"'But is not optimism a useful and sane philosophy?' I asked him.
"There's too much sham optimism, humbugging and even cruel optimism,' Mr Hardy retorted. 'Sham optimism is really a more heartless doctrine to preach than even an exaggerated pessimism—the latter leaves one at least on the safe side. There is too much sentiment in most fiction. It is necessary for somebody to write a little mercilessly, although, of course, it's painful to have to do it.'"
That is what we must do if we wish to move on the higher ideal of philosophical speculation as Hardy explains it. He points out that there is something in a novel that should transcend pessimism, meliorism or optimism, and that is the search for truth:
"So that to say one view is worse than other views without proving it erroneous implies the possibility of a false view being better or more expedient than a true view; and no pragmatic proppings can make that idolum specus stand on its feet, for it postulates a prescience denied to humanity."
Charges of pessimism Hardy dismisses as the product of the chubble-headed people who only desire to pair all the couples off at the end of a novel and leave them with a plentiful supply of "simply exquisite" babies, hard cash and supreme contentment.
As I have hinted before, the face and the wealth of the earth are a constant joy to Hardy, and he has great admiration for the Dorset rustics—those sprack-witted, earthy philosophers who have won support for his novels even in circles where his ideals of life are not in favour. He enthusiastically follows the ways and works of nature in which man co-operates. One instantly calls to mind Winterborne, the travelling cider-maker in The Woodlanders, as an instance of this: "He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat colour, his eyes blue as cornflowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards."
The above is a prose-poem which is worthy to stand beside Keats' Ode to Autumn.
* * * * * *
William Barnes was born at Rushay, near Pentridge, a village about four miles from Cranborne, in the north-east of the county, on the Wiltshire border, and in the heart of the Vale of Blackmore, the beauties of which he was never tired of extolling in his gentle poems enriched with his native dialect. His mother was a woman of good education and refined tastes, and he attended an endowed school at Struminster, where the classes were composed of boys and girls and conducted in the American way. On leaving school he entered a solicitor's office in the same town, but at the age of eighteen he removed to Dorchester. In 1823 he went to Mere, in Somerset, where he worked as a schoolmaster for four years in loneliness. At this time he married Miss Julia Miles, and after an additional eight years at Mere he returned to Dorchester, where teaching was still his profession. One might almost say that Dorchester was his spiritual birthplace, for here his genius began to attract more than local attention, and here he grew into the hearts of the people so deeply that when he passed away all wished to preserve his memory in the form of a public statue. Barnes was one of the secretaries of the Dorset Field Club. His most earnest wish was to enter the Church, and from St John's College, Cambridge, he was ordained by the Bishop of Salisbury in 1847, and became pastor of Whitcombe. He fell on troublous days and passed through a labyrinth of trials—sickness, death and sordid money embarrassments. Only once did he allow his pent-up humours of discouragement to break loose. One day he came in to his family with a sheaf of correspondence in which letters from duns were accompanied by others containing warm eulogy of the poet. "What a mockery is life!" he exclaimed; "they praise me and take away my bread! They might be putting up a statue to me some day when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread and they gave me a stone," he added bitterly. At about this time he was awarded a Civil List pension of seventy pounds a year, while the gift of the living of Came relieved him of the anxiety over money matters. The happiest days of his life were spent at Came, and here he followed with great diligence his one hobby—the Anglicising of the Latinised English words in our vocabulary, which he called speech-lore.