1 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Downloaded from YTS.MX 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:08,960 ANNA: What is it, Angel? Have they come for me? 3 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX 4 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:11,080 It is as it should be. 5 00:00:12,240 --> 00:00:15,640 Angel, I am almost glad - yes, glad. 6 00:00:15,680 --> 00:00:19,760 This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. 7 00:00:21,080 --> 00:00:23,080 I have had enough. 8 00:00:23,120 --> 00:00:25,280 And now I shall not live for you to despise me. 9 00:00:26,800 --> 00:00:28,800 I am ready. 10 00:00:45,520 --> 00:00:48,360 SAM: I am but a shape that stands here, 11 00:00:48,400 --> 00:00:50,400 A pulseless mould, 12 00:00:53,480 --> 00:00:56,200 A pale past picture, screening 13 00:00:56,240 --> 00:00:58,240 Ashes gone cold. 14 00:01:01,440 --> 00:01:04,640 And if when I died fully I cannot say, 15 00:01:04,680 --> 00:01:08,360 And changed into the corpse-thing I am to-day... 16 00:01:15,960 --> 00:01:18,040 'Peace upon earth!' was said. 17 00:01:18,080 --> 00:01:21,440 We sing it, and pay a million priests to bring it, 18 00:01:21,480 --> 00:01:26,720 after two thousand years of mass, we've got as far as poison-gas. 19 00:01:36,760 --> 00:01:39,880 Hardy's third novel is called A Pair Of Blue Eyes, 20 00:01:39,920 --> 00:01:42,560 and it's set in Cornwall. 21 00:01:43,560 --> 00:01:46,600 And in one of the episodes in it, 22 00:01:46,640 --> 00:01:52,760 one of the leading characters is left hanging on the edge of a cliff. 23 00:01:53,920 --> 00:01:56,040 'How much longer can you wait?' 24 00:01:56,080 --> 00:01:59,200 came from her pale lips along the wind to his position. 25 00:02:00,440 --> 00:02:04,120 'Four minutes,' said a weaker voice than her own. 26 00:02:05,600 --> 00:02:09,160 He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, 27 00:02:09,200 --> 00:02:12,240 and that her form was singularly unattenuated. 28 00:02:16,240 --> 00:02:22,920 Elfride takes all her underwear off to make a rope to draw her friend 29 00:02:22,960 --> 00:02:27,200 who's half-fallen down a cliff - it's such a wonderful bit of imagination. 30 00:02:27,240 --> 00:02:32,360 There was so much for her to take off to knot into the rope 31 00:02:32,400 --> 00:02:36,920 to draw up her friend, and suddenly, she looked quite different. 32 00:02:36,960 --> 00:02:39,160 She looked very small. 33 00:02:39,200 --> 00:02:42,840 I always think that's a marvellous bit of Hardy's observation. 34 00:02:42,880 --> 00:02:45,560 And this is reputed to be 35 00:02:45,600 --> 00:02:48,360 one of the first cliffhangers in English literature 36 00:02:48,400 --> 00:02:51,920 because the moment at which she is left hanging on the end of a cliff 37 00:02:51,960 --> 00:02:56,920 is the last of one of the serialisation instalments. 38 00:02:56,960 --> 00:03:01,880 And Hardy's novels were, from that point on, published in instalments, 39 00:03:01,920 --> 00:03:04,560 either monthly or weekly. 40 00:03:04,600 --> 00:03:07,680 Thomas Hardy never looked back. The concept worked. 41 00:03:08,680 --> 00:03:12,120 Far From The Madding Crowd, which followed it, was a great success. 42 00:03:12,160 --> 00:03:15,600 I mean, he went on, his observation of Bathsheba, 43 00:03:15,640 --> 00:03:20,200 and her lying back on the horse and flirting with Troy, and her... 44 00:03:21,200 --> 00:03:24,840 ..all her behaviour is so lovingly and accurately... 45 00:03:24,880 --> 00:03:29,160 it seems, accurately - she seems like a real person, doesn't she? 46 00:03:29,200 --> 00:03:33,280 And that's partly why such good films have been made from that book 47 00:03:33,320 --> 00:03:36,120 because there is a sense of reality in it. 48 00:03:36,160 --> 00:03:39,800 What an extraordinary journey from a poor cottage in Dorset, 49 00:03:39,840 --> 00:03:43,280 to being buried twice, once in Westminster Abbey 50 00:03:43,320 --> 00:03:47,000 with his coffin held aloft by Rudyard Kipling, the Prime Minister, 51 00:03:47,040 --> 00:03:50,000 and once with his heart being buried in Dorset. 52 00:03:52,720 --> 00:03:55,040 Thomas Hardy was the son of a builder 53 00:03:55,080 --> 00:03:58,600 and a severe but well-read mother, who had been in service. 54 00:03:58,640 --> 00:04:01,920 Widely read in his youth, Hardy became an apprentice 55 00:04:01,960 --> 00:04:05,200 to the leading church architectural firm Blomfield. 56 00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:07,400 Hardy is irrevocably associated 57 00:04:07,440 --> 00:04:09,760 with his creation of the region of Wessex, 58 00:04:09,800 --> 00:04:13,400 an area that spans from Oxford in the north to Cornwall in the west, 59 00:04:13,440 --> 00:04:16,080 to Salisbury in the east and the sea in the south. 60 00:04:17,160 --> 00:04:19,520 When he was a young boy of about nine, 61 00:04:19,560 --> 00:04:22,480 he knew a shepherd boy his own age who died of hunger. 62 00:04:22,520 --> 00:04:28,560 He grew up with stories of Chartism, the Swing Riots, Tolpuddle Martyrs, 63 00:04:28,600 --> 00:04:31,840 stories of working-class resistance and rebellion. 64 00:04:33,120 --> 00:04:35,840 He grew up before the mechanisation of agriculture, 65 00:04:35,880 --> 00:04:38,400 before the railway, before the telegraph. 66 00:04:38,440 --> 00:04:42,240 He saw the changes that took place with the spread of urbanisation 67 00:04:42,280 --> 00:04:44,520 and the intrusion of the metropolis, and above all, 68 00:04:44,560 --> 00:04:47,120 the loss of centuries of rural life. 69 00:04:47,160 --> 00:04:51,480 In the Wessex landscape even now, you can sense Hardy's depiction. 70 00:04:52,480 --> 00:04:54,560 The final impression you have from Hardy 71 00:04:54,600 --> 00:04:56,800 is of a man who enjoyed the world, 72 00:04:56,840 --> 00:05:03,040 and who loved the landscape, the grass, the sea... 73 00:05:04,760 --> 00:05:10,240 ..and drew pleasure from his experience of life. 74 00:05:12,280 --> 00:05:15,640 When I set out for Lyonnesse, A hundred miles away... 75 00:05:16,680 --> 00:05:20,480 ..The rime was on the spray, And starlight lit my lonesomeness... 76 00:05:21,720 --> 00:05:23,720 When I set out for Lyonnesse 77 00:05:23,760 --> 00:05:26,120 A hundred miles away. 78 00:05:26,160 --> 00:05:28,520 When I came back from Lyonnesse 79 00:05:28,560 --> 00:05:30,760 With magic in my eyes, 80 00:05:30,800 --> 00:05:33,560 All marked with mute surmise 81 00:05:33,600 --> 00:05:36,560 My radiance rare and fathomless... 82 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:41,560 So one way of thinking about that quality of landscape in Hardy 83 00:05:41,600 --> 00:05:45,800 is to start from where he grew up, the cottage in Bockhampton, 84 00:05:45,840 --> 00:05:50,120 and just walk out of the back of that house onto the heath. 85 00:05:50,160 --> 00:05:54,960 It backs on to an expanse of heathland, which to some extent 86 00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:58,560 has been planted since the Second World War with pines, 87 00:05:58,600 --> 00:06:01,360 but in Hardy's day was... 88 00:06:02,760 --> 00:06:06,520 ..much, much larger and much more barren. 89 00:06:06,560 --> 00:06:11,440 Also, it was raised above the valleys and Dorchester scenes 90 00:06:11,480 --> 00:06:14,840 going to the south and to the west. 91 00:06:15,880 --> 00:06:20,360 It was, at present, a place perfectly accordant with man's nature... 92 00:06:21,760 --> 00:06:24,560 ..neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly... 93 00:06:25,560 --> 00:06:28,360 ..neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame... 94 00:06:29,480 --> 00:06:33,520 ..but, like man, slighted and enduring. 95 00:06:33,560 --> 00:06:37,960 BIRCH: Hardy's unforgettable evocation of heath 96 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:42,320 and what the heath embodies is one of the most enduring, 97 00:06:42,360 --> 00:06:46,000 one of the most powerful images in his writing. 98 00:06:46,040 --> 00:06:49,400 It's very specific. It really is a place. 99 00:06:49,440 --> 00:06:52,120 You feel that in reading the description - 100 00:06:52,160 --> 00:06:56,920 of course, we know that he did have a specific place in mind. 101 00:06:56,960 --> 00:07:01,640 It is a deeply mythical landscape 102 00:07:01,680 --> 00:07:05,800 against which his character's lives are played. 103 00:07:05,840 --> 00:07:12,080 It is a landscape that predates our modern world, 104 00:07:12,120 --> 00:07:15,480 and Hardy suggests, will outlive it. 105 00:07:15,520 --> 00:07:19,520 The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life 106 00:07:19,560 --> 00:07:24,120 shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, 107 00:07:24,160 --> 00:07:28,320 with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. 108 00:07:28,360 --> 00:07:30,880 There the water-flower was the lily... 109 00:07:31,880 --> 00:07:33,880 ..the crow-foot here. 110 00:07:36,840 --> 00:07:40,280 Another element in Hardy's childhood landscape 111 00:07:40,320 --> 00:07:44,640 is visible from the heath. 112 00:07:44,680 --> 00:07:47,640 If you go to the edge of the heath and look south, 113 00:07:47,680 --> 00:07:52,240 you see the valley of the Froom, 114 00:07:52,280 --> 00:07:56,440 along which the railway came in his early youth. 115 00:07:56,480 --> 00:07:59,440 And often, if you go to Higher Bockhampton all the way, 116 00:07:59,480 --> 00:08:02,560 you can still hear the trains from his doorstep. 117 00:08:02,600 --> 00:08:06,600 One of the things about his later life, when he lived at Max Gate - 118 00:08:06,640 --> 00:08:09,960 every weekend he would walk from Max Gate to his childhood home 119 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:12,000 in order to visit his parents. 120 00:08:12,040 --> 00:08:15,320 And that would take him across the valley of the Froom, 121 00:08:15,360 --> 00:08:21,520 week-by-week, a valley which was, by contrast with the heath, 122 00:08:21,560 --> 00:08:26,960 full of fertile farmland, which might be seen as correlated with 123 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:30,000 his own sense of success and achievement. 124 00:08:30,040 --> 00:08:33,960 When Hardy, as a child, travelled day-by-day 125 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:37,440 from his home in Higher Bockhampton into Dorchester, 126 00:08:37,480 --> 00:08:40,160 he wasn't only going from one community to another, 127 00:08:40,200 --> 00:08:42,680 one kind of society to another, 128 00:08:42,720 --> 00:08:45,600 he was, in some ways, going from one period of time to another - 129 00:08:45,640 --> 00:08:50,800 from something that had been the same from time immemorial, 130 00:08:50,840 --> 00:08:53,840 to a world which was changing rapidly around him. 131 00:09:00,480 --> 00:09:03,960 Hardy in 1870, whilst still working as an architect, 132 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:07,080 met his first wife Emma whilst restoring St Juliot - 133 00:09:07,120 --> 00:09:10,360 the parish church of St Juliot near Boscastle, Cornwall. 134 00:09:14,240 --> 00:09:18,600 O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea... 135 00:09:19,600 --> 00:09:23,960 ..And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free... 136 00:09:25,120 --> 00:09:29,600 ..The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me. 137 00:09:30,760 --> 00:09:33,880 There she is, she has her little horse. 138 00:09:33,920 --> 00:09:40,520 And she rides wildly along the cliff edges, seeming extremely independent 139 00:09:40,560 --> 00:09:42,680 and adventurous and dashing. 140 00:09:42,720 --> 00:09:45,600 And he falls immediately in love with her. 141 00:09:47,480 --> 00:09:49,640 The woman he falls in love with, Emma, 142 00:09:49,680 --> 00:09:52,640 he falls in love with her genuinely and profoundly... 143 00:09:53,640 --> 00:09:56,680 ..and one of the things which draws them together 144 00:09:56,720 --> 00:09:59,320 is a shared love of literature, 145 00:09:59,360 --> 00:10:03,680 and of the belief in Hardy as a writer, 146 00:10:03,720 --> 00:10:06,520 which his family, as I say, didn't really share. 147 00:10:06,560 --> 00:10:10,800 And she supported him as an aspiring writer right from the beginning. 148 00:10:10,840 --> 00:10:12,840 She writes out his manuscripts for him, 149 00:10:12,880 --> 00:10:17,080 she becomes his secretarial help, she collaborates with him 150 00:10:17,120 --> 00:10:20,520 in his programme of self-education and reading, 151 00:10:20,560 --> 00:10:26,120 which he undertook in the 1870s in his late 30s. 152 00:10:26,160 --> 00:10:30,840 Quite late on, she still feels that she should, and can, 153 00:10:30,880 --> 00:10:33,640 be his helpmate as a writer. 154 00:10:35,560 --> 00:10:39,320 For a while, it was very happy, and they had that wonderful two years 155 00:10:39,360 --> 00:10:43,000 in Sturminster Newton when he wrote The Return Of The Native, 156 00:10:43,040 --> 00:10:45,600 which was, I think, one of his best novels. 157 00:10:47,640 --> 00:10:50,920 And they had this lovely house looking out over the Blackmoor Vale 158 00:10:50,960 --> 00:10:52,960 at the edge of the town. 159 00:10:57,080 --> 00:11:00,760 His writing career takes him away from her into quite a... 160 00:11:00,800 --> 00:11:05,760 masculine world of, you know, clubs and fellow authors 161 00:11:05,800 --> 00:11:07,800 from which she's excluded. 162 00:11:07,840 --> 00:11:11,520 And I think that that exclusion from his writing world 163 00:11:11,560 --> 00:11:14,640 became a source of great hostility and resentment, 164 00:11:14,680 --> 00:11:19,360 and a sense of unfair exclusion on her side. 165 00:11:19,400 --> 00:11:22,720 The sale of Henchard's wife in The Mayor Of Casterbridge 166 00:11:22,760 --> 00:11:26,520 may express more than a little of Hardy's frustration with Emma. 167 00:11:26,560 --> 00:11:29,400 I'll sell her for five guineas to any man that'll pay me the money 168 00:11:29,440 --> 00:11:31,360 and treat her well. 169 00:11:31,400 --> 00:11:34,200 And he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o' me. 170 00:11:34,240 --> 00:11:38,480 Now, then, five guineas, she's yours. Susan, you agree? 171 00:11:40,040 --> 00:11:43,040 Aye.Five guineas, or she'll be withdrawn. 172 00:11:44,120 --> 00:11:45,960 Anybody? 173 00:11:47,600 --> 00:11:50,840 The last time. Yes or no? 174 00:11:57,000 --> 00:11:58,520 MAN: Yes. 175 00:12:00,280 --> 00:12:03,040 You say you do? I say so. 176 00:12:04,040 --> 00:12:07,880 Saying one thing, paying's another. Where's the money? 177 00:12:07,920 --> 00:12:10,240 Hardy writes like no other novelist - 178 00:12:10,280 --> 00:12:13,520 there's a real ease about the writing, and he surprises us. 179 00:12:13,560 --> 00:12:17,440 He'll give us a moment of beauty, of illumination or joy, 180 00:12:17,480 --> 00:12:19,960 and there's so much in a single phrase. 181 00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:23,080 For example, in The Mayor Of Casterbridge he talks about 182 00:12:23,120 --> 00:12:26,080 those households whose crime it was to be poor. 183 00:12:26,120 --> 00:12:28,840 What he's doing there is refuting 184 00:12:28,880 --> 00:12:33,400 the idea that need or poverty was somehow a crime, 185 00:12:33,440 --> 00:12:37,640 the criminalisation of poverty that was happening at the time. 186 00:12:37,680 --> 00:12:39,800 ANNA: Emma Hardy wrote that Hardy 187 00:12:39,840 --> 00:12:44,000 'only understands the women he invents - the others not at all. 188 00:12:44,040 --> 00:12:46,720 With these extraordinary creatures, and particularly 189 00:12:46,760 --> 00:12:49,360 in the case of Tess, he was in love.' 190 00:12:49,400 --> 00:12:52,880 Emma Hardy wrote both of her husband, and husbands in general, 191 00:12:52,920 --> 00:12:57,800 to expect neither gratitude nor attentions, love nor justice. 192 00:12:57,840 --> 00:13:00,120 Of course, she wanted to be a writer herself. 193 00:13:00,160 --> 00:13:04,040 And she was hurt when Hardy stopped showing her the books 194 00:13:04,080 --> 00:13:07,360 and showed them to other people to read - understandably. 195 00:13:08,640 --> 00:13:11,760 He did treat her badly, he did. 196 00:13:11,800 --> 00:13:17,360 And her reaction to Jude The Obscure was extremely hostile. 197 00:13:17,400 --> 00:13:22,280 Because she felt that in it, he was attacking not just the church, 198 00:13:22,320 --> 00:13:25,560 but his wife, who was very religious. 199 00:13:25,600 --> 00:13:30,080 So that... She also noticed that inside Jude, 200 00:13:30,120 --> 00:13:34,120 there's a representation of Florence Henniker, 201 00:13:34,160 --> 00:13:39,680 an aspiring and successful author who was well-born, 202 00:13:39,720 --> 00:13:44,840 and with whom Hardy had been conducting a platonic liaison - 203 00:13:44,880 --> 00:13:50,040 a friendship which was also under the mask of friendship, 204 00:13:50,080 --> 00:13:53,760 for Hardy at least, filled with sexual desire. 205 00:13:53,800 --> 00:13:58,520 He was a man with a very powerful sexual drive, 206 00:13:58,560 --> 00:14:05,120 and there is no evidence that those flirtations, 207 00:14:05,160 --> 00:14:10,120 those quasi-affairs that he embarked on, 208 00:14:10,160 --> 00:14:15,240 ever resulted in sexual relations. 209 00:14:15,280 --> 00:14:20,360 So there was always that element of being thwarted 210 00:14:20,400 --> 00:14:25,640 alongside enjoying those new opportunities. 211 00:14:25,680 --> 00:14:30,480 Some of those relations were, or might have been, 212 00:14:30,520 --> 00:14:33,720 a real threat to the marriage. 213 00:14:33,760 --> 00:14:38,080 The relation with Florence Henniker would probably be 214 00:14:38,120 --> 00:14:42,000 the most powerful example of an infatuation 215 00:14:42,040 --> 00:14:45,720 that could very readily have become something else. 216 00:14:45,760 --> 00:14:48,280 He did fall in love with her. 217 00:14:48,320 --> 00:14:53,080 She did, apparently, encourage him because she liked flirting with him. 218 00:14:53,120 --> 00:14:56,720 But then he thought she would become his mistress, 219 00:14:56,760 --> 00:14:59,480 and she absolutely made it clear that she wouldn't. 220 00:14:59,520 --> 00:15:02,840 They retained a real friendship to the end, 221 00:15:02,880 --> 00:15:07,480 and she was an interesting, very interesting, and lively woman. 222 00:15:09,440 --> 00:15:13,040 SAM: 'I've been offended with you for some time for what you said, 223 00:15:13,080 --> 00:15:15,560 that I was an advocate of free love. 224 00:15:16,560 --> 00:15:19,160 I hold no theory whatever on the subject 225 00:15:19,200 --> 00:15:22,840 except by way of experimental remarks at tea parties. 226 00:15:22,880 --> 00:15:26,000 And seriously, I don't see any possible scheme 227 00:15:26,040 --> 00:15:29,400 for the union of the sexes that would be satisfactory.' 228 00:15:33,920 --> 00:15:38,080 But what happened was that Emma saw that in Sue Bridehead, 229 00:15:38,120 --> 00:15:40,920 he was presenting of idealised picture of Florence Henniker, 230 00:15:40,960 --> 00:15:44,280 somebody who Hardy was attached to, and she knew he was, 231 00:15:44,320 --> 00:15:48,560 and realised he was actually not only attacking 232 00:15:48,600 --> 00:15:50,600 lots of the things she loved, 233 00:15:50,640 --> 00:15:54,480 but was now writing not for her but for Florence. 234 00:15:55,680 --> 00:15:58,800 There is a sense in which Hardy, perhaps as compensation 235 00:15:58,840 --> 00:16:02,440 for his inner losses, possesses the characters in his novels. 236 00:16:02,480 --> 00:16:05,840 The novels depict intense relationships with women, 237 00:16:05,880 --> 00:16:09,400 though in his actual life, none led to any meaningful physical 238 00:16:09,440 --> 00:16:13,560 or sexual outcomes. In the novels, there is intense sexual observation 239 00:16:13,600 --> 00:16:15,880 and continuous physical attraction. 240 00:16:15,920 --> 00:16:18,440 There is more than a hint of voyeurism and identification 241 00:16:18,480 --> 00:16:20,560 in his depiction of women. 242 00:16:20,600 --> 00:16:24,800 Throughout his life, Hardy desired close contact with beautiful women. 243 00:16:24,840 --> 00:16:27,920 He was rebuffed by many of the women he greatly admired. 244 00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:31,000 You love not me, 245 00:16:31,040 --> 00:16:33,160 And love alone can lend you loyalty... 246 00:16:34,160 --> 00:16:37,080 ..I know and knew it. But, unto the store 247 00:16:37,120 --> 00:16:39,640 Of human deeds divine in all but name, 248 00:16:39,680 --> 00:16:42,760 Was it not worth a little hour or more 249 00:16:42,800 --> 00:16:46,320 To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came 250 00:16:46,360 --> 00:16:50,800 To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be 251 00:16:50,840 --> 00:16:52,840 You love not me? 252 00:16:54,280 --> 00:16:57,080 For himself, he asked once, mournfully, 253 00:16:57,120 --> 00:16:59,320 'Who marries these beautiful women? 254 00:17:00,440 --> 00:17:02,640 Alas, not Thomas Hardy.' 255 00:17:03,800 --> 00:17:07,600 As a novelist, he wrote, 'If the true artist ever weeps, 256 00:17:07,640 --> 00:17:10,680 it probably is when he first discovers the fearful price 257 00:17:10,720 --> 00:17:14,440 he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language.' 258 00:17:15,960 --> 00:17:17,960 Oh. 259 00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:20,440 (STAMMERS) 260 00:17:20,480 --> 00:17:22,560 Finish thanking me in a day or two. 261 00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:27,080 Laban Tall, will you stay with us? 262 00:17:27,120 --> 00:17:30,280 You, or anyone else who pays me well, ma'am.The man must live. 263 00:17:30,320 --> 00:17:33,520 Bathsheba says, 'I'm going to astonish you all.' 264 00:17:33,560 --> 00:17:37,360 She says, 'If you serve me well, so shall I serve you.' 265 00:17:37,400 --> 00:17:40,320 But she also says it is very difficult for a woman 266 00:17:40,360 --> 00:17:45,040 to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men 267 00:17:45,080 --> 00:17:47,120 to express theirs. 268 00:17:47,160 --> 00:17:50,840 He took you by force. I was compelled. 269 00:17:50,880 --> 00:17:53,000 You said it was against your wishes. It was. 270 00:17:54,000 --> 00:17:56,720 I was young and confused. And he seduced you? 271 00:17:56,760 --> 00:18:00,480 I didn't understand. You allowed yourself to be seduced. 272 00:18:00,520 --> 00:18:02,920 I felt beholden to him for the help he had given to my family. 273 00:18:02,960 --> 00:18:06,040 And your virtue was his reward, his payment?No! 274 00:18:06,080 --> 00:18:08,120 Why are you twisting my words like this? 275 00:18:08,160 --> 00:18:11,120 It wasn't like that. Not at all. 276 00:18:11,160 --> 00:18:14,440 Hardy, titled...subtitled Tess Of The D'Urbervilles 'A Pure Woman', 277 00:18:14,480 --> 00:18:17,680 not least because he was describing a fallen woman, 278 00:18:17,720 --> 00:18:19,920 and he wanted to make a very powerful point 279 00:18:19,960 --> 00:18:24,920 about the purity of people who are viewed as impure. 280 00:18:24,960 --> 00:18:29,720 Tess is kind of a polemic against self-righteousness 281 00:18:29,760 --> 00:18:32,280 and against the taboo on chastity. 282 00:18:32,320 --> 00:18:35,920 Angel, please, say you forgive me, as I have forgiven. 283 00:18:37,120 --> 00:18:39,120 I forgive you. 284 00:18:39,160 --> 00:18:42,680 Hardy has a succession of relationships, 285 00:18:42,720 --> 00:18:47,760 putative relationships with younger women in the course of his 50s. 286 00:18:47,800 --> 00:18:51,160 And then when he's about 65, 287 00:18:51,200 --> 00:18:55,160 he is approached by another aspiring writer... 288 00:18:56,680 --> 00:19:00,520 ..Florence Dugdale, and she becomes a friend. 289 00:19:00,560 --> 00:19:02,880 She comes to visit Max Gate. 290 00:19:02,920 --> 00:19:05,240 She becomes known to Emma. 291 00:19:05,280 --> 00:19:09,640 And...the relationship between them 292 00:19:09,680 --> 00:19:12,920 seems to have been... 293 00:19:12,960 --> 00:19:17,280 almost accepted by Emma at some point. 294 00:19:17,320 --> 00:19:20,480 And it was certainly known to the family, which was quite different 295 00:19:20,520 --> 00:19:23,600 from the relationships that Hardy pursued with Henniker. 296 00:19:23,640 --> 00:19:26,600 Though Henniker became a friend of Emma and Hardy, 297 00:19:26,640 --> 00:19:33,520 this new person, Florence, went on holiday with Hardy, 298 00:19:33,560 --> 00:19:36,040 and also with Hardy's brother. 299 00:19:36,080 --> 00:19:41,440 So, there's a sense that she's being incorporated into the Hardy network 300 00:19:41,480 --> 00:19:43,520 in a way which had never happened before. 301 00:19:43,560 --> 00:19:47,440 And this is happening in the last years of Emma's life... 302 00:19:47,480 --> 00:19:51,960 over quite a protracted period of time. 303 00:19:52,000 --> 00:19:54,400 The relationship lasts much longer than had been the case 304 00:19:54,440 --> 00:19:56,920 with any of the previous ones. 305 00:19:56,960 --> 00:20:02,040 Emma's relationship to it is initially, I think, quite accepting, 306 00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:04,960 but then she becomes suspicious, and there's kind of... 307 00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:08,120 there's ructions, and she tries to both... 308 00:20:08,160 --> 00:20:12,640 suborn or kind of take over Florence. 309 00:20:12,680 --> 00:20:16,480 Then when Florence won't play, she just gets very hostile. 310 00:20:16,520 --> 00:20:19,480 So there's quite a lot of argy-bargy going on there, 311 00:20:19,520 --> 00:20:23,440 and you sense that that indicates that she knew something was up. 312 00:20:23,480 --> 00:20:26,320 As far as we know, the relationships that Hardy had, 313 00:20:26,360 --> 00:20:30,040 the flirtatious relationships with literary ladies in his 50s 314 00:20:30,080 --> 00:20:32,840 never became sexual. 315 00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:37,480 Whereas with Florence Dugdale, whom he met in his 60s, 316 00:20:37,520 --> 00:20:40,320 and who was at the time in her late 20s, 317 00:20:40,360 --> 00:20:44,240 it seems fairly likely that they became sexually intimate 318 00:20:44,280 --> 00:20:47,720 before Emma died, and that certainly when they were married, 319 00:20:47,760 --> 00:20:49,760 it was a sexually passionate relationship. 320 00:20:49,800 --> 00:20:56,280 And I think...partly because of Jude, partly because of Florence, 321 00:20:56,320 --> 00:21:01,520 partly because of her illness, the marriage... 322 00:21:01,560 --> 00:21:06,280 pretty much disintegrated entirely, I would say, in the last ten years. 323 00:21:06,320 --> 00:21:11,200 There was an emptiness in her life, and emptiness breeds resentment. 324 00:21:11,240 --> 00:21:14,280 It breeds bitterness. 325 00:21:14,320 --> 00:21:18,720 Hardy had withdrawn into his writing. 326 00:21:18,760 --> 00:21:24,840 She withdrew into those attic rooms 327 00:21:24,880 --> 00:21:28,000 that, in the end, 328 00:21:28,040 --> 00:21:33,480 became where she led a sort of alternative life. 329 00:21:33,520 --> 00:21:37,960 And Emma became isolated and unhappy 330 00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:40,560 and angry in her own way. 331 00:21:40,600 --> 00:21:43,960 So there was a lot of anger boiling in Max Gate 332 00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:50,520 beneath that respectable routine that everyone describes. 333 00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:55,200 And then in the summer of 1912, she started to go into a decline, 334 00:21:55,240 --> 00:21:59,080 Hardy didn't really take much notice, I think, initially... 335 00:22:00,080 --> 00:22:04,240 ..and then, actually quite suddenly really, she died in November. 336 00:22:04,280 --> 00:22:06,480 And that seems... 337 00:22:06,520 --> 00:22:09,760 it seems to me unsurprising that he was taken by surprise - 338 00:22:09,800 --> 00:22:11,920 partly because they weren't very close, 339 00:22:11,960 --> 00:22:14,600 but also because she died quite suddenly, really. 340 00:22:15,760 --> 00:22:18,120 SAM: Why did you give no hint that night 341 00:22:18,160 --> 00:22:21,120 That quickly after the morrow's dawn, 342 00:22:21,160 --> 00:22:24,400 And calmly, as if indifferent quite, 343 00:22:24,440 --> 00:22:28,200 You would close your term here, up and be gone 344 00:22:28,240 --> 00:22:30,240 Where I could not follow... 345 00:22:32,000 --> 00:22:35,480 Emma's death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. 346 00:22:35,520 --> 00:22:38,240 And after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall 347 00:22:38,280 --> 00:22:40,840 to revisit places linked with their courtship. 348 00:22:41,840 --> 00:22:45,680 The poems, particularly those written between 1912 and 1913 349 00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:48,560 and subsequently, reflect upon her death. 350 00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:52,200 And as he planted never a rose 351 00:22:52,240 --> 00:22:54,480 That bears the flower of love, 352 00:22:54,520 --> 00:22:57,240 Though other flowers throve 353 00:22:57,280 --> 00:23:01,240 Some heart-bane moved our souls to sever 354 00:23:01,280 --> 00:23:04,920 Since he had planted never a rose... 355 00:23:06,680 --> 00:23:10,520 The marriage wasn't happy in the long term, 356 00:23:10,560 --> 00:23:13,320 though I've never subscribed to the belief 357 00:23:13,360 --> 00:23:18,040 that it was an entire failure, even in those later years. 358 00:23:18,080 --> 00:23:21,280 I think that there was a mutual dependence, 359 00:23:21,320 --> 00:23:25,680 a strong bond between the two people, which, of course, 360 00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:30,160 then emerged with real creative drama 361 00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:33,280 after Emma's death in 1912, 362 00:23:33,320 --> 00:23:37,760 and the great flowering of Hardy's work as a poet. 363 00:23:37,800 --> 00:23:41,080 But his best poems, which he wrote - 364 00:23:41,120 --> 00:23:47,280 and he describes how he had to write them - are about Emma. 365 00:23:47,320 --> 00:23:49,320 And they are Emma. 366 00:23:49,360 --> 00:23:52,200 And it's a rare tribute, I think, 367 00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:54,880 for a writer to leave something like that. 368 00:23:56,760 --> 00:24:00,280 Why did Heaven warrant, in its whim, 369 00:24:00,320 --> 00:24:03,120 A twain mismated should bedim 370 00:24:03,160 --> 00:24:05,640 The courts of their encompassment, 371 00:24:05,680 --> 00:24:08,800 With bleeding loves and discontent! 372 00:24:09,960 --> 00:24:16,160 What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore, 373 00:24:16,200 --> 00:24:20,760 The woman now is - elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore... 374 00:24:21,760 --> 00:24:26,200 ..And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there never more. 375 00:24:39,760 --> 00:24:43,120 Beautiful city, so venerable, so lovely, 376 00:24:43,160 --> 00:24:46,920 so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century. 377 00:24:46,960 --> 00:24:51,560 So serene, her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us 378 00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:53,720 to the true goal of all of us - 379 00:24:53,760 --> 00:24:56,400 to the ideal, to perfection. 380 00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:02,080 Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his 381 00:25:02,120 --> 00:25:05,320 with whom who he shared a common mental life - 382 00:25:05,360 --> 00:25:09,000 men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, 383 00:25:09,040 --> 00:25:13,080 mark, learn, and inwardly digest. 384 00:25:13,120 --> 00:25:16,560 Only a wall - but what a wall! 385 00:25:19,800 --> 00:25:24,360 Hardy faced huge social prejudice because of his radical views. 386 00:25:24,400 --> 00:25:28,600 The rejection by some of the public of Jude The Obscure 387 00:25:28,640 --> 00:25:33,120 was an example of this, and it was a senseless reception 388 00:25:33,160 --> 00:25:37,160 because it was a senseless misunderstanding 389 00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:40,200 as far as Hardy could see, because what he had written 390 00:25:40,240 --> 00:25:44,120 was a moral story about a man who could not go to Oxford, 391 00:25:44,160 --> 00:25:47,920 who was elbowed off the pavement by millionaire's sons. 392 00:25:47,960 --> 00:25:52,880 Hardy's final completed novel, Jude The Obscure, seems to be, 393 00:25:52,920 --> 00:25:58,160 at one level, a...very thoroughgoing assault 394 00:25:58,200 --> 00:26:02,000 on the oppressive forces within his society. 395 00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:04,360 Whether that's forces of class, 396 00:26:04,400 --> 00:26:07,880 an education system which is biased in favour of, you know, 397 00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:13,080 the elites, the closing off of all sorts of routes to fulfilment 398 00:26:13,120 --> 00:26:16,280 by class interest. 399 00:26:16,320 --> 00:26:19,240 The way in which gender relations 400 00:26:19,280 --> 00:26:22,720 are similarly oppressive and unequal. 401 00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:28,680 The way in which religion confines people within highly normalising 402 00:26:28,720 --> 00:26:33,840 and restrictive roles at the expense of love. 403 00:26:34,840 --> 00:26:39,400 So, it does all of these things, and it seems no surprise, I think, 404 00:26:39,440 --> 00:26:43,000 that the book receives such hostility from its community 405 00:26:43,040 --> 00:26:48,160 because it was assaulting all sorts of sacred cows of Hardy's day. 406 00:26:48,200 --> 00:26:51,480 At the same time, Hardy seems to think that what's going on 407 00:26:51,520 --> 00:26:57,840 in that particular moment of 1890s Britain is not so unusual. 408 00:26:57,880 --> 00:27:02,240 This is, in a way, the nature of human experience - 409 00:27:02,280 --> 00:27:06,360 that we're caught between aspiration and possibility. 410 00:27:06,400 --> 00:27:11,800 What we seek to achieve is thwarted by forces beyond our control... 411 00:27:13,120 --> 00:27:17,040 ..which can be identified, 412 00:27:17,080 --> 00:27:19,680 and whose injustice can be anatomised 413 00:27:19,720 --> 00:27:22,280 but can't necessarily be removed. 414 00:27:22,320 --> 00:27:25,800 One reviewer said that that is the voice of the working class 415 00:27:25,840 --> 00:27:29,400 speaking more distinctly than ever before in literature, 416 00:27:29,440 --> 00:27:33,920 and that there is no other novelist alive with this breadth of sympathy. 417 00:27:35,520 --> 00:27:39,560 Hardy wrote in his final, desolate novel, Jude The Obscure... 418 00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:43,680 ..'Then another silence, till she was seized with another 419 00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:45,720 uncontrollable fit of grief. 420 00:27:47,400 --> 00:27:50,400 "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!' 421 00:27:50,440 --> 00:27:53,160 First it said, 'You shan't learn!' 422 00:27:53,200 --> 00:27:57,920 Then it said, 'You shan't labour!' Now it says, 'You shan't love!'" 423 00:27:57,960 --> 00:28:02,320 He tried to soothe her by saying, "That's bitter of you, darling." 424 00:28:02,360 --> 00:28:04,360 "But it's true!"' 425 00:28:06,920 --> 00:28:10,480 Dominated by a sense of being between classes, 426 00:28:10,520 --> 00:28:13,680 he loved London society, yet never felt part of it. 427 00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:18,520 Neglectful of his first wife, dominated by a troubled inner life, 428 00:28:18,560 --> 00:28:22,720 this public man lived in what is called a malignant universe. 429 00:28:23,720 --> 00:28:26,080 Hardy, like the prophet Job in the Old Testament, 430 00:28:26,120 --> 00:28:29,360 challenged the cruelty of the God he no longer believed in. 431 00:28:29,400 --> 00:28:32,360 He found the cruelty of the world unbearable. 432 00:28:33,480 --> 00:28:36,640 Bishops were to burn his books, and his views, 433 00:28:36,680 --> 00:28:39,320 particularly his views on the destructive effects of religion, 434 00:28:39,360 --> 00:28:42,440 were to turn his first wife, Emma, against him. 435 00:28:42,480 --> 00:28:45,720 And then, finally, to force Hardy himself to forsake the novel 436 00:28:45,760 --> 00:28:48,480 and return to the poetry he had always loved more. 437 00:28:49,880 --> 00:28:52,280 But deep in his inner self, 438 00:28:52,320 --> 00:28:55,360 Thomas Hardy remained that raging, wounded self 439 00:28:55,400 --> 00:28:58,240 who chastised the values of the world he inhabited. 440 00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:08,240 After Emma's lonely death in the attic of Max Gate, 441 00:29:08,280 --> 00:29:11,280 Hardy suddenly fell in love again with the wife 442 00:29:11,320 --> 00:29:14,560 he had ignored and neglected for so much of their marriage. 443 00:29:14,600 --> 00:29:18,400 He kept Emma's coffin at the end of his bed for three days. 444 00:29:19,560 --> 00:29:23,880 He sought to possess her as he had done with his great heroines. 445 00:29:24,880 --> 00:29:27,720 Hardy was to write no more about other women. 446 00:29:28,840 --> 00:29:31,880 He remembered his own past through an outpouring of passion 447 00:29:31,920 --> 00:29:34,280 and wonderful poetry. 448 00:29:34,320 --> 00:29:37,760 So, after her death, the poems he initially wrote 449 00:29:37,800 --> 00:29:42,640 were full of praise and celebration of the love that they'd enjoyed 450 00:29:42,680 --> 00:29:44,760 as a young couple. 451 00:29:44,800 --> 00:29:47,240 In years defaced and lost, 452 00:29:47,280 --> 00:29:50,560 Two sat here, transport-tossed, 453 00:29:50,600 --> 00:29:52,600 Lit by a living love 454 00:29:52,640 --> 00:29:54,760 The wilted world knew nothing of... 455 00:29:55,760 --> 00:29:57,760 'O not again 456 00:29:57,800 --> 00:29:59,960 Till Earth outwears 457 00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:02,000 Shall love like theirs 458 00:30:02,040 --> 00:30:04,040 Suffuse this glen!' 459 00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:07,560 What is also interesting, however, is that... 460 00:30:07,600 --> 00:30:09,960 subsequently to that, he writes a number of poems 461 00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:16,160 in which he acknowledges the cruelty that started to arise between them, 462 00:30:16,200 --> 00:30:18,960 and cruelties which he himself perpetrated. 463 00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:21,720 And this is something - a side of him which... 464 00:30:22,760 --> 00:30:24,880 ..does seem remarkable in the extent 465 00:30:24,920 --> 00:30:27,200 to which he's willing to acknowledge remorse... 466 00:30:27,240 --> 00:30:31,240 ADRIAN: Now I am dead you sing to me The songs we used to know, 467 00:30:31,280 --> 00:30:35,360 But while I lived you had no wish Or care for doing so. 468 00:30:36,360 --> 00:30:39,600 Now I am dead you come to me In the moonlight, comfortless; 469 00:30:39,640 --> 00:30:44,480 Ah, what would I have given alive To win such tenderness! 470 00:30:44,520 --> 00:30:48,800 ..but also seems to correlate with, and to be based in, 471 00:30:48,840 --> 00:30:53,040 acts of genuine cruelty, which he performed. 472 00:30:53,080 --> 00:30:55,120 It was but a little thing, 473 00:30:55,160 --> 00:30:57,320 Yet I knew it meant to me 474 00:30:57,360 --> 00:31:00,080 Ease from what had given a sting... 475 00:31:00,120 --> 00:31:02,280 But I would not welcome it; 476 00:31:02,320 --> 00:31:04,320 And for all I then declined... 477 00:31:05,320 --> 00:31:07,480 ..O the regrettings infinite 478 00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:09,840 When the night-processions flit 479 00:31:09,880 --> 00:31:11,880 Through the mind! 480 00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:14,640 For example, in the early 20th century, 481 00:31:14,680 --> 00:31:16,920 he was awarded the Order of Merit. 482 00:31:16,960 --> 00:31:21,520 The story goes, and there seems to be some evidence for it, 483 00:31:21,560 --> 00:31:24,560 that he was awarded the Order of Merit instead of a knighthood, 484 00:31:24,600 --> 00:31:26,600 and that he had turned down a knighthood. 485 00:31:26,640 --> 00:31:28,800 And one of his reasons for turning down a knighthood 486 00:31:28,840 --> 00:31:31,400 was that Emma would have been honoured by it - 487 00:31:31,440 --> 00:31:36,360 she would have been made a Lady, and he had no truck with that. 488 00:31:36,400 --> 00:31:40,680 So that his behaviour towards her was, 489 00:31:40,720 --> 00:31:43,520 as he became increasingly aware after her death - 490 00:31:43,560 --> 00:31:45,680 and perhaps aware only after her death - 491 00:31:45,720 --> 00:31:48,400 his behaviour towards her had been, in many ways, 492 00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:50,760 reprehensible and cruel and harsh. 493 00:31:50,800 --> 00:31:55,880 Had you wept; had you but neared me with a frail uncertain ray, 494 00:31:55,920 --> 00:32:00,840 Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye, 495 00:32:00,880 --> 00:32:06,240 Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day, 496 00:32:06,280 --> 00:32:09,320 And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven, 497 00:32:09,360 --> 00:32:12,560 have smoothed the things awry. 498 00:32:12,600 --> 00:32:14,600 What he then writes, though, 499 00:32:14,640 --> 00:32:19,120 are a number of other poems in that same volume of 1914, 500 00:32:19,160 --> 00:32:21,240 and then in his subsequent volumes, 501 00:32:21,280 --> 00:32:27,880 in which the more difficult side of this experience come to the surface, 502 00:32:27,920 --> 00:32:32,440 poems in which he asks himself what went wrong - why did it go wrong? 503 00:32:32,480 --> 00:32:34,800 What did I do that made it go wrong? 504 00:32:35,800 --> 00:32:39,040 What kind of torture did I inflict on this woman 505 00:32:39,080 --> 00:32:41,600 in the course of our married life? 506 00:32:41,640 --> 00:32:44,320 Unwittingly, perhaps, unconsciously, not deliberately, 507 00:32:44,360 --> 00:32:50,040 but nonetheless, actually. And to what extent, actually, 508 00:32:50,080 --> 00:32:52,720 in ways that I don't necessarily want to acknowledge, 509 00:32:52,760 --> 00:32:55,320 to what extent was she responsible for this? 510 00:32:55,360 --> 00:33:00,800 'I wounded one who's there, and now know well I wounded her; 511 00:33:00,840 --> 00:33:05,480 But, ah, she does not know that she wounded me!' 512 00:33:06,480 --> 00:33:08,400 And not an air stirred... 513 00:33:09,400 --> 00:33:14,800 ..Nor a bill of any bird, and no response accorded she. 514 00:33:14,840 --> 00:33:17,920 So there are really remarkable poems in those later volumes, 515 00:33:17,960 --> 00:33:21,080 in which all those really difficult questions 516 00:33:21,120 --> 00:33:25,200 when you look back at a failed or unsuccessful relationship, 517 00:33:25,240 --> 00:33:27,800 those questions are allowed to come to the surface. 518 00:33:27,840 --> 00:33:32,000 So, it seems to me that the experience of... 519 00:33:32,040 --> 00:33:34,760 I mean, I think he was a great poet before Emma died, 520 00:33:34,800 --> 00:33:39,560 but I think that the experience of her death produced in him, 521 00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:45,880 in some ways, both one of the most successful and profound moments 522 00:33:45,920 --> 00:33:48,880 of conventional elegy in 1912-1913. 523 00:33:48,920 --> 00:33:54,080 And then a succession of poems which are acutely difficult 524 00:33:54,120 --> 00:33:56,240 in their emotional register... 525 00:33:57,640 --> 00:33:59,960 SAM: O the doom by someone spoken - 526 00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:02,320 Who shall unseal the years, the years!- 527 00:34:02,360 --> 00:34:04,680 O the doom that gave no token, 528 00:34:04,720 --> 00:34:06,760 When nothing of bale saw we... 529 00:34:08,680 --> 00:34:12,040 ADRIAN ..O the doom by someone spoken, 530 00:34:12,080 --> 00:34:15,440 O the heart by someone broken, 531 00:34:15,480 --> 00:34:21,640 The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me. 532 00:34:22,880 --> 00:34:29,200 ..and profoundly insightful, and also self-critical, actually. 533 00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:35,280 He won't let go of the sense that...he was at fault, 534 00:34:35,320 --> 00:34:39,240 that she was at fault. Why can it not be rectified? 535 00:34:39,280 --> 00:34:42,200 Why didn't they rectify it while they had the chance? 536 00:34:43,200 --> 00:34:45,560 What stopped him? What stopped them? 537 00:34:45,600 --> 00:34:47,880 And those, I think, are really great poems. 538 00:34:49,320 --> 00:34:54,480 SAM: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, 539 00:34:54,520 --> 00:34:57,920 Saying that now you are not as you were 540 00:34:57,960 --> 00:35:01,400 When you had changed from the one who was all to me, 541 00:35:01,440 --> 00:35:04,200 But as at first, when our day was fair. 542 00:35:12,400 --> 00:35:15,080 Thomas Hardy was also a great war poet. 543 00:35:15,120 --> 00:35:17,400 Young Hodge the Drummer never knew - 544 00:35:17,440 --> 00:35:20,160 Fresh from his Wessex home - 545 00:35:20,200 --> 00:35:22,240 The meaning of the broad Karoo, 546 00:35:22,280 --> 00:35:24,320 The Bush, the dusty loam, 547 00:35:24,360 --> 00:35:27,240 And why uprose to nightly view 548 00:35:27,280 --> 00:35:29,920 Strange stars amid the gloam. 549 00:35:29,960 --> 00:35:32,160 Yet portion of that unknown plain 550 00:35:32,200 --> 00:35:34,280 Will Hodge for ever be; 551 00:35:34,320 --> 00:35:36,680 His homely Northern breast and brain 552 00:35:36,720 --> 00:35:38,720 Grow up a Southern tree, 553 00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:41,680 And strange-eyed constellations reign 554 00:35:41,720 --> 00:35:43,920 His stars eternally. 555 00:35:43,960 --> 00:35:47,960 BIRCH: Hardy's sympathies when it came to global conflicts, 556 00:35:48,000 --> 00:35:50,600 international conflicts - war, in short - 557 00:35:50,640 --> 00:35:56,600 were always with the soldier and the sufferings of the soldier. 558 00:35:56,640 --> 00:36:03,200 So, his poem in response to the Boer War, Drummer Hodge, for instance, 559 00:36:03,240 --> 00:36:09,800 is not a grandiose celebration, nor indeed a grandiose elegy. 560 00:36:09,840 --> 00:36:14,480 It's a very simple poem about that homely - 561 00:36:14,520 --> 00:36:16,800 he uses that word, 'homely' - 562 00:36:16,840 --> 00:36:21,920 northern breast that is buried there in South Africa. 563 00:36:21,960 --> 00:36:26,040 And it's that perspective, the perspective of the soldier, 564 00:36:26,080 --> 00:36:32,360 that subsequent soldiers, some of them themselves poets, found moving. 565 00:36:33,480 --> 00:36:36,160 Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, 566 00:36:36,200 --> 00:36:40,320 We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! 567 00:36:41,320 --> 00:36:46,080 But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, 568 00:36:46,120 --> 00:36:50,760 I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. 569 00:36:51,760 --> 00:36:56,280 Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down 570 00:36:56,320 --> 00:37:00,640 You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown. 571 00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:04,720 The evidence from Hardy's letters and from his poems, 572 00:37:04,760 --> 00:37:08,040 and from his introductions to his post-war poems, 573 00:37:08,080 --> 00:37:11,800 all of that together makes it clear that, for him, 574 00:37:11,840 --> 00:37:16,600 the First World War was... a devastating moment. 575 00:37:16,640 --> 00:37:21,600 Catastrophic in its...in the fact that it happened, really. 576 00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:28,440 Firstly, that the investment he'd made in the idea of human progress, 577 00:37:28,480 --> 00:37:32,320 in civilisation moving forward gradually, incrementally, 578 00:37:32,360 --> 00:37:36,360 but nonetheless steadi... you know, genuinely. 579 00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:40,280 All of that was thrown into question when the First World War broke out 580 00:37:40,320 --> 00:37:45,920 and the nations of Europe went back to their internecine struggles, 581 00:37:45,960 --> 00:37:49,720 but now with, you know, the added bonus of machine guns. 582 00:37:50,760 --> 00:37:53,760 So that part of him retreated from the war completely. 583 00:37:53,800 --> 00:37:58,960 On the other hand, he wrote poems 584 00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:02,600 in support of, and to encourage, 585 00:38:02,640 --> 00:38:05,720 people in their struggles in the war. 586 00:38:05,760 --> 00:38:09,080 He wrote a wonderful poem early on called Men Who March Away. 587 00:38:10,120 --> 00:38:14,240 In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just, 588 00:38:14,280 --> 00:38:17,440 And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust, 589 00:38:17,480 --> 00:38:20,440 Press we to the field ungrieving, 590 00:38:20,480 --> 00:38:23,720 In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just. 591 00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:29,040 And that's very typical of him in the sense that he had of... 592 00:38:30,120 --> 00:38:33,720 ..the value and impressiveness of military heroism, 593 00:38:33,760 --> 00:38:36,320 that's something that runs right across his career. 594 00:38:36,360 --> 00:38:39,800 And at the same time, his sense that, you know, war is hell, 595 00:38:39,840 --> 00:38:44,160 war is horrible, war is just a hideous... 596 00:38:45,160 --> 00:38:50,280 ..you know, intolerable...historical event. 597 00:38:51,320 --> 00:38:56,640 This is an aspect of Hardy which is often muffled by his reception, 598 00:38:56,680 --> 00:39:00,560 by the image he presents himself in life 599 00:39:00,600 --> 00:39:05,880 of the mellow and insightful wise man, 600 00:39:05,920 --> 00:39:08,880 the respectable country gentleman. 601 00:39:08,920 --> 00:39:12,360 With all of those attributes, which are unmistakably present in him, 602 00:39:12,400 --> 00:39:17,320 co-exist with a furious indignation at the injustice of the world. 603 00:39:22,440 --> 00:39:26,160 The death of the children in Jude is, I think, 604 00:39:26,200 --> 00:39:30,800 the most painful episode in Hardy's fiction. 605 00:39:30,840 --> 00:39:34,080 It was a very conscious choice on his part 606 00:39:34,120 --> 00:39:36,640 to make that extreme statement, 607 00:39:36,680 --> 00:39:40,920 perhaps the most extreme moment in his fiction. 608 00:39:42,440 --> 00:39:44,960 Hardy's long-standing friend Edmund Gosse, 609 00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:51,840 even he found Jude inexplicable in its rage and wrote about it. 610 00:39:51,880 --> 00:39:54,480 I'm slightly paraphrasing, 611 00:39:54,520 --> 00:39:56,840 'What has moved Thomas Hardy to stand up in Dorset 612 00:39:56,880 --> 00:39:58,880 and shake his fist at the creator?' 613 00:40:03,600 --> 00:40:06,360 Hardy was, all his life, afraid of being touched. 614 00:40:07,440 --> 00:40:11,440 It is through his eyes that Hardy touches the world. 615 00:40:11,480 --> 00:40:14,120 This may account for the vividness of the visual impressions 616 00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:16,160 he makes in every part of his work. 617 00:40:17,600 --> 00:40:20,880 The sadness surrounding not wanting to be touched is mirrored by 618 00:40:20,920 --> 00:40:24,640 his inability to touch the beautiful women that he desired so much. 619 00:40:26,800 --> 00:40:28,960 Beneath the sense of a great man, 620 00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:32,320 it is impossible not to notice the cross-classing voyeur... 621 00:40:33,520 --> 00:40:37,200 ..the man who, in today's money, made six million pounds - 622 00:40:37,240 --> 00:40:41,680 so much money he was able to turn to poetry without any restriction. 623 00:40:43,040 --> 00:40:45,720 He had had enough of the need for permanent cliffhangers 624 00:40:45,760 --> 00:40:47,760 required in his novel writing. 625 00:40:49,840 --> 00:40:53,280 On his death bed, Hardy himself felt he had achieved everything 626 00:40:53,320 --> 00:40:55,600 he had wanted to achieve in life. 627 00:40:55,640 --> 00:40:58,200 Almost uniquely for a dying man, 628 00:40:58,240 --> 00:41:02,400 Hardy also asked for God's forgiveness, not of himself, 629 00:41:02,440 --> 00:41:06,720 but for the very God himself to be forgiven by Thomas Hardy. 630 00:41:08,920 --> 00:41:11,520 Hardy felt that he was a dead man walking - 631 00:41:11,560 --> 00:41:14,720 he only had life when he could see and feel his own work. 632 00:41:15,920 --> 00:41:19,880 That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death 633 00:41:19,920 --> 00:41:22,360 or made to grieve on account of me, 634 00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:25,960 and that I be not buried in consecrated ground. 635 00:41:26,960 --> 00:41:29,960 And that no sexton will be asked to toll the bell. 636 00:41:30,960 --> 00:41:34,200 And that nobody is wished to see my dead body, 637 00:41:34,240 --> 00:41:37,920 and that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral. 638 00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:41,640 And that no flowers be planted on my grave... 639 00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:45,400 ..and that no man remember me. 640 00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:47,440 To this I put my name. 641 00:41:51,400 --> 00:41:55,560 One of the things which most annoyed Hardy about the way he was reviewed 642 00:41:55,600 --> 00:42:01,080 was the habit critics had of imposing upon his work 643 00:42:01,120 --> 00:42:04,960 something consistent by way of a philosophy or something systematic. 644 00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:09,840 So, his sense that life is sometimes full of great things 645 00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:13,960 co-exists with his absolutely equivalent sense 646 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:17,920 that life is often remarkable in its nastiness, 647 00:42:17,960 --> 00:42:20,840 in its injustice, in its cruelty and its pain. 648 00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:25,080 Now all these specimens of man, 649 00:42:25,120 --> 00:42:27,800 So various in their pith and plan, 650 00:42:27,840 --> 00:42:31,440 Curious to say Were one man. Yea, 651 00:42:31,480 --> 00:42:34,160 I was all they. 652 00:42:34,200 --> 00:42:39,080 Hardy was capable of great ruefulness, great wistfulness 653 00:42:39,120 --> 00:42:42,440 and a sense of human loss and tragedy. 654 00:42:42,480 --> 00:42:45,360 But at the same time you notice, and again, 655 00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:49,640 it's something I think which his reputation has somehow hidden, 656 00:42:49,680 --> 00:42:53,400 you can see in his writing, both in prose and poetry, 657 00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:59,320 an enormous capacity to enjoy, to cherish, to welcome life. 658 00:42:59,360 --> 00:43:01,560 There's a wonderful poem called Great Things, 659 00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:05,360 which he publishes as late as 1917, 660 00:43:05,400 --> 00:43:09,640 which says cider is a great thing, dancing is a great thing, 661 00:43:09,680 --> 00:43:12,560 music is a great thing, riding on a horse. 662 00:43:12,600 --> 00:43:16,960 He lists all the sources of ecstatic, excited, 663 00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:19,520 delightful pleasure which he takes in life. 664 00:43:19,560 --> 00:43:22,200 There's another poem he writes in the same volume called... 665 00:43:22,240 --> 00:43:26,520 Lines Written To A Movement In Mozart's E-Flat Symphony, 666 00:43:26,560 --> 00:43:31,400 which again, is all about the way life draws you on, takes you up, 667 00:43:31,440 --> 00:43:35,920 instils in you energy, dynamism, pleasure, delight. 668 00:43:35,960 --> 00:43:40,200 And I think one of the things I most regret about Hardy's reputation 669 00:43:40,240 --> 00:43:43,240 is the extent to which that aspect of him, 670 00:43:43,280 --> 00:43:48,360 that simple and pure and dynamic pleasure 671 00:43:48,400 --> 00:43:52,040 he takes in being alive - how frequently that's been lost. 672 00:43:54,560 --> 00:43:56,920 ADRIAN: Hardy never succumbed to despair 673 00:43:56,960 --> 00:43:59,480 but acknowledged it and interrogated it. 674 00:43:59,520 --> 00:44:02,400 He was not only a dead man walking, 675 00:44:02,440 --> 00:44:07,040 Hardy's greatness as a man allowed him to actually walk beside 676 00:44:07,080 --> 00:44:11,200 his own dead self - the 'corpse-thing I am to-day' - 677 00:44:11,240 --> 00:44:14,280 to have two inner lives, lived together. 678 00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:19,760 Hardy's self-interrogation was undertaken with the same force 679 00:44:19,800 --> 00:44:23,040 with which he had looked so carefully and honestly 680 00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:25,840 at his behaviour towards his wife Emma. 681 00:44:27,240 --> 00:44:30,480 After the First World War, Max Gate, Hardy's home, 682 00:44:30,520 --> 00:44:36,080 became a focus of pilgrimage for many different young writers, 683 00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:38,040 many of them who had fought in the war. 684 00:44:38,080 --> 00:44:43,520 And it's sort of peculiar, they also write great celebratory verses 685 00:44:43,560 --> 00:44:47,400 for his birthday, they kind of revere him, they elevate him. 686 00:44:47,440 --> 00:44:53,000 One wonders why, and it seems to me that the explanation lies in 687 00:44:53,040 --> 00:44:57,240 the extent to which Hardy was able to convey... 688 00:44:58,280 --> 00:45:01,480 ..stability, steadiness under fire, 689 00:45:01,520 --> 00:45:05,080 and also the value of continuing to write 690 00:45:05,120 --> 00:45:07,760 even when the world seems to be falling apart around you. 691 00:45:07,800 --> 00:45:12,280 So, the transformation of Hardy from pariah to establishment figure, 692 00:45:12,320 --> 00:45:16,840 in the latter part of his life, carried on after his death 693 00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:20,720 in the sense that his funeral in 1928 694 00:45:20,760 --> 00:45:24,040 was a civic and national moment, 695 00:45:24,080 --> 00:45:29,920 with politicians - leading politicians - carrying the coffin. 696 00:45:29,960 --> 00:45:34,840 The leading writers of the day assembled around to honour him. 697 00:45:34,880 --> 00:45:37,880 At the same time, however, he was... 698 00:45:40,240 --> 00:45:43,120 ..although he was buried in Westminster Abbey, 699 00:45:43,160 --> 00:45:49,720 his heart was buried right next door to him in Stinsford churchyard. 700 00:45:49,760 --> 00:45:54,560 And his younger sister, Catherine, who outlived him, 701 00:45:54,600 --> 00:45:59,200 wrote about that funeral with touching simplicity, actually, 702 00:45:59,240 --> 00:46:02,600 and said that this was where he really was - 703 00:46:02,640 --> 00:46:07,840 that the civic, the national occasion had seemed to take him over 704 00:46:07,880 --> 00:46:14,880 and consumed him, and made him into this emblem of national achievement. 705 00:46:14,920 --> 00:46:17,680 But for her and, I think, for Hardy himself, 706 00:46:17,720 --> 00:46:20,800 he remained in this place of Dorset 707 00:46:20,840 --> 00:46:23,840 where he'd grown-up and where he'd lived all his life. 708 00:46:26,680 --> 00:46:30,640 Thomas Hardy had lived from 1840 to 1928, 709 00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:32,680 through a period of enormous political, 710 00:46:32,720 --> 00:46:35,080 technical and scientific change. 711 00:46:35,120 --> 00:46:39,120 He had supported women's suffrage, opposed empire and racism, 712 00:46:39,160 --> 00:46:42,240 and stood behind the poor and disenfranchised. 713 00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:44,960 Thomas Hardy's heart was a radical heart. 714 00:46:46,040 --> 00:46:48,560 Hardy's return to Cornwall after the death of Emma 715 00:46:48,600 --> 00:46:52,880 is the most remarkable attempt at rebirth by a 73-year-old man. 716 00:46:52,920 --> 00:46:56,680 His memory of what he felt for two wonderful years returns to him 717 00:46:56,720 --> 00:47:00,160 in an extraordinary mixture of ecstasy and regret. 718 00:47:00,200 --> 00:47:04,960 Hardy relives feelings of love and possibility which re-elevated him 719 00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:07,600 and acted to increase the quality of his poetry 720 00:47:07,640 --> 00:47:10,360 in a further fifteen years of powerful work, 721 00:47:10,400 --> 00:47:13,000 this poetry being the finest that he wrote. 722 00:47:14,000 --> 00:47:17,640 To the outer world, Hardy's persona included being a bicyclist, 723 00:47:17,680 --> 00:47:20,640 a Justice of the Peace, a lover of nature 724 00:47:20,680 --> 00:47:23,960 and an enthusiastic participant in London society. 725 00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:28,160 Hardy emphasised kindness and mercy above all things 726 00:47:28,200 --> 00:47:30,720 in personal and social relationships. 727 00:47:30,760 --> 00:47:33,680 He had a permanent horror of cruelty to animals. 728 00:47:35,040 --> 00:47:37,960 A haunted man living in a haunted self, 729 00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:41,720 Thomas Hardy lived to a great age. He married two women - 730 00:47:41,760 --> 00:47:44,320 the second, 39 years younger than himself. 731 00:47:44,360 --> 00:47:46,360 He had no children. 732 00:47:47,440 --> 00:47:49,480 'We have been made to enter the shade 733 00:47:49,520 --> 00:47:54,040 of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, 734 00:47:54,080 --> 00:47:57,160 bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, 735 00:47:57,200 --> 00:47:59,440 even when most moved to anger, 736 00:47:59,480 --> 00:48:02,960 lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women.' 737 00:48:04,040 --> 00:48:06,640 Hardy's is a vision of the world and of man's lot 738 00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:09,720 as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination - 739 00:48:09,760 --> 00:48:14,240 a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. 740 00:48:14,280 --> 00:48:16,680 AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk