The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
The Novelist (1870-1898)
STILL remembering Meredith's admonition: "Less talk—more incident!" Hardy finished Desperate Remedies late in 1870. It was a tale of mystery, sensation, murder, conflagration, attempted rapine and miscellaneous thrills, artificial and unconvincing, relieved only by a few scenes from rural life, such as the cider-pressing episode. There was some difficulty about having it printed, but the author finally discovered that "Old Tinsley" of Tinsley Brothers would undertake its publication, provided that Hardy himself would agree to endow the work with an advance payment of £75. A record of this interesting transaction is contained in Hardy's letter to Tinsley, written from Bockhampton on December 20th.
Tinsley has been rather unfairly abused for his insistence on such a financial arrangement. It should be remembered that Hardy at this time, although over thirty years of age, had really very little evidence at hand to demonstrate his powers as a writer of prose. He himself did not acknowledge the novel. It appeared anonymously, and to all later editions he attached a very apologetic preface, making it apparent that he did not wish the book to be taken too seriously. Tinsley's conduct was further justified by the reception—lack of reception, rather—accorded the work. It attracted no notice whatever, and remained almost totally unknown until it was revived by the growing interest in Hardy's maturer work. It was practically inaccessible to English readers until the appearance of its second edition eighteen years later, although it had been reprinted in America. Copies of the three-volume first edition are to-day extremely rare.
Meredith again was interested in the rather dynamic, if crudely developed, "drive" of the narrative. He certainly had no further cause for complaint on the score of paucity of incident and plot. In another interview with Hardy he advised a lightening and brightening of tone-color.
This advice again took immediate effect. It resulted in the most pleasing idyl among all the Wessex novels, Under the Greenwood Tree, written after Hardy had definitely forsaken Weymouth and had returned to the inland villages of Dorset, where he could again feel himself to be the countryman born and bred. The full flavor of the countryside can be sensed in this story. It remains the most popular of the series, with the possible exception of Tess, probably because it is the least painful in its effects upon sensitive readers. It was greatly admired by both Tennyson and Browning. Its lightly sketched-in undertone of irony, which casts dun shadows over the concluding paragraphs particularly, went largely unnoticed.
From September, 1872, to July, 1873, Tinsley's Magazine ran a serial story called A Winning Tongue Had He. This narrative was then issued in three volumes, again by Tinsley Brothers, under the revised title, A Pair of Blue Eyes. Both historically and intrinsically, this novel is one of the most important of the series. It was the first book that Hardy acknowledged as his own from the start, and for its plot, melodramatic thrills, characterization, nature-machinery, acid irony and occasional gentleness and humor, may fairly be called the first really characteristic Hardy-novel. Its reception was not enthusiastic.
Ample atonement for all this public and critical apathy was accorded, however, in the greeting which was bestowed upon Far from the Madding Crowd, which began to run anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine in 1873, and which was published in two volumes by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1874. There was much speculation as to its authorship. Strangely enough, it was thought by many to be a late work of George Eliot, who had long since passed the Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss stage of her career. The Wessex folk in the tale drew much unfavorable comment, however; one reviewer characterizing the inimitable Joseph Poorgrass as a "preeminent bore." Edmund Gosse remembers that the dialect of the rustics was also called "odd scraps of a kind of rural euphuism . . . a queer mixture, very dreary and depressing."
In spite of these and similar blunders on the part of readers, the book achieved an instant and considerable vogue. Encouraged by this first material success, Hardy and Miss Gifford decided to risk matrimony. They were quietly married, and immediately established themselves in Dorset, first at Stourminster-Newton, the "Stourcastle" of the novels. Then they removed to London, where they lived, off and on, for several years, and later to Wimborne. Here the Hardys resided, with frequent absences in London and in a Paris flat near the Quai Voltaire, until they moved into their present home, Max Gate.
Instead of immediately and whole-heartedly following up Far from the Madding Crowd with another effort in similar vein, the "coming" novelist felt at this time a strong iteration of the impulse to devote his entire energy to composition in verse. But he was persuaded by Leslie Stephen to continue with his novels, particularly with The Return of the Native, which he had had in hand for some years. From 1870 to 1874 he had produced an important book each year, but there followed an interval of four years before the actual completion and publication of his prose epic of Egdon Heath.
Meanwhile, in 1876, The Hand of Ethelberta, a "comedy in chapters . . . a somewhat frivolous narrative," as he called it, had appeared, and had added little to his reputation, although it is a unique work, and of considerable importance for the study of the development of his art. His preface to the edition of 1895 presented the book as an argument for social liberalism in comedy, defending the claims of the servants’ hall as a proper scene for artistic drama.
In these unhurried years of his career, Hardy continued to write poetry—verse remained throughout his favorite means of literary expression. His ambition to become a great poet was never submerged under a sense of his undoubted success, in spite of himself, as a novelist. It was hinted again and again that only the necessity for earning a livelihood kept him writing fiction.
Leslie Stephen at this time exercised other influences over Hardy besides keeping him at his novels. The conversation of the two men, in London and in Dorset, was reported by Edmund Gosse to have “obstinately turned upon theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time."
Of such metaphysics in the stricter sense, however, one can find but few remaining traces until one looks at the supernatural machinery of The Dynasts and some of the later lyrical poems. All the evidence at hand seems to indicate that the consistent philosophy at the base of all of Hardy's output was less the result of erudition than the effect of the peculiar characteristics of his very individual personal temperament.
With the publication of The Return of the Native began the long series of controversies on modern art and morals which followed nearly every one of his subsequent works. "I recollect the zeal with which the late Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, scandalized a company at his own dinner-table by what seemed then an absolutely extravagant laudation of it," wrote Gosse in 1901.
Nevertheless, popularity came but laggingly to Hardy. It is related that he once accompanied Rudyard Kipling on a search for a seaside cottage, to be shared by both authors during the summer months. They found a suitable house in the neighborhood of Weymouth, and proceeded to negotiate for its rental. Unawed by Hardy's then imposing full beard, the landlady demanded references.
"Why," said Hardy, "this is Mr. Kipling."
"Mr. Kipling? . . ."
"Rudyard Kipling, the famous Indian balladist."
"Rudyard Kipling? . . ."
The woman had never heard of him, so Kipling himself carried on:
"But this is Mr. Hardy."
"Mr. Hardy ? . . ."
"Thomas Hardy, the great Wessex novelist."
"Thomas Hardy . . . Wessex? . . "
She had never heard of either of them. This happened in the present century. Such is the fame of even successful littérateurs.
The record for Hardy's next two decades can be little more than an annotated catalogue:
1880: The Trumpet-Major, the most genial of the novels; the first evidence of the growing hold which the Napoleonic legend was assuming over the author.
1881: A Laodicean, dictated through a wearisome illness of six months, to a predetermined happy ending, featuring architecture, designed to appeal to less mature readers, particularly youngsters into whose souls the iron had not yet entered.
1882: Two on a Tower; the lonely lives of a boy-astronomer and an indiscreet lady of quality, projected against a stellar background.
1886: The Mayor of Casterbridge, the profound effect of Biblical influences—a simple, headstrong character, relentlessly pursued to his doom by a Nemesis at once drawn out of the Old Testament and Greek tragedy.
1887: The Woodlanders, German idealistic philosophy, a dramatic metaphysical flame, illuminating a tale of virginal passion.
1888: Wessex Tales, novelettes, masterpieces of short-story technique.
1891: A Group of Noble Dames, local heroines, tragic and comic, fitted into a Chaucerian framework.
1891: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the sensational tragedy of the virtuous seduced woman. Tess was the fruit of many months of reflection and research. There is an anecdote which explains how much of Hardy's material was acquired, and throws a little light on the character of his first wife. The originals for the famous D'Urberville portraits were actually hanging in the manor house at Wool. The Hardys called there in order to obtain a view of them. Admission was denied, however, and they were turning away in disappointment, when Mrs. Hardy fell in a faint. She refused to revive until they had carried her into the house. Her husband naturally accompanied her within. Thus the pictures were viewed. Copies were subsequently painted for Hardy by John Everett.
Upon the publication of Tess, the discussion of the ethical implications and moral values of Hardy's "message" reached feverish intensity, and finally assured him of large sales. Tess remains his best seller; it has even been filmed.
1894: Life's Little Ironies, the best of the collections of briefer stories; the most tragical and the most comical juxtaposed in A Few Crusted Characters.
1895: Jude the Obscure, the story of the male counterpart of Tess, a still more passionate study of unusual psychological phenomena of an erotic type, aggravated by their setting in conditions governed by characteristically British social and academic prejudices. A copy of this "dangerous" book was publicly incinerated by an official of the Church, possibly, as Hardy remarked, because of his chagrin at being unable to accord the same treatment to its author.
1897: The Well-Beloved, a curious, semi-allegorical, semi-absurd treatment of the vagaries of ideal love.
In 1913 the scattered remains of Hardy's fiction were gathered together in a single volume, called A Changed Man and Other Stories. These, together with the stray essays recently collected and published under the title Life and Art[1] complete the sum of his significant prose works.
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Max Gate was built in 1885, from Hardy's own designs, not far from the house of William Barnes. By a turn of circumstance worthy of a place in the novels, the tract of land selected for the site of his permanent home was found to cover an ancient Roman cemetery, containing the remains of a whole platoon of Hadrian's military forces, and of a lady of evident nobility, whose brooch is now an interesting item in Hardy's collection of local antiquities.
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The way was now cleared. He was known as a successful, vital writer. His livelihood was assured; he was "fixed"—alas, too "fixed," perhaps, in the popular mind.
At any rate, he now approached another turning-point in his career. He contemplated the final abandonment of prose and the utter dedication of his powers to the service of the poetic muse. It would be idle to deny that the writing of the Wessex novels had not fitted him eminently for his subsequent rhyming. In 1869 his equipment had been broad, but sketchy; by 1897 his knowledge and appreciation of most of those artistic adjuncts which make the effective poet had ripened, deepened and increased immeasurably in intensity.
When we consider the art of music, a subject of the highest importance for the modern poet, we find Hardy paying eloquent tributes to its power and soul-stirring beauty. Testimony that he did not rank music among the least of the arts, in spite of what has sometimes been said about the "unmusical" quality of his verse, is not wanting in his prose writings, although it will be seen that he gave more attention to certain kinds of rural and folk-music than to the more highly developed art-music of the cultural centres.
One of the memorable scenes in Desperate Remedies is that of Manston's playing of his organ to Cytherea, in which the influence of the powerful strains of music as produced by his practical hand are represented as shaking and bending the impressionable girl "as a gushing brook shakes and bends a shadow cast across its surface." In contrast to the rather sinister spell exercised by the art here, one might call attention to the wonderful power for good which the strains of the hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light," have over the tortured soul of Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd. Tess's innate love of melody, also, "gave the simplest music a power over her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times."
Hardy's knowledge of the history and of the technical side of the art may not have been as great as his knowledge of painting, but he could at times make telling use of the information he possessed. Thus the elm-tree with which John South's life is bound up, gives forth melancholy "Gregorian melodies," Eustacia's presence calls to mind Mendelssohn's march in "Athalia," and Mop Ollamoor might have been "a second Paganini." The Baptists in A Laodicean sing a rather long hymn "in minims and semibreves," and the Trumpet Major possesses the faculty of "absolute pitch." In The Mayor of Casterbridge the sounds emanating from Ten-Hatcher-Wier are likened to the various voices of a symphony orchestra.
Christopher Julian in The Hand of Ethelberta is the only professional musician who plays a major part in any of the novels. He belongs to the variety known as "organist-composers," and, as an all-around musician, proves a suitable vehicle for Hardy's opinions on the profession. Of his circumstances we learn that in comparison with starving, he thrived; "though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with thriving he starved." Ethelberta's musicale provides a beautiful opportunity for criticism of the usual attitude of the cultured public towards the cultivated art they profess to admire.
Not only the unappreciative public, but the creative musician himself, when he loses sight of his ideals in his efforts towards material advancement, called forth most satiric comment from Hardy. Jude the Obscure, stirred to his soul by the strains of the hymn, "The Foot of the Cross," imagines its composer as one who would, of all men, understand his difficulties. The interview that he finally obtains is one of the great disillusionments of his life. In place of the full and throbbing soul he had thought to find, he meets a respectable, but shabby-genteel, and altogether mercenary spirit.
Although one may come across references to a great variety of musical subjects in the stories, including the ever-popular arts of singing, piano-playing, and the like, Hardy's preferences usually run to phases of musical expression that do not generally appear in metropolitan concert-halls. His interests lie rather in such things as the efforts of a humble shepherd with the flute he loves, in a soldier's affection for his martial trumpet, in that curious and almost extinct instrument, the serpent, or "Schlangenrohr," and in a crudely constructed æolian harp, the mournful notes of which are fraught with suggestion.
The only modern concert-instrument for which Hardy seems to have a decided liking is the organ. His experience as a church-architect is probably largely responsible for his intimate acquaintance with its parts and with the effects that it can produce. He likens the wooden tones of the wheels and cogs of the flour-mill to the distinctive quality of the stopped diapason pipes of an organ; the mournful wind sounding through the chimney reminds him of its deep and hollow pedal tones; and a sensitive woman's quivering lip is to him like a tremolo-stop opened in her speech. With regard to organ-performers, we notice that in addition to Jude, the poorly equipped amateur, Manston, the well-trained amateur, and Christopher Julian, the professional, there is another most interesting "semi-professional" class, represented by Fancy Day, Elfride Swancourt, and Tabitha Lark. These rural young ladies figure as the supplanters of the ancient local string-choirs, of which Hardy was so enamoured.
Religious music, in general, was employed by him in preference to other kinds, for incidental use in heightening the effects he wished to achieve. That he had at least some knowledge of the history of church-music in England is shown by Somerset's ruminations over the tune "The New Sabbath," in the first chapter of A Laodicean. He recollects that the tune appertained to the old west-gallery period of church-music, anterior to the great choral reformation and rule of Monk—that old time when the repetition of a word, or half-line of verse, was not considered a disgrace to an ecclesiastical choir. The old psalm-tunes, familiar and dear to every true Englishman's heart, often add a wealth of suggestion to incidents and situations. As an inn burns down to the ground, the bewildered chimes of the near-by church "wander through the wayward air of the Old Hundred and Thirteenth" and when the unfortunate Cytherea has been deserted by her Edward, the well-known verses of the First, cause "that sphere-descended maid, Music, friend of Pleasure at other times," to become a positive enemy—racking, bewildering, unrelenting. Turning for illustrations from the earliest novel to the latest, a remarkable passage from Jude the Obscure might be mentioned as an instance of the dramatic use of church-music. It will be remembered that the repentant Jude enters the Cathedral-Church of Cardinal College at Christminster just as the choir intones the second part, In quo corriget, of the 119th Psalm, stirred by the question, "Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his way?" A more tragic and a stupendously ironic effect is achieved by the same means later on. After Little Father Time's hanging of himself and of the children of Sue and Jude, the two miserable parents are aroused from the stupor that had succeeded their first shock of horror by the notes of the organ of the College chapel. Jude recognizes the music as the anthem from the Seventy-third Psalm: "Truly God is loving unto Israel."
The substitution of the single organist for the string-choir in rural communities is a theme that runs through much of Hardy's work, but finds its most complete expression in Under the Greenwood Tree. He loved to think of the old bands of musicians, with their quaint and naive ways, and the beautiful effects achieved by their noels on Christmas-eve. His heart went out to them for their earnestness and zeal in the performance of their tasks, which they did as a real labor of love; and their passing away before the advance of the tastes of "fashionable society" filled him with sadness. His treatment of the old instrumentalists and singers of Mellstock, Longpuddle, and other localities, is not always melancholy or serious,—they provided him at times with material for the most delightfully humorous passages in his works. The curious juxtaposition of religious and profane matter in their music-books calls forth some rather sprightly comment, and the anecdote entitled Absentmindedness in a Parish Choir shows Hardy in his very gayest mood. It is really uproariously funny.
Popular and folk-music always possessed great attractions for him. He used "The Break o' the Hay" and other ditties that were supposed to induce the cows to let down their milk, in Tess, and Donald Farfrae enraptures his audience in "The Golden Crown" with his singing of the emotional Scotch folk-melodies.
Closely allied to Hardy's treatment of music are his references to, and his employment of, the art of the dance. The village choirs, of which he was so fond, play not only psalms, but officiate on festive occasions with the livelier sections of their repertoires. The psychological effect of the crescendo of excitement as produced by the country-dances with which he was familiar, often plays a large part in the development of his stories. The dance at the "gypsying" in The Return of the Native, for instance, is conceived as one of the most powerful influences that attract Eustacia and Wildeve to each other, and to their own destruction. It is at Paula's first dance that Somerset discovers his affection for her, and it is by his reckless dancing at Etretat that he draws her to him, repentant. The excitement of the dance leads the two Hardcome cousins to exchange life-partners on the eve of their weddings, which rash decisions bring on their inevitable tragic consequences. Mop Ollamoor steals back his child by forcing the unfortunate Carline to dance herself to exhaustion under the influence of the seductive strains of his fiddle. Dancing, even in its more refined forms, was viewed by Hardy less as an esthetic phenomenon, or as an art in the stricter sense, than as a purely physio-psychological phenomenon which carries with it certain ethical considerations.
Before attempting to distill from his writings Hardy's ideas on the function and practice of the art of poetry itself, it might he well to observe the actual extent of his acquaintance with the literature of all times, with the aim of discovering his qualifications as a critic of his own chosen art. In the first place, it will be noticed that he displayed a remarkable, it might almost be said, a phenomenal, familiarity with that fountain-head of forcible and beautiful expression, the Bible. His books are full, not only of quotations from the King James Version, but of innumerable less tangible echoes of the fine old Biblical phraseology—turns of phrase that might have been conceived by the Psalmist. In his very first novel, the references run practically all through the Old Testament: the stories of Adam, Abraham, Joseph and Pharaoh, Samuel and Elijah, are alluded to, and the reader is already made aware of his fondness for the Psalms. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, one comes across Judges, Kings, Ruth, Isaiah, and many other books, of both the Old and the New Testament, and the rhymed Psalter figures again. One might continue to gather such references throughout Hardy's writings. That his language, and, to some extent, his very mode of thought, is saturated with Scriptural flavor, few who read his books can deny. It is perhaps in The Book of Job that he finds most food for his enthusiasm—at any rate the immortal words that he puts into the mouth of the dying Jude, punctuated by the "hurrah's" of the gay crowd outside the house, stir the soul of the reader as nothing else could. The words of King Lemuel in the Proverbs, beginning, "Who can find a virtuous woman?" are used with a remarkable ironical effect in Tess, and in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard's compulsion of the village choir to play the tune of the savage 109th Psalm represents the author's belief in the truth to life of Old Testament doctrines, and his criticism of them, on moral grounds. This seems to indicate that although he probably had no knowledge of Hebrew, he was acquainted with the general trend of Biblical criticism.
With the New Testament Hardy is even more familiar than with the Law and the Prophets. The title of one of his novels was taken from the Revelation. Certain passages in Jude the Obscure and in A Tragedy of Two Ambitions seem to show that he had some acquaintance with the Greek original. Sue Bridehead not only indulges in the usual kind of criticism to which the Song of Solomon and its chapter-headings are usually treated, but also advocates the printing of the books of the New Testament in the order in which she conceives them to have been written, beginning with Romans, and putting the gospels much further on. Hardy is familiar not only with the books in the generally accepted canon of both Testaments, but also with the Apocrypha. Thus, one of the divisions of Jude is headed by an excerpt from the apocryphal Esther, and the rejected books of the New Testament, notably the Gospel of Nicodemus, are discussed by Sue. Even extra-Biblical religious literature, from the writings of the Church Fathers to those of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Pusey, and Newman, must at some time or other have attracted his interest and attention.
It has often been pointed out that Hardy's work has much in common with that of the more austere of the ancient classical writers. Without following out the important and interesting analogies that suggest themselves in this connection, it might be well to discover first the actual extent of his acquaintance with the Greek and Latin languages and literatures. Although he was trained in Latin early in life, he picked up his Greek chiefly by his own efforts. At any rate, he displays a considerable first-hand knowledge of Greek, especially Greek tragedy, and, what is more uncommon, a genuine interest in it as well. Æschylus in particular exerted a permanent influence over his work; and this in spite of his repeated denials of any real intellectual affinity between himself and the ancients, and his occasional misunderstanding of the classical authors to whom he alludes.
The casual references to Greek literature range from Homer, Sappho, Hippocrates and Sophocles, to Menander, Plato, Diogenes, Laertius, and Eudoxus, the astronomer, but the most numerous and the most striking direct uses of the remains of ancient writings are found in his employment of phraseology and of complete excerpts from Æschylus the tragedian. The intensely ironic close of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is of course the first instance to come to mind: "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) [2] had ended his sport with Tess." Of equal significance is the reference found in the most tragic section of Jude the Obscure:
"I am a pitiable creature," she said, "good neither for earth
nor heaven any more! I am driven out of my mind by things!
What ought to be done?" She stared at Jude, and tightly held
his hand. "Nothing can be done," he replied. "Things are as they are and will be brought to their destined issue." She paused. "Yes! Who said that?" she asked, heavily. "It comes in the chorus of the Agamemnon. It has been in my mind continually since this happened."
W. S. Durrant has also called attention to the strong "atmospheric" effect produced by Sue's comment upon the tragic story of the Fawleys' ancestor who was gibbeted near the Brown House: “It makes me feel as if a tragic doom overhung our family as it did the House of Atreus." Even in a discussion of realism in literature Hardy was inevitably reminded of Æschylus's masterpiece, when be wrote, "All really true literature directly or indirectly sounds as its refrain the words in the Agamemnon: 'Chant Ælinon, Ælinon! But may the good prevail.'"
With Latin he was fairly familiar, hut not more so than the average educated Englishman. In his earliest book he quoted, somewhat pedantically, from the Latin poets, later on he occasionally permitted himself a Latin expression, such as solicitus timor, pari passu or casus conscientice. His references to the literature cover a wide field, but they are for the most part allusions of the most casual character. The "golden age" of Roman literature is represented in his novels by Cicero, Horace, Catullus, and Vergil; and Ovid and Marcus Antoninus supply mottoes for sections of Jude the Obscure.
In this account of the artistic influence of the classics, some notice must be taken of Hardy's frequent repudiation of what he terms "the Greek point of view" in art, as it might otherwise seem somewhat audacious, in dealing with the ancient echoes that sound through his greatest work, to attempt to prove a proposition the validity of which the author himself may be said specifically to have denied.
The attitude which he assumed and defended is most clearly shown in two fairly well-known passages; one from The Return of the Native, the other from the preface to The Dynasts. The former attempts to contrast the general Greek attitude towards life with the modern viewpoint; the latter points out the great gulf which, supposedly, separates the purely artistic ideals and methods of the Greeks from those of Hardy:
The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing the zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted as a new artistic departure. . . .
The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently replaced the Hellenic ideal of life, or whatever it may be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Æschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary man is in by their operation.
Both of the assumptions upon which the above excerpt is based are very emphatically open to question. In the first place, was the early "zest for existence" any more intense than it is to-day? The truth seems to be that outside of the Far-Eastern countries, which have for century after century clung to their ingrained notions of determinism and the inevitability of destiny, the "love of life" is as strong and universal a trait of mankind as ever. The fatalism expressed by East-Indian soldiers on the western front in the war struck the British with whom they came in contact as something remarkable and as a curiosity worth writing about—not as a view of life that had already become universal. Even a rather superficial acquaintance with the attitude of the latest voices in the poetry of to-day will lead one to believe that the unreasonable and unreasoning zest for existence is growing stronger and stronger in man as the tragedy of one generation is succeeded and exceeded by that of the next—and this applies in almost equal measure to contemporary English novelists, with one notable exception: Hardy himself. Modern drama, however, tells a somewhat different story, with cynicism rampant in comedy and with tragedy saturated, as always, with a pessimism seldom exceeded even by Schopenhauer's intellectual plunges into the depths of human existence. But tragedy by its essential nature presupposes catastrophe, and its success has always been in direct proportion to the violence with which the crack of doom bursts over the heads of the protagonists. It is perhaps true that we are to-day somewhat more familiar with disillusive reasoning, and that pessimistic utterances have a more familiar ring to our ears; but that the average thinking person accepts these ideas and conforms his life to the conclusions they indicate, is highly questionable.
Scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the all too scanty remains of classical literature will probably be very slow to admit that the average reflective Greek thinker indulged in any "revelling in the general situation" to the degree which Hardy supposed. Of course the Greeks were a sanguine people, particularly after the national will had been stiffened by the successes of the Persian wars, but this great outburst of vitality has since been duplicated by other nations with much the same degree of "high spirits." One need only mention two familiar instances—the great Elizabethan literature, a veritable "revelling" in optimism, which followed the crushing of Spanish sea power by England, and the ascendance of the German drama after the Franco-Prussian war. Hardy seemed almost unconscious of the very deep-seated strain of disillusionment and pessimism which runs through the greater part of early Greek literature. A short monograph by Dr. Anton Baumstark, for instance, takes the very fragmentary remains of Greek lyric poetry still extant, and turns up an amazing display of melancholy utterances. Herbert L. Stewart has likewise taken exception to Hardy's attitude here, and has noted that he is sometimes unfortunate in his Greek allusions. In calling attention to the statement in one of the novels, that "ideal Greek beauty went with Greek sanguineness of temperament," Mr. Stewart noted that there was a deep tone of sadness in the temperament which Hardy thought so sanguine, and referred to Professor Butcher's essay, The Melancholy of the Greeks, for confirmation of this statement.
The second pronouncement which must be disposed of is the following:
The scheme of contrasted choruses and other conventions of
this eternal feature was shaped with a single view to modem ex¬
pression of a modern outlook, and in frank divergence from
classical and other dramatic precedent which ruled the ancient
voicings of ancient themes.
The field of investigation opened by this quotation is a large and many-sided one, and cannot be discussed in great detail here. It might be well to point out, however, that one who attempts to compare the form of The Dynasts with that of the Greek drama need not be disturbed or embarrassed by Hardy’s repudiation of Greek influence. His choruses, though transfigured, still remain choruses, and the function of a chorus is the same to-day as it was yesterday. The same will he found to apply to other ancient dramatic precedents now seldom used, but revived and adapted by Mr. Hardy to his gigantic scheme and then disclaimed. As to the observance of the various species of dramatic decorum, and other classical and pseudo-classical requirements, it may possibly be shown that The Dynasts, considered as a play, is more nearly related to the most ancient type of Athenian drama than to the usual play of the present time. Of course no on will attempt to deny the essential "modernity" of The Dynasts—it has been hailed by philosophers of the day as one of the few combinations of modern poetry and an up-to-date view of life—but the terms "modern" and "ancient" are sometimes less than valueless when used as criteria to judging serious intellectual works of any period. Original ideas of any time can nearly always be regarded in two lights—as restatements of something that had already been hinted at, and as foreshadowings of later developments. Certain great and insoluble problems have ever attracted speculative poets, whose reactions have generally varied not so much according to the age in which they lived as according to the general type of temperament and intellect they represented—and these contrasted general types have repeated them¬ selves since the invention of writing. The invocation of comparisons of certain aspects of Hardy's genius and the ideals of the oldest Greek tragedy will perhaps be regarded as a not entirely unreasonable procedure if these considerations are borne in mind.
Turning now to the investigation of the extent of the acquaintance with Continental European literature displayed by the author of the Wessex Novels, one will find that he is limited to the French and German of comparatively recent times, as is only to be expected—notwithstanding the fact that he may here and there make a casual allusion to Dante's Inferno in describing a scene, or the fact that that character-monstrosity, Dare, in A Laodicean, may quote Italian and Spanish proverbs to show that he is a real citizen of the world.
French expressions, phrases, and proverbs, such as en l'air, coup d'ceil, incredules les plus credules, raison d'etre, ensemble, tete-a-tete, and so on, are very common, and show at least a superficial acquaintance with the language, although they might perhaps be regarded by purists as barbaric impedimenta to a good English prose style. A more agreeable effect, perhaps, is made by his occasional introduction of a French song into the story. Thus, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Elfride sings, ('Je I'ai plante, je I'ai vu naitre," etc., to Stephen Smith; in Two on a Tower, the worldly-wise Louis Glanville sings in an undertone, "Tra deri, dera, L'histoire n'est pas nouvelle!" The best and most famous example, however, is Clym's singing of "Le point du jour," as he works as a furze-cutter in The Return of the Native.
References to the literature of France are not numerous. There is passing mention of the "delicate imposition" of Rochefoucauld and of ('la jalousie retro spec tif" of George Sand. More important is the acquaintance shown with the sceptical ratiocinations of the Dictionnaire Philosophique and with the symbolist and decadent schools of modern French poetry.
If we disregard for the moment the influence of German philosophical writers upon his later work, it will be found that in the field of German the extent of his acquaintance is of about the same scope as his acquaintance with the French. Dare, of course, shows off his cosmopolitanism by saying: Hörensagen ist halb gelogen; Mrs. Charmond is said to have a weltbürgerliche nature; the Melancholy Hussar speaks of his Heimweh; and Alec D'Urberville gets back his old Weltlust after his temporary “conversion” has spent itself. The quaint lines of the lyric Lieb' Liebchen (in translation) are employed as an index to the agitating emotions of Lady Constantine's heart, and Börne's observation, Nichts ist dauernd als der Wechsel, made famous by its employment as the motto of Heine's Harzreise, is used to make clear the author's conception of the elusiveness of the objects of idealistic love.
If it were not for the very definite evidences of Hardy's reading in the German philosophers encountered in the novels from the year 1887 onward, one might be justified in denying to him anything but the merest smattering of German. But The Woodlanders contains unmistakable evidences of the influence of the Nineteenth Century transcendentalists; in Tess of the D'Urbervilles one can follow out with some degree of accuracy the path of Schopenhauer's inroads on Hardy's thought and its expression; and in Jude the Obscure, Humboldt and others come to the fore.
It would be pointing out the very obvious to show in any detail Hardy's familiarity with the great English writers, from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Swinburne. Not only the more "literary" types of poetic composition claim his attention, but also such things as the old ballads, folk-plays and the saints' legends. The great Elizabethan outburst of literature fascinated him, and Shakespeare is mentioned in nearly every novel. With Milton he was, of course, familiar, and, among a host of other well-known figures that appear in his pages, he singled Defoe out for his especial admiration. Of the leaders of the great Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth Century he was particularly fond of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats; and Wordsworth stimulated his interest, if not always his approval. Tennyson and Browning came in chiefly for criticism of their "optimism," Rosetti for his typically Pre-Raphaelitish absurdities of expression. Of American writers he mentioned Poe and Whitman. Although Hardy, as a writer, was singularly independent of "literary influences," echoes of Shakespeare, Milton (especially in The Dynasts), and Shelley can sometimes be heard in his poems, and his enthusiasm for the matter-of-fact but vivid and individual prose style, and the fearless realism of Defoe was undoubtedly responsible in large measure for those qualities as they are found in his fiction.
The modern literary world is presented from the amateur writer's standpoint in most interesting fashion in the discussion of Elfride's Gothic Romance: The Court of Kellyon Castle, and of Ethelberta's publication of her efforts in the writing of vers de societé, a book "teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial . . . to justify the ways of girls to men."
Hardy had very little to say directly of his opinions on the art of poetry itself, but the little that he did say is of the utmost significance. In the first place, he took pains to combat the popular notion of the poet and the poet's life. For instance, when Christopher Julian's simple-minded sister, Faith, is asked if Ethelberta is really a poetess, she replies, "That I cannot say. She is very clever at verses; but she don’t lean over gates to see the sun, and goes to church as regular as you or I, so I should hardly be inclined to say that she's the complete thing. . . ." One may notice also the following bit of burlesque dialogue in The Hand of Ethelberta, in which the same fallacious views of the practice of poetry are ridiculed with rather broad satirical strokes:
After a pause Neigh remarked half-privately to their host, who was his uncle: "Your butler Chickerel is a very intelligent man, as I have heard."
"Yes, he does very well," said Mr. Doncastle.
"But is he not a—very extraordinary man?"
"Not to my knowledge, " said Doncastle, looking up surprised. "Why do you think that, Alfred?"
"Well, perhaps it was not a matter to mention. He reads a great deal, I dare say?"
"I don’t think so. "
"I noticed how wonderfully his face kindled when we began talking about the poems during dinner. Perhaps he is a poet himself in disguise. Did you observe it?"
"No. To the best of my belief he is a very trustworthy and honorable man. He has been with us—let me see, how long?—five months, I think, and he was fifteen years in his last place. It certainly is a new side to his character if he publicly showed any interest in the conversation, whatever he may have felt."
"Since the matter has been mentioned," said Mr. Jones, "I may say that I too noticed the singularity of it."
"If you had not said otherwise," replied Doncastle somewhat warmly, "I should have asserted him to be the last man-servant in London to infringe such an elementary rule. If he did so this evening, it is certainly for the first time, and I sincerely hoped that no annoyance was caused—"
"O no, no—not at all—it might have been a mistake of mine," said Jones. "I should quite have forgotten the circumstances if Mr. Neigh's words had not brought it to my mind. It was really nothing to notice, and I beg that you will not say a word to him on my account."
Application of the qualities discovered in a poet's writing to the character of the poet himself is a process of reasoning that Hardy often characterized as fallacious. Sue tells Jude that "some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." There are evidences, on the other hand, that he did not think very highly of emotional poetry produced by phlegmatic temperaments. Thus Ethelberta begins as a poet of a rather sweetened Satanic school, but as experiences accumulate, she begins to wonder if her early notes "had the genuine ring in them, or whether a poet who could be thrust by realities to a distance beyond recognition as such was a true poet at all." The author goes on to hint that the distorted Benthamism with which she justifies her subsequent course may be, ethically considered, superior to her original playful Romanticism. One may here call to mind the complete absence of the typical Romantic emotionalism from Hardy's own lyrics, from even his avowed "love-lyrics." No one can possibly consider him a "passionately erotic" poet, and very few would go so far as definitely to call his verse "emotional," if by that term is meant the unpremeditated overflow of feeling, untinctured by reason. Romantic love is conspicuously absent from the scheme of The Dynasts, and when it is treated in the lyrics, there is nearly always running through it that kind of matured and disillusioned insight that finds its classic expression in Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes. Of course, this does not mean that emotion is absent—the poet shows unmistakably that he feels, but he cannot help showing at the same time that he knows the "whence" and the "wherefore" of his feeling. This may help one to understand Springrove's statement that the writing of emotional verses was a stage that some types of young men must pass through, as they pass through the stage of shaving for a beard.
Besides his opposition to sentimentalism in modern poetry, Hardy sometimes expressed a total lack of appreciation of the production of beautiful sounds in poetry for their own sake. The sense, the idea of a composition was to him the main consideration, and was not to be subordinated to the texture of the material with which it was presented. The form should always suit the matter; therefore a poet must be a master of the technique of his craft; but his technical dexterity should never be permitted to detract the reader's attention from the things he really wants to say; if he has nothing to say, he should not manufacture beautiful sounds in order to say it. Thus we find him writing, four years after the first Poems and Ballads of Swinburne had started a cult of sound for sound's sake, "The conversation was naturally at first of a nervous, tentative kind, in which, as in the works of some minor poets, the sense was considerably led by the sound." The same opinion was expressed somewhat later in An Imaginative Woman, in which the poetic activities described as belonging to Robert Trewe might be considered as rather faithful reflections of the author's:
Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he ought not to have done.
Hardy's description of other aspects of the poetry of the fictitious Robert Trewe opens the general question of the relationship between poetry and life, and brings one again to the scarred battlefields where the opposing armies of realism and romanticism have fought many a fight:
Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition.
Hardy's own opinion in the matter is perhaps more directly and forcibly expressed in Tess, when, in dealing with the miserable and undeserved lot of the children of the shiftless Durbeyfields in being born into the world in such circumstances as theirs, he remarks, with a quite perceptible sneer, "some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his verse is tonic and breezy gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan.'"
As a sincere disciple of realism Hardy aimed always to give "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs" of the characters he created. This picture of humanity as it really is he framed in a nature-setting that was the result of the closest and sharpest observation, refined and interpreted by the deepest possible insight. But he was not merely a realistic photographer of scenes and impressions. His essentially romantic insight often enabled him to pierce through the surface of the material things and invest them with a personality that is often more striking and more vividly presented than the human agents. Egdon Heath is of course the supreme example of this, but to the discerning reader the rural fragrance of Under the Greenwood Tree, the cliff and the storm in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the lonely observatory surrounded by the eversighing pines in Two on a Tower, and the ancient Roman amphitheatre in The Mayor of Casterbridge, are dramatis personæ whose distinctive qualities linger in the mind long after many of the human characters have faded out of memory. If the essential Romantic is, in the words of Lawrence Gilman, "he, who, piercing the illusory veil of material fact, reveals to us, through symbol and imagery, the enduring soul of wonder and enchantment which inhabits the world," then Hardy is, at least in his treatment of the external world, an essential Romantic.
His greatness as a novelist is probably due, however, to his recognized insight into the workings of the human heart. That he possessed no mean power of psychological analysis of motives is shown by many a passage in his very first novels. Sometimes his expression of a quite common and simple observation could be altogether delightful in its simplicity, as when
Dick wondered how it was that when people were married they could be so blind to romance; and was quite certain that if he ever took to wife that dear impossible Fancy, he and she would never be so dreadfully practical and undemonstrative of their passion as his father and mother were. The most extraordinary thing was, that all the fathers and mothers he knew were just as undemonstrative as his own.
More subtle analysis is seen in the following:
There exists as it were an outer chamber of the mind, in which, when a man is occupied centrally with the most momentous question of his life, casual and trifling thoughts are just allowed to wander softly for an interval, before being banished altogether.
Despite his constant and consistent aim at truth to life, he departed, at the outset of his career, from the rock-bound principles of the stricter Naturalists, in his advocation of the principles of the necessary selection and artistic ordering of the facts of life as observed, in order to reproduce, as the resultant effect, the writer's personal interpretation of the ultimate significance, or non-significance, of things in general. Thus we find him in full accord with the most famous novelist of the English Romanticists in the motto he prefixed to Desperate Remedies:
It would naturally be the greatest possible fallacy to assume that Hardy's sympathy with the ideals of the historical romancers went very far. There is indeed a vast gulf between Quentin Durward and The Trumpet-Major. The idea of "poetic justice" and the inevitable happy ending was claimed by Hardy to be absolutely inconsistent with honesty to the facts or to the significance of life. One of his earliest bits of literary criticism was a palpable sneer at "the indiscriminate righting of everything at the end of an old play," although in the novel in which it occurs, everything turns out fairly well in the end. Realism, even though it involves the acceptance of a rather distasteful pessimism, is defended by the tranter, Reuben Dewy, who, in the discussion of Michael Mail's sometimes rather unsavory stories, remarks:
". . . That sort o' coarse touch that's so upsetting to Ann's feelings is to my mind a recommendation; for it do always prove a story to be true. And for the same rayson, I like a story with a had moral. My sonnies, all true stories have a coarseness or a bad moral, depend upon't. If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd ha' troubled to invent parables?" . . .
In the search after truth, Hardy maintained that no previous general conceptions of "what ought to be" should be permitted to influence the full recognition of the facts themselves as such. Not until a view of life has actually been distilled from close observation, and fixed through insight and ratiocination, should it be employed in influencing the artistic selection, ordering, and presentation of impressions. Henry Knight comes to grief chiefly because of his failure to observe this principle:
The moral rightness of this man's life was worthy of all praise; hut in spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an abstraction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it.
Hardy hinted that Shakespeare himself did not follow out the principle of "poetic justice" in Romeo and Juliet and Othello. King Lear and The Return of the Native are both great poetry and they are both true to life, but they both present a view of life that is not particularly appealing to the optimistic idealist and romantic.
The novelist's criticism of the subject matter and technique of fiction is found in its most concentrated form in the articles which he contributed to various periodicals between 1888 and 1891. In them he defended his sincere search for truth, accompanied by an attentive ear for the "still sad music of humanity" that ultimately makes all writing such as his own worth while. In this latter respect his aims differed from those of Zola and other purely scientific realists.
A steady growth of self-consciousness as a literary artist seems to have taken place in Hardy, from the time of his first "disillusioned" verses onwards. Like his own "Immanent Will" he seems very gradually to have gained cognition and consciousness of the movements of which he was a part. By the late nineties he probably realized, not that he was part of a movement of scepticism and pessimism, hut that the freedom from illusion of the time was, curiously, in agreement with the sardonic point of view that he had already developed and expressed.