In The Lamp of Memory, John Ruskin said something about architecture that is hard to dispute: “We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.” To substantiate his point, he reminded his reader that “there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality.” Why? For Ruskin, “it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life.” Consequently, for the social critic in Ruskin (and the art critic as well), it is
an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathise in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering, that this, with all the record it bare of them, and all of material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon—was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave.
I was reminded of these passages after reading Mark Ford’s superb critical study, Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry, which revisits the poetry written by the former architect’s draftsman in memory of his first wife, Emma, with whom he lived for twenty-seven years in Dorchester at Max Gate, the house he built to his own architectural specifications. Although the modest red-brick Queen Anne house built in the style of Philip Webb still stands—indeed, it is a part of the National Trust and serves as a Hardy museum—the strongest conqueror of “the forgetfulness of men” which the writer left behind was not the building but these heartbreakingly beautiful poems written in honor of a woman he had loved profoundly, something he only began to understand fully after her death.
Thomas Hardy was born in the Dorset hamlet of Higher Bockhampton in 1840, the first of four children of a stonemason. What Henry James styled “the imagination of disaster” might have come to characterize most of Hardy’s work as the result, initially, of his having been presumed stillborn and only saved by the attentions of a vigilant midwife. His mother, Jemima, according to Hardy’s biographer Michael Millgate was “tough-minded and managerial . . . and ingrained in her eldest child habits of prudence, economy, and limited expectation that became lifelong.” She was also dead set against marriage for Hardy or any of her children: her experience of a drunken father whose fecklessness put the family on the parish was one she never forgot.
Due to his sickly youth, Hardy received no schooling until the age of eight, spending most of his time at home, from which he acquired his delight in the countryside evident in all his writings. From an early age, he also loved hymns, which he sang, as he said, in the “good old High-and-Dry-Church way.” Taught the violin by his father, he often played with him and his paternal uncle at local gatherings, an unforgettable music-making, “elusive as a jack-o’-lanthorn’s gleam,” as he calls it in “To My Father’s Violin” (1916). After attending Anglican, non-conformist, and commercial schools, Hardy taught himself Greek and Latin and resolved on going to Cambridge to prepare for the church. In 1862 he left Dorchester for London, where he abandoned his plans to apply to Cambridge and became instead a draftsman in the offices of a prominent Gothic architect. In 1870 he married Emma Lavinia Gifford, the daughter of a Plymouth solicitor. If Emma came of a superior social class, the gentry as opposed to Hardy’s rural working class, she shared her husband’s delight in literature, though the couple never saw eye to eye on religion, the solicitor’s daughter being an impassioned Christian. Indeed, all of London’s ultra-Protestant societies counted her as a member. Hardy, for his part, might have wished to believe but never managed it. Upon the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, what Christian faith he had retained from childhood gave way to rationalist doubt, which he carried with him to the grave.
In 1872 Hardy published his first successful novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which drew heavily on his Cornish courtship of Emma. This was followed by a series of books that gained him critical as well as commercial success: Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874, The Return of the Native in 1878, The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891. His final novel, Jude the Obscure, appeared in 1895; it is strangely fitting that a poet whose greatness owes so much to his own marriage should have given his full attention to composing verse only after writing this denunciation of English nuptial law. His first collection of poems, Wessex Poems, appeared in 1898, when he was fifty-eight. Seven volumes followed, all of an undiminishing richness.
When Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, she left behind voluminous journals, most of which her husband burned after discovering that they abused him directly. A highly disciplined author, Hardy dedicated so much of his time to his writing desk that Emma finally chose to live in the house’s attic, where she abandoned herself to aggrieved prayer when not deploring what she regarded as her husband’s monstrous solipsism. This is one reason why she might have felt impelled to burn all the love letters that she and Hardy had exchanged during their courtship. Another was the chilly reception she received from Hardy’s mother and sisters, who bristled at Emma’s airs of superiority. Still another was his irreverence. The rabid Protestant in Emma could not abide her husband’s swipes at Anglicanism, which he considered a derisory national Christianity. What she seems not to have realized was that her husband’s blasphemies were distress signals. “I have been looking for God for fifty years,” he joked, “and I think that if he had existed, I should have discovered him.” This persistence, however contemptuously expressed, suggests that Hardy’s attitude toward religion amounted to something more than disdain.
After his wife’s death Hardy’s guilt became the handmaiden of not only contrition but renewed artistry. No Christian poet ever wrote a poem about conscience finer than “Cogitavi vias meas,” which Hardy based on Psalm 119:59: Cogitavi vias meas et converti pedes meos in testimonia tua (“I thought on my ways and turned my feet unto thy testimonies”):
A cry from the green-grained sticks of the fire
Made me gaze where it seemed to be:
’Twas my own voice talking therefrom to me
On how I had walked when my sun was higher—
My heart in its arrogancy.
Here we have Hardy’s signature awkward diction put to excellent use. But then we also have a moral honesty not always evident in the poet’s contemporaries:
“You taught not that which you set about,”
Said my own voice talking to me;
“That the greatest of things is Charity. . . .”
—And the sticks burnt low, and the fire went out,
And my voice ceased talking to me.
Two years after Emma’s death, the poet married Florence Dugdale, a friend of Emma’s and an admirer of his work, thirty-nine years his junior. When Florence expressed surprise that her husband’s poems should be fixated on the sorrows of lost love, Lady Hoare had her hands full trying to convince the new wife that the voices of poems were not always those of the poet himself. In 1928, at the time of his death, the stonemason’s son was worth more than ninety-five thousand pounds, which would be more than six million today. Here was proof that the class division between Hardy and Emma might have been smoothed away—the poet amassed a bigger bank balance than all the Giffords combined—but it had been achieved at a terrible cost to the marriage.
Mark Ford’s book focuses on the poetry Hardy wrote about Emma before and after her death. His mastery of the poet’s work is dazzling. On page after page, he speaks of the genius and appeal of Hardy’s prodigious poetic output with unflagging brilliance, combining biographical with critical insights to bring alive a masterly body of work.
“Emma’s absence pervades Max Gates,” he shows in one passage, quoting lines from “The Lament of the Looking-Glass,” in which Hardy, in his playful way, has the mirror complain to the curtains: “Why should I trouble again to glass / These smileless things hard by / Since she I pleasured once, alas / Is now no longer nigh?” He then proceeds to show, quoting Hardy’s poem “The Strange House,” how Emma haunts Max Gate into the distant future prefigured by the poem. For Ford, “Hardy depicts her haunting its late inhabitants by performing ghostly tunes on a non-existent piano, by appearing as a spectre on the stair, [and] by stirring the parlour door. The walls of this ‘strange house,’ like a sort of architectural palimpsest, are inscribed with ‘weird tales’ deriving from this ‘queer’ couple’s romance.” Here Ruskin’s point about the extent to which architecture and poetry preserve and transmit the memory of history and the memory of life and art is nicely corroborated. Yet Ford also intimates how poetry avails itself of memory to perform a still more vital charge:
Fugitive moments . . . do indeed become permanent once incorporated into the architecture of a poem or projected onto a poem’s landscape: “what they record in colour and cast,” [Hardy] insists of the primaeval rocks bordering the road up from Boscastle in “At Castle Boterel,” “Is—that we two passed.” In this startling assertion, veteris vestigia flammae are imagined as embedded, like fossils, into the eternal.
The Latin phrase here—meaning “sparks of an old fire”—is spoken by Dido, Queen of Carthage, in Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, describing how her capacity to love, which had died with her husband Sychaeus, is rekindled by the Trojan hero Aeneas, whose subsequent abandonment of her prompts her suicide. This is an apt tag for the rueful Hardy. But Ford goes further. “Hardy’s Virgilian epigraph,” he suggests, “might be read as a prompt to analogous musings on how Hardy’s literary vocation, particularly after he abandoned novels for poetry, ended up complicating and compromising his attentiveness or sympathy as a husband.” If Aeneas had to leave Dido to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome, Hardy had to leave Emma to fulfill his as the poet of elegiac love. He clearly chose the phrase as the epigraph for the series of poems entitled Poems 1912–1913 in Satires of Circumstance to herald the way the theme of love unifies his poems in response to Emma’s death, though it could have prefaced any number of Hardy’s earlier books of verse as well. The theme of how love fares within mortal life always animates the poet’s immortal longings, as in “Shut Out That Moon”:
Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.
For Ford, many of Hardy’s poems written after Emma’s death recreate “the guise she wore” before death threatened to reduce her to a name hewn on a white stone. “Beeny Cliff” is perhaps the most incandescent. Here Emma appears once again as she was when Hardy first met her—as beautiful as the waves besides which she rides on the Cornish coast:
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.
In another poem, he even goes so far as to recreate Emma’s childhood. If retreating to the attic of Max Gate and being thought an unpresentable, dreary woman by London society had robbed the world of the lovableness of the woman Hardy had married in his exultant youth, he would marshal his lyric genius to summon back that lovableness, starting with its pristine infancy:
Nobody says: Ah, that is the place
Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago,
What none of the Three Towns cared to know—
The birth of a little girl of grace—
The sweetest the house saw, first or last;
Yet it was so
On that day long past.
Nevertheless, in “Beeny Cliff,” we see the poetic alchemist in Hardy, whose power to conjure back his lost love can be positively Shakespearian, agreeing, in effect, with W. H. Auden that poetry makes nothing happen:
What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.
Emma’s death prompted Hardy to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life. In light of this profoundly aesthetic enterprise, Ford’s subtitle was not chosen idly: his is a book very much about the art of poetry, the art that takes the seemingly stray mortal things of human experience and reveals their immortal pedigree. Hardy speaks of this in “Shelley’s Skylark,” in which he ponders while visiting Leghorn on holiday:
The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be;—
Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.
Emma, Hardy’s poetry confirms, was just such another “tiny pinch of priceless dust.” Indeed, in this and so many other instances, Hardy managed to write poems replete with Christian impulses, one of which, “On a Discovered Curl of Hair,” shows how he never stopped yearning for love—resurrected, imperishable love. This was something he could only understand after Emma had died and left him grappling with her accusatory ghost, a grappling always consumed with thoughts of “before” and “after”:
When your soft welcomings were said,
This curl was waving on your head,
And when we walked where breakers dinned
It sported in the sun and wind,
And when I had won your words of grace
It brushed and clung about my face.
Then, to abate the misery
Of absentness, you gave it me.
Where are its fellows now? Ah, they
For brightest brown have donned a gray,
And gone into a caverned ark,
Ever unopened, always dark!
Yet this one curl, untouched of time,
Beams with live brown as in its prime,
So that it seems I even could now
Restore it to the living brow
By bearing down the western road
Till I had reached your old abode.
That Hardy should have been writing so many of his poems about Emma just before and throughout the First World War gives them a lively historical import. He might have been preoccupied with the nature of love for deeply personal reasons, but the question of this nature had everything to do with the cataclysm that shook Western civilization to its vitals. After all, France, Belgium, and England went to war with Germany to repel the deified Prussian state, whose power lust had such insatiable sights on the land and way of life beloved of the French, Belgians, and English. In this sense, Scott Fitzgerald knows what he is about when he has Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night declare that the First World War had been “the last love battle”:
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. . . . This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties.
Hardy was certainly appreciative enough of the shared Christian culture of the combatants to know that its ordeal before, during, and after the war was no good augury for the sustainability of any future Christian order. As he was constrained to observe in his epigram “Christmas: 1924”: “After two thousand years of mass / We’ve got as far as poison-gas.” That the culture of death threatens to supplant the culture of life in our own time would have come as no surprise to Hardy.
Nor to Emma, whose understanding of the relation between love and art was rather more profound than her husband’s. “I have some philosophy and mysticism, and an ardent belief in Christianity,” she wrote in Some Recollections, a volume edited by Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings. She also was very much aware of “the life beyond this present one, all which makes any existence curiously interesting.” For Emma “outward circumstances” were “of less importance if Christ is our highest ideal. A strange unearthly brilliance shines around our path, penetrating and dispersing difficulties with its warmth and glow.” Here is a striking gloss on what could be an epigraph for all of Hardy’s poetry about love and art, T. S. Eliot’s beautiful line from “East Coker”: “Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.” If Emma could see our present tragic obsession with “here and now,” and our concomitant obsession with power, she would certainly see the logic of why the culture of death should have those societies in such a stranglehold.
Some might question whether Hardy thought in such grand visionary terms in his verse, especially since he tended to eschew the metaphysical ramifications of what he nicely called “the bell of quittance.” Yet Ford is usefully precise about Hardy’s treatment of the theme of “vision,” especially since the poet chose the title Moments of Vision for his first post-war collection of poems. Indeed, the collection’s title poem, as Ford says, “constitutes his most determined attempt to articulate and assess the role that poetry might play in the shaping of consciousness. ‘Moments of Vision’ conjugates the standard Renaissance trope of art as a mirror, probing the image in relation to the quest for self-knowledge, as well as in relation to the impulse to evade it.” And then Ford quotes from the poem itself to pose questions that go to the heart of our own post-war crisis:
That mirror
Which makes of men a transparency,
Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bared spectacle to see
Of you and me?
For Hardy, it was certainly no longer the mirror of English Christianity or the sort of rationalism approved by his friend Leslie Stephen that could sort out with any reliable authority the “breast-bared spectacle” of the human condition. “The word ‘vision,’” Ford points out, “glossed as the ‘divine faculty’ by Wordsworth, and used to describe the magical trance inspired in Keats by the nightingale (‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’), occurs repeatedly in Hardy’s poetry, but the word is frequently imbued with either a hint of wistfulness or with . . . ironical humour.” One can hear the wistfulness in the poems that Hardy wrote of Emma, including “The Voice,” “Beeny Cliff,” “The Phantom Horsewoman,” and “At Castle Boterel.” But it is in such prophetic poems as “We Are Getting to the End” that we hear the ironical humor—the savage, satirical humor—which arises out of the questions of what we mean by love, which is to say, the question that so haunted Hardy after Emma’s death:
We are getting to the end of visioning
The impossible within this universe,
Such as that better whiles may follow worse,
And that our race may mend by reasoning.
We know that even as larks in cages sing
Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse
That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse,
We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.
And that when nations set them to lay waste
Their neighbours’ heritage by foot and horse,
And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams,
They may again,—not warily, or from taste,
But tickled mad by some demonic force.—
Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams!
Here is the sort of architecture, not in stone but in poetry, of which Ruskin might have approved. It certainly gives us that “lamp of memory” which the best of poets shine upon the history of our dismay.
