The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces

by Joyce Kilmer

A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY

OF Elizabeth-Jane who is the heroine of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," if heroine this tale may be said to have, we learn that "she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." This is a rather Jacobean sentence, in form not typical of Hardy, but in thought it is greatly significant. It is likely that Hardy himself wondered at the happiness in which he left Elizabeth-Jane, reassuring himself perhaps by the conviction that her "unbroken tranquillity" was the exception which proved the rule her youth had taught her.

For it cannot be denied that according to the Hardy philosophy, implicit in his tales and explicit in his poems, sorrow is the rule and joy the exception. In no other writing is he more clearly a fatalist than in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"; in no other book does he urge more unmistakably his belief that men and women are but helpless puppets in the hands of mischievous fate, that good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons for humanity's defense.

The evident fact that Thomas Hardy is a fatalist is responsible for the common and absurd idea that he is a pagan. Now, there is no philosophy—with the exception of the robust and joyous philosophy of the Middle Ages—with which Hardy's philosophy contrasts more strongly than it does with paganism, that is, with the pagan philosophy of the spacious classic day. When we speak of a pagan of ancient Greece or a pagan of ancient Rome we have in mind a brave patriotic man, with a vivid sense of the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship, and the habit of making the most of life, of enjoying to the full the years allowed him on earth. This last characteristic rose from the pagan fatalism, the belief that man should make sure of such visible and tangible delights as were available, because there was no counting on the possibility of happiness or even of existence after death. This was the state of mind which succeeded the earlier romantic polytheism, and was the natural successor of a religious system which attributed to the gods power over mankind but neither love nor justice. So the typical fatalism was materialistic; it was based, of course, upon despair, but its manifestations were not desperate. Rather there was a general conspiracy of joy, not dissimilar to that of a popular religious cult which arose in the United States during the last half century. Disease and sorrow and death were to be generally ignored; mankind was expected to eat, drink and be merry, and good manners required silence as to the explanatory "for to-morrow we die."

However hollow may have been mirth of the pagan fatalists, it was at any rate loud and general. And there can be no doubt that by a kind of self-hypnosis these fatalists were able to give their joy a convincingness and a continuity—they "were always drunken," in Baudelaire's sense. Artificial and in essence tragic as was their state of mind, he would be a false historian who pictured these pagan fatalists as people obsessed with the idea of death and the unkindness of the gods; as holding with anything like unanimity the belief that "happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

But this is Hardy's dominant idea; it is a belief on which he insists with a propagandist enthusiasm which sometimes mars the artistic value of his work. No Scotch or English members of some stricter offshoot of a strict Calvinistic sect ever was more firmly convinced that this earth is a vale of tears, or more eager to spread this belief. Every writer, I think, deals with the characters who are his creations as he imagines God to deal with mankind. This is why literary criticism is closer to theology than to any other science; this is why we cannot claim to understand any writer unless we know what he thinks about God. And the God of Hardy's belief, as indicated in his long succession of stories and poems, is no more the remote, indifferent, sensuous, self-sufficient Deity of the pagan fatalist than he is the loving and omnipotent Father of true Christian belief. Instead he is the stern, avenging Deity of the Hebrews, without pity, accessible to no intercessors, the Deity whom we find to-day fearfully worshiped by adherents of the bleakest forms of Puritanism. It would be a misnomer to call Hardy's philosophy a Christian fatalism, but it is a fatalism which is the basis of the religious systems of many who since 1517 have professed and called themselves Christians.

I am frequently impressed, as I read Hardy, with what I may call the evangelical cast of his mind. He is so intent on announcing his discovery that mankind is fallible, unhappy, helpless, undesirable. The people of Hardy's stories are so virtueless, for the most part, that the reader can readily believe that Hardy is determined to show that they deserve no pity from the extraordinary Deity who is also a creature of Hardy's imagination, and that in his own way the novelist (like his greatest Puritan predecessor in literature) is trying to "justify the ways of God toward man." And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," with its lovely pictures of Wessex hills and valleys and its most unlovely pictures of Wessex men and women, irresistibly recalls lines from a certain popular evangelical hymn—the lines which tell of a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile."

Hardy is a true realist in that he reports faithfully the habits and manners of people with whom he is familiar, and in that—unlike Mr. Dreiser and other claimants to the title realist—he has humor and admits it to his chronicles. Also he admits good impulses to the lives he creates, although his philosophy seldom lets him cause these impulses to be translated into successful action. He is poet enough to have a sense of beauty and humor inherent in phrases. "But I know that 'a's a banded teetotaler," says Solomon Longways, "and that if any of his men be ever so little overtook by a drop he's down upon 'em as stern as the Lord upon the jovial Jews." And what living poet could write a simpler and more moving study of the immemorial subject, death, than Mother Cuxsom's brief elegy on Mrs. Henchard? "Well, poor soul, she's helpless to hinder that or anything now. And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing."

A student of literary motives can easily trace the working of Hardy's philosophy in this book—can see it guiding the novelist's pen, changing his purposes, forcing him to deal harshly, sometimes, with characters whom a writer must come to love as a father his children. Was not Matthew Henchard's rehabilitation to be complete, and the tale to end with a prosperous reunited family? Probably, but Thomas Hardy (unlike Victor Hugo when he handled a similar plot in "Les Miserables") had his monster theory to reckon with. So Elizabeth-Jane must be Newson's child, Lucette must maleficently tangle lives, and Henchard must die in a road-side hut. And even the goldfinch must starve in its paper-covered cage.

And how Hardy enjoys the moments when he escapes his obsession! He had as much fun when Henchard and Farfrae wrestled on the top floor of the granary as Blackmore did in the Homeric fisticuffs of "Lorna Doone." When Hardy dressed up Lucetta and sent her out to plead with Henchard he had the same sporting excitement that Thackeray had when he prepared Becky Sharp for her conquests. At such times Hardy seems momentarily to accept the existence of free will, with its tremendous dramatic possibilities. These are his moments of greatest creative power, of highest poetry, of clearest discernment. They occur more frequently and they last longer in his latest writings. The War has seen to that.