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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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