The Novels of Thomas Hardy
IN a certain book on Japan the traveler asks his guide why all the little Japanese birds on a telegraph wire face the same way. He even noted it as a characteristic national trait. On learning that they were more comfortable beak to the wind, the author artlessly observes that American birds probably follow the same custom, for the dignity of their tail feathers, only at home such trifles escaped his notice. That man was an accomplished art critic, and to such small purpose had he learned to use his eyes! Now Thomas Hardy, on the contrary, has so seen and felt the world about him, that whether his particular country be as unfamiliar as the mountains of the moon, whether your range of vision be as urban as my Japanese traveler’s, you nevertheless recognize and ratify the truth of every word that Hardy utters. Grass grows on the same impulse, birds mate and nest, cattle ruminate under shade trees, sap rises in the spring, women are of two minds, men act under strange promptings, the mills of the gods grind inscrutably, whether the scene be laid in “Wessex,” Asia, or central Pennsylvania. For this reason, interesting as it may be to investigate Hardy’s country as a matter of sentiment and amiable gossip, to the real student of Hardy the facts that Casterbridge is Dorchester, that Loveday’s mill can still be pointed out to pilgrims, that Eustacia waited on that barrow, that Bathsheba sold corn in this market-place, should be of the most superficial consequence. Indeed, this local aspect of his work has been dwelt on rather to the damage of larger and deeper appreciation. The quite external fact that his books cover a small geographical field, that he is a trustworthy antiquarian, historian, and naturalist, has somewhat obscured the greater field illumined by his genius. Thus, whimsically, the most universal English writer since Shakespeare is often treated as a limited specialist, because every one of his rare and delightful products comes from the tender, sympathetic cultivation of one small garden plot.
Although he may leave whole sides of life untouched, this in no way detracts from his universal quality, since his appeal is never made to any special class. Superficial people read him for the story, lovers of beauty for delight of the eye and ear, humorists for the quaintness of his comedy; while no thoughtful human being can fail to gain from him flashes of self-knowledge and understanding of the world at large. Not that he, at his best, explains; but when, in descriptions of another’s emotions, sensations are found that each of us has tingled with, our own understanding and sympathy are at once enlarged, and we have momentarily responded, be it ever so little, to that universal vibration of life, to know and feel which is the only true knowledge.
Hardy’s first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published in 1870, when, after coming to London as a country student of ecclesiastical architecture, he had won his spurs by writings on professional subjects.
The plot is enormously complicated, fatiguingly intricate. It is worked out to the smallest point, prepared, dovetailed. Each trifling event leads on to the next, but the machinery obtrudes itself. Such mazes are too complicated; too great demand is made upon the attention; there are too many involutions, too many coincidences; also, in the effort toward brevity, he dates his narrative like a diary, breaking continuity, giving the effect of disjointed scenes. The people talk alike. His young country architect, Owen Grey, Edward Springgrove, Manston the gentlemanly villain, Anne Seavey fresh from the London pavements, and Cytherea Grey, use much the same language. The rustics, of course, speak their own humorous, salty dialect. But even here, in spite of this outward sameness, the characters do not in the least resemble one another.
In Cytherea, Hardy’s first girl, we at once have a true Shakespearean heroine. At a stroke he gives the beautiful creature, gentle and spirited, neither clever nor stupid, instinctive, unable to resist love or a lover. Like Trollope’s Lily Dale, Cytherea is of one mind, faithful. She is unconventional, without coquetry, imprudent, and — you believe that she is charming.
It is curious that in a first book Hardy’s fundamental structure should appear complete; it is almost his formula, what might come after he had at first written unconsciously, then grown aware of his own method, then formalized to baldness. In this he reverses the usual process. To take random instances, Mr. Crawford and Mr. W. E. Norris began with interesting novels, but their later works have become merely examples of how these accomplished gentlemen write, quite ceasing to be stories of live men and women. In Desperate Remedies, on the contrary, you see how Hardy got at things, before he gained ease in concealing his processes.
Although his first manuscript (The Poor Man and the Lady), by Mr. George Meredith’s advice, was suppressed as too revolutionary for public endurance, his early attitude toward bourgeois and philistine seems rather remote than antagonistic, less conscious revolt than instinctive avoidance. Flaubert’s malicious Dictionnaire des Idées reçues would not appeal to him; neither irritable nor nervous, he appears simply observant and truthful.
At once you feel a touch new to English fiction. Here is a colorist. Not in the school of Gautier! He is not occupied with the hue of words, or with their harmonies. He makes no jeweled mosaic of cunningly chosen vowels and consonants, no musical alliterations, but rather evokes your visual imagination by the intensity with which he sees, an intensity cleaving its own way to the apt word. In 1870 this young provincial Englishman saw with the eyes of a Monet. Inventing no phrases to announce his discoveries, he seems to arrive by instinct at the purest impressionist vision, joined to an ability to transmit, with the greatest directness, every impression, whether of comedy, external loveliness, or emotion.
While lacking some quality of selection not yet developed, Desperate Remedies abounds in treasures of beauty and observation, flung out unheralded, with small stress; and here, in a flash, is one of his elements of greatness. Never do you feel his eye upon the audience. Whatever struggles he may have gone through, they surely were struggles to seize his idea, to realize his vision, never to impress you. Hence, when he is prolix, you pardon it; careless, you ignore it; feeling that only pettiness could stoop to pick up a split infinitive, a needless repetition. In fact, at the beginning, a critic must concede these occasional faults once for all, as facts to be acknowledged and forgotten.
In his next book, published in 1872, Hardy passed from promising amateur to accomplished story-teller. Under the Greenwood Tree is as simple as its predecessor was intricate. Plot dwindles to the slightest thread, along which are strung a series of rural scenes. Dick Dewey, a young “tranter,” coming home on Christmas Eve, is invited to join the Waits on their usual rounds. The vicar thanks them from under warm bedclothes, a rich, churlish farmer curses them. They are disappointed at having no response from the new schoolmistress, when her window opens for a second, showing a radiant, gracious young girl.
Between this Fancy Day and Dick, for the ensuing months, a mild courtship goes on. Her father favors the rich farmer, but is easily managed, when Fancy feigns illness. The vicar struggles against a desire to mate below his station, but breaks down and addresses her. Tempted for an hour, she plans throwing Dick over, thinks better of it, and marries her sweetheart. From this trite situation Hardy extracts a minute of enchantment, set among trees and cottages, relieved by the absurd talk of villagers. The drollery of his style banishes dullness, the pervading beauty lifts it above the commonplace. Whether a branch drop across the road, whether it be an atmospheric change, a gliding from dusk to darkness, from autumn to winter, there is the same absolute freshness in seeing and describing. The used phrase does not exist, yet you have no impression of a fastidious, conscious search for originality. “ A Rural Painting of the Dutch School ” he calls it, ignoring English descendants of the Dutch, although there is hardly a page without its glimpse of Constable or Crome, its spreading oak, a band of villagers, or one bent figure with “no distinctive appearance beyond that of a human being.”
Showery skies, darkening woods, rushing little rivers, and comfortable domestic animals are clear in solid English fashion. Food and drink play a hearty part without their material presence ever blemishing the poetry of conception. In Fancy we have the real creation. No fresh charm of young girlhood has ever been more delicately conveyed. Her prettiness, caprice, coquetry, untruthfulness, adaptability, — you see perfectly that she is a little baggage, but also you know that, being young and vigorous, she will have many babies, and that, being entirely a creature of instinct, she will by these babies be kept out of mischief. By the workings of that very instinct which makes Fancy an unreliable maid, Dick’s home will be safe in the hands of Fancy the mother. Hardy strikes his key unerringly, and never leaves it, dealing in cheerfulness, good smells, wholesome sun, warm fires, ringing frost.
Descriptions of appearance, whether of place or people, are so blended with interpretation of character, that in one brief sentence Hardy not only makes you see how Reuben Dewey’s cottage looked, but incidentally conveys the genial and social nature of its inhabitants. He has gained power of elimination. What is needful for you to know is made quite plain, but irrelevant detail drops out of sight. When Fancy takes a day off for sweethearting, you are merely told that “for some reason connected with cleaning the school, the children had given them this Friday afternoon for pastime.” The earlier Hardy would have complicated his movement by patiently going into the reason. But from this time on he knows exactly when to condense, when to linger. The manner may occasionally be wordy, but superfluous matter has vanished, with the result that in long leisurely books you positively feel as if the author had done your skipping for you. Your pudding is all plums ; Wagner has made his own cuts.
Take the first paragraph. It being night, he appeals to the sense which thrives on darkness. You hear the symphonic utterance of trees, then a step, a youth whistling, and with a short half page he is in full swing of his story. There is no harking back, no picking up of lost threads. The entire chapter is a model of brevity. By some gift of heaven, the very turn of the words fills you with gay expectancy; yet for all its directness, the wonderful use of analogy sometimes shows that only through knowing other worlds is Hardy able to see this rustic one so engagingly.
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) has often been rated as inferior, possibly from its somewhat trashy title. Yet in it Hardy strikes a far deeper note than in Under the Greenwood Tree. There is the poetic rapture of an early love, a neglected, lonely girl and a beautiful youth flowing together as naturally as two drops on a window pane. Had Hardy rested here, he would have pleased those critics who already had him shelved and labeled as a master of poetic genre. But instead of stopping, he goes on to show how Elfride Swancourt’s love for Stephen Smith develops her into the woman who promptly outgrows her boyish admirer. Inevitably, she then falls prey to the next man who presents himself. Her disturbed emotions seek a goal. That Henry Knight should be a nineteen-carat prig is one of those ironic chances which may lead to tragedy or comedy. That the development should be serious gave fresh offense to the critics who had not grasped the writer’s fundamental and realistic treatment of character under his misleadingly romantic manner. Elfride belongs in his category of innocent, unformed girls; but, unlike those of Scott, these young creatures are never in the least conventionalized. Each one shows individual variation. Elfride is as completely an almost rustic lady as Fancy is a lady-like rustic. While Cytherea Grey is born to steadfastness, Elfride only attains it by a process of growth superficially indistinguishable from fickleness. Fancy Day’s waverings arise from sheer coquetry, with a tinge of worldly ambition. Fancy might be called a “bright” girl. Cytherea is neither clever nor dull, —• that issue does not come in; her point is character. But Elfride, while deficient in character, distinctly possesses intellect. To look below the surface of these easily blushing, delicate-bodied young creatures seems as ruthless as stripping the petals from a flower, — a process of which their author is never guilty. He simply presents them, but if you choose to look deeper, you will find no inconsistencies, no mistakes.
What a sense he gives of Elf ride’s bodily presence: “Appearing in her riding habit, as she always did in a change of dress, like a new edition of a delightful volume.” And how tender a humor plays about her early troubles, when “ All her flowers seemed dull of hue, her pets seemed to look wistfully into her eyes, as if they no longer stood in the same friendly relation to her as formerly. She wore melancholy jewelry, gazed at sunsets, and talked to old men and women.”
The humor which points Mr. Swancourt is of quite different flavor: “A firm-standing, perpendicular man whose fall would have been backward in direction, if ever he lost his balance;” a pompous being who put “on his countenance a higher class look than customary, as became a poor gentleman who was going to read a letter from a lord.” But this humor never deepens to outright mirth. The minor key may admit of a few discreet modulations, but a note of apprehension dominates every page. The pathetic end comes with appropriate quiet, finding you fully prepared, like Stephen, whose “hopes for the best had been but periodic interruptions of a chronic fear of the worst.”
In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) the progressive movement is toward a larger scale. It is solider, more robust; that word applies alike to characters, situation, and treatment.
Gabriel Oak, a young yeoman, sees a handsome girl sitting on top of a cartload of household goods, disputing her toll with the gatekeeper. He pays her toll. Vexed at losing her point with the gatekeeper, she barely thanks him. This gives the broad rusticity of the pair. Gabriel makes her acquaintance through the agency of a milch cow which she visits daily. “By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.” The development of the story simply is that Bathsheba fails to appreciate Oak, experiments with a rich neighbor, Farmer Boldwood, to her own sorrow, and marries for love a faithless Sergeant Troy. She grows more and more to rely upon Oak’s disinterested help in all matters of farming; but on her husband’s supposed death, half unwillingly commits herself to Boldwood. Troy reappears on the eve of her marriage, and Boldwood, in a fit of madness, shoots him dead. Stripped of its clothing, this sounds like rank melodrama ; but after all, since life may at any moment furnish melodrama, there seems no reason why the serious novelist need boycott that field, if only he has the power to avoid cheapness.
And throughout this story there is such a marvel of lyrical prose, expressing such tender and perfect vision, that not Maeterlinck himself has cast more beauty upon simple and common things. Not a leaf falls, not a bird chirps, but Hardy’s word recalls your own closest and happiest observation; through his magic you realize for the first time the meaning of many an unconsciously stored impression of life and nature. Nor is he merely the accomplished paysagiste. Character never cea ses to be as important as visions of sky and pasture. The lives of his people are never a mere vehicle for poetized bits of natural history. You see Bathsheba in the foreground, with fields and sheep in perspective, — a rustic Diana, full of unspent sex, a queer blending of unbridled impulse and middle-class decorum. Her physical beauty stands proved, also an honesty which is quite compatible with wavering. “ A censor’s opinion on seeing an actual flirt would have been a feeling of surprise that Bathsheba could be so different from such a one, yet so like what a flirt is supposed to be.”
If Thackeray had been minded to make an attractive man of Major Dobbin, or to show George Osborne as a beguiling specimen of his class, the results would not have been unlike Gabriel Oak and Sergeant Troy. Of the latter, Mr. Barrie goes so far as to say: “ Never till Troy was shown at work, had we learned from fiction how such a being may mesmerize a bewitching and clever woman into his arms. Many writers say their Troys did it, but Mr. Hardy shows it being done.” Tito Melema is of Troy’s family, except that the ethical George Eliot, by compelling the reader to dislike Tito, at once diminishes the sense of his charm. In Troy’s case, while cherishing no illusions, you never outgrow a wholly indefensible liking for this agreeable scamp, who “never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly; and hence, though his morals had never been applauded, disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile.”
And here, in this, is another trait of Hardy’s genius. He can put man or woman in difficult situations without deflecting what theatre people call “the sympathy.” The wife abandoned by a young and gallant husband usually appears unattractive; it is almost inherent in her position. Not so Bathsheba; you see exactly how it came about, without immediately losing the sense of her dash and beauty.
Specialists in “local color” should make a profound study of this book. Although Gabriel’s sheep form the picturesque motif of the whole, and seldom are more than a field or so away, they never steal the curtain. You never suspect that Bathsheba is wooed and won for the sake of an eclogue upon shearing. The most celebrated passages are known to all students of English literature; yet every rereading will discover new bits illustrating not only Hardy’s lyric beauty, but the piercing truth of expression which makes for brevity and humor. There are marvelous analogies, unstrained but original, and true as proverbs: “He would as soon have thought of carrying an odor in a net, as of attempting to convey the intangibility of his feelings in the coarse meshes of language.” Or take the old master who “ seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a line, — sheering off as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he ever got there at all.” Whether it be heat, cold, a sweep of the heavens, an ingle-nook, the regular change of seasons, or a storm, through this same direct method Hardy reaches his highest effects; and here his storms are no longer gentle disturbances of Constable or Gainsborough, but, like Turner’s, they breathe excitement. More sinister than those showers which merely threaten the wayfarer’s comfort, these menace life and happiness. You feel danger in their approach. “The same evening the sheep had trailed home, head to tail, the behavior of rooks had been confused, and the horses had moved with timidity and caution . . . time went on and the moon vanished not to reappear. It was the farewell of the ambassador previous to war.”
In another season: “It was a time in cottages when the breath of sleepers freezes to the sheets, when round the drawing-room fire of a thick-walled mansion the sitters’ backs are cold even while their faces are all aglow. Many a small bird went to bed supperless that night among the bare boughs.” A passage as perfect in its way as the opening lines of “TheEve of St. Agnes.” And yet another mood of nature, when “ to persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.”
As for his chorus of rustics, one critic cries to Heaven to witness their travesty of daily speech, another finds pure Thomas Hardy the only current tongue in “Wessex.” Who can tell ? The point is that you believe the mental attitude of his boors to be spirit perfect. Perhaps they do talk too much like Launcelot Gobbo for Victorian England. Granted! But does this matter, since they give you a complete sense of country life, since they are amusing, and adequately fill their space ? If their tongues be too archaic (and many visitors to Wessex declare them to be literally true), the medium, right or wrong, never clogs the workings of their minds. There is an atmosphere of such just values that even when Farmer Boldwood talks suspiciously like Hamlet his flights never seem far-fetched.
Hardy changes the angle of his narrative to please himself. He avoids explanation. He expects you to take mere detail for granted. No preparatory chapter exhausts Bathsheba’s past life. You are vaguely told that she studied to be a governess, but was too wild. Only Parson Adams would feel bound to ask — what her parents did — if she were an only child. Toward the end, the whole movement visibly slackens, — not weakly, but suitably, as in the last pages of a Beethoven finale. It is the slow resolution of dominant into tonic, soothing to mind and spirit, so that you reach the end with a great sense of completion, of Hardy’s power to evoke the beauty of homely things. Take the whole question of breeding, lambing, shearing, and — indigestion! Remember the distended bellies of the “ blasted ” sheep, how he treats this episode! Your sympathy is wrought on for the animals’ pain, the farmer’s loss; but the unpleasant side, though never shirked, is given no undue prominence. The entire passage might be quoted as one more proof how little beauty or refinement depends upon theme. When Ferdinand hears of his father’s death, when Ariel sings the changes taking place in a submerged and decomposing body, how is it told ? “Full fathom five thy father lies,” and so forth,—the most poetic lyric human fancy ever produced! Yet think of that same morbid process even touched upon by the hands of Caliban! So Hardy gives a clear picture of the lambs’ gastormented bellies; but he also never loses sight of blue sky, kindly sunshine, fresh brooks, and fecund meadows.
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) is to Hardy what Evan Harrington was to George Meredith. Nature plays a minor part, as discreet and deftly used background. It is satiric comedy, but satire which, in the deep old sense, appreciates instead of despises the thing satirized. The rustic is almost eliminated. Ethel-berta deals with more or less civilized human beings. A scant page of quick retrospect, and you are posted in Ethelberta’s history up to the very moment when she steps out of an ancient Wessex inn. Then, following afoot a mid-air battle between a wild duck and a hawk, she loses her way, meets an old lover, and, without effort or weariness, you are started with her along her devious and perilous career as a lady in society whose father is, and always has been, a respectable butler. With all of this, you never feel that Ethelberta is a snob. She is never ridiculous in an impossible situation; she never ceases to be charming. She is born superior to her class, — why ? You are given a hint of an ambitious mother. Old Mrs. Chickerel calls her girls by romantic names, educates this promising one to be a nursery governess, is always cautious, always ambitious. Ethelberta obviously inherits this, but you are never told so. Although contemporary criticism deeply resented Hardy’s meddling with town life, the mot juste seems really his, whether in London or Wessex. In treating people of more or less “good society,” while unaffectedly taking the tone of an outsider, Hardy never gives the impression of making mistakes. It is as if a person learned in dogs and horses should suddenly have occasion to describe elephants and giraffes. He almost says, “ Creatures of this species are not my speciality, but this is how they appear.” Beyond its charm and interest, Ethelberta has the indefinable quality of being a real book, not a tissue of clever scenes and acute observations.
If criticism resented Hardy’s venturing upon satire, still deeper annoyance was caused by his next move. The position is three-sided, and very curious. His stories are almost entirely limited to the dealings of one locality. That small area is seen by one pair of eyes, through the medium of one definite temperament. But within these limits, the author finds genre, comedy, satire, tragedy, history, monograph, problem, and allegory. His critics, moreover, so confused the man with the theme that each of these developments affected them as a new (and for the most part blamable) departure from his own field, and only in retrospect has it become plain that he has never ceased to be entirely and consistently himself.
The Return of the Native (1878) caused indignant outcry. What business had he with sheer pagan tragedy? Sir David Wilkie putting on the airs of Æschylus or Euripides! Yet no genuine element of tragedy is lacking.
Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright meet by chance on Egdon Heath at the moment of his having attained “that stage in a young man’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear to him, and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.” Eustacia was merely lonely, unoccupied, and had reached a point when her former sweetheart, Wildeve, had faded to “ the rayless outline of the sun through smoked glass.” Clym was a dreamer, philosopher, and lover of mankind; the eternal visionary, with obstinacy for passion, reason for impulse, resignation in place of ambition. This luckless man casts his lot with Eustacia, and tries to instill the domestic virtues into a creature who is the incarnation of all that men rhapsodize in women. She is the eternal, triumphant mistress, yet the type which invariably ends by losing, always going down at last before such women as Thomasin, the eternal mother.
Nowhere in English prose is there such inexpressible beauty of description. Ever modulating and changing as the theme grows gay or sad, it plays over the whole like music. Song and accompaniment are not more closely welded. And with this sense of sound, you never lose a sense of acute vision. You see not only the great moor through recurrent seasons, but cottages, thresholds, angles of chimneys, the pools, those bonfires illumining many hilltops above the dark basin of heath, till the heathmen seem to be standing “in some radiant upper story of the world.” And the heath at night! “ Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flights and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream, till revived by scenes like this.” The whole first chapter is like the opening adagio of a great symphony. Read this passage at midday in a landscape of vernal efflorescence, and the still relentless gloom of Egdon wall darken your very soul. How to accomplish this is Mr. Hardy’s secret. The Return of the Native is too close-knit for the stitch to reveal itself. Read and re-read it; each time you are so swept along that you fail to pause and scrutinize the method. You are possessed by its beauty and sadness; you lose all wish to know through what mechanism such effects are produced. You see that he is steeped with classic drama. Long before he refers to Hauff, or drops a quotation from Börne, you realize that he has been through his German philosophers and poets; only, unlike Carlyle, he has not stayed with them, but has come out on the far side, — enriched with all they could give, developed, but not changed.
Although many younger writers, quite fairly and without plagiarism, suggest Hardy, he never by any chance reminds you of any one else, — always, and with due reverence, excepting Shakespeare. In the deepest sense he is original, not by eccentricity, not by revolt. If he revolts, it is only by noting the irony of life. He is so far from seeking novelty that at times he seems reverently and sadly to end a chapter of the world’s history, as if he stood among the departing good things of past time, as if roadside wanderings with Lavengro, the tender observation of Richard Jefferies, the whole rural life of ancient England, here had its beautiful and mournful valedictory. Then suddenly a word, a phrase, and he binds you to the future. You remember that the moon waxes and wanes, even over smoke-enshrouded cities; that flood tides still lap even the esplanades of vulgar watering places; that the seasons march on, heedless of human artifice. In fact, he leaves you comforted with a sense of the abiding strength of nature.
The Trumpet Major (1880) modulates at once into a cheerful key. Granted a maid be desirable, naturally she will have more than one admirer. Therefore, in making herself and the chosen one happy, she must of necessity leave a broken heart or so in her wake. Granted the fact of war, a soldier or two must fall. Hence, though the figures in The Trumpet Major, seen on a cloudy day through fog and rain, might appear sombre enough, in the glow of genial sun and comfortable firesides they give the effect of gayety and content. While in Ethelberta and The Native, Hardy untwists every strand that goes to make his characters, in this he gives the cheerfullest of external genre pictures. Examine his figures, and you find no faulty drawing; but throughout he is occupied rather with their exteriors than with their souls. The mill, the flowers, the modest young girl perplexed among her lovers, the middle-aged courtship of Mrs. Garland and the miller, are perfectly solid, without any painstaking dissection.
Though so unlike Scott that comparison at first glance seems forced, Hardy in this historic novel has one great quality in common with him. Upon both writers, whether by accident of surroundings or disposition, the past has kept a warm personal hold. Hence their stories suggest, a genuine narrative of events in process of merging into legend, yet almost within the reach of living memories. It is noticeable that Hardy gets his effect of remoteness without doing violence to fact. In historic novels it is a customary trick to antedate the style from one to two hundred years, by way of artificially producing an air of “ quaintness.” Hardy’s people speak as rustics, and his own style is no more archaic than Thackeray’s in describing Waterloo, or Moore’s, Byron’s, and Haydon’s comments on the same period. The result of this in The Trum-pet Major is not a loss of distance, but a gain in naturalness, affording a pregnant example to those stragglers after atmosphere who set Waterloo in a dialect of Preston Pans, the Boyne in the language of Flodden Field, and tales of the Armada in a tongue worthy the battle of Hastings.
A Laodicean (1881) may be explained and dismissed in a few words. The preface tells that it was dictated during a period of tedious illness, and carried through to a predetermined good end. Of this it bears the mark, in lack of vitality. Moreover, it may be suspected that Hardy is here passing from the fiery period of early production to the broader and less personal plane of a man in the forties. This is a perilous moment for any creative genius. Those who fail to meet it frankly stay forever in a state of atrophied youth, where each succeeding story must be a mere réchauffé of already used impressions.
In Two on a Tower (1882), however, he has taken a fresh start, and there could be no better example of the subtle change to which I allude than the difference between this book and the earlier Hardy. He is still busy with the loves of young people, — Viviette is only twenty-six,— but, in a fashion which defies analysis, you feel that he has ceased to be any one of his own characters. He looks at Swithin St. Cleeve, seeing every shade of thought passing through the boy’s mind; the same with Viviette. He is no longer in the thick of the struggle, yet loses nothing. The scene is bitten into your memory. The firclad mound rising like an island out of ploughed land is a more real feature in your mind than mountains you have actually climbed and forgotten.
If Egdon Heath presided over Clym and Eustacia, the whole dome of heaven, no less, is setting for the episode of Swithin and Viviette. In this story Hardy boldly invades debatable ground. The critics are talking of it still! Many worthy ladies and gentlemen seem to be in sympathy with a priceless argument recently brought against the works of a certain great Frenchman. “ Living writers,” the censor impressively declared, “must remember that they take certain liberties at their peril.”
To the Westminster reviewer Two on a Tower recalled —Beyle! True, both in La Chartreuse de Parme and Rouge et Noir, the young men have a penchant for older ladies; but the analogy seems superficial. In the eighties certain episodes in Two on a Tower raised a general outcry on the score of propriety. To-day we should rather take exception to an occasional prolixity and carelessness, probably attributable to traces of that same illness. Whenever Hardy’s vitality flags, the outpourings of genius are temporarily moderated, and then his lack of interest in mere craft becomes apparent. In the main, however, he is quite unchanged. Fate rules the world. People stumble into joy or sorrow, not through deserving either, but simply because the wind blew, the mail was late! He sees the injustice, but confines himself to chronicling it. Yet he is never unkind to his creatures. If he thinks Viviette foolish, he at least convinces you that folly was thrust upon her, and deals tenderly with her shortcomings.
In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) Hardy marks another stage. It is the drama of middle life. Strange to say, austerity is the note of this book, which opens with a drunken laborer’s selling his young wife and child to a wandering sailor. This austerity, moreover, deepens, though wives prove not to be wives, or maids to be maids, and children have unexpected fathers. Yet the whole is steeped in puritanical, middle-class morality. The tragic figure of Michael Henchard, a rebellious, inarticulate Job, stands out from a sober, unemotional background. Restraint prevails, though, here as elsewhere, Hardy delights in “ nature’s jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles.” He revels in showing the accepted conventions of morality in contrast with actua l human passion. Not Mr. Bernard Shaw himself was ever more edified by the truly British point of view that certain things are not, at war with the actual fact that they are. Indeed, many people have hailed Shaw as the exponent of doctrines which are to be found full grown in the pages of Hardy, with three differences. Hardy loves his people, he clothes his theories in quivering flesh and blood,— they are never disembodied intellects, — and he, so far, is guiltless of propaganda.
In The Mayor of Casterbridge he obtains a great effect by using so humdrum a background that every flicker of passion flames out like a bonfire. Apart from Michael Henchard, the characters are only saved from commonplace by the sheer charm of narrative; and in this book the mere craft has made strides. There are no slipshod sentences, no lapses into wordiness, and this without loss of wit or beauty. The description of a country town is as fresh as if he never before had taken his readers to Casterbridge.
The Woodlanders (1887) is a grave study of purely rustic character. Little Hintock suffers from over-shading by many trees. Trees cast gloom and sombreness upon the lives of its inhabitants. There is base intrigue, weakness, and failure. But the point brought out by this book, in spite of the sacrifice of Giles Winterbourne, opens your eyes to an unsuspected quality in Hardy’s philosophy. Whether externally beaten by Fate, or successful, the solid characters invariably have the reward of winning affection; while inferiority, one way or another, is always worsted. This seems invariable, and, underlying Hardy’s fatalism, it prevents his ever degenerating into bitter pessimism. It is his point of reconciliation with the cruelties and injustices of life, the spring of his steadfast endurance. Under all his observation of Fate’s ironies, he is convinced that character tells. Perhaps not at a glance, but somewhere, somehow, it does meet with a reward, usually intangible, satisfying only to your soul; and with this, even in the sombreness of The Woodlanders, his tenderness never fails; and, as Brandes says of Goethe: —
“His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies perpetual change of form, — this power of resolving all nature into feeling, was his earliest gift.”
Of the three volumes of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), and Life’s Little Ironies (1894), there is only space to say that they show still further gain in purity and condensation of style. Each story ends with a queer turn, leaving you half laughing, half gasping. The humor is whimsical, a consciously artificial atmosphere pervades these curious scenes. You imagine careful parents hurrying them from drawing-room tables, serious, middle-aged spinsters protesting at them as libels upon their sex. What do they represent ? Possibly the moment in his life when the irony of things became too oppressive, when he at last fell into the throes of belated revolt, and was spurred on, by cumulative indignation, to an attempt at bettering matters.
In Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Hardy for the first time has a thesis to maintain, a text, — no less a one than that opposed by Richardson in Clarissa, and preached by Gissing in The Unclassed, and by Eugène Sue. But, unlike Tess, Fleur-de-Marie herself is hopeless of reinstatement. The thing has happened. Had she lost an eye or an arm through no fault of her own, she would still be blemished. That is Eugène Sue’s view of it.
Aiming at quite an opposite conclusion, Hardy seems constantly thwarted by forces beyond his control. He contends that, but for society’s prejudice, as expressed in Angel Clare, Tess’s purity would be uncontested. The trouble is that, by taking a text, the novelist stands bound to prove it. A less candid man than Hardy would suppress enough of the truth to leave his teaching consistent. But, while Hardy the moralist lays disaster to unnatural human laws, Hardy the incorruptible observer constantly remembers the cruelty of Nature herself. Consequently his record is the perfection of beauty and truth; but his comments, with their visible effort to wrest logic from an insoluble problem, merely hamper him. He is too unpartisan for the problem novel, in contrast to those writers who can only get up steam with the irritation of a question to argue; he who sails by tides, breezes, and tempests is merely thwarted by a determination to instruct. Consequently the warring elements in Tess place it on a lower plane than The Return of the Native, in spite of a faultlessly told story, moving through absorbing beauty to an inevitable tragedy. That the very end falls below the level of the whole, that it verges perilously upon cheapness, is a small matter, since the larger logic of events is never tampered with to the extent of shirking an unavoidable catastrophe. The real flaw lies in our pagan chronicler’s effort to suggest remedies for what he with the same breath proves irremediable. At the time of its publication, — problems held full sway over fiction in the early nineties, — this very element introduced Hardy to the large general public which had hitherto paid him comparatively slight attention. By a queer paradox, its weakness gave it tremendous vogue, but no one could ever imagine Tess as a conscious bid for popular favor. Rather it seems that Hardy’s extraordinary impressionability suddenly laid him open to a contemporary influence, and that, too, at an age when men usually become slower in response to outward conditions, less sympathetically alive to the world about them; when the conservative “Better not try” of middle age is wont to check the generous iconoclasm of youth.
His mental attitude is much the same in Jude the Obscure (1895). It is as if the spectacle of the world’s injustice had so wrought upon him that he was finally trying to hammer some sense out of it. The gropings for a path which usually mark early works, the violence of contrast which generally belongs to hot young blood, have come to him now, — the desire to reconcile actual conditions with some respectable fundamental scheme of the universe. If the beauty of vision is of necessity less, — since he never lugs in irrelevant ornament,— the style itself is of measured perfection. But—he preaches, and without absolute conviction. At times he seems to be pointing out that those who even appear to infringe upon established social order shall be ground small and cast to the winds. He, in fact, insists upon this. But, having arraigned society as guilty, he also proves that Jude and Sue were temperamentally unfit for existence; and by way of further confusion, he gives Jude a complete inability to resist the — flesh! He depicts two natures so warring that under any conditions they must have suffered; and then blames their troubles upon an uncharitable world.
Jude is the poor boy aspiring to high scholarship, baffled quite as much by his own baser appetites as by outward obstacles. Sue is a sprite of a creature, clever, speculative, granting nothing to the flesh, yet tender-hearted, —one of those abnormal women who appear sexless to themselves, and fill men with baffled desire; an independent little pagan of quick moods, warm affection, no overmastering passions.
An unjust, pursuing fate is the genuine note of the book. Here again Hardy’s conscious attempt to put his hand to the rudder and steer a course is perpetually thwarted by his invincible truthfulness. Jude is another variation of the irresolute Hardy man, with taste, feeling, strong but spasmodic will. Whereas Christopher Julian, Clym Yeobright, and Angel Clare are purely intellectual (radiance without warmth is the wonderful description of Angel’s love for Tess), Jude,for everyday in the year but one, is a creature of intellect, and just for a day falls victim to his senses, never his passions. He is eternally governed by a woman, betrayed into coarse excess by Arabella, cribbed and confined into abnormal restraint by Sue. These three stand out in high relief. There is no middle distance, only shadowy figures in remote perspective. The achievement here is that, at his age, Hardy should have added a new type to his collection of women. Sue is the modern girl, self-tormenting, frank, one of those unhappy halfway creatures who lose their hearts but never their heads; women whose actions often seem dictated by sheer caprice, because the voice of Nature calls them in uncertain tones, and they have the will to let that summons pass unheeded. Such women suffer most, accomplish least. They are elements of disturbance, because they arouse feelings which they can never satisfy. They subdue men without giving a fair equivalent; yet they are entirely without calculation, recklessly disinterested. They should never be confounded with the French heroine who suffers from sêcheresse de cœur, and experiments to ease her consuming curiosity of life. If in Tess, without losing his romantic manner, Hardy shows sympathy with ultra-modern views, in Jude he creates the absolutely modern woman, a creature as distinctively the manifestation of her own day as Pamela, Dorothea Brooke, or Mrs. Ward’s Marcella. Hardy, in fact, has kept in touch. Like Verdi, he has lived along with his time. Some of us may prefer Trovatore and Aïda to Otello, but no people in their senses could fail even to prefer Falstaff to what Verdi would have produced had his development stopped at Trovatore, making all subsequent work the mere remodeling of early thoughts and impressions.
After four books of deepening tragedy, we are suddenly delighted by a recrudescence of Hardy the ironic comedian. The Well-Beloved (1897) is an embodiment of certain mature reflections in a set of figures, conventionalized, if you will, the story being merely stated without apparent didacticism of purpose. Our pagan again, but in a mood of whimsical tolerance. The hero is no vulgar Don Juan. Never was man more solicitous for the welfare of his lady loves. The French, of course, perpetually discuss the theme of reluctant fickleness, but with them it is always an affair of the senses. Hardy is far more subtle. Jocelyn Pierston lives and loves with his imagination; never had the baser part of man less to do with his troubles. His adventures are an allegory of the human being who fails to develop normally, whose spirit remains young in an aging body, constantly upset by the painful astonishment known to all of us when some outward proof suddenly jars our inward conviction of perpetual youth. The rustic analogy is always in Hardy’s mind. He amuses himself by seeing these city people in relation to country folk, as he sees the countryman in relation to his cattle.
As a masterpiece of ironic analysis, The Well-Beloved belongs to the same class as Sentimental Tommy, but with far higher qualities of force, restraint, and proportion.
Although we stand perilously near for an attempt at placing this great novelist, it is safe even now to suggest that his chief original service to English fiction has been the same as Tennyson’s to English verse. He bridges over the gulf between poetry and science. He holds fast to romance without slurring or ignoring the facts of actual life.
If art be the conscious power of using the raw material of genius, the power not only of bringing down fire from heaven but of curbing and directing it, then as an artist Hardy, in many places, falls short. Nor is his genius at its best when he attempts subjecting it to guidance; but the genius itself — except in A Laodicean — never flags in quality and abundance. Had his craft been equal to his inspiration, then Shakespeare would have come to life in our midst. It is such genius as at times to give the effect of highest art, as opposed to Thackeray, whose art is so unapproachable as to be at times quite indistinguishable from genius. Hardy more nearly resembles Dickens, in this unstudied quality; but Dickens never shows his ravishing sense of loveliness. Hardy can see beauty anywhere. He can love anything, a sty-fed pig! And make you love it, and as a pig, too, not idealizing it, never forgetting that it is merely the winter’s store of lard, sausage, and bloodpudding. Where M. René Bazin polishes his tales of peasant life till their smooth surfaces present never a flaw or inequality, careless of means as Nature herself, Hardy is busy oniy with his matter. He is forever occupied with his idea, yet at times his intensity burns away all dross, purifies and refines, leaving only an incomparable beauty. The unfretted energy, never consumed in mere attention to craft, in its finest outbursts achieves results undreamed of by more accomplished artisans. This method, or lack of it, howrever unsafe for smaller men, is obviously the only possible one for Hardy.
For all his melancholy, he is far kinder to man and beast than Mr. Phillpotts. His sun shines oftener: there are more genial draughts of mead and metheglin, his beer is a generous fluid, his cider has mellowed in the cask. Thirsty lips are not always sodden ones. I have purposely omitted his rustics, as the aspect of him least needing emphasis. Their humor and quaintness have been so insisted upon that there is danger of his being classed as a “ clever ” portrayer of dialect and quaint corners. When, as a fact, if he be happiest in Wessex, if he create his neighborhood till it is more familiar to eyes which have never seen it than the country at their doors, — if this be true, we may also be very sure that, had Hardy been born at Whitechapel, India, or Iowa, he would still have written imperishable records of men and women.
Although Hardy’s very latest work is of an importance to demand separate and lengthy appreciation,—as well sum up in a paragraph the second part of Faust and a few Greek tragedies, — no study of his novels is complete without at least a reference to The Dynasts (Part One, 1904, Part Two, 1906).
This inchoate and disturbing production contains his garnered observation upon the whole of life, no less! It is his final comment, recorded with a scrupulous love of truth which rejects anything so empirical as a conclusion.
In fact, so far from arriving anywhere, The Dynasts gains its chief interest from unraveling the strands which go to make up the dual nature of Thomas Hardy. Aiming at complete freedom from the restrictions of form, he casts it in the shape of a huge panoramic drama of Europe under Napoleon. This immense field is commented upon from middle air by a spirit chorus, each member of which personifies an unchanging point of view. Whatever the practical defects of this form, or lack of form, it at least has the merit of giving elbow room. The author swings individuals, armies, nations, with complete disregard of any limit. His saturation with his period, in feeling and detail, is so thorough as to give The Dynasts weight as a mere historical summary, a tracing of motive and design by a hand strong enough to grasp the situation at its largest.
Beyond this, his spirit chorus continues an ever baffled attempt “to prove there is any rhyme or reason in the Universe.” At times the lines are full of a sonorous beauty, with a sweep which makes the same demand upon the attention as the long phrasing of modern music. The Spirit of the Pities forever deplores the cruelty and sadness of life. The Spirit Sinister frankly exults in mischief. The Spirit of Irony impersonally comments; the Spirit of Years counsels tolerance.
Indeed, if these debates fail to contain a satisfactory theory of the universe, they do afford a key to the apparent inconsistencies of Thomas Hardy. While all his reasonings sooner or later abut upon an “unmaliced, unimpassioned, nescient Will,” something deeper than reason forever denies so chill and meaningless a law of existence. He is like those biologists who, having pushed research to the remotest forms, are still bound to confess that just beyond there lies something which they can neither explain nor ignore.
Re-read in the light of The Dynasts, every one of Hardy’s novels represents a phase of mental struggle. Hardy has the mind of an ironic pessimist. Taken from this angle, almost every book is an invective against the wanton cruelty of “The Immanent Will.” If this were all, we should merely have an arraignment of the entire scheme of creation. But in this lifelong debate, the intellect is constantly opposed by an instinct which steadily rejects a philosophy of logical despair.
As was wisely said of Anatole France, his intellectual irony would finally grow unbearable, if it were not for his sentient, human heart. Different, as they are in every other respect, Hardy and Anatole France have this in common. Each in his way views the spectacle with an inward vibration which irrationally persists, and in consequence of which each is saddened but unembittered by the worst that life can show.
And in the end, as emotion must always prevail over reason, as love is eternally constructive, to the great gain of Hardy’s readers, the discouragement wrought by his pitiless logic is forever canceled by his indestructible human sympathy.