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| Beeny Cliff, Cornwall |
O, the opal and the
sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding
high above with bright hair flapping free
The woman whom I loved
so and who loyally loved me.
Beeny Cliff
Thomas Hardy is one of our greatest British novelists. He has a style and voice that is unique and distinctive
and thus hard for academics to analyze and classify. I like that.
Dry, dusty minds do so love to pigeon hole, compare, criticise and
reduce all to components and parts. It
takes the delight of reading away. Hardy
wrote from his heart and soul, a man of great feeling yet who refused to run
away from life’s realities. That is what
makes his work so individual and special.
His intense and abiding love for Nature, reflected in his poetry, and the often exquisite descriptions in his prose are not of the Wordsworthian
mystical variety. Rather he saw Nature
red in tooth and claw as well as in her shimmering illusory beauty. Mother Nature, the great and mysterious
Feminine, Maya, was his real love, the true love of his life. And this ultimate love became peculiarly
wrapped up in the strange relationship he had with his wife, Emma.
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| Hardy's birthplace |
Hardy considered himself as poet first and foremost. Born in the little hamlet of Upper
Bockhampton in Dorset in 1840, he was the son
of a stonemason and a fiddler. His
education finished at the age of sixteen when he became apprenticed to James
Hicks, a local architecht. He showed
promise in this work, winning prizes which ultimately took him to work in London, a place for which
he had no great affinity. Country born and bred, he set his novels in rural
scenes and small towns, creating his own landscapes which derived from an inner
landscape of his own, a place set in earlier years when his father would have
been a young lad. The world of his
father had already begun to change rapidly as the Victorian society, in all its
glory and onward march into
industrialisation, modernisation, and expansion, ploughed over society as
men once ploughed over the heavy fields. He felt the heart and soul was being ripped
from the land and from the men who worked it.
Despite the grinding poverty he saw around him, he realised that
comradeship and the simple joys of country life were fast disappearing as more and more
workers migrated to the factories and cities.
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| Sturminster Newton |
Hardy could be said to be a nostalgic writer. I think many writers are. Even Dickens set his characters in an earlier
period of his life and the two men had in common a sense of the injustices of
society, Dickens with urban life and Hardy with rural life. Dorset was
one of the most backward of all the English counties but was a place of
unparelled beauty, still fairly untouched or changed, still lovely. The rolling countryside of Hardy’s youth
became the setting for his novels. He called this imaginary place Wessex, after the old Anglo Saxon kingdom which
had once covered the area of southwest England. Hardy drew up maps and gave
different names to real places in those counties and to this day the area is called
‘Hardy’s Wessex’.
It was while Hardy was in St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 , busy with restoring the
old church there, that he met Emma Lavinia Gifford. It was with her in mind that he wrote A Pair of Blue Eyes. She was said to be a real beauty then with
her vivid blue eyes, long auburn ringlets and rosy cheeks. Her nature was girlish, cheerful, lively, unrestrained
and delightful. Quite a contrast to the
small, slender, uncertain, highly sensitive Thomas with his romantic tendency
to depressions and gloom over life. Hardy felt Emma’s vibrant magic and expressed it in
this extract from a poem written when he returned to London.
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| Emma Gifford |
When I came back from
Lyonesse
With magic in my eyes
None managed to
surmise
What meant my godlike
gloriousness
When I came back from
Lyonesse
With magic in my eyes.
During the four year period of their courtship Hardy seldom
visited Emma in Cornwall
but she never appeared to complain or look elsewhere. The pair eventually married in1874. Almost at once, Hardy felt trapped by
marriage as if romance could no longer exist and all the excitement of
courtship was over. Despite many happy
years in their early days, he was to say in 1895 that ‘a bad marriage is one of
the direst things on earth and one of the cruellest.’ Emma over time changed from the carefree,
slightly wild young woman of her youth, the girl, who with her hair streaming
in the wind, rode her horse across the cliff tops to the disapproval of local folk.
She became plump and ordinary-looking, even dowdy, as if no longer taking
trouble and could no longer match some of the beauties Hardy encountered while
in London enjoying his fame and fortune.
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| Hardy at the time of meeting Emma |
Opposite natures often match well, like magnets poles,
drawing one another together, but there have to be some things in common. Unfortunately, these two were alike in ways
that clashed because they rivalled one another.
That which first drew them together - a love of books, poetry, beauty of
nature and a longing to express their feelings in some creative way - ultimately
pushed them apart. If Emma had borne
children, it may have helped to channel some of her creative longings into
life’s pleasant mundanities. But this did not
come about and she remained emotionally unfulfilled in every way. This led to her wish to express herself
through her own writing and poetry and she did publish some poetry but often at
her own expense and without any encouragement. Her poetry was strange and had a
mystical bent to it. Later on in life she
said, ‘I have it all here but I have not the power of expressing it’. With encouragement she may have learnt to
express it but Hardy considered her pretensions as a writer as a ‘painful
delusion’. My impression is she had a more universal view
of life than Hardy who rested mainly in the human world and whose ardent love of
Nature was poetic but at the same time open eyed with a realistic view. His early faith was, like many others of the
time, dissolved by Darwin’s
theories. He found it hard to reconcile
the traditional Christian God with the suffering and pain he saw around
him and he believed more and more in a malign and uncompromising Fate against which human beings struggled to exist and function. If he had a God it was the stern and uncompromising Jehovah and he was Job. Emma, however, saw stranger visions that fled
beyond the earthy existence. But they
were just as valid: here is one of her published poems.
In misery swirled
Is this one-moon
whirled,
But there’s no sorrow
or darkness there
In that mighty Planet
where
There is no night.
Ten moons ever
revolving
All matters its long
years resolving
To sweetness and
light.
Ten Moons
Emma claimed that she helped her husband considerably with
ideas and suggestions when writing his first novels. Yet there was never any mention of her or
acknowledgment in any of his books. He
seemed to take her totally for granted.
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| Emma in later life |
Why did she change, why did marriage fail her as much as it
did Thomas? He often declared his
existence to be a prison . . . why, when he was free to go where he would,
often fleeing to his London
apartment? The sense of imprisonment was
of his own making. He admired and flirted with several beauties when in London, extolling their
writing, dancing with them and enjoying their company. Meanwhile back home, neglected, ignored, Emma
was always there, like a good mother figure while he played the errant son who
was always away or else locked in his study with his writings, his despair and
depressions. He was the typical ‘puer aeternus,’ a figure studied and
written about by the psychologist, Carl Jung.
The idealistic, creative man who never quite grows up inside no matter
how old he may be in years. He remains a
Peter Pan who wants his Wendy there forever caring for him. Such a man is always attached to The Great
Mother or Mother Nature, the eternal Feminine principle.
Marriage is indeed a prison for such a man because it means
responsibility, sharing, compromise, loss of total individuality through forming one
from two - which is what marriage should be about. Such a man never ‘feels’
married but always wants to feel life still has creative and sexual
possibilities.
From descriptions of Emma’s character, we get the impression
that she was herself a ‘puella’ the female equivalent of Peter Pan. I suspect she was no more entranced by
marriage than her husband but would never have admitted it. She felt equally trapped though in a
different way. There was a conventional
streak to her that made her react with outrage when he wrote in Jude the Obscure that ‘Fewer women like marriage than you suppose .
. . they enter into it for . . . the social advantages it gains them.’ The fact was that Emma came from a far higher
social background than Hardy and had gone against her beloved father’s wishes
in marrying him. She had in fact
‘lowered’ herself by the standards of the time. Plus, it was belittling to her to publicly rant
about marriage and constantly praise and adore other women as Hardy did. Scarcely surprising that she tried hard to
have Jude the Obscure banned. In fact, so adverse was reaction to this book that
Hardy decided to give up writing novels and concentrate on poetry instead. It is now considered one of his greatest works.
Hardy was not an easy man to be married to; he was very
private with a distaste for prolonged intimacy of any kind, even in marriage.
Was he simply a romantic dreamer for whom Woman would forever be an ideal
rather than a creature of flesh and blood? He was a complex man; a realist on one hand
and an idealist on the other and very self-centred and hyper-sensitive. Emma
was not the right woman to deal with this complexity for she had a longing to
be someone in her own right which in that day and age was never to be fulfilled. She eventually withdrew entirely into her own
space literally and symbolically, a room in the attic where she became prey to varied ailments and complaints
such as fatigue, shingles, pains, rheumatism and indigestion, all signs of depression,
nervous and emotional stress. On 25th
November 1912 she took to her bed and a couple of morning later, Hardy was
asked to come up to her which he did with ill grace, weary of such
summons. Within five minutes
she was dead.
After her sudden death, reading her diaries and charmingly
written memories of their early happiness, Hardy now found himself strangely
lonely. She had always been there in the
background of his life, the equivalent of Gabriel Oakes while he played the
flighty Bathsheba. She was the mother
figure who sustained him without his even realising the fact. But, ah!...now he no longer had the real
woman, his heart and soul could dwell forever on the dream, the romance, on his
ideal view of the Feminine and Nature…the girl with streaming auburn hair on her horse
against the blue of the Cornish sea. The
real person could never live up to that glorious lost romantic vision. Thus when Emma Gifford Hardy died, she came
to life again in all her youthful charm and beauty and his old love welled up in
him. He then wrote wonderful love poems about
Emma from her death until the end of his days, even though he remarried
later. On his own death in 1928 his heart was put near her grave at Stinsford Churchyard while his
ashes were taken to Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.
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| Marsland, Cornwall |
In many ways, we can draw parallells with the feelings Dante
Gabriel Rossetti had for Lizzie Siddal.
They loved one another madly but as time went on, Rossetti began to ignore
the woman who was once his great love and inspiration, though he did at least encourage
her artistic endeavours. After Lizzie’s
untimely death, he, like Hardy, felt immense remorse and drew several strange paintings
in which she became his muse again, his beloved anima, Beata
Beatrice. He had always identified
with his hero, Dante Alighieri, who
loved and wrote about Beatrice, a beautiful girl who had died young and left
him forever longing for the unnattainable vision. Women loved more in death
than in life. In the same way, Hardy
painted Emma in poetic pictures of love and longing. He took a pilgrimage to Cornwall and
revisited all the places that they had explored when in love and wrote with poignant
sadness over a lost time when life was sharp and vivid, coloured by intense
feelings, every minute detail remembered, a time never to return. His poems are amongst his best work and speak
so eloquently of that aching longing for love in every one of us, that
something indefinable which no human being can ever really fulfil.
What if still in
chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is –
elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,
And knows not nor
cares for Beeny, and will laugh there never more.
