THE NOVELIST OF PITY
To those interested in the meaning of the generation that has now left us quivering on the beach of after war, Thomas Hardy's books are so engrossing that to write of them needs no pretext; yet the recent publication of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces included is a welcome excuse for what I propose to make, not so much an essay as a record of a sudden understanding. Long familiarity with Hardy's novels had led to an afternoon of conversation with the author himself in the mildness of old age. But he remained for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to an earlier century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if not ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty he saw the young men beginning to follow him. It was a reading of "The Dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of the new edition, that suddenly and unexpectedly seemed to give me a key.
The danger, so I had thought and think, is that Hardy bids fair to become a legendary figure with an attribute, as is the way with such figures, better known than the man himself. "Hardy, oh, yes, the pessimist" threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy of gloom is already overshadowing the man's intense interest in strong and appealing life. It has been the fate of many a great artist to get a nickname, like a boy, and never be rid of it.
I do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove that Hardy was not a pessimist. He is the father of the English school that refuse to be either deists or moralists, and, like them, pushes his stories to an end that is often bitter. His temperament is cast in that brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indicates. Like the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brooding, adumbrative, rather than incisive or brilliant, and it often limps among the facts of his story like a man in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist, except when his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder passages that we remember him. Yet the most important fact about Hardy is not that he is pessimistic.
His manner of telling a story, however, helps to confirm the popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series of accidents, by which the doom of some lovely or aspiring spirit comes upon it by the slow drift of misfortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude—it is clear enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make them liable. But the master prepares for them trivial error, unhappy coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, until it is not surprising if the analytic mind insists that he is laboring some thesis of pessimism to be worked out by concrete example.
Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is annoying that the dean of letters in our tongue should be subjected to a sophomoric formula in which the emphasis is wrongly placed. The critics, in general, have defined this pessimism, stopped there, and said, this is Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism reads Hardy avidly. More light is needed.
Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and melancholy pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is the first quality one feels in him, but at eighty he still waxed his mustache tips, and his eyes lit eagerly. I remember how earnestly he denied knowledge of science, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had declared that his art consisted of applying the results of scientific inquiry to the study of simple human nature. If his treatment of nature was scientific, as I affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did not deny, then, he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not by theory. The war was still on when I talked with him. It had lifted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no longer interested him vitally. "It is too mechanical," he said. His novels, where fate seems to operate mechanically sometimes, he was willing that day to set aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too wasteful of time and space in its attempt to come at real issues. Yet these real issues, it appeared as we talked, were not theories. Ideas, he said, if emphasized, destroy art. Writers, he thought, in the future would give up pure fiction (serious writers, I suppose he meant). Poetry would be their shorthand; they would by intenser language cut short to their end.
What was his end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint characterization. He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey now in concentrated form by poetry which to him, so he said, was story- telling in verse.
It is easier to understand what he meant if one thinks how definitely Hardy belongs to his age, the latter nineteenth century, in spite of his reachings forward. On the one hand, his very gentleness is characteristic of a period that was above all others humane, On the other, his somber moods sprang from a generation that was the first to understand the implications of the struggle for life in the animal world all about them. They, to be sure, deduced from what they saw a vague theory of evolution in which the best (who were themselves) somehow were to come out best in the end. He, though gentle as they were, deduced nothing so cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepancies between fact and theory, so that his very gentleness made him pessimistic, where Browning was optimistic. Then, like Hawthorne in the generation before him, Hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life than his own, and there made his inquiries. Hawthorne, who did not accept the theology of Puritanism, was yet strangely troubled by the problem of sin. Hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution without its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity. This is his open secret.
The clearest statement is in his poetry, where again and again, in our conversation that day, he seemed to be placing it—most of all, I think, in "The Dynasts."
"The Dynasts" was published too soon. We English speakers, in 1904-1906, were beginning to read plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival, and the plays we read were successful on the stage. As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much of it at least was busied with the form of the drama, its great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel—a mistake. We thought that Hardy was taking the long way around, when in truth he had found a short cut to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the vastness of its Napoleonic subject, was far more concise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not become manifest, although the sharper- eyed may have seen it.
In "The Dynasts" I find all of Hardy. The Immanent Will is God, as Hardy conceives Him, neither rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating His own seeming ends, without irony and without compassion, and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sinister Angel and the Ironic Angel are moods well known to Hardy, but not loved by him. The Spirit of the Years that sees how poor human nature collides with accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is Hardy's reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities (not always, as he says, logical or consistent) is Hardy's own desire, his will, his faint but deep-felt hope. I quote, from the very end of the great spectacle, some lines in which the Spirits, who have watched the confused tragedy of the Napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts: