[1] Lord Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, v. 43 (London, 1846).
HARDY, ALEXANDRE (1569?-1631), French dramatist, was born in Paris. He was one of the most fertile of all dramatic authors, and himself claimed to have written some six hundred plays, of which, however, only thirty-four are preserved. He seems to have been connected all his life with a troupe of actors headed by a clever comedian named Valleran-Lecomte, whom he provided with plays. Hardy toured the provinces with this company, which gave some representations in Paris in 1599 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Valleran-Lecomte occupied the same theatre in 1600-1603, and again in 1607, apparently for some years. In consequence of disputes with the Confrérie de la Passion, who owned the privilege of the theatre, they played elsewhere in Paris and in the provinces for some years; but in 1628, when they had long borne the title of “royal,” they were definitely established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Hardy’s numerous dedications never seem to have brought him riches or patrons. His most powerful friend was Isaac de Laffemas (d. 1657), one of Richelieu’s most unscrupulous agents, and he was on friendly terms with the poet Théophile, who addressed him in some verses placed at the head of his Théâtre (1632), and Tristan l’Hermite had a similar admiration for him. Hardy’s plays were written for the stage, not to be read; and it was in the interest of the company that they should not be printed and thus fall into the common stock. But in 1623 he published Les Chastes et loyales amours de Théagène et Cariclée, a tragi-comedy in eight “days” or dramatic poems; and in 1624 he began a collected edition of his works, Le Théâtre d’Alexandre Hardy, parisien, of which five volumes (1624-1628) were published, one at Rouen and the rest in Paris. These comprise eleven tragedies: Didon se sacrifiant, Scédase ou l’hospitalité violée, Panthée, Méléagre, La Mort d’Achille, Coriolan, Marianne, a trilogy on the history of Alexander, Alcméon, ou la vengeance féminine; five mythological pieces; thirteen tragi-comedies, among them Gésippe, drawn from Boccaccio; Phraarte, taken from Giraldi’s Cent excellentes nouvelles (Paris, 1584); Cornélie, La Force du sang, Félismène, La Belle Égyptienne, taken from Spanish subjects; and five pastorals, of which the best is Alphée, ou la justice d’amour. Hardy’s importance in the history of the French theatre can hardly be over-estimated. Up to the end of the 16th century medieval farce and spectacle kept their hold on the stage in Paris. The French classical tragedy of Étienne Jodelle and his followers had been written for the learned, and in 1628 when Hardy’s work was nearly over and Rotrou was on the threshold of his career, very few literary dramas by any other author are known to have been publicly represented. Hardy educated the popular taste, and made possible the dramatic activity of the 17th century. He had abundant practical experience of the stage, and modified tragedy accordingly, suppressing chorus and monologue, and providing the action and variety which was denied to the literary drama. He was the father in France of tragi-comedy, but cannot fairly be called a disciple of the romantic school of England and Spain. It is impossible to know how much later dramatists were indebted to him in detail, since only a fraction of his work is preserved, but their general obligation is amply established. He died in 1631 or 1632.
The sources for Hardy’s biography are extremely limited. The account given by the brothers Parfaict in their Hist. du théâtre français (1745, &c., vol. iv. pp. 2-4) must be received with caution, and no documents are forthcoming. Many writers have identified him with the provincial playwright picturesquely described in chap. xi. of Le Page disgrâcié (1643), the autobiography of Tristan l’Hermite, but if the portrait is drawn from life at all, it is more probably drawn from Théophile. See Le Théâtre d’Alexandre Hardy, edited by E. Stengel (Marburg and Paris, 1883-1884, 5 vols.); E. Lombard, “Étude sur Alexandre Hardy,” in Zeitschr. für neufranz. Spr. u. Lit. (Oppeln and Leipzig, vols. i. and ii., 1880-1881); K. Nagel, A. Hardy’s Einfluss auf Pierre Corneille (Marburg, 1884); and especially E. Rigal, Alexandre Hardy ... (Paris, 1889) and Le Théâtre français avant la période classique (Paris, 1901.)
HARDY, THOMAS (1840- ), English novelist, was born in Dorsetshire on the 2nd of June 1840. His family was one of the branches of the Dorset Hardys, formerly of influence in and near the valley of the Frome, claiming descent from John Le Hardy of Jersey (son of Clement Le Hardy, lieutenant-governor of that island in 1488), who settled in the west of England. His maternal ancestors were the Swetman, Childs or Child, and kindred families, who before and after 1635 were small landed proprietors in Melbury Osmond, Dorset, and adjoining parishes. He was educated at local schools, 1848-1854, and afterwards privately, and in 1856 was articled to Mr John Hicks, an ecclesiastical architect of Dorchester. In 1859 he began writing verse and essays, but in 1861 was compelled to apply himself more strictly to architecture, sketching and measuring many old Dorset churches with a view to their restoration. In 1862 he went to London (which he had first visited at the age of nine) and became assistant to the late Sir Arthur Blomfield, R.A. In 1863 he won the medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects for an essay on Coloured Brick and Terra-cotta Architecture, and in the same year won the prize of the Architectural Association for design. In March 1865 his first short story was published in Chambers’s Journal, and during the next two or three years he wrote a good deal of verse, being somewhat uncertain whether to take to architecture or to literature as a profession. In 1867 he left London for Weymouth, and during that and the following year wrote a “purpose” story, which in 1869 was accepted by Messrs Chapman and Hall. The manuscript had been read by Mr George Meredith, who asked the writer to call on him, and advised him not to print it, but to try another, with more plot. The manuscript was withdrawn and re-written, but never published. In 1870 Mr Hardy took Mr Meredith’s advice too literally, and constructed a novel that was all plot, which was published in 1871 under the title Desperate Remedies. In 1872 appeared Under the Greenwood Tree, a “rural painting of the Dutch school,” in which Mr Hardy had already “found himself,” and which he has never surpassed in happy and delicate perfection of art. A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which tragedy and irony come into his work together, was published in 1873. In 1874 Mr Hardy married Emma Lavinia, daughter of the late T. Attersoll Gifford of Plymouth. His first popular success was made by Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which, on its appearance anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, was attributed by many to George Eliot. Then came The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), described, not inaptly, as “a comedy in chapters”; The Return of the Native (1878), the most sombre and, in some ways, the most powerful and characteristic of Mr Hardy’s novels; The Trumpet-Major (1880); A Laodicean (1881); Two on a Tower (1882), a long excursion in constructive irony; The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); The Woodlanders (1887); Wessex Tales (1888); A Group of Noble Dames (1891); Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Mr Hardy’s most famous novel; Life’s Little Ironies (1894); Jude the Obscure (1895), his most thoughtful and least popular book; The Well-Beloved, a reprint, with some revision, of a story originally published in the Illustrated London News in 1892 (1897); Wessex Poems, written during the previous thirty years, with illustrations by the author (1898); and The Dynasts (2 parts, 1904-1906). In 1909 appeared Time’s Laughing-stocks and other Verses. In all his work Mr Hardy is concerned with one thing, seen under two aspects; not civilization, nor manners, but the principle of life itself, invisibly realized in humanity as sex, seen visibly in the world as what we call nature. He is a fatalist, perhaps rather a determinist, and he studies the workings of fate or law (ruling through inexorable moods or humours), in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man’s point of view, and not, as with Mr Meredith, man’s and woman’s at once. He sees all that is irresponsible for good and evil in a woman’s character, all that is untrustworthy in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her variability. He is her apologist, but always with a reserve of private judgment. No one has created more attractive women of a certain class, women whom a man would have been more likely to love or to regret loving. In his earlier books he is somewhat careful over the reputation of his heroines; gradually he allows them more liberty, with a franker treatment of instinct and its consequences. Jude the Obscure is perhaps the most unbiassed consideration in English fiction of the more complicated questions of sex. There is almost no passion in his work, neither the author nor his characters ever seeming able to pass beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of every hour among the fields and on the roads of that English countryside which he has made his own—the Dorsetshire and Wiltshire “Wessex”—mean more to him, in a sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind and painful and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth, translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have been compared with Shakespeare’s; he has the Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious wisdom in their close, narrow and undistracted view of things. The order of merit was conferred upon Mr Hardy in July 1910.
See Annie Macdonell, Thomas Hardy (London, 1894); Lionel P. Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London, 1894).
(A. Sy.)