almost entirely painless to both parties.
Whether you find the idea as compelling as Proust did and regard the book as a triumph of modernism, or take it as a mildly original exercise without much force, depends on what you look for in fiction. If you want Dorset scenery and customs, the descriptions of Portland and its inhabitants are well worth reading. Hardy’s fiction is never dull, and there are some strong and surprising paragraphs about London life too. Here, for instance, is Pierston fighting his way through a society hostess’s crush with Swiftian relish for the unpleasantness of the experience: ‘After ten minutes given to a preoccupied regard of shoulder-blades, back hair, glittering headgear, neck-napes, moles, hairpins, pearl-powder, pimples, minerals cut into facets of many coloured rays, necklace clasps, fans, stays, the seven styles of elbow and arm, the thirteen varieties of ear; and by using the toes of his dress-boots as coulters with which he ploughed his way’. 27 Written straight from Mrs Jeune’s drawing room, no doubt.
Pierston is looking for an ideal, or perhaps a goddess, and his response to the new moon in the sky suggests he worships as a pagan wherever he finds beauty: ‘In a crowd secretly, or in solitude boldly, he had often bowed the knee three times to this sisterly divinity on her first appearance monthly, and directed a kiss towards her shining shape.’ 28 Hardy may be imagined doing the same, offering his tribute to the goddess who is always changing, always beautiful and always inaccessible. The book turned out to be prophetic. Pierston, looking through old photographs, comes on one of an early love whom he now thinks dead. The effect on him is that ‘He loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life… the times of youthful friendship with her, in which he had learnt every note of her innocent nature, flamed up into a yearning and passionate attachment, embittered by regret beyond words.’ 29 Hardy seems to be seeing ahead to 1912 when precisely this process would be enacted, following Emma’s death, and he would find himself in thrall to her, dead and inaccessible, as he had not been for many years in life.
For the living Emma, The Well-Beloved was another insult to be borne. In August 1899 she was asked for her advice on marriage by Elspeth Thomson, who, with her sister, a painter, had been on friendly terms with the Hardys for some time. Elspeth had just married Kenneth Grahame, the children’s author. Their wooing had been conducted in baby-talk, and he turned out to be more set in his bachelor ways than she had expected. Hence her appeal to Emma. Elspeth may have suspected that Hardy was not an ideal husband either. In any case Emma seized on the opportunity to lay out her own disappointments in marriage, say what she thought of Hardy’s behaviour and cast herself as an ideal wife, inexplicably undervalued. ‘I can scarcely think that love proper, and enduring, is in the nature of men… and at fifty, a man’s feelings too often take a new course altogether. Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, and he wearies of the most perfect, and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life. Of course he gets over it usually, somehow, or hides it, or is lucky!’
She went on to lament interference from in-laws and suggested that ‘keeping separate a good deal’ was a way of dealing with crises. This was sensible enough, and it was advice she was putting into practice herself. She went on with a grim warning to expect ‘little neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may have set your heart on’. And more: ‘If he belongs to the public in any way, years of devotion count for nothing.’ At the end of her letter she acknowledged that happy marriages do exist, but usually when both partners are Christians. 30 Mrs Grahame accepted the advice about keeping separate, although she hardly needed it. 31
Emma presented Hardy with a Bible that summer of 1899, intended to rekindle his Christian faith. Later in the year, pursuing her interest in women’s suffrage, she wrote her name in a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the great feminist texts, which included, although she probably failed to realize it, some strongly anti-clerical passages. The tragicomedy pursued its course. During that year she moved out of the marital bedroom: ‘I sleep in an Attic – or two!… My boudoir is my sweet refuge and solace – not a sound scarcely penetrates hither. I see the sun, and stars and moon rise.’ 32 During the next year she made notes for a novel in which divorce looms, because the hero is so indifferent to his wife that he never looks at her. Meanwile Hardy, ever unpredictable, was inspired to write a poem called ‘Wives in the Sere’, distinguished by the acuteness and tenderness of its observation:
Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her. 33
In October 1899 the rumbling dispute between the Dutch settlers in southern Africa and the British, fired by imperial ambitions, broke out into war. Hardy was no imperialist, but he had grown up in a barracks town, watched soldiers in the streets, and observed the arrivals and departures of regiments as part of everyday life since his childhood, when he had also pored over his grandfather’s illustrated military magazines. He could not help being curious about war. He went to watch the regiments leaving Dorchester, and bicycled to Southampton – fifty miles there and back – to see the troops embarking for southern Africa. He told Mrs Henniker that he took pleasure in tactics and strategy, as in a game of chess, but that the human side horrified him – horrified, and fascinated too. 34 He struggled with the philosophical question as to how wars began, and how men became willing to embark on mass slaughter. Meeting Henry Moule, he suggested that Buddhism might be more effective than Christianity in promoting peace. Moule, a good Christian who thought the Boers were in the wrong, was shocked. 35 Emma took the view that ‘the Boers fight for homes and liberties – we fight for the Transvaal Funds, diamonds and gold… Why should not Africa be free, as is America?… Well, we gabble all day long about this war.’ 36
In the first months of the war Hardy produced a series of poems, meditations on the feelings of departing men and wives left behind, the putting up of the lists of killed and wounded outside the War Office in December 1899, and what the souls of the slain might ask and conclude about the relative merits of military glory and quiet domestic life. They are workmanlike and agreeably idiosyncratic. In one, he imagines himself meeting the souls of slain soldiers flying home and hearing them ask how they are remembered; they divide into two groups for ever, the loved, whose spirits return home, and the unloved, who plunge into darkness. In another, a Colonel reflects that ‘the Girl I leave behind me’ is now a grandmother and that she suffers much more than the young wives. One short poem, ‘The Dead Drummer’, rises to sublimity. It comes through Hardy’s observation that a country boy, for whom the stars he has grown up with and seen every night are an integral part of his experience, would be disconcerted by the strangeness of the southern sky; it was a response to Hardy’s hearing that a Dorset drummer boy had been killed in Africa. In the poem he gives the boy the pejorative name of Hodge, as applied to the lumpish and ignorant peasant: ‘Drummer Hodge’. He goes on, with exquisite courtesy, to offer him a perfectly shaped elegy.
I
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
II
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessexhome –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally. 37
The particular significance of the year 1900 for Hardy and Emma was that it brought the thirtieth anniversary of their first meeting at St Juliot in March. A visitor to Max Gate at this time described how her mind ran on the past: ‘It is pathetic to see how she is struggling against her woes. She asserts herself as much as possible and is a great bore, but at the same time is so kind and goodhearted, and one cannot help realising what she must have been to her husband. She showed us a photograph of herself as a young girl, and it was very attractive… She says it was she who encouraged him to give up the architect’s profession.’ 38 The anniversary also prompted him to make an effort to put things on a better footing between them. His account of the process is given in a poem called ‘A Second Attempt’. It begins:
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.
He goes on to describe how he retraced his first sensations of love, its hopes and fears, then marriage and life together, and how he hoped to revive his past love. Only,
… when I looked around
As at the former times,
There was Life – pale and hoar;
And slow it said to me,
‘Twice-over cannot be!’
The striking thing is that he describes a purely internal process, communing with himself and listening to ‘Life’. He is not just telling us that Life forbids a return to earlier feelings, but that Emma has become inaccessible, and real communication is no longer possible between them. 39
There was no London Season during the war, and they did not take a London house or flat; when Hardy went to town he stayed at a Bloomsbury hotel. Gordon was now working in the Blomfield office, and Lilian was at Max Gate for long periods. In October, Emma’s sister Helen was taken ill, and she went to nurse her in Hampshire. Hardy worried about the strain on her, wrote affectionately ‘ “take it stiddy” as they say here’ and advised her on investing her sister’s money: ‘Corporation stock… is as good as anything. It pays about 3 per cent; and if you are offered more anywhere you may be sure there is some risk.’ 40 Meanwhile he had Lilian, and visits from a persistent American admirer, Rebekah Owen. He took Rebekah bicycling with Lilian, and for a nighttime tour of the rougher streets of Dorchester – Mixen Lane, in The Mayor of Casterbridge – which may have seemed rather tame to a New Yorker. Emma dashed home in November, then went back to stay with Helen to the end; she died in December. Hardy lowered the blinds at Max Gate respectfully on the day of the funeral.
The last of the year was quiet, and he produced what became his most famous poem. It was printed in the Graphic on 29 December 1900 and was called ‘The Century’s End, 1900’, but a deleted ‘1899’ on the manuscript suggests he had written it a year before. Later he renamed it ‘The Darkling Thrush’. 41 He manages a perfect balance between his unbelief and his nostalgia for the faith in which he had been reared, and this is what gives it such wide appeal: you can respond to it from either side of the divide. He places himself in the romantic tradition by invoking Keats’s nightingale, to whom the poet listened ‘darkling’, while the bird sang with ‘full-throated ease’: Hardy’s thrush delivers a ‘full-hearted evensong / Of joy’. 42 The bleak scene is scrupulously set, the dying light of a cold country afternoon, shrivelled hedge plants and bare twigs from which comes the voice of the bird, so ecstatic
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.