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.