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ANNA: What is it, Angel? Have they come for me?
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It is as it should be.
Angel, I am almost glad - yes, glad.
This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much.
I have had enough.
And now I shall not live for you to despise me.
I am ready.
SAM: I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.
And if when I died fully I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing I am to-day...
'Peace upon earth!' was said.
We sing it, and pay a million priests to bring it,
after two thousand years of mass, we've got as far as poison-gas.
Hardy's third novel is called A Pair Of Blue Eyes,
and it's set in Cornwall.
And in one of the episodes in it,
one of the leading characters is left hanging on the edge of a cliff.
'How much longer can you wait?'
came from her pale lips along the wind to his position.
'Four minutes,' said a weaker voice than her own.
He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen,
and that her form was singularly unattenuated.
Elfride takes all her underwear off to make a rope to draw her friend
who's half-fallen down a cliff - it's such a wonderful bit of imagination.
There was so much for her to take off to knot into the rope
to draw up her friend, and suddenly, she looked quite different.
She looked very small.
I always think that's a marvellous bit of Hardy's observation.
And this is reputed to be
one of the first cliffhangers in English literature
because the moment at which she is left hanging on the end of a cliff
is the last of one of the serialisation instalments.
And Hardy's novels were, from that point on, published in instalments,
either monthly or weekly.
Thomas Hardy never looked back. The concept worked.
Far From The Madding Crowd, which followed it, was a great success.
I mean, he went on, his observation of Bathsheba,
and her lying back on the horse and flirting with Troy, and her...
..all her behaviour is so lovingly and accurately...
it seems, accurately - she seems like a real person, doesn't she?
And that's partly why such good films have been made from that book
because there is a sense of reality in it.
What an extraordinary journey from a poor cottage in Dorset,
to being buried twice, once in Westminster Abbey
with his coffin held aloft by Rudyard Kipling, the Prime Minister,
and once with his heart being buried in Dorset.
Thomas Hardy was the son of a builder
and a severe but well-read mother, who had been in service.
Widely read in his youth, Hardy became an apprentice
to the leading church architectural firm Blomfield.
Hardy is irrevocably associated
with his creation of the region of Wessex,
an area that spans from Oxford in the north to Cornwall in the west,
to Salisbury in the east and the sea in the south.
When he was a young boy of about nine,
he knew a shepherd boy his own age who died of hunger.
He grew up with stories of Chartism, the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs,
stories of working-class resistance and rebellion.
He grew up before the mechanisation of agriculture,
before the railway, before the telegraph.
He saw the changes that took place with the spread of urbanisation
and the intrusion of the metropolis, and above all,
the loss of centuries of rural life.
In the Wessex landscape even now, you can sense Hardy's depiction.
The final impression you have from Hardy
is of a man who enjoyed the world,
and who loved the landscape, the grass, the sea...
..and drew pleasure from his experience of life.
When I set out for Lyonnesse, A hundred miles away...
..The rime was on the spray, And starlight lit my lonesomeness...
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless...
So one way of thinking about that quality of landscape in Hardy
is to start from where he grew up, the cottage in Bockhampton,
and just walk out of the back of that house onto the heath.
It backs on to an expanse of heathland, which to some extent
has been planted since the Second World War with pines,
but in Hardy's day was...
..much, much larger and much more barren.
Also, it was raised above the valleys and Dorchester scenes
going to the south and to the west.
It was, at present, a place perfectly accordant with man's nature...
..neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly...
..neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame...
..but, like man, slighted and enduring.
BIRCH: Hardy's unforgettable evocation of heath
and what the heath embodies is one of the most enduring,
one of the most powerful images in his writing.
It's very specific. It really is a place.
You feel that in reading the description -
of course, we know that he did have a specific place in mind.
It is a deeply mythical landscape
against which his character's lives are played.
It is a landscape that predates our modern world,
and Hardy suggests, will outlive it.
The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life
shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud,
with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long.
There the water-flower was the lily...
..the crow-foot here.
Another element in Hardy's childhood landscape
is visible from the heath.
If you go to the edge of the heath and look south,
you see the valley of the Froom,
along which the railway came in his early youth.
And often, if you go to Higher Bockhampton all the way,
you can still hear the trains from his doorstep.
One of the things about his later life, when he lived at Max Gate -
every weekend he would walk from Max Gate to his childhood home
in order to visit his parents.
And that would take him across the valley of the Froom,
week-by-week, a valley which was, by contrast with the heath,
full of fertile farmland, which might be seen as correlated with
his own sense of success and achievement.
When Hardy, as a child, travelled day-by-day
from his home in Higher Bockhampton into Dorchester,
he wasn't only going from one community to another,
one kind of society to another,
he was, in some ways, going from one period of time to another -
from something that had been the same from time immemorial,
to a world which was changing rapidly around him.
Hardy in 1870, whilst still working as an architect,
met his first wife Emma whilst restoring St Juliot -
the parish church of St Juliot near Boscastle, 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.
There she is, she has her little horse.
And she rides wildly along the cliff edges, seeming extremely independent
and adventurous and dashing.
And he falls immediately in love with her.
The woman he falls in love with, Emma,
he falls in love with her genuinely and profoundly...
..and one of the things which draws them together
is a shared love of literature,
and of the belief in Hardy as a writer,
which his family, as I say, didn't really share.
And she supported him as an aspiring writer right from the beginning.
She writes out his manuscripts for him,
she becomes his secretarial help, she collaborates with him
in his programme of self-education and reading,
which he undertook in the 1870s in his late 30s.
Quite late on, she still feels that she should, and can,
be his helpmate as a writer.
For a while, it was very happy, and they had that wonderful two years
in Sturminster Newton when he wrote The Return Of The Native,
which was, I think, one of his best novels.
And they had this lovely house looking out over the Blackmoor Vale
at the edge of the town.
His writing career takes him away from her into quite a...
masculine world of, you know, clubs and fellow authors
from which she's excluded.
And I think that that exclusion from his writing world
became a source of great hostility and resentment,
and a sense of unfair exclusion on her side.
The sale of Henchard's wife in The Mayor Of Casterbridge
may express more than a little of Hardy's frustration with Emma.
I'll sell her for five guineas to any man that'll pay me the money
and treat her well.
And he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o' me.
Now, then, five guineas, she's yours. Susan, you agree?
Aye.Five guineas, or she'll be withdrawn.
Anybody?
The last time. Yes or no?
MAN: Yes.
You say you do? I say so.
Saying one thing, paying's another. Where's the money?
Hardy writes like no other novelist -
there's a real ease about the writing, and he surprises us.
He'll give us a moment of beauty, of illumination or joy,
and there's so much in a single phrase.
For example, in The Mayor Of Casterbridge he talks about
those households whose crime it was to be poor.
What he's doing there is refuting
the idea that need or poverty was somehow a crime,
the criminalisation of poverty that was happening at the time.
ANNA: Emma Hardy wrote that Hardy
'only understands the women he invents - the others not at all.
With these extraordinary creatures, and particularly
in the case of Tess, he was in love.'
Emma Hardy wrote both of her husband, and husbands in general,
to expect neither gratitude nor attentions, love nor justice.
Of course, she wanted to be a writer herself.
And she was hurt when Hardy stopped showing her the books
and showed them to other people to read - understandably.
He did treat her badly, he did.
And her reaction to Jude The Obscure was extremely hostile.
Because she felt that in it, he was attacking not just the church,
but his wife, who was very religious.
So that... She also noticed that inside Jude,
there's a representation of Florence Henniker,
an aspiring and successful author who was well-born,
and with whom Hardy had been conducting a platonic liaison -
a friendship which was also under the mask of friendship,
for Hardy at least, filled with sexual desire.
He was a man with a very powerful sexual drive,
and there is no evidence that those flirtations,
those quasi-affairs that he embarked on,
ever resulted in sexual relations.
So there was always that element of being thwarted
alongside enjoying those new opportunities.
Some of those relations were, or might have been,
a real threat to the marriage.
The relation with Florence Henniker would probably be
the most powerful example of an infatuation
that could very readily have become something else.
He did fall in love with her.
She did, apparently, encourage him because she liked flirting with him.
But then he thought she would become his mistress,
and she absolutely made it clear that she wouldn't.
They retained a real friendship to the end,
and she was an interesting, very interesting, and lively woman.
SAM: 'I've been offended with you for some time for what you said,
that I was an advocate of free love.
I hold no theory whatever on the subject
except by way of experimental remarks at tea parties.
And seriously, I don't see any possible scheme
for the union of the sexes that would be satisfactory.'
But what happened was that Emma saw that in Sue Bridehead,
he was presenting of idealised picture of Florence Henniker,
somebody who Hardy was attached to, and she knew he was,
and realised he was actually not only attacking
lots of the things she loved,
but was now writing not for her but for Florence.
There is a sense in which Hardy, perhaps as compensation
for his inner losses, possesses the characters in his novels.
The novels depict intense relationships with women,
though in his actual life, none led to any meaningful physical
or sexual outcomes. In the novels, there is intense sexual observation
and continuous physical attraction.
There is more than a hint of voyeurism and identification
in his depiction of women.
Throughout his life, Hardy desired close contact with beautiful women.
He was rebuffed by many of the women he greatly admired.
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty...
..I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?
For himself, he asked once, mournfully,
'Who marries these beautiful women?
Alas, not Thomas Hardy.'
As a novelist, he wrote, 'If the true artist ever weeps,
it probably is when he first discovers the fearful price
he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language.'
Oh.
(STAMMERS)
Finish thanking me in a day or two.
Laban Tall, will you stay with us?
You, or anyone else who pays me well, ma'am.The man must live.
Bathsheba says, 'I'm going to astonish you all.'
She says, 'If you serve me well, so shall I serve you.'
But she also says it is very difficult for a woman
to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men
to express theirs.
He took you by force. I was compelled.
You said it was against your wishes. It was.
I was young and confused. And he seduced you?
I didn't understand. You allowed yourself to be seduced.
I felt beholden to him for the help he had given to my family.
And your virtue was his reward, his payment?No!
Why are you twisting my words like this?
It wasn't like that. Not at all.
Hardy, titled...subtitled Tess Of The D'Urbervilles 'A Pure Woman',
not least because he was describing a fallen woman,
and he wanted to make a very powerful point
about the purity of people who are viewed as impure.
Tess is kind of a polemic against self-righteousness
and against the taboo on chastity.
Angel, please, say you forgive me, as I have forgiven.
I forgive you.
Hardy has a succession of relationships,
putative relationships with younger women in the course of his 50s.
And then when he's about 65,
he is approached by another aspiring writer...
..Florence Dugdale, and she becomes a friend.
She comes to visit Max Gate.
She becomes known to Emma.
And...the relationship between them
seems to have been...
almost accepted by Emma at some point.
And it was certainly known to the family, which was quite different
from the relationships that Hardy pursued with Henniker.
Though Henniker became a friend of Emma and Hardy,
this new person, Florence, went on holiday with Hardy,
and also with Hardy's brother.
So, there's a sense that she's being incorporated into the Hardy network
in a way which had never happened before.
And this is happening in the last years of Emma's life...
over quite a protracted period of time.
The relationship lasts much longer than had been the case
with any of the previous ones.
Emma's relationship to it is initially, I think, quite accepting,
but then she becomes suspicious, and there's kind of...
there's ructions, and she tries to both...
suborn or kind of take over Florence.
Then when Florence won't play, she just gets very hostile.
So there's quite a lot of argy-bargy going on there,
and you sense that that indicates that she knew something was up.
As far as we know, the relationships that Hardy had,
the flirtatious relationships with literary ladies in his 50s
never became sexual.
Whereas with Florence Dugdale, whom he met in his 60s,
and who was at the time in her late 20s,
it seems fairly likely that they became sexually intimate
before Emma died, and that certainly when they were married,
it was a sexually passionate relationship.
And I think...partly because of Jude, partly because of Florence,
partly because of her illness, the marriage...
pretty much disintegrated entirely, I would say, in the last ten years.
There was an emptiness in her life, and emptiness breeds resentment.
It breeds bitterness.
Hardy had withdrawn into his writing.
She withdrew into those attic rooms
that, in the end,
became where she led a sort of alternative life.
And Emma became isolated and unhappy
and angry in her own way.
So there was a lot of anger boiling in Max Gate
beneath that respectable routine that everyone describes.
And then in the summer of 1912, she started to go into a decline,
Hardy didn't really take much notice, I think, initially...
..and then, actually quite suddenly really, she died in November.
And that seems...
it seems to me unsurprising that he was taken by surprise -
partly because they weren't very close,
but also because she died quite suddenly, really.
SAM: Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Where I could not follow...
Emma's death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him.
And after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall
to revisit places linked with their courtship.
The poems, particularly those written between 1912 and 1913
and subsequently, reflect upon her death.
And as he planted never a rose
That bears the flower of love,
Though other flowers throve
Some heart-bane moved our souls to sever
Since he had planted never a rose...
The marriage wasn't happy in the long term,
though I've never subscribed to the belief
that it was an entire failure, even in those later years.
I think that there was a mutual dependence,
a strong bond between the two people, which, of course,
then emerged with real creative drama
after Emma's death in 1912,
and the great flowering of Hardy's work as a poet.
But his best poems, which he wrote -
and he describes how he had to write them - are about Emma.
And they are Emma.
And it's a rare tribute, I think,
for a writer to leave something like that.
Why did Heaven warrant, in its whim,
A twain mismated should bedim
The courts of their encompassment,
With bleeding loves and discontent!
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 never more.
Beautiful city, so venerable, so lovely,
so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century.
So serene, her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us
to the true goal of all of us -
to the ideal, to perfection.
Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his
with whom who he shared a common mental life -
men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read,
mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Only a wall - but what a wall!
Hardy faced huge social prejudice because of his radical views.
The rejection by some of the public of Jude The Obscure
was an example of this, and it was a senseless reception
because it was a senseless misunderstanding
as far as Hardy could see, because what he had written
was a moral story about a man who could not go to Oxford,
who was elbowed off the pavement by millionaire's sons.
Hardy's final completed novel, Jude The Obscure, seems to be,
at one level, a...very thoroughgoing assault
on the oppressive forces within his society.
Whether that's forces of class,
an education system which is biased in favour of, you know,
the elites, the closing off of all sorts of routes to fulfilment
by class interest.
The way in which gender relations
are similarly oppressive and unequal.
The way in which religion confines people within highly normalising
and restrictive roles at the expense of love.
So, it does all of these things, and it seems no surprise, I think,
that the book receives such hostility from its community
because it was assaulting all sorts of sacred cows of Hardy's day.
At the same time, Hardy seems to think that what's going on
in that particular moment of 1890s Britain is not so unusual.
This is, in a way, the nature of human experience -
that we're caught between aspiration and possibility.
What we seek to achieve is thwarted by forces beyond our control...
..which can be identified,
and whose injustice can be anatomised
but can't necessarily be removed.
One reviewer said that that is the voice of the working class
speaking more distinctly than ever before in literature,
and that there is no other novelist alive with this breadth of sympathy.
Hardy wrote in his final, desolate novel, Jude The Obscure...
..'Then another silence, till she was seized with another
uncontrollable fit of grief.
"There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!'
First it said, 'You shan't learn!'
Then it said, 'You shan't labour!' Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"
He tried to soothe her by saying, "That's bitter of you, darling."
"But it's true!"'
Dominated by a sense of being between classes,
he loved London society, yet never felt part of it.
Neglectful of his first wife, dominated by a troubled inner life,
this public man lived in what is called a malignant universe.
Hardy, like the prophet Job in the Old Testament,
challenged the cruelty of the God he no longer believed in.
He found the cruelty of the world unbearable.
Bishops were to burn his books, and his views,
particularly his views on the destructive effects of religion,
were to turn his first wife, Emma, against him.
And then, finally, to force Hardy himself to forsake the novel
and return to the poetry he had always loved more.
But deep in his inner self,
Thomas Hardy remained that raging, wounded self
who chastised the values of the world he inhabited.
After Emma's lonely death in the attic of Max Gate,
Hardy suddenly fell in love again with the wife
he had ignored and neglected for so much of their marriage.
He kept Emma's coffin at the end of his bed for three days.
He sought to possess her as he had done with his great heroines.
Hardy was to write no more about other women.
He remembered his own past through an outpouring of passion
and wonderful poetry.
So, after her death, the poems he initially wrote
were full of praise and celebration of the love that they'd enjoyed
as a young couple.
In years defaced and lost,
Two sat here, transport-tossed,
Lit by a living love
The wilted world knew nothing of...
'O not again
Till Earth outwears
Shall love like theirs
Suffuse this glen!'
What is also interesting, however, is that...
subsequently to that, he writes a number of poems
in which he acknowledges the cruelty that started to arise between them,
and cruelties which he himself perpetrated.
And this is something - a side of him which...
..does seem remarkable in the extent
to which he's willing to acknowledge remorse...
ADRIAN: Now I am dead you sing to me The songs we used to know,
But while I lived you had no wish Or care for doing so.
Now I am dead you come to me In the moonlight, comfortless;
Ah, what would I have given alive To win such tenderness!
..but also seems to correlate with, and to be based in,
acts of genuine cruelty, which he performed.
It was but a little thing,
Yet I knew it meant to me
Ease from what had given a sting...
But I would not welcome it;
And for all I then declined...
..O the regrettings infinite
When the night-processions flit
Through the mind!
For example, in the early 20th century,
he was awarded the Order of Merit.
The story goes, and there seems to be some evidence for it,
that he was awarded the Order of Merit instead of a knighthood,
and that he had turned down a knighthood.
And one of his reasons for turning down a knighthood
was that Emma would have been honoured by it -
she would have been made a Lady, and he had no truck with that.
So that his behaviour towards her was,
as he became increasingly aware after her death -
and perhaps aware only after her death -
his behaviour towards her had been, in many ways,
reprehensible and cruel and harsh.
Had you wept; had you but neared me with a frail uncertain ray,
Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye,
Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day,
And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven,
have smoothed the things awry.
What he then writes, though,
are a number of other poems in that same volume of 1914,
and then in his subsequent volumes,
in which the more difficult side of this experience come to the surface,
poems in which he asks himself what went wrong - why did it go wrong?
What did I do that made it go wrong?
What kind of torture did I inflict on this woman
in the course of our married life?
Unwittingly, perhaps, unconsciously, not deliberately,
but nonetheless, actually. And to what extent, actually,
in ways that I don't necessarily want to acknowledge,
to what extent was she responsible for this?
'I wounded one who's there, and now know well I wounded her;
But, ah, she does not know that she wounded me!'
And not an air stirred...
..Nor a bill of any bird, and no response accorded she.
So there are really remarkable poems in those later volumes,
in which all those really difficult questions
when you look back at a failed or unsuccessful relationship,
those questions are allowed to come to the surface.
So, it seems to me that the experience of...
I mean, I think he was a great poet before Emma died,
but I think that the experience of her death produced in him,
in some ways, both one of the most successful and profound moments
of conventional elegy in 1912-1913.
And then a succession of poems which are acutely difficult
in their emotional register...
SAM: O the doom by someone spoken -
Who shall unseal the years, the years!-
O the doom that gave no token,
When nothing of bale saw we...
ADRIAN ..O the doom by someone spoken,
O the heart by someone broken,
The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me.
..and profoundly insightful, and also self-critical, actually.
He won't let go of the sense that...he was at fault,
that she was at fault. Why can it not be rectified?
Why didn't they rectify it while they had the chance?
What stopped him? What stopped them?
And those, I think, are really great poems.
SAM: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Thomas Hardy was also a great war poet.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
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 up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
BIRCH: Hardy's sympathies when it came to global conflicts,
international conflicts - war, in short -
were always with the soldier and the sufferings of the soldier.
So, his poem in response to the Boer War, Drummer Hodge, for instance,
is not a grandiose celebration, nor indeed a grandiose elegy.
It's a very simple poem about that homely -
he uses that word, 'homely' -
northern breast that is buried there in South Africa.
And it's that perspective, the perspective of the soldier,
that subsequent soldiers, some of them themselves poets, found moving.
Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place.
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.
The evidence from Hardy's letters and from his poems,
and from his introductions to his post-war poems,
all of that together makes it clear that, for him,
the First World War was... a devastating moment.
Catastrophic in its...in the fact that it happened, really.
Firstly, that the investment he'd made in the idea of human progress,
in civilisation moving forward gradually, incrementally,
but nonetheless steadi... you know, genuinely.
All of that was thrown into question when the First World War broke out
and the nations of Europe went back to their internecine struggles,
but now with, you know, the added bonus of machine guns.
So that part of him retreated from the war completely.
On the other hand, he wrote poems
in support of, and to encourage,
people in their struggles in the war.
He wrote a wonderful poem early on called Men Who March Away.
In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just.
And that's very typical of him in the sense that he had of...
..the value and impressiveness of military heroism,
that's something that runs right across his career.
And at the same time, his sense that, you know, war is hell,
war is horrible, war is just a hideous...
..you know, intolerable...historical event.
This is an aspect of Hardy which is often muffled by his reception,
by the image he presents himself in life
of the mellow and insightful wise man,
the respectable country gentleman.
With all of those attributes, which are unmistakably present in him,
co-exist with a furious indignation at the injustice of the world.
The death of the children in Jude is, I think,
the most painful episode in Hardy's fiction.
It was a very conscious choice on his part
to make that extreme statement,
perhaps the most extreme moment in his fiction.
Hardy's long-standing friend Edmund Gosse,
even he found Jude inexplicable in its rage and wrote about it.
I'm slightly paraphrasing,
'What has moved Thomas Hardy to stand up in Dorset
and shake his fist at the creator?'
Hardy was, all his life, afraid of being touched.
It is through his eyes that Hardy touches the world.
This may account for the vividness of the visual impressions
he makes in every part of his work.
The sadness surrounding not wanting to be touched is mirrored by
his inability to touch the beautiful women that he desired so much.
Beneath the sense of a great man,
it is impossible not to notice the cross-classing voyeur...
..the man who, in today's money, made six million pounds -
so much money he was able to turn to poetry without any restriction.
He had had enough of the need for permanent cliffhangers
required in his novel writing.
On his death bed, Hardy himself felt he had achieved everything
he had wanted to achieve in life.
Almost uniquely for a dying man,
Hardy also asked for God's forgiveness, not of himself,
but for the very God himself to be forgiven by Thomas Hardy.
Hardy felt that he was a dead man walking -
he only had life when he could see and feel his own work.
That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death
or made to grieve on account of me,
and that I be not buried in consecrated ground.
And that no sexton will be asked to toll the bell.
And that nobody is wished to see my dead body,
and that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral.
And that no flowers be planted on my grave...
..and that no man remember me.
To this I put my name.
One of the things which most annoyed Hardy about the way he was reviewed
was the habit critics had of imposing upon his work
something consistent by way of a philosophy or something systematic.
So, his sense that life is sometimes full of great things
co-exists with his absolutely equivalent sense
that life is often remarkable in its nastiness,
in its injustice, in its cruelty and its pain.
Now all these specimens of man,
So various in their pith and plan,
Curious to say Were one man. Yea,
I was all they.
Hardy was capable of great ruefulness, great wistfulness
and a sense of human loss and tragedy.
But at the same time you notice, and again,
it's something I think which his reputation has somehow hidden,
you can see in his writing, both in prose and poetry,
an enormous capacity to enjoy, to cherish, to welcome life.
There's a wonderful poem called Great Things,
which he publishes as late as 1917,
which says cider is a great thing, dancing is a great thing,
music is a great thing, riding on a horse.
He lists all the sources of ecstatic, excited,
delightful pleasure which he takes in life.
There's another poem he writes in the same volume called...
Lines Written To A Movement In Mozart's E-Flat Symphony,
which again, is all about the way life draws you on, takes you up,
instils in you energy, dynamism, pleasure, delight.
And I think one of the things I most regret about Hardy's reputation
is the extent to which that aspect of him,
that simple and pure and dynamic pleasure
he takes in being alive - how frequently that's been lost.
ADRIAN: Hardy never succumbed to despair
but acknowledged it and interrogated it.
He was not only a dead man walking,
Hardy's greatness as a man allowed him to actually walk beside
his own dead self - the 'corpse-thing I am to-day' -
to have two inner lives, lived together.
Hardy's self-interrogation was undertaken with the same force
with which he had looked so carefully and honestly
at his behaviour towards his wife Emma.
After the First World War, Max Gate, Hardy's home,
became a focus of pilgrimage for many different young writers,
many of them who had fought in the war.
And it's sort of peculiar, they also write great celebratory verses
for his birthday, they kind of revere him, they elevate him.
One wonders why, and it seems to me that the explanation lies in
the extent to which Hardy was able to convey...
..stability, steadiness under fire,
and also the value of continuing to write
even when the world seems to be falling apart around you.
So, the transformation of Hardy from pariah to establishment figure,
in the latter part of his life, carried on after his death
in the sense that his funeral in 1928
was a civic and national moment,
with politicians - leading politicians - carrying the coffin.
The leading writers of the day assembled around to honour him.
At the same time, however, he was...
..although he was buried in Westminster Abbey,
his heart was buried right next door to him in Stinsford churchyard.
And his younger sister, Catherine, who outlived him,
wrote about that funeral with touching simplicity, actually,
and said that this was where he really was -
that the civic, the national occasion had seemed to take him over
and consumed him, and made him into this emblem of national achievement.
But for her and, I think, for Hardy himself,
he remained in this place of Dorset
where he'd grown-up and where he'd lived all his life.
Thomas Hardy had lived from 1840 to 1928,
through a period of enormous political,
technical and scientific change.
He had supported women's suffrage, opposed empire and racism,
and stood behind the poor and disenfranchised.
Thomas Hardy's heart was a radical heart.
Hardy's return to Cornwall after the death of Emma
is the most remarkable attempt at rebirth by a 73-year-old man.
His memory of what he felt for two wonderful years returns to him
in an extraordinary mixture of ecstasy and regret.
Hardy relives feelings of love and possibility which re-elevated him
and acted to increase the quality of his poetry
in a further fifteen years of powerful work,
this poetry being the finest that he wrote.
To the outer world, Hardy's persona included being a bicyclist,
a Justice of the Peace, a lover of nature
and an enthusiastic participant in London society.
Hardy emphasised kindness and mercy above all things
in personal and social relationships.
He had a permanent horror of cruelty to animals.
A haunted man living in a haunted self,
Thomas Hardy lived to a great age. He married two women -
the second, 39 years younger than himself.
He had no children.
'We have been made to enter the shade
of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood,
bore itself with a grave uprightness and never,
even when most moved to anger,
lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women.'
Hardy's is a vision of the world and of man's lot
as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination -
a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.
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