SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
What wouldst have hoped and had the
Will to be?…
SEMI-CHORUS I OF THE PITIES
Nay;—shall not
Its blindness break?
Yea, must not
Its heart awake,
Promptly tending
To its mending
In a genial germing purpose,
and for loving-kindness' sake?
SEMI-CHORUS II
Should It never
Curb or cure
Aught whatever
Those endure
Whom It quickens,
Let them darkle
To extinction
Swift and sure,
CHORUS
But—a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and
Deliverance offered
From the darts that were,
Consciousness the
Will informing, till
It fashions all things fair!
The Spirit of the Years (which is another name for Hardy's reflections upon life and history) planned in sad conviction of the "blank entrancement" of the Great Foresightless Will, those sad narratives in which innocence, as in "Tess of the d'Ubervilles," is crushed, or vivid personality frustrated, as in "The Return of the Native." It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy which wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but pity worked them out.
The characters that Hardy loved—Grace, Marty South, Jude, Tess— are life, brooding, intense, potential, and lovely, struggling against a fate which they help to draw upon themselves, but which is, nevertheless, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not told to describe it. It is his creatures that get the color, the interest; they are valuable to us, and would be to him, whatever the truth of his philosophy. But because he loves life, the living thing, even the lizard in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations.
Pessimistic Hardy is, as any gentle heart would be who chose to study misfortune; yet pessimist is not the right term for him. Realist he is clearly, in the philosophic sense of one who is willing to view things as they are without prejudice. I seek a term for a mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when most ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. Pity for the individual, not despair of the race, is his motive. And pity makes his gentle style, pity makes him regardless of artifice, and gives his often clumsy novels an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. It is instructive to compare the relative fortunes of Hardy and Meredith, once always bracketed—the apostle of pity in comparison with the most subtle and brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has outranked him.
Already it begins to appear that the inconsistent, half-conscious Will that was the sum and substance of Hardy's pessimism was given certain attributes of gloom that scarcely belonged to it. The ruthless struggle for life by which the fittest for the circumstances of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the clear law of human life. Science, with the rediscovery of Mendelism and its insistence upon psychological factors has submitted important qualifications to this deduction which Hardy, in common with others intellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. But it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that counts in his art? except in so far as it casts the plan of his stories, or sometimes, as in "Tess," or "The Woodlanders," gives too much play to cruel accident, and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser moments of the plots. Our critical emphasis in the past has been wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words, be set not upon the idea, the suggested explanation of misfortune, but upon the living creatures in his novels and poems alike. It is the characters he wrought in pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a great man in our modern world, although only once did he pass beyond the bounds of his primitive Wessex. The novelist of pity and its poet, not the spokesman for pessimism, is the title I solicit for him.