Fate strikes in the Hardy novels with inexorableness of Greek tragedy. Did he learn this from life? Or did he imbibe it as rule of creation from careful, classical training? The physical world Hardy shows is lovely. The spiritual world is stern and life difficult, where natural right wears garb of wrong.
Hardy believes in fickleness of women. To him they remain Biblical characters, creatures under a curse, workers of woe, whom he has seen at a distance and not well. He lavishes phrases upon them, careful meticulous description, but still he does not paint them understandingly. Only a roué could do that, who had found favor with them, and who knew their hearts. I do not believe he admired women greatly, except those whom he created to suit himself, and only fleetingly then, as one admires, then regrets, beautiful glass which is broken. Hardy has seen life and judged it, in light of the puritan Scriptures.
In conversation among workers on thriving Wessex farms, men of the field, forest, there is something Shakespearian. There again is the tough, dependable fibre of England, England of conquest. And no one has loved better than he its fields, spring-time and harvest; and its brave, mist-covered, protecting sea. How many dawns, how many sweet noons of summer, he has patiently watched it, or observed with critical eyes of connoisseurship, then loved it deeply!
His sense of humor must not be neglected. Not kindly American humor be it said, nor brilliant, crackling Irish humor, like hoar frost on clear, thin crystal, but one that is English, like an English sun, shining persistently (which is the habit of suns), but, never burning with brightness, something, however, we ought to be grateful for, because of reliability, as English people are grateful for niggard, hard-fought living. The happiness, grief, discreet merriment of his stories are framed just as the life of England is framed, against background of ancient churches. They are a series of pictures within eloquent curves of mullioned, Gothic windows.
Human love (with Hardy) got mixed with religion. He expected women to resemble saints. Life did not come to his expectation. He could not love where he could not reverence. So he passed it by. He had puritan inability to make concessions. Puritanism, without his knowledge, ingrained life, until it fashioned dreams. He could not forget and be happy, in the present beauty of a thing as it is, without inquiring minutely into condition of its soul, both before and after. The pagan put in practice this, forget. The puritan never learned the noblest teaching of his faith, forgive.
I have enjoyed vastly traveling with Hardy along fresh, green, sea-bound highways of the land he loved, with the bracing sea breeze in my face, my hair, and lazy, long winged sea-birds wheeling over head. I have enjoyed the peace of old-fashioned country gardens under high heat of noon, and his quaint, careful naming of old time garden-flowers. And I have liked, too, sometimes feared, the tragic lonely blackness of the downs at night, with only the wild, steel-grey flash of the far away sea and above my head dim, forgotten stars. He has flashed moments of sensation upon me which I treasure. He is always sincere, and sometimes great, because he can both think and feel. The keenest memory he has left with me, is of the roads and the forests of Wessex.
In the novel of the mid Nineteenth Century the Jew has been too often exploited as the modern roué. This is injustice. Neither history nor observation justify it. To mention a few books because they are important and led the way, which prove this, I call attention to The Harlot’s Progress, by Balzac, Zola’s Nana, Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis, and many a short story by Maupassant. In each a rich Jewish banker uses wealth to buy women. And in each the character of the Jew is so similar it could be lifted from one book to the other without injury to the mise-en-scène. They are Jews from Germany. They have similar names, Steiner, Hafner. Their methods of procedure, business enterprises, amusements, ambition, home life are the same. This is true likewise of La Garçonne, the book by Victor Margueritte, of which France has expressed disapproval. The Jew in Zola’s Nana, seems lifted over, with this new book.
The blond courtesans in all are alike, too. It is peculiar that courtesans of the world of fiction, women who have been thoroughly bad, have been blonde.
The history of the antique world happens to corroborate this. She has been the type without heart, soul; most lustful, mercenary, cruel, uncaring. What was back of this? Was it borrowed impulse handed on, or was it reason founded upon observation?