The war meant that they now rarely went to London, there being no Season, little entertaining and small chance of seeing Mrs Henniker, Lady St Helier or Gosse. Then, because Hardy wanted their visits to Aldeburgh during Emma’s lifetime to be effaced from the record, he decreed that there were to be no more, even when they were married; when he heard that Clodd was writing his memoirs, he made Florence warn him off any mention of their visits and threatened retaliatory measures if he did. 1 Clodd revealed nothing, but, not surprisingly, the friendship faded. There were no other holidays, which could be blamed on the war; but the fact was Hardy no longer wanted to go away.
The gaps left in his life – and in Florence’s – were filled by a new friend, the ebullient Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Cockerell had a tigerish energy in pursuing men and women he admired, and was also an obsessive collector. He had started with shells as a boy and progressed to medieval manuscripts, books and paintings. He had to leave school and go into the family coal business, rather than to a university, but kept up his intellectual interests. Bouncing his way into the affections of Octavia Hill, he helped her with her housing projects for the poor, then set his sights on John Ruskin, charmed him and was invited to travel with him in France. Then he took on William Morris, whose assistant he was for many years, acting as Secretary to the Kelmscott Press, becoming virtually part of the Morris family and after the death of Morris giving unstinted support to Mrs Morris and her daughters. 2 He took friendship seriously. As a young man he was a socialist, and all his life an atheist. He was also an obsessive diarist, writing down in unvarying thin green notebooks the activities and encounters of each day, although he lacked any gift of characterization or self-presentation, so that the description of him as ‘a blameless Pepys’ is sadly astray. 3 You long for him to expand his narrative but have to be grateful for what you get, and, since he was Hardy’s friend for seventeen years and visited Max Gate many times, he does give an impression of its atmosphere and routines, and every now and then something unexpected and even precious is jotted down, between the precisely noted weather and train times.
Cockerell had been appointed director of the Fitzwilliam in 1908 at the age of forty. By his own account, ‘I found it a pigstye; I turned it into a palace.’ He had to overcome opposition, especially as he was not a Cambridge man, but he quickly became one of the most active and influential figures in the university. He brought in Sunday opening, prevailed on the King and the Duke of Devonshire to lend prints from their collections on a regular basis, started the ‘Friends of the Fitzwilliam’ scheme (the first of its kind in Britain) and began to acquire modern literary manuscripts. It was in the hope of persuading Hardy to let him have a manuscript that he wrote to him in 1911. Amazingly, he confessed after Hardy’s death that he had read none of his novels at the time, ‘though I read them all later’. 4 This makes him seem more like a bounder than a scholar, and there were always two sides to Cockerell, the red-hot enthusiast and the cool fixer.
In spite of his ignorance of Hardy’s work he made such a good impression on his first visit to Max Gate that Hardy got out almost all the manuscripts he could lay his hands on and agreed with him immediately on a plan to divide the spoils among the British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen (which had given him a degree), Birmingham, Manchester, Dorchester, Windsor and Boston or New York. Cockerell felt that Hardy was shy about writing to curators and librarians, so volunteered to do so on his behalf. In gratitude, Hardy presented him with the manuscript of ‘The Three Strangers’, one of his best stories, a valuable gift. 5 Cockerell made sure too that the manuscript of Jude the Obscure, the most famous of his novels, went to the Fitzwilliam. It was an astounding transaction between a successful writer and a man he was meeting for the first time, but Cockerell knew how to charm and how to pitch his demands, and Hardy was unaware of the value of what he was giving away, and not apparently interested.
It seems odd in a man who dealt sharply with publishers in his financial dealings with them, but he had already given Clement Shorter the manuscript of The Return of the Native as a way of thanking him for getting his manuscripts bound, and he never showed any sign of regretting what he had done – not even when he found he could sell the manuscript of The Woodlanders for £1,000 to an American collector in the early 1920s. 6 He also told Gosse that, having no children and enough money for his wants, he did not regard the value of the manuscripts. 7
Cockerell did not meet Emma on this first visit, and he had nothing to say about her on the second, in June 1912, when he brought his wife, Kate, with him, beyond that both Hardys were very nice, and he especially unassuming, and that Hardy expressed his admiration for Shaw’s plays, and for Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. 8 At the end of the year he noted again in his diary that they had spent ‘a delightful afternoon with Thomas Hardy and his wife’ – adding, with characteristic brevity, ‘(since dead)’. 9
Cockerell’s enthusiasm and air of authority, his knowledge of libraries and museums, and his years with Morris all went to win Hardy’s trust. There was also his position at Cambridge, which opened up the possibility of connections with the university Hardy had once thought of applying to. And indeed Cockerell soon repaid Hardy’s generosity by putting forward his name for an honorary degree at Cambridge. He seems to have tried and failed in 1912, but within months of Emma’s death, in February 1913, the offer came. The Vice-Chancellor who tended the invitation was the Revd Alexander Donaldson, an evangelical Christian who had taught at Eton for thirty years and was now Master of Magdalene, but there is no doubt that Cockerell was the man responsible. 10 Hardy was asked to come to Cambridge to receive his doctorate in June. His sister Mary, remembering he had thought of applying to study at Cambridge in the 1860s, wrote to congratulate him: ‘Now you have accomplished it all with greater honour than if you had gone along the road you then saw before you.’ 11
The Cockerells put him up, and Sydney, who loved to arrange such things, prepared a programme of pleasures. There was dinner at Jesus, where he was a Fellow, and to which he had invited A. E. Housman at Hardy’s request. After dinner they went to see an undergraduate production of The Importance of Being Earnest, with the all-male cast expected at Cambridge, although possibly not by Hardy, who spoke of ‘that man Oscar Wilde’ and delighted in pretty actresses. 12 The next day there was lunch at Magdalene. ‘Hardy chattered away very gaily… and seemed in a chirpy mood,’ wrote Benson, who had contributed a pallid appreciation of his writing to the Cambridge Magazine without mentioning his poetry. 13 At the degree ceremony Hardy received a great ovation, and in the evening they dined at Trinity, where the Master spoke fittingly of Hardy. There was a reception at Trinity Lodge lasting late into the evening, at the end of which Cockerell escorted his very happy guest back to his house. 14 The third day took in the Fitzwilliam and lunch at Peterhouse. Hardy’s simplicity and charm was generally admired in Cambridge and the whole visit judged a great success. 15
A week later both Sydney and Kate Cockerell took up Hardy’s invitation to stay at Max Gate, where they found that ‘Miss Florence Dugdale, Thomas Hardy’s very nice secretary and kinswoman, had assisted him in preparing everything for our comfort, and we were very kindly received.’ 16 Their fellow guest was the artist William Strang, a high-spirited man with a fund of good stories to tell. Hardy responded with stories of his own, and there was laughter all evening. It seems to have been the jolliest weekend ever recorded at Max Gate. No one wanted to go to church on Sunday, and they walked to see the grave of William Barnes and then across the water meadows to Stinsford. In the evening there was laughter again, Hardy and Strang exchanging more stories. On Monday, Florence took them to see Hardy’s birthplace at Bockhampton. They left with a copy of The Dynasts and spent the next few days reading it respectfully and visiting sites associated with Tess.
If Cockerell records more hilarity than most visitors to Max Gate, it was perhaps because he helped to provoke it. He had given Hardy one part of his heart’s desire at Cambridge, and Hardy’s high opinion of him never wavered. Nor did Cockerell’s assiduity. He worked at the friendship, writing and visiting Max Gate often, always delighted by Hardy’s conversation and sending presents of books chosen to interest him, among them biographies of Morris and of an earlier Thomas Hardy, the radical shoemaker of the 1790s. In November, Hardy was invited to Cambridge for a second celebration when Magdalene College made him an honorary Fellow. There had been some anxiety about his being described in the Cambridge Magazine as ‘the celebrated Atheist’ by a young Fellow of the college, ‘that ass Ogden’ (Benson’s description of C. K. Ogden, editor of the magazine), because the Master had planned a religious service, but everything went smoothly, and it was during this visit that Hardy told Benson about the poems he had written following Emma’s death. 17 Benson in turn showed Hardy the new college building he was responsible for, intended for his own use and then for the college after his death. It was just being finished and had a private dining room with a minstrels’ gallery, stained glass brought from Austria and fine stone work. The young I. A. Richards, then an undergraduate, remembered Hardy’s reaction to the building: while others admired, he went up and put his hand on the stone work and then smelt it – the gesture of a stonemason, thought Richards. 18
Cockerell wanted to turn Hardy’s thoughts to writing his memoirs, and he began to press him at least to give him a list of important dates in his life, to which Hardy responded by setting Florence to type diary entries from his notebooks, as well as Emma’s recollections of her girlhood as she set them down in 1911. Florence wrote to Cockerell to tell him about the ‘longish manuscript which Mr Hardy wants to send you – an account of Mrs Hardy’s early life, together with extracts from Mr Hardy’s own diary note-books’. 19 Hardy’s next visit to Cambridge was made in May 1914. By now he and Florence were married, and this time she went with him. They stayed at the University Arms, Cockerell again took charge of everything, and there was another round of feasts for the men, while, this being Cambridge, ‘Mrs H supped with Kate.’ 20 Hardy saw Housman again and met Lowes Dickinson. Florence was, however, invited to lunch at Magdalene and subjected to Benson’s scrutiny. He saw ‘a shy, rather comely, youngish woman but with very ugly hands and feet… Hardy was very spruce & gay & had enjoyed himself here – he said it was wonderfully delightful to find himself really at home in a little academical body. They seemed happy together – I lent him the car for the afternoon.’ 21 They took the car to Girton, where they had tea with the Mistress, E. E. Constance Jones, a philosopher about to publish The Three Great Questions (An Outline of Private and Public Duty). Miss Jones had learnt her Greek from Coleridge’s granddaughter Edith, a link which must have delighted Hardy. 22
His remark about being at home in a little academical body clearly came from his heart, the courtesy, ceremony, friendship and conversation offered in Cambridge being enjoyable in themselves but also supplying a balm for all the years in which he had felt isolated and slighted. Benson saw that he greatly appreciated ‘being one of a society’, and it seemed likely he would become a regular visitor. In August 1914 any chance of that was knocked out. The war put an end to all feasting and celebrations in the universities, as their young men went off to fight, and when peace came Hardy was nearly eighty and no longer inclined to travel. This time fate defeated him conclusively, and he never made another visit to Cambridge.
He did, however, subscribe to the Cambridge Magazine, the remarkable publication edited by ‘that ass Ogden’, which ran throughout the war, raising its circulation to over 20,000 readers by allocating half its space to reports from the foreign press, not all of them sympathetic to the British. In 1916 he allowed Ogden to publish an advertisement in The Times quoting Hardy’s praise: ‘I read the Magazine every week, and turn first to the extracts from Foreign Newspapers, which transport one to the Continent and enable one to see England bare and unadorned – her chances in the struggle freed from distortion by the glamour of patriotism.’ 23 And when the magazine’s policy got it into trouble, Hardy joined Gilbert Murray, Quiller-Couch, Arnold Bennett, Jane Harrison and others in a letter of support. 24 The Cambridge Magazine continued publication, and Hardy made plain his dislike of narrow, simple-minded nationalism.
The war settled into its long and hideous pattern, devouring the young men all over Europe. Hardy expected it to drag on. As early as the spring of 1915 he wrote to Mrs Henniker that he thought it most probable ‘that it will last till one of the combatants is exhausted and sues for peace without being beaten, or till one or more country is bankrupt, or starved, or till there is a revolution in Germany… I hardly think it will end by the sheer victory of one side or the other in the field.’ He believed that England was ‘innocent for once… the war began because the Germans wanted to fight.’ 25 By now there were between 2,000 and 3,000 German prisoners held in the Dorchester camp. He noticed with amusement that the Kaiser was being moved at Madame Tussaud’s ‘from the Royal group to the Chamber of Horrors’. 26 He also wrote ‘The Pity of It’, about how the English and the Germans were ‘kin folk kin tongued’:
I walked in loamy Wessexlanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like ‘Thu bist’, ‘Er war’,
‘Ich woll’, ‘Er sholl’, and by-talk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird
At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughter are. 27
‘I cannot do patriotic poems very well – seeing the other side too much,’ he told John Galsworthy. 28 Another poem that went far beyond patriotism was ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” ’, dug out of the past from a memory of the summer of 1870 when he was in Cornwall with Emma during the Franco-Prussian War, and contrasting the immemorial life of the countryside with the sound and fury of battle. 29
In August 1915 a second cousin, Frank George, a lawyer by profession, likeable and intelligent, was killed at Gallipoli. Hardy had thought of making him his heir and pulled strings to get him a commission, and he sorrowed for his death. He looked with interest and pity too at the German prisoners in the big camp now holding 5,000 men outside Dorchester. He had visited them in the spring, sent them German books from his shelves and on one occasion sat with a wounded prisoner, ‘in much pain, who died whilst I was with him – to my great relief, and his own. – Men lie helpless here from wounds: in the hospital a hundred yards off other men, English, lie helpless from wounds – each scene of suffering caused by the other!’ 30 In the autumn he asked the authorities if some of the German prisoners could do paid work in his garden. He kept up his interest throughout the war, telling Cockerell later,
We are having some trees rooted, so as to enlarge the kitchen garden for more potatoes, and the Commandant of the prison camp here has sent me out some prisoners for the job with guards, rifles, interpreter and all complete. Nothing has made me more sad about the war than the sight of these amiable young Germans in such a position through the machinations of some vile war-gang or other. Nevertheless they seem perfectly happy (though they get only ld an hour each of the 6d each that I pay). 31
Some of the Germans inscribed their names on a shed door in the garden, and Hardy used to point these out to visitors years later. 32
He refused an invitation from Gosse in November 1915 to a dinner with the Prime Minister, Asquith, excusing himself with ‘between ourselves my dining-out days are nearly over.’ But he and Florence happily joined a November house party given by Lady Ilchester at Melbury, the great mansion of his mother’s childhood. They stayed for four or five days, returning to Max Gate on the 20th to find that Mary was dying at Talbothays, where she had moved with Kate and Henry. She had been ill for some time – and she died of emphysema on the 24th, almost exactly three years after Emma. While Hardy grieved for the loss of his sister, Florence was appalled by Kate’s insistence that she should kiss Mary’s corpse, not once but many times. There was a quarrel when Hardy said he did not want to go back to Talbothays after the funeral. Florence thought he dreaded meeting the relatives who would be there, but he braced himself and went.
In the same letter in which Florence wrote to a woman friend about Mary’s funeral, she described Lady Ilchester’s charm as a hostess.
She is most unceremonious and by no means ‘dressy’… Her evening dresses were quite simple – black and black and white. But she wore her famous pearl necklace and lovely diamond ear-rings. She spent all the time with us – showing us the house the park and the villages and motoring us about. There was nobody there of much importance – some of the Digbys, her relatives – a Miss Sonia Keppell. 33
One of the villages they were shown was certainly Melbury Osmond, where Hardy’s mother was born and married. The irony of their being driven there as Mary lay on her deathbed must have struck Hardy painfully afterwards, the more so because, although he was devoted to his sister, his devotion to her had always been in the style of accepting her love rather than demonstrating his. He had made very little effort to involve her in his life, even before the falling out with Emma, and there was a wistfulness in her awareness that he had moved into another world while she remained in the old one. She murmured once that she was not asked to dinner or treated like a lady by anyone except the Locks, the family of her solicitors in Dorchester. 34 Mary lived like a hermit, Hardy said, and would not even stay overnight in London when she went up to see the summer show at the Royal Academy each year, insisting on returning to Dorchester on the evening train. 35 She made one trip to the Lake District after the death of her mother, alone, fulfilling a lifelong ambition inspired by her love of Wordsworth. 36 She was well read, a gifted painter and a good cook; also kind, for example sending small sums of money to her cousin Nat Sparks when his wife Annie, her old friend from the training college, was ill. But, as Hardy said, she scarcely made a mark on the world. Her pupils were simple Dorset girls with no aspirations themselves, and she was isolated by her position as a headmistress in a small country town, and by her culturally divided family. No one fell in love with her or asked for her in marriage. Instead she mothered Kate. Kate and Henry learnt to ride bicycles; Mary never did. She became deaf as she aged, and her world closed in around her. Although she had savings, and a friendly solicitor, she did not even write a will. Hardy told Cockerell that he had very little in common with either Kate or Henry; in practice he shared almost nothing with Mary either. 37 Yet he missed her and wrote a handful of small, sad poems in her memory. In the best of them he looks at a log of apple wood burning on the fire and remembers the tree it came from and how he climbed it as a child with her:
My fellow-climber rises dim
From her chilly grave –
Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave. 38
The young brown hand, the laughter and the tomboyish climbing suggest a Mary who might have made more of her life. Instead, she was trapped as a spinster schoolteacher, tied to the childhood home and her mother’s dominance, and she never belonged anywhere else.
After her death Hardy fell into gloom and kept his door shut even on Kate when she came to see him. Neither would he have Cockerell to stay when he proposed himself during the winter vacation, Florence complained, any more than he would let her accept invitations to go to friends in town or visit her own sick father. 39 Cockerell wrote urging Hardy to write his memoirs: ‘write down something about yourself – and especially about that youthful figure whose photograph I have got, and of whom you told me that you could think with almost complete detachment.’ 40 When Hardy’s old friend George Douglas wrote with the same suggestion, Hardy answered, ‘My reminiscences: no, never!’ 41
Yet Mary’s death had forced him to think of his own and about the arrangements he needed to make. He decided to ask Cockerell to become his literary executor in partnership with Florence. It was a sensible decision, given Cockerell’s experience in looking after Morris’s affairs, and he was willing. From now on Cockerell corresponded far more intensively with Florence than with Hardy. 42 She sometimes praised him for being like a son to Hardy, sometimes confided in him and at other times complained about him, but she depended on his friendship, and he was attentive to her, inviting her to Cambridge on her own and taking her to the theatre in London. 43 He made five visits to Max Gate during 1916, scarcely leaving himself time to fit in moving house with his wife and children in June, a move made necessary because Kate Cockerell had developed multiple sclerosis and walking was difficult for her. When Hardy heard this bad news, he at once offered to send Emma’s bath chair, which was, he said, ‘of the very best make and appearance’, and it was duly shipped off to Cambridge for Kate. Her life became tragically confined, but Sydney never even considered changing his habits, and he continued his frequent visits to Max Gate on his own.
In February he found both Hardys welcoming. Florence told him that Hardy had spent much of the past two months in bed with a cold caught at Mary’s funeral, but he was now on the mend, and clearly pleased to have Cockerell to talk to again. He told him something of Horace Moule, how he had been his early friend and adviser, and the tragedy of his suicide in Cambridge. He also gave him a set of the Wessex Edition of his books, and they discussed literary copyrights. 44 During his April visit Hardy explained that his family would become extinct with his generation, and they settled the final details of the executorship. Florence entertained Cockerell and herself by summoning Hermann Lea’s car and taking him to meet neighbours, the Sheridans, who brought out the manuscripts of The School for Scandal and The Critic. In July they were all invited to lunch at Kingston Maurward House and walked there across the water meadows, pausing to visit the Hardy graves in Stinsford churchyard – now known to Cockerell by its fictional name of ‘Mellstock’. In September they went to Weymouth for tea, and the next morning Florence seized her moment to tell Cockerell her version of the truth about her predecessor. ‘Went for a short walk with Mrs Hardy who told me what a complete failure TH’s first marriage had been and that when the first Mrs Hardy died they were in the midst of a bitter quarrel and even about to separate. All the poems about her are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has come to believe!’ 45 Cockerell wrote her words down carefully and without comment. In the afternoon there was a tea party, a stroll and ‘TH exceedingly cordial.’ The two men spent Monday morning talking happily, until it was time for Cockerell to go for his train. He was back in December, when J. M. Barrie was a fellow guest, and they dined at Kingston Maurward House and went to see a performance of the Wessexscenes from The Dynasts at the Corn Exchange in Dorchester, leaving Hardy in bed with a cold. Cockerell was now so much part of the family that in the morning he was invited to sit with Hardy in his bedroom for their talk.
He was there again during 1917, when Hardy was working on the proofs of Moments of Vision, and Cockerell volunteered to look over them. It is not clear from his diary whether he appreciated the privilege since he makes no comment about the poems, merely saying he talked about them with Hardy over breakfast. There were plenty of outings, people coming to call, lunches and dinners out, even though the war was at its grimmest. On 1 January 1918 Florence told him Hardy contemplated living into his nineties, ‘and there seems to be no reason why he shouldn’t.’ In September he offered to rehang the pictures in the repapered drawing room at Max Gate, staying for five days to get the job done and enjoying himself thoroughly as he worked.
During 1917 Hardy had embarked on another large literary project. This one needed Florence’s help from start to finish, typing out his notes and narrative as he compiled material for what was to be his own life story. He was giving way to Cockerell’s urging that he should write his memoirs, if not in quite the style expected. His system was to go through his accumulation of old notebooks, diaries and letters, copy what he wanted preserved and then destroy the original documents, giving him complete control over what was quoted or told. It was to be written in the third person and its authorship assigned to Florence. There is nothing very unusual in writers seeking to control what is said about them, and Hardy simply went a stage further than most. It was a deception but not a very serious one. Florence was open with Macmillan as well as Cockerell about Hardy’s intense involvement in every stage of the process of compiling the ‘biography’, and it was obvious that all the information came from him and that no further research was done. Work on this absorbed them both to the end of the war and beyond.
She kept Cockerell informed of progress on the book, and in June 1920, soon after Hardy’s eightieth birthday, she showed him the work she had done, and Cockerell had the impression that, after much labour, it was now finished, which was far from the truth. That evening he and Florence were invited to dine with the Ilchesters in their great house at Melbury, to which they were driven along lanes in midsummer flower. 46 Hardy had stayed at home, and when they arrived back at ten they found him ‘looking out for us. Talking about his family he said that he would have called his book Tess of the Hardys if it had not seemed too personal.’ Cockerell was naturally intrigued by this, and the next morning, as he and Hardy walked into Dorchester together, ‘I asked him about his wonderful mother.’ If he was hoping for a revelation that Jemima had been the original for Tess, he was disappointed. ‘He said she was short, with a fine head that looked a bit too big for her body. She had wonderful vitality.’ Tess’s history is impossible to match with what is known of any of the women of Hardy’s family, so either Hardy knew what no one else does or he was teasing Cockerell. 47
Florence was being hopeful when she described the Life as finished in 1920, because she was still taking Hardy’s corrections and insertions six years later, warning his publishers that there seemed to be no prospect of the work being completed. It was only his death that brought an end to his revisions, and he left further instructions allowing her to cut out anything ‘indiscreet, belittling, monotonous, trivial, provocative, or in any other way unadvisable’. 48 She took this as a licence to reduce the references to Emma, but she made a good job of the publication, and the two volumes are indispensable reading for anyone interested in Hardy, whatever is missing from them. They are idiosyncratic, sometimes entertainingly, sometimes infuriatingly, but the voice is unmistakably that of Hardy. 49