THOMAS HARDY
We shall deal with three outstanding novelists, each of whom is representative of a different class. We shall have space sufficient for a small number only of the other novelists.
1. His Life. Thomas Hardy was born (1840) in Dorsetshire, and after being educated locally finished his studies at King’s College, London. He adopted the profession of an architect, being specially interested in the architecture of early churches. Ambitious to achieve fame as an author, he began, as so many other literary aspirants have done, with poetry. In this branch of literature he met with scant recognition; so, when he was over thirty years old, he took to the writing of novels. These too had no popular success, though they did not go unpraised by discerning critics. Nevertheless, Hardy continued uninterruptedly to issue works of fiction, which gradually but surely brought him fame. He was enabled to abandon his profession as an architect and retire to his native Dorchester, where he lived the life of a literary recluse. Popular applause, which he had never courted, in the end came in full measure. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday the greatest literary figures of the day united to do him homage, and the King, with characteristic felicity, sent a message of gracious compliment. Some years previously (1910) he had received the Order of Merit, no inappropriate distinction.
2. His Poetry. As early as 1865, and thence onward, Mr. Hardy issued fugitive pieces of poetry, which were at length collected and published as Wessex Poems (1898). Many of the poems, none of which is very long, are of the dramatic monologue type. The typical Hardy note is apparent in nearly all of them; a careful and measured utterance, a stern eye for the tragedy of common things, and a somber submission to the dictates of an unkind fate. One or two of them are brighter, with a wry kind of humor, like the well-known Valenciennes. A second collection, Poems of the Past and Present (1901), has a deeper and more sardonic note, but the feeling of pitiful regret is still predominant. This is particularly so in the poems on the South African War. The Dead Drummer, a poem of this group, three brief stanzas in length, tells of Drummer Hodge slain and buried in the veld. The Hardy attitude is almost perfectly revealed in the last stanza:
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.
In The Dynasts, which was published in several parts between 1903 and 1908, we meet with Mr. Hardy’s most ambitious poetical effort. In scope the poem is vast, for it deals with the Napoleonic wars, with all Europe for its scene. In length it is prodigious, and before the reader has reached the end he is overwhelmed with the magnitude of it. In form it is dramatic, in the sense that Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is dramatic; the scene shifts from point to point, the historical figures utter long monologues, and superhuman intelligences, such as Pity and the Spirit of the Years, add commentaries upon the activities of mankind. Above and behind all of it broods a sense of stern fatalism—the Immanent Will, as the author calls it; and in front of this enormous curtain of fate and futility even the figure of Napoleon is dwarfed and impotent.
Satires of Circumstance (1914) is another collection of shorter pieces. The satires themselves, which occupy quite a small portion of the book, are almost brutal and rancorous in their choice and treatment of unhappy incidents. No doubt their author judges such a tone to be necessary in the production of satire. The effect is very impressive. For example, in the short piece called In the Cemetery he begins:
“You see those mothers squabbling there?”
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
“One says in tears, ‘’Tis mine lies here!’
Another, ‘Nay, mine, you Pharisee!’
Another, ‘How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!’
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.”
And the cemetery man goes on to say that all the bodies had been removed to make room for a drain-pipe, and that the quarreling was taking place over the drain-pipe.
A further group of poems in this same volume is called Poems of 1912–1913. In this group of poems, which are elegiac in nature, Mr. Hardy’s lyrical genius develops a late but splendid bloom. It is unique in our history for a poet over seventy years old to surpass all the efforts of his prime. In the depth of their emotion and the terse adequacy of their style they represent the consummation of his poetry. We quote briefly:
(1) I found her out there
On a slope few see,
That falls westwardly
To the sharp-edged air,
Where the ocean breaks
On the purple strand,
And the hurricane shakes
The solid land.
(2) Nobody says: Ah, that is the place
Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago,
What none of the Three Towns cared to know—
The birth of a little girl of grace—
The sweetest the house saw, first or last;
Yet it was so
On that day long past.
Nobody thinks: There, there she lay
In a room by the Hoe, like the bud of a flower,
And listened, just after the bed time hour,
To the stammering chimes that used to play
The quaint Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth tune
In Saint Andrew’s tower
Night, morn, and noon.
*****
Nay: one there is to whom these things,
That nobody else’s mind calls back,
Have a savour that scenes in being lack,
And a presence more than the actual brings;
To whom to-day is beneaped and stale,
And its urgent clack
But a vapid tale.
Places
3. His Novels. Mr. Hardy’s first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), is, even as a first attempt, a little disappointing. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) is an improvement, and in its sweet and faithful rendering of country life suggests Silas Marner. Next appeared A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), much more powerful, in which coincidences combine to produce a pitifully tragic conclusion. This is a fine specimen of the Hardy “pessimism.” By this time Mr. Hardy had matured his style and developed his views, and the succeeding novels display a masterly power that rarely deserts him: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-Major (1879), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1885), and The Woodlanders (1887). Then Mr. Hardy’s career as a novelist culminated in two novels which have already taken rank among the great books of the language: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894). The first is the story of a woman (“a pure woman,” the novelist calls her), of a noble line long decayed, who, as the victim of a malign and persistent destiny, commits murder and perishes on the scaffold; the second is the life-history of an obscure craftsman, fired by the noblest ideals, who struggles to attain to better things, but dies broken and disappointed, like Job cursing the day he was born: drab and somber tales, lit by rare gleams of delicious humor and sentiment, and lifted to the level of great art by boundless insight and pity. After this The Well Beloved (1897) was of the nature of an anti-climax, and Mr. Hardy wrote no more novels.
4. Features of his Novels. (a) Their Literary Quality. Of the novelists of his time Mr. Hardy is the most assiduous in his attention to the practices of his great literary predecessors, such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Shelley. This, perhaps, gives his novels rather a heavy touch, so that he will never find a facile popularity; but he is never cheap and never tawdry, he builds broad and square, and his work will surely endure.
(b) Their English Quality. Like Chaucer and Shakespeare, Mr. Hardy, though he includes all humanity in his outlook, is profoundly and essentially English. His works embrace English folk and strike their roots deep into English soil. His most successful creations are those of peasants bred in his own native shire, or in the adjacent shires. Hence he has given us a notable gallery of men and women who are true to their breed and satisfying in their actuality. The scene of the majority of his novels is a section of England that he calls Wessex. This includes approximately all the south and west of England south of a line joining Oxford and Bristol. Within this boundary he moves with ease and precision, and there he finds adequate literary sustenance. From a man of the caliber of Mr. Hardy such parochialism hardly requires an apology, but if it does he has given it fully. We quote a passage in which he defends his practice, and which in addition provides a good specimen of his expository prose:
It has sometimes been conceived of novels that evolve their action on a circumscribed scene—as do many (though not all) of these—that they cannot be so inclusive in their exhibition of human nature as novels wherein the scenes cover large extents of country, in which events figure amid towns and cities, even wander over the four quarters of the globe. I am not concerned to argue this point further than to suggest that the conception is an untrue one in respect of the elementary passions. But I would state that the geographical limits of the stage here trodden were not absolutely forced upon the writer by circumstances; he forced them upon himself from judgment. I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large proportion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex, that the domestic emotions have throbbed in Wessex nooks with as much intensity as in the palaces of Europe, and that, anyhow, there was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose. So far was I possessed by this idea that I kept within the frontiers when it would have been easier to overleap them and give more cosmopolitan features to the narrative.
General Preface to the Wessex Edition
(c) Their Pessimism. It cannot be denied that the novels are somewhat oppressive in the gloom of their atmosphere. As a novelist Mr. Hardy seems to conceive mankind as overlooked by a deliberately freakish and malignant Fate. His characters are consistently unfortunate when they deserve it least. In places, as in the case of Tess, he appears to bear down the scales, throwing against them the weight of repeated unhappy coincidences. Such a dismal method would in the end be repulsive to the reader’s sense of pity and justice if Mr. Hardy did not add to it a certain largeness and detachment of view and a somber but sympathetic clarity of vision that make the reader’s objections seem paltry and spiritless.
(d) Their Humor and Pathos. In many places, as in the rustic scenes of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the novels have a delicacy and acuteness of humor that strongly resembles that of George Eliot. At other times the humor is hard and heavy, as it is in his satires; at others, again, it has an odd grotesqueness. A short poetical extract will illustrate the last type:
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares.
We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds.
Channel Firing
His pathos is deep, sure, and strong, never degenerating into mawkishness or sentimentality. The conclusion of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a pattern of the dignified expression of sorrow:
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.
(e) His Style. Like many other great novelists, Mr. Hardy has no outstanding tricks of style. The general impression given is one of immense strength and dignity. His vocabulary is copious, but handled with scholarly care and accuracy. He is apt in phrase and pithy in expression, and in moments of emotion his prose moves with a strong rhythmic beauty. In his poetry the style may sometimes be crabbed and unorthodox, but only to suit a definite satiric purpose. We may sum up by saying that in his style, as in all the other constituents of his writing, he is always the sane and catholic artist.