I
Thomas Hardy is a realist in a sense true of no English novelist of anything like equal rank preceding him: his literary genealogy is French, for his "Jude The Obscure" has no English prototype, except the earlier work of George Moore, whose inspiration is even more definitely Paris. To study Hardy's development for a period of about twenty-five years from "Under the Greenwood Tree" to "Jude," is to review, as they are expressed in the work of one great English novelist, the literary ideals before and after Zola. Few will cavil at the inclusion in our study of a living author like Hardy. His work ranks with the most influential of our time; so much may be seen already. His writing of fiction, moreover, or at least of Novels, seems to be finished. And like Meredith, he is a man of genius and, strictly speaking, a finer artist than the elder author. For quality, then, and significance of accomplishment, Hardy may well be examined with the masters whose record is rounded out by death. He offers a fine example of the logic of modern realism, as it has been applied by a first-class mind to the art of fiction. In Meredith, on the contrary, is shown a sort of synthesis of the realistic and poetic-philosophic interpretation. Hardy is for this reason easier to understand and explain; Meredith refuses classification.
The elements of strength in Thomas Hardy can be made out clearly; they are not elusive. Wisely, he has chosen to do a very definite thing and, with rare perseverance and skill, he has done it. He selected as setting the south-western part of England—Wessex, is the ancient name he gave it—that embraces Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well as one of philosophic fatalism.
It has not the cold removedness of the stoic: it has pity in it, even love. But it is deeply sad, sometimes bitter. In Hardy's presentation of Nature (a remark applying to some extent to a younger novelist who shows his influence, Phillpotts), she is displayed as an ironic expression, with even malignant moods, of a supreme cosmic indifference to the petty fate of that animalcule, man. And this, in spite of a curious power she possesses of consoling him and of charming him by blandishments that cheat the loneliness of his soul. There is no purer example of tragedy in modern literature than Mr. Hardy's strongest, most mature stories. A mind deeply serious and honest, interprets the human case in this wise and conceives that the underlying pitilessness can most graphically be conveyed in a setting like that of Egdon Heath, where the great silent forces of Nature somberly interblend with the forces set in motion by the human will, both futile to produce happiness. Even the attempt to be virtuous fails in "Jude": as the attempt to be happy does in "Tess." That sardonic, final thought in the last-named book will not out of our ears: Fate had played its last little jest with poor Tess.
But there are mitigations, many and welcome. Hardy has the most delightful humor. His peasants and simple middle-class folk are as distinctive and enjoyable as anything since Shakspere. He also has a more sophisticated, cutting humor—tipped with irony and tart to the taste—which he uses in those stories or scenes where urbanites mingle with his country folk. But his humorous triumphs are bucolic. And for another source of keenest pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work. Whether for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master. His mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is inscrutably dark and mysterious. He knows, none better, of the comfort to be got even from the sad when its beauty is made palpitating. No one before him, not Meredith himself, has so interfused Nature with man as to bring out the thought of man's ancient origin in the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on his allegiance. This gives a rare savor to his handling of what with most novelists is often mere background. Egdon Heath was mentioned; the setting in "The Return of the Native" is not background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its influence upon the fate of the other characters. So with "The Woodlanders" and still other stories. Take away this subtle and vital relation of man to Nature, and the whole organism collapses. Environment with Hardy is atmosphere, influence, often fate itself. Being a scientist in the cast of his intellect, although by temperament a poet, he believes in environment as the shaping power conceived of by Taine and Zola. It is this use of Nature as a power upon people of deep, strong, simple character, showing the sweep of forces far more potent than the conventions of the polite world, which distinguishes Hardy's fiction. Fate with him being so largely that impersonal thing, environment; allied with temperament (for which he is not responsible), and with opportunity—another element of luck—it follows logically that man is the sport of the gods. Hardy is unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws. Indeed curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, "the Dynasts," the culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a plan of the universe which may be beneficial.
To name another quality that gives distinction to Hardy's work: his fiction is notably well-built, and he is a resourceful technician. Often, the way he seizes a plot and gives it proportionate progress to an end that is inevitable, exhibits a well-nigh perfect art. Hardy's novels, for architectural excellence, are really wonderful and will richly repay careful study in this respect. It has been suggested that because his original profession was that of an architect, his constructive ability may have been carried over to another craft. This may be fantastic; but the fact remains that for the handling of material in such a manner as to eliminate the unnecessary, and move steadily toward the climax, while ever imitating though not reproducing, the unartificial gait of life, Hardy has no superior in English fiction and very few beyond it. These ameliorations of humor and pity, these virtues of style and architectural handling make the reading of Thomas Hardy a literary experience, and very far from an undiluted course in Pessimism. A sane, vigorous, masculine mind is at work in all his fiction up to its very latest. Yet it were idle to deny the main trend of his teaching. It will be well to trace with some care the change which has crept gradually over his view of the world. As his development of thought is studied in the successive novels he produced between 1871 and 1898, it may appear that there is little fundamental change in outlook: the tragic note, and the dark theory of existence, explicit in "Tess" and "Jude," is more or less implicit in "Desperate Remedies." But change there is, to be found in the deepening of the feeling, the pushing of a theory to its logical extreme. This opening tale, read in the light of what he was to do, strikes one as un-Hardy-like in its rather complex plot, with its melodramatic tinge of incident.
The second book, "Under the Greenwood Tree," is a blithe, bright woodland comedy and it would have been convenient for a cut-and-dried theory of Hardy's growth from lightness to gravity, had it come first. It is, rather, a happy interlude, hardly representative of his main interest, save for its clear-cut characterizations of country life and its idyllic flavor. The novel that trod on its heels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," maugre its innocently Delia Cruscan title,—it sounds like a typical effort of "The Duchess,"—has the tragic end which light-minded readers have come to dread in this author. He showed his hand thus comparatively early and henceforth was to have the courage of his convictions in depicting human fate as he saw it—not as the reader wished it.
In considering the books that subsequently appeared, to strengthen Hardy's place with those who know fine fiction, they are seen to have his genuine hall-mark, just in proportion as they are Wessex through and through: in the interplay of character and environment there, we get his deepest expression as artist and interpreter. The really great novels are "Far From the Madding Crowd," "The Return of the Native," "The Mayor of Casterbridge" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles": when he shifts the scene to London, as in "The Hand of Ethelberta" or introduces sophisticated types as in the dull "Laodicean," it means comparative failure. Mother soil (he is by birth a Dorchester man and lives there still) gives him idiosyncrasy, flavor, strength. That the best, most representative work of Hardy is to be seen in two novels of his middle career, "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "The Return of the Native" rather than in the later stories, "Tess" and "Jude," can be established, I think, purely on the ground of art, without dragging cheap charges of immorality into the discussion. In the last analysis, questions of art always become a question of ethics: the separation is arbitrary and unnatural. That "Tess" is the book into which the author has most intensely put his mature belief, may be true: it is quiveringly alive, vital as only that is which comes from the deeps of a man's being. But Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects from a stern necessitarian. Tess need not be a murderess; therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal. He is fatalistic, yes; but in general he royally disdains the cheap tricks of plot whereby excitement is furnished at the expense of credulity and verisimilitude. In Tess's end, there s a suspicion of sensation for its own sake—a suggestion of savage joy in shocking sensibilities. Of course, the result is most powerful; but the superior power of the novel is not here so much as in its splendid sympathy and truth. He has made this woman's life-history deeply affecting and is right in claiming that she is a pure soul, judged by intention.
The heart feels that she is sinned against rather than sinning and in the spectacle of her fall finds food for thought "too deep for tears." At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Tess's piteous plight,—the fact that fate has proved too strong for a soul so high in its capacity for unselfish and noble love,—is based upon Hardy's assumption that she could not help it. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, you must accept his premise, or call Tess (whom you may still love) morally weak. It is this reservation which will lead many to place the book, as a work of art, and notwithstanding its noble proportions and compelling power, below such a masterpiece as "The Return of the Native." That it is on the whole a sane and wholesome work, however, may be affirmed by one who finds Hardy's last novel "Jude the Obscure" neither. For there is a profound difference between two such creations. In the former, there is a piquant sense of the pathos and the awesomeness of life, but not of its unrelieved ugliness and disgust; an impression which is received from the latter. Not only is "Jude" "a tragedy of unfulfilled aim" as the author calls it; so is "Tess"; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be an eye-witness of the foul and brutal: he is asked to see a drama develop beside a pig-sty. It is therefore, intensely unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any work of art. It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense; that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble with it.
And intellectually, it would seem to be the result of a bad quarter of an hour of the author: a megrim of the soul. Elements of greatness it has; a fine motive, too; to display the impossibilities for evolution on the part of an aspiring soul hampered by circumstances and weak where most humanity is Weak, in the exercise of sex-passion. A not dissimilar theme as it is worked out by Daudet in "Le Petite Chose" is beautiful in its pathos; in "Jude" there is something shuddering about the arbitrary piling-up of horror; the modesty of nature is overstept; it is not a truly proportioned view of life, one feels; if life were really so bad as that, no one would be willing to live it, much less exhibit the cheerfulness which is characteristic of the majority of human beings. It is a fair guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of a novelist of genius. Its harsh reception by critics in England and America was referred to by the author privately as an example of the "crass Philistinism" of criticism in those lands: Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book understood, appreciated. I imagine, however, that whatever the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon view, it comes close to the ultimate decision to be passed upon this work.
One of the striking things about these Novels is the sense that they convey of the largeness of life. The action moves on a narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the incidents in the main small and unexciting. Yet the tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought home in the most impressive way. This is because all have spiritual value; if the survey be not wide, it sinks deep to the psychic center; and what matters vision that circles the globe, if it lacks grasp, penetration, uplift? These, Hardy has. When one calls his peasants Shaksperian, one is trying to express the strength and savor, the rich earthy quality like fresh loam that pertains to these quaint figures, so evidently observed on the ground, and lovingly lifted over into literature. Their speech bewrays them and is an index of their slow, shrewd minds.
Nor is his serious characterization less fine and representative than his humorous; especially his women. It is puzzling to say whether Hardy's comic men, or his subtly drawn, sympathetically visualized women are to be named first in his praise: for power in both, and for the handling of nature, he will be long remembered. Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess and the rest, they take hold on the very heart-strings and are known as we know our very own. It is not that they are good or bad,—generally they are both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human. They mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad lines of character. And it is natural to add, while thinking of Hardy's women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists, he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on woman's involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in previous study of sex relations. And he has not hesitated to depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the spirit to noblest heights. And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called weak because of the generous movement of her blood. No one can despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense, understanding pity. Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the fiction-makers before him. There is no finer handling of sex-love with due regard to its dual nature,—love that grows in earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven—than Marty's oft-quoted beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief rings again in the defense of that good fellowship—that camaraderie—which can grow into "the only love which is as strong as death—beside which the passion usually so-called by the name is evanescent as steam." A glimpse like that of Hardy's mind separates him at once from Maupassant's view of the world. The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as they have that of all the writers born into the speech and nourished on its racial ideals.
Another reason for giving the stories of the middle period, such as "The Return of the Native," preference over those that are later, lies in the fact that the former have no definite, aggressive theme; whereas "Tess" announces an intention on the title page, "Jude," in a foreword. Whatever view of life may be expressed in "The Mayor of Casterbridge," for example, is imbedded, as it should be, in the course of the story. This tendency towards didacticism is a common thing in the cases of modern writers of fiction; it spoiled a great novelist in the case of Tolstoy, with compensatory gains in another direction; of those of English stock, one thinks of Eliot, Howells, Mrs. Ward and many another. But however natural this may be in an age like ours, the art of the literary product is, as a rule, injured by the habit of using fiction as a jumping-board for theory. In some instances, dullness has resulted. Eliot has not escaped scot-free. With Hardy, he is, to my taste, never dull. Repellent as "Jude" may be, it is never that. But a hardness of manner and an unpleasant bias are more than likely to follow this aim, to the fiction's detriment.
It is a great temptation to deflect from the purpose of this work in order to discuss Hardy's short stories, for a master in this kind he is. A sketch like "The Three Strangers" is as truly a masterpiece as Stevenson's "A Lodging for The Night." It must suffice to say of his work in the tale that it enables the author to give further assurance of his power of atmospheric handling, his stippling in of a character by a few strokes, his skill in dramatic scene, his knowledge of Wessex types, and especially, his subdued but permeating pessimism. There is nothing in his writings more quietly, deeply hopeless than most of the tales in the collection "Life's Little Ironies." One shrinks away from the truth and terror of them while lured by their charm. The short stories increase one's admiration for the artist, but the full, more virile message conies from the Novels. It is matter for regret that "Jude the Obscure," unless the signs fail, is to be his last testament in fiction. For such a man to cease from fiction at scarce sixty can but be deplored. The remark takes on added pertinency because the novelist has essayed in lieu of fiction the poetic drama, a form in which he has less ease and authority.
Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate is concerned: but always a poet at heart (he began with verse), he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity, so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so pathetic in its doom. There is something noble always in the tragic largeness of Hardy's best fiction. His grim determinism is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome, he is consoled by contact with "the pure, eternal course of things"; whose august flow comforts Arnold. Because of his art, the representative character of his thought, reflecting in prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius, Thomas Hardy is sure to hold his place in the English fiction of the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of the few to be recognized and honored abroad. No writer of fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice of subject. If his convictions have led him to excess, they will be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English literature.