Hardy the Novelist

IN 1942, members of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, had their minds momentarily diverted from the war through a series of lectures by an Oxford don. Lord David Cecil’s Clark Lectures, subsequently published in London in 1943, so filled the needs of a book-starved British public that the little volume ran through three impressions in three months with no copies left over for the American market. It is high time that so rare and delightful a book as this should be made known to American readers. For David Cecil’s book is a delight. It is genial without being flippant; it is wise without being ponderous. As a critical thinker Lord Cecil shows himself to be perceptive, discriminating, and scholarly; as a writer he is gracious in attitude and graceful in utterance. In short, this is one of the most enjoyable books that have appeared in a long time.

Cecil announces at the beginning that he is going to discuss Hardy’s novels and nothing else. He will not wander off into literary aesthetics on the one hand or into psychological biography on the other. He will stick to “the path of true criticism,” which winds precariously between “the barren upland of pedantry” and “the steamy swamps in which the so-called personal critics disport themselves.” Cecil warns his readers at the outset that they must not expect him to “begin gossiping about Hardy’s relations to Mrs. Hardy.” Nor does he.

In five chapters he discusses Hardy’s scope (“his theme is mankind’s predicament in the universe”), his power, his art (Hardy’s “creative impulse seems to have instinctively expressed itself in picture”), his weakness (he “was a great artist, but not a great craftsman”; . . . “when Hardy’s preaching mood is on him, preach he must, whatever muddle it gets him into”), and his style (“he writes clumsily; but he writes creatively”). These sound like old subjects but the lectures are, for all that, fresh and stimulating. Cecil has found a surprising amount of new things to say and he says them in an unusually attractive way. Readers who like Hardy will like the light that Lord Cecil throws on him; those who may care little for Hardy will delight in Cecil for his own sake, as a genial and witty essayist.

The Oxford critic emerges from his review of the Wessex novels with a sincere admiration for Hardy the man. “We do not just admire, we love him. . . . Behind the work stands the man. . . . Bitter and hard as he conceived life to be, Hardy himself was never hard. . . . The burning flame of his charity blazed all the higher” because of what he conceived to be the “unrelieved blackness of the universe.” Cecil’s remarks here are as wise as they are kindly. They leave one with the feeling that this is the sanest book on Hardy published since his death in l928.

CARL J. WEBER