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GORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

 

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
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FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
IN PREPARATION

POEMS

By LIONEL JOHNSON

Price 5s. net
 
THE ART OF
THOMAS HARDY

BY LIONEL JOHNSON

—

WITH A PORTRAIT ETCHED FROM
LIFE BY WILLIAM STRANG
AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY

JOHN LANE

e

LONDON: ELKIN MATHEWS

AND JOHN LANE: VIGO ST.

NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD
AND COMPANY

1894
A.76192

PR
4734
Jb7
1894

Edinburgh: T. and A. Consrasie, Printers to Her Majesty
PREFACE

IT is held, upon all hands, that to write about
the works of a living writer is a difficult and a
delicate thing : I have felt the inevitable difficulty ;
I have tried to preserve the becoming delicacy.
Throughout these essays upon the works of Mr.
Hardy, there will be found, I trust, no discourtesy
in my censure: I trust still more, no impertinence
in my praise. Dr. Johnson assigned two meanings
to the word Critick; in the first place, it means
‘A man skilled in the business of judging of
literature ; a man able to distinguish the faults
and beauties of writing’: in the second place, it
means ‘A snarler; a carper; a caviller” This
evil kind of critic is prettily described by
Drayton :

‘This Critick so sterne,

But whom, none must discerne,

Nor perfectly have seeing,
Strangely layes about him,
As nothing without him

Were worthy of being.’
Vv
PREFACE

But there is another critic, equally abhorrent: a
creature of adulation, prying and familiar, whose
criticism is founded upon personal gossip about
his victims: a rude fellow, who holds a writer’s
private life and history, to be public concerns.
To all such canaille écrivante, | would apply these
verses of Cowper :

‘The man who hails you Tom, or Jack,
And proves by thumping on your back,
His sense of your great merit,
Is such a friend, that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed,
To pardon or to bear it.’

All varieties of evil criticism flourish exceedingly
in books upon the works of living writers: so
many and so great are the vices incident to them,
that some judicious persons would have them
discouraged altogether. Yet there is much to
be said on their behalf: somewhat of this kind.
Most of us accept with equanimity the reviews,
the journals, the magazines, which contain an
abundance of criticism upon living writers ;
criticism, of necessity hastier, than the criticism
contained in a deliberate book. But reviews, I
may be told, and journals, and magazines, are
published for the passing day: a book makes the
greater pretension to some lasting value. The

reply had its force, did all journals die with the
vi
PREFACE
day, the week, the month, the quarter, of their
production: did all books remain ever in the
public way. But the review, be it good or bad,
once published, is indestructible; posterity can
excavate it from the stores of newspapers in
libraries and in museums; can light upon it
among the volumes of old magazines; “tera
Scripta, it must remain. Ephemeral it may be, in
value ; it cannot be ephemeral, in duration : whilst
for such books, as this of mine, I claim that, if
they be worthless, they will but exist in equal
obscurity with the reviews, an offence to no one;
and that, if they have some little value, they may,
by the more careful workmanship and prepara-
tion, which alone can justify them, be of greater
interest and worth, than the criticism produced
under conditions, not so favourable tg thought
and care.

But the reviews, it may be urged, deal with a
writer's books, singly and in succession, without
attempting to consider his life’s work, as though
it were ended ; they remember, that he may yet
write a great number of books: it is premature
to write a book about a living writer’s books: he
may write books of so new and fresh a kind, as
wholly to overthrow his critic’s general positions.
Certainly, that is possible: and, certainly, it is

improbable. But, be it so or not so, when a
Vii
PREFACE

writer has published fifteen volumes, the critic is
at no loss for materials of criticism. Mr. Hardy
may write as many works, as Sophocles or
Shakespeare, Voltaire or Goethe, Balzac or Hugo,
Dumas or Scott: that does not deter me from
considering, nor from expressing, the character of
his fifteen published works: for I make no silly
claim to pass sentence upon them, to determine
their absolute value, to assign them their rank
and place. It amply contents me to dream, that
some gentle scholar of an hundred years hence,
turning over the worn volumes upon bookstalls
yet unmade, may give his pence for my book,
may read it at his leisure, and may feel kindly
towards me. For we look back with eagerness
upon memories of the Mermaid Tavern and of
the Apollo Room, of Wills and of Button’s and
of The Club: we are grateful to Drummond of
Hawthornden, to Boswell, and to Spence: and
this, because we love to know how the great, or
the little, writers of those days were esteemed by
the great, or by the little, critics. Criticism of
living writers need not be presumptuous, nor
impertinent ; let the critic feel but the reverence
of a novice in the tribes of Ben, of Dryden, of
Addison, of Pope, of Johnson ; he may take heart
of grace, and speak his mind upon the seeming

masters of his own day. I do not know, that he
viii
PREFACE
will do well to think much about the ‘Science
of Criticism’: about the ‘Science of Fiction,’
Mr. Hardy has written, that an attempt to set
it forth ‘is to write a whole library of human
philosophy, with instructions how to feel’ I
have but brought to these essays the best of my
thought and of my knowledge: remembering,
how it is held, upon all hands, a difficult and a
delicate thing, to write about the works of a
living writer.

LIONEL JOHNSON.

CADGWITH : 1892.
IL,

Ill.

Iv.

s

VI

CONTENTS

PREFACE, . ‘ 3

. CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES,

DESIGN AND COMPOSITION,

WESSEX, . s ‘ ‘ :

COUNTRY FOLK,

CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN, .

SINCERITY IN ART, . . . .

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

PAGE

37
89
131
180

224
ERRATA

Page 75, line 13, for Saturninus vead Saturnius.
» 78, 5, 4, for stand vead resist.

2» 162, ,, 31, for Dr. Johnson professed vead it was
said of Dr. Johnson.

»> 211, ,, 25, for impossibilité read impossibilités,

o> 252, ,, 21, for Euphorion read Euphranor.
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

I

CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

LITERATURE has.commonly been called humane,
by way of precept and of praise: if that fact be
well taken to heart, it rebukes our solitary pride
in our own works, and it calms our feverish concern
for our own times: it fills the mind with a cheer-
ing sense of security and of companionship. In
the humanities of literature, its various occupation
with the whole mind of man, consist its value
and its power: and the famous phrase in Terence,
which declares the natural sympathy of man with
man, serves further to declare the natural sphere
of men’s most natural art, the art of letters. The
most enduring things, in a world of growth and
change, are the human passions and the human
sentiments: it is the office of good literature, the
distinction of classical literature, to give form in
every age to the age’s human mind. Knowledge
increases ; the history of one age is the intellec-
tual inheritance of the next: the sciences appear to
conquer the natural world, and the philosophies
attempt the mysterious: but literature must always
I A
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

have a supreme care for those original elements of
human passion, and of human sentiment, which
knowledge trains, and experience educates, with-
out changing their essential quality. Life, in con-
tact with the passions and with the emotions of
men, and so provoking their minds to expression,
is the occasion, the origin, of literature. From
Homer or Virgil, to Wordsworth or Goethe, the
great books and utterances tell all one story,
under diverse forms: with accumulating wealth
of matter, and with increasing complexity of
thought, but with the same animating spirit of
‘fair humanities.’ To the apprehensions of some
hasty and impatient minds, the lucid wisdom of
the ancients is poor and stale: the Eastern
sages, the Greek tragedians, Homer and Pindar,
Theognis and Herodotus, Virgil and Horace,
Hafiz and Omar: how much of all these seems
flat and frigid, mere proverb, parable, allegory,
personification! For our century has in succes-
sion enjoyed the Welt-Schmerz of Germany, and
the Névrose of France: an immense and desolate
melancholy from Russia, a perverse and astringent
misery from Scandinavia. We ‘refine upon our
pleasures,’ as Congreve has it; and our refinement:
takes the form of that paradoxical humour, which
confounds pleasure with pain, and vice with
virtue. It is a sick and haggard literature, this
literature of throbbing nerves and of subtile sensa-
tions; a literature, in which clearness is lost in
mists, that cloud the brain; and simplicity is

2
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

exchanged for fantastic ingenuities. Emotions
become entangled with the consciousness of
them: and after-thoughts or impressions, laboured
analysis or facile presentation, usurp the place of
that older workmanship, which followed nature
under the guidance of art. Ages of decay,
seasons of the falling leaf, are studied for love of
their curious fascination, rather than ages of growth
and of maturity: ‘the glory that was Greece,
and the grandeur that was Rome,’ are chiefly
welcomed in the persons of those writers, whom
it is convenient to style Cantores Euphorionis.
Literature, under such auspices, must lose half its
beauty, by losing all its humanity: it ceases to
continue the great tradition of polite, of humane
letters : it becomes the private toy of its betrayers.
Many and many a book, full of curious devices,
and of distorted beauties, full of hints and of
suggestions, can charm our modern taste, with its
indulgence, not to say its appetite, for all sorts of
silly audacity : but we dare not prophesy for such
books an immortality, nor contemplate them by
the side of the classics. Yet the classics, of all
ages and in all tongues, are a catholic company:
in their fellowship is room for comers from
the four winds, laden with infinitely various gifts
and treasures. But, as the Church Catholic, /a
seule Eglise qui a mis Chumanité dans sa vote,
embracing Tauler and Saint Teresa, excludes
Swedenborg and Behmen: so too acts the catholic
company of the classics. Diversity is admirable :

3
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

perversity is detestable: the distinction may be
delicate, but it is decisive, and separates, accord-
ing to the judgment of time, the cleverness of
to-day, from the genius, that is at home through-
out the centuries. I profess my faith in too many
writers of this age, to accuse myself of a backward
tendency in my appreciations, of an over conser-
vative spirit in my attempts upon criticism: but at
the outset of these essays, and before I venture to
approach the art of Mr. Hardy, I wish to declare
my loyalty to the broad and high traditions of
literature ; to those humanities, which inform with
the breath of life the labours of the servants, and
the achievements of the masters, in that fine art.
There are theorists, who maintain the absolute
independence of the artist ; his ‘unchartered free-
dom’ from all traditions, and from all influences ;
his isolated station, his spontaneous powers: and
there are theorists, who maintain the entire de-
pendence of the artist upon hereditary impulse,
upon circumstantial influence, upon local forces,
and upon social tendencies; they rob him of
his originality, that they may fit him into their
theory. The great name of Carlyle, and the
distinguished name of M. Taine, may stand
sponsors for the two doctrines. And yet the
truth would seem to lie between these two des-
perate extremities, of plenary inspiration and of
mechanical necessity: between that doctrine,
which detaches the artist from his fellow men;
and that doctrine, which forbids them to see, even

4
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

in the artist, an example of free and of creative will.
At the least, it is of interest to consider the middle
position: to contemplate the artist, the man of
letters, in his relation to past times and to his
own, with something ofa Positivist spirit, tempered
by a saving disbelief in Positivism. The result of
such a meditation might be of this kind ; with due
allowance for ‘accidental variations.’

The supreme duties of the artist toward his art,
as of all workmen toward their work, are two in
number, but of one kind: a a duty of reverence, of
fidelity, of understanding, toward the old, great
masters ; and a duty of reverence, of fidelity, of
understanding, toward the living age and the
living artist. There are times, when the two duties
are hard to reconcile ; when the artistic conscience
must put forth all its honest casuistry, and deter-
mine the true solution with laborious care. The
law of restraint seems to say one thing: and the
liberty of power, another. Is this, asks the artist
of his conscience, a fine discovery of beauty, a
fine exercise of strength? or is it a temptation,
a vicious thing disguised, for the moment, in the
semblance of beauty and of strength? Am I
dishonouring art, by the rejection of fine chances?
or honouring art, by obedience to fine traditions?
As the artist decides, so does he find his salvation,
or pronounce his:own sentence of failure: if he
decide well, his work is alive, vigorous, and sure,
But the difficulty of decision! for it requires no
less than a science, to lay at rest questions of the

5
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

artistic conscience: a knowledge of the ends of
art, an insight into the perplexed issues, the
tangled ideas, which beset the artist’s mind, and
confound his plain morality. It is not in estimates
of the past, that the difficulties come: it is in
estimates of the present. That the habit and the
drift of our own age are good, and to be praised,
who shall assure us? The facts of life, its energies
and activities in play about us, we can recognize
with some clearness; and the fashions, ventures,
experiments, of contemporary artists are almost
too prominently in sight. But we require a
touchstone and a test; some image, as it were, of
that perfect state, ‘which lieth in the heavens,’
seen there by Plato, ‘eternal in the heavens,’
proclaimed by Paul; before we can accept with
joy, and follow with readiness, the ways of our
living age, of our living artists. And in the old,
great masters, and even in the excellent, old writers
of less excellence, we have our test, a test of the
widest application, whereby to assay ourselves and
others. For, securus tudicat orbits terrarum: sure
and sound is the whole world’s judgment: in
Homer and in Virgil, in Milton and in Dante,
virtue and truth shine clearly. The general voice
of men, the authoritative voice of artists, go to-
gether in praise of the old, great masters, ‘But
they lived in their times, we live now ; what have
we to do with them?’ asks many a man, whose
illiteracy has made him petulant. Neither did the
old, great masters flourish together: yet examine,
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

I pray you, the debt of Virgil to Homer, the debt
of Dante to Virgil, the debt of Milton to Dante,
to Virgil, and to Homer. Do you not find it an
inestimable debt of reverence, of fidelity, of under-
standing? Or can you discern in those masters,
for the most part, any sign of a servile obedience
to each other? Call it rather, not a debt due, but
a grace sought and received. Great art is never
out of date, nor obsolete: like the moral law of
Sophocles, ‘God is great in it, and grows not old’:
like the moral law of Kant, it is of equal awe and
splendour with the stars. A line of Virgil, written
by the Bay of Naples, in some most private hour
of meditation, all those long years ago! comes
home to us, as though it were our very thought :
upon each repetition, experience has made it more
true and touching. Or some verse of Arnold,
written at Oxford or in London, some few years
past: it comes home to us, as though a thousand
years had pondered it, and found it true. In
beauty and in strength, in beauty of music and
in strength of thought, the great artists are all
contemporaries: ‘Vandyke is of the company,’
now and always: an eternal beauty and strength
are upon the great works of art, as though they
were from everlasting. Be we artists then, or
students merely, let us value our age and ourselves,
according to the mind of the great masters, and
in their spivzt. ‘There is but one way for me,
wrote Keats, in the very accents of Milton:
‘The road lies through application, study, and

7
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
thought. I will pursue it. To his disciples in
art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, sanest and most refined
of English painters, gave the same counsels: ‘The
daily food and nourishment of the mind of an
artist is found in the great works of his predeces-
sors. There is no other way for him to become
great himself. Serpens, nist serpentem comederitt,
non fit draco, is a remark of a whimsical Natural
History, which I have read, though I do not
recollect its title; however false as to dragons, it
is applicable enough to artists.’ In his old age,
Michael Angelo was met among the ruins of the
Colosseum, by the Cardinal Farnese: who en-
quired of him, to what end he meditated there.
‘I go yet to school,’ said Michael Angelo, ‘that I
may continue to learn.’ But in our day, many
men of admirable powers love to think of them-
selves, as alone in the world, homeless in the
universe ; without fathers, without mothers ; heirs
to no inheritance, to no tradition; bound by no
law, and worshippers at no shrine: without medi-
tation, without reverence, without patience, they
utter, and would have us hear, their hasty and
uncertain fancies. To what ‘lyrical cries’ do they
bid us listen: to what ‘psychological moments’
do they invite our attention! These have no
habitual, nor constant, principles of thought; no
test, nor standard, of judgment: loose sentiment,
and lawless imagination, are the signs to them of
free and fearless genius. It is easy indeed fora
man to bé ‘deep-versed in books, and shallow in
8
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

himself, crude or intoxicate’; but that is not a
common danger in these days: rather are the
humble students of modern literature moved to
exclaim, with Dr. Johnson; ‘I never desire to
converse with a man, who has written more than
he has read.’

In the second place: at one with our test by
ancient greatness, is the test by our proper con-
science. There are occasions, when we say, with
a confidence beyond words, Th7s zs right: against
text-book and precept, warning and exhortation,
we know our work to be true. The pedant, with
a mechanic reverence, in a blind fidelity, through
a dull understanding, may quote against us his
Aristotle, his Vitruvius, his Pope, his Reynolds:
we know, that:'we are their dutiful sons, not he;
that what we try to do, in humility following our
conscience and our light, is in the spirit and in
the truth of what they did, following theirs. With
the increase of knowledge, the growth and change
of civility, the diverse forms and novel aspects of
men and things, there comes a like alteration in
the manners of literature: but it must be a rational
development, not a mindless innovation ; the work
of a loyalist, not of a rebel; careful in spirit of
art’s constitutions, not indifferent to their violation.
‘Hereditary virtues must be discernible, if the new
art is to be legitimate: and they must be nurtured
and tended well. As in the spiritual or interior
life, the Church would have a man perfect himself
by the help of approved rules and meditations,

9
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

not superseding, but directing, his conscience: so
in art, where also there is an interior life, the
collective wisdom of the great masters must help
to nourish and sustain that conscience, which,
cannot thrive wholly upon the desires and the
intimations of its own genius. If we regard such
men as Spenser, and as Sidney, in Elizabethan
times; or as Mr. Whitman in our own: we find not
their greatness, nor their felicity, to lie in the
attempt to compose English poetry in the antique
metres of Greece and Rome; nor in the attempt
to rob English poetry of all metrical law. Yet
Spenser, in that early enthusiasm of the English
Renaissance, was certain that the new age, with
its new learning and its new taste, demanded his
innovation: Mr. Whitman is still more convinced,,
that Democracy, America, and many things be-
side, justify his bold adventure. See here the
dangers of art, and its ironical revenges! For
Spenser's hapless innovation came of a false de-
ference to antiquity: he misapprehended alike the
needs of his own age, and the lessons of the great
past. But when he came to himself, he showed
a triumphant apprehension of both: and in the
Faery Queen, the spirit of old romance, and the
spirit of new times, met together without dis-
cord. And, to consider Mr. Whitman: is he not
then most a poet, when, forgetting the imagined
new needs of his time and country, he chaunts
simple, heroical things, with a ‘large utterance,
almost Homeric? Let Sir Joshua sum up for us,
10
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

in two weighty passages, the issues of the whole
matter, upon both sides. First, for tradition : ‘The
habit of contemplating and brooding over the
ideas of great geniuses, till you find yourself
warmed by the contact, is the true method of
forming an artist-like mind; it is impossible, in
the presence of those great men, to think or
invent in a mean manner; a state of mind is
acquired that receives those ideas only, which
relish of grandeur and simplicity.’ Next, for
originality ; ‘I should hope that it is not necessary
to guard myself against any supposition of re-
commending an entire dependence upon former
masters. I do not desire that you shall get other
people to do your business, or to think for you;
I only wish you to consult with, to call in, as
counsellors, men the most distinguished for their
knowledge and experience, the result of which
counsel must ultimately depend upon yourself.
Such conduct in the commerce of life has never
been considered as disgraceful, or in any respect
to imply intellectual imbecility ; it is a sign rather
of that true wisdom, which feels individual imper-
fection ; and is conscious to itself of how much
collective observation is necessary to fill the im-
mense extent, and to comprehend the infinite
variety, of nature. I recommend neither self-
dependence nor plagiarism.’ He, who falls into
neither of those criminal mistakes, is the perfect
humanist: he reveres the past, he comprehends
the present: he ‘sees life steadily, and sees it
II
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

whole.” The humanists, in any liberal sense of
that term, are the catholics of art: well balanced.
and well proportioned in mind, they exaggerate
nothing, and they ignore nothing ; but upon the
facts of life, spiritual and material, they look with
a discernment, which tries to realize them all at
their true value. The worthiest, the most valuable,
facts of life are the human emotions and the
human passions, ‘in widest commonalty spread,’
yet touching, to all imaginable varieties of issue,
each single soul. It is the aim of these essays to
show, that Mr. Hardy is often of the humanists:
that he may be of the classics.

His chosen method of expression is the novel:
that method, which, since the days of Elizabeth
and of the Stuarts, has more and more won for
itself a high and serious consideration: so that
it is commonly recognized in our times, as the
characteristic method of presentation, for the high
play of motives and adventures. I have insisted
upon the unchanging identity of human emotions
and of human passions, under all circumstances of
time and place: and I see, in this universal triumph
of the novel, no sign of a wholly new order of things
for artistic treatment ; but a sign, that with an
increased conflict and complexity in the old play
of human life with life, art has established, by
means of the novel, a new and lively convenience
for giving to that play a form. Our fashionable
talk, about our marvellous subtilty, analytic skill,
psychological insight; as though our forefathers

12
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

in the arts had been fools and blind; seems to
compliment ourselves, upon the creation of a state
of things, for which the whole great course of social
history is responsible. It is the office of art, to
disengage from the conflict and the turmoil of
life the interior virtue, the informing truth, which
compose the fine spirit of its age: and to do this,
with no pettiness of parochial pride in the fashions
and the achievements of its own age, but rather
with an orderly power to connect what is, with
what has been, looking out prophetically towards
what will be. La partie tmmortelle et vraiment
humaine survit: how small a part is that! Yet
the by-ways of the world, and the back-waters ;
the rare nooks and corners of life, where the
passions and the emotions play their freaks and
phantasies : there is no reason, why the curiosity
of art should not dwell upon these to fine purpose ;
discovering, among so much quaintness, repulsion,
or obscurity, the spirit that unites them to the
general life. ‘There is no excellent Beauty, that
hath not some strangenesse in the proportion.’ I
can think of nothing, so beyond hope deformed,
so past endurance dreadful, but art could show
it to me, humanized, and brought within the pale
of beauty. But for this kindly office of art, in
art’s romantic moments, is required a classic sense
of scholarship: otherwise, this romantic delight
in subtilties of situation, and in audacities of
thought, will run riot, and produce those uncouth,
clever pieces of extravagance, which charm the

13
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

undisciplined. There are certain English writers,
who in compliment, as it were, to republican
France, appear to hold all French novelists for
free and equal: when we have perused and
weighed their adjectives in praise of living men,
whose claims and charms are of to-day, we fall
to wondering, what praises may remain for Balzac
and for Flaubert. Nothing can cure this desire
for novelty, corrupted into a disease, but contact
with wide ranges of knowledge: a prolonged
handling of the serene classics, until the beauty,
the greatness, the goodness of them grow wonder-
ful to us, and romantic; fresh and living. Be
it the Ziad or the Agamemnon, Paradise Lost or
the Ancient Mariner, that we taste, and learn, and
master; still we are left with the one assured
sense of having spent our time in a great society,
ina good company: Deus nobis haec otia fecit!
Clear of controversy, away from the noise and
dust, happy among the immortals, we can study
them under the light of our own day; and only
then shall we understand, upon what matters of
our own day to turn that living light, and so find
in them the soul of our living age. Only when
a delight in the classics has passed into a dislike
of contemporary art; when a living love of the
classics has degenerated into an artificial habit
of esteem: does familiarity with the classics
become dangerous to the critics. In the study
of novels, that danger is never far away; for
novels, to be true to life, must deal with its

14
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

medley of matters in a spirit of impartiality,
which is often hard to bear: and the protest of
many a reader against the levity or the serious-
ness, the sunlight or the twilight, the conflict or
the calm, which distresses him in a novel, is often
an unconscious protest against its truth to his
own experience; and a longing for those older
books, whose old-fashioned charm of manner and
of matter has given him some respite and release.
That may not have been the office of those older
books in their own day: but, daring and romantic
then, they are classical and familiar now. The
novelist must lay his account with all that:
remembering, that not in China only do men live
backward and forward ; but that only in China
do they write books for the dead.

Much has been written about the English origins
of that great art, which Mr. Hardy pursues with
so eminent a zeal, and with so excellent a skill:
erudite dissertations, upon the sources of the
Morte d’Arthur or of the Arcadia; upon the
Elizabethan novel at large. Much, again, has
been written about that invention of the dramatic
spirit and form, whence in great measure came
the art of fiction. But these intricate matters
may be with reverence dismissed : for the modern
novel can find a point, in the long rolls of its
pedigree, whence date all its more characteristic
features. The desire to tell stories, the love of
hearing them, are among the oldest things in the
world: Homeric rhapsodists, and Eastern fabu-

15
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

lists, and savage persons known to anthropology,
witness to it. But the simple dramatic instinct is
satisfied by almost any dramatic method: verse
or prose, it is all one, so a story be told. The
modern novelist would scarce recognize a brother
artist at Ionian festivals, in Oriental bazaars,
beside savage camp fires. His humanism would
make him at home, his sympathies would go out
to his surroundings: but not his conception of
his own art. So too, with the Gesta Romanorum,
with Maundeville, with Boccaccio, with Malory,
with More, with the Euphuist authors of pastoral,
with the earlier writers of stirring history or travel,
with the earlier essayists and disciples of Theo-
phrastus, with the voluminous inventors of French
romance: germs of the modern novel lie concealed
in all these ; but not the most vital, nor the most
fertile. Call it fanciful, if you will: I incline to
think, that the modern English novelist, bent
upon genealogical research, would do well to
consider the three familiar names of Bunyan,
Pepys, Defoe. It is true, that the Pzlgrim’s Pro-
gress was for long held low, plebeian, and inele-
gant, a kitchen book: but its marvellous power
of direct narration by strong strokes, its living
portraiture and steady movement, forced it upon
the attention of all classes. Pepys came to light
too late, to be the joy of innumerable wits and
worthies, who would have tasted him with relish;
he has had, therefore, no part in the formation of
the novelist’s art, by the example of his infinite
16
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

curiosity and vivacious style: but he is a most
notable figure in the history of literature, by virtue
of those qualities and of his use for them. A con-
stant readiness to note the value of trifles in the
art of life; an appreciation of facts, of realities,
of things, veritably seen and heard and done: few
earlier writers, dealing with their own experience,
have shown these powers in so great a degree.
With the name of Defoe, we come to the first
writer of English novels, in whom we can recog-
nize and revere a modern master. He has had
hard measure dealt out to him: he stood in the
pillory of the law, and in the more cruel pillory
of Pope: and, though Dr. Johnson ranked Rodzx-
son Crusoe with the masterpieces of Cervantes and
of Bunyan, as one of the three books, which their
reader could wish longer than they are; for the
most part, he has been abandoned to boys, and
neglected by men. That he wrote two master-
pieces, is indeed remembered: it is commonly
forgotten, that he wrote many things of only less
great merit. In praise of these three, Bunyan,
Pepys, Defoe, it suffices to say, that their works ;
in the cases of Bunyan and Defoe, both imagina-
tive and real; are beyond all reckoning more true
to reality, than the narratives of the old, famous
News-Writers : more true, that is, to the genius of
persuasive narration, to the spirit of verisimilitude,
to the powers of alert and faithful story-telling. It
were beside the mark, to waste words upon the
work of such less worthy writers, as Mrs. Behn or
7 B
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Mrs. Manley; though in these, and in many others,
the modern novel may be descried, not always
under the most happy conditions : between Defoe
and Mr. Hardy come all the greatest English
novelists, with all their great allies.

Five years after the birth of Defoe, was born the
great and terrible Swift: and that name carries
forward our thoughts, with no considerable change
or break, until we reach that second Renaissance,
associated with the names of Wordsworth and of
Coleridge. The century of the wits, the satirists,
the essayists ; of stately common sense, of scholarly
grace, of leisurely perfection! Let me add, and
ignore all ridicule from les précieux ridicules, a
century of admirable poets, and of novelists unsur-
passed. The English Revolution had established
a solid peace and security at home; all the foreign
wars, the strife of parties, the national difficulties
and dangers, were as nothing beside those ages
of storm, which the country had already known :
and the French Revolution was yet to come, with
its long train of disturbing consequences. The
world of English letters betook itself to the main-
tenance of sober reason. The very heterodox in
faith, in philosophy, and in morals, prided them-
selves upon their sound sense, and had no airs of
superior inspiration. Experience, verified facts,
the ascertained contents of life, the clear prin-
ciples and powers of human nature: these were
the plain arguments and matters, for the con-
sideration of reasonable men. The roll of moral-

18
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

ists, or of metaphysicians, illustrates this reliance
of thought upon common sense, in very various
ways: there were the elegant Shaftesbury, with
his characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times ; Mandeville, with his Private Vices, Public
Benefits ; the rhetorical commonplaces, uttered in
no commonplace rhetoric, of St. John; the mixed
depravity and charm of Chesterfield; Johnson’s
golden mean of wisdom ; the composed and Attic
reasonings of Berkeley; the Gallicized Scotch
sceptic, Hume; the moral father of political
economy, Smith; Butler, the champion of pro-
bability ; Burke, the Hooker of statesmen, upon
whom at last fell the moral horror of the French
Revolution, in all its lawlessness. Here is no lack
of variety ; here are prelates and professors, states-
men and politicians, lights of the court and oracles
of the coffee house: but in all, we note a desire
to be sensible and reasonable; to present, each
his own views of truth, as the plain, sane state-
ment of facts; demanding, doubtless, care and
labour from the student of truth; yet not ex-
ceeding the grasp of any honest and educated
man. Weare far away from the breathless heights
of German speculation. Neither was it an age of
general and shallow culture; the learned com-
posed a somewhat close corporation: yet the
simple citizen, and the plain tradesman, were apt
to feel a respect for letters, an interest in them,
comparatively rare in these more pretentious
days. And the immediate precursors of the

19
TH ART OF THOMAS HARDY

great eighteenth century novelists found their
material for art among the busy places of their
world: continuing, in a measure, the tradi-
tions of Elizabethan comedy, but imparting to
them a greater seriousness and a greater grace,
Addison and Steele brought to its perfection the
English essay. Neither the fierce note of revolt in
Swift, nor the more exquisite, if sometimes in-
decent, sensibility of Sterne, so directly suggested
or improved a way for English fiction, as
did those satires, sketches, pathetic or ironical
masterpieces, which immortalized the memories
of Addison and Steele. In these, the spirit of pure
humour walks abroad, now touching to tears, now
brightening with smiles, the sensitive and the
observant: dwelling upon the kindly details of life,
the little graces, fashions, absurdities, enchaunt-
ments, which go to its merry making; as also
upon the simple, grave, and eternal elements in
human nature, which make of life so solemn a
thing. Notably in Addison and in Steele, notice-
ably in their successors and imitators, an habit of
interest in the common life prevailed: their light-
ness of air, that dainty felicity of phrase, witness-
ing less to any artificial survey of life, than to a
power of seizing upon the main matters in hand,
and of presenting them clearly and well, free from
the encumbering mass of things. They made no
pretensions to the novelist’s art, but limited them-
selves to the design of the essay, as they con-
ceived and brought to perfection that difficult
20
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

form: the rich, massy, and sententious Bacon,
Montaigne the eloquent and the elusive, whilst
they excelled Addison and Steele, beyond all
reckoning, in genius of thought, were yet inferior
to them in justice of design. In this rare quality
lay their influence upon the art of the novelist:
that just and clean design, exhibited in so many
of their little narratives and incidents, cannot but
have prompted others, of less delicate a concern
for moral meditation, but of an equal turn for
discerning the plots and plays of common life, to
draw character, and to describe adventure, upon
a more considerable scale. The literary annals
of the last century swarm, indeed, with stories,
romances, sketches and satires in prose, sprung
from most various originals: but, setting aside
these obscure products, we may fairly claim for the
great essayists of the last century, that they did
much to help and to inspire that characteristic art
of England, the novel of common life.

We come to the great triumvirate of early
English novelists; to Richardson, to Fielding,
and to Smollett: now at last, we can delight, as
Mrs. Sarah Battle at her whist delighted, in ‘a
clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the
game. Perhaps, they have few lovers left them
now; tedious Richardson, hearty Fielding, gross
Smollett! for tediousness should in these days
be the tediousness of a problem in psychology ;
heartiness, that of a riotous and brutal pessimism;
grossness, the grossness of a mock scientific

21
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

curiosity. But from their lovers, who constantly
converse with them, the great three, in a very
English way, and upon a vastly lower level, have
something of the inseparable love and reverence,
which the three great tragic Greeks will always
have. Pamela, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison ;
Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Amelia; Humphrey
Clinker, Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random: the
names are redolent of joy and gladness. There
is a tendency to accuse these books, and their
partial prototypes, in French or Spanish literature,
of inartistic methods: the digressions, the inter-
polations, the reflections, the leisurely pace, the
dalliance with every passing thought and senti-
ment; upon all this, we hear, the laws of art
cry out. If so it be, the ‘gentle’ readers of these
books must lie under a very evil spell: for at
the close of their reading, the delusion is strong
upon them, that they have been present at a
very miracle of art’s working. All the wayward
wanderings from the straight path, in the matter
of epistolary episode, meditative diversion, irrele-
vant narrative, seem to have been necessary to
the complete expression of the writer’s mind: far
from ignoring, or perverting, the true method of
his art, it was with deliberation, that he thus con-
ceived and followed his method. There are two
kinds of old books, full of charm: the stories,
which take the road, and put up at inns, and fall
there into singular entanglements ; which resound
with laughter, and bustle, and the voices of a
22
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

medley world, yet with a strong hand keeping
all in order: and there are the stories, with the
tranquil air of certain old manor houses, where
the genius of the place is gracious and strong, in
book room and in still room and in oratory, a
placid spirit perfected by long years. Richardson,
Fielding, and Smollett, each in his way and mea-
sure, combine these charms: if you weary of
Richardson's fine-drawn sentiment, until at last
you could hang yourself, as said his friend the
Doctor; you will presently fall upon some scene
of a vigour all the more impressive, for its lengthy
prelude: if Fielding tire you with his rough
and ready adventures, you will soon meet with
some incomparable stroke of wit, or wisdom, or
tender thought, all the more affecting by force of
contrast. These writers determined the course of
the English novel: they gave the word of com-
mand, that English novelists should thrive upon
a generous spirit of humanity ; concerned for the
little realities of life, but still more concerned for
the great realities. So doing, they established it
upon a firm footing : and gave examples of success
in the new art found for prose, fashioned after the
heart and mind of Shakespeare, the head of the
new art found in his day for verse.

Signs were not wanting, that this too was the
day of a new art, of a new spirit, for verse also:
the impulse towards a truer simplicity, or a
greater depth, had already begun to stir. Collins,
Gray, Shenstone, Goldsmith, Percy, Warton,

23
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Cowper, Chatterton, Crabbe, Blake, Burns: be-
tween all these, we may find a closer similarity,
than the fact that they preceded Wordsworth.
As Gray to Goldsmith, as Chatterton to Crabbe,
as Blake to Burns, so was Richardson to Fielding :
but as Richardson and Fielding, despite all differ-
ences, were fellow workmen in the same cause, so
too were those opposed poets. They provoked
the spirit of reality once more: and, as the
novelists went deeper than their predecessors the”
essayists, so these poets went nearer to the heart
of things, than went Pope the admirable, and his
lifeless imitators. Goldsmith, restoring comedy
and pastoral romance to life, while sweetening the
theme and metre of ‘heroic’ verse ; Collins, with
‘sweet entrancing voice’ and ‘ mingled measure’;
Gray, bringing a lively culture, Italian, Celtic,
classical, artistic, scientific, to the service of an
over anxious Muse; Cowper, pondering the quiet
country ways with a mind as natural, but less
quiet ; Crabbe, a master in ‘real’ tragedy; Chat-
terton the mediaeval dreamer, Blake the universal
dreamer, and Burns the first ‘magician’ of the
North: here are mighty workings of the spirit, not
without their influence upon the novel. For the
unity of the arts, that neglected truth, is a most un-
deniable truth : and, with no foolish encroachment
of one art upon another, either on the part of artist
or of critic, it is easy to discern the mutual help of
all arts to each other, and of each branch of one
art to each other branch. For a time, the novel was
24
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

composed with no great change of manner or of
matter ; the delightful Miss Burney, first of the
great English women, who have composed novels,
did not vary from the essential characteristics of
her predecessors, unless in a certain sprightliness
of humour, commonly found among the letters and
the memoirs of distinguished French women: but
the general tone of literature was changing, in
ways curious enough to observe. The school of
sentiment, glorified in England by Richardson,
was a dangerous school for those of smaller
powers: the ‘Man of Feeling,’ and yet more the
woman, exercised strange fascinations: even
Lamb was under their spell, when he produced
the fine tragedy, but the strained sentiment, of
his Rosamund Gray. Mocked by the wholesome
laughter of Goldsmith and of Fielding, it yet
maintained a place: under various forms and
influences, it was ever displaying its sickly
affectations. ‘Ossian’ had nothing to do with
sentiment proper; nor yet Rousseau: but all
kinds of stuff about the gray ghost of the departed
warrior, and the innocent delights of the noble
savage, mingled with the proper concerns of
sentiment and sensibility. The novel of extrava-
gance in sentiment, whether accompanied by
melodramatic effects, or merely left to its own
melancholy moonshine, may be dismissed without
regard to chronological precision. Writers of
ability allowed themselves to use the novel of
extravagance, for the expression of their ideas:

25
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

and writers of no great merit have captivated, by
their novels, writers of the highest excellence.
Godwin, for an example of the first class, though
less extravagant in his novels than dull, no longer
rests upon them for his fame: Clara Reeve and
Brockden Brown did little to deserve the admira-
tion of Shelley and of Landor. Beginning with
Walpole, the miscellaneous list continues with
Mackenzie, Shelley, Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe, Maturin;
with the writers of the Minerva Press, whimsically
dear to Macaulay; with an array of feeble and
spasmodic works, echoes of German romance at
its romantic worst; I am half disposed to end the
list with the names of Guy Livingstone and of
Pelham, at the period of muscular and of fashion-
able novels. I confess, that so receptive a roll
brings together, and ranges in succession, names
and works of an amazing variety: but through
them all runs a strain of extravagance, due to
some perversion or excess of mere sentiment,
enough to link them together, if not in every case
enough to deprive them of a certain merit. It
may be counted not the least of Peacock’s good
deeds, that his pungent satire gave the death blow
to the more frantic follies of the sentimental kind:
to the rhetoric doing duty for eloquence, to the
silliness masquerading as romance, to the meagrims
dignified with the name of despair, to the blood
and thunder, skull and crossbones, cypress and
nightshade, of spurious Goethes and of mock
Byrons. From this absurd outcome of the French
26
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

Revolution in the state, and of the English and
German reformations in literature, let us turn to
the genuine tradition once more.

Among the dead English novelists of our
century, there are seven great names: at the least,
seven names so far above mediocrity, that we can
only call them great. These are Scott, Miss
Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronté,
Emily Bronté, and George Eliot. Among lesser
names, there are Miss Ferrier, Miss Edgeworth,
Mrs. Gaskell, Bulwer in his happiest books, Reade
and Trollope in two or three masterpieces: and
there are schools innumerable of particular novel-
ists; whose novels either rank below the great
novels in virtue of their local or temporal limita-
tions, or are not the chief results of their writers’
genius. Newman, Kingsley, and Disraeli, as
novelists, may be thought to come under both
heads. I began this rapid survey of the English
novel, with one possibly fanciful statement: I am
now forced to conclude it, with another. The
modern novel of to-day, in all its phases and
developments, seems in my judgment to begin
with the work of George Eliot : the more ancient
novel, to end with the work of Thac eray. Not
that I see any violent break with the past; no
sudden discovery of new form or matter: the old
is not obsolete and outworn, the new is not perfect
and complete ; they touch at countless points, and
are not antagonistic: rather I mean, that in read-
ing Thackeray, I am led to think about his pre-

27
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

decessors ; in reading George Eliot, I am led to
think about her successors, and in no slight degree,
about Mr. Hardy ; whom I am approaching in a
leisurely and, it may be, in a too leisurely, way.
All times of great development have increased
men’s capacity of apprehension and of apprecia-
tion: the last and most notable of such times was
that of the French Revolution. At the Italian
Renaissance, according to familiar definitions,
there came about a ‘development of the indivi-
dual,’ followed by a‘ discovery of the world and
of man.’ These ingenious phrases discover and
disguise the truth in almost equal measure: but
upon the whole, they are not to be condemned.
They are very applicable to the French Revolu-
tion also: if it be well kept in mind, that the same
process of development and of discovery has been
in progress, since the most primaeval days. But
the age of the French Revolution had upon litera-
ture a marked influence: its theoretic justifications,
its appeals to passion and to principle, its splen-
dours and its terrors, all its vast energy and
impulse of spirit, culminating in the supreme
figure of Napoleon ; all that, from first to last,
served to quicken the creative powers of the
imagination. Upon some of the poets already
named, the Revolution acted, like a revelation;
Burns, the Ayrshire peasant, felt the prouder for
it: to Wordsworth and to Coleridge, in whom the
tendencies of these earlier poets were summed up
and perfected, the Revolution was the dawn of
28
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES
hope and joy in all things. The tendencies of
literature, apart from all social and _ political
events ; and the social and political events, hopes,
possibilities, of the Revolution ; combining with the
natural genius of Wordsworth and of Coleridge,
produced the wonderful results, all know: as all
know, how by the same things was affected the
genius of Shelley and of Byron, in a less perfect
way. All of them, all writers of distinction at the
time, felt their sympathies widened and deepened:
nature! all that was meant by nature, in the heart
of man and in the visible world, became clearer to
them. ‘The wonder and bloom of the world,’
came back : and Wordsworth turned for beauty
and for truth to homely men, and to natural
scenes ; whilst Coleridge, as though the old world’s
privilege to dream were returned in all its fresh-
ness and its fullness, turned to the ‘magical
nature’ of the world, with its rare powers. A
shepherd, a beanfield, a spring in the hills, a cottage
tragedy, strange histories of enchaunted seas: out
of these came a philosophy and a poetry, hard at
first sight to associate with the heroism and the
horror, with the waves and storms, of insurgent
France. Yet the association was real: and even
when Wordsworth and Coleridge were disap-
pointed of their hopes in France, that freshness
and depth of thought remained. One year after
Wordsworth, one year before Coleridge, Scott was
born: and I have touched upon the two greater
poets, because they illustrate one side of the new

29
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

stir and impulse, which was to become, through
Scott the poet, so potent an influence upon Scott
the novelist ; whilst Scott the man shared nothing
of the social and political aspirations, in their case
combined with it.

I can hardly forgive myself, if I say anything
against the last century; so great is the debt of
gratitude, that I owe to its French and English
literature: yet the age, which ‘slavishly bowed
down to the word of John Locke,’ as Rosmini puts
it, was an age of singular narrowness, of singular
self-sufficiency. In nothing was this more shown,
than in its attitude towards the past: its cant
word ‘Gothick, flung at most things between
the age of Charlemagne and the age of Louis
XIV.; its contempt for the ‘lifeless imbecility’
of such national and poetical relics as Chevy
Chace; all the coarseness and the rudeness, that
afflicted Gray ; the serene elegance and airs, with
which the gentlemen in fine wigs and dainty
ruffles, smiling upon us from the canvases of
Reynolds, fixed, settled, determined, and estab-
lished, all things in heaven and earth: all this is
apt to irritate us, who are ourselves, may be, not
too conscious of our own fallibility. Scott, once
and for all, confounded that smiling contempt,
and displayed the riches of the past: drawn to
the past by that instinct of sympathy, quick
within the blood, which peoples the past with
personal friends and foes. It is dangerous, in
the present temper of many eminent persons, to

30
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

profess an admiration of Scott: to whom Cardinal
Newman, as a boy and as an old man, professed
no less than ‘a devotion.’ Yet to err, if error it
be, in the company of our English Plato, is better
than to be exceeding wise in that of our English,
and American, sophists: whose voices are some-
what high-pitched and discordant. In Scott, the
antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a
science; it laid upon him a duty and a service
of romantic patriotism, and was no mere minister
to his curiosity : in the border legends and ballads,
the pageantries of the middle age, the humours
of his countryside, all the beauty and gallantry
and pity in the world’s chronicles, he found out
the worth of life, past and present. It matters
very little, that his style could be faulty, and his
archaeology wrong: Shakespeare is not blame-
less in either respect: it matters very much that,
like Shakespeare, Scott could marshall and con-
trol high actions and high passions upon the field
of art. Here are ées bons clercs et les beaux
chevaliers morts en bataille et en fortes guerres, les
braves sergents @armes et les hommes de parage.
Here are les joueurs de harpe, les jongleurs et les rots
du monde. And, side by side with these, are the
poor, with their tragedies and their comedies, full
of that reality, which imagination gives: an host
of men and women, without the frequent rude-
ness of Fielding’s humble figures, and without
the grotesqueness common in those of Dickens.
Scott had something of the high office, which be-

31
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

longed to Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare, and
to Goethe: he seems to draw into his art a thou-
sand matters of fact and thought and imagination,
which lay loose and scattered before: he enlarged
our sense of human life, by enlarging literature
with fresh expressions of the ‘fair humanities,’
To him the novel owes a rank, in the history of
literature, equal to the rank of the epic and of
the drama: the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Keats, Shelley, Byron, greater though it be in
itself, wrought no effect so great, no result so new.
Each after his own way, those poets caught and,
it may be, heightened and magnified in some
things, the spirit of the old, imperishable poets:
Scott taught the writers of stories in prose, all
Europe over, to attempt things unattempted and
undreamed of by their greatest predecessors.

In the books of Miss Austen, appears the most
delicate genius, that has yet found expression in
the English novel: an humour, which ripples
gently through the scenes; a patience, which
never tires, nor is tired: an exquisite touch, said
Scott, denied to him. Hers is a more fine and
subtile manner, than that of the eighteenth cen-
tury humourists: there is a modern note in its
refinement of simplicity, an accent of deeper truth.
Yet she belongs rather to the past, than to the
present: that serenity and sobriety are marks of
a mind at rest in its enjoyment of quiet humour,
not busy with the solution of intricate moral and
zsthetic questions. And even the great name of

32
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

Bronté carries nothing typically modern in the
mention: the two sisters wrought out their master-
pieces of passion in remote places, or among
strange circumstances: something primitive and
vehement stirs them, they have a northern in-
spiration. The fire and gloom of Elizabethan
tragic poets, the mystery and darkness of German
romantic rhapsodists, the flash and clearness also
of the French, go to compose their charm : their
sincerity is too direct, almost too childlike, to be
modern. In Dickens and in Thackeray, the old
English novel took its widest range: with how
triumphant a success! The powers of wit and
humour, the springs of tears and pity, the com-
prehension of life in its greatness and in its little-
ness, its loftiness and its absurdity: all these are
in Dickens and in Thackeray. Writers so great
have great faults: let us not speak of their faults
with easy condescension or contempt. The
desire of the artist for perfection is an excellent
thing: but I cannot understand, why your sol-
dier and your saint should be remembered for
their victories, and pardoned for their faults ;
whilst your artist of a thousand conquests must
have ever rehearsed against him the tale of his
failures and of his faults. There is no such man,
as a perfect artist: he knows it best, whom the
world holds most perfect. Hold you your peace
about the ‘cheap cynicism,’ the egoism, the per-
sonal intrusion, of Thackeray: I promise you
mine about the ‘cheap pathos,’ the declamation,

33 Cc
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

the fustian tragedy, of Dickens : let us give thanks
together for Esmond, Colonel Newcome, Beatrix,
and Becky Sharp; for David Copperfield, Mr.
Pickwick, Mr. Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp. After
all, Shakespeare may have written 72tus Androni-
cus. The modern novel differs from its predeces-
sors mainly in this: that it is concerned, not with
the storm and stress of great, clear, passions -and
emotions, but with the complication of them: the
greatness remains, the clearness is gone. There
is a sense of entanglement: right and wrong,
courage and cowardice, duty and desire, are pre-
sented to us in confused conflict. Scientific law,
irrevocable fate, inherited impulse, thwarted and
perverted emotions, distracted and uncertain pas-
sions, take the place of the old simplicity : a sim-
plicity, no doubt, of various degrees, but in the main
quite simple. An early Italian artist gives us his
Moral Virtues, each a fair and stately form, unmis-
takeable and complete: there is Fortitude, and that
is Temperance: from a German artist we have, here,
Death the Skeleton, and there, Time the Reaper,
It was a large, sane way of expression: and that
large, sane way, in spirit and in essence, may be
traced throughout literature also, up to modern
times. But in the troubled air of later days,
obscure with mists of doubt and difficulty, those
lucid forms have grown hard to discern, and dim:
they move against a background of shifting lights
and colours. Fielding and Thackeray may arrest
their stories, to say with the Cardinal de Retz:

34
CRITICAL PRELIMINARIES

‘ Permettez-moi, je vous supplie, de faire un peu
de réflexion sur la nature de l’esprit de homme’:
but we no longer use set phrase, or put forth a
definite scheme: our work is full of permeating
influences, unseen forces, cross currents, vague
drifts and tendencies ; all obeying some law, could
we find it, and following some instinct, could we
detect it. The greatest modern novels have about
them a mysterious awe, like that of the Eschylean
drama: the Powers and Laws, almost personified,
of a Science, almost deified, hold the actors in
their grasp: and the actors, with their rebellions,
dreams, revolts, desires, play a desperate game.
A vast deal of imposing nonsense is dealt out to
us, under the cover of these modern conceptions :
silly heroes posture in a fit of ‘male green-sick-
ness, unwholesome heroines display similar imagi-
nations, disease and delirium are pourtrayed with
abnormal gravity or delight. But from the weighty
masterpieces of George Eliot, down to the daintiest
trifle of Mr. Henry James, works of singular power
and beauty have sprung from brains, that brood
upon, and imaginations, that dwell among, these
problems and questionings, bred of modern in-
trospection. Psychology, to use that ambitious
term, supplies the novelist with his studies and
materials: not only the free and open aspect of
life itself. It would be beyond my purpose to
discuss the foreign influences, that have played
upon the art of the Englist novelist: to discrimi-
nate between the influence of Goethe and of ds

35 ’
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Goncourts, of Stendhal and of M. de Maupassant,
of Balzac and of Count Tolstoi, of Flaubert and
of George Sand: it is done admirably, by skilled
critics, every week; it is not necessary to my
purpose of dwelling, with what care and precision
I may, upon the works of an English novelist, who,
continuing the high traditions of his art, is faithful
to the spirit of his age; but faithful also to the
spirit of his country.

36
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

II
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

In making mention of Mr. Hardy alone, as an
eminent novelist of that.modern_kind, first raised
to an high place by G¢ipge Eliot, I do not forget
his eminent fellows in the same field of art: nor do
I forget those few brilliant writers of romance, who
turn from anxious problems, to spirited adventures.
But so great is the difficulty felt, and so great is
the delicacy required, by critics of contemporary
art, that the safer plan is to examine each notable
writer by himself: and, in place of comparing
to-day’s artists with each other, to compare, con-
trast, and confront them, with the fine work of an
established fame. That diligent and accomplished
scholar, Dr. Birkbeck Hill, has of late pointed out
to us time’s many reversals of the verdicts, passed
upon men of letters by their contemporary friends
or foes: Shakespeare increases, Cowley decreases,
Sterne stands firm, despite the prophetic censures
of his day. Horace, with his parable of the horse’s
tail, long ago warned the world,how hard it is to fix
the date, at which a writer receives the canonization
of art, and becomes a classic: it is equally hard to

37
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

determine the date, at which a writer, once noised
and famous, ceases to find favour. Browning and
Arnold died but a few years since; yet I cannot
imagine that age to come, which will not esteem
them, as great poets: Ascham and Habington,
Drayton and Wotton, have now but few lovers ;
yet, to my own private taste, they very greatly
relish. Upon the whole, sure and sound is the
world’s judgment, that these are classics, and those
are not, these great, and those not great: but,
chiefly honouring the classical and the great, let
us recognize many degrees of merit and of fame.
I dare not promise myself, since I have no voice
in the decision, that Arnold and Browning, among
the lately dead, Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy,
among the yet living, will be held great and
classic: but I have a right, upon a survey of
literary annals, to feel sure, that favour, esteem,
and consideration, in no slight degree will be
always theirs. At the very least, there can be no
presumption in the desire, and no great presump-
tion in the attempt, to discuss those qualities of
a living writer, which have won him the applause
of his own day: though I desire not in panegyric
to emulate the Alcalde of Corcuvion, who pro-
claimed Jeremy ‘Baintham, a Solon, a Plato, and
a Lope de Vega.

It is to be borne in mind, that Mr. Hardy is no
veteran in the service of good letters; his first
novel was published but twenty-one years since;
for aught we know, he may not have come to the

38
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

plenitude of his powers: to say more upon this
point were to risk an impertinence. With this
fact of chronology in mind, to warn and to correct
us, we may turn to Mr. Hardy’s fifteen volumes.
Thirteen of these are novels, of more or less
elaborate design: two are collections of short
stories. For clearness’ sake, a classification of_
these fifteen volumes may be tried, according to
the dominant tone and nature of the various
groups, into which they fall with éase, There
seem to be three such groups :the 7vragzc, the
Idylli¢g, and a third ;_for which I can find no name,

until one word be discovered to express in com-
bination the_comzc, the zronic, the satiric, the
romantic, Che eanapETT Scout of morking
audacity, and of serious laughter, animating a
Pantagruel of Psychology. The Zragze group
comprises ; besides Desperate Remedies, an early
failure of much promise; the six books, upon
which Mr. Hardy’s readers love to dwell: The
Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess of
the I) Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far
From the Madding Crowd, and A Pair of Blue
Eyes. To these, may be added the finest of the
Wessex Tales, with other short stories, yet un-
collected. The /dyllic books are two: Under the
Greenwood Tree, and, notwithstanding its greater
dignity and sadness, Zhe Trumpet Major. To
the third set, belong 7e Hand of Ethelberta, Two
on a Tower, A Laodicean, the short stories called
A Group of Noble Dames, and the Romantic

39

 
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Adventures of a Milkmaid. No doubt, this classi-
fication is a little whimsical: all classifications,
those of the sciences excepted, must be so. I
confess, that the tragic novels contain purely
idyllic passages; that the idyllic pair are not
without their unhappy or satiric touches ; that the
remaining books, among their engaging medley,
exhibit simple tragedies and simple idylls. But
the dominant tone and nature of the fifteen
volumes warrant their careful reader, in making
this triple division : a touch of innocent joy does
but deepen the prevailing tragedy; a stroke of
grim tragedy does but add fresh zest to the sad
laughter of the satirist; a ripple of mockery,
a breath from gloomier places, best serve to
enhance the charm of idyllic scenes. ‘Tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, histori-
cal-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-
historical-pastoral’: thanks be to Polonius, for
thus illustrating the necessity, the difficulty, and
the frequent absurdity, of artistic classification.
‘Blessed,’ cried Hawthorne, ‘ blessed are all simple
emotions, be they bright or dark: it is only the
mixture of them that is infernal” But his own
miraculous charm comes of his concern for that
mixture : and I doubt, whether Homer, the prince
of simple and majestic art, does not most delight
the world by the mingled emotions, both bright
and dark, of Achilles and of Hector. With some-
thing in them of the beast, and something of the
god, mortal men can know little of unmixed

40
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

emotions. Mr. Hardy’s moral treatment of these
complexities, his artistic sincerity and truth, must
be discussed elsewhere: at present, it is enough
to say, that his stories, rightly or wrongly, blend
darkness and light together; that he mingles
various proportions of either element, to produce
various combinations ; and this, chiefly in the
three manners already named.

 

The _most_appreciable_mark_of ’s
power_in design is the tenacity, with which his|

designs hold the memory : it resembles the power
of architecture to stamp there its great designs ;
while music is wont to leave but a vague sense of
airy charm. That flying, elusive, delight has its
place in literature: but only, I think, in verse.
The genius of prose demands a stricter beauty of
design: graces it has, and delicate adornments,
and fit times for their introduction ; but the genius
of prose in general, and the genius of narrative
prose in especial, are averse from luxuriance in
these delicacies. M.de Maupassant declares his
hostility to those affectations in modern style,
which make of language a thing dzzarre, compliqué,
nombreux, et chinois: like affectations, in the con-
struction of a story, are no less repugnant to the
novelists of lucidity and strength. To this matter
of consistent and vigorous design might be applied
a fine, sententious, utterance of Mr. Pater: who
himself, by precept and by example, has so well
insisted upon the logical structure, necessary to
good writing. ‘The perfection of culture is not

41
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

rebellion but peace ; only when it has realized a
deep moral stillness has it really reached its end’
Only when the artistic teller of an imaginative
story has passed through the anxieties of choice,
and determined his design; when he has realized
that ‘stillness’ and security of mind ; can he hope
to reach his end in peace of conscience. He will
not be enticed into divagations, pleasant by them-
selves, but in the long run tiresome, because dis-
tracting : he will eschew all matters by the way,
and confine himself to those, which serve his
purpose of exhibiting certain characters, under
certain conditions and impulses, in their progress
to certain ends. He will know, when or whether
to describe the natural features of a country or
place, and at what length, and in what way: now,
such a description is essential to a right under-
standing of his chosen characters ; now, it is of
the nature of a rare, justifiable, digression. He
will know, what variety of style is in keeping with
his final end and aim ; what, with his immediate
and subordinate business: nor will the varieties
employed in various passages be discordant with
that first and finalend. If he have a dangerous
facility in pathos, or in humour; a besetting desire
to use a certain kind of phrase or word, image or
illustration: he will constantly check himself, and
restrict the exercise of his facility to its proper
occasions. He will know, that to give pleasure is
the end of his art ; but he will also know, that by
doing violence to the laws of his art, he will give

42
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

pleasure to many: and, in loyalty to his art and
to his conscience, he will choose rather to give a
greater pleasure to the few by his loyalty, than a
less pleasure to the many by his rebellion. Lastly ;
to write down a commonplace, which some ‘artists’
call a paradox ; the ideal artist, and not least the
novelist, will know with Lessing, that truth is a
necessary of the soul, and may not be suppressed :
but that pleasure, the end of art, is not a neces-
sary, and may be dispensed with or foregone. To
hold otherwise is, in the term of Gregory XVI,
a deliramentum.

The novelist’s art, then, is a serious art: at the
present time, it is not easy to be a serious novelist
in the right way. The aim of a novel, as of all
artistic works, is pleasure: but pleasure is not
another name for amusement, although it be
clearly not another name for instruction. Yet the
great majority of readers ‘take up,’ and ‘glance
at,’ and ‘look into,’ and ‘skim through,’ and ‘ pass
the time with, novels: whilst a large number of
the minority fall to upon them, with appetities
eager for doctrine and for edification. Tasteless
levity, if you will, and, beyond question, silly
seriousness ! between these horrid extremes must
the novelist find his golden mean. Again, these
extremes have some reason upon their sides: the
novelist need not resolve, neither to amuse at all,
nor to instruct at all: yet some able novelists,
with the gift of wit or humour, deny their gift,
and turn to preaching ; others, with a capacity for

43
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

artistic seriousness, in fear of being dull, elaborate
painful jest books. To crown all, there is the
incessant chatter of the theorists ; sevmo zn circulis,
the talk of artistic groups and gatherings, the
enthusiasms of pioneers, champions, innovators,
reactionaries ; all the attendant bustle and hubbub,
that are the delight of the artistic world, and the
worry of the artist: all this has its effect, not a
beneficial effect, upon any but strong and resolute
workmen. Such a workman is Mr. Hardy: I
will try to prove it, from his works.

I have said, that there is an architectural quality
in the designs of Mr. Hardy; it may be, in a
measure, a result of some intimate acquaintance
with architectural art, such as is manifested, even
to excess, by the love of architectural topics and
terms in many of his books. But, to supplement so
literal an explanation, we can take it for granted,
that the bent of his natural genius is towards a
measured and spacious order of design: his books
have a large and sweeping simplicity. Not only
_in the collective impression made by their definite
outlines, but in the detailed effect of single, isolated,
passages or pages, is this quality of adjustment
felt. It is but seldom, that a reader can find so
few, as five lines in these books, which would not
suffer by detachment from their structural con-
text. The keen epigram, the swift and brilliant
saying, are rare: ‘Love is a possible strength in
an actual weakness’ is an example of that manner,
in which Mr. Hardy is not wont to write: as is

44
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

his sentence upon Grace Melbury, that she ‘com-
bined modern nerves with primitive emotions.’
Both examples show a nicety, a felicity, in the
art of making brief, neat, phrases: but Mr. Hardy
prefers to build up his speech upon a statelier
plan, and a larger scale; making each word in
the phrase, each phrase in the sentence, each
sentence in the paragraph, each paragraph in the
chapter, each chapter in the book, do its definite
work : he is no spendthrift, nor miser, of language,
and has no notion of careless, or of niggardly,
dealing with his material. This fine economy
in the use of words helps towards that general
effect of gravity, seriousness, deliberation, which
Mr. Hardy’s work creates: you can no more miss
a sentence, or give some hurried minutes to a
chapter, than you can appreciate the proportions
of a great Palladian building, if you omit to notice
’one of its orders. This unity of effect is, in my
own judgment, the distinction of Mr. Hardy: that
eminent quality, which I place at the head of his
fine qualities, and which should constitute his
securest claim to a lasting regard. It matters
little, which of an author’s books, out of the many
admirable examples, be held by this man or by
that for his chief and master piece. Tempera-
ment, for the most part, rules our choice. So,
without impugning another’s right to make a
different choice, I readily confess, that I can as
little question the pre-eminence of Zhe Return
of the Native, among Mr. Hardy's works, as

45
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

that of King Lear, among Shakespeare’s plays.
The naked facts of the story are few and plain.
A great, waste tract of land, called Egdon Heath:
Mrs. Yeobright, a widow, some degrees higher of
rank than her neighbours, the peasantry ; a stern,
loving, inflexible woman: her niece, Thomasin,
married, against Mrs. Yeobright’s will, to Damon
Wildeve, a plausible, pitiful fellow, once an engi-
neer, now a small inn keeper, pretty, shifty,
clever, and young: Eustacia Vye, living on the
heath with her grandfather, an old seaman, after
a life at Budmouth, a fashionable watering place;
Eustacia is beautiful, fitful, imperious, discontented,
and inexperienced; she hates the great lonely
heath, and makes an ideal of Budmouth; and
she has, half in boredom, half from self-deception
and love of love, enslaved Wildeve: Clym Yeo-
bright, the widow’s only son, come home from
a jeweller’s business in Paris, out of a partly
Quixotic, but wholly noble, disgust with selfish
and low aims in life; a gentle, affectionate youth,
and hard as iron against all opposition to his
fixed resolutions, in matters of sentiment and
conduct: and Diggory Venn, an early suitor of
Thomasin, once a farmer, now an itinerant ‘ reddle-
man, and still her chivalrous defender. These
are the six principal actors: I have given the
most bald and meagre indications of their char-
acters and lots: I will but add similar indica-
tions of the resulting tragedy. Clym intends, in
a fit of revolt against ambition and worldliness,

46
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

to begin some scheme of education, moral and
mental, for the benefit of his peasant countrymen,
to which his mother, in her pride of him, is hardly
reconciled ; upon that blow, follows the far greater
blow of the discovery, that Clym has fallen in love
with, and means to marry, Eustacia ; who, finding
in Clym a finer likeness to her ideal lover and
hero, has given over Wildeve, and fallen in real
love with his successor. They marry: Mrs. Yeo-
bright and her son having a bitter reproach, one
against the other. She in no way sanctions the
marriage: and any early attempts at reconcilia-
tion are frustrated by misunderstandings. Clym,
finding his eyesight fail him, takes to furze-cut-
ting, like a labourer, for his living: he occupies
a small cottage with Eustacia; who learns to
repent of her marriage, which has brought no
realization of her vague hopes for some splendid
or rapid scene of life; and to renew her old capri-
cious relations with Wildeve. Venn, Thomasin’s
unselfish lover, moves about the district, alert to
discover anything, that nearly concerns her:
through his agency, much of the drama is de-
veloped. Mrs. Yeobright at last relents, in love
for her only son, and sets out to visit him and
his wife, upon a day of intense heat. Clym, tired
with labour, is asleep in his room: his wife
Eustacia, and his cousin’s husband Wildeve, are
discussing affairs, while he sleeps. Eustacia sees '
Mrs. Yeobright at the door: their eyes meet:
Eustacia does not open the door, startled and-

47
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

afraid: the mother knocks again: it seems to
rouse Clym: thinking, that Clym will open the
door, Eustacia dismisses Wildeve by another way.
Coming back, she finds Clym still sleeping, and
his mother gone: she does not tell Clym: Mrs.
Yeobright, worn out with suffering and physical
weakness, is found by Clym, after his going out,
at the point of death upon her way home. He
accuses himself of killing his mother, and falls
into a fever: upon recovery, he learns from casual
talk with the folk of the place; and from an ex-
planation of certain words, spoken by his mother
to a small boy upon the heath, as she lay down to
die; that Eustacia had seen her, had not opened
the door to her, and had been with a man at the
time. Exaggerating, in ignorance, her culpability,
he upbraids her violently and wildly: she leaves
him, and returns to her father’s house. The story
ends, in tragical misadventure, with the deaths of
Eustacia and of Wildeve, one wild night, when
he meant to drive her to Budmouth, whence she
would go alone to France. Thomasin marries
her loyal lover, Venn: Clym betakes himself, full
of sorrowful experience, to his mission of simple
preaching among the country folk.

This sketch I have given, with full intention,
in a way that can interest no one, who does not
know the book, and can but exasperate those, who
do. Just so, might one sketch the rude outlines
of a great Greek play; Agamemnon, King of
Mycenae, captain of the Greeks before Troy, was

48
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

killed upon his triumphant return by his guilty
wife, Clytemnestra, for the sake of her paramour,
fEgisthus: just so, might one adumbrate the
great argument of a Shakespearian tragedy ; King
Lear, deluded by the hypocrisies of his two elder
daughters, and angered at the fearless sincerity
of his youngest, divides his kingdom among the
two, only to be driven mad by their heartless
ingratitude; whilst the spurned child, and one
loyal friend, and a fool, are faithful to him in his
miseries. There is much significance in the fact,
that only great works of literary art can be thus
crudely sketched, with any coherence at all: their
bare, stark facts contain the heart of the whole
matter; whereas the power or charm of lesser
works is inextricably bound up with their way-
ward incidents, their desultory graces, their for-
tunate distractions. After reading The Return
of the Native, with a perfect relish of its details,
still the simple truth of those bare facts, a girl’s
passionate caprice, a mother’s hungry and jealous
love, a son’s agony of contrition, remains in the
mind and in the memory, as the one thing borne
in upon them, by the gradual evolution of the
story. Now, this singleness and simplicity of
effect are secured, only by an exquisite skill. To
know, when an ornament, by itssmature and place,
will minister to the attainment of a general unity
and simplicity in design, is the prerogative attri-
bute of genius: the merely clever workman, con-
scious that he is weak in harmonious order and

49 D
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
organization, relies for his degree of success upon
his happy turn for disconnected and unessential
ornament. ‘The elevation is poor, upon the whole;
but those mouldings are pretty’: or, ‘The charac-
ters are unnatural; but the descriptive passages
are charming’: criticisms of that nature are nothing
else, than condemnations of the thing criticised.
They cannot be passed upon the chief works of
Mr. Hardy. The Return of the Native opens with
a chapter of descriptive writing, to which I can
find no just parallel, save certain periods of
Lucretius: those tremendous periods, where single
words seem to gather out of the deep, and to re-
verberate like the thunder. Presently, there is an
humourous, wild scene of country folk, round a
bonfire on the hills, pourtrayed with, an almost
kindred humour, grotesque and quaint. I might
pass through the book, noting the various con-
tributions of Mr. Hardy’s knowledge and imagina-
tion, to Mr. Hardy’s purpose and design. They
are all instinct with life, they are all full of
strength: but not one exceeds its just limit, not
one makes me forget its final end, in its immediate
excellence. The few tragical conclusions of the
relentless logic are all in all: the premises are
remembered, chiefly because to those great con-
clusions, they so surely led. Chiefly, but not
. solely: where the whole is good, the parts are
good, and will therefore stand a scrutiny, each
_upon its own merits: Mr. Hardy’s novels are rich
in good details, duly subordinate to his design.
50
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

Were the temper of this age a severe temper, there
would be profit, no less than pleasure, in lingering
over some examples of such workmanship in
details: but the temper of the age is not severe.
‘Every thought I think is thought: and every
word I write is writing.’ Few authors of our day
can make their own that fine, true, declaration of
Cardinal Newman: the many seem to consider it
too practical and prosaic a care, for the luxurious
souls of artists to entertain. We have already
pleaded, that the faults of great writers are to be
forgiven them: ‘Let not their frailties be re-
membered ; they were very great men’: but no
amount of virtue can cancel or transfigure a vice,
no degree of general success can obliterate a
partial failure. Where a living writer, with many
faults and failures, yet deserves, upon a just
reckoning, our praises, let him have then:: but
where a living writer gives us nothing but feccata
dulcia, ingenious extravagances of lawless art, he
is past pardon. It matters not at all, that great
writers fall, now and then, into the same snare:
they break away from it. I dwell upon Mr.
Hardy’s unity of design, because it is an excellence
rarely desired now, and an excellence, which atones
for a multitude of faults. Mr. Hardy’s faults, as I
seem to see them, are easily copied: but his seve-
rity, his austerity, his clearness and seriousness of
conception, cannot be copied : they are his proper
birthright, as an inheritor of the spirit of art.

For he is an inheritor, by pure descent and kin-

51
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

ship: not a parvenu, a nouveau riche, of literature:
the praise bestowed by Plutarch, upon the works
raised up by Pericles, the praise of being new and
old, is applicable here. Nearly all Mr. Hardy’s
novels are concerned with the sentiment of those
changes, which are ever coming over the worlds
of society and of nature: and with those enduring
characteristics, which make life, after all, so uni-
form and so unanimous. He dwells, in a dramatic
meditation, upon the earth’s antiquity, the thought
of ‘the world’s gray fathers, and in particular,
upon certain tracts of land, with which he has an
intimacy ; upon the human traditions of old time,
upon the pageant of the past, upon the relics of
long gone powers and forces; genealogies, rolls,
tenures, heraldry; old names and old houses
lingering in decay, unconscious of their age; pagan
impulses, the spirit of material and natural religion,
the wisdom and the simplicity, the blind and
groping thoughts, of a living peasantry still primi-
tive; the antique works and ways of labour in
woods and fields, the sense of a sacred dignity
inherent in such things, in that immemorial need
of man to till the soil for his daily bread ; medita-
tion upon ‘the drums and tramplings’ of great
armies, the fair forms of vanished civilities, the
heroism and the ambition, the beauty and the
splendour, long past away, while still the old
necessities remain, and still men go forth to their
work and to their labour, until the evening;
meditation upon the slow, sure, cnd of all those

52
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

evenings, in the darkness and the pains of death ;
meditation upon the deep woods, under the black,
starry, nights, among the sounds of that solemn
time, and upon the generations of labourers in
their graves; meditation upon their stern or
generous virtues, their patience, loving-kindness,
and self-sacrifice ; upon their humours and habits,
the homely, pleasant, features personal to each
man of them ; upon the great procession and con-
tinuance, above and beyond these mortal lives, of
universal laws: And there is another side to his-
dramatic meditation: he loves to contemplate the
entrance of new social ways and forms, into a
world of old social preference and tradition; to
show, how there is waged, all the land over, a con-
flict between street and field, factory and farm, or
between the instincts of blood and the capacities
of brain; to note, how a little leaven of fresh
learning may work havoc among the weighty mass
of ancient, customary, thought; to exhibit the
mercurial influence of new things upon old, the
frivolous fashion and light vulgarity of the seaside
town, in contrast with the staid dignity and cum-
brous strength of the gray village, the significance
discernible in the intrusion of the jaunty villa
among barns and dwellings and churches, old ‘as
the hills’; to build up, touch by touch, stroke upon
stroke, the tragedy of such collision, the comedy
of such contrast, the gentle humour or the heart-
less satire of it all, watched and recorded by an
observant genius.

53
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

So considering Mr. Hardy’s work, I cannot con-
fine my thought of him to the immediate interests
of to-day: I cannot but think of him, as of one,
upon whom has fallen a powerful spirit of great
art: as of one, who has received a vocation to
do great things for English literature. We have
too many writers, who seem unconscious of their
English birth ; to whom ‘the glories of their blood
and state, as Englishmen, bring no exultation;
who care nothing for the distinguishing genius of
their land, without pride in its achievements, joy
at the thought of it, love for its earth. Placid
cosmopolitans! but not artists: art must always
be national, in the sense, that men of a certain
nature, in certain places, at certain times, must,
partly from the compulsion of circumstances,
partly at the dictate of their own artistic sense,
display the virtues, common to the art of all times
and places, in particular manners. Mr. Hardy
can lie under no charge of insular arrogance: but
he uses powers, in which I see many affinities with
the French genius of our time, not in a French
manner, but in an English; revealing his art in
no provincial way, but rather producing books of
which, at their best, it may be said: ‘Here is
work, done after the best English manner: and
its truth to nature, its truth to art, are universal.’
That is really higher praise than: ‘ Here is work,
which looks like an admirable translation from the
French.’ This patriotic element of Mr. Hardy’s
art, felt rather in the whole drift of his natural

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

genius, than in any written profession of faith, or
declaration in words, will be more closely exa-
mined, when we come to consider by themselves
his treatment of country folk, his portraits of men
and women, his delineation of his own Wessex.
At present, it is in the design and composition
of his novels, taken together, that I would try
to make clear his classic manner of work. His
interest in modern subtilties of emotion and of
thought is an interest, which separates him, as a
novelist, from the older novelists: I do not say,
which sets him above them. But in the largeness
of design, in the march and sweep of imagination,
in the greatness of his greater themes, he has
given to the novel a simple grandeur and impres-
siveness, the more impressive, for his pre-occupa-
tion with the concerns of modern thought. The
figures of Tess, of Henchard, of Winterborne, of
Mrs. Yeobright, of Marty South, of Boldwood ;
tragic, passionate figures; move across the stage
‘in all the pomp of exquisite distress,’ with sorrows
full of dignity: yet nearly all, if indeed not all,
are thwarted and cast down by some sentiment or
event, which gives rise to troubled questionings
and to searchings of heart, inarticulate or unin-
telligible, apart from the promptings of modern
mental science, and of modern emotional thought.
There is no discord between the old passions, and
the new touches which arouse them ; between the
old emotions, and the new appeals which wake
them: Chaucer and Shakespeare, Shakespeare

55
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

and Wordsworth, Wordsworth and Browning, one
does not clash with the other, despite the vast
changes of thought and knowledge, which make
each of them present the same play of life, in very
different fashions. The little men, for all their
quick cleverness, cannot charm us by their tricks
and turns, into thinking of them quite seriously :
what is novel in them, may deserve some compli-
ment, but not the manner of its presentation. In
Mr. Hardy’s work, there is a manner of presenta-
tion, which has about it something Elizabethan,
something Shakespearian ; or something of later
date, Jacobean and Caroline: His morality, be
it the appropriate sentiment of his rustic folks, or
the prevalent tone of his whole works, contains
echoes of those spacious and elaborate times.
Browne’s rich solemnity of meditation upon death
and change; the lyrical dirges of Webster,
Beaumont, Shirley ; the peculiar accent of Shake-
speare’s commoners and clowns, so racy and so
shrewd, experience talking, as it were, in quips
and cranks and jests, conceits and saws and by-
words ; much of all that recurs to the mind of Mr.
Hardy’s readers, as the slow story unfolds itself
so surely. The increasing gravity, noticeable in
the best of Mr. Hardy’s later books, in The Wood-
landers, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the
D'Urbervilles, is the same in spirit and in kind, as
the increasing gravity in Shakespeare’s maturer
work. What Romeo and Juliet is to King Lear,
that, each in its lower degree of excellence, is The
56
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

Trumpet Major to The Woodlanders. This steady
progress in seriousness of presentation marks the
laborious artist, not content with the more facile
beauty, but pressing on towards its more august
and difficult forms. Gvavitas, auctoritas, the
pressure of spirit upon matter, controlling and
informing it; the heightened sense of what is
meant by these loves, hates, joys, sorrows, lives,
deaths, so ready to the artist’s hand, but too great
to be lightly treated ; the stronger mastery over
that rhythmical impulse, which finds fit words to
express the almost inevitable impulse of passion:
these are signs of an art still unsatisfied, still
hungering after its ideal; an art, ambitious of
nothing less than continual progress, and ever
anxious for its perfection. Progress in art is
progress towards simplicity : at first, the sense of
power over the world intoxicates the artist: these
tragedies and comedies, things humourous and
things fantastic, are at his mercy, to be handled,
moulded, shaped, as pleases him: he makes
experiments among the lives and souls of men,
luxuriating in the emotions of a creator. But, ‘it’s
no fish ye’re buying—it’s men’s lives’: until the
literary artist have a sense of sacredness in his
relation of men’s lives, he remains trivial, incon-
siderable: ‘For soul is form, and doth the body
make, as the poet said, after Aristotle. The
humourist begins, either in pettinesses or in ex-
travagances: he must find his way to the natural
heart of things. When Fielding tells us of Major

57
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Bath, with his eternal talk about the dignity of
man; how he is found, wrapped in a woman’s
bedgown, warming his sick sister’s posset, and
heartily ashamed of his detection: then Fielding
changes from our boisterous entertainer to our
generous friend, and that, through a triumph of
humourous art.

Mr. Hardy is fast making us forget his extrava-
gances in his realities, and the change is great.
Extravagance of a sort he will always love, it
inheres in his chosen materials: but he has
abandoned artificiality for art. His earlier
extravagance is an extravagance, which delights
in audacities of situation, and in exhibitions of
-temperament, rather startling than brilliant: a
certain touch of unpleasantness, and taste of
vulgarity, just felt by the distressed reader, went
near to spoiling some stories, otherwise delightful.
The satire seemed almost splenetic, the humour
little else than bad nature: the cynic’s wit was
mordant, the jester’s smile, a sardonic wrinkling
of the lips. A Laodicean, The Hand of Ethelberta
and 7wo on a Tower, 1 write it with reluctance,
contain much that fills me with admiration, but
still more that fills me with annoyance: I see
the conscious schemes of them, their spirit and
design ; the superb audacity, in especial, which
directed the fates of Swithin, Viviette, and the
Bishop: but something unkind, an uncanny sort
of pleased and sly malevolence, looks out upon
me from many a page, and stops the laughter.

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION
Whimsicalities, incongruities, detected by the
humourist in the nature of things; degradations,
disgraces, dragged by him to the light of day:
these need give no offence. Nor is there any
essential matter of offence in the play of a philo-
sophical humour, the mocking of a keen wit.
But a reader, capable of enjoying the excellences
of Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift, Heine, Sterne, may
yet refuse to admire certain things in some of Mr.
Hardy’s books: although he can find in them
nothing coarse, indecent, bestial, irreverent, sala- -
cious, in the varied fashions of those five great
men. Reuben the tranter had much truth upon
his side, when he disagreed with his wife’s distaste
for the ‘musical circumstances’ of old Michael
Mail: ‘Well, now, that coarseness 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 reason, I like a
story with a bad moral. My sonnies, all true
stories have a coarseness or a bad moral, depend
upon ’t. Ifthe story-tellers could have got decency
and good morals from true stories, who’d ha’
troubled to invent parables?’ Gross facts and
unwelcome conclusions may test our sincerity in
facing life: With those, we have no quarrel. But
Ethelberta’s matrimonial schemes, or the talk of
Lord Mountclere with his valet, or Captain de
Stancy’s first stolen sight of Paula in her gymna-
sium, or Lady Constantine’s rather sickly affection,
are not gross, great facts, nor do they conduct us

59
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

by a logic of wholesome severity to unwelcome
conclusions: they are merely what annoyances
are to sorrows, or bad manners to natural rough-
ness. Doubtless, it would be foolish to look for a
‘high seriousness’ in works of deliberate extrava-
gance: it is none the less distasteful, to come
upon a somewhat mean unpleasantness, pervading
books of so much power.

A like displeasing artificiality spoils the narra-
tive in these books: though with a less jarring
effect upon the reader. A favourite contrivance
is the assemblage of several actors upon the scene,
sometimes unconscious of each other’s presence,
or intention to be present ; sometimes against each
other’s will, in a grotesque contrast with each other.
Thus, in Desperate Remedies, which foreshadowed
faintly many of Mr. Hardy’s coming virtues and
vices, we have the singular nocturnal procession,
‘at equi-distances of about seventy yards,’ of
fEneas Manston, Miss Aldcliffe, Anne Seaway,
and the detective officer: in The Hand of Ethel-
berta, the juxtaposition at the Rouen inn, of
Ethelberta and her three suitors; Lord Mount-
clere in the lower room, while Ladywell and Neigh,
each in an upper room, lean from their windows,
and hear his lordship’s proposal: and we have also
the journey of Mr. Mountclere and Sol Chickerel,
to prevent, the one his brother’s, the other his
sister's, marriage; the journey of Christopher
Julian, her lover, and the butler, her father, each
unknown to the other, upon the same business ;

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

the union of the two parties, and their arrival
together, five minutes too late. In A Pazr of Blue
yes, which deserves Mr. Stevenson’s description,
‘a worthy specimen of the dramatic novel, there
are coincidences, contrasts, oddities of circum-
stance, almost wholly natural and justifiable, yet
with a touch of a like extravagance: Elfride,
Stephen, and Knight, that tragic trio, in various
combinations, repeating the same scenes, meeting
under conditions of curious strangeness; until they
meet at last, Elfride in her coffin, the wife of neither ;
and her two rival lovers, with their strained old
intimacy of master and pupil, travelling in the
train that carries her; each having concealed from
the other his purpose of going down to find her,
both ignorant of her death. Mr, Hardy is too
simple and strong a master of his art, to insist
always upon his coincidences of time and place,
or his repetitions of incident and experience, with
any forced emphasis: but, now and then, some
artificiality, an occasional stiffness and eccentricity
of mechanical contrivance, makes itself felt. Had
the novelist done no more than write the books,
which contain such faults of taste and artificialities
of device, he would be no more than a writer of
great cleverness.

It is to be observed, that Mr. Hardy’s sureness
of heart and hand deserts him, or in a measure
deserts him, only when he deserts Wessex and its
people, or when he deals with Wessex people,
uncharacteristic of Wessex. In fidelity to nature,

61
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

his men and women of what is called good society,
or of what is called education, compared with his
Wessex folk, are like Lady Blarney and Miss
Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs, by the side of
Dr. Primrose. Every novelist of peculiar excel-
lence in rendering the note, the cachet, of certain
classes and places, seems to lose something of his
skill in venturing outside them: Dickens, for a
familiar example, abandoned the great medley of
‘middle and lower’ classes in the town, at his
peril. Mr. Hardy is fond of pourtraying the
troubles, that come from the infusion of a little
experience, a little education, dazzling and dis-
quieting, into the old, placid, homely village
lives: or of showing the effect upon new, vigorous
mind and blood, of contact with hoar, ‘effete’
antiquity. Grace Melbury, Eustacia Vye, Ethel-
berta Petherwin, Stephen Smith, Bathsheba Ever-
dene, even Matilda Johnson, produced upon their
families or their neighbours the same effect: the
feeling of uncomfortable inferiority, the fear of
being ‘scorned’ by these elegant and accomplished
persons, with their book learning and their polished.
airs, Paula Power, again, heiress of a railway king,
has an irresistible longing for the ancient splendour
of the de Stancy line, whose castle she inhabits:
Edred Fitzpiers, the very contemptible young
doctor, last representative of an old _ house,
fascinates farmer Melbury, against his will and
sense of justice, into a preference for him above
Winterborne, his farmer rival for the hand of
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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

Grace, so elevated by her fine schooling above
the rustic level: the discovery, that Tess is a
D’Urberville, has its profound charm for the very
radical and modern Angel Clare. Endless is the
chain of thought, that these things prolong: what
ponderings upon necessity, upon assertions of the
old blood, upon the revenges and the ironies of
time and fate! But Mr. Hardy himself, no less
than his own creatures, seems at times perplexed
by it all: and to lose his clearness of sight, with
gazing at the revolution of the wheel.

‘It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764,
as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol,
while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in
the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the
decline and fall of the city first started to my
mind.’ So confesses the luminous Gibbon: and
Goldsmith meditates, how

‘In those domes, where Caesars once bore sway,
Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,

There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed’ ;

and Rabelais, in solemn speculation, thinks that
‘plusieurs sont aujourd’huy empereurs, rois, ducs,
princes et papes en la terre, lesquelz sont descenduz
de quelques porteurs de rogatons et de costrets.
Comme, au rebours, plusieurs sont gueux de
Vhostiaire, souffreteux et miserables, lesquelz sont
descenduz de sang et ligne de grands rois et
empereurs.’ It is all trite and obvious, certainly ;
the commonplace of moralists: but I find some-
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

thing far from commonplace in the spectacle of a
writer, brooding over the ancient history of his
native soil, and far back into the ages without
history: and then surveying it with his own eyes,
acre by acre, hill and vale by hill and vale, and
marking the permanence and the change, the
growth and the decay, the sublime in it and the
ridiculous, the laughter in it and the tears. Little
wonder is it, if Mr. Hardy should sometimes reflect
the confusion of the change, rather than the calm
of the endurance. But with any such defects, I
have done, preferring to speak of triumphs and
successes.

From long and frequent converse with the works
of any favourite author, we often grow to thinking
of them under some symbol or image ; to see them
summed up and expressed in some one composite
scene of our own making: this is my ‘vision’ of
Mr. Hardy’s works. A rolling down country,
crossed by a Roman road: here, a gray standing
stone, of what sacrificial, ritual origin, I can but
guess ; there, a grassy barrow, with its great bones,
its red brown jars, its rude gold ornaments, still
safe in earth: a broad sky burning with stars:
and a solitary man. It is of no use to turn away,
and to think of the village farms and cottages,
with their antique ways and looks; of the deep
woods, the fall of the woodman’s axe, the stir of
the wind in the branches ; of the rustic feasts and
festivals, when the home-brewed drink goes round,
to the loosening of tongues and wits; of the hot

64
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

meadows, fragrant hayfields, cool dairies, and
blazing gardens; of shining cart horses under the
chestnut trees, and cows called in at milking time:
they are characteristic scenes, but not the one
characteristic scene. That is the great down by
night, with its dead in their ancient graves, and
its lonely living figure : it brings before my thought
a pageant of Scandinavian warriors, Roman sol-
diers and Stoics, watchers upon Chaldaean plains,
laborious Saxon peasants, Celtic priests in the
moonlight ; and vast periods of early time, that
chill the pondering mind. And the sentiment
of a sacred dignity in pastoral, rural, labours,
is prominent here: the lonely figure recalls
the spirit of Virgil in his Georgzcs, of Giotto’s
shepherds with their flocks, of Wordsworth and
of Millet: of Arnold’s Resignation, of Arnold’s
Scholar-Gipsy. How much experience must the
‘clown, the ‘common labourer, have amassed
from the earth, the downs, the fields, with their
vasta silentia, their otta dia! Like Claudian’s
old Veronese, the man has lived close to his
mother earth, not hurried hither and thither:

‘ Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos:
Plus habet hic vitae: plus habet tlle viae.’

Painful, such a life must be; not without its
heaviness and its weight: but not ignoble, its
very offences in our more civilized eyes being
animal, not bestial. Sordid and gross, savage
and repulsive, such a life can be: but not utterly

65 E
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
grovelling and inhuman, at its worst: at its best,
full of grandeur and high virtues. Mr. Meredith’s
Master Gammon embodied, to the anxious minds
at Queen Anne’s Farm, ‘the grand primeval
quality of unchangeableness’: Hawthorne’s Silas
Foster gave a like healthy lesson to his trans-
cendental pupils in agriculture: and the labouring
man, whom I see by night upon the downs, at his
patient watch, is the incarnate emblem of Mr.
Hardy’s books.

This is no more than an imaginative summary,
by the help of concrete symbols, of the finer and
the deeper impressions made upon the mind, by
Mr. Hardy’s best work: a sense of awe, in the
presence of a landscape filled with immemorial
signs ofage ; a sense of tranquillity in the presence
of human toil, so bound up and associated with the
venerable needs of human life. But Mr. Hardy
is no mere patron of the dignity and the honour
of labour, standing at heart a little aloof from
its realities ; content to admire its historical and
monumental aspects; satisfied with blessing its
nobility from a distance. How near and dear to
him is the labouring life of Wessex, I hope to
show presently : now I will rather indicate, with
what stir and movement of strong passions he
animates it all. ‘He rides well his horse of the
night, said Emerson of Hawthorne, after one of
his long, unbroken silences: take away the tinge
of unhealthy restraint, at which the sentence hints,
and you have a marked feature of Mr. Hardy’s

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

‘heroes.’ They are strong, generous, and capable
of ‘a wise passiveness’: and their part is the part
of Jacob serving Laban for love of Rachel. Giles
Winterborne, John Loveday, the Reddleman,
Gabriel Oak: how well do they contrast with those
worldlier lovers, men with the spirit, now of a
tarnished Lovelace, now of a gilded Branghton ;
men of imperfect gentilities, and of incomplete
refinements! With the trials, overcome or not,
of these flighty creatures, we have little sympathy:
but when Winterborne dies his gracious death, we
are present at the passing of a martyr:

‘Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail,
Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.’

We have the same exaltation of heart, when the
Trumpet Major’s ringing step is heard, as he
leaves his lost love to his unworthy brother, in
the disguise of a brave gaiety, going off ‘to blow
his trumpet, till silenced for ever upon one of the
bloody battlefields of Spain.’ And the Reddle-
man, that guardian angel of a grim colour, moves
_about ‘haggard Egdon’ with a loyal care for
Thomasin, which even the winning of her seems
hardly to reward. And Shepherd Oak is of the
same strong make, patient and true. These men
endure dumb agonies and silent pangs: they have
a pagan majesty of mien, these Wessex country
folk, with their slow speech and ancient dialect.

67
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Against these, are set the figures of plausible
scamps and braggarts, vulgar and mean in their
flashy tricks of accomplishment: Sergeant Troy,
who has at least a martial bearing ; Fitzpiers, the
tinsel gallant and spurious gentleman ; Wildeve,
the dangling, pretty fellow; Bob Loveday, with
his stupid insincerity and shallowness; even Jim
Hayward, so skilled in the diplomacy of love.
And the plays are played out among the most
appropriate scenes: be it woodland or moor-
land, sheepfold or dairy farm, seacoast or inland,
market town or hamlet, Mr. Hardy knows what
the nature of things will bring about in each case.
He has, what Hawthorne had, a gift of sight into
the spirit of place: a most rare gift. With a few
words, he makes us smell the damp woods; catch
the change in the wind’s voice, as it travels through
each kind of tree ; know the foldings of the hills
by heart, and by instinct, what lies beyond them ;
recognize each tree, by the noise of its snapping
twigs, or the rustle of its dead leaves underfoot ;
keep the path through the heath at night, by the
feel of its worn herbage ; remember, how the ash
and the beech, more than other trees, hold the
early dripping fog: a few words, and we can
swear to the occupations of a dozen labourers,
though in their Sunday dress, and without their
implements; distinguish upon the road the farmer,
whose negotiations at market have prospered, from
him, who has not hit things off to his mind; is it not
to be read in the complexion? As the naturalist
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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

with a bone, so Mr. Hardy with a word can con-
struct for us the whole manner of a man, the whole
aspect of a place. Not the looks of definite
objects only, but their surrounding and intervening
atmospheres, become plain to us; the blue mists,
or dusty gold lights, or thin gray breaths of
air: once familiarized with one of his places, we
know all about it. If westep out of doors in Little
Hintock, or upon Egdon, or at Casterbridge, in
some dream or fancy of our own, we know our
way; we know, according to season, what the
wind will be doing with the cottage chimney
smoke by nightfall, or what apples will be upon
the grass by morning, or what prices are current at
the corn exchange, or what likelihood there be of
a fair lambing time. Butif we search Mr. Hardy’s
books, to discover why we know this so surely,
we are hard put to it for a reason: so delicate
has been his manner, so natural and unobtrusive
his ‘mental tactility, that we have learned it all
from his pages, as we should learn it by experi-
ence: our certainty and familiarity have grown
upon us. It is in a very different manner, that M.
Zola instructs us: ‘Those are the facts,’ he seems
to say, ‘catalogued and scheduled ; you may rely
upon their technical accuracy ; and you may take
it for truth, that I have omitted nothing and
added nothing’: with the result, if I may quote
my humble experience, that I remember little,
but his fine violations of his own laws. Quelle
magnifique carriére il a mal courue! and how
69
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

thankful must he be, that he is not living under
Theban law.

This subtile fidelity to nature makes it difficult
to light upon separable passages, by way of
example: detach a phrase, a scene, a dialogue, and
it cries out against you for the mutilation, like the
trees of Virgil and of Dante. I have already
spoken of Mr. Hardy’s almost architectural feeling
for constructive unity: but constructive unity of
design may be the cold result of a servile respect
for laws and canons, the correctness of a pedantic
humanist : the subtile fidelity, the living congruity,
which we have just considered, show us that from
such pedantry and coldness, Mr. Hardy is free.
Each of his greater books, the books of high
and simple intention, has its orderly movement
towards its end predestined: there is no wantoning
with chance attractions by the way: phrase and
scene and dialogue, incident and narrative and medi-
tation, like the members of a body, do their part
in their several places, for the general and common
good. Acurious effect is produced by the patient
elaboration of story and of style, in these novels:
it brings a strange conviction home to the reader,
a comfortable assurance. Line upon line, as char-
acters unfold, and passions wake, and motives meet
or cross, the reader’s mind falls into step with the
writer’s: to vary the figure, I might say that the
reader answers the writer’s call, as one instrument
another, by sympathy. Butso quietly do the fine
actors perform their allotted parts ; without strut

7O
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

and blare and fustian, but in the plain beauty
of all natures, faithful to themselves ; that when
they have done, we seem to have assisted at the
progress of a story within our actual experience:
romance? we ask ourselves ; psychology? or what
is the name for this spirit of simple truth? After
all, critical terms are poor enough: and this rich
play of passions and emotions, with its ancient
elements, in their modern combinations, deserves
-no poorer name than truth.

In dwelling upon a few results of Mr. Hardy’s
style, I recognize the inexhaustible amount of
positions, from which style may be considered,
and of lights, under which it may be viewed. Yet
all is said, if we are content to say, that scholar-
ship is the only arbiter of style: scholarship, the
adroit urbanity of an artist, which passes judgment
upon his aims and inspirations. In any living
sense of the term, scholarship is a natural good
breeding in the arts of humane life, quickened
and trained by discipline: it implies a sense of
the absurd, the impossible: it may show itself
in a thousand forms, and always with becoming
grace:

‘ Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet,

Pedantry and illiteracy, it holds in equal
abhofrence; all lack of urbanity, all failure in
courtesy, all marks of the clown and of the fop,
are hateful to scholarship: whilst it is tolerant of
infinite variety. The scholar thinks with Pope’s

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

friend: ‘my Lord has so bad a taste, as to like
all that is good’: he has his preferences, but no
prejudices. Among authors and books and
styles, he has his more intimate friends and
favourites: but he is convinced, that the good of
all ages and of all kinds are more like each other,
than they are like their bad contemporaries.
From Thucydides’ Reflections on the Revolution
zn Corcyra, we pass to Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, with no sensible discomfort,
or surprise of complete change. The style of Mr,
Hardy is a deliberate and a grave style: his
thought falls into phrases and paragraphs of a
Latin massiveness. Rarely can it be called supple,
agile, brilliant: the sentences do not flash out
with a bright play of wit and fancy, in the manner
of some delightful modern writers. Rather, Mr,
Hardy cultivates a sustained equability, like that
of the Roman writers: he gives us the comfortable
sense of dealing with realities. Of each page, and
paragraph, and sentence, we can say, that we
know the reason of its existence: the measured
expressions, one with another, each contributing
its just service, compose an organic whole. There
is no hurry: none of that haste to be concise and
tense, which makes a cluster of excited epigrams
do the work of many rich and thoughtful pages.
The genius, which gets at the ultimate simplicity
of things, their vitality, their reality, knows with
what care of expression, at what expense of space,
in what tone and key, to communicate its appre-

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

hensions of each several thing: and, the thing
communicated rightly, the reader accepts it rightly,
without any immediate sensation of wonder or
surprise. That sensation is felt, when the story
is over: then comes the rush of emotion, as the
accumulated truth and beauty, which in detail we
have quietly accepted, come home to us in their
unity and their entirety. TZantae molts erat, we
Say, so great a labour and a toil were wanted, to
build up this one human soul in strength and
truth, to work out these fates of a few men and
women, to make real the pity and the glory of it
all: meditating upon the evolution or construction
of the work, we have no lack of enthusiasm and
of delight. Much, doubtless, of the dignity of the
work comes from its occupation with dignified
natures: with men and women conscious, in a
deep and fearless way, of the great, commanding
verities, life and death, love and hate; beings of
a pagan resignation, almost of a sombre pride,
at the thought of fate and of fatality ; creatures
unskilled in the culture of light emotions, vagrant
impressions, the cross purposes ard chance hints
of those, whose nerves are over sensitive, whose
minds are over flexible. To say this, is to say
that Mr. Hardy’s form is proper to his subject:
for there is evidence in plenty, that his work is
full of conscious pains, of forethought, and of
elaboration.

The scholarly workmanship of Mr. Hardy
recalls to me the large manner of our early

73
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

masters in English prose: those masters of the
rich phrase, the elaborate cadence, the liberal and
golden eloquence. Many a passage in these
novels, where the writer has gathered up his
powers for a prolonged triumph over the difficul-
ties of a great occasion, seems to belong in spirit
to those writers of ‘might and majesty,’ whom
Landor loved; to whom Edward Irving paid
allegiance, in periods equal to their own: ‘I
cannot learn to think, as they have done, which is
the gift of God: but Ican teach myself to think
as disinterestedly, and to express as honestly
what I think and feel. They are my models of
men: of Englishmen, and of authors. My con-
science could find none so worthy, and the world
hath acknowledged none worthier. They were
the fountains of my English idiom: they taught
me forms for expressing my feelings: they
showed me the construction of sentences, and
the majestic flow of continuous discourse.’ Exa-
mine some of Mr. Hardy’s heightened passages,
knit together and compact, instinct with a passion
strongly controlled: and then turn to those old
classics of our tongue. You will find the same air
of delighted mastery, the same sense of royal
command over a rich language, the same exercise
of unwearied powers throughout great reaches of
thought and feeling. Sometimes, the resemblance
is of a lesser kind; an echo of some choice,
particular style, just caught and recognized : thus,
is not Burton audible here? These were among

74
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

the things but darkly known to Angel Clare,
before his farming life: ‘the seasons in their
moods, morning and evening, night and noon
in their temperaments, winds in their several
dispositions, trees, waters, and clouds, shades and
silences, genes fatuz, constellations, and the voices
of inanimate things.’ Down to the touch of Latin,
that roll call of great natural facts, where the
writer’s mind and ear can be felt luxuriating in
the richness of sense and sound together, is in the
full and flowing manner of Burton: whom Mr.
Hardy further resembles, in that he too is vere
Saturnihus.

For the most part, Mr. Hardy delights in the
immense resources of our traditional speech: with-
out wandering into new paths, he knows, how —
much strength and beauty spring from the simplest
words, well chosen and well consorted by the
scholar’s discrimination. Perhaps, it is not suffi-
ciently remembered by some readers, that scholar-
ship and erudition are no less concerned with
simple things, than with recondite and abstruse:
that what charms them, in a writer’s sure and lucid
style, so full of grace and ease, is quite as much a
result of knowledge, as it is a natural gift. Itisa
truth best learned, by study of the classical French
prose writers: of Pascal and Voltaire, Fénélon and
Rousseau, Massillon and Bossuet. ‘A clear con-
ception of the thing to be set down in words, the
quite simple and appropriate words, produces
wonders. Modern English is in some danger of

Z§
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

losing that powerful charm, by its hatred of sim-
plicity: but our old writers, even the forgotten
among them, are seldom without it. I take down
the first book, ready to my hand: it is a version
of Herodian, ‘Done from the Greek by a Gentle-
man at Oxford, 1698. Commodus, we read, was
very beautiful: ‘His Eyes were languishing, and
yet had a peculiar sort of lustre: His Hair was
curled, and yellow, resembling Flame, when he
walked in the Sun ; which made some Men fansie
he was powdered with Dust of Gold.’ Here, the
writer has not a free hand ; he is translating: but
the singular charm of the sentence is due to the
translator's satisfaction with simple words, full of
force and grace, dexterously assorted. Mr. Hardy
abounds in such fine simplicities: and, whilst his
happy turns and phrases do not startle us into a
surprised delight, disproportionate to their import-
ance, they fill us with a continual pleasure. ‘The
sad science of renunciation’: Pascal could not
better that. ‘They sat in a rigid reticence, that
was almost a third personality’: it is as good as
Browning’s, ‘one and one, with a shadowy third.’
‘Her touch upon your hand was as soft as wind’:
Fletcher might have imagined it, or Herrick.
‘The shearers reclined against each other as at
suppers in the early ages of the world’: it is said
in the most delicate manner of Hawthorne. ‘The
occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of
some immense sad soul, conterminous with the
universe in space, and with history in time’:

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DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

Senancour wrote so, at the height of his mournful
wisdom. There is no cleverness, sought after and
hard won, in these perfect sentences: they are
right, by some natural magic of their own, as
Virgil’s and as Dante’s words are right: and,
again in the way of those masters, it is scholar-
ship, with its disciplined joy in the simple and
the severe, that helped the writer to capture the
beauty of this natural magic. In his greater’
books, the four or five tragedies upon which,
surely, his fame will rest, Mr. Hardy preserves,
with scarce a lapse into less austere a style, the
accent of stateliness and of solemnity, unsoftened
and unrelieved by the gentler spirit of sympathy,
so frequent a companion of the delicately austere.
And now, to more literal matters.

Verbal criticism has its antagonists: before,
then, I venture upon some verbal criticism, I may
in brief touch upon the controversy. Pope spent
some of his glorious wit upon the verbal critics:

‘Each wight, who reads not, and but scans and spells,
Each Word-catcher, that lives on syllables’:

And Pope, whom Hazlitt echoed, is still, in my
belated judgment, an authority upon points of
the kind. But so too is Ascham: ‘They be not
wise, that say, what care I for Man's Words and
Utterance, if his Matter, and Reasons be good? ...
Ye know not, what Hurt ye do to Learning, that
care not for Words, but for Matter; and so make
a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.’

77
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

And, to provide one more champion, let us hear
Landor: ‘There are those, who would persuade
us, that verbal .criticism is unfair, and that few
poems can Stand it. The truth of the latter
assertion by no means establishes the former:
all good criticism hath its foundation on verbal.’
Pope was too brilliant a master of words, and too
brilliant a verbal critic, to condemn all such criti-
cism: he did but mean to condemn the petulant
pedantry, which is wholly enslaved to the letter.
Upon points of construction, I have one charge,
and only one, to bring against the style of Mr.
Hardy: he, like Miss Burney, is an inveterate
patron of ‘the split infinitive’: an usage, which
deserves the severest censures of purist and
precisian. This excepted, Mr. Hardy writes a
style of grammatical nicety: nervous and sound.
I may add, that his style is unaided by his stops:
among recent novelists, Dickens alone, whose
knowledge of the last century novelists was
thorough, has preserved their perfect punctuation.
Against his vocabulary, here and there, has been
brought a charge of undue parade and pomp,
in the use of erudite terms: a fondness for the
expressions of physical sciences, the phraseology
of the arts, and the like. Before coming to a
consideration of the charge, in Mr. Hardy’s case,
some older critics may help us: Flaubert and
Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola
and M. Mallarmé, with all their colleagues or op-
ponents, may sometimes be set aside, and suffer

78
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or
Dryden.

Here is a little wisdom from the Dzscovertes :
‘Some words are to be culled out for ornament
and colour, as we gather Flowers to strow Houses,
or make Garlands ; but they are better when they
grow to our stile; as in a Meadow, where though
the meer grass and greenness delights; yet the
variety of Flowers doth heighten and beautifie.
Marry, we must not play or riot too much with
them, as in Paranomasies.’ Again: ‘ Words bor-
rowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of “Majesty to
stile, and are not without their delight some-
times. For they have the Authority of Years,
and out of their intermission do win to themselves
a kind of grace-like newness. But the oldest of
the present, and newest of the past Language, is
the best.’ Once more: ‘You are not to cast a
Ring for the perfumed Terms of the Time, as
Accommodation, Complement, Spirit, &c. But
use them properly in their place.” Dryden also,
whose Prefaces are among the masterpieces of
our criticism and of our prose, warns the writer
against ‘a too curious election of words. And
Quintilian, protesting against the abuse of
rhetoric, denounces those who, ‘seduced by
glittering show, and shrinking from common ways
of speech, encompass all that they have to say
with floods of verbosity’: and Cicero, who ‘ writes
Roman,’ is no less anxious to avoid the emblema
vermuculatum, intricate mosaic work in words.

79
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Now, there is no lack in England of flourishing
eccentrics, who devote a passionate diligence to
the construction of such work: I would, Panta-
gruel had by the throat these professors of strange
speech. They suffer, many of them, from the
delusion, that they are very French: emulating,
with pathetic zeal for the impossible, certain
French graces, and stiil more, certain French
follies, which cannot survive transplantation.
‘French folly,’ wrote Voltaire in English, ‘is
pleasanter than English madness’: pleasanter:
that is precisely true: English writers play the
fool but awkwardly. But there are others, who
do not offer violence to the genius of the English
tongue; yet whose writing contains words and
phrases, not wholly acceptable at first sight:
writers, who have the desire strong upon them,
to find the exact expression for their thought;
though the quest should lead them to explore the
vocabularies of the sciences, the arts, the meta-
physics. Such an one, Mr. Hardy would seem
to be: simple and severe, we have already found
him ; we have now to consider him, as a lover of
learned technicalities, for occasional use.

In the first place, it is to be remembered, that
art requires self-denial: a beautiful, rich word, a
learned, weighty phrase, excellent in themselves,
may be at war with their humbler context: it is
the sin of ‘the purple patch.” The artist, then,
must decide each case by itself; and determine,
whether the harmonious tone of his work would

80
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

be spoiled by a brilliance borrowed from another
range and another rank of style: or, again,
by fetching from antiquity, or from ‘modernity, °
words and phrases fallen into unjust neglect, or
delayed upon their way to common use. If he
decide to insert among his pedestrian words some
word of poetry, to take a metaphor from scientific
theory, to ‘snatch a fearful joy’ by any such bold
transgression from the common way ; he must be
very sure, that the possible success is worth the
certain risk. Thus, Mr. Pater, writing in all the
strength of his fine scholarship, inclines to hold,
that contemporary prose might well absorb and
naturalize the larger terms of modern science:
those expressions, which are but as ‘resident
aliens’ in our literary language. Mr. Pater can
do it: but can lesser men be safely urged to so
delicate a task? For to take the case of con-
temporary science and metaphysic: it requires
a prophetic gift, to know which, of all the many
phrases in the air just now, will endure and will
always be intelligible. Substance, accident, subject-
matter ; these have endured and are intelligible ;
men use the terms, who know nothing of their
first significance. But were I, airily and confi-
dently, to use the term holenmerian or nullibist, 1
should deserve a grave rebuke: even Zineal gland,
or conarion, are not precisely popular expressions,
to be used at random. Certainly, there are some
terms, in which modern science expresses very
plausible views, and in very simple language:
81 F
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

natural selection, survival of the fittest: so great
is the intellectual stir, the mental animation,
connoted by these phrases, that no future age will
be at a loss to comprehend them: whatever may
be the fate of the hypotheses, which gave them
birth. Again: certain words, expressing facts
about which there is no question, are universally
understood: certain others are not. Thus Zer-
pendicular, axis, vertebrate, are universally under-
stood; dznomzal, agnation, atavism, are not:
dynamic, crystallization, segment, require little or
no apology; guaternion, polarization, kinetic,
require a good deal. It is clear, that all these
terms cannot be used, by the mere man of letters,
with equal readiness: in each case, the exact
thing signified by the term, the propriety of its
employment ere and xow, its intrinsic force or
beauty, must be separately studied. These terms,
as many writers use them, are not so won for
literature, as to have lost all harshness of the
schools: they are obtrusive, impertinent, glaring.
Like the foolish among the Ciceronians of the
Renaissance, like the foolish among the Euphu-
ists, so too the foolish affecters of the scientific
phrase are in our day mistaking elaborate pre-
cision for meritorious pains: and bringing into
discredit the more scholarly labourers in the same
field. There must always be much learning ina
writer’s mind, of which he can never make a direct
use: but it is not wasted, although it be not dis-
played. The knowledge, with the train of thought

82
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION
that follows it, strengthens and fertilizes the mind
by its silent influence: and when the writer writes,
not from the plethoric abundance of his knowledge,
but from the strength of his thought, it is clearly
seen, how the half may be greater than the whole.
‘Le pédantisme, writes M. Renan, ‘l’ostentation
du savoir, le soin de ne négliger aucun de ses
avantages, sont tellement devenus la régle de
certaines écoles, qu’on n’y admet plus Vécrivain
sobre qui, selon la maxime de nos vieux maitres
de Port-Royal, sait se borner, ne fait jamais pro-
fession de science, et dans un livre ne donne pas
le quart des recherches que ce livre a cofitées.
L'élégance, la modestie, la politesse, l’atticisme
passent maintenant pour des manitres de gens
arriérés.’ =

The practice of Mr. Hardy is much akin to that
of George Eliot: though she, indeed, had the more
simple interest, of a moral kind, in the hints and
suggestions supplied by scientific metaphor: Mr./
Hardy is rather impassive, and concerned for
accuracy of description. I may give sundry
examples of his ‘learned’ language: statzc, momen-
tum, thesmothete, zenithal, nadiral, monochromatic,
zsometric, mechanised friendship, photosphere, unten-
able redemptive theolatry, pink nebulosity, yellow
luminosity. These are fair examples: and Mr.
Hardy’s readers, who remember, or who discover,
the various contexts, will agree that those words
and phrases are not felicitous in themselves, or
necessary to their surroundings. To take some

83
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

passages: ‘ The oat-harvest began, and all the men
were a-field under a monochromatic Lammas sky,
amid the trembling air and the short shadows of
noon. ‘Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye
beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread
out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of
little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a
bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed
labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink
nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill’ Or
this, a somewhat different kind of example:
‘Viewed sideways, the closing-line of her lips
formed, with almost geometric precision, the curve
so well known in the arts of design as the cima-
recta, or ogee. The sight of such a flexible bend
as that on grim Egdon was quite an apparition.
It was felt at once that that mouth did not come
over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates
whose lips met like the two halves of a muffin.
One had fancied that such lip-curves were mostly
lurking underground in the south as fragments of
forgotten marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips
that, though full, each corner of her mouth was as
clearly cut as the point of a spear.’ Or, again,
‘the wet cobwebs, that hung like movable dia-
phragms, on each blade and bough.’

It is not difficult to imagine Mr. Hardy’s
intention in using the terms monochromatic, pink
nebulosity, cima-recta or ogee, and diaphragms: they
represent attempts to give in words the greatest
possible effect of reality and exactitude. What

84
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

was in Mr. Hardy’s mind, or before his eyes, was
not a rosy mist, or a red haze, or a ruddy glow,
or a faint purple cloud, nor yet a morning flush:
it was something fznk, and something mebulous ; a
pink nebulostty therefore. And even that is not
the perfect truth: to rival the delicacy of nature
herself, with her tender gradations, it must be @
hint of pink nebulosity, There, at last, is the very
thing itself. Were Mr. Hardy engaged upon a
description of morning twilight, in an Apuleian
vein, the phrase would do mighty well: yet, as
Keats confessed, ‘ scenery is fine, but human nature
is finer’: our thoughts are busy with the picture
of those tired labouring men and women, under
their ‘coverlets made of little purple patchwork
squares.’ We know them so well: Tess, too, upon
her lonely walk at that strange hour, and her
thoughts of those low cottage rooms, with their
homely memories and associations, fill our minds
and hold our affections. Then, upon all this
simple emotion, comes the hint of pink nebulosity,
to the disturbance and the confusion of our plea-
sure. Elsewhere, the phrase may pass, may even
charm: here, it is an offence. So too, #ono-
chromatic conflicts with Lammas: the words are
oil and vinegar, refusing to mix. And, whilst the
Saxon pirates, the two halves of a muffin, the
broken marbles hid away in the South, the spear
point, are one and all harmonious and agreeable
with the third scene: the czma-recta, or ogee, is an
intrusion, Just so, when we are looking down
85
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

with Angel and ’Liza-Lu upon the towers of
Winchester, waiting for his wife, her sister, to
die a shameful death: it is incongruous with the
solemnity, the naked horror, of it all, to be told
that the prominent buildings showed, ‘as in an
isometric drawing.’ It may be so: I have looked
down upon the old city, some hundred times,
from the same height, without realizing the fact :
and at so culminating a moment, at the dark
close of the great, simple tragedy, the mention of
so professional and technical a detail affronts the
reader. Not so did Dante, at the height of his
great arguments, mar their intensity and plainness :
then he used, not learned terms, but the simplest
and the homeliest possible. Such phrases as these,
that I have ventured to disapprove, set side by
side with the phrases, that I took leave to praise,
carry their own condemnation.

Mr. Stevenson has well said: ‘What sort of
English word I use is a matter of the very slightest
moment to me, so long as I can get the meaning
close, and so long as the word is in the key of
what I am writing. This question of key is—I
am afraid it is really incommunicable. A good
example of a key perfectly held, perhaps as good
as I can name, is the Church of England Prayer
Book. There does not seem to me one word in
the whole of that, which is not of near zsthetic
kin to all the rest.’ Upon the same occasion, Mr.
Stevenson also said, of Mr. Hardy: ‘I have seen
sentences of his, that I don’t think could be

86
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION

bettered in any writer or in any language.’ All
Mr, Hardy’s readers have seen the same: but it
was when Mr. Hardy had observed the sound
principle of Mr. Stevenson’s other saying. For
the most part, his vocabulary, simple or learned,
is employed with scrupulous care: and, if I have
taken upon myself to point out a few cases of
dubious success, it is because untempered panegyric
is no less impertinent, than absurd.

With certain chief characteristics of Mr. Hardy’s
design and composition, the_following essays will
deal: with his presentation of the Wessex country,
with his sympathetic skill in setting forth the
country folk, with his manner of showing the
natures and passions of some men and women in
particular, their simplicity and their complexity ;
with his view of those vexed, great questions
about art and morals, artistic sincerity and moral
truth. These considerations will exhibit the
psychological, modern character of Mr. Hardy’s
novels: his love of making clear the difficult
play of motives and of characters, among scenes
where all looks placid, taciturn, or dull. For the
present, I have been content to dwell rather upon
the general qualities common to all his books, in
matter and in manner; though more prominent,
both good and bad, in some books than in others.
In especial, I have tried to suggest, what must
haunt the minds of all his readers, who care for
the great traditions of English letters: his affinity
with the great makers of English literature.

87
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

George Sand or Count Tolstoi, Flaubert or Balzac;
to these, and to many others, we may discern
resemblances in Mr. Hardy: resemblances and
contrasts ; the result, now of conscious or uncon-
scious influence, now of chance and of coincidence.
No writer escapes, or should desire to escape, the
influences of his age: but it is not merely by
recording them, that he will live: it is by showing
that in them, which is of no time or country, but
old as the human race. Partial success in that
endeavour marks a writer for a humanist ; perfect
success, for a classic: the humanist may be
recognized by his contemporaries; the classic
must have faith in himself, whilst his contem-
poraries can have no more than hope on his
account. If Mr. Hardy have deserved the perfect
success, he will command it also: when, matters
not at all.

88
WESSEX

Ill

WESSEX

In a Study from Euripides, Mr. Pater tells us, how
Theseus destroyed ‘that delightful creature, the
Centaur, and warred with the Amazons also:
and how ‘they exerted the prerogative of poetic
protest, and survive thereby.’ That is a thing to
muse upon: Art the Preserver! Art, gathering
up the wonders and the powers, no longer living
of themselves ; but henceforth to live only in Art:
which has a net office of piety towards the
past. Mr. Hardy has done this service to a
great region of England, to! Wessex : for so, with
characteristic love of reality, he calls the land of
his inventions; by no imaginary name, but by a
name of famous age and meaning. It is not with
any mere desire to make an open secret of his
choice, that; he has given an ancient name to the
country, where the people of his imagination live:
Wessex is full of significance, and no outworn
appellation of antiquity, without a living force.
In calling th the land of his birth and of his art after |
its_ancient name, the Land of the West Saxons,
Mr. | Hardy would have us feel the sentiment of
historical continuity from those old times to ours ;

 
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

the storms of violent fortune, the slow touches of
change, which have left their trace upon the land,
whilst leaving it at heart the same: Wessex, the
Land of the West Saxons, preceded by Romans
and by Celts, followed by Danes and by Normans.
In Mr. Hardy’s books, all that succession of races,
their fusion and confusion, are brought before_the
mind: with a scientific severity, and with an
atiietic beauty, to which there is no parallel in
English literature. Many an English writer has
a Patavinitas of his own; a touch of native
patriotism upon his ways of speech and habits
of thought: but none have quite that cast of
mind, that bent of imagination, which make Mr.
Hardy’s concern for Wessex so singular and rare
a power in art. An ardent zeal, antiquarian and
patriotic, for some county, district, or place, is
common enough; but it is rarely directed by a
spirit of art: a romantic love of some country
side, rich in memories and legends, is common
also; but it is rarely combined with the spirit of
science. Mr. Hardy has all the zeal, say, of
the old county historians, and all the romance
of Scott, minstrel of the Border: the study of
these Wessex books excites two passions, the
intellectual love of science, and the emotional
love of beauty.

This concentration of Mr. Hardy’s art upon
the varieties of one great theme, Wessex and its
people, has provoked, now and again, complaints
from readers, to whom Wessex is not infinitely

gO
WESSEX

interesting: give us Wessex to-day, they entreat,
but let it be Japan to-morrow. For my own part,
I would apply, to the art of literature, what Thomas
a Kempis wrote, concerning the art of religion:
qui multum peregrinantur raro sanctificantur:
much pilgrimage rarely sanctifies. Our modern
journeys to the shrines of ‘local colour, the wide
world through, result in little fine art: they
allow no leisure for patient meditation upon the
nature of the men and things selected, nor for
confident familiarity with them. But that art,
which meditates at home, and whose longest
travels are of the mind, is the conquering art.
Yet hasty and restless art is fashionable: and, as
young labourers upon the soil swarm into distant
towns for alien labour, so young labourers at the
rts fly abroad for foreign themes of art. Certainly,
art should not be parochial, provincial: but the
art, which sketches the round world with an airy
ease, is worse than the most untravelled and
unadventurous art. One is moved to wonder,
when these Ariels of modern art will cease to put
a girdle round the globe, and will begin to think.
It is not, that we want art to show signs of effort
and of labour: we want art to be the result of
great effort and of long labour, whilst wearing
a look of spontaneous creation. Sir Joshua
Reynolds, said Hazlitt, ‘being asked how long
it had taken him to do a certain picture, made
answer: “All his life.”’ That fine artist, Mr.
Whistler, once made a similar reply. A single

gI
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

sojourn in Italy, very brief, affected Chaucer,
Milton, Gray, during the whole course of their
lives and studies. It matters nothing, whether a
work of art be produced with painful care, or with
a breathless and delighted speed: so it be the
outcome of thought, a designed, composed, and
meditated work. Mr. Hardy’s way of work, to
judge by his choice of matter, and by the perfection
to which it is wrought, is the way of elaboration ;
a cautious, anxious way. If the monotony, the
unity, the sameness, of all his work, have for some
readers so powerful a charm, it is for this reason:
that, content to labour in one rich field, he shows
us the wealth of human nature. Wessex, one
part of a small island, is his ground; and of
Wessex, he takes one part in especial, the county
of Dorset: he has rarely left it, throughout fifteen
books. He has studied it in his maturity of
mind; he has loved it with the fervour of a
patriot ; he has understood it with the instinct of
a child: it is his own. As Wordsworth would
have the poet find his mystery in a ‘primrose by
the river’s brim’; as Shelley would have him watch
the sun upon ‘the yellow bees in the ivy bloom,
to some high Platonic end: so Mr. Hardy has
pondered the looks and the ways, the histories
and the associations, the places and the people, of
his native region. He has done it with that
patient contemplation, which is so English a
thing: that satisfaction with experiences, few
perhaps, and monotonous, yet deep and strong,

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which is sometimes corrupted into stolidity. { But
Mr. Hardy, like Hawthorne of Salem, has the gift
of vision, to penetrate beneath the familiar surface,
and to surprise us with ever fresh manifestations
of the riches there: to reveal varieties of human
nature, infinitely unlike each other at heart, yet
all sharing the same birthright, in that Wessex
has set on them all its seal, as born there, bred
there, moulded upon a Wessex plan. No lover
of Hawthorne can quite reconcile himself to the
Marble Faun, with its Italian colour and Roman
interest: that gray New England of the Puritans
was Hawthorne’s very own. Old America, the
ruined cities of Yucatan: what a fascination is in
that unrealized antiquity! what a charm in the
thought of Aztecs and of Incas! And there are
the days of Spanish domination: New Orleans,
the glory of the South, aristocratic and decaying ;
old Spanish kings, Charles or Philip, with their
Viceroys in New Spain; all the slow impressive-
ness of Castile, corrupt and haughty, in a conquered
land, itself to be conquered by the modern
American; Mr. Cable has told that story: then,
too, there is the Grand Monarque, with the nobles
of France; Canada, and the Jesuit missions ;
Quebec and Montreal, Montcalm and Wolfe;
that is another aspect of American romance in
history. But Hawthorne did not touch these mov-
ing themes of art: a child of the Puritans, he made
art out of their memories. Yet his attachment
to the past was not only the loving attachment

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

of an antiquary, an humourist, who delights in
the thought of what is ancient or fantastic, vener-
able or quaint: no Antony a Wood, no Lamb.
Hawthorne had a deeper sentiment than that
genial, cordial, reverence and habit of affection: .
he had, in his own phrase, ‘a mere sensuous sym-
pathy of dust for dust’; dull, fallen Salem! so
mean, so chilly, so commonplace; yet, in that
town were done the sins, and the benefactions, of
his forefathers: ancestral Hawthornes, with their
sad raiment, and gloomy creed, walked those
streets, breathed that keen air, gave their dust to
those grim church-yards. Again; to take a living
writer, at the outset, surely, of a great career; Mr.
Barrie has been content to spend the same loving
pains upon a little community of Scotch folk,
dear to him for home’s sake: until he has given
us some scenes of truth and beauty, for which he
should be honoured by all, who know in part the
sorrow and splendour of the world. A clinging to
home, old memories, old associations, is the mark
of fine natures: like Scott in Italy, like the exiled
Jacobite, who

‘Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for his lovelier Tees’ :

So too, it is permitted us to think, would Mr
Hardy long for his Wessex folk, and beseech
the divinity of Domiduca, should occasion lead
him to write about another people. It is these
writers, men with love for their place of patient

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work, whom we trust: they have reached the
truth, hard to reach, and undiscerned by the
passers by. Through these writers, we come to
learn, how every place, dull though it be to us,
and of no account, is like Bunyan’s Valley of
Humiliation: ‘Though Christian had the hard
hap to meet here with Apollyon, and to enter
with him into a brisk encounter, yet I must tell
you, that in former times men have met with
angels here, have found pearls here, and have in
this place found the words of life.’ 1

Mr. Hardy’s Wessex is not a region of strict
boundaries : it touches Exeter, Bristol, Salisbury,
Winchester: but, for our present purposes, it
may be considered, as equivalent to the County
of Dorset. Critics have already identified Mr.
Hardy’s localities with their originals; a map
of them has been published: and most careful

readers could assign to each novel, with no great |

labour, its corresponding scenery and actual
home. [It is impossible, not to feel some regret
at this publicity : innocent as it is, it yet savours
of intrusion. From pointing out the originals of
places, it is but a short step to pointing out the
originals of persons: let us rest content, in their
lifetimes, with what our novelists tell us. Granted,
that Mr. Hardy’s Casterbridge is Dorchester ;
his Melchester, Salisbury ; his Sherton Abbas,
Sherborne: Mr. Hardy has not pledged himself
to the literal fidelity of a guidebook. Nothing
is gained, by a minute comparison of the real

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

places, with their imagined counterparts: it is
better, to dwell upon the general characteristics
of the county, which Mr. Hardy reproduces, than
to linger upon the details, which he combines,
transposes, and employs, to suit his immediate
ends.

No place; I had almost said, in the world ;
but certainly, no place in the greater part of
it, is dissociated from history: and few parts
of England seem more saturated with histori-
cal memories, more stratified by the successive
passages of historic time, than Dorsetshire. Mr.
Hardy appears well suited, by natural tendencies
of his mind, to such a region: for no novelist has
a greater appreciation of historic, and even of

‘prehistoric, records. All nature is in his eyes,
what it was in Bacon’s: a field for the conquests
of science. Thus, he tells how, to Swithin the
young astronomer, in the southern region of stars,
‘space, being less the historic haunt of human
thought than overhead at home, seemed to be
pervaded with a more lonely loneliness.’’ The
sentence is full of suggestions: it illustrates Mr.
Hardy’s somewhat rigid and impassive attitude
towards the history of man; natural science
is the true history, and man is but a natural
product. Thus, whilst he is fond of conjuring
up thé long pageant of human history, those
Celts and Romans, those Normans and Danes,
it is often in a hard and marble manner:
without the spiritual imagination of Bossuet, but
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WESSEX

rather with the cold splendour of Gibbon. Yet
the artist in Mr. Hardy can overpower the man
of science: he can dwell upon the human history
of Wessex with an evident emotion. Dorset
looks ‘a very old, aged’ county: a home of
venerable tradition, symbolized by its lonely
barrows, its weathered towers, its homely streets.
Its old towns, Roman in plan, Georgian in
architecture, combine the virtues of nice precision,
severe regularity, and comfortable cleanness; the
ages have met and mingled, to result in a grave,
decorous, compromise. The whole region, its
towns, villages, woodlands, pastures, heaths, downs,
and people, affect their student in this singular
way: an impress of many ages and of many
influences is stamped upon them. Dorset has a
character, distinct from its neighbours: Cornwall
and Devon, with their Atlantic seaboard, their
Elizabethan romance, their vague memories of
Mediterranean commerce, all the wild medley of
tradition and of myth, are of another spirit: nor
are Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, of one
character with Dorset; which seems to have
kept by itself, primitive and quaint in its own
way. Here, each influence, military from the
Romans, ecclesiastic from the Saxons, feudal
from the Normans, has sunk deeply into the
land : whilst the aboriginal character has received
each influence in a particular fashion. There are
barrows, camps, rings, all over the district, of
which the learned cannot determine the origin

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

and date: one race may have succeeded to its
predecessor’s works, and changed them for its
own needs: until the mounds, raised by human
hands, have come to look like nature’s work.
That is an inverse symbol, of the immaterial
results of ancient history, upon this tract and.
people: get past the confused traces, blent and
crossed, of historic ancestry, and you reach the
primitive pagan stock. To read aright this
living palimpsest, requires a disciplined skill and
a long familiarity: Mr. Hardy, who is thus
qualified, lets no hint or trace escape him.
‘They are the representatives of antiquity,’ he
says of the Dorset folk : ‘Many of these labourers
about here bear corrupted Norman names; many
are the descendants of the squires in the last
century, and their faces even now strongly
resemble the portraits in the old manor-houses.
Many are, must be, the descendants of the
Romans, who lived here in great pomp and state
for four hundred years. I have seen faces here
that are the duplicates of those fine faces I saw
at Fiesole, where also I picked up Roman coins,
the counterpart of those we find here so often.
They even use Latin words here, which have
survived everything.” The old town of Caster-
bridge ‘announced old Rome in every street,
alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke
the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome.
It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two
deep about the town fields and gardens without

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WESSEX

coming upon some tall soldier or other of the
Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive
rest for a space of fifteen hundred years. He was
mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop
in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell; his
knees drawn up to his chest; sometimes with
the remains of his spear against his arm; a fibula
or brooch of bronze on his heart or forehead ; an
urn at his knee, a jar at his breast, a bottle at his
mouth; and mystified conjecture pouring down
upon him from the eyes of Casterbridge street
boys and men, who had turned a moment to
gaze at the familiar spectacle as they passed by.’
There, just without the town on the south road,
is the vast Amphitheatre: where, so old people
affirmed, ‘at certain moments in the summer
time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a
book, or dozing in the arena, had, on lifting their
eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion
of Hadrian’s soldiery, as if watching the gladia-
torial combat; and had heard the roar of their
excited voices; that the scene would remain
but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then
disappear’ In that grim place met the Mayor
of Casterbridge and his wife, sold long years
before: and when she died, she was buried in
‘the still-used burial-ground of the old Roman-
British city, whose curious feature was this, its
continuity as a place of sepulture. Mrs. Hench-
ard’s dust mingled with the dust of women
who lay ornamented with glass hairpins and
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

amber necklaces,°-and men who held in their
mouths coins of Hadrian, Postumus, and the
Constantines.’ This Roman feeling pervades the
countryside: a wanderer, of the impressionable
kind, would hardly be startled, to descry a cohort
glittering upon the white, straight road ;1 to come
upon the paved villa, in all its Italian elegance,
the home of some high official; to find the
builders at work upon those massy walls. He
too, like the peasant by the Loire, ‘palit de la
grandeur des ossements romains!’ And, just as
the Roman Empire seems very present with the
Wessex wayfarer, so too seems the Roman
Church : from Wimborne in the east, to Sherborne
in the west, that august presence still rules the
land, a mighty memory. Saint Aldhelm, famous
scholar and bishop, crosses the downs, leaning
upon his ashen staff: Saint Osmund, Count of
Seéz, builds his cathedral church of Old Sarum,
and compiles the Sarum Use: Saint Cuthburga
presides at Wimborne, Saint Edward lies at
Shaftesbury, Saint Stephen Harding learns of the
Sherborne Benedictines. It is no mere dream of
the early ages, an indulgence of gentle sentiment :
it is enough to go through the land of Wessex,

1 Since writing this, I have read with pleasure a sentence in
The Wrecker of Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Lloyd Osboume, about
Stalbridge Minster, their Dorset town: ‘The town was of Roman
foundation ; and as I looked out that afternoon from the low

windows of the inn, I should scarcely have been surprised to

see a centurion coming up the street with a fatigue draft of
legionaries.’

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WESSEX

noting the names of its villages, the remnants of
its religious houses, the proud beauty of its
churches and of its minsters ; if you would realize,
not the fancies, but the facts, that make those
times so great, and ours, so full of their memories.
Old episcopal and abbatial places, long since
stripped of their honour, keep something magis-
terial about them, something sacrosanct and
austere: the sense of a comely order surrounding
the throne, the cloister, centres of light and
strength : a grace seems to go out of the ancient
stones, built up after a plan so consecrated. Much
comes of living beside them.

Like Sir John Durbeyfield, Mr. Hardy is proud
of the many brave and goodly ‘skellintons, that
lie in his native Wessex : ‘dear, delightful Wessex,
whose statuesque dynasties are even now only just
beginning to feel the shaking of the new and
strange spirit without, like that which entered the
lonely valley of Ezekiel’s vision, and made the
dry bones move, where the honest squires, trades-
men, clerks, and people still praise the Lord with
one voice for His best of all possible worlds.’

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a long tragedy, upon
the striving of that modern spirit, among the
ancient Wessex places: how ancient in spirit,
perhaps Mr. Hardy alone knows. Some of his
Noble Dames excepted, his story of The Trumpet
Major deals with older matters, than any other of
his stories: and yet, those villagers on the alert
to welcome Bonaparte, are no more primitive,

IOI
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

than are the villagers described in Zess. Here is
a long passage, in which Mr. Hardy dwells upon
some moving thoughts, very apt for quotation at
this point. -
‘They sheared in the great barn, called for the
nonce the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan
resembled a church with transepts. It not only
emulated the form of the neighbouring church of
the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. Whether
the barn had ever formed one of a group of con-
ventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware;
no trace of such surroundings remained. The
vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit
a wagon laden to its highest with corn in the
sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of
stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very sim-
plicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent
in erections where more ornament has been at-
tempted. The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced
and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals,
was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in
material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern
churches. Along each side wall was a range of
striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the
spaces between them, which were perforated by
lancet openings, combining in their proportions the
precise requirements both of beauty and ventilation.
‘One could say about this barn, what could
hardly be said of either the church or the castle,
akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which
had dictated its original erection was the same
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WESSEX
with that to which it was still applied. Unlike
and superior to either of those two typical rem-
nants of medizvalism, the old barn embodied
practices which had suffered no mutilation at the
hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the
ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the
modern beholder. Standing before this abraded
pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind
dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense
of functional continuity throughout—a feeling
almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the per-
manence of the idea which had heaped it up. The
fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be
founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its
purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had
battered it down, invested this simple grey effort
of old minds, with a repose, if not a grandeur,
which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in
its ecclesiastical and military compeers. For once
medizvalism and modernism had a common stand-
point. The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten
arch-stones and chamfers, the orientation of the
axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred
to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious
creed. The defence and salvation of the body by
daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire.

‘To-day the large side doors were thrown open
towards the sun to admit a bountiful light to the
immediate spot of the shearers’ operations, which
was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed
of thick oak, black with age and polished by the

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

beating of flails for many generations, till it had
grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the state-
room floors of an Elizabethan mansion. Here
the shearers knelt, the sun slanting in upon their
bleached shirts, tanned arms, and the polished
shears they flourished, causing them to bristle
with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a
weak-eyed man. Beneath them a captive sheep
lay panting, increasing the rapidity of its pants
as misgiving merged in terror, till it quivered like
the hot landscape outside.

‘This picture of to-day in its frame of four
hundred years ago did not produce that marked
contrast between ancient and modern which is
implied by the contrast of date. In comparison
with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The
citizen’s Then is the rustic’s Mow. In London,
twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris
ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four
score years were included in the mere present, and
nothing less than a century set a mark on its face
or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of
a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock frock, by the
breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter
the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex
nooks the busy outsider’s ancient times are only old;
his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

‘So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the
shearers were in harmony with the barn.’

Certainly, at Cerne Abbas or at Abbotsbury, the
sight of those old granaries, where bundles of straw

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WESSEX

protrude through noble windows, calls up the same
thoughts, with which the scholar looks upon
Virgil’s very plough, still furrowing the earth of
Italy: as does Mr. Hardy’s picture of the calves,
sheltered under old arches, who cooled ‘their
thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman
carving, which glistened with the moisture” In
Wessex, one feels it hardly behind the age, to
travel with no road book, but the Jénerary of
Antoninus, or at the least, of Leland: and to use no
book of husbandry, but the Fzve Hundred Points
of Tusser. Each spirit of change, each breath of
new doctrine, ‘comes slowly up this way’: here
time is slow, and almost drowsy: and here, all
distances are great. Tess, after her calamity, seeks
out a refuge in another tract of her county: ‘It
was not quite so far off as could have been wished ;
but it was probably far enough, her radius of
movement and repute having been so small. To
persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical
degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces
and kingdoms.’ There is but the faintest touch
of caricature in the following talk of Wessex
labourers. Cainy Ball was asked, what, besides
his Mistress Bathsheba and Sergeant Troy, he
saw in Bath.

‘“Great glass windows to the shops, and great
clouds in the sky, full of rain, and old wooden trees
in the country round.”

‘« You stun-poll! What will ye say next?” said
Coggan.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

‘“Let en alone,” interposed Joseph Poorgrass.
“The boy’s maning is that the sky and earth in the
kingdom of Bath is not altogether different from
ours here. ’Tis for our good to gain knowledge of
strange cities, and as such the boy’s words should
be suffered, so to speak it.”

‘““And the people of Bath,” continued Cain,
“never need to light their fires except as a luxury,
for the water springs up out of the earth ready
boiled for use.”

‘Tis true as the light,” testified Matthew Moon.
“I’ve heard other navigators say the same thing.”

‘“They drink nothing else there,” said Cain, “and
seem to enjoy it, to see how they swaller it down.”

‘“ Well, it seems a barbarous practice enough to
us, but I daresay the natives think nothing of it,”
said Matthew.

«“ And don’t victuals spring up as well as drink?”
asked Coggan, twirling his eye.

‘““ No—I own to a blot there in Bath—a true blot.
God didn’t provide’em with victuals as well as drink,
and ’twas a drawback I couldn’t get over at all.”

‘“Well, ’tis a curious place, to say the least,”
observed Moon, “and it must be a curious people
that live therein.”’

This mixture of natural ignorance and shrewd
humour, the one heightening the other, is faithful
to fact: a like concentration of knowledge, and of
interest, upon one small place, marks your true
Dorset labourer. Upon the top of a great hill,
close by the sea, stands a Chapel of Saint Catharine,

106
WESSEX

according to ancient custom: ruinous, but arrested
in its decay. A venerable man, whose face, like
that of Dame Martin, ‘showed itself worn and
rutted, like an old highway, by the passage of
years, replied to the question of a pilgrim, when
was the Chapel ruined? by the emphatic words:
‘There’s not a man can say that, but his lordship,
who keeps the records and the writings: not a
man. But it’s been as ’tis, ever since I were a
boy. The conviction, that local history could
only be known to local scholars, or dignitaries, is
characteristic, and delightful. Customs, dialect,
all the traditions fast rooted in the soi soil, flourish for
centuries in one ne place, v while they seem. outlandish
to the people of another, within a day’s walk,
‘When Abbotsbury people came to Poole,’ said
Mr. Gosse, the late eminent naturalist, in a post-
humous paper, Poole folk were amused at a
peculiarity in the Abbotsbury speech: the two
places are not more than thirty miles apart. One
comes to understand the attitude towards public
affairs of the Dorset Clubmen, in the days of the
great War: ‘a plague on both your houses!’
There is much virtue and significance, for many
reasons, in names: a fine use of them, with sympathy
and imagination, a memory and an ear alive to
their rich meanings and associations, have been held
to mark great poets. Arnold found in them true
spiritual analogies to the temper of their bestowers
and employers. ‘As the Saxon names of places,
with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

them,—Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—are to
the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating,
lofty beauty,—Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,—
so is the homely realism of German and Norse
nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature’
Dorset names, a whole roll call of them, illus-
trate the kinds of historical influence, that have
affected the country ; and also the kindly, homely -
sentiment, which has led Mr. Hardy to adopt so
many of them, for the names of his places and of
his people.

There are the Latin names, with all sorts of
ecclesiastical and other flavours about them:
Toller Porcorum, Toller Fratrum, Ryme Intrinsica,
Cerne Abbas, Milton Abbas, Melbury Abbas,
Bradford Abbas, Winterbourne Abbas, Compton
Abbas, Blandford Forum, Whitechurch Canoni-
corum, Lyme Regis, Bere Regis, Minterne Magna,
Fontmell Magna. There are the names, which
preserve the memory of veneration paid to certain
Saints; not the phantom Saints of Celtic Wales
and Cornwall, but Saints familiar throughout
Christendom: Sydling St. Nicholas, St. Martin’s
Town, Frome St. Quentin, St. Margaret’s Marsh,
Stanton St. Gabriel, Melbury Osmund, Fifehead
Magdalen. There are the names, which recur
again and again, sometimes with that neigh-
bourly air of community, telling an historic tale:
Tarrant Gunville, Tarrant Launceston, Tarrant
Rushton, Tarrant Crawford, Tarrant Rawston,
Tarrant Keynston, Tarrant Hinton, Hinton

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WESSEX
Martell, Hinton Parva, Hinton St. Mary, Gussage
St. Michael, Gussage St. Andrew, Gussage All
Saints, Melbury Osmund, Melbury Bubb, Melbury
Sampford, Melbury Abbas, Winterbourne Abbas,
Houghton Winterbourne, Winterbourne White-
church, Stickland Winterbourne, Winterbourne
Kingston, Winterbourne Zelstone, Winterbourne
Clenstone. Finally, to conclude this pardonable
indulgence in the manner of Walt Whitman,
there are the names, some richly romantic, some
comfortably rural, which seem to demand celebra-
tion in prose or verse: Winford Eagle, Compton
Vallance, Lytchett Matravers, Langton Matravers,
Worth Matravers, Purse Caundle, Marsh Caundle,
Caundle Bishop, Corfe Mullen, Stower Provost,
Iwerne Minster, Wootton Glanville, Hazelbury
Bryan, Sutton Pointz, Owre Moigne, and all the
countless ‘barrows. Mr. Hardy’s readers will
recognize some of these: and others, which he
has either taken or adapted; Fitzpaine, which
suggests Edred Fitzpiers; Charmouth, which
recalls Mrs. Charmond; and the Chickerels,
made famous in the name of those good work-
men, Sol and Dan.

It would take years to discover, how much
history is hidden away in these names: what
memories of old houses, what stories of Catholic
devotion, what records of Norman pride, what
monuments of Saxon labour: and, earlier than
all, what dim traces of Celtic worship, civility, and
war. Antiquaries give their lives to the discovery

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

of these things: archeological bodies discuss
them ; as did that meeting at Coomb Castle, to
which went Ethelberta upon her donkey. But
there is no life in the results of these researches ;
none, in the collections of museums: and the
writers of imagination, who might devote them-
selves to the animation of this buried past, so
rich, so romantic, so real, are busy with Morbihan
or Dinapur. Almost alone, Mr. Hardy has cared
for the ‘Past and Present’ of an English county:
finding in it a field of art, upon which he can work,
with all his science, all his imagination. He gives
us no hint, by any flagging or repetition of old
work, that he tires of his Wessex, or that he has
done all things possible with it: more than Herrick
did for his Devon fields, Crabbe for his eastern
coasts and fens, Burns for his Ayrshire streams
and ploughlands, Wordsworth for his Cumbrian
lakes and mountains, the Brontés for their York-
shire moors, has Mr. Hardy done for Wessex. It
need hardly be said, that I make here no com-
parisons between the work of those writers, and
that of Mr. Hardy, in point of literary merit: I
do but say, that Mr. Hardy, more than any other
English author, has demonstrated-the value of a ~
single, little region, as a field of art; and, by
implication, the rich value of many fields un-
noticed or unvisited.

It may be an idle fancy, yet I think that it is
not, to see in this close and long attention to the
characteristics, very various, but all noted, of one

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WESSEX

locality, a spirit and an energy parallel to those,
which prompt in our day the students of anthro-
pology. One may mark, how the books of that
science, so gravely impartial and impassive in
their collection of facts, are more full of pathetic,
of sympathetic, human interest, than are most
novels: Those records, unsparing and unadorned,
of primitive races and of savage tribes, apart from
all initial or complementary theories about them,
touch us very nearly, wakening ‘the sense of tears
in mortal things.’ Reading these books, one cries
out with Newman:

*O man, strange composite of heaven and earth !
Majesty dwarfed to baseness! fragrant flower
Running to poisonous seed ! and seeming worth
Cloking corruption! weakness mastering power !
Who never art so near to crime and shame,

As when thou hast achieved some deed of name.’

In the brooding woods, or in the busy streets,
there are times when, if one consider the lives
of men, all the pity and all the pride, there rises
from the heart no word, but the constant word
of Saint John: £ikiolé! filiolé! Little children
find infinite pleasure and pain in the most trivial
things: nothing is too common, too ugly, too dull,
to become the centre and masterpiece of their play,
their work of imagination. They have means

‘To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower ;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.’
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Children, with their instinctive glorification of all
things round them; men of scholarship and
science, with their patient attention to the least
signs and vestiges of human nature ; artists, with
their necessity of piercing through its piteous
littleness to find its true greatness: all these
are allies and friends. Doubtless, the writers,
who find their happiness in the recital of con-
spicuous and shining deeds; blades flashing,
trumpets sounding, the savour of the sea in
the nostrils, or the surge of the wind in the ears ;
these writers, who

‘Chase brave employments with a naked sword
Throughout the world,’

do us fine and heartening service: but I find the
greater beauty, and the greater strength, in the
writers, who meditate more common things:
things of no stir and show, the old and wonted
experiences of men. It is curious to consider,
how much there is in life, which has never found
a place in art: for an example, we might take the
various forms of industry and labour; not to
produce technical treatises upon them, diversified
with narrative; but to bring out the human
features in the forms of human work. Every
man, who has a work of his own, a daily business
with art, or trade, or the public service, knows
how strong has been the influence of that business
upon his character ; how it has affected his views
of life, and his principles of conduct. Yet the
Ti2
WESSEX

novelists, detaching men from their common
interests, present them, for the most part, under
the sudden storms of passion, or in rare and
subtile difficulties: and the reader neither knows,
nor can gather, anything of the actors’ habitual
selves. It is an admirable method, rightly used:
but not a method for common use. The whole
story of Zess might have been told in a few
pages, each electric as a flash of lightning; so
too might have been told the stories of Adam
Bede, or of Wuthering Heights: they would have
stricken and have blinded us, with rending agony.
Now, they fill us with an emotion, which is no
rapid pang, but‘a gradual appeal to the charity
of intellect: we have watched life, slowly and
fully lived, among the Dorset valleys, the Mid-
land fields, the Yorkshire moors; the trivialities,
businesses, experiences, set before us with so
skilful a choice, have made the eventful tragic
acts, an hundredfold more tragic. The stroke of
sentiment, the touch upon the nerves of sensi-
bility, how easily are these effected! But the
gradual evolution of a tragedy, by dwelling with
art upon the forces and necessities, which surround
the actors in their daily life, demands of the artist
a deeper mind. Sudden death, grievous calamity,
or signal joy, the heroic points and rare heights of
life, are imaginable with no great effort: still easier
is it, to practise a mechanic and unimaginative
fidelity, in transcribing every detail of life: Mr
Hardy can fill his books with the breath of life, yet
3 “113 bia See H-
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

he asks no excessive help from rare accidents of
romance, nor places all his reliance upon the
witness of his senses. The anthropologist knows,
that in rude customs and in savage rites may lurk
a soul of pure spiritual desire: the grossness and
the brutality do not blind him to the human sense
of need and reverence and adoration, corrupted or
concealed beneath them. Just so, Mr. Hardy and
.the novelists resembling him, undeterred by any
look of triviality or of insignificance, discern domi-
nant emotions and potent passions, behind the
use and wont of every day. It is to be noted,
that in his finest books, Mr. Hardy contrives
some special touch of rare romance or strange-
ness: but never, as the great and palmary_excel-
lence of his story. In The Woodlanders, there is
Melbury’s vow to Winterborne’s father, his dead
friend: in Zhe Mayor of Casterbridge, there is
Michael Henchard’s sale of his wife: in Tess of
the D’ Urbervilles, there is the murder of Alec
D’Urberville, the enchaunted walk, the solemn
morning hour at Stonehenge, the sad end of all at
Wintoncester. But while these touches of rare
romance or strangeness, each in its degree, are
very strongly felt, they are not felt with a sudden
thrill: they are of one kind with all the touches of
quieter experience throughout the work: and The
Return of the Native has its profound charm for,
at the least, one reader, by reason of that uniform
simplicity ; which is so impressive, as to overpower
the mind with a sense of high romance, in Dante’s

114
WESSEX

way. So wonderful a thing is common life, con-
sidered by the artist or the priest.

Each of Mr. Hardy’s books takes us into a most
definite sphere, and naturalizes us among a most
living people : we carry away the conviction, that
we have dwelt in the woodlands, under the green-
wood tree, by country market places, upon waste
heaths, at dairy farms, and among sheepfolds. It
is a real accession of knowledge, extension of
sympathy, enrichment of experience: we have
not been burdened with useful information, yet
there is nothing vague about our thoughts and
recollections. In this simple love for simple,
ancient, varieties of life, Mr. Hardy has the
manner of early poets. Literature holds nothing
more delightful, than Homer’s account of daily
life: now it is the business of seafaring, now of
festival, now of gardening, now of artists’ work,
and now of hunters’: there is an innocent, healthy
pleasure in the reading of it, as there must have
been in the composing. Virgil has not lost that
pleasure ; but he has mingled with it melancholy:
and Mr. Hardy is too meditative an artist, to find
nothing but a natural joy in his contemplations.
Now and again, as in Under the Greenwood Tree,
he yields himself to the Arcadian sentiment, though
with strict veracity of description: but for the
most part, it is through the homely features of his
pastoral scenes, that he makes his most poignant
emotions felt. To take a slight example: Giles
Winterborne drove home from Sherton to Little

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Hintock, Grace Melbury, just done with her fine
school: he has loved her all his life, and he is
no more than a woodlander, a man of orchards, a
‘rustic.’

‘« Don’t Brownley’s farm-buildings look strange
to you, now they have been moved bodily from
the hollow where the old ones stood to the top of
the hill?”

‘She admitted that they did, though she should
not have seen any difference in them if he had not
pointed it out.

‘“They had a good crop of bitter-sweets, they
couldn’t grind them all”—nodding towards an
orchard where some heaps of apples had been left
lying ever since the ingathering.

‘She said “ Yes,” but looking at another orchard.

““Why, you are looking at John-apple trees! you
know bitter-sweets—you used to well enough?”

‘“«T am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting
too dark to distinguish.”

‘Winterborne did not continue,’

Here is very simple talk: but this matter of
the bitter-sweets and the John-apples does in a few
words the work of many pages. One feels the
not unworthy limitation of the man’s interests to
the fruits of the earth and their seasons: the
girl’s thoughts, busy with the delicate, cultured
ways of her late life: the distance between the
two. It excites a long train of reflections about
life: and when sorrow falls upon Grace, and she
finds in Giles, his very simplicity and homeliness, a

116
WESSEX

saving strength, the incident comes back to mind.
Finally, when he dies in serving Grace, Marty
South, who has loved him with resolute silence,
gives him a farewell of praise, which leaves us
among the woods and orchards, with a strange
sense of endurance and of peace.

‘“She entered the churchyard, going to a
secluded corner behind the bushes, where rose
the unadorned stone that marked the last bed of
Giles Winterborne. As this solitary and silent
girl stood there in the moonlight, a straight slim
figure, clothed ina plaitless gown, the contours of
womanhood so undeveloped as to be scarcely
perceptible, the marks of poverty and toil effaced
by the misty hour, she touched sublimity at
points, and looked almost like a being who had
rejected with indifference the attribute of sex
for the loftier quality of abstract humanism. She
stooped down and cleared away the withered
flowers that Grace and herself had laid there the
previous week, and put her fresh ones in their
place.

‘“Now, my own, own love,” she whispered,
“you are mine, and on’y mine; for she has forgot
‘ee at last, although for her you died. But I—
whenever I get up I'll think of ’ee, and whenever
I lie down I’ll think of ’ee. Whenever I plant
the young larches I’ll think that none can plant
as you planted ; and whenever I split a gad, and
whenever I turn the cider wring, I’ll say none
could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let

117
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

me forget home and heaven! .. . But no, no, my
love, I never can forget ’ee; for you was a good
man, and did good things!”’

None but a great artist could have closed his
work thus perfectly: with that passionate simpli-
city of speech, straight from the heart of a noble
woman, whose silent and austere suffering, as she
went about her woodland labour, had given so
grave a beauty to the tragic play. (Without the
woodland talk and work and air, made real to us,
touch by touch, we should have missed_the pathos
of that final scene. In like manner, without the
elaborate, slow pourtraiture of Egdon Heath, we
should have missed some depths of tragedy in
Eustacia, Yeobright, and his mother: without the
detailed dairy work and field work of Tess, we
should have missed the glow of her love, the
strength of her endurance: the artist has felt the
fulness of life, and made us feel it ; with what
force and what conviction, they best know, who
best know Wessex.) It is no small task, to set
whole spheres of life and work in a light so true,
that all must own its truth. Patience and loving
study alone can do it: no brilliant epigram, nor
biting phrase, can make us understand the slowly
prevailing, gently lingering, charm of all those
rural lives and ways. It is the province of a
deeper art : an art, patient, studious, and sure: an
art without those graces could but pourtray the
country in its mean dulness, or in the violence
of its incivility. ‘In sleep, writes Mr. Hardy,

118
WESSEX
‘there come to the surface buried genealogical ”
facts, ancestral curves, dead men’s traits, which
the mobility of daytime animation screens and
overwhelms.’ The ‘sleep’ of Wessex, its air of
long repose, in which ancient memories assert
their claims to life, is never far from Mr. Hardy’s
mind, when he dwells upon the present stir and
business of Wessex: he writes of the labourers,
who work there to-day; and the reader is left
with thoughts of patriarchal days: from the
faithful pourtraiture of a secluded village, a
lonely farm, the reader gains that range and
height of contemplation, whence the life of long
and battling ages wears in part that look of
still life, which it must wholly wear for eternal
eyes.

Through his concentration upon this kingdom
of Wessex, where he rules alone, now that its poet
is dead, Mr. Hardy has been able to write out of
the abundance of his heart: love of Wessex has
urged him to the knowledge of Wessex. Not the
calm curiosity of a stranger, among the old castles
of France or churches of Italy ; but the warm love
of one at home, among the old sights and sounds,
‘old’ in another way, is the moving principle
of his Wessex books. But he is the least senti-
mental of writers: he never lets sentiment take
art into captivity. Examine those passages,
in which Mr. Hardy, like the Welsh preacher
with his Awy/, gives a play to all the powers of
his thought and style, that he may compose a

119
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

worthy praise of some Wessex greatness: you will
find no verbiage, nor effusion of sentiment. He
writes with emotion, but not in agitation: he has
learned much of Virgil’s secret ; the art of being
stately in passion, with a natural instinct of fine
manners, in the presence of fine things; yet with
swells and storms of emotion, beneath the austere
solemnity.

Egdon Heath never fails to rouse a kind of
personal pride in Mr. Hardy (he dwells upon the
beauty of its desolate wastes, With the glow of a
lover ) No Carew nor Crashaw, Cowley nor Donne, -
exercized more ingenious an art for passion’s sake,
than this restrained writer exercizes on behalf of
his ‘ great, inviolate place.’ He would not for the
world, that haggard Egdon should blossom as the
rose: he, a writer little given to quotation, quotes
Domesday Book and Leland, in proof of Egdon’s
wildness from ancient times. ‘The untamable,
Israelitish thing that Egdon now was it always
had been.’ It is older than the sea. ‘Who can
say of a particular sea that it is old? , Distilled
by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed
in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea
changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages,
and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.’
These sentences are in that masterpiece of almost
Roman grandeur, the first chapter of The Return
of the Native. But Egdon’s praise is not forgotten
in other of Mr. Hardy’s books. When Tess and
Angel Clare took the milk cans to the station, ‘in

120
WESSEX

the diminishing daylight they went along the
devel roadway, through the meads, which stretched
away into gray miles, and were backed in the
extreme edge of distance by the swarthy abrupt
slopes of Egdon Heath. On its summit stood
clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched
tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning
black-fronted castles of enchantment.’ Clare, in
his remorse, went to find Tess at Sandbourne, a
fashionable watering-place. ‘An out-lying eastern
tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at
hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece
‘of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this
pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within
the space of a mile from its outskirts every
irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every
channel an undisturbed British trackway; not
a sod having been turned there since the days
of the Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here,
suddenly as the prophet’s gourd; and had drawn
hither Tess.’ Rhoda Brook and her boy, in that
grim story of The Withered Arm, lived at ‘a lonely
spot high above the water meads, and not far from
the border of Egdon Heath, whose dark counte-
nance was visible in the distance as they drew
nigh to home.’ Rhoda, with Gertrude Lodge of
the withered arm, together sought out Conjuror
Trendle ‘in the heart of Egdon.’ On their
mysterious errand, ‘they hardly spoke to each
other,gnd immediately set out on their climb into
the interior of this solemn country, which stood
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

high above the rich aliuvial soil they had left an
hour before. It was a long walk; thick clouds
made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet
only early afternoon; and the wind howled
dismally over the hills of the heath—not impro-
bably the same heath which had witnessed the
agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to
after-ages as Lear. When Gertrude made her
journey to Casterbridge, to win leave of the
hangman to touch with her arm his dead victim’s
neck, she rode over Egdon: and Mr. Hardy takes
occasion to tell, how ‘Enclosure Acts had not
taken effect, even at that not remote date.
‘Gertrude, therefore, rode along with no other
obstacles than the prickly furze bushes, the mats
of heather, the white water-courses, and the
natural steeps and declivities of the ground’:
And again, when Elizabeth-Jane and Donald
Farfrae went in search of her stepfather, Henchard,
late Mayor of Casterbridge, they heard news of
him in Egdon. They drove ‘across that ancient
country whose surface never had been stirred to a
finger’s depth, save by the scratchings of rabbits,
since brushed by the feet of the earliest tribes.
The tumuli these had left behind them, dun and
shagged with heather, jutted roundly into the sky
from the hill above, as though they were the full
breasts of Diana Multimammia supinely extended
there. It might be thought, that at certain times
Mr. Hardy’s way of writing has certain qualities
of Egdon: the rigid, sombre, air of its soil, its
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WESSEX
combination of vastness and compression, are
matched by Mr. Hardy’s close, reticent, and
weighty style.

It is hard to express that singular quality of Mr.
Hardy’s writing, when he deals with the aspects
of Wessex: that quality, by virtue ot which the
reader sees the very landscape in its exact truth:
although Mr. Hardy is neither an ‘impressionist,’
nor a ‘word-painter, nor a maker of ‘ prose poems.’
He has well recognised the part really played by -
the natural scenes of a landscape, in the daily life
of those among them: he never makes the mis-
take of describing the scenery of his stories, as
though it were fresh and new to his people. Few |
things are more curious, than the effect of trying
to imagine, that the roads, the fields, the woods,
familiar to us from childhood, are now seen by us’
for the first time: the landscape changes, and all
is new, touched with fresh colours, seen under a
strange light ; the homeliness of the old place has
gone. Most novelists are not at home among
the places of their imagination: from first to last,
they describe their woods and fields, not as long
familiarity makes them appear, but as they ap-
pear to unaccustomed eyes: there is no heart in
them. But Mr. Hardy has the art of impressing
upon us so strong a sense of familiarity with his
scenes, that we read of Wessex, and we think of
our own homes, far away and far different though
they may be. To one, familiar with Wales, the
rural aspects of Dorset are scarcely less foreign,

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

than those of Limousin or of Lombardy: yet, by
virtue of that sense for the humanity in a land-
‘scape, Mr. Hardy’s woods and valleys, fields and
farms, take him back to the wilds of Merioneth.
Once more, here is the classic power of the
humanist: that power to touch all hearts and
minds, not by vague generalities common to all
the world, but by the evocation, from special
things, of a general truth.

Certainly, there is no lack of special things,
peculiar to Wessex : among them is the genius of
their celebrator. All men of ‘sense and _ sensi-
bility’ feel the spirit of the country, at large and
in particular: few can express it in forms of art,
though many try. There is no half truth more
dangerous to art, than the half truth, that many
men are poets, merely ‘lacking the accomplish-
ment of verse’: singers, who ‘die with all their
music in them.’ This injudicious kindliness is
often extended to all manner of potential artists :
yet in art, unlike ethics, work is not valued by the
nature of its intention, but of its performance.
Rhetorical description, and servile enumeration,
and bold caricature, are ways of treating country
things, not too difficult for many a gushing, stolid,
or unscrupulous writer: but art has nothing to do
with all that. ° Even so good and pleasant a writer,
as was the late Mr. Jefferies, could but touch
country life and country looks, with complete
felicity, in essays and in disquisitions: the con-
structive powers were denied him. That Mr.

124
WESSEX
Hardy, so concerned for all manifestations of the
liberal arts and human sciences, so wrought upon
by the spirit of local patriotism, so abounding in
mental curiosity, should have so firm an hold upon
his art, and pay so loyal an obedience to its laws,
is a notable triumph for the lovers of severe
beauty. The severity, I had nearly said, the
hardness, of his ideal has preserved him. If we
have looked upon Mr. Hardy’s Wessex country,
before we have read his books; in reading them,
we are filled with astonishment at the simplicity
of his dramatic power: what our eyes saw, what
our fancy made, of those various landscapes, is
proven so poor and shadowy, beside the wonder-
ful truth, as it {is in Mr. Hardy. There are the
pasture valleys: ‘delightful meadows and rich
lands, so an old writer describes those of the
Stour; Spenser’s ‘Stour with terrible aspect’:
and most Dorset valleys deserve the descrip-
tion. But we cannot seize upon their points of
singularity, their peculiar charms: to us, all are
great valleys of green fields, where the air is full
of gold dust, and the grass gleams with warm
light. They lie deep below ranges of high downs,
on whose sides the chalk shows in white scars:
a long, white road leads through them, bordered
with wide strips of wooded pasture, set with
flowers among the tangled thickets : rough horses,
with black, shaggy manes, browse leisurely along,
under green oak trees: no one is in sight, but some
young boy, with large eyes and grave face,in charge

125
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

of a brindled cow, armed with a fading branch.
The downs give place to wooded hills: wooded
hills, waving ranges and circles of them, with a
blue, soft mist glowing upon their massed boughs,
in the heat and sun: and there are stretches of
woodland on either hand, where the woodmen are
at work, among the fallen, stripped trees, the
stacked hurdles, piled spars, and bound faggots,
Presently, the valley narrows down by steep
slopes; the road falls away towards a nestling
village, between high banks, upon which great
beech trees stand, their branches sweeping low
across the way: in the hollow lies a dreamy
cluster of little houses, their thatch-eaves rounded
over the windows, and drooping between them,
dispersed round the gray church; behind them
are the meadows, deep in rich grass, yellow with
blossoms; fields full of sheep, very white in the
blinding sun; and uplands climbing to the sky,
patched with heather, shadowed with beech and
fir. Then, there are the clear rivers, in which the
dark rushes bend to the breeze: rivers, winding
never far from the way, and bridged by old, stout
arches of gray stone. And there are the two kinds
of desolate country: the gray, green downlands,
rolling away in easy undulations ; and the brown,
dark heaths, that look so stiff and menacing, with
their hillocks topped by fir clumps: both, so
silent and so still, that time seems at a pause
upon them. Something in this way, does the
unilluminated writer describe the ‘ Dorsetian fields’
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WESSEX

of Drayton, the ‘pure Dorsetian downs’ of
Thomson; sometimes he may catch a little of
Tom Warton’s pretty sentiment, or the pensive
elegance of Bowles. But the masters cover him
with confusion: only a Coleridge can tell,

“How exquisite the scents
Snatched from yon bean-field ! and the world so hushed !
The stilly murmur of the distant sea
Tells us of silence’:

or how,
‘The dell,
Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate
As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax,
When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light.’

As Coleridge knew to fit his musings to his
Somerset dell, expressing perfectly the sentiment
of meditation in a lonely village place, an English
village place: so Mr. Hardy knows to fit his
invention and his imagination to the Wessex
scenes. He may have followed ‘the white roads
up athirt the hills, all Dorset through, with no
conscious plans of art to come; have so entered
the long, straggling villages, talked with the folk
there, and watched the labourers and the gossips ;
have so gone by the fields in seedtime or harvest,
summer or winter, letting no sign of life escape
him ; have so visited ancient houses, fallen from
their manorial honours, barrows eloquent of old
Britain, camps eloquent of old Rome; so too,
have turned his thoughts upon the elder antiquity
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

of the earth itself, and upon earth’s changes
witnessed by the same calm stars: into the
private history of Mr. Hardy’s art, I have no right
to enquire: but I enjoy the right to praise its
works, for truth, and strength, and beauty.

It may be thought, that there is enough, and to
spare, of a meditative quality in these rural books:
surely, summer suns might have shone in them
more brightly, and winter winds blown through
them more freshly! there is but one Under the
Greenwood Tree. But that is only a first thought,
and not of the best: Chaucer and Walton, Herrick
and Burns, can always give us their less pre-
meditated delights. Mr. Hardy, almost alone,
but for certain resemblances to Wordsworth and
to Crabbe, has pondered the country, and brought
thought to bear upon it. And his stories, learned
though they be, do not seem to have come from
the silence of a library, fragrant with old books:
they seem to have come of long meditations in
the open air; art shaping into form, science
moulding into thought, pure influences of earth
and sky. Seldom do trains of grave thoughts,
arrays of learned remembrances, and musters of
happy images, more often crowd upon the brain,
than in a spell of undirected musing out of doors.
Our own house is our familiar friend, we are upon
intimate and equal terms with it: there are the
backs of our books; a glance across the shelves,
and we fall into some accustomed, literary, mood.
But the universe, which has no rights, nor powers,

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WESSEX

inside our library, makes good its full claim upon
us in the open air: we are children again, and pre-
historic men, and wondering creatures: we cannot
help meditating, waywardly and dreamily, upon
the gravest matters. Then, nature prompts us
with all manner of felicitous suggestions: and,
whatever art or learning be ours, it is quickened
into life, and responds to the inspiration of nature,
with all its might. The final form, the last graces,
are achieved at home, by long and patient care:
but the work will not have lost the character of
its original conception, that share in ‘the first
integrity of things.’ It is so, that Lucretius must
have composed his ‘mighty line’: and it is this
impression, that Mr. Hardy’s greater books leave
with their readers. This meditative quality, full of
nature’s own deepening power upon us, forms the
large and wholesome atmosphere of Mr. Hardy’s
finer novels: he deals with perversities of conduct,
sentiment, and situation; but the air is never
tainted, never loses its clearness, never stagnates.
In his less austere stories, there is no such sense
of an healthy atmosphere: breaths of malice
vitiate the air around them ; and Mephistopheles’
infects their world, with horrid cleverness.

There is one aspect of Mr. Hardy’s devotion to
Wessex, upon which I must again touch: its ex-
ample, in an English writer, of that spirit, which
animates the fébrige of Provence, the Celtic
gatherings of Brittany, the Ezsteddfod of Wales.
In one way, the late Mr. Barnes, by writing in

129 I
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Dorset dialect, more closely resembled those
confraternities of provincial patriots in art: but
Mr. Hardy has done the greater service, by the
greater dignity and range of his work. He shows,
how to write of .provincial ways without pro-
vincialism: rather, how to write of them in the
most liberal spirit. Among the misfortunes of
Ireland, not the least has been the note of pro-
vinciality in her literature: Carleton and Banim
could not overpass their limitations of tone and
culture. Wessex, a less distressful country, has
in Mr. Hardy an ardent lover and a_ stern
chronicler. He laughs at Wessex, he is unsparing
of Wessex, he delights in Wessex: with all the
world around him, and all history behind him, he
is content to find ‘infinite riches in a little room,
and he cleaves to Wessex. It is an example of
voluntary attachment upon an artist’s part, to be
commended and emulated: for in losing the ties
and bonds of home, art in these days is losing its
strength. Spartaim nactus es: hanc exorna. Mr.
Hardy has his Sparta: its ancient ways will long
boast their grave adornment and orderly display at
his hands, in a great province of art’s kingdom.

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COUNTRY FOLK

IV

COUNTRY FOLK

‘JOHN HEWET was a well-set man of about five
and twenty ; Sarah Drew might be rather called
comely than beautiful, and was about the same
age: They had pass’d thro’ the various labours of
the year together with the greatest satisfaction ;
if she milk’d, ’twas his morning and evening care
to bring the cows to her hand: it was but last
fair that he bought her a present of green silk for
her straw hat, and the posie on her silver ring was
of his choosing. Their love was the talk of the
whole neighbourhood ; for scandal never affirm’d
that they had any other views than the lawful
possession of each other in marriage. It was that
very morning that he had obtain’d the consent of
her parents, and it was but till the next week that
they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps in the
intervals of their work they were now talking
of the wedding cloaths, and John was suiting
several sorts of poppys and field flowers to
her complection, to chuse her a knot for the
wedding-day.

‘While they were thus busied (it was on the

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last of July between three and four in the after-
noon) the clouds grew black, and such a storm
of lightning and thunder ensued, that all the
labourers made the best of their way to what
shelter the trees and hedges afforded. Sarah was
frightned, and fell down in a swoon on a heap of
barley. John, who never separated from her, sate
down by her side, having raked together two or
three heaps the better to secure her from the
storm. Immediately there was heard so loud a
crack, as if heaven had split asunder; every one
was solicitous for the safety of his neighbour, and
called to one another throughout the field. No
answer being return’d to those who called to our
Lovers, they stept to the place where they lay;
they perceived the barley all in a smoak, and then
spy’d the faithful pair; John with one arm about
Sarah’s neck, and the other held over her, as to
skreen her from the lightning.

‘They were both struck dead in this tender
posture. Sarah’s left eyebrow was sing’d, and
there appear’d a black spot on her breast ; her
lover was all over black, but not the least signs of
life were found in either. Attended by their
melancholy companions, they were convey’d to
the town, and the next day interr’d in Stanton-
Harcourt Church-yard.’

This letter by Gay, which Thackeray has
immortalized in another version, enshrines with
so great a grace one view of country life, that I
have set it down here: innocent, comely labourers ;

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COUNTRY FOLK

pretty, serious ways of love in the fields ; glimpses
of the fair, that last fair at the busy, homely town ;
the kindly concern of the neighbours ; then, the
angry storm bursting over that hot hayfield, the
.storm so grand a visitation: all this makes of
John Hewet and Sarah Drew, typical figures,
whom we can see now in the fields, with no harsh
presentiment of poverty or of coarseness to come:
they lie dead, those English country lovers, in all
the significant beauty of Cleobis and Bito. It
is a story, of which one loves to think, when
challenged to think well of country life, in face of
certain horrors and brutalities, undeniably there :
as in Madame Darmesteter’s The New Arcadia,
or Mrs. Woods’ A Village Tragedy. It helps us,
this true idyll of the last century, to believe that
much vaunted sentiment about the country is
born from more than love of a pretty insincerity ;
Strephon sighing to Chloe in the shade, Damon
piping to Phyllis among the flocks ; those nymphs
and swains, whom French and English art made
so delightful, an hundred years ago ; giving them,
for all their coats and gowns of another mode,
something of Apollo’s glory and something of
the Muses’ grace. The apparent monotony of
rural ways, viewed by spectators used to streets
crowded with strange faces, inclines a writer to
people his fields and villages with primitive virtues,
or with primitive vices, but hardly with both.
‘To make men moral something more is requisite
than to turn them out to grass:’ wrote George

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Eliot, in protest against the superstition about
blameless Arcadians. But from George Eliot’s
protest to M. Zola’s practice, the descent is long
and difficult: /a béte humaine is no more real than
the Arcadian, nor Hodge than Strephon. No
long acquaintance with country folk is wanted, to
persuade us that every Sabine labourer is not
hardy, not every Breton poetical, not every
Russian patient. Though ‘rustics’ be to some
men as undistinguishable, as ‘silly sheep,’ the
shepherd can distinguish a world of difference
between silly face and face.

Mr. Hardy has given us some ten groups of
country folk; the farm hands, woodlanders,
shepherds, dairy-maids, furze cutters, carriers,
snondescript labourers, servants,* cottagers, who
form the main populace of his Wessex scenes.
Unessential, in many cases, to the conduct of the
mere narrative, they and the landscape around
them yet serve to emphasize the force of that
narrative: far from being picturesque accessories,
they form the chorus, whose office is to insist upon
the stable moralities, the tried wisdom and ex-
perience, with which the fortunes of the chief
actors are in contrast. Yqun d , prudent
and foolish, consciously or uféonsciously, they
come to represent a body of sentiment and
opinion, the growth of rustic times : their proverbs,
witticisms, anecdotes, comments, are all senten-
tious. Thus, as a Greek chorus, with its leisurely,
appropriate utterances, sometimes full of an

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COUNTRY FOLK

exasperating sobriety, stands round about the two
or three passionate souls in travail; so these aged
patriarchs, half-witted clowns, shrewd workmen,
village butts and wits and characters, move through
the Wessex scenes, where Henchard or Eustacia
or Tess is acting and suffering, with grotesque,
stolid, or pathetic commentaries. But they never
lose their reality, their hold upon life and truth, in
the creator’s hands: not one of them is set up, a
puppet of the stage, to drawl bucolic common-
places in a dialect, or to pass the bounds of nature
in savagery, and whimsicality, and uncouthness.
As we read, it is borne in upon us, that in this
peasant talk we have the spiritual history of a
country ‘side: feudalism and Catholicism and
Protestantism, law and education and tradition,
changes in.agriculture and commerce and tenure,
in traffic and society and living, all these have
worked and wrought upon the people, and here
is the issue: ¢hzs and ¢his is their view of life;
thus:and thus they think and act; Here is a
survival, and ¢here a desire; here a spirit of
conservation, and ¢here a sign of decay, and éhere
again a look of progress. Poor laws and school
boards, the Established Church and the Dissenting
Mission, the extension of the franchise and the
condition of the labourer, matters for grave
enquiry and debate among men of social studies,
though you may read Mr. Hardy’s books without
noticing them there, are there none the less: not
discussed in set form, often not so much as

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

mentioned, admirably kept back from intrusion,
they are yet to be recognised and felt. Not only
what the peasants are, but also the causes of their
being that, are implied in Mr. Hardy’s artistic
treatment of them: he deals with men, hard to
understand and to pourtray ; but mere ghosts and
caricatures of men unless pourtrayed with under-
standing. In literature, no less than in life, they
resent patronage: the rustic, whose office in a
book is that of a gargoyle upon a tower, to look
quaint and to spout, takes revenge by becoming
very wearisome.

The country life has received two chief kinds of
celebration in English literature: the academic,
so to call it, and the popular. There are the
writers, who derive from Cicero and the younger
Pliny ; who talk of Cincinnatus and of Diocletian
in their retreats; who quote Corycius senex and
Angulus ile; men of gracious minds and manners,
half courtly and half cloistral. Such are Evelyn
and Bacon, Cowley and Temple, Marvell and
Vaughan, Spenser and Milton: Lord Falkland
with his friends at Tew, Dr. More in the gardens
of Cambridge, even Pope in his grotto and
Thomson by his peaches, wear this air of cultured
pleasure and of conscious virtue. Plato and
Epicurus and Saint Benedict, turned mightily
Ciceronian, preside over this company : a company
high-born, well-read, often devout and grave, often
profound and passionate. Of a piece with these
academics of country life are the dainty votarists

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of pastoral: men of whom Shenstone is the type,
men for whom the lawns and fields have a pleasant,
cleanly look of innocence and peace, not felt at
heart, but relished upon the surface. They might
sing in Addison’s delightful chorus, with no sus-
picion of its gentle raillery :
*O how fresh the morning air !
Charming fresh the morning air !
When the Zephirs and the heifers

Their odoriferous breath compare,
Their odoriferous breath compare.’

But all these aspects of country life come from
the graceful inspirations of culture: that love of a
decent ritual for daily life, beyond its positive
necessities, which gives a charm to Colleges and
to Inns of Court, where old habits linger still. It
is pleasant to walk along a formal terrace, with
worn gray steps and balustrade, holding an Aldine
classic, less for study than for company: to look
out, with comfortable joy, across the flourishing
landscape: to taste the solitude, the dignity, the
peace, of a country day. The Golden Age, em-
bellished to a courtly, cloistral perfection, with
finer music than pastoral reeds, and daintier fare
than acorns and spring water, returns at such a
time: at this happy distance, the town seems vile.
Theocritus and Ronsard are good to read in a
sunny kind of dream ; Comus, and L’ Allegro, and
Il Penseroso are pure delights: but ‘the swinkt
hedger’ rouses less lively interest in rural toil,
than literary interest in old English,

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

The writers, who compose pictures out of their
sentimental impressions, are very much our bene-
factors: ‘sit by my side, and let the world slip:
we shall ne’er be younger, is sometimes the
invitation to a wise indulgence. But there are
other writers, whose treatment of country life is
not so decorative: men, who feel a strong drawing
towards the earth and its tillers, from mere love
of life, or sympathy with men; because both
emotions are most felt among the scenes of men’s
oldest and earthiest occupations. No metaphorical
truth is so true, Lucretius be our witness, as is the
Motherhood of Earth: I do not understand the
temptation to worship the sun: but I understand
very thoroughly the temptation to worship the
earth; not with a vague, pantheistic emotion, but
with a personal love for the sensible ground under
my feet. The thought, that the earth is doubly
sacred ; both blessed and cursed ; is a thought past
fathoming. And all needs of men, that have an
immediate connection with the mysterious earth,
have themselves a share in the mystery, the
primaeval sacredness. One may stand before a
steam engine, in shameful, yet unashamed, ignor-
ance of its construction: but in presence of the
ploughman, shepherd, gardener, reaper, sower,
woodman, and of their implements and operations,
he has a longing to comprehend those venerable
crafts, which speak so movingly of men’s natural
needs, The smell of the dark earth, ruddy
original of Adam, as the share breaks into it,

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seems fragrant with the first breath of mornings
in the early world:

‘Come, sons of summer, by whose toil,
We are the lords of wine and oil;
By whose tough labours and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crowned with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing harvest home.’

Indeed, I have a fellow feeling with Triptolemus
Yellowley, whose taste was all for the rustical
parts of Latin literature. The lust of labour,
glad and sad together, of labour for our daily
bread, seems glorified by an ancient sanction, in
the case of agriculture: whatever be its conditions
now, once upon a time the tilling and preparing
of the ground was the most natural, simple, and
imperious necessity of men. Akin to it are the
pastoral arts and sciences, all dealings with the
earth and the earth’s tribes, all Virgil’s themes of
husbandry. Such pictures of the early world, as
that in Lucretius, charm us by the romance in-
separable from simple and dignified things: the
old poets did wisely, in their ignorance, to fill
the early world with innocent tribes of men; to
discover them at peace. So, one loves to think,
it should have been: that laborious burden of
daily work lies more gently upon our shoulders,
when we consider the golden days of Arcadia and
the Hesperides, those lands and blessed fields of
Kennaquhair. Demeter and Persephone, Dionysus
and the Mighty Mother, were divinities not hard

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

to love, for they were very good to men: and
other gods also:
‘O montana Pales! O pastoralis Apollo,
Et nemorum Silvane potens !?

It is this ‘pagan’ sentiment, the sentiment of
homely villagers, which makes many readers desire
the triumph of those anthropologists, who maintain
a great attribution of divinity to woods and fields:
readers, for whom Mr. Frazer’s The Golden Bough
has a magical charm. Without putting our faith
in Rousseau, nor even in Count Tolstoi; but with
a firm faith in the growing civilities of the world ;
we may still find, in country labour, the memory
and the type of men’s ancient business with nature.
It is restful, among the bewildering commerce of
life, to reflect upon those hard, yet wholesome,
relations between man and the earth: the natural
sacrament of ‘daily bread,’ to which is related,
for innumerable men, another, and a more than
natural mystery:

‘ Car sur la fleur des pains et sur la fleur des vins,

Fruit de la force humaine en tous lieux répartie,
Dieu moissonne, et vendange, et dispose & ses fins
La Chair et le Sang pour le calice et Phostie !’

But if this reverence towards the earth, and
towards work upon it, is to be fruitful in literature,
writers must not only be full of sentiment: they
must be fullof science. In literature, the place of
experiment is taken by curiosity: by a desire to
come at the heart of life, in its various forms
and manifestations. With all allowance for the

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vague emotions, indefinite wants, and discontinu-
ous thoughts, which throng the mind of a man at
his work ; yet it is not in these, but in the material
details of his work, that its power and significance
for art reside: in the actual things, to be seen and
handled, which the man uses; among which he
lives; of which he is the master or the servant;
with which his senses have grown familiar, as with
sunrise and with sunset. The Saints are pictured
with the instruments of their glorious and crown-
ing passions; the swords and spears, which were
not their weapons and companions; but which
are appropriate to them now, since the blows and
thrusts of cruel steel in fierce hands made it
suddenly clear, that their lives were battles, their
deaths victories, themselves soldiers. Take what
class of men you will: there will be always found
some concrete thing, to be the symbol of their
histories. In the case of peasantry, labourers at
rural work, so intimate is the relationship between
the workman and the work, that the least thing
about them seems to have its significance, and
to be; rude, poor thing that it is! eloquent with
appeals to our sympathy, and charged with senti-
ment. Remember Mr. Secretary Pepys, and the
old shepherd, whom he held in talk upon the
downs: a very famous scene. The old man’s
little boy read the Bible to him: and the old
man blessed the boy: ‘“the most like one of the
old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it
brought those thoughts of the old age of the

I4I
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

world in my mind for two or three days after.
We took notice of his woolen knit stockings with
two colours mixed, and of his shoes shod with
iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great
nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty
pretty ; and taking notice of them, “Why,” says
the poor man, “the downes you see are full of
stones, and we are faine to shoe ourselves thus ;
and these,” says he, “ will make the stones fly till
they ring before me.”’ Then Mr. Pepys, good
gossip, gave the old man ‘something,’ tried to
cast stones with his horn crook, heard about
the shepherd’s pride in his dog, about the
number of his flock, about his wages: and so,
on to other pretty diversions. We could deny
ourselves much fine talk about Humanity and
Man, for the sake of more personal, loving
knowledge about the ways of men: about the
touching circumstance, the significant furniture
and garniture, of their laborious lives. There is
much wisdom for daily life, to be learned from
that most natural devotion of the Church, the
devotion to holy relics; piteous, or marvellous, or
homely, memorials of the sacred dead: for there
is something venerable in most things, that speak
of a man’s personality. They are the winning
writers, who know the truth of these lines:

*Momentous to himself, as I to me,
Hath each man been that ever woman bore:
Once, in a lightning-flash of sympathy,
I feét this truth, an instant, and no more.’

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If this truth were felt, not for an instant, but for
a lifetime, by more writers, literature would boast
of fewer egoists and of better novelists.

Mr. Hardy’s books, one and all, shew this con-
suming devotion to the old records, and to the
living details, of men: in especial, to those of
labouring men, in constant occupation with the
earth, its living things, and its things that give
life. Corn and wine and oil: beasts and much
cattle: the fruits of the earth in due season: fields
white to harvest: he gives loving study to men
busied with all such things. But he pursues
them far beyond the fields and farms of their
labour: he knows them, not by sight alone, but
by heart. The Wessex traveller, the traveller in
any rural part, is ever alert with wonder, to see
the wealth of obscure histories all round him.
There are worn implements of toil, rusty ploughs
and harrows, lying alone in the field; they look
immeasurably old, old as the heaped graves of
warriors, among which they rest: what hands
once grew hard with handling them, hands
mortified long since! Here is a lonely, mean
house, built some forty years ago, standing back
from the road; too commonplace and dull to
hold the attention long: but the story of its
successive inmates, their labours and achieve-
ments, failures and desires, the secret truths of
the plays played out in the dreary place, might
prove a masterpiece of life, and yield matter for a
masterpiece of art. Here is a milestone, crusted

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

with gold lichen, or a signpost, coated with green
moss, both long past their work: one meditates
upon times, when they were new, and upon the
travellers from village to village, who quickened
or slackened their pace on reading them: what
sort of men were those, before they went per zter
tenebricosum? And the long, straggling villages ;
barely picturesque, may be, save for the gray
church, and all the decent associations of that;
some cottages, indeed, whose walls are thick, and
their thatched roofs down to the ground among
the tall flowers; but more still with plain, slate
roofs, and walls of crude, bad bricks: the long,
straggling villages rouse thoughts in plenty,
thoughts of infinite variety. An old labourer
passes by, trudging upon his ‘ragged staff, and
gives me a gruff greeting: and I am suddenly
aware, that to know this man’s life, all spent
within a circuit of twenty miles, I would be
content never again to read one querulous French
diarist ; to remain, in Baudelaire’s despite, ‘lecteur
paisible et bucolique.’

For here too is the greatness of life, and here
the littleness ; here, among the Wessex labourers,
so easily caricatured, so hardly comprehended :
Gray has said it all in verses, with which we are
familiar to the verge of contempt. ‘The pale
artisan’ is an estimable person, with good, strong
virtues, and bad, weak vices, of his own: but,
giving him all the good will in the world, we need
not exalt him at the cost of ‘clodhoppers’ and

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‘bumpkins.’ It is a distinction of Mr. Hardy, that
he is honest in these matters: even George Eliot
could yield to the temptation of making rustic
characteristics, the foil to her own humour. And
Mr. Hardy has paid the penalty of honest work,
the penalty of misunderstanding : to the master of
Wessex ways and works have been applied the
epithets, theatrical and artificial, unimaginative
and dull.

These charges were plausibly brought, by a
reader not conversant with Mr. Hardy’s whole
work: by one, who should light at random upon
some page of rustic talk. ‘How grotesque and
strained are these phrases !’ he might think : ‘how
wandering and aimless, the whole drift of talk.
This is not the manner of Shirley, of Silas
Marner: there is no swift brilliance of pourtraiture,
no delicious play of humour; all is desultory,
awkward, slow.’ It were plausibly concluded, by
one unversed in Mr. Hardy’s art: to readers com-
fortably at home among his works, such conclu-
sions seems quite false. For they have learned to
see in Mr. Hardy an artist, obedient to the com-
mands of his art, and therefore resigned to the
limitations, content with the capabilities, of his
materials: an artist, like those, whom Mr. William
Morris loves to praise ; the artists, whose use of
wood and stone and brick was guided by the
various natures of the various places, where they
had a call to exercise their art. A fen country, a
down country, a hill country, makes each its own

145 K
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

demands upon the designer of buildings : his pride
it is, to respect the universal laws of art, whilst
respecting the genius of place and circumstance,
in the application of them. Mr. Hardy appreciates
the nature of the soil, in which he works, upon
which he builds: he knows it for Wessex, not
Northumbria, West Saxon, not East Anglian:
his ground plan, structure, ornament, are designed
to harmonize with the definite features of the
land. Men and women, he insists upon it, are
natural growths of the soil; children of earth,
with a particular seal of that common lineage set
upon them, according to their lot of birth-place
and local origin : ‘racy of the soil, with him, is a
phrase of most exact and literal a meaning. He
dwells upon the very externals of such ‘ raciness,’
its visible and concrete symbols, with an insistence
almost excessive. Thus, he speaks of dress: ‘A
person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and
colour has more or less an anomalous look. We
seem to want the oldest and simplest human
clothing where the clothing of the earth is so
primitive.” Again, in another place: ‘When in
the midst of the field, a dark spat on an area of
brown, there crossed her patk a moving figure,
whom it was as difficult to distinguish from the
earth he trod as the caterpillar from his leaf, by
reason of the excellent match between his clothes
and the clods. He was one of a dying-out
generation who retained the principle, nearly un-
learnt now, that a man’s habiliments should be in

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harmony with his environments.’ These are very
literal applications of a great artistic principle:

yet, since Carlyle has taught us to moralize upon
clothes, we may well see in these sentences a
suggestion of Mr. Hardy’s general manner, in
dealing with country folk, and with country things.
It is not enough to know them, cut off from their
circumstances, isolated and singled out: their
circumstances, material and spiritual, must be
mastered, before any attempt to present the men
themselves. For the men are not prodigal of
their own natures: they do not deal in the
‘synthetic’ phrase, the ‘decisive’ word, the
clinching epigram: they are leisurely, discursive,
roundabout: you cannot pierce through to their
real selves, in the course of a brief acquaintance:
Yet, they leave with their foreign hearers an
impression of strong character: these are men, it
must be, in touch with the facts of life, men of
experience, and of original thoughts about that
experience; but without that quick versatility
of expression, which enables far shallower men
to play with a dozen philosophies in a dozen
phrases: these children of the soil deal with the
rich and rugged. q ‘pths of their own minds, as
they deal with the earth in view of harvest to
come. They have no sophisticated fear of a moral
sentence, or of a general principle: there is no
safeguarding of themselves against the imputation
of talking platitudes and truisms. The simple
sentences of proverbial wisdom come, the fruit of a

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

laborious experience, from these work folk, as like
simple sentences came from early Ionian sages:
old saws, well warranted from Aryan _ times.
They waste no words in pure love for the game of
talk, without any ulterior purpose: lumbering,
cumbrous, they can often be: deliberately trivial,
consciously fooling with phrases, they never are.
Their set discussions upon the affairs of labour,
or of life; very much the same thing, to some
of them; may be rambling, and slow, and full of
iteration: but they are not the less weighty for that.
They feel towards each other, not by the virtue
of condescension learned from experience, but by
an instinct of nature, what Herbert felt towards
his poor parishioners: ‘it is some relief for a poor
body to be but heard with patience.’ One by one,
gravely and slowly, they adduce their anecdotes
in illustration of the theme, they elaborate their
solid thoughts about it, they bring to light the
ripe produce of their labouring minds. No
haunt of sad-cultured men hears so sturdy a
debate upon life, as I chanced to hear at a Wessex
wayside inn. Many men were of many minds:
until a well weathered labourer, whose great
scythe leant against the wall beside him, closed
the session with these words: ’7%s none too easy a
matter, is life: take it gentle or take tt rough.
There followed, from all the company, a solemn
shaking of heads, a pathetic thumping of knees,
and a luxurious draining of two-handled pint cups,
Schopenhauer and Leopardi leave no such con-
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COUNTRY FOLK

viction, as that rustic sentence left: but it is one
thing to recognize the depths of character in
these folks; and another, to comprehend the
conditions and experiences of life, which go to
its various formations. Let us remember the
talk, upon a memorable day, of the Mellstock
quire.

‘“ Ves; Geoffrey Day is a clever man if ever
there was one. Never says anything: not he.” '

*“ Never.”

‘“You might live wi’ that man, my sonnies, a
hundred years, and never know there was any-
thing in him.”

‘“Ay; one o’ these up-country London ink-
bottle fellers would call Geoffrey a fool.”

‘“Ye would never find out what’s in that man:
never. Silent? Ah, he is silent! He can keep
silence well. That man’s silence is wonderful to
listen to.”’

That poor creature, the ‘up-country London
ink-bottle feller,” can do his best to describe
rustics: he will hardly, without infinite pains,
attain to the interpretation of them. But Mr.
Hardy has all the powers required for both
description and interpretation of his own country-
men: in his books, the rustic folk are perfectly
alive. He knows what lies behind the silence of
the shrewd, the sullenness of the stupid; the
blessings or the blows of fortune, which have
moulded character ; the countless details of work,
which have marked the workman’s mind and

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hand: all the contents of his Wessex country.
The views of life, of society, of religion, views
multifarious and odd, entertained there, are familiar
to him: but his knowledge is not a source of
power alone; it is a source of beauty too. Ina
paper upon ‘The Philosophic and Historic Basis
of State Intervention, Mr. D. G. Ritchie, speaking
of a prejudice against that intervention, observes:
‘This view of the State as an alien and hostile
power is admirably expressed in one of Thomas
Hardy’s Wessex Tales’ He alludes to that plea-
sant tale of the young Methodist preacher, and
of the gentle smuggler, his landlady. Mr. Hardy
may have been led to write it, by the romantic
legends of smuggling upon the Dorset coast ; or
by a desire to exhibit, slightly and humourously,
the view of which Mr. Ritchie speaks ; or by the
quaint problem presented in the preacher’s love
for so lawless a sweetheart. The one thing of
importance is the skill, with which the writer
of a story, containing matter apt for quotation
in a grave, sociological essay, turns that matter
“into art. For there is no obtrusion of knowledge
in these novels: no pages, which read like the
results of a scientific enquiry, undertaken for its
own sake, and forced into a story. But the social
state of Wessex folk must be known, if you would
know the forces, which direct the story of their
lives: high romance and rare comedy, and all
things bright or dark, in those lives, depend for
their effect, in literature as in life, upon the back-
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ground against which, upon the atmosphere in
which, they appear and are.

‘These things are life :
And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.’

In The Woodlanders and in Tess of the D’ Urber-
villes, Mr. Hardy avails himself, with admirable
effect, of a peculiar mode in tenures: the system
of ‘liviers,’ In the woodland story, Winterborne’s
tragic calamity in love, and heroism in death, are
intensified, and in part occasioned, by his necessity
of leaving his house: a necessity caused by the
fall of an old man’s frail life, brought about through
his rustic superstition; and by the offended
dignity of a capricious woman. In the later
story, the final defeat of Tess is greatly assured
by the same necessity, which casts her and her
mother and her mother’s children at the mercy
of the world, leaving Tess to the temptation of
helping them by a surrender to Alec D’Urber-
ville. Interwoven thus with the fabric of the
story, these facts of rural life quicken wonderfully
our living interest: sudden death is a common
device among the novelists: but the sudden deaths
of old South and of poor ‘Sir John, involving
plain, legal consequences of so tragic and pitiful
an issue, are more moving than a score of
less practical misfortunes. All the changes and
chances of village life, migrations and depopula-
tions; the terms of rural service, matters of fact
about wage and hire; the variations in local

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

prosperity, affairs of parchment and of record:
all these become critical turns in a romance, at
Mr. Hardy’s bidding. Through the writer’s sense
of the piteous, human interest in such things, we
see the contrast between Tess and Marian at Tal-
bothays, the dairy farm in the rich pasture land,
where they lived and moved like pagan nymphs
of Arcady or Sicily; Tess and Marian at Flint-
comb Ash, that gaunt, hard place, where they
bent over their weary work, ‘like some early
Italian conception of the two Marys.’ The con-
trast is brought home to us, an actual bitterness
and desolation to think upon. The fortunes of
John Inglesant’s anxious soul, the valourous and
gentle spirit of Alan Breck, the consuming selfish-
ness of Sir Willoughby, compose no more pas-
sionate and stirring histories, than do these homely
affairs of Wessex folk: provincials, but of the
centre also, when pourtrayed by the art of an
humanist.

I have used the terms, ‘country folk,’ or
‘labourers, or ‘work folk,’ or * peasantry,’ with-
out precision: these Wessex people, of whom
Mr. Hardy writes, include all varieties of class;
farmers and their hinds, tradesmen in villages
and market towns, gamekeepers and millers, inn-
keepers and servants. They vary in degree from
respectability to vagabondage: but all have this
in common, that they live under rural conditions
of life, and are scarcely affected by the life of
towns at all. The most flourishing of them,

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COUNTRY FOLK

wealthy farmers and merchants, are more akin
to their dependants, than to their immediate
superiors; parsons and squires, whose rusticity,
however great, is tempered with remnants of
urbanity. These Wessex folk are of the country
alone: their towns are of the country also. At
Casterbridge, the chief of them, ‘The farmer’s
boy could sit under his barley mow and pitch
a stone into the office window of the town clerk ;
reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to
acquaintances standing on the pavement corner ;
the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-
stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa,
floated in from the remainder of the flock browsing
hard by; and at executions the waiting crowd
stood in a meadow immediately before the drop,
-out of which the cows had been temporarily driven
to give the spectators room.’ The eastern purlieu
of Casterbridge is Dummerford: ‘Here wheat
ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust
their eaves against the church tower; green-
thatched barns, with doorways as high as the
gates of Solomon’s Temple, opened directly upon
the main thoroughfare. Barns indeed were so
numerous as to alternate with every half dozen
houses along the way. Here lived burgesses who
daily walked the fallow; shepherds in an intra-
mural squeeze. A street of farmers’ homesteads
—a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet
echoing with the thump of the flail, the flutter of
the winnowing-fan, and the purr of the milk into

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

the pails—a street which had nothing urban in it
whatever—this was the Dummerford end of Caster-
bridge.” Under this single term, then, Country
Folk, is comprehended all the miscellaneous popu-
lace of Wessex, as men attached to the soil, in the
various ranks of a rustic hierarchy.

It must strike with force upon the mind of Mr.
Hardy’s reader, that these folk, in rural towns,
or rural villages, are a Shakespearian folk: the
very people of that England, merry and old, which
we are wont to lament for dead; gone with the
maypole and with the morrice, if not with the
Mass. It is true, that the dreary genius of
Protestantism, the grim genius of Puritanism,
have wrought their will upon our national life,
to the souring of our tempers, and to the saddening
of our souls: but it is a point for consideration,
whether those abhorrent Powers have wrought a
complete work. In England, as elsewhere, one
can discern two historical aspects of country life:
the joyous and the sullen, the happy and the
oppressed. There are the joyous, happy folk,
with their carols ringing on a night of stars and
frost; there are the sullen, oppressed folk, with
their rhymes of revolt and discontent: the simple
peasantry, all dance and song and feast; the
‘little people, near neighbours of Death: the
‘pretty country folks;’ and the ugly country
serfs, Here is an honest Jacques Bonhomme: his
children may be of the /acguerie. Upon the one
side, we see the beauty of Catholic faith, of homely

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COUNTRY FOLK

pleasures, of fair work : upon the other side, there
is the cry of the poor, the peasant risings, the
angry, blind despair of men turned to brutes. In
the days, for which Bishop Corbet sang his dirge,
days of the faeries, days of the Catholics,

‘When Zom came home from Labour,
Or Ciss to Milking rose ;
Then merrily went their Tabor,
And nimbly went their Toes’:

Hobbes, it seems, made a comparison less insolent
than his wish, in comparing the Catholic Church
and the Faery Kingdom. But, while merry songs
are many to quote, so too are the dismal rhymes,
telling of misery and want. Here is a doleful
screed, from one of the old Penny Books, by ‘ our
loving Friend Poor Tom.’
‘Attend, ye gentlemen all,
A story oft proves true ;

For the poor suffer hunger and cold,
Which makes them look pitiful blue.

It was writ in an evening bright,
When Bacchus began to be ruddy,
And Luna began to give light,
Poor Tom fell into a study,

Which vexed his brain right sore,
To see how oppression doth thrive,
And conscience is kick’d out of door,
Such cruelty now is alive.’

In the same collection, mixed up with Dr. Faustus

and Friar Bacon, Parismus and Angelica, Argalus

and Parthenia, Sir Bevis and Don Belianis, all the
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

broken fragments of scholarly and courtly reading,
come down to the kitchen and the cottage, is an
idyll of perfect simplicity and charm: the story
of Honest John and Loving Kate. By the side of
Sir Roger de Coverley and his adoring tenants
may be set the sad fortunes of ‘sweet Auburn,’
It would be instructive, again, to compare the
experiences of these lettered ecclesiastics at
various times and places: Hooker of Bishop’s
Bourne, Herrick of Dean Prior, Herbert and
Norris of Bemerton, Newton of Olney, White of
Selborne, Crabbe of Belvoir, Sydney Smith of
Combe Florey, Bronté of Haworth, Hawker of
Morwenstow, Newman of Littlemore, Manning of
Lavington, Keble of Hursley, Kingsley of Eversley.
Their varieties of sentiment about country folk
would be endless: yet, in our rough way, we
think of all their rural flocks as ‘the common
people,’ as ‘rustics’: just as we think of all the
labourers upon one farm, as ‘ Hodge,’ indis-
tinguishable members of ‘the agricultural class.’
The changes of time, notably the great changes
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
faith and law, have changed the externals of
country folk, to an incalculable degree: but their
interior life, the life of thought and sentiment, has
been more perdurable. In Wessex, or in any
such districts, as those of which Dr. Jessopp and
Dr. Atkinson have written well, the past survives :
there are the railway and the steam plough, but
there are the traditions and the habits of long ago,

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COUNTRY FOLK

no less. ‘Read a page of rustic talk in Mr. Hardy,
and you will think of Shakespeare: listen to an
hour of rustic talk in Wessex, and you will think
of Mr. Hardy.) The common folk of Shakespeare
are less serious and slow, more farcical and ready :
their stupidity is lighter, their wit brisker. Mr.
Hardy’s men have learned, without loving it,
Seneca’s lesson: mon est virt timere sudorem.
They can less lightly throw off the burden of
work: the village revels of the old day are gone,
and only the ale house is left to loosen slow
tongues, and to relax tired limbs. Yet when they
speak, it is in a Shakespearian humour: from
Shallow and Silence, to Mistress Quickly and
Doll, from Lance and Lancelot, to Costard and
Touchstone, we hear the old tones, taste the old
wit, take the old humour, until we are ready to
swear by that impressive phrase, the continuity
of history. Let us compare two scenes: here is
one beyond our praise.

‘ Shallow. O, the mad days that I have spent! and to
see how many of mine old acquaintance are dead !

Silence. We shall all follow, cousin.

Shallow. Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure:
death, as the Psalmist saith, is common to all: all shall
die. How a good yoke of dullocks at Stamford fair?

Silence. Truly, cousin, 1 was not there.

Shallow. Death is certain. Is old Double of your town
living yet"

Silence. Dead, Sir.

Shallow. Dead! See, see! He drew a good bow; and
dead ! he shot a fine shoot : John of Gaunt loved him well,

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

and betted much money on his head. Dead! he would
have clapped i’ the clout at twelve score ; and carried you
a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it
would have done a man’s heart good to see. Howa score
of ewes now?

Szlence. Thereafter as they be : a score of good ewes may
be worth ten pounds.

Shallow. And is old Double dead?’

One comes to understand, why Hurrell Froude
would bind together Hamlet and the Georgics,

‘Here is another scene of tragic comedy, from
Mr. Hardy: the gossips’ commentary on death
in general, and on Mrs. Henchard’s death in
particular.

‘“ And she was as white as marble-stone,” said
Mrs. Cuxsom. “And likewise such a thoughtful
woman too—ah, poor soul!—that a’ minded every
little thing that wanted tending. ‘Yes,’ says she,
‘when I’m gone, and my last breath’s blowed,
look in the top drawer o’ the chest in the back
room by the window, and you'll find all my
coffin clothes; a piece of flannel—that’s to put
under me, and the little piece is to put under my
head ; and my new stockings for my feet—they
are folded alongside, and all my other things.
And there’s four ounce pennies, the heaviest I
could find, a-tied up in bits of linen, for weights
—two for my right eye and two for my left,’ she
said. ‘And when you’ve used them, and my eyes
don’t open no more, bury the pennies, good souls,
and don’t ye go spending ’em, for I shouldn’t like
it And open the windows as soon as I’m carried

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COUNTRY FOLK

out, and make it as cheerful as you can for my
Elizabeth Jane.”

‘“ Ah, poor heart!”

‘““ Well, and Martha did it, and buried the ounce
pennies in the garden. But if you'll believe
words, that man, Christopher Coney, went and
dug ’em up, and spent ’em, at the King of Prussia.
‘Faith, he said, ‘why should death deprive life of
fourpence? Death’s not of such good report that
we should respect ’en to that extent,’ says he.”

“oTwas a cannibal deed!” deprecated her
listeners.

‘“ Gad, then, I won’t quite ha’e it,” said Solomon
Longways. “I say it to-day, and ’tis a Sunday
morning, and I wouldn’t speak wrongfully for
a silver sixpence at such a time. I don’t see
no harm in it. To respect the dead is sound
doxology ; and I wouldn’t sell skellintons—least-
ways respectable skellintons—to be varnished for
*natomies, except I run out o’ work. But money
is scarce, and throats get dry. Why should death
deprive life of fourpence? I say there was no
treason in it.”

‘“Well, poor soul; she’s helpless to hinder
that or anything now,” answered Mother Cuxsom.
“ And all her shining keys will be took from her,
and her cupboards opened ; and things a’ didn’t
wish seen, anybody will see ; and her little wishes
and ways will all be as nothing!”’

One might compare the talk of the workmen in
the Luxellian vault, with that of Hamlet and the

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

grave-diggers: the fine, rich foolishness of Joseph
Poorgrass, that enchaunting character, with the
fantastic tongue of many a Shakespearian fool:
the difference, great indeed, is not merely the
difference in abstract genius between Shakespeare
and Mr. Hardy; but also between the dramatic
art, and the narrative. Yet we are led to the
conclusion, that both men gave each his proper
genius to the artistic treatment of characters,
essentially the same. The old conditions of
Elizabethan life before modern modes of travel
and modern necessities of industry changed them,
are not changed past recognition in Wessex, that
‘outstep’ land: there are the same strong influ-
ences of locality, the same forces of conservation
and endurance. And town life, country life, are
not separate, nor causes of separation, for Wessex
is not given over to urban trades and interests :
“so that Shakespeare’s medley of people, from
justices to clowns, is matched by Mr. Hardy’s
Wessex populace. ‘The changes of time are duly
considered ; he has laid his account with them :
and the result is the discovery of a people,
presented by a living artist in all the truth of
their actual life, as it veritably is: yet a people,
whom facts, not fancies, compel us to call
Shakespearian.

It is to be observed, that these Wessex folk
display their thoughts and humours most racily
and richly, when talk turns upon the more com-
mon emotions: birth and death, and the two or

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COUNTRY FOLK
three intermediate affairs of moment. But their
talk is not wont to be prettily poetical, nor full
of a simple elevation: it is shrewd, rude, of an
earthy and material savour. In Under the Green-
wood Tree, a tale of rural lovers, there is not a
sentence of fine, bold, rushing oratory. True it
is, as Tibullus put it, ‘Love is gone into the
country, and is learning the country speech’; at
Mellstock, Love keeps his senses, and indulges in
no romance of an operatic kind. Only the few
characters of deep and silent passion, Henchard
or Marty South, break sometimes into a natural
eloquence, untutored save by the dignity of
emotion. The rest use quaintnesses of speech,
more coarse, gross, or irreverent of sound, than
they are by design: rough crudities or rare
felicities of phrase, which are grounded upon the
facts of life. These men have not made the
grand tour of culture, nor come home to them-
selves, dissipated by variety of appreciation, sur-
feited with the taste of too many fine interests:
a neat phrase, of good literary form, it delights
them to hit on or tohear. ‘More know Tom Fool
than Tom Fool knows, said John Hostler of the
Old Fox in Weatherbury: and rejoiced Michael
the milkman with so choice a bit of wording.

‘““More know Tom Fool—what rambling old
canticle is it you say, Hostler?” enquired the
milkman, lifting his ear. “Let’s have it again—
a good saying well spit out is a Christmas fire to
my withered heart. More know Tom Fool——”

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

““ Than Tom Fool knows,” said the hostler.

““Ah! That’s the very feeling I’ve feeled over
and over again, hostler, though not in such gifted
language. ’Tis a thought I’ve had in me more or
less for years, and never could lick into shape !—
O—ho—ho—ho! Splendid!” ...

Weare hastily inclined to think it caricature:
yet our own feeling towards some new dainty
phrase in literature is of a piece with Michael’s
rapture over the scrap of sententious proverb,
heard for the first time.

For men of wide culture, able to range at ease
through the literatures, the histories, the sciences
of long gone times, danger lies upon the side of
vague and dreamy thought, in which nothing, not
truth itself, is at a stay: ‘the flowing philosophers,’
to whom life is a drifting and a change; votaries
of aesthetics, to whom it is a pageant. But the
danger for these labouring men, fast rooted in the
soil, lies upon the side of mental immobility : the
spirit is clogged with earth, no less than braced
by its contact ; and the natural virtue of life in
the open air, among the woods and fields, may
be corrupted into a stagnation of the faculties.
These are points for consideration, in any estimate
of rural thought about matters spiritual. ‘Howe
can he get wisedome that holdeth the plough, and
hee that hath pleasure in the goade, and in driving
oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and talketh
but of the breede of bullocks?’ Eeclestasticus
asks the question; and, though’ Dr. Johnson

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professed that he would ‘learn to talk of runts,
with a man who talked of them, he did not believe
in the supreme wisdom of country men, and
country minds. There will always be two classes
of rustic men: those, whose stolidity requires the
quickening influence of direct education ; and
those, whose lack of direct knowledge is supplied
by the indirect education of nature, in somewhat
a Wordsworthian way, or in that of Thoreau.
Sons of Jabal and Triptolemus, for good and bad
they are of the earth, earthy.

In Mr. Hardy’s books, rustic religion is repre-
sented, as ‘fetichistic’: a primitive superstition
about places and things, persons and practices,
of a pagan original, and only disguised under
a Christian nomenclature. ‘God is in’ this
and that: God, or devils, certainly great Powers,
Some Wessex folk still ‘seek unto them that have
familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and
that mutter. Dairyman Crick felt desperate,
when the butter would not come at churning.

‘“OTis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle’s
son in Egdon—years,” said the Dairyman bitterly.
“ And he was nothing to what his father had been.
I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I
don’t believe in him. And I don’t believe in him.
But I shall have to go to him if he’s alive. Oh,
yes, I shall have to go to him, if this sort of thing
continnys!”

‘Even Mr. Clare began to feel tragical at the
dairyman’s desperation.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

‘“Conjuror Fall, t other side of Casterbridge,
that they used to call ‘Wide-O, was a very
good man when I was a boy,” said Jonathan
Kail. “But he’s rotten as touch-wood by now.”

‘“My grandfather used to go to Conjuror
Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and a clever man
a’ were, so I’ve heard grandfather say,” continued
Mr. Crick. “But there’s no such genuine folk
about nowadays !”’

To Conjuror Trendle went Rhoda Brook and
Gertrude Lodge : to Conjuror Fall went the Mayor
of Casterbridge : Susan Nonsuch made a waxen
image of Eustacia, murmuring the Lord’s Prayer
backwards thrice, stuck it full of pins, and watched
it waste in the fire: Bathsheba, with her handmaid
Liddy, tried divination by the Bible and key:
Mrs. Durbeyfield refused to let that grimy volume,
the Complete Fortune-Teller, rest in the house
by night. ‘Between the mother, with her fast-
perishing lumber of superstition, folk-lore, dialect,
and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter
with her trained National teachings, and Standard
knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there
was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily under-
stood. When they were together the Jacobean and
the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.’ ‘Conjuror
Fall was sometimes astonished that men could
profess so little and believe so much at his house,
when at church they professed so much and
believed so little.’ These Wessex stories abound

‘tin legends, myths, magical rites: such as those,
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COUNTRY FOLK

with which the woodlanders amused the un-
principled prig Fitzpiers, so proud of his Shelley
and his Schleiermacher: incidents, such as the
divination by hemp seed on old Midsummer Eve,
and South’s horror of the great tree. A sense of
old-world credulity pervades the books: we hear
the voices of such haggard crones, as live for us in
Horace, in Propertius, in Apuleius the magical : of
witches from Thessaly or Lapland.

Apart from all speculation, about the natural
tendencies of a rustic people, to keep something
primitive and pagan in their religion, it is not hard
to find historical reasons, for the permanence of
such a tendency in England: we can consult in
Bede the letter of Saint Gregory the Great to
Saint Augustine, and read there, how the wise
economy of the Church dealt with the pagan pre-
possessions of a convert people. But Protestant-
ism, during the three centuries of its rule, has
shewn no such wisdom in directing and in purify-
ing, what the Master of Balliol calls, ‘underground
religion’: that gloomier and more fearful strain
of thought about things spiritual, which ancient
Greece itself could never annul. When their
reverent familiarity, with the things of faith, was
gone, country folk, unmoved by the decent dulness
of Protestantism, gave in the more to the pagan
instinct: that instinct, which Catholicism had
recognized, and partly turned into a purer sen-
timent. What remained, but that the simple
folk should betake themselves to all manner of

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

confused oracles, dubious rites, gross fancies?
That comely service and decorous liturgy; so
moving to the gracious spirits of Herbert and of
Ken, so comfortable to the trained minds of
Walton and of Johnson, so stately at Whitehall
and at Oxford ; could it make much appeal to
ruder spirits and to unlettered minds? The
country parson, the parson’s clerk, the Sunday
service, became official, legal, and conventional,
in the eyes of rustics: but for stirring converse
with unseen powers, for trembling emotion and
awful fear, better the haunted places, the oracles
of nature, the books of magic, the woodland
solemnities and divinations, than the cold correct-
ness of authorized religion. Przmus in orbe deos
fecit timor: we are told by Statius and Petronius:
‘nous humanisons souvent la divinité, writes
Malebranche: the two tendencies, the habit of
fear and the habit of literality, unchastened by
higher habits of thought, produce just that rustic
‘fetichism, so strongly realised by Mr. Hardy.
At the same time, it may be thought, that he too
dwells more upon the letter of such habits, than
upon the spirit: he hardly makes allowance for
the struggling light, which finds its blind way
through that gross darkness covering the people.
Anthropologists know well, how honest travellers,
after long sojourn among savage races, will report
of them, atheism and unspirituality beyond doubt:
and how a closer investigation reveals their jealous
concealment of a wild theology. So too, it is
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COUNTRY FOLK
easy to fix our thoughts upon the peasant’s’ out-
ward degradation of spiritual faith, without
thinking of the interior sentiment so rudely
manifested. At the least, I would apply to these
Wessex ‘pagans,’ what Burke said of the French
peasants, and of the new light poured upon them
by the ‘ philosophers’: ‘I cannot conceive, how a
man’s not believing in God can teach him to
cultivate the earth with the least of any additional
skill or encouragement.’ The quality of a man’s
belief is hard to estimate: like the quality of a
man’s pleasure, that famous problem, it is a matter
of very various degree: but you do not rob
anything of its value to its possessor, by treating
it with a scientific contempt, or with an artistic
condescension.

The attitude of Mr. Hardy’s country folk,
towards existing forms of worship, is that of
customary adherence to the ‘old ancient’ ways,
venerable by their establishment for three cen-
turies ; a religion of use and wont ; not lightly to
be renounced, not greatly to be revered, but to
be accepted naturally, as a fact in the order of
existing things. Joseph Poorgrass, confessing to
certain lapses from good conduct, was unwilling
to go too far: ‘Your next world is your next
world, and not to be squandered off-hand.’ So
serious a view roused his fellow tipplers at the
Buck’s Head, that melancholy day: while Fanny
Robin’s coffin lay in the cart without, under the
dripping boughs, in the chill air.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

‘“T believe you to be a chapel-member, Joseph.
That I do.”

*“Oh, no, no! I don’t go so far as that.”

‘“For my part,’ said Coggan, “I’m staunch
Church of England.”

«“ Ay, and faith so be I,” said Mark Clark.

‘“T won't say much for myself; I don’t wish
to,” Coggan continued, with that tendency to
talk on principles which is characteristic of the
barley-corn. “But I’ve never changed a single
doctrine: I’ve stuck like a plaster to the old faith
Iwas bornin. Yes; there’s this to be said for
the church, a man can belong to the church and
live in his cheerful old inn, and never trouble
or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But
to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in
all winds and weathers, and make yerself as
frantic as a skit. Not but that chapel members
be clever chaps enough in their way. They
can lift up beautiful prayers out of their own
heads, all about their families and shipwrecks in
the newspaper.”

‘“They can—they can,” said Mark Clark, with
corroborative feeling; “but we Churchmen, you
see, must have it all printed aforehand, or, dang it
all, we should no more know what to say toa
great person like the Lord than babes unborn.”

‘“Chapel folk be more hand-and-glove with
them above than we,” said Joseph, thoughtfully.

““Ves,” said Coggan. “We know very well
that if anybody goes to heaven, they will. They ’ve

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COUNTRY FOLK

worked hard for it, and they deserve to have it,
such as ’tis. I’m not such a fool as to pretend
that we who stick to the church have the same
chance as they, because we know we have not.
But I hate a fellow who’ll change his old ancient
doctrines for the sake of getting to heaven. I’d
as soon turn King’s evidence for the few pounds
you get.”’

Of a piece with this religious constancy,
preached indeed by a theologian in his cups, but
not the less sincere for that, is the fatalism of
the Wessex poor. Throughout all Mr. Hardy’s
books, ‘’Twas to be,’ is the consolation, the
justification, the meditation, of his countrymen.
‘Fortune is a woman, said Machiavel, ‘and must
be hectored to keep her down’: but Grandfer
Cantle, or William Worm, or old Creedy, would
but find in that definition another reason for
acquiescence, submission, and resignation, with an
almost humourous joy in the simplicity of life,
thanks to the arrangement of fate. ‘Steeped
in fancies and prefigurative superstitions, these
people look upon life, less as a field of battle, than
as a place of ordeal: all are blindfolded : but this
man never sets foot upon the red shares, that man
never escapes them. Hence the air, now of
peace, now of gloom, which hangs over the
Wessex stories : such tranquillity or such melan-
choly, as the seasons of nature seem to feel. The
fields glow in the sunlight: ‘’twas to be’: the
wind wails through the bare branches: ‘’twas to

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

be.” The Mayor of Casterbridge, passionate and
powerful, did not wrangle with his fate: ‘his
usual habit was not to consider whether destiny
were hard upon him_or not, the shape of his
ideas in cases of affliction being simply a moody
“T am to suffer, I perceive.”’ The village tragedies
owe half their tragedy to this impassive patience of
men filled with strong passions: there is no wild
anger against so natural a thing, as a predestina-
tion to sorrow and to loss. The rise and fall of
families, upon which Mr. Hardy loves to meditate,
strengthen the rural fatalist in his convictions:
a vague sense of departed greatness, as a common
thing, known from father to son, helps to make
present afflictions bearable. Mr. Mozley, in his
reminiscences of the Oxford movement, notes
that many of his labouring parishioners in Devon
had their coats of arms, their descent from noble
houses: it is characteristic, as Tess pleaded,
of all Wessex. These considerations explain
that monumental, that almost mortuary, look of
passionless calm in Mr. Hardy’s books: an air of
massive grandeur, which moulds their features,
from long pondering upon the ways of time and
of death. Sir Thomas Browne, with a far greater
command of imagination, had no greater sense of
human mutability, and of immitigable death, than
has Mr. Hardy: in whom the place of Browne’s
ardent faith is taken by a volcanic spirit of
protest and of pity, breaking out through the
steady darkness,
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COUNTRY FOLK

*“ MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL.

“That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my
death, or made to grief on account of me.

“®& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.

“& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.

“ & that nobody is wished to see my dead body.

“& that no murners walk behind me at my
funeral.

“®& that no flours be planted on my grave.

“& that no man remember me.

“To this I put my name.

“MICHAEL HENCHARD.”

‘“ What are we to do?” said Donald, when he
had handed the paper to her.

‘She could not answer distinctly. “O Donald!”
she said at last, “what bitterness lies there! But
there’s no altering—so it must be.”’

This naked misery and mere agony, sublimed
to grandeur by endurance, seem commensurate
with the great looks and ways of nature: like the
sacred madness of Lear, this aching stoicism, in
which all is petrified but one nerve of pain, escapes
the charge of extravagance, through its affinity
with the wild scene of its passion. It is a truth,
of which Mr. Hardy often avails himself, that
place and passion should be well matched: ‘The
new vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in
Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer
and closer harmony with external things wearing
a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

young.’ Ethelberta puts it in her melodramatic
way: ‘We must not be poor in London. Poverty
in the country is a sadness, but poverty in town
is a horror. There is something not without
grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open
mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones
lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain:
but a back garret in a rookery and the other
starvers in the room insisting on keeping the
window shut—anything to deliver us from that !’
It is to the harmony between themselves and
their surroundings, that the country folk owe the
singular impressiveness of their virtue and of
their vice: they are not engulphed in vast crowds,
distracted by the whirl of life: they retain a
personality, clear and strong, which years and
experience do but confirm. Brutal, ignorant,
sottish, they are still full of character: kindly,
wise, dignified, they are still full of distinction.
Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak, by their
exquisite congruity with their occupations and
circumstances, force us to think of them, as
masters in the art of life: as men, who fulfil the
duties, who possess the culture, demanded of
them: men in their right minds and places, to
a degree past attainment by men of the crowd.
Here is a passage, which I read with just that
feeling of respect, felt in reading of Cuvier or of
Bentley.

‘Gabriel proceeded towards his home. In
approaching the door, his toe kicked something

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COUNTRY FOLK
which felt and sounded soft, leathery, and dis-
tended, like a boxing-glove. It was a large toad
humbly travelling across the path. Oak took it
up, thinking it might be better to kill the creature
to save it from pain; but finding it uninjured, he
placed it again amongst the grass. He knew what
this direct message from the Great Mother meant.
And soon came another.

‘When he struck a light indoors there appeared
upon the table a thin glistening streak, as if a
brush of varnish had been lightly dragged across
it. Oak’s eyes followed the serpentine streak to
the other side, where it led up to a large brown
garden-slug, which had come indoors to-night for
reasons of its own. It was Nature’s second way
of hinting to him that he was to prepare for foul
weather.

‘Oak sat down meditating for nearly an hour.
During this time two black spiders, of the kind
common in thatched houses, promenaded the
ceiling, ultimately dropping to the floor. This
reminded him that if there was one class of
manifestations on this matter that he thoroughly
understood it was the instincts of sheep. He left
the room, ran across two or three fields toward
the flock, got upon a hedge, and looked over
among them.

‘They were crowded close together on the other
side around some furze bushes, and the first
peculiarity observable was that, on the sudden
appearance of Oak’s head over the fence, they did

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

not stir or run away. They had now a terror of
something greater than their terror of man. But
this was not the most noteworthy feature: they
were all grouped in such a way, that their tails,
without a single exception, were toward that half
of the horizon from which the storm threatened.
There was an inner circle closely huddled, and
outside these they radiated wider apart, the
pattern formed by the flock as a whole not being
unlike a vandyked lace collar, to which the clump
of furze bushes stood in the position of a man’s
neck.

‘This was enough to re-establish him in his
original opinion. He knew now that he was
right, and that Troy was wrong. Every voice in
nature was unanimous in bespeaking change.
But two distinct translations attached to these
dumb expressions. Apparently there was to be
a thunderstorm, and afterwards a cold continuous
rain. The creeping things seemed to know all
about the latter rain, but little of the interpolated
thunderstorm ; whilst the sheep knew all about
the thunderstorm and nothing of the latter rain.’

The passage fills me with a strange fear; so
magical seems this warning of nature in the night:
and with a strange shame; so little should I
have understood it. The richness of the world
in wonder is opened before us: and we come to
comprehend, dimly and slowly, how the life of
labouring men, away from the confused commerce
of towns, is a life in which nature plays a direct

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COUNTRY FOLK

part ; with what influence upon soul and body,
it is no light task to say. For crowds and multi-
tudinous traffic, these men have the innumerable
society of natural things, trees and winds and
waters: they find companionship in creatures of
the woodland and the field: their hopes, fears,
experiences, sciences, their faith and love, sorrow
and hate, are nourished by the Mighty Mother.

There are many features of the country folk
in Mr. Hardy’s books, upon which I have not
touched : those village choirs, with their pleasant
pride in a music, which, laugh over it, if you will,
was a relic of artistic instincts, fast dying out
among the rustics of to-day: scenes of rural feast
and converse, drawn with delightful sympathy,
and sometimes, as in that brief comedy of error,
The Three Strangers, full of moving incident: all
kinds of adventure, business, and stir, such as
those, which go to the making of Mr. Hardy’s
Wessex ballad :

‘ There was skimmity-riding with rout, shout, and flare,
In Weatherbury, Stokeham, and Windleton, ere
They had proof of old Sweatley’s decay ;

The Mellstock and Yalbury folk stood in a stare
(The tranter owned houses and garden ground there),
But little did Sim or his Barbara care,

For he took her to church the next day’:

there is the happy pastoral of Dick Dewy and
Fancy Day, deserving all praise for its simplicity,
which is not forced, and for its reality, which is
not unkind: but Mr. Hardy’s genius is very rich,

ee
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

and I make no attempt to illustrate its richness
on all sides.

One point remains, which must not go without
notice: Mr. Hardy’s treatment of the Wessex
dialect. An artistic interest in provincial dialect
is older, than many men might think it to be:
Shakespeare, of course, and Ben Jonson, have
given us their impressions of the Irish, Welsh, and
Scotch versions, of our English speech: Fielding
and Smollett, with their Squire Westerns, their
Lismahagos, their Morgans, their Seagrims, pro-
duced a rare Babel of tongues: but all this is in-
cidental, and by way of casual diversion. Some
instances there are, of an interest in provincial
dialect more like that of Mr. Hardy ; an interest
more scientific and serious: and of these, I know
none more curious than ‘An Lamoor Scolding,
in the Propriety and Decency of ELamoor Lan-
guage, between two sisters, Wz/mot Moreman and
Thomasin Moreman, as they were spinning. Also
an Exmoor Courtship.1 These pieces, produced
early in the eighteenth century, though somewhat
overdone, yet have much in common with Mr.
Hardy’s management of the Wessex speech: and
they do not stand alone. Our antiquarian ances-
tors did not bestow all their horrified curiosity
upon ‘wild Irish’ and ‘Highland savages:’ the
barbarous and Gothic peasantry of England, in

1] have to thank my friend, Mr. Victor Plarr, Librarian of

King’s College in the Strand, for calling my attention to these and
to other rare pieces.

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COUNTRY FOLK

the north and west countries, had their share of
attention. Mr. Hardy has it always in mind, that
the Wessex dialect is the passport to intimacy
with the Wessex folk: not merely a means of
making his readers feel themselves carried into
the country. He makes but a sparing use of
local words ; barton, blue-vinnied, and the like; he
prefers, by careful disposition of words, elabora-
tion of sentences, turns of phrase, and stresses of
accent, to convey a notion of that slow, emphatic
speech, one of the strongest spoken in England.
It abounds in peculiarities, which the erudite
German may call ‘diseases of language’: at least,
they are ‘ dulcet diseases, full of charm and vigour.
A writer, less powerful than Mr. Hardy, would
have composed a terrible parody of rustic lan-
guage ; a jargon neither to be repeated, nor to be
understood ; the resources of print would have
been ransacked for means of recording it; there
would not have been three lines of common
English put into a rustic mouth. Mr. Hardy
knows, that a novel is not a phonograph, any
more than it is a photograph: and he contrives
to reconcile the demands of truth with those of
art, in a way which brings Wessex before our
eyes, and the memory of its speech into our ears.
For accuracy, he is most noticeable: he tells us,
how ancient usages, /ch for J, [ch woll for [ will,
er woll for he will, er war for he was, and the like,
are ‘still used by old people in north west Dorset
and Somerset’: and how ‘Grammer Oliver’s

177 M
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

conversation in The Woodlanders, that story of
the north west, is ‘an attempted reproduction.’
He adds, that such forms are dying rapidly, and
only used by others than the old, in moments of
strong emotion: witness the speech of Tess, with
its sudden changes. I know not, whether any
part of England has been so glorified in verse and
prose of its own familiar speech, as Dorset has
been glorified by Barnes, the poet of Blackmore
Vale, and by Mr. Hardy, who has all Wessex to
his province.

‘J’aimerais les paysans, si le paysan ne me
dégéutait, says the Abbé Roux, of those Limousin
folk, whom he depicts with so subtile a mingling
of repulsion and of love: I am not sure, that love
for the best of Wessex, or disgust for its worst, is
the characteristic of Mr. Hardy: so impassive is
he, so reticent and restrained. But of his fidelity
I can see no question: if there be fidelity in
George Sand or in Turgeneff, in Count Tolstoi or
in M. Fabre, when they paint their rural scenes,
there is at least an equal fidelity in the Wessex
artist. Sitting in some humble, homely inn;
hung round, not with ballads, like Walton’s
‘honest ale-house,’ nor with ‘lavender in the
windows, but, like The Three Tuns in Sherborne,
with bills of sale and agricultural notices; en-
sconced in the old settle, black or white, and
joining in talk with mine Hostess and her blue-
coated gossips: many a time, I have almost
dreamed myself into one of Mr. Hardy’s books ;

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COUNTRY FOLK
and awoken to marvel at the power of an art, so
faithful without pedantry, so imaginative without
exaggeration. Humane and high seriousness;
far reaching thoughts, and sympathies with the
things of home: by these Mr. Hardy has made
masterpieces, for which I cannot trust myself to

thank him; masterpieces of beauty, masterpieces
of truth.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Vv

CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

THE writer of this century, whom Mr. Hardy
brings most often before my mind, is Wordsworth:
that austere poet. Mr. Hardy’s ‘message,’ his
burden, is indeed not that of Wordsworth; it is
no solemn exultation of mind, exaltation of soul,
that fill us, while we read the Wessex stories:
yet there is an ardent austerity about them, a
grave joyousness now and then, which recall the
temper and the mood of Wordsworth. The works
of each bring before our minds the presence of a
mind burning with passion, but strong to restrain
it: a mind touched to its depths by the appeals
of nature and of mankind, but disdainful of all
light answers: a mind enamoured of meditation,
but impatient of mere dreams. The style of both
is massive in its simplicity, and moves to a solemn
music; with sudden elevations of tone, which stir
in us an indescribable pleasure: each style dis-
plays a rare mingling of richness and severity ;
that beauty of restrained art, which enchaunts us
beyond all the charms of an art ever prodigal and
gorgeous. Both writers love to deal with the
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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

spiritual magnificence of men in a humble station ;
with the unadorned majesty of natural lives ; with
things immemorial, the oldest signs and tokens of
an ancient world; with great passages of time,
dissolutions, vanishings, and vicissitudes: both
impress upon us the ‘ magnalities’ of the universe,
alike throughout the whole unconceived eternity
of things, and at each single point within it; both
are obedient to the vision of forms, laws, powers,
ideas, awful and august, among which men walk,
themselves mysterious and tragic. Both have so
solicitous an impartiality and indifference in their
dealings with the world, so perfect a loyalty, each
to his sense of righteousness and truth, that their
very virtues provoke us to some anger: we exclaim
against this austerity, this iron mood, this unami-
able serenity, this unbending dignity: and both go
lumbering over low ground, when they relinquish
their accustomed heights. Both present men with
a directness, a belief in the power of plain, strong
figures, which sometimes creates an effect of
awkwardness: the verse can be bald and barren,
the prose can be wooden and stiff. A passionate
prepossession by some few dominant thoughts
must issue, either in works of singular and
distinguished loftiness, or in works of a rigid and
stark monotony: there is little room for flashing
plays of thoughts and fancies, volatile, mercurial,
rapid. Like mailed men, these writers fall heavily,
and lie grievously cumbered: in the manner of
Sacrovir’s iron troops, whose clumsy helplessness,
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Tacitus describes with so pleasant a zest. Both
writers are filled with the spirit of their country:
when Wordsworth is uninspired, he has the mulish
obstinacy of his dalesmen; when Mr. Hardy is
uninspired, he has the graceless perversity of his
West Saxons: and when either indulges his
genius in all its strength and beauty, he gives
voice to the very earth under his feet. Yet these
two writers are at variance, upon the fundamental
principles and the crowning issues of life: the
living writer has challenged the dead writer's
faith.

The likeness between these two is worth a con-
sideration here; because the writer of established
fame helps to explain certain qualities of the
writer, whose very virtues, the ground of a future
fame, are still in the making: Wordsworth, an
idealist and a mystic assignable to no school,
presents the formation and the exercise of char-
acter by certain methods; which are also those
of Mr. Hardy, a positivist upon many sides, but
somewhat isolated, and sworn to no binding tenets.
‘That the laws which nature has fixed for our
lives are mighty and eternal, Wordsworth com-
prehended as fully as Goethe, but not that they
were pitiless as iron. Wordsworth had not rooted
in him the sense of Fate—of the inexorable
sequences of things, of the terrible chain that so
often binds an awful end to some slight and
trivial beginning.” What Mr. Morley finds lack-
ing in Wordsworth is plentiful in Mr. Hardy:

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

who would subscribe to a saying in George Sand ;
‘Il n’y a ni bien ni mal dans le veeu de la nature,’
But both writers, by loyalty to their rival appre-
hensions of truth about things, apprehensions
which they have treasured with a passionate
attachment, come to resemble each other in
virtue of that common tenacity: now they cure,
now complement, each other; they stand in
antagonism, like the first sentence of Montes-
quieu and the first sentence of Rousseau; they
stand side by side, as all men in earnest must,
whatever be their illusions about truth. Now
it were hard to describe, without the pains of
long circumlocution, the characteristics of the
men and women in Wordsworth; hard, apart
from the fact that he is a lyrical and a meditative
poet, not skilled in the direct narrative for its
own sake: yet few characters live more in our
memories, than those of Michael, of the Leech-
gatherer, of Lucy, of the Highland girl. And it
is Wordsworth’s habitual openness to certain in-
fluences, his prepossession with ideas of a certain
order, that make these characters at once so
indelible from our memories, and so elusive of
our descriptions. This is true of Mr. Hardy’s
characters also. As a teller of stories, a composer
of situations and events, he is admirable; it has
already appeared, that he is independent of casual
graces, a strict and stern master of design; there
is in him no baffling obscurity, nor blinding bril-
liance: yet, like Wordsworth, he has a vision of
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

things so personal, from a point of view discovered
by himself, that we do not at once recognize the
familiar scenes of human passion. In the curious
dialect of some modern critics, we might say, that
his characters are subtly coloured, or chemically
compounded, by the idiosyncrasies of his psycho-
logical analysis. To say so were an ugly affec-
tation: but the saying would be true in substance.
As in Wordsworth, the simplest things; a gray
stone, a gleam of light, a bed of flowers, a song
of birds; are so wrought into relation with human
life, and human life so harmonized with them,
that the world seems to suffer a transfiguration
and a glory, which most eyes must be purged to
see: so Mr. Hardy realizes the world of men and
things in a severe harmony; under the hard light
of natural laws, whose alone is the supremacy ;
with that pitying irony and chilled compassion,
which play vainly in the shadow of those laws.
The conclusions of the two men are far apart:
but in both there is this concentration, this in-
tensity, signs of a certain spiritual temperament,
to be seen in a large class of strenuous minds.
Lucretius, Pascal, Rousseau, Obermann, Haw-
thorne; some mystical theologians of Germany
and Spain; certain devotees of passive despair,
in philosophy and in poetry: many of these com-
municate fine truth, gold tried in the fire; others
yield only dust and ashes; but, one and all, they
are men of minds too intensely strained in one
direction, to apprehend truth in its fullness and

184
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

in its wholeness. Wordsworth was saved by that
salt of common sense, which kept him human and
wholesomely terrestrial, even at the height of his
contemplations: he has more in common with
the austerity and the strenuousness of Dante and
of Milton, than with those of Lucretius and of
Pascal: but he seldom fills us with a sense of
that large and liberal wisdom, which seems to
know no bounds. And in reading Mr. Hardy,
whose books are never fanatical, we are forced
now and then to pause, and to discount some
phrase or tendency, by saying to ourselves: Zhe
shield has another side. That is to say, Mr.
Hardy’s prepossessions of a positivist sort are
held with so firm a conviction, that all things,
from farmyards to the stars, and all men whoso-
ever, are touched by them: his novels are not
written for a purpose, to prove the truth of some-
thing ; but with the prejudice, that it is a proven
truth. There are few English novels, controlled
from end to end by a philosophic unity of ideas ;
few, which do not show their writers playing fast
and loose with their sovereign notions: but Mr.
Hardy will not allow either his art or his philo-
sophy, to lose anything by their conjunction ;
rather, he would deny the possibility of any such
loss. He runs two risks: the risk of unpopularity
among the unphilosophical and the inartistic: and
the risk of dislike from lovers of another philo-
sophy and of another art. For he does nothing
to conciliate possible enemies: there are no con-
185
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

cessions to a vulgar, or to a fastidious, taste:
when once a character, or an event, or an issue
of events, is conceived by him as true to the
nature of things, he will present it with all the
power of his art; but he will not soften its
asperity, nor herald it with deprecation, nor dis-
miss it with a palinode. He is unlike that ancient
Greek writer upon medicine, who in certain cases
of syncope recommends, for the sufferer’s support,
an application of encouraging words and rose
water. It follows, that without some reasonable
readiness to be patient under discomforts, an
unsympathetic reader of Mr. Hardy will find
constant provocation to ill humour: once let such
a reader give way to a passion of controversial
wrath, and the spell is broken, the book charms
no more. Were a few characters only, or a few
events, brought under the great principle, so
potent to displease, the reader might fasten upon
the harmless remnants of the book, and find there
his pleasure, in contempt of logic and of art: but
the art of Mr. Hardy is a logical art, and is no
more capricious than the facts of nature.
‘Streams will not curb their pride
The just man not to entomb,
Nor lightnings go aside,
To give his virtues room’ ;
nor will an honourable man be false to his vision
of truth, for fear of offence: he may enjoy it in
private, revealing nothing: but he may not mis-
represent it. There are, then, two chief difficulties
186
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN __

in the way of a criticism upon Mr. Hardy’s char-
acters: their relation to certain views of life; and
the method of their presentation, which follows
upon an honest holding of those views. The first
difficulty may be almost left for longer discussion,
and with it, the character of Tess: let us rest
content, for the present, with chiefly examining
into some of Mr. Hardy’s characters, as he pre-
sents them to us.

Throughout the preceding essays, I have laid
stress upon the strength and the stability of
character, which Mr. Hardy loves to present ;
upon his souls of a somewhat pagan severity,
grand in the endurance of dooms; upon their
simplicity, resoluteness, and power: yet I have
also spoken of Mr. Hardy, as a novelist typical of
modern literature in this, that he loves the com-
plexity of things, the clash of principles and of
motives, the encounter of subtile emotions. Both
criticisms, as I dare think, are true: and in these
two characteristics, brought together, contrasted,
made to illustrate each other, lies the power of
Mr. Hardy’s art. For he chooses to present the
play of life, tragic and comic, first of all, in a
definite tract or province of England; in the
Kingdom of Wessex: whither new influences
penetrate but slowly. Secondly, he takes for his
chief characters, men of powerful natures, men of
the country, men of little acquired virtue in mind
and soul: but men disciplined by the facts and
by the necessities of life, as a primitive experience

187
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

manifests them. Thirdly, he surrounds them with
men of the same origin and class, but men of less
strongly marked a power, of less finely touched
a spirit: the rank and file of country labour.
Fourthly, he brings his few men of that stronger
and finer nature, his rustic heroes, into contact
and into contrast with a few men, commonly their
superiors in education, and sometimes in position,
but their inferiors in strength and fineness of
nature: men, whom more modern experiences
have redeemed from being. clowns, at the risk of
becoming curs. Fifthly, he makes this contact
and this contrast most effective, through the
passion of love: to which end, he brings upon the
scene women of various natures; less plainly
marked in character than the men; for the most
part, nearer to the flashy prigs and pretty fellows
in outward sentiment, fashion, and culture; but
nearer to the stronger and finer men, in the depths
of their souls. Sixthly, the narratives are con-
ducted slowly at the first, and great pains are
given to make clear the spirit of the country, with
its works and ways: when that has been made
clear, the play quickens into passion, the actors
come into conflict, there is strong attraction and
strong repulsion, ‘spirits are finely touched’: then,
there is a period of waiting, a breathing space, an
ominous stillness and a pause; till, at the last, with
increased force and motion, the play goes forward
to its ‘fine issues’; all the inherent necessities of
things cause their effects, tragic or comic, triumphs
188
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

of the right or of the wrong : and the end of all
is told with a soft solemnity, a sense of pity
striving against a sense of fate.

I do not say that any one novel presents those
features, in precisely that way: it is but an
attempt to construct a mechanical type, to which _
all Mr. Hardy’s novels tend to conform. / At the
least, it is true of them all, that they present, either .
the resolution of a discord into a harmony, or the
breaking of a harmony by a discord: always the
contrast, and the various issue, according to the
worth of the performers with that strange organ,
the human mind. Tess was changing from
peasant ignorance and convention, when she met
Clare, changing from the conventional culture and
belief of a higher station; the woman struggling
up from superstition, the man struggling free from
prejudice: the two natures, breaking with the past,
came together, she straining towards his level of
thought, he stooping to her level of life: the
result was a tragic discord. It might be inter-
preted in many ways. Perhaps the superstitious
faith of the Durbeyfield household, and the
Calvinist faith of the Clare household, were more
nearly in accord with the essential verities of life,
than the new aims and impulses of their offspring:
perhaps Tess and Clare carried right theories into
wrong practice: perhaps one alone did so:
certainly, we have in this story a singular pre-
sentation of the struggle between old and new, in
various ranks of life and ranges of thought ; of

189
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
the contact of the new in one rank and range
with the new in another ; of the curious reversion,
in each case, of the new to the old. Tess acts, on
several occasions, from impulses and in ways,
which derive, so her maker hints, from her
knightly ancestors: Clare, at the crisis of her life
and of his own, falls back in cruel cowardice
to the conventional standards of that society,
which he so greatly scorns. Tess, again, having
learned by ear and heart Clare’s arguments
against Christian theology, repeats them to her
old betrayer, Alec D’Urberville, then a fanatical
convert to the Calvinism of Clare’s father: and
she enables him thereby to become a second time
her betrayer. Finally, this tangled play of new
things upon old comes to its wretched end at
Stonehenge, the most ancient of religious monu-
ments in England, and at Winchester, the ancient
capital of England: religion, however stern,
society, however cruel, are vindicated in the
presence of their august memorials. The old, we
are meant to feel, was wrong, and the new was
right: but the inhuman irony of fate turned all to
misunderstanding and to despair: the new devil
quoted the new scriptures in the ears of the new
believers ; and they went to the old destruction.
But the human comedy of Tess must be
elsewhere discussed in detail: now it merely
serves to illustrate a characteristic common to
almost all Mr. Hardy’s books. Norris of Bemer-
ton, ‘the English Malebranche,’ has this saying in
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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

his third Contemplation: ‘’Twas a Celebrated
Problem among the Ancient Mythologists, What
was the strongest thing, what the wses¢, and
what the greatest? Concerning which ’twas
this determin’d, that the strongest Thing was
Necessity, the wisest was Time; and the greatest
was the Heart of Man.’ That would seem to be
the determination of Mr. Hardy also, at his best
and deepest: almost over conscious of the fatal
strength, ever delighted with the growing wisdom,
strongly moved by the unsatisfied greatness, he
sends out his characters to that forlorn hope, life :
forlorn, but not lost, and promising at least the
noblest of defeats. I remember but few of Mr.
Hardy’s general sentiments, about the meaning of
the unconscious universe, or of conscious mankind,
with which I do not disagree : his tone of thought
about human progress, about the province and the
testimony of physical science, about the sanctions
of natural and social ethics, neither charms, nor
compels, me to acquiescence: but it is because I
am thus averse from the attitude of a disciple, that
I admire Mr. Hardy’s art so confidently. Not
even unwelcome judgments upon those estranging
‘matters, the humane arts, can cool my zeal for this
artist. He writes of a house: ‘It was Palladian,
and, like all architecture erected since the Gothic
age, was a compilation rather than a design.’
Saeva indignatio were a poor term, by which to
describe my emotion upon first reading that: yet
my faith is unshaken. These personal confessions

IQI
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
are not impertinent, only because they best help
me to declare the power, the beauty, the fidelity,
to his own visions of truth, which I reverence in
this writer, as I reverence them in Lucretius.
That wise impassiveness, which Mr. Hardy in-
culcates, seems in a measure to affect certain of
his readers: for we come to read him at his best,
this living writer about modern life, with that
tranquil equability and cheerfulness, wherewith we
read the twenty-eight Lucretian arguments against
the soul’s immortality ; and rejoice in the marvel-
lous chaunt that follows, to the glory of deathless
death. There is but one living writer beside, who
produces a like effect: that poet of vast, austere,
and melancholy genius, M. Leconte de Lisle.
These conflicts, then, and antagonisms, between
the forces of the world and the forces of the
human soul, realized by Mr. Hardy with a sombre
imagination, as though by some Hugo smitten
suddenly unspiritual ; are of sufficient validity in
the region of imaginative thought, to fill a story
with the breath of life; even for readers, who
would give them another interpretation. Such
readers may indeed be forced, by some trenchant
utterance of Mr. Hardy upon grave problems, to
think themselves, ‘sad friends of Truth’: but they
are never impelled to cry out against any such
distortions of thought and sentiment, as in these
days so often pass for the last word of man upon
the universe. The hard sayings of this writer
come from a commanding height of speculation.
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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

His three classes, most worthy of consideration,
for their displays of character, are the country
heroes and lovers, Winterborne, Henchard, and
their fellows: those examples of ‘a poor Sixpeny
Soul, a Subburb Sinner, Fitzpiers and Clare,
with the rest of that company: and the various
women, Eustacia, Elfride, Grace, Elizabeth-Jane,
and others of the sisterhood. To these may be
added certain typical figures of different kinds:
the youths, too delicate to be imperious, too gentle
to be vicious, yet of a certain hardness ; Yeobright
and Smith, Julian and Swithin, Somerset and
Farfrae; a whole chapter of ecclesiastics; and
other inhabitants of Wessex.

The first class shows the immitigable strength
of Mr. Hardy at its best: a comparison of Win-
terborne and Henchard will serve our purpose.
Winterborne was a plain countryman, skilled in
woodland lore, honest and courteous and kind, but
in no way a man of genius, in things worldly, or
in things spiritual: his chief distinction was that
simple refinement and habitual reverence, which
in some country natures grow to a singular kind
of grace. The woman, whom he loved with a
great delicacy and awe in his passion; a woman,
trained to a certain height of taste and thought,
above the old woodland level, but at some loss of
its natural contentment ; fell in love with a man
of origin, of education, and of interests, rarely met
among the woodlands: she married him. Winter-
borne, upon whom other blows also fell, bore it

193 N
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

with an unbroken dignity of sorrow, accepting his
lot. Presently, Grace found her husband to be a
man of unstable nature, loving her in a fitful way,
yet careless of her: and vehemently drawn by
the lures of another woman, the great lady of the
place, Felice Charmond, known to him long since,
abroad ; a woman of untempered and unregulated
emotions. After much misery, Grace and her
husband parted: presently, her father heard a
wrong account of the new law of divorce, imper-
fectly understood among so remote a people: and
he saw in it the one escape for Grace out of
her wretchedness, the one way to destroy the
reproach upon his house, and the means of making
amends to Winterborne. With the most gracious
care, lest he give any offence, Winterborne em-
braced this hope: Grace, too, who had learned
to know his nature, wearied and distracted by her
unhappiness, accepted the prospect of deliverance
and of peace. But the mistake was discovered ;
Grace was not wronged enough: and the old
troubles had to continue: at last, upon the return
of her husband, Grace, unequal to the endurance of
her distress, resolved upon flight to a friend at a
distance. She was forced, by circumstances, to
ask the guidance of Winterborne for a little way,
to the market town, the first stage of her evening
flight: then came a storm of rain, preventing her
journey. In this distress, Winterborne entreated
her to remain, till morning, in his hut: while he
passed the night under some hurdles. But his ,

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

troubles and hard work, had already told upon
him: and that night’s exposure ensured, as he
had foreseen, the overthrow of his strength. Grace,
not dreaming of his illness, agreed to his plausible
arguments, that she should remain, where she was:
until, the fever prostrating him, he could no longer
come to speak with her. At last, the truth broke
in upon her: and, going out to his wretched shelter,
she found him unconscious. The rest need not be
told : he died, a loyal sacrifice to the purity of her
honour and of his love; a reparation, partly, for
his one act of ‘treachery,’ in having once suffered
her to make him express his love, during her brief
delusion into happiness; when he had already
learned, that it was a delusion.

In weak hands, such a character would have
been weak also: the rustic lover, unsuccessful in
his love, would have been either sullen or frantic :
his hope of success at last, through the divorcing
of his successful rival, would in itself have seemed
nauseous or absurd; and his behaviour in that
hope, of necessity, undignified: even his death
would have been but a blunderer’s last chance of
redeeming his blunders, by a self-sacrifice less
resolute than dogged. There is none of this
in Mr. Hardy’s handling of the story: without
idealizing the man; without any dexterous en-
listment of our sympathies, by hints of some
finer strain in his nature, than the mere facts
reveal ; without any shrinking from the homeliness
and the rusticity of his life; Mr. Hardy, through

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

,the strength of his belief in the truth and beauty
\of his conception, wins us without a struggle.
Winterborne is not blameless, and therefore
impossible to understand: nor is he perfect in
mind and person, a tiresome model of the rustic
proprieties: we can be amused by the arrange-
ments of his household, and be shocked by his
taste in hostelries: he is handed over to our
scrutinies and to our mercies, a natural Wessex
woodlander. Even when he lies dead before us;
and when the two women, who loved him, Grace,
whom he never won, and Marty, whom he never
loved, meet in his presence; Mr. Hardy is not
afraid to provoke our sense of humour: he knows,
how much pity is at the springs of humour.

‘To check her tears she turned, and seeing a
book in the window-bench, took it up. “Look,
Marty, this is a Psalter. He was not an out-
wardly religious man; but he was pure and
perfect in his heart. Shall we read a psalm over
him ?”

‘“QOh, yes, we will; with all my heart!”

‘Grace opened the thin brown book, which poor
Giles had kept at hand mainly for the convenience
of whetting his penknife upon its leather covers.
She began to read in that rich, devotional voice
peculiar to women only on such occasions. When
it was over Marty said, “I should like to pray for
his soul.”

‘“So should I,” said her companion. “ But we
must not.”

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

‘“Why? Nobody would know.”’

The conduct of the story is characteristic of
its writer’s fearlessness: the true lover might so
easily have been rewarded, the unworthy husband
put out of the way: the moral might have been
pointed, how far better are simple happiness and
contentment, than distracting passion and rest-
lessness. As it is, the story has a_ bolder
disentanglement: Grace and Winterborne, her
husband Fitzpiers and her rival Mrs. Charmond,
teach each other lessons of bracing courage:
husband and wife come together at last. We are
not led to suppose, that Fitzpiers was radically
changed by experience: but he was at least
warned, reproved, and strengthened: and the
love, which began to our dismay, ends in a
possible happiness through purification. Grace
and her husband go out to their new trial of life:
and we are left with Marty South, standing by
Winterborne’s grave; while the lines of an old,
forgotten poet run in our minds:

‘Since then, though more I cannot love,
Without thy injury :
As Saints that to an Altar move,
My thoughts shall be.’
The character of Michael Henchard, Mayor of
Casterbridge, is in rich contrast with that of
Giles Winterborne. Henchard was a hay-trusser:
tramping, with his wife and child, along the road,
he came to Weydon-Priors on fair-day. A
turbulent man by nature, of a passionate habit,

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

given to gusts of anger and discontent, he was a
hard man to his weary wife. The wretchedness
of their married life came to an end, for some
twenty years, in a tent at the fair: drunk with
‘laced’ furmity, Henchard sold his wife to a sailor
for five guineas. She thought the transaction
binding, for she was a woman of much simplicity,
and went with the sailor and her child. Next
morning, shamed and remorseful, Henchard made
a solemn vow to touch no strong drink, during
as many years, as he was old that day. Two
years had yet to pass, at the opening of the
next scene, before Henchard might touch strong
drink with a clear conscience. A crowd was
standing outside the chief hotel of Casterbridge,
looking in at a dinner of the municipal magnates:
the worshipful Mr. Henchard was in the chair:
among the crowd were three travellers, just come
to the town. Two of them were Henchard’s wife
and child: the third was a Scotch youth, Donald
Farfrae. The four actors were upon the stage
together, all in an almost equal ignorance of their
past, present, and future relationships, worthy of
the Attic theatre. Henchard had worked his
imperious way up to this height of prosperity,
retrieving his self-respect, and concentrating his
pride of will. The four actors mingled their
fortunes: Henchard, under the guise of a new
marriage, took back his wife, whose buyer, she
said, was dead: she had found Henchard after a
long search, telling Elizabeth-Jane, that he was
198
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

a kinsman, but not the truth of the kinship.
Farfrae became the Mayors manager in his
business of corn-dealer. The Mayor, then, had
redeemed his past wrong, and was proud of his
present prosperity: the rest of the story tells,
how that past wrong had yet to bring its in-
evitable and grievous penalty of sorrows; and
how Henchard allied himself to his pursuing fate,
through that stubborn pride and passion of his
will, which had caused alike his old wrong doing,
his repentanee, and his prosperity. In the in-
sanity of his jealous pride, he dismissed Farfrae,
his most faithful servant and friend, to whose
knowledge and skill he owed an increased
prosperity: he would not have his man for his
master: though the ‘man’ was innocent of any
such thought. Farfrae established himself in
business, and against his own will, by the talents
which had enriched Henchard, now drew away
his prosperity: and he crowned his unconscious
offences by marrying a lady, to whom Henchard,
believing his sold wife to be dead, had not only
the right, but had been bound by honour, to
regard himself as pledged. After his wife’s actual
death, Farfrae frustrated his wish to fulfil that
pledge. He felt little affection for his daughter
Elizabeth-Jane, while her mother lived: but then,
feeling his loneliness, he told her that not the
sailor, as she had believed, but he, was her father;
giving her a kindly, falsified version of the old
tragedy. A warm love would have sprung up

199
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

between them, to the joy of both: and again
_Henchard became the minister of his own down-
fall. Finding a paper left by his wife, not to be
opened till the girl’s wedding day, he disregarded
the direction, and opened it: it was his wife’s
confession, that Elizabeth-Jane was not their
child: that child died three months after the
fair: Elizabeth-Jane was the sailor’s child. In
mortification at the mockery of things, he treated
her with such harsh coldness, that she left him
with his consent, to live with a lady come to the
town, whose acquaintance she had made: the lady
was Lucetta, who was to become Farfrae’s wife.
For though engaged to Henchard, she fell in love
with Farfrae: strengthened in her consequent
dislike to Henchard, by the publication of his
“early crime. The furmity seller, an old woman
fallen from that flourishing estate, was brought
before Henchard and the magistrates for drunk-
enness: and then, recognising the actor in that
scene at her tent, she told the story: Henchard
confirming her. This scandal turned the scale
against him in the public judgment: and his
affairs, rashly undertaken and roughly managed,
since Farfrae’s dismissal, ended in bankruptcy.
He hired two rooms of a cottage in a melancholy
quarter: his landlord was a man, whom he had
long ago cashiered or disappointed, to make
room for Farfrae, then the bosom friend of his
violent affections. Farfrae bought his old house
and place of business, treating Henchard with

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(cuaracters OF MEN AND wom )

infinite tact and delicacy in offers of help: but
Henchard, in a fit of half grim, half noble,
humour at the vicissitudes of life, asked for a
place among Farfrae’s men. The years of his”
vow were now ended: and drink brought him
into a yet closer correspondence with his early
fortunes, obliterating the signs of his advance
in life, from his temper and from his will. By
an hundred ways, the reversal was completed.
Lucetta, his rival’s wife, had written to him, during
their former intimacy, letters of an effusive kind:
these she begged him now to restore, He gave
them to his former victim and present landlord,
to give to her: he first, in hatred of Henchard,
reads them in a low haunt of poachers and loose
women; who learn that Farfrae, now Mayor,
has a wife married to him in defiance of a
previous engagement; a chance for that uproari-
ous form of public censure, the ‘ skimmity-ride.’
It was carried out: Lucetta, overcome with
shame, fell into a violent disorder, and died with
fearful suddenness. Henchard, just before this,
had nearly murdered Farfrae, in a seizure of
wrath and madness: then, smitten with a horror
of remorse, remembering all the past, had longed
to make amends. Upon the night of Lucetta’s
shame, her husband was away: Henchard grasp-
ing at his chance, hastened to meet him, with
entreaties to return at once: Farfrae, disbelieving
his story, and suspecting some scheme of violence,
refused ; and he returned to find his wife dead.
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Each step of these miseries was Henchard’s act,
voluntary, or, against his will, inevitable. Now
one thing alone remained: the love of Elizabeth-
Jane, who still thought him to be her father, and
had sought him out, and tended him. All his
passionate affection went out towards this child
of the man, to whom he had sold her mother:
nothing, surely, could rob him of her love. Then
came the last blow: her real father was not dead ;
but content to let her mother think him lost at
sea, because she had heard in agony, that she
still was Henchard’s wife, and not her buyer’s
by law and right; and he now came to find
his daughter, knowing that her mother had
returned to Henchard, and was now dead.
Henchard told him, that Elizabeth-Jane was dead
too: hoping against hope, that he would go away,
believing it, not rob him of that one solace, her
companionship and love. But, inevitably, the
sailor came to find the truth: and father and
daughter met at last. Henchard had schooled
himself, with sore pains, to accept the fact, that
she was in love with Farfrae: who had loved her,
till Henchard, by his jealous action, threw him in
the way of Lucetta’s fascination. But the return
of her father was more than he could bear,
remaining among the scenes of his long life: her
contempt and dislike would be intolerable. When,
therefore, he learned that she was about to meet
a stranger, whom he knew to be her father,
the stranger having asked for an interview with

202
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN
her: he told her, that he would leave her to a
happy married life, and leave Casterbridge, giving
broken reasons for his resolve. He dressed again
in rustic clothes, bought a new basket, ‘cleaned
up his old hay-knife and wimble, and tramped
out of the town, where he had been so eminent a
citizen, the lowly figure, that entered it long ago.
He first went to Weydon-Priors, the scene of his
old disgrace: then, with bitterness at heart,
wandered till he came into Egdon: and there he
died, and was found dead by the married lovers,
both of whom he had hated and loved so well. I
know few histories more poignant than this: none,
which more perfectly fulfil the great de demands of
Aristotle upon the composers of dramatic plot,
and the conceivers.of dramatic character. There
is no forced contrivance of artifices, by which to
bring about so exact and relentless a retribution :
for good and bad, Henchard is his own fate, and
to himself ‘both lee and | impulse: : at the end of”
all, he cries aloud : ‘My puni ly punishment i is not greater
than I can bear! cP And there is no glamour about
him, no halo of tragic greatness, as there were
none about Winterborne. Henchard is no o such
splendid victim of his consuming passions, as are
some northern men famous in romance: he i is
no Heathcliff, but a far more commonplace man.
Yet his story moves almost as deep, if not
nearly as fierce, a compassion: the man is so like
a child in his simplicity, so like a hurt animal: he
_seems to feel the fatality of his own acts, and to
203
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

make no complaint; he has no vast self-pity.
‘Misery taught him nothing more than a defiant
endurance of it’: the fates were so much more
practised in the ways of life, than this poor,
passionate man, that we give him the pity, he
would not give himself: yet we own the justice
of his lifelong discipline. The book does but
enforce, with fresh vigour, that ancient truth, by
noone stated more forcibly, than by the genial
Neapolitan :

‘Sumus hic tot Inferi, quot homines vivimus,
Suusgue guisgue adirus est Erebus stbi,

These two men, Winterborne and Henchard, are
probably the best examples of Mr. Hardy’s
enduring heroes : the rest seem allied in character
to one or other of them. John Loveday’s carriage
towards Anne Garland has much of Winterborne’s
natural courtesy, with something of a worldlier
air, acquired in his profession of arms. Farmer
Boldwood, the silent, keen man, driven desperate
and maniacal with passion for Bathsheba, has that
intensity which we could imagine in Henchard,
had his fortune in love been the same. In Diggory
Venn the reddleman, and in Gabriel Oak the
shepherd, Mr. Hardy has drawn portraits of the
patient lover, with a more decided insinuation of
kindly humour into his work: the reddleman’s
fantastic figure, as he lurks among the Egdon
hills and trenches, to surprise news of import to
his lost mistress Thomasin, has a touch of the
204
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN
grotesque about it; and Gabriel’s devotion to
Bathsheba the farmer adorns a character, sturdy
indeed, but of less distinction, than we like to
admit.

The braggarts and roisterers compose a curious
group: they are rustical with a twang of the
town, ill conditioned and shifty fellows: or men
of wider knowledge and of higher station, who
show to disadvantage among the country folk:
Wildeve, Sergeant Troy, Bob Loveday, Festus
Derriman, Edward Springrove, Edred Fitzpiers, ;
Angel Clare. Doubtless, it is not quite discri-
minating to class all these together: there are
wide gradations of offensiveness between many
of them. But a swagger of body, or a swagger
of soul, is common to them all: a lack of good
manners, in the bearing of mind or person. ‘He
that was only taught by himself,” says Ben
Jonson, ‘had a fool to his Master.’ These men
were so taught; their masters were all foolish:
for though one be a soldier, and one a sailor; one
a doctor of great science and good family, and
one the enlightened son of that poor thing, a
theologian ; one a small squire in the yeomanry,
and one an engineer turned innkeeper: one and
all follow their own wills and ways, not with a
just pride, but with a jaunty petulance. Whether
it be Festus, talking big about his gallantry
and martial merits, to the placid cottagers of
Qvercombe ; or Angel, pluming himself upon his
liberality of mind, in contrast with the timid

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

orthodoxy of his brothers: it is to be surmised,
that the valour and the freedom are but sorry
stuff; and the course of events in each case
proves it true. Against the insolent cowardice
of Festus is set the quiet courage of John:
against the vagueness of Clare is set the steadi-
ness of Tess. Neither the man of blood, nor the
man of thought, handsels well his valour or his
freedom. All the men of this class have their
excellent qualities, but qualities alloyed and
damaged by an infusion of something impure:
some spirit of selfishness, or of heartlessness, or of
coxcombry, which obtains an exaggerated power
in their compositions. There are no ‘villains,
except Atneas Manston, and not wholly he, in
Mr. Hardy’s Wessex ; men of deliberate malice,
vowed to the service of evil, and trustworthy
in their service: we meet but irritable egoists
rejoicing, neither in right nor in wrong, but in
themselves. Some of them became laughing-
stocks of their own pretentions: Clare and Fitz-
piers; conscious, the one of finer aims and ideals,
the other of wider knowledge and experience,
than the people about them possessed; made
their acts a parody of their pretensions: Clare
fell away from his high, theoretic rule of life, into
just that petty, pharisaic disproportion, for which
he blamed the world, and his own family ; Fitz-
piers, who thought himself, whom his humble
neighbours thought, worthier of Grace than one
of themselves, knew nothing of her value, till his

206
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

homely rival had died to serve her. Such men
are schooled into distrust of self by mortification,
shamed into modesty by mockery of their pride:
the dimensions of their failure are a cruel comment
upon the dimensions of their confidence: they
are left thrilling and tingling from the scourge
of an instructive irony. Most of the others in
this set are less prigs, than scapegraces: not
scapegraces, who take our hearts by storm, with
their engaging follies ; but unamiable scapegraces,
who drift and dangle into dishonour. Sergeant
Troy indeed, whose character is illuminated by
Mr. Hardy in ten most brilliant paragraphs, almost
cajoles the reader into tolerance, as he cajoled
women into admiration. ‘He never passed the
line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly’:
and thus, according to Burke’s one sophism, his
vices seem to lose ‘half their evil.’ But he isa
flashy proficient in the elegances of vice. As he
dazzled and enchaunted Bathsheba by his miracles
of sword play, in that hollow among the ferns,
so it was by the quick keenness and flashing’
assault of his manner and speech, that he won her
heart: and what a contrast are those displays
to the slow, laborious, faithful, ways of Gabriel!
A vulgar paladin, after all, the Sergeant: even
when he and his wife meet over the coffin of Fanny
Robin, the woman whom he had betrayed and
abandoned, his agonies of contrite love for Fanny,
and his deliberate insults to Bathsheba, are but
sentiments, the most like sincerity possible, of a
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

theatrical conscience. Bob Loveday, without the
intellect of Troy, and with a sailor’s professional
temperament in place of a soldier’s, is not unlike
him: one can imagine both men, lace ruffles fall-
ing over their white hands, with an incommuni-
cable air of elegance, insolence, and ease, the
heroes of old comedy. They would have been
at home there: the one hard and brilliant as a
diamond, the other full of shallow sentiment and
charm. These men bring into Mr. Hardy’s most
rural books a strain of worldliness, in the lighter
sense of that condemnation, which the word im-
plies. Wessex can furnish its own great crime
and sin: but its casual, careless peccadilloes are
uninteresting, unless some wider experience has
touched them ; experience, however contemptible
and slight, some hint of superior education, some
trace of the world’s bustle and business ; anything
that flashes, or struts, or shifts, will serve to pass
across the scenes of a play, in which braggarts
and fops are wanted, as foils to more passionate
and steady natures.

Of the women, whose characters and fortunes are
pourtrayed by Mr. Hardy, most various opinions
may be held. Some have that winning audacity,
the charm of strength, which marks in diverse
manners those gentle ladies, Captain Keeldar, Sir
Julius, and Count von Rosen, the creations of
other eminent hands; some are alternately ‘ caute-
lous’ and ‘temerarious,’ old words of too exact
a meaning to be lost: some have a distant like-

208
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

ness to Miss Austen’s great characters, a likeness
that takes us by surprise: some almost incur from
Dr. Johnson the charge of flirtation, since he de-
fines a flirt to be ‘a pert young hussey.’ I cannot
think that any one of them is so powerfully con-
ceived and drawn, as are the best of Mr. Hardy’s~
men: but more cleverness, more adroitness and
dexterity of wit, more research, have gone to their
portraits. An admiration of their versatility, in
maintaining their consistency, is the sentiment,
which they provoke: an amazed awe of the infinite
ingenuities, which their sincerity can devise for
its protection. ‘A very little wit, wrote Swift,
‘is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a
few words spoken plain by a parrot.’ That is too
often the dangerous and ignorant view of woman’s
wit, entertained by Mr. Hardy’s men, with dis-
tressing consequences.

Eustacia, Lucetta, Ethelberta, Bathsheba, Vivi-
ette, Felice, Elfride, and some of the noble
dames, how admirable is the contrast between,
these and Anne, Faith, Grace, Elizabeth-Jane,/
Thomasin, Charlotte, Marty South! Upon the
one side, all shades and lights of passion, petu-
lance, perversity: upon the other, of reticence,
patience, and restraint. The violent or ambitious
natures are more opulent and prodigal in their
demeanour ; mood follows mood, they are always
in a state of revolution against themselves: the
quiet or constant natures are more refined and
proud in their bearing ; they suffer, but in silence

209 oO
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY
and with strength. Not one of them all is a copy
of any other: but these are the general distinc-
tions and divisions to be traced among them.
Eustacia is a masterpiece of pathetic satire.
‘Queen of night, she is described in the most
gorgeous chapter, that Mr. Hardy has yet written :
gorgeous, with a royal pomp and pride of magni-
ficent phrases, but all perfectly restrained and
measured. ‘She had Pagan eyes, full of noc-
turnal mysteries’: she was a dreamer of great
dreams, and in love with the imageries of an
heroic love: allied with the rich and solemn
beauty of things, a votarist of supreme powers,
majesties, and splendours, rather felt than con-
ceived: her looks and ways, those of an antique
divinity: vera zncessu patuit dea: a lonely, pas-
sionate, and hungering spirit, in a marvellous form,
among the wastes of Egdon: set apart for tragedy
tocome. Thus far, she is an imperial recluse, of
a grandeur equal to that of Egdon itself: but Mr.
Hardy did not create her, without indulging his
sense of humour. She is drawn, a very rival of
Rachel’s great portrait in V7l/ette: but she has
not the tragic chances of the stage. In bitter
contrast with her ideals, she has but the wretched
wastes of Egdon, the stupid labourers, the mad-
dening unworldliness of the wilderness: and she
knew Weymouth in earlier days. Just as that
respectable place was to her a modern Paris and
an ancient Rome, so Damon Wildeve was a very
prince of romance: a trivial fellow, of decent
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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

looks and a little education. Rejecting him for
Clym Yeobright, she takes Clym for a born leader
of men, who will go with her into all the brilliance
of all the world: she finds him bent upon plain
living and high thinking, and is in despair, deso-
late and famished, outside the whirl of pleasures,
triumphs, joys. Her pitiful standards of great-
ness, pitiful ignorance of life, pitiful hunger of
heart, not wholly vulgar nor absurd, yet in large
measure both, make her a masterpiece: seldom
has a woman’s impatient craving for the fullness
of life, and the freedom of action, been so set
down in words; one doubts, whether to call the
portrait the most cruel of caricatures, or the most
superb of likenesses. But without doubt, Eustacia
was both lamentable and ridiculous: contrasted
with Egdon, she could but suffer. Egdon ‘reduced
to insignificance by its seamed and antique features
the wildest turmoil of a single man’: and still
more the rushing rhetoric of this woman’s vehement
longings, those

‘ Impériales fantaisies,

Amour des somptuosités ;

Voluptueuses frénésies,

Réves d’impossibilité:!’
Much, that is seemingly wayward in some of these
women, can be explained by Bathsheba’s pleading
criticism: ‘It is difficult for a woman to define
her feelings in language which is chiefly made by
men to express theirs’: which recalls the quaint
sagacity of Clarissa in observing, that ‘the men
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

were the framers of the matrimonial office’
Mr. Hardy expresses well that dissatisfaction
with the refractory strictness of language, which
distresses a woman, when she would speak, not
the logic of thought, but the logic of emotion:
she has all manner of real convictions, hidden
deep in her consciousness, but only explicable
by hints and suggestions, which sound like the
shifts of a prevaricator. She feels, that ‘the
plain truth’ does but give the lie to a great
many obscure truths, hard of definition, but pro-
foundly true. In some crisis, when she must act;
at some question, to which she must reply: she
struggles against the necessity, shrinking from the
bluntness of a decision. Thrice, Mr. Hardy repre-
sents a woman, recoiling from her purpose in this
way. Elfride made up her mind to tell Knight,
her engaged lover, that she was once engaged
to Smith: when the time came, she pretended
that the matter of her confession was merely
her precise age, about which she had led him into
error. Tess, in the same way, could only bring her-
self to confess to Angel, that she was a D’Urber-
ville: she could not confess the haunting secret of
her history. Lady Constantine, having sent for
Mr. Torkingham the parson, to disclose certain
confidences about her husband and herself, sent him
away in ignorance, and chose Swithin the young
astronomer for her confidant. In the case of
Elfride and of Tess, there appears a justification
for the cowardice and the deception, in the conduct

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

of Knight and of Clare, when the truth at last
appeared: both men heard that they had been
forestalled, with an unreasoning jealousy and
anger ; that temper, which has so often roused the
laughter and the scorn of Mr. Meredith. A strange
impression is left upon the reader by these
characters, half crafty and half agonized; the
sense, that they are snared and tangled in a net;
birds, so trapped, cower down, very still, with
bright, wild eyes, then flutter desperately : just so,
these various troubled women have their times
of quiet resignation to harsh facts, succeeded by
breathless battle. Much that at first offends us,
as a representation of women, almost insulting,
proves on reflection to be a tribute to their
honesty: they are bewildered and distracted,
where men would see no difficulty and require no
casuistry, from their incapacity to see all sides of |
the case. Elfride had three engagements and one
marriage ; Bathsheba had three engagements and
two marriages: and there were circumstances in
either instance, which demand a somewhat deli-
cate justification. To those who would seriously
censure Elfride or Bathsheba, I would say in Miss
Austen’s words: ‘Your reasoning is very good,
but it is founded on ignorance of human nature.’
Equally free from reproach is the momentary
falseness of Fancy Day, in accepting Mr. May-
bold ; carried away, despite her love for Dick, by
the sudden chance of ‘stepping into history,’ or at
least, of entering an higher rank of life: just as
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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Margery Tucker’s romantic friendship with the
Baron amply excused her perverseness. I ndis-
cretion, the defect of that good quality, a quick
wit, is often imputable to these various characters :
the child Elfride, and the great lady, Viviette, are
not wholly blameless; the innocence of Elfride,
and the experience of Viviette, should have
hindered, even whilst they caused, the rashness
of the first, and the intoxication of the second.
Sometimes Mr. Hardy illustrates that different
feeling about the relative value of things, enter-
tained by an emotional woman, and by a man,
whose intellect has grown faster than his emotion.
Swithin, the young astronomer, with the beauty of
Nero, the heart of a child, and the ardour of
Copernicus, talked to Viviette about the stars,
in a rapture of intellectual enthusiasm: Lady
Constantine merely said, ‘Say some more of it
to me’: no words could express more heartily
her sentimental pleasure in watching the boy’s
eloquent, beautiful face, in hearing his inspired
voice. ‘Say some more of it to me’: the hope-
less inadequacy of the phrase to the occasion
is inimitable.

It is a relief to turn from these to less disquieting
characters: to women who, like Anne Garland,
could reconcile ' dignity with sweetness’: of whom
it could be said ; ‘beneath all that was charming
and simple in this young woman there lurked a
real firmness, unperceived at first, as the speck of
colour lurks unperceived in the heart of the palest

214
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

parsley flower. Perhaps none of these strong and
quiet women is more gently attractive, than Faith
Julian ; whom one does not immediately learn to
esteem at her true value: it requires the wearying
agility of Ethelberta’s ambition, to set off the rest-
ful charm of Faith. It was true of Ethelberta,
that ‘the oscillations of her mind might arise as
naturally from the perfection of its balance, like
those of a logan-stone, as from inherent lightness’ :
but such perfections are doubtful blessings, Faith,
Elizabeth-Jane, Anne, and a few more, are more
stable natures, not rocking in a perpetual indeci-
sion: nor yet, by the alternative perfection, motion-
less from inability to choose one of two bundles
of hay; like Buridan’s famous ass, which so greatly
puzzled Bayle. They do not fill a book with their
flighty humours, nor show us the perplexity of
their minds, and the troubles of their souls, upon
every page: dene latent, they are well cloistered
in the seclusion of their own thoughts. A very
haunting scene is that in the British Museum,
where Faith, intent upon her sense of a wonderful
reality, face to face with the sculptures of Nineveh,
visionary kings and cities of Scripture, eternized
in that barbaric art, listens to her brother’s story
of his rejection by Ethelberta, without hearing a
word of it: her mind enthralled by the sudden
spell of a great antiquity. Henchard too knew
the spell of an unworldly art, transporting him to
the land, ‘that is very far off” even farther than
old Assyria : ‘with Henchard music was of regal
are
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

power. The merest trumpet or organ tone was
enough to move him and high harmonies transub-
stantiated him.’ Elizabeth-Jane found a strength
and stay in the Roman traditions of Casterbridge :
and to Marty South the woods were full of sad,
wise voices. These women, at least, ‘have some
roses from Pieria.’ There is no trace of uncomely
sternness or defiance, coldness or firmness, in these
women: but they are not weak: harassed by the
bewilderment of love, they do not fall into danger
or indignity. A certain manliness in such perfect
women gives them a curious grace of courage: and
they shape their sorrows into finer forms, than do
men. Mr. Hardy’s art in his presentations of
women, whatever be their natures, might well
draw to him readers, whom Wessex does not win
by itself: for his fertility of imagination is greatest,
when the fortunes of a woman’s soul are his study.
He knows the wealth of meaning in a woman’s
acts: meaning, not to be come at by any brutal
_impatience of meditation, by the laziness of hasty
epigram. In three novels, two of old fame, one of
recent success, V2llette, The Marble Faun,and The
New Antigone, there is an identical scene: a
woman, in the first two cases not a Catholic, in
the third not a Christian, suddenly mastered by
the appeal of the confessional, to disburden her
conscience there. The three scenes are outwardly
identical: inwardly, there is no single feature
common to them. It is so with all the acts and
circumstances of life: there is no repetition: and

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

Mr. Hardy has brought home to us that variety,
by his diverse treatment of passion in characters
and under conditions, outwardly often uniform.
That singular group of Noble Dames, disinterred
from the decaying traditions of Wessex, furnished
him with an humourous means of illustrating the
diversity of women’s character, in strange and
trying ways: the book is a gothic work of the
quainter sort ; an indulgence of truth in whimsical
evidences. It is true, that he has now and again
allowed himself satire, to which the ill-disposed
may impute an element of contempt: but the
contempt, if it be there, is a contempt of men.
‘An evill spirit, your beautie haunts Me still,’ sang
Drayton to his /dea:

‘Thus am I till provok’d to every Evill,
By this good wicked Spirit, sweet Angell Devill.’

It were a mistake, to attribute malice to
Drayton’s muse, in that simple confession of his
own embarrassed and unequal love.

There is an attractive set of youths, as charac-
teristic of Mr. Hardy’s books, as Marius, Sebastian,
Gaston, are characteristic in the works of Mr.
Pater: these are the youths, who with a simpli-
city native to the soil, a literal humility, combine.
an energy, often artistic, which has raised them
to another level. Somerset, Owen Graye, and
Smith, are architects: Christopher Julian is a
musician: Swithin St. Cleeve is an astronomer :
Yeobright is an idealist upon ways of life and

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

thought: Farfrae is an artist in commerce, with a
moving gift of sentiment and song. They havea
charming persuasiveness in their eager, brilliant,
ways and looks; or in their dreamy persistence,
a gentle serenity of purpose, which effects much,
and seems to effect nothing. Julian had ‘an
under feeling’ always in him, ‘that at the most
propitious moment the distance to the possibility
of sorrow is so shert, that a man’s spirits must not
rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare
respect to his insight.’ A thoroughly Greek piece
of natural wisdom: and a later sentiment of the
young musician in love is Greek also. ‘ His habit
of dreaming instead of doing led him up to a
curious discovery. It is no new thing fora man
to fathom profundities by indulging humours:
the active, the rapid, the people of splendid
momentum, have been surprised to behold what
results attend the lives of those, whose usual plan
for discharging their active labours has been
to postpone them indefinitely. Certainly, the
immediate result in the present case was, to all
but himself, small and invisible: but it was of the
nature of highest things.” It was, that his lost
mistress might become to him a ‘Creature of
Contemplation,’ and thus ‘almost a living soul’:
a lover’s perverse theory of ideas, Platonic twice
over. Asarule, it is the function of these youths,
active or contemplative, to be drawn by virtue of
their temperaments, and by the same virtue to
draw others, into love: commonly with the result,

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

that they prove to have, and to have been,
attracted wrongly. Their peculiar blessing of a
genius, apparent in and through their youthful-
ness, misleads their mistresses into thinking them
all beautiful and all young, ignoring the necessary
hard grounds of all effective genius: while the
youths find a natural charm in the condescension
of a woman’s love, without the prosaic foresight
of considering its kind. Yeobright and Eustacia,
Swithin and Viviette, are cases in point: perhaps
also, Farfrae and Lucetta, Ethelberta and Julian.
At the least, a delightful vivacity, or a delicate
pensiveness, pervades some of Mr. Hardy’s books,
thanks to this band of youths.

Such, then are a few of Mr. Hardy’s chief char-
acters: and what a multitude of others throng his
Wessex! He has dispossessed it of the living, to
people it with the creatures of his art: rather, the
two peoples have become one. The very memo-
ries of literature in Dorset fail to impress us, when
our minds are full of Mr. Hardy’s pageant. In
the north-east, we forget that Voltaire walked ‘on
Dorset Downs’ with Young, under the auspices
of Dodington, Thomson’s patron, Browning’s
victim : we forget how Gibbon, during his military
career, tasted ‘the dissipations of Blandford,’ that
birthplace of ‘Virgil’ Pitt and of ‘Lucretius’
Creech: in the south-west, we forget that Words-
worth wrote his dreadful tragedy at Race-
down, first meeting Coleridge there: that Mill in
his laborious childhood visited Bentham at Ford

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Abbey: that Wyatt died, and Raleigh lived, at
Sherborne. On Portland, it is not the drowning
of Wordsworth’s brother, when his ship went
down off the Bill, but Anne Garland’s sorrow,
that we remember. Upon the Dorset coast,
Keats wrote his last great sonnet: it was the
last English earth under his feet: but Mr.
Hardy’s storm off Swanage, is more in our
minds. If we think of George IIL, at sight of
that equestrian monarch cut in chalk by Osming-
ton, or along the shores of Weymouth, it is less
history than Mr. Hardy’s fiction, that guides our
thoughts about the kindly king. Lyme Regis,
indeed, is sacred to Anne Elliot, in the eyes of
Miss Austen’s lovers; and, ‘seven miles from
Dorchester, lived Evelina and the Reverend
Mr. Villars, at ‘dear Berry-Hill’; at Stour,
Fielding displayed the disastrous luxury of his
married life; Eustace Inglesant was killed at
Minterne Inn: but the whole of Dorset belongs
to Mr. Hardy.

The characters, which have at once least power
and least originality, are those of sundry gentle-
men, who have no great parts to play: even
Knight, who is of vital importance in the story of
Elfride ; Neigh, who helps much to intensify the
comedy of Ethelberta; Power, the domineering
uncle of Paula the heiress; Lady Constantine's
brother, who provides her with a husband in the
Bishop of Melchester; the Baron Von Xanten,
mysterious and dyspeptic; are not characters,

220
CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

that arrest us very greatly. Knight, in particular,
contrives to disappoint us: he is so dryly real,
that he ought to be more interesting. Like the
others, whom I have mentioned, and many beside,
‘He was at the brightest period of masculine
growth, for his intellect and his emotions were
clearly separated: he had passed the time during
which the influence of youth indiscriminately
mingles them in the character of impulse, and he
had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they
become united again, in the character of prejudice,
by the influence of a wife and family.” It may
be to that very clear separation between the
intellect and the emotions, that the lack of interest
is due: that process is more than a separation, it
is a divorce.

Mr. Hardy’s divines must not be left without a
word of gratitude: they are of many kinds, and
all excellent. There is old Mr. Clare, most love-
able of stern Calvinists: the Baptist minister,
whom young Somerset confronted upon Pzdo-
baptism, for the support of the backsliding Paula :
the Bishop of Melchester, so cruelly fooled in his
marriage: Mr. Swancourt, a genial aristocrat with
the gout, beneficed at the ends of the earth:
others, whose acquaintance we make best through
the criticisms of their flocks, Fitzgerald, in angry
letters about Dorsetshire to Carlyle and to Mr.
Tennyson, describes the two main kinds of country
parson, with whom Mr. Hardy deals. The one
has a touch of Parson Trulliber, and a touch of

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Parson Adams: ‘quaint and humourous,’ Fitz-
gerald calls such an one, ‘quiet and saturnine’:
‘a poor Rector in one of the most out-of-the-way
villages in England—has five children—fats and
kills his pig—smokes his pipe—loves his home and
cares not ever to be seen out of it. But he also
found Dorset much given over to the ‘ Pugicides,’
as the rustics termed the energetic clergy, so
loathed by the late Rector of Lincoln. The
villagers of Mellstock held strong views upon
clerical duty.

«« Ah, Mr. Grinham was the man!” said Bowman.
“Why he never troubled us wi’ a visit from year’s
end to year’s end. You might go anywhere, do
anything : you’d be sure never to see him!”’

But Mr. Grinham’s successor was not, in
Addison’s phrase, a ‘reverend vegetable’: he dis-
established the stringed instruments, and provoked
this perfect utterance from the schoolmistress:
‘Vicars look so miserable and awkward, when
one’s house is in a muddle; walking about
and making quaint impossible suggestions in
academic phrases, till your flesh creeps and you
wish them dead.’ The rural clergy in these
Wessex novels provide admirable mirth, and
quite good-humoured.

It is a rare praise, to say of a book that it-is
passionate, without a necessity to add, that it
lapses into rhetoric and rant: it is largely true of
Mr. Hardy’s books. There are few passages, in
which the passion swells into big words: but

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CHARACTERS OF MEN AND WOMEN

many, in which it uses the heightened tones of
nature, words powerful and moving, in all the
keys of emotion, yet utterly free from bombast.
Mr. Hardy has written some scenes, created some
characters, of a passion almost unbearable for
poignancy: but with little more ‘fine language,’
than we find in Thucydides’ Sicilian Expedition,
or in Caesar's Siege of Alesia. There are some
popular novelists just now, romantic, passionate,
grandiose, who can scarcely be read, without re-
calling Dryden’s happy wit. He writes of dis-
eased authors: ‘ Another, who had a great Genzus
for Zragedy, following the Fury of his natural
Temper, made every Man and Woman too, in his
Play, stark raging mad: there was not a sober
Person to be had for Love or Money: All was
tempestuous and blustering: Heaven and Earth
were coming together at every Word; a mere
Hurricane from the beginning to the endl and
every Actor seem’d to be hastening on the Day
of Judgement.’

Mr. Hardy’s control over his art is a good
example, for our day of - tempestuous writing: an

example of sanity, of beauty, and of strength.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

VI
SINCERITY IN ART

‘IT requires a talented omission of your real
thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.’
Knight indulged his rather acrid temper in that
sarcasm: and Elfride consoled him with more
sarcasm unawares. ‘Is that really necessary?
Well, I am sure you could learn to do that with
practice.’

It is often asserted, that practice has made most
English novelists perfect in this art of omission,
and that popularity has rewarded hypocrisy:
there are shrill prophets among us, who denounce
our average novel, as our national vice. When-
ever lamentations and denunciations rend the air,
come they from Tory or from Radical, the poor
listener would do well, to recall the wisdom of
Savile the Trimmer : ‘What do angry men ail, to
rail so against moderation? Does it not look as
if they were going to some very scurvy extreme,
that is too strong to be digested by the more con-
sidering part of mankind?’ It is none too easy
a task, to determine the just proportions, which
right reason would assign to the contending

224
SINCERITY IN ART

elements in artistic work: the senses and the
imagination, the claims of constraining morality
and the claims of creative desire, are in persistent
warfare. ‘In the present day, said Cardinal
Newman, ‘mistiness is the mother of wisdom’:
it is tempting to cut the knot, by declaring that
art and morals have nothing in common: or that
one must give way to the other. These theories
might be rational in Utopia, and lucid in a Land
of the Fourth Dimension: they are inexpressibly
meaningless, here and now. Not even music, that
art so independent of matter, is disconnected from
morality: the great Greek critics of art and
morals would have been astounded at that notion.
So long as art proceeds from, and appeals to, men
of a whole and harmonious nature, art must
express that wholeness and that harmony: an
artist is forbidden, by the facts of his natural
structure, to dissociate his ethics from his
aesthetics: as well might he try to live by bread
alone, without exercising reason, or by reason
alone, not eating bread. Certainly, he can mutilate
his mind: not indeed, as yet, by a physical
mortification or excision of his conscience; but
by a culture of morbid tendencies in thought and
will ; of which the end is to find

‘his moral powers gone idiot,
And his intellect sane, to watch them,

Not a few writers of our time are engaged in those
watches of the night: not a few are fascinated by
225 P
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

another variety of contemplation; they ‘shut
their eyes, and look into their stomachs, and call
it introspection.’ Further, there is no little cant
upon all sides: writers of the poorest stuff, which
is not literature at all, talk boldly of their high,
artistic mission: they cry out, with Lady Wishfort
in the play; ‘If you think the least scruple of
carnality was an ingredient!’ These suspicious
and suspected persons, could we believe them,
are all for the dignity of sacred art: just as the
loudest clamourers against many public burdens
are those, who do not bear them. Now, as in
Swift’s age, ‘some men, under the notion of knead-
ing out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty, and
religion’; and now, as in Swift’s age, ‘ when a true
genius appears in the world, you may know him
by this sign, that the dunces are in confederacy
against him.’ Extremes are just now in fashion
and in favour, with this unfortunate result: that
catholicity of taste is set down, as the sign of
lukewarmness and of half-heartedness: he must
be indifferent to the great issues at stake, the
great principles involved, who can see ‘much to
be said on both sides.’ It is very tiresome: ‘life
with substantial ills enough is cursed, as the
tragic Smollett observes, without this additional
pest of artistic parties: may we not be allowed
to like Dr. Ibsen, and to dislike M. Verlaine ; or
to like M. Verlaine, and to dislike Dr. Ibsen; or
to like or dislike them both; without being held
guilty of a mortal sin? We are so violent in

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SINCERITY IN ART

these days ; and, to our irreparable loss, there is
no Arnold left to charm us into serenity: there
are four noisy schools, who deafen us with their
controversies. There are those, who preach the
principle of art for art’s sake: those, who preach
the principle, that art is bound to preach the
dogmas of Christianity: those, who preach the
principle, that art is bound to preach the dogmas
of almost everything else: and those, who preach
the principle, that art has no principles at all.
Like most heresies, these doctrines contain, each
a distorted fragment of truth: and, like orthodoxy,
art survives all its abuses. ‘What Art can be
more pernicious,’ asks Sir Henry Wotton, ‘than
even Religion itself, if itself be converted into an
Instrument of Art? Therefore, Ad abuti ad non
utt, negatur consequentia.’

' Mr. Hardy has written an essay upon Candour
in English Fiction, expressing his sense of the
difficulties, under which the novelist lies: diffi-
culties, due to the trammelling of his thought, by
the puritan shackles of his readers; difficulties,
created by ‘the censorship of prudery. The
essay, it hardly need be said, is admirably dignified
and grave: there is nothing in it of the fanatic’s
excitement. But it states a few reasons, why so
large a proportion of English novels compose ‘a
literature of quackery’: a literature false to truth,
afraid of truth. ‘The crash of broken command-
ments, writes Mr. Hardy, with equal force and
fineness, ‘is as necessary an accompaniment to

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

the catastrophe of a tragedy as the noise of drum
and cymbals to a triumphal march. English
readers, the vast majority of them, coercing, and
coerced by, the commercial producers and dis-
tributors of books, will not endure that music of
the nether sphere: they are all for a lulling,
soothing, comfortable strain. Upon this, two
remarks may be made. First, the writer cannot
with justice complain, if the public taste be
against his works: he can only regret it. By
the act of publication, the writer gives over his
work to the public judgment: he has no rights
over that judgment. He can think it a foolish
judgment, a stupid and a dull judgment: he may
strive to bring the judges to a better mind, to
purge their blind eyes, and to enlighten their
dark minds: he may find solace in the thought of
time, the final arbiter and judge of appeal. But
he has no right to command applause and the
verdict of success: he trades in a fine art, and
offers his best to the public: the public is under
no obligation to like it. Secondly, it is not
criminal to enjoy poor art, provided that the
enjoyer do not enjoy it for artistic reasons: let us
consider the example of Darwin. In early life, he
loved great poetry, painting, and music: immersed
in scientific studies, he lost those tastes, and
loathed the great arts: the ‘dullness’ of Shake-
speare ‘nauseated’ him. But, on the other hand,
‘novels, which are works of imagination, though
not of a very high order, have been for years a

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wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often
bless all novelists. A wonderful number have
been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately
good, and if they do not end unhappily—against
which a law ought to be passed.’ I do not say,
that novelists with a high respect for their art will
return the blessing of Darwin: but need they
beat the breast, and be indignant? Here was a
man, whose life was devoted, in the face of
vehement antagonism, to the discovery of great
facts about physical science; a man incapable
of loving falsehood, or of concealing truth: his -
devotion to science caused an atrophy of his
aesthetic tastes: yet some refreshment he must
have, in the midst of his labours; and he found it
in stories, that took him away from the fierce
storms of human life, from the vision of conflict
and of pain in the physical order; pleasant,
charming, trifling inventions, all about happy
people and fortunate events. Had the writers of
these stories prefaced them by saying, that they
contained a ripe philosophy of life, the mature
fruits of wise consideration, Darwin would not
have been deceived: but his favourite novelists
made no such pretensions. They pourtrayed life
in bright colours: they wrote fictions, not facts:
their aim was to give simple pleasure, by charming
men into a paradise for a little while: they looked
at the world, and chose out certain cheerful
incidents of life, rejecting certain others: and so
doing, they soothed and rested one of the noblest
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men, that have yet enriched our knowledge.
From pretty tales of happy marriages, Darwin
turned with fresh zest and vigour to an unflinching
pursuit of hard, inexorable, and momentous facts.
The majority of men and women turn from their
work and occupation, in the same spirit, to the
enjoyment of novels: they have no taste for art,
they have no interest in its difficulties, nor in its
triumphs: they want to be amused, and they find
amusement in plausible stories about pleasant
things. ‘Why do you write such melancholy
things? Life is melancholy enough without
that, is their reproach to the serious writer: a
reproach, which shows two things. The cheery,
trivial stories do not mislead them, they wish to
be caressed and charmed into an illusion of happi-
ness: and they know nothing about the joy of an
artist in making beauty out of all things, glad or
sad. And they have great allies: Dr. Johnson
said to Mrs, Sheridan: ‘I know not, Madam, that
you have a right, upon moral principles, to make
your readers suffer so.much’: and Arnold has
immortalized that saying of Joubert about the
soul’s cry, ‘You hurt me!’ Even Mr. Hardy has
protested against ‘the gratuitous infliction’ of
miseries. Doubtless, there are limits to the right
of a smiling author to prophesy smooth things:
when Bentley presents Milton with two new
concluding lines for Paradise Lost,

‘Then hand in hand with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with heav’nly comfort cheered,’
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we do well to be exceeding angry: the principle
of ‘happy endings’ has gone too far. But I must
be allowed to think it an hard task, to discern
infallibly all transgressions of common sense, let
alone, of art, in these matters. To take a famous
instance: the sounding letter of Sulpicius to
Cicero, upon the death of Cicero’s daughter.
‘On my return from Asia, as I sailed towards
Megara from Aé%gina, I fell to surveying the
prospect. Behind me lay A®gina, before me
Megara, to right of me Piraeus, to left of me
Corinth: fallen from their high estate, all fallen!
And in this our day, what men of shining fame
are perished! How is the empire of the Romans
minished! How are the provinces convulsed
and shaken! And now: im unius mulierculae
animula st tactura facta est, tanto opere com-
moveris ?’? The futile elegance of those sentiments,
set to sonorous phrases, after a sentimental
journey! Your child is dead: I am so sorry!
But Ninus and Assaracus are dead too: think of
that, and be comforted! Yet I can hardly doubt,
considering much indubitable evidence about
Stoic endurance and Epicurean calm, that Cicero,
received comfort from such rhetoric: his experience
of the world, and of his own heart, did not wholly
give the lie to its consolations.

For these reasons, then, I think that there is
some exaggeration in the complaints, even of Mr.
Hardy: and the best proof of it is his own work.
In that, there is no courting of the popular tastes,

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no mutilation of thought or of invention, no
pandering to prejudice or to preference of any
kind. His last book shows his courage and
conscientiousness: he need have no concern for
the artistic demerits of lesser men, who do not
claim to be great artists. But, before proceeding
to an examination of Tess, we may well consider
one point in Mr. Hardy’s general view of things,
which may have been some hindrance to his
,popularity: that is, his love for ‘the note of
revolt.’

In a public letter about the recognition of
literary merit by the State, Mr. Hardy writes:
‘ The highest flights of the pen are often, indeed
mostly, the excursions and revelations of souls
unreconciled to life; while the natural tendency
of a government would be to encourage acqui-
escence in life as it is’ In his sombre Egdon
novel, he asks: ‘Was Yeobright’s mind well pro-
portioned? No. A well proportioned mind is one
which shows no particular bias; one of which
we may safely say that it will never cause its
owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a
heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on
the other hand, that it will never cause its owner
to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest,
or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are
happiness and mediocrity. It produces the poetry
of Rogers, the paintings of West, the state-craft of
North, the spiritual guidance of Sumner ; enabling
its possessors to find their way to wealth, to wind

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up well, to step with dignity off the stage, to die
comfortably in their beds, and to get the decent
monument which, in many cases, they deserve.
It never would have allowed Yeobright to do
such a ridiculous thing as to throw up his business
to benefit his fellow-creatures.’ Throughout Mr.
Hardy’s books, this spirit burns with a passionate
flame: his anger grows sometimes to a white
heat: under the grandeur of his eloquence, Roman
and massive, leaps, hardly to be controlled, this
fervour of scorn and wrath. Shelley was not
more grandly angered against Lord Eldon, than is
Mr. Hardy against the powers and the influences,
of an unjust society, and of a false religion.
Accepting, for the moment, the righteousness of
such anger, I yet cannot assent to this attitude:
it is possible to have right motives for revolt, yet
to revolt wrongly. How, and when, and where,
must be considered in all things, according to
the eternal common sense of Aristotle: or the
remedies may prove worse than the diseases.
Here is the sober counsel of one who, like his own
Heine, was a Knight in the War of Liberation:
‘Dissolvents of the old European systems of
dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us
who have any power of working; what we have
to study is that we may not be acrid dissolvents
of it.” Those ‘old European’ systems, in religion
at the least, I regard as eternal and ideal, neither
old nor European: but how wise, with all the
wisdom of a child of this generation, is the

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courtesy of Arnold’s counsel! For again, ‘the
perfection of culture is not rebellion, but peace’:
rebellion is but a lamentable, necessary means to
an end, at best. The great literature has always
expressed the sanity, the measure, the harmony,
of the world: we may confront Mr. Hardy’s irony
about the well-proportioned mind, with the history
of great revolutionaries. Contemplate Socrates in
prison, and Dante in exile: contrast them with
Shelley and with Byron. There is nothing more
pathetic, and nothing more triumphant, than the
figure of Socrates, drawn by his disciple in the
Crito: Socrates is urged to fly from prison, and to
take refuge in Thessaly : the laws have condemned
an innocent man: why should he respect them,
and not rather save a life, full of light and
strength to many? But Socrates hears the voice
of the Laws murmuring in his ears: ‘ Will you fly
to Thessaly, the land of disorder? Will you
break our commands, because men have used us
wrongly? Will you return evil for evil? Will
you go to death and to the lower world, to be
received by our brothers, the Laws of that world,
asanenemy? But, going in innocence, you go a
sufferer of wrong, and not a doer of it. Dante
also: the fruit of his exile was no strain of revolt
alone : he denounced injustice and wrong, he had
no fear of wickedness in high places: but his
solemn meditations, his ‘contemplation every-
where of the sun and stars,’ issued in the most
perfect poem of an universal harmony: modern

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taste seems to prefer Ovid’s 77istia. Socrates, or
Plato speaking for him, and Dante, who certainly
speaks for himself, had minds well balanced, with
a ‘particular bias’ towards the solution of life’s
doubts and difficulties, not by captious, querulous,
lamentations, but by a generous and patient ex-
position of the best truth known to them. A
revolt, which finds no better expression than
weeping and wailing, or than flouts and sneers,
is not a little contemptible. There are personal
convictions of sorrow and of wrong, which are not
ignoble to entertain, but very ignoble to make
public: many sufferers should ‘die, and make no
sign’: many should ‘learn in suffering, that
silence may sometimes teach more, than any song.
Most modern preachers of revolt in literature
resemble some among those men, turned into
beasts, noble and ignoble, upon the Island of
Circe:
‘ Hinc exaudiri gemitus, traegue leonum
Vincla recusantum, et sera sub nocte rudentum ;

Saetigerique sues, atgue in praesepibus urst
Saevire, ac formae magnorum ululare luporum.

But the lions are few: the swine, and bears, and
wolves, are many. Mr. Hardy has an austere
habit of style, which but seldom changes into
flippancy : human life is too sacred a thing in his
eyes, to be lightly treated: but at times the
passion, that informs his work, seems to break
out in fitful phrases, which impede his story
without the justification of being solid arguments.

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

The novels, which ‘vindicate the ways of God to
man,’ are indeed wearisome: but fully as weari-
some are those, which vindicate the ways of man
to God: and itis because Tess of the D’ Urbervilles
contains so much insinuated argument of this
kind, to the detriment of its art, that I cannot
rank it so high, as certain other of Mr. Hardy’s
books. Its spirit is nothing new, for all Mr.
Hardy’s books proceed from the same range of
thought: but none of them show quite this
irritability of casual comment: this refusal to
let the facts of the story convey their own moral,
without the help of epigrammatic hints. At
times, they read like quaint, modern imitations
of those marginal glosses, which adorn the
Pilgrims Progress and the Ancient Mariner:
‘Here Tess illustrateth the falling out betwixt
Nature and Society,’ or, ‘In this place did Angel
mock at Giant Calvinist, for that he taught an
untenable redemptive theolatry.’

There can be no need to repeat the story of
Tess: her guiltless seduction ; her love for Clare ;
his rejection of her, within a few hours of their
marriage, upon learning her early fate ; her piteous
fidelity to him, among hard scenes, in his absence ;
his tardy return, repentant of his desertion, to
find her won back by the arts of her seducer, who
played upon her love for her outcast family ; the
meeting of husband and wife at the house of her
bondage and of her shame; her murder of her
seducer, in a revulsion of agony and love; her

236
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wandering fortunes with her husband, ending in
her capture at Stonehenge, and her execution at
Winchester. The story goes with a surge and
sweep, a magnificence of movement; a cloud of
vast forces, labouring at the fates of one poor girl,
overshadows every page: Hugo, and, to dare a
greater illustration, AXschylus, so wrought out
their mighty tragedies. But in this vital point,
the illustrations fail: Les M¢sérables and the
Oresteia carry conviction, not in the telling
merely of their tragedies, but in the presentation
of their moral imports: Zess of the D'Urbervilles
does not. ‘A Pure Woman faithfully Presented,’
writes Mr. Hardy upon his title page: the second
and fourth words would be the better for some
definition. Let us set down, for consideration,
some passages from the book.

The Durbeyfield household is described, with
these comments, ‘All these young souls were
passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely
dependent on the judgment of the two Durbey-
field adults for their pleasures, their necessities,
their health, even their existence. If the heads
of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into
difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation,
death, thither were these half-dozen little captives
under hatches compelled to sail with them—six
helpless little creatures, who had never been
asked if they wished for life on any terms, much
less if they wished for it on such hard conditions
as were involved in being of the shiftless house of

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know
whence the poet whose philosophy is in these
days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his
verse is pure and breezy, gets his authority for
speaking of “Nature’s holy plan.”’

Twice Mr. Hardy suggests, that some act of
Tess was an hereditary impulse: once, that her
suffering was in retribution for her ancestor’s sins.
Upon the latter theory he comments: ‘But
though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the
children may be a morality good enough for
divinities, it is scorned by average human nature;
and it therefore does not mend the matter.’

When at home after her first great sorrow, Tess
only walked out after dark. ‘It is then that the
plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its
least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun
mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the
world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unfor-
midable, even pitiable, in its units. ...

‘At times her whimsical fancy would intensify
natural processes around her till they seemed a
part of her own story. Rather they became a

art of it; for the world is only a psychological

enomenon, and what they seemed they were.

he midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst

he tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter

twigs, were formule of bitter reproach. A wet

klay was the expression of irremediable grief at

her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical
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being whom she could not class definitely as the
God of her childhood, and could not comprehend
as any other.

‘But this encompassment of her own charac-
terization, based on shreds of convention, peopled
by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was
a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy,
a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was
terrified without reason. It was they that were
out of harmony with the actual world, not she.
Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges,
watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit
warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough,
she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intrud-
ing into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while
she was making a distinction when there was no
difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was
quite in accord. She had been made to break a
necessary social law, but no law known to the en-
vironment in which she fancied herself an anomaly.’

Her baby is born: ‘Alone in a desert island
would she have been wretched at what had hap-
pened to her? Not greatly. If she could have
been but just created, to discover herself as a
spouseless mother, with no experience of life
except as the parent of a nameless child, would
the position have caused her to despair? No, shé
would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure
therein. Most of the misery had been generated
by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
sensations.’

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

Her baby dies: ‘So passed away Sorrow the
Undesired—that intrusive creature, that bastard
gift of shameless Nature who respects not the
civillaw’;...

Some time has passed: ‘Almost at a leap
Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex
woman. Symbols of reflectiveness passed into
her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her
voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent.
She became what would have been called a fine
creature; her aspect was fair and arresting; her
soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experi-
ences of the last year or two had quite failed to
demoralize. But for the world’s opinion those
experiences would have been simply a liberal
education... . Was once lost always lost really
true of chastity? she would ask herself. She
might prove it false if she could veil bygones.
The recuperative power which pervaded organic
nature was surely not denied to maidenhood
alone.’

At the dairy farm, the three milkmaids were in
love with Angel Clare. ‘The air of the sleeping-
chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless
passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly
under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on
them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which
they had neither expected nor desired... . The
full recognition of the futility of their infatua-
tion, from a social point of view; its purposeless
beginning ; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of

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SINCERITY IN ART
everything to justify its existence in the eye of
civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of
Nature) ; the one fact that it did exist, ecstasizing
them to a killing joy; all this imparted to them a
resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid
expectation of winning him as a husband would
have destroyed.’

Clare considered his position towards Tess.
‘Despite his heterodoxy Clare was a man with a
conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to
toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her
precious life—a life which, to herself who endured
or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as
the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her
sensations the whole world depended to Tess;
through her existence all her fellow-creatures
existed, to her. The universe itself only came
into being for Tess on the particular day in the
particular year in which she was born.

‘ This consciousness upon which he had intruded
was .the single opportunity of existence ever
vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First
Cause—her all ; her every and only chance.’

After some time passed at the dairy farm, Clare
felt the spirit of his home foreign and uncongenial.
‘Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the
great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped,
incontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which
futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be
content to palliate.’

Tess at last consented to marry Clare, and

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kissed him passionately in earnest of her love:
‘She had consented. She might as well have
agreed at first. The “appetite for joy” which
pervades all creation, that tremendous force which
sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways
the helpless reed, was not to be controlled by
vague lucubrations over the social rubric.’

On her hard way to work, after Clare’s desertion,
Tess passed a night in a wood, disturbed by
strange noises: in the dawn, she found that they
were the sound of wounded pheasants, falling
from their perches: she put them out of their
pain. ‘“Poor darlings—to suppose myself the
most miserable being on earth in the presence of
such misery as this!” she exclaimed, her tears
running down as she killed the birds tenderly.
“And I have not a twinge of bodily pain about
me! I am not mangled and I am not bleed-
ing, and I have two hands to feed and clothe
me.” She was ashamed of herself for her gloom
of the night, based on nothing more tangible
than a sense of condemnation under an arbi-
trary law of society which had no foundation in
Nature.’

Tess was hanged for killing her seducer:
‘“ Justice” was done, and the President of the
Immortals (in Aéschylean phrase) had ended his
sport with Tess.’
~ To these passages, we may add three or four
from the earlier writings, of the same character,
but there more rarely found. Henchard reflected,

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SINCERITY IN ART
as he visited the scene of his old disgrace, upon
the strange issues of his act: ‘It was an odd
sequence that out of all this wronging of social law
came that flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of
his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his
perceptions of its contrarious inconsistencies—of
Nature’s jaunty readiness to support bad social
principles.” Had Eustacia been made a goddess,
the world would have felt no change in its govern-
ment: ‘There would have been the same in-
equality of lot, the same heaping up of favours
here, of contumely there, the same generosity
before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the
same captious alternation of caresses and blows as
we endure now.’ Again,‘In Clym Yeobright’s face
could be dimly seen the typical countenance of
the place. Should there be a classic period to art
hereafter, its Phidias may produce such faces.
The view of life as a thing to be put up with,
replacing that 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 ac-
cepted as a new artistic departure. People already
feel that a man who lives without disturbing
a curve of feature, or setting a mark of: mental
concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed
from modern perceptiveness to be a modern type.
Physically beautiful men—the glory of the race
when it was young—are almost an anachronism
now ; and we may wonder whether, at some time

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or other, physically beautiful women may not be
an anachronism likewise.

‘The truth seems to be that a long line of dis-
illusive centuries has permanently displaced the
Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may be called.
What the Greeks only suspected we know well;
what their A®schylus 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 law, and see the
quandary that man is in by their operation.’
Yeobright did not share his mother’s views of
social advancement. ‘He had no desires of that
sort. He had reached the stage in a young man’s
life when the grimness of the general human
situation becomes clear; and the realization of
this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it
is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this
stage; in England we do much better, or much
worse, as the case may be.’ Wildeve also had his
perversities: ‘To be yearning for the difficult, to
be weary of what offered ; to.care for the remote,
to dislike the near: it was Wildeve’s nature
always. This is the true mark of the man of
sentiment. Though Wildeve’s fevered feeling had
not been elaborated to real poetical compass, it
was of the standard sort. He might have been
called the Rousseau of Egdon.’ Swithin, the
young astronomer, recovered from his sickness,
through his strong desire to study the appearance
of a new comet: ‘his example affords another

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SINCERITY IN ART
instance of that reflex rule of the vassal soul over
the sovereign body, which, operating so wonder-
fully in elastic natures, and more or less in all,
originally gave rise to the legend that supremacy
lay on the other side. Once more, Mr. Hardy’s
essay speaks of an original treatment required
for the presentation of that high tragedy, which
modern taste now relishes, as it was relished in
the days of Pericles and of Elizabeth; but a
tragedy, differing in its dramatic motives from
those old tragedies: it is a treatment, ‘which
seeks to show Nature’s unconsciousness not of
essential laws, but of those laws framed merely as
social expedients by humanity, without a basis in
the heart of things’; not that there must be any
‘prurient treatment of the relation of the sexes,
or... any view of vice calculated to under-
mine the essential principles of social order’; nor
should literature ‘for a moment exhibit lax views
of that purity of life upon which the well-being
of society depends.’ Finally, writing upon the
Dorset labourers, Mr. Hardy observes: ‘It is
among such communities as these that happiness
will find her last refuge on earth, since it is among
them that a perfect insight into the conditions of
existence will be longest postponed.’

I have read Jess, some eight or ten times: at
first, with that ravishment and enthusiasm, which,
great art, art great in spite of imperfection, must
always cause. Still the grandeur of the book,
its human tragedy, holds and masters me: ‘how

245
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largely it is all planned!’ as Goethe said of
Marlowe's Faustus. But gradually, difficulties,
unfelt under the first spell of enchauntment, begin
to appear: it were unjust to Mr. Hardy to ignore
them. Doubtless, there is something prosaic in
scrutinizing, with unmoved tranquillity, the argu-
ment of so piteous a story: why not accept its
simple beauty and its simple pity, the moving
passion of it ; without curiously considering those
places, where the writer’s personal convictions
have expressed themselves in irony and in anger?
That is impossible: because Zess is more than
the history of a woman’s life and death; it is also
an indictment of ‘Justice, human and divine, as
the Oresteza is its vindication. Either the story
should bear its own burden of spiritual sorrow,
each calamity and woe crushing out of us all hope,
by its own resistless weight : or the bitter sentences
of comment should be lucid and cogent. But had
Mr. Hardy denied himself all commentary, and
left the story to carry its own moral into our
hearts ; I doubt, whether we should all have re-
ceived quite the same moral: to prevent any such
‘perverse’ resistance to his intended moral, Mr.
Hardy has not denied himself the luxury, or
perhaps the superfluity, of comments at once
inartistic and obscure. The sincerity of the book
is indubitable: but the passion of revolt has led
the writer to renounce his impassive temper ; and
to encounter grave difficulties, in that departure
from his wonted attitude towards art.

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SINCERITY IN ART

In art, nothing is more difficult than to turn
theories of ethics, or of metaphysics, into living
motives: than the expression of them through
the treatment of human characters and of human
actions: the genius of Browning could not always
overcome that difficulty. For a false step here is
irrecoverable: a false thought may vitiate the
whole book. It is not so with the treatment of
facts, for their own sake, as great things to see
or hear: a mistake is deplorable, but not fatal.
Hugo may give us impossible science, grotesque
history, confused learning: but it is not that,
which can condemn him, just as it is not absurdities
of detail, which can condemn Euripides: it is bad
logic, bad inference, misrepresentation of a mind.
Various artists have various ways: Lucretius,
whose argument is much that of Mr. Hardy, has
no hesitation in stating his plain reasons in un-
adorned language, one by one, orderly and simply :
that done, the spirit of poetry leaps from its re-
straint, and chaunts the dirge of worlds and men.
Shakespeare goes delicately, suffusing all his work
with the spirit of his thought. But it is useless
to attempt a combination of methods: when
the reader is following the fortunes of Tess, he
hates to fall into some track of thought, which
leads him to the debateable land, where he must
listen to Aristotle and Rousseau, Aquinas and
Hegel, Hobbes and Mill, Sir Henry Maine and Mr.
Herbert Spencer. It is a question of manner:
things, intolerable in one manner, are delightful

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

in another. If I wish to study certain aspects of
English melancholy, at various times, I can turn
to Burton’s Azatomy, to Cheyne’s English Malady,
to Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night: if French
melancholy be my study, there are Pascal, Rous-
seau, Baudelaire, ready at hand: all these tell their
tale with greater or with less felicity: their spirit
and their form, are well consorted. But Mr. Hardy
is not content to frame his indictment, by the
stern narration of sad facts: he inserts fragments
of that reasoning, which has brought him to his
dark conclusion. They are too many, too bitter,
too passionate, to be but an overflow, as it were,
from his narration: they are too sparse, too
ironical, too declamatory, to be quite intelligible.
After enjoying their grimness, I want definitions
of nature, law, society, and justice: the want is
coarse, doubtless, and unimaginative ; but I can-
not suppress it. It is the fashion of to-day to
mock at those scholastic disputations, which en-
livened the scholars of old time: logical quibblings,
we say, useless and trivial, a vain logomachy!
But we greatly need something of their discipline
now : for there will presently remain few words of
philosophic language, unburdened with several
meanings in several mouths. To one man the
phrase, physical realism, suggests a question in the
metaphysics: to another, a question in the arts.
Many misty persons, who exercise ‘the right of
the individual to general haziness, would feel
most unhappy, confronted with the great Doctors,

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the Subtile, the Irrefragable, the Special, the
Admirable, the Solid, and the Profound. Without
doubt, Mr. Hardy is a man of his mind, with
careful conclusions upon perplexing points: but
his thought is something elusive, in such passages,
as I have quoted.

Nature’s plan is not ‘holy, as Wordsworth
taught, because children come unconsulted into
a world, where endless miseries may await them.
Nature has no respect for the civil law, and none
for the conventions of society about sexual com-
merce. Nature’s law is cruel: exciting sensations,
which cannot be gratified; and desires, which
civilization cannot justify. Tess felt herself
condemned by an ‘arbitrary’ social law, with no
foundation in Nature: yet the law, which she was
made to break, was a ‘necessary’ social law. She
rebuked herself for her self-pity, because she was
suffering no physical pain, in a world full of
animal pains: and she was wrong in feeling a
consciousness of guilt, among the scenes and
creatures of the woods, because, like any other
animal, she had but fulfilled a physical function
of nature. Not her ‘innate sensations, but the
conventions of society, caused most of her misery
at the thought of her unmarried motherhood:
upon a desert island, she would have taken
pleasure in it: but for public opinion, her
seduction and her motherhood would have
been but ‘a liberal education.’ After all, organic
nature is full of recuperative power: does not

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that power extend to lost maidenhood? After
all, men and women are helpless before that
‘appetite for joy,’ which rules all creation, and is
far too strong to be controlled by disquisitions
about social rites and customs: its full force
cannot be checked by creeds, but only paltered
with and winked at by wisdom: it leads, at worst,
in Lovelace’ phrase, to ‘a transitory evil, an evil
which a mere church-form makes none.’ And the
world is only a psychological phenomenon: and
the First Cause is unsympathetic : nay, is fiendish,
because the children suffer for the fathers; and
sportive, because the fate of Tess was a prolonged
caricature of justice, ending in the supreme jest of
her violent death.

I know not, who can lie under a stronger
necessity to realize the sorrow of the world, than
a Catholic: but he lies under no obligation to
abnegate his reason: and I cannot, with all the
will in the world, to understand Mr. Hardy’s
indictment, understand one word of it. Making
all allowance for mere sentiment, and all deductions
for mere passion, I can see in it but a tangle of
inconsistencies. What is this ‘Nature, of which
or of whom, Mr. Hardy speaks? Is it a Natura
naturata, or a Natura naturans? Is it a conscious
Power? or a convenient name for the whole mass
of physical facts? The Doge of Genoa might
well propound his difficulties :

‘ My thoughts are fixed in contemplation,
Why this huge earth, this monstrous animal,
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That eats her children, should not have ears and eyes.
Philosophy maintains that Nature’s wise,

And forms no useless or unperfect thing.

Did Nature make the earth, or the earth Nature?

For earthly dirt makes all things, makes the man,
Moulds me up honour, and like a cunning Dutchman,
Paints me a puppet even with seeming breath,

And gives a sot appearance of a soul :

Go to, go to: thou liest, Philosophy.

Nature forms things unperfect, useless, vain.

Why made she not the earth with eyes and ears?
That she might see desert, and hear men’s plaints :
That when a soul is splitted, sunk with grief,

He might fall thus, upon the breast of earth ;

And in her ear halloo his misery :

Exclaiming thus, O thou all-bearing earth,

Which men do gape for, till thou cram’st their mouths,
And chok’st their throats with dust : oh chaune thy breast,
And let me sink into thee. Look, who knocks ;
Andrugio calls. But oh, she’s deaf and blind :

A wretch but lean relief on earth can find.’

Let us take Nature to be no more than a
personification of physical facts: neither moral
nor immoral : ‘ power is in nature,’ ‘says Emerson,
‘the essential measure of right’; that is a calm
statement, preferable to Mr. Hardy’s ‘cruelty’:
and M. Renan may give us a graceful statement
of nature’s productive desire, in place of Mr.
Hardy’s ‘tremendous force,’ ‘Si la nature était
méchante, elle serait laide.... La nature a du
goit: seulement elle ne va pas a la morale; elle
ne va pas au dela de l'amour.” All this is but
the doctrine of modern science about the physi-
cal conditions of life: conflict and survival, both

S61
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caused by strong forces of impulse. But Mr.
Hardy juggles with ‘Nature’: now she is cruel,
which is a reproach to divine justice ; now she is
kindly, whereas society is harsh. ‘To remove and
cast off a heap of rubbish that has been gathering
upon the soul from our very infancy requires
great courage and great strength of faculties.
Our philosophers, therefore, do well deserve the
name of esprits forts, men of strong heads, free-
thinkers, and such like appellations, betokening
great force and liberty of mind. It is very
possible the heroic labours of these men may
be represented (for what is not capable of mis-
representation?) as a piratical plundering, and
stripping the mind of its wealth and ornaments,
when it is in truth divesting it only of its pre-
judices, and reducing it to its untainted original
state of nature. Oh nature! the genuine beauty
of pure nature!’ Thus Alciphron, in the manner
of Mr. Squeers upon the same theme: and thus
Euphorion, in answer. ‘You seem very much
taken with the beauty of nature. Be pleased to
tell me, Alciphron, what those things are which
you esteem zatural, or by what mark I may know
them.’ Whereat Alciphron falls into the prettiest
confusion possible. And Mr. Hardy’s praise of
nature is in the very dialect of the eighteenth
century: the suggestion, that on a desert island,
away from censorious eyes, Tess would have felt
innocent and unashamed, is worthy of Rousseau.
Nature alone has essential laws: society has but

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expedient laws ; ‘arbitrary,’ in the sense that they
are only expedient ; ‘necessary,’ in the sense that
they ave expedient. Such seems to be Mr.
Hardy’s position. Now, the misfortune of Tess,
her seduction, was in conformity with Nature, as
a simple, physical occurrence: it was out of con-
formity with Society, because it broke a social
law, necessary, if arbitrary: but a state of Nature
precedes a state of Society, and has therefore
deeper, wider, larger laws: Society, then, was
but prejudiced in favour of its own well-being,
when it condemned Tess: therefore Society was
unjust, preferring its necessary laws of expediency
to the great fundamental laws of Nature. Tess,
from fulfilling against her will her natural function,
was driven on by iron forces, till at last she
committed murder: she could not help herself:
why was she hanged, unless to amuse God?
True, she was at first haunted by a sense of
guilt: but conscience is a conventional thing, the
utilitarian product of racial experience: it merely
meant, that her misfortune, though nothing in
the sight of Nature, belonged to a class of acts
prejudicial to Society: true, she yielded at the
last to her old seducer; but that was in despair,
and to help her family; she was but wvulneng
herself, as heralds say of the pelican in her piety ;
and, once more, since the rabbits and the pheasants
would have seen no harm in it, why should she,
merely an animal, higher in the scale of physical
development ?

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It is perplexing: some one, some thing, must
be to blame. It cannot be Nature, because you
cannot blame an abstraction: it cannot be
Society, unless you would have it commit suicide:
it must be God.

‘ Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods:

They kill us for their sport.’
There is almost a delicious irony in the thought:
no need for reverence remains: if this be true, no
gaminerie can be too bitter an insult to the God
of Israel and of the Christians. One can but
stand up in righteous wrath, and repeat the severe
rebukes of Mill, against so monstrous a divinity.
It might be thought, even so, that dignity coun-
selled silence and endurance: Gloria im terra
Hlomint, beyond question: but perhaps it were
only respectful to add, with Lucretius, e¢ zx caelo
pax dets nullius voluntatis: to assume, that the
gods are at rest in an impassive peace; and to
revile some blind Will, or superior Fate, instead.
But that were to forego much occasion of
rhetoric: ‘ Victrix causa dets placuit, sed victa
Catone’: ‘morality good enough for divinities,
but scorned by average human nature’: ‘“Justice”
was done, and the President of the Immortals
(in AEschylean phrase) had ended his sport with
Tess.’

It is characteristic of Mr. Hardy to quote the
Prometheus: that one play of A®schylus, which

1 This chapter was written before, and has not been altered
since, the publication of Mr. Hardy’s new preface to Jess.

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may be thought to show a malevolence of God to
man.
‘Do you not see, dear friend, that thus
You leave Saint Paul for Aischylus?’

asks Browning: but Mr. Hardy has left even
fEschylus, for ‘nursery children’; the babes and
sucklings of our disillusioned day, to whom ‘the
grimness of the general situation’ is revealed, and
out of whose mouths is pessimism perfected. But
I am content with Aischylus.
‘O prima tnfelix fingenti terra Prometheo !
Ltle parvum caut? pectoris egit opus:
Corpora disponens mentem non vidit in arte.
feecta animé primum debutt esse via’

If Propertius were right in so criticising the
labours of Prometheus, Zeus were also right in
refusing to bless them: but it is no true criticism.
Nor have we a right to infer the faith of
fEschylus, from but one part of a mutilated
trilogy: as well-might we reason about the
faith of Dante, with sole reference to the Jzferno.
In the Ovesteta, those three poems beyond all
human praise, Aéschylus has declared the grounds
of his faith in a just ordering of the world. I
believe, speaking in reverence and under correc-
tion, that a simple, full, literal exposition of
féschylus’ moral system would be found to
correspond, without any forcing of phrases, with
the catholic doctrine of sin, punishment, free-will,
and fate. That no man is compelled to sin; that
sin is the act of a bad will; that punishment is

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the correlative of sin; that suffering is discipline ;
that no inherited tendency to sin is too strong
for a good will; that with God is no caprice nor
tyranny: all this is the faith of millions to-day.
There is no literature more melancholy, from end
to end, than the Greek; but it is often with a
gracious wistfulness: and there is no literature
more full of faith in a divine justice. With Plato
in his Gorgias, the great spirits of men have
constantly upheld the teaching, that to do evil is
worse than to suffer it: and that to go unpunished
is an injustice to the evil-doer. Mulla poena,
quanta poena! As Herbert said, the ‘divine
regiment, the government of God, is ‘clad in
simpleness and sad events’: and elsewhere he
wrote a word of spiritual cunning:
‘life’s poore span
Make not an ell, by trifling in thy woe.’
It is Mr. Hardy’s apparent denial of anything
like conscience in men, that makes his impressive
argument so sterile: granted, that there is no
sign of conscious morality in the world, apart
from man; and it is a vast concession; yet, to
place man upon the level of other animals is to
ignore the whole weight of evidence from the
history of mankind in general, and of single men
in particular; and also to ignore difficulties
connected with the nature of the mind, which no
man of commanding science has even professed
to explain. When Amiel asked M. Renan, what
he made of sin? M. Renan, with a sweet un-
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reasonableness, replied : ‘Je crois bien qu’en effet
je le supprime.” That is practically Mr. Hardy’s
answer: and his view of conscience is scarce more
convincing, than that of Swedenborg’s men of
medicine: who defined it to be ‘an uneasy pain,
which seizes both the head and the parenchyma
of the heart, and thence the epigastric and
hypogastric regions beneath.” The unhappy senti-
ments of Tess are attributed to a vague sense of
social misdemeanour, to a wandering drift of
superstitious ideas, to a childish misconception
of her experience, that ‘liberal education’: not
to any deep cry from the heart and soul, bearing
true witness to the wrong, that she had suffered.
It is a pity, that she was ignorant of Hume’s
doctrine upon the nature of chastity: it might
have established her in a rational content, and
in ‘a cool self-love’” As it was, she did but
illustrate, in her darkling conscience, a great
sentence of Leo XIII: lta maguam in animis
coelesti doctrina carentibus vim habutt natura rerum,
memoria originum, conscientia generis humani !

Mr. Hardy would not for a moment have
literature, restored to its freedom, ‘exhibit lax
views of that purity of life upon which the well-
being of society depends’; but he pleads that,
‘the position of man and woman in nature, and
the position of belief in the minds of man and
woman—things which everybody is thinking but
nobody is saying—might be taken up and treated_
frankly.’ But there is little advantage to be

257 KR *
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

gained, by showing the unsocial position of man
and woman, as nature regards them, to an age of
social thought and practice: it is like Diderot’s
exposition of naked beatitude in the Pacific Isles.
‘Men cannot enjoy, wrote Burke, ‘the rights of
an uncivil and of a civil state together’: looking
back upon vast ages of the world’s history, Burke
was but using the voice of common sense, when
he declared; ‘I have in my contemplation the
civil social man, and no other” No more than
in his day, have we ‘subtilized ourselves into
savages’: like the Englishmen of his day, ‘we
know that we have made no discoveries ; and we
think that no discoveries are to be made, in
morality’; we, too, as members of ‘eternal society,’
are loth ‘to separate and tear asunder the bands
of our subordinate community, and to dissolve
it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of
elementary principles. And the present age
also has discovered, that ‘men of letters, fond of
distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to
innovation. Mr. Hardy’s writings are, in the
main, far too austere of tone, to expose him to
the least suspicion of a desire, to loosen the social
ties of life: yet I cannot conceive, what may be
his design in elaborately descanting upon the
fact, that man and woman in ‘nature’ are not the
same, as man and woman in ‘society.’ ‘Lucretius
knew that: but he drew thence the lesson, that.
with family life, and the cessation from wild
promiscuity of living, came the first signs of

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social concord: no longer Homo homini lupus,
but Homo res sacra homini. Life ‘according
to nature’ means many things: Aristotle at least
saw in the phrase nothing inconsistent with
another phrase, that ‘man is by nature a social
animal’: just as Burke declared him to be ‘a
religious animal.’ It was reserved for a dis-
tinguished philosopher of our times, to dictate the
following delightful counsels: ‘It is important,’
writes Hartmann, ‘to make the life of beasts
better known to our youth; as the truest source
of pure nature, wherein youth may learn to
understand its true being, in its simplest form ;
wherein to rest and refresh itself, after the
artificiality and deformity of our social state,’
Plato, on the other hand, somewhat mistrusted
‘the wild beast in the soul, already there, and
not rashly to be encouraged: and Dr. Johnson’s
comment upon the German’s advice would pro-
bably surpass his sensible wrath against Rousseau.
There is a tendency in Zess to treat women, with
a curious lack of dignity : we hear of ‘the charm
which is acquired by woman when she becomes
part and parcel of outdoor nature’: and Angel
Clare, at the dairy farm in Var Vale, experienced
an ‘aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural
life and lush womanhood’: the latter phrase
expressing, not a simple buoyancy of spirits,
enhanced by unsophisticated life in the open air,
among rural scenes and duties, but a positive
absence of any higher qualities. The hunger

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to be rid of social hypocrisies has led to a mere
materialism, in which neither material earth, nor
material mankind, preserve their charm. This
seeming declension from the hardly won, firm ground
of social concord ; this lust after ruinous and aban-
doned ways ; compel a melancholy anger. To what
end has the human race discovered, through ages
of strife and struggle, the better way: if, provoked
by its imperfections, men are to fall back into the
old confusions? But the sanctions of Christian
marriage, the ethics of Christian civility, are some-
thing stern, you say, and austere: They are: do
you expect much softness and much ease in an
honourable life? Boethius was wiser :

‘O felix hominum genus,

St vestros animos amor,

Quo coelum regitur, regat !”
It may be presumptuous to require in a novel the
rigour of a treatise: but Mr. Hardy himself has
led us to require it of his novels. They are
nothing, unless they be the outcome of his own
most honest thought. It is little hindrance to us,
if we miss the force of some rhetorical term in
Seneca : but we are wholly thrown out of the way,
if we miss the force of some logical term in
Aristotle. Mr. Hardy has accustomed us to look
for the same closely knit fabric of thought and
word: but in this book, great as it yet is, there are
many places, where Zace! dictum est Aristoteli
by Mr. Hardy ; in another sense to that, in which
Abelard sang. Is it, that he is carrying out the

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polite doctrine: ‘ Nous devons la vertu 4 lEternel :
mais nous avons droit d’y joindre, comme reprise
personnelle, lironie’? In that case, one is tempted
to reply, with Valentine: ‘Lass unsern Herr Gott
aus dem Spass’: only the most spiritual, or the
most undisciplined, of humourists, Plato or Heine,
can be trusted with such jesting.

It is hard, to feel bitterly against even so
bitter a book: it is harder, to say anything, that
can for an instant move other minds, to share my
view of it: against the grandeur of such a book,
criticism unadorned has the poorest of chances.
Indeed, the book and the age are in many ways
good friends: for both are full of humanitarian
sentiment, often most true and fine; and both
incline towards the same philosophy. The late
Mr. Cotter Morison, in a book of strenuous
rhetoric, began a sentence with the words: ‘ Buta
deeper philosophy, or, rather, biology’: the popu-
lar voice speaks in that astounding substitution.
We have long since forgotten Hume’s irony:
‘All this is metaphysics, you cry: That is
enough: there needs nothing more to give a
strong presumption of falsity” ; And in matters
of practical ethics, Mr. Find is no solitary
champion :)Moliére is grown obsolete; his Madelon -
is a woman of advanced thought, his Gorgibus is
antiquated. ‘Madelon. “Ah, mon pere! ce que
vous dites la est du dernier bourgeois. Cela me
fait honte de vous ouir parler de la sorte ; et vous
devriez un peu vous faire apprendre le bel air des

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THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

choses.” Gorgibus. “Je n’ai que faire ni d’air ni
de chanson. Je te dis que le mariage est une
chose sacrée, et que c’est faire en honnétes gens
que de débuter par la.”

‘Madelon. “Mon Dieu! que si tout le monde
vous ressemblait un roman serait bientét fini! ”’

Mansel, thirty years ago, speaking of a novel
called Recommended to Mercy, observed: ‘The
moral that would be drawn up by the author may
be conjectured from the title of the book; that
which will be drawn by many of its readers may
be summed up in the comfortable doctrine of Hans
Carvel’s wife,—

“That if weak women went astray,
Their stars were more in fault than they.”
In truth, we much doubt the wisdom or the
morality of drawing fictitious portraits of noble-
minded and interesting sinners, by way of teach-
ing us to feel for the sinner while we condemn
the sin.’

Prior’s lines have not lost all their point yet:
though we do not speak of astrology, but of
heredity. Astrology is indeed discredited: but is
heredity proved? Doubtless, from the days of
Ezekiel and of A‘schylus, men’s minds have been
occupied by the thought of transmitted tendencies
and of vicarious sufferings: but only in our day
has the creed of ‘determinism’ taken body and
form: and that, with a somewhat premature de-
cision. Considering the great conflicts of opinion
upon the matter of heredity, among leading men

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of science, we can only assume the truth of it,
in any one form, at some risk of reputation to
come. But Mr. Hardy keeps ever in our view
the inherited impulses of Tess: by hints and
fanciful suggestions, he turns our minds towards
the knightly D’Urbervilles, men of violence and
of blood, lawless, passionate, rude. Whether she
throw her glove in Alec’s face, or stab him with
a knife, we are led to look upon her, as an
inheritor of ancestral passions: society demands
her punishment, in reparation and in self-defence :
but, since she was at the mercy of her inherited
nature, she claims our pity and our pardon.
Certainly, no one can read her story, and be
unmoved :
‘Io son fatta da Dio, sua merc, tale,

Che la vostra miseria non mi tange,
Neé fiamma d’ esto incendio non m/assale.’

So she seems to say, all through her troubled
life: and to take for epitaph:

‘Weep only o’er my dust, and say, Here lies
To Love and Fate an equal sacrifice.’

Not indeed, ‘so made by the compassion of God’
as to pass unscathed among the flames of this
world: but so made by the indifference of Nature,
as to be forced among them, to suffer them, yet
to be at heart, innocent and pure.

But, winning and appealing as she seems, there
remains in the background that haunting and dis-
enchaunting thought, that upon the determinist

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principle, she could not help herself: she fulfilled
a mechanical destiny. There is nothing tragic
in that, except by an illusion: like any other
machine, she ‘did her work,’ and that is all. Those,
who held the automatic theory of the lower
animals, were yet compelled to speak of them in
the common, illogical language, as capable of
cognition: just so, Tess is pitiable, because we
retain the illusion of freedom. Tragedy, said
Chaucer, versifying the old view of it,

‘ Tragedie is to sayn a certain storie,

As olde bookes maken us memorie,

Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,

And is yfallen out of high degree,
Into miserie, and endeth wretchedly.’

The tragedy of Tess does indeed rouse in us
‘pity and fear’: it does indeed purge us of ‘ pity
and fear’: but with what a parody of Aristotle!
For, as Butler has it, ‘Things are what they are,
and the consequences of them will be what they
will be; why, then, should we desire to be
deceived?’ Upon Mr. Hardy’s principles, there
was no real struggle of the will with adverse
circumstance, no conflict of emotions, nor battle
of passions: all was fated and determined: the
apparent energies of will, regrets of soul, in Tess,
were but as the muscular movements of a dead
body: ‘Simulars’ of freedom and of life. Our
pity and our fear are not purified merely: they
are destroyed, and no room is left for them: in
Cudworth’s phrase, we have but ‘ Belluine Liberty

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and Brutish Force. It may be urged, that in the
very illusion lies the tragedy: ‘All this passion,
sorrow, and death, inevitable and sure, to come
upon one poor girl, whose struggles were ordained
by the same force, that ordained their vanity! Is
there no tragedy in that?’ I can find none: I
can find in it nothing, but a reason for keeping
unbroken silence. Least of all, do I find in it
an excuse for setting up a scarecrow God, upon
whom to vent our spleen. , Quid superbis, terra et
ctnts ? asked LEcclesiasticus of man: but if dust ~
and ashes be all, there is no question more of
pride: we had best read Hawthorne’s allegory,
and say nothing. It is in the conflicts of will
with will, and of force with force, that Tragedy
finds a voice: men battling with the winds and
waves, or with the passions and desires; men
played upon by the powers of nature, or by the
powers of mind; men struggling with the powers
known to science, or with the powers known to
conscience: an eternal warfare, and no illusion
of battles in the clouds: a theatre, not of pup-
pets, but of men. If our will be no more than
a powerless yearning, life is a farce, much too
tedious to amuse. — a

It is not cheerful acquiescence in life, an
oblivious and partial view of it, that have marked
the great vindicators of human will, and therefore,
of human tragedy. ‘When I see the blindness
and the misery of man; when I survey the whole
dumb universe, and man without light, left to

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himself, and lost, as it were, in this corner of the
universe ; not knowing who has placed him here,
what he has come to do, what will become of him
when he dies, and incapable of any knowledge
whatever ; I fall into terror, like that of a man
who, having’ been carried in his sleep to an island
desert and terrible, should awake, ignorant of his
whereabouts, and with no means of escape; and
thereupon I wonder, how those in so miserable a
state do not fall into despair.’ That is Pascal:
this is Newman. ‘Starting then with the being
of a God, . . . I look out of myself into the
world of men, and there I see a sight which fills
me with unspeakable distress. The world seems
simply to give the lie to that great truth, of which
my whole being is so full; and the effect upon me
is, in consequence, as a matter of necessity, as
confusing as if it denied that J am in existence
myself. If I looked into a mirror, and did not
see my face, I should have the sort of feeling
which actually comes upon me, when I look into
this busy living world, and see no reflexion of its
creator. This is, to me, one of those great difficul-
ties of this absolute primary truth, to which |
referred just now. Were it not for this voice,
speaking so clearly in my conscience and my
heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a
polytheist, when I looked into the world. I am
speaking for myself only; and I am far from
denying the real force of the arguments in proof
of a God, drawn from the general facts of human

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society and the course of history, but these do not
warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away
the winter of my desolation, or make the buds
unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my
moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is
nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of
“lamentations, and mourning, and woe.”’ Then
follows a period embracing, in sad and unsparing
detail, the sorrows of the world: with a somewhat
large experience of such sorrowful literature, I
still know nothing that approaches this confession
of Newman, in its piercing apprehension of the
world’s innumerable sadness. It was no blindness
to the facts of life, that made it impossible, for
Pascal and for Newman, to draw such conclusions
from the world, as logic is forced to draw from
Tess, upon a scrutiny of each word and sentence.
But without changing a single incident of the
story, it is possible to reject Mr. Hardy’s ‘moral :
read it apart from his commentary, and it loses
nothing of its strength: rather, it gains much.
Tess is no longer presented to us, as predestined
to her fate: she once more takes the tragic place.
Beginning in ‘great prosperitee, as a girl of
generous thought and sentiment, rich in beauty,
rich in the natural joys of life, she is brought into
collision with the harshness of life: she may have
inherited impulses, vehement abettors of her
temptations: circumstances may be against her
always: the conflict will be an agony between
the world and the will. Like Marty South, she
267
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

might have been austerely strong, with a bitter
maceration of her desires: like Teresa of the
Carmelites, she might have learned to long for
suffering or for death, aut pati aut mori, as a more
joyous denial of joy, than any ‘appetite for joy’:
with Miss Rossetti, she might have said, ‘ Bitter-
ness that may turn to sweetness is better than
sweetness that must turn to bitterness.’ Since
she was so ‘Hellenic, she might have realized
with the Greeks, that happiness is lower than
beatitude, and prosperity than blessedness. She
did none of those things: the world was very
strong; her conscience was blinded and _be-
wildered ; she did some things nobly, and some
despairingly: but there is nothing, not even in
studies of criminal anthropology or of morbid
pathology, to suggest that she was wholly an
irresponsible victim of her own temperament, and
of adverse circumstances. Oportet te transire per
zenem et aguam, antequam venerts in refrigerium :
like Maggie Tulliver, Tess might have gone to
Thomas a2 Kempis: one of the very few writers,
whom experience does not prove untrue. She
went through fire and water, and made no true
use of them: she is pitiable, but not admirable.
Mr. Hardy’s last book, then, contains much
that may be disliked, much that may seem untrue,
and much that may seem inartistic: but it is
among the books of most ardent sincerity, that
I have yet read. There is nothing in it capable
of producing even a ‘ labefactation of principles’ :
268
SINCERITY IN ART

or, at the least, nothing directed to that end. Mr.
Hardy's art is not of the sort described by Bishop
Blougram :

‘Our interest’s on the dangerous side of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist, demirep

That loves and saves her soul in new French books—
We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway : one step aside,

They ’re classed and done with.’

Tess is ‘good, but not religious-good,’ as a
rustic casuist of Wessex puts it. Much hostile
criticism comes of the eternal separation between
man and man: that isolation, alone with his
thoughts, in which each man lives, and which no
intimacy can abolish. For, as Newman said in
one of his Dublin lectures upon literature, all
literature and style are personal, the expression
of a personality: with the greatest pains, no
reader can perfectly pass into the writer’s mind:
nor can the writer draw him in thither. And so,
if I see in this or that passage of Mr. Hardy, what
he has called ‘an odd mixture of scientific earnest-
ness and melancholy distrust of all things human,’
my own temperament may disqualify me for a
criticism of that mixture. I will but say, that in
the new battle between the philosophy of faith,
and a philosophy of the senses, Mr. Hardy seems
to take the vehement part of a Luther, Calvin,
Knox, rather than the serene part of an Erasmus,
Colet, More. Yet he belongs to a nobler company

269
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

of artists, than they who are simply clamouring
for some new thing, and his works witness to his
sincerity: xemo enim ile vitia ridet, nec corrum-
pere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur. He has never
condoned corruption, as saeca/um, the spirit of the
age: or, as the silly dialect of the day has it, as
jin de stécle. It is hard, indeed, to sympathize
“with much of his sentiment upon man’s position
in nature: as Carlyle said of the material world,
‘mere circlings of force there, of iron negation, of
universal death and merciless indifference’: but
its meditative grandeur is unquestionable. Here
are two passages, in which two aspects of it are
seen: both prompted by the stars and night, to
which, with their mistress or handmaid, Astro-
nomy, he appears to have a devotion. ‘The sky
was clear—remarkably clear—and the twinkling
of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one
body timed by a common pulse. The North
Star was directly in the wind’s eye, and since
evening the Bear had swung himself round it
outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right
angle with the meridian. A difference of colour
in the stars—oftener read of than seen in England
—was really perceptible there. The kingly
brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely
glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Alde-
baran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.

‘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. The

270
SINCERITY IN ART
sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide
of the stars past earthly objects, which is per-
ceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the
better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or
by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever
be its origin, the impression of riding along is
vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a
phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form
of that gratification it is necessary to stand on
a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having
first expanded with a sense of difference from the
mass of civilized mankind, who are horizontal and
disregardful of all such proceedings at this time,
long and quietly watch your stately progress
through the stars. After such a nocturnal re-
connoitre among those astral clusters, aloft from
the customary haunts of thought and vision, some
men may feel raised to a capability for eternity
at once.’

There is the beauty of night and stars, as our
poor eyes can see them, and our poor poetical
imaginations dream of them: but Astronomy is
tragic: and Swithin displayed with pride its
tragedy to Viviette. He would not let her call
the actual universe ‘ grand.’

‘The imaginary picture of the sky as the con-
cavity of a dome whose base extends from horizon
to horizon of our earth is grand, simply grand,
and I wish I had never got beyond looking at
it in that way. But the actual sky is a horror.’
He dilated upon the monstrous Immensities.

271
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

‘There is a size at which dignity begins ; further
on there is a size at which grandeur begins;
further on, there is a size at which solemnity
begins; further on, a size at which awfulness
begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness
begins. That size faintly approaches the size of
the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying
that those minds who exert their imaginative
powers to bury themselves in the depth of that
universe merely strain their faculties to gain a
new horror?’ Then he dwells upon the ‘ weird-
ness’ and ‘pitifulness’ of the decay of stars,
‘Imagine them all extinguished, and your mind
feeling its way through a heaven of total dark-
ness, occasionally striking the black, invisible
cinders of those stars... . If you are cheerful,
and wish to remain so, leave the study of
astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone
deserves the character of the terrible.’ This is
the truth of all that beauty, in which our deceived
senses take unalloyed delight. And what becomes
of Addison’s hymn? From such contemplations,
Mr. Hardy turns away to earth:

‘Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm, kind earth is all I know’:

or perhaps,

‘Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.’

And yet, from that ‘heaven of total darkness’
there falls an horror upon earth also, chilling its
272
SINCERITY IN ART
warmth and kindness: and our dying fires do
but remind us of the ‘eternal’ fires, that also
waste and die. It is in passages like these, that
we feel the gloomy power of Mr. Hardy: such
contemplations, and the pictures of human life
drawn by such a contemplator, must be dignified,
grand, solemn, if not awful and ghastly. The
stars may look charming, and wonderful, and
sublime, and so may human life: but look far
and well into both, and you will be stricken
with horror.

Both conclusions deal but with one side of the
matter: Sir Isaac Newton is able to face the
heavens, knowing their reality, and to say: Ele-
gantissima haecce solis, planetarum, et cometarum
compages non nist constlio et dominio entis tntel-
ligentis orirt potuzt. And Berkeley is no whit
behind Mr. Hardy in grasping the doctrine of
the heavens: ‘Astronomy is peculiarly adapted
to remedy a little and narrow spirit... . These
ideas wonderfully dilate and expand the mind.
There is something in the immensity of this dis-
tance that shocks and overwhelms the imagination ;
it is too big for the grasp of a human intellect:
estates, provinces, and kingdoms, vanish at its
presence.’ Lucretius also deplored, how the con-
templation of Nox et noctis signa severa may bring
enlightened minds back to the superstitions of
religion: whilst the infinite spaces did but terrify
Pascal.

When Oliver Madox Brown lay upon his death-

273 s
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

bed, the first chapters of Far from the Madding
Crowd were read to him: the story was appearing
in the Cornhill Magazine, which had just refused
a story of his own: ‘No wonder,’ the boy ex-
claimed, ‘they did not want my writing!’ Time
has shown, that there is little writing by modern
men, which is more wanted, more acceptable, than
the writing of Mr. Hardy. Think what we may
of his implicit philosophy, of its rationality and
truth, we can hardly refuse our praise to a writer
of so much poweri Like Crabbe’s ideal poet :

‘He loves the Mind, in all its modes, to trace,

And all the Manners of the changing Race ;

Silent he walks the Road of Life along,

And views the aims of its tumultuous throng :

He finds what shapes the Proteus-Passions take,
And what strange waste of Life and Joy they make’;

and that, because
“Tis good to know, ’tis pleasant to impart,

These turns and movements of the human Heart.’
Good to know, and pleasant to impart: no phrases
of a more perfect precision could be found. There
is nothing so dreadful and so dark, that art cannot
take pleasure in moulding it into fine form, nor
the mind be bettered by the knowledge thus won.
In Mr. Hardy’s fifteen books, there is a wealth of
fine form, enclosing a wealth of good knowledge.

‘If thou hast in thee any Country-Quicksilver,
come and watch the lives of country ‘souls’:
find tragedy and comedy in poor men trudging
to their work, along the lanes of Wessex:

274
SINCERITY IN ART
understand, in spite of Sappho, how even ‘a
peasant girl,” with no acquired courtliness, can
‘charm the heart’ The country folk of Mr.
Hardy, with their Wessex homes and labours,
are the material of his great achievements: of
these he is a master, and his work in this kind
will surely stand the test of time. It is the work
of long thought about familiar things: the two
conditions of the best writing. There is much,
that may grow dim with time, though to us it
have a living brilliance: it is not within our
province to discuss that. But we have the right,
looking back over the history of literature, and
assaying by that test the books of Mr. Hardy,
to pronounce, that if posterity care nothing for
him, posterity will have come to care nothing for
many a name, which generations of men have
venerated. Not even in art, is it ‘in mortals to
command success’: but there is no sphere of
human action, in which they, who deserve success,
more commonly achieve it. Much, again, of Mr.
Hardy’s work is an austere descant upon ‘the
dust and ashes of things, the cruelty of lust, and
the fragility of love’: unwelcome truths; and
not all the truths, there are. But they are very
old and very grave truths: and Mr. Hardy
presents them with a consciousness of their
greatness. By the severity of thought and of
style,.which he rarely deserts, he takes his place
among those writers, who from the early ages
of literature have expressed in art a reasonable

275
THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY

sadness. That deep solemnity of the earth in
its woods, and fields, and lonely places, has
passed into his work: and when he takes it in
hand, to deal with the passions of men, that spirit
directs and guides him. I do not find his books
quite free of all offence, of anything that can
hurt and distress; but I never find them merely
painful : their occasional offences are light enough,
and unessential; the pain, they sometimes give,
is often salutary, even for those who still hold,
with Aéschylus, to the truth of that ancient
doctrine, which makes the sorrow of the world, a
discipline: The Gods ave upon their holy thrones :
the grace of the. Gods constraineth us.

276
THOMAS HARDY
A BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1865—1894]

BY

JOHN LANE
PREFACE

THE publication of this book has been so long
delayed—the date at the end of Mr. Johnson’s
preface being that on which the final proofs were
passed—that some explanation becomes neces-
sary, more particularly as repeated statements
have been made that the delay was owing to
the incomplete state of my bibliography; the
latest paragraphists adding for reason that I
was experiencing great difficulties in identify-
ing a number of Mr. Hardy’s early papers on
architectural subjects, contributed to professional
magazines and journals.

Just as the book was ready for issue, notice was
received of the suspension of the firm with which
arrangements had been made for the publication
of the American edition. A considerable time
elapsed before it was possible to annul the agree-
ment with that firm; but, as soon as this could
be effected, negotiations were entered on with
Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Co., who now occupy

the position of sponsors for the book in America,
iii
PREFACE

In compiling Mr. Meredith’s bibliography I had
to take into account that his recognition was a
matter of slow conquest. The little leaven of
appreciative readers was there from the first, but
the process cf leavening the whole lump lasted
a generation. I consequently felt that room
must be found in the bibliography for references
to the reception accorded by the critics to each
book in its turn.

Mr. Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding
Crowd, brought him immediately, not merely a
name, but popularity. In his case, then, I did
not feel the necessity of enumerating in the
bibliography any reviews except those treating
of his work generally.

It seems to me an interesting point that the
first appearance in print of Mr. Hardy, as of
Mr. Meredith, should have for Jocale the same
magazine, Chambers’s Journal.

Much of Mr. Hardy’s earliest work—I have
been told on good authority, the entire work of
two years—was in verse, a circumstance which
may perhaps account for a certain indefinable
nuance in his prose. Of this work, however,
everything, with the exception of one poem, was
destroyed.

And here comes in another curious parallel.
Mr. Meredith had ready for publication in 1857

iv
PREFACE
a collection of verses entitled British Songs. No
allusion to the fact has ever been made public
before, for the author destroyed the whole of the
poems, and at the present time has only the
haziest recollection of any of them.

I am fortunate enough to have obtained Mr.
Hardy’s permission to reproduce in its original
form his one piece of salvage, a Wessex ballad,
which appeared, bowdlerised, in The Genile-
man’s Magazine in November 1875. Mr. Hardy’s
courtesy in this respect has also extended to a
sketch of William Barnes’s life published in The
Atheneum on October 16th, 1886.

Any indication of omissions, for incorporation
in a later edition of this volume, will be gratefully
acknowledged.

In conclusion, I have to express my thanks
for kind assistance rendered me by—amongst
others—Mr. Clement K. Shorter, Dr. Garnett,
Mr. Edward Marston, Mr. Andrew Chatto, Mr.
Richard Le Gallienne, and my friend and colleague
Mr. Frederic Chapman.

JOHN LANE.

Tue ALBANY, LoNnpoN, W.,
August 1894.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

How I Burtt myseLr a House. Article in Chambers’s
Journal, Saturday, March 18, 1865, pp. 161-164
(unsigned).
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

DESPERATE REMEDIES. | A Nove. | ‘Though
a course of adventures which are only connected
with each other by | having happened to the same
individual is what most frequently occurs in | nature,
yet the province of the romance-writer being artifi-
cial, there is more | required from him than a
mere compliance with the simplicity of reality.’ | Sir
W. Scott | In Three Volumes. | London: | Tinsley
Brothers, 18, Catherine St, Strand. | 1871. | [Zhe
hight of Translation is Reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol.
I, pp. vi 304; Vol. II., pp. v 291; Vol. IIL, pp.
vi 274.

Second Edition.

DESPERATE REMEDIES | A Nove | By |
Tuomas Harpy | Author of ‘ Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ etc. | ‘Though an unconnected course of
adventures is what most frequently | occurs in nature,
yet the province of the romance writer being arti-
ficial, | there is more required from him than a mere
compliance with the simplicity | of reality.’ | Sir W.
Scott | With a Frontispiece by F. Barnard | New
Edition | London | Ward and Downey, Publishers |
12, York Street, Covent Garden | 1889. Post 8vo,

pp. 384.
PREFATORY NOTE.

The following story, the first published by the author, was
written nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way
toa method. The principles observed in its composition are, no
doubt, too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, sur-
prise, and moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest ;

viii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

but some of the scenes, and at least one of the characters, have

been deemed not unworthy of a little longer preservation; and as

they could hardly be reproduced in a fragmentary form, the novel

is reissued complete—the more readily that it has, for some con-

siderable time, been reprinted and widely circulated in America.
January 1889.

Third Edition.

DESPERATE REMEDIES | A Novex | By |
Tuomas Harpy | Author of ‘ Tess of the D’Urber-
villes,’ etc. | ‘Though an unconnected course of
adventures is what most frequently | occurs in nature,
yet the province of the romance-writer being arti-
ficial, | there is more required from him than a mere
compliance with the | simplicity of reality.’ | Sir W.
Scott | Popular Edition | London | William Heine-
mann | 1892 | [AZ rights reserved.| Post 8vo, pp.
viil 384.

ix
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

UNDER THE | GREENWOOD TREE | A | Rurax
PAINTING OF THE DutcH ScHOOL. | By the | Author
of ‘Desperate Remedies.’ | In Two Volumes | Lon-
don: | Tinsley Brothers, 18 Catherine St., Strand. |
1872. | [A rights reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol. I, pp.
215; Vol. II., pp. 216.

Second Edition.

UNDER THE | GREENWOOD TREE. | A | Rurat
PAINTING OF THE DuTcH ScHoor. | By THomas
Harpy, | Author of ‘ Far from the Madding Crowd,’
‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ etc. | Illustrated Edition. |
London : | Tinsley Brothers, 8 Catherine St., Strand. |
1876. | [Ad rights reserved.| Crown 8vo, pp. vii
342. 17 Illustrations.

Third Edition.

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE. | A | Rurat
PAINTING OF THE DutcH ScHooL. | By Tuomas
Harpy, | Author of ‘ Far from the Madding Crowd,’
‘Return of the Native,’ etc. | A New Edition, with
Illustrations. | London: | Chatto and Windus,
Piccadilly. | 1878. | Ad/ rights reserved.|

This Edition differs from the Second only in the title-
page and the absence of the frontispiece.

Reprinted in the railway novel form by Chatto &
Windus in 1878 and 1891; and in the library form,
with cloth covers and the illustrations of the 1876
edition, except the frontispiece, for which a portrait of
the author is substituted, in 1892.

x
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES. | A Novet. | By THomas
Harpy, | Author of | ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’
‘Desperate Remedies,’ et . |

‘A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute ;
No more.’ |

In Three Volumes. | London: | Tinsley Brothers,
8 Catherine St., Strand. | 1873. | [Ze right of transla-
tion and reproduction is reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol. L.,
pp. 303; Vol. II., pp. 311; Vol. IIL, pp. 262.

Tinsley's Magazine, vols. xi. and xii, Sept. 1872 to
July 1873, A Pair or Biue Eves, by the Author of
“Under the Greenwood Tree,’ ‘Desperate Remedies,’
etc. With 1x Illustrations.

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES. | A Novet. | By |
Tuomas Harpy, | Author of ‘Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ ete. |

‘ A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute ;
No more.’ |

Henry S. King & Co., London. | 1877. |
With a Frontispiece by M. E. E.(dwards). Post
8vo, pp. 369.

The same Edition was afterwards sold by Kegan Paul & Co.,
who succeeded to the publishing business of Henry S. King & Co.,
and by them transferred in June 1884 to Sampson Low & Co., by
whom it has been reprinted in Dec. 1886, June 1890, June 1892,
and June 1893.

xi
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. | By
Tuomas Harpy, | Author of | ‘A Pair of Blue
Eyes,’ ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ etc. | With
Twelve Illustrations. | In Two Volumes. | London: |
Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Waterloo Place. | 1874. |
(All rights reserved.) Demy 8vo. Vol. L, pp. iv
333, with 6 full-page Illustrations by Helen Paterson ;
Vol. IL, pp. iv 342, with 6 full-page Illustrations by
Helen Paterson.

Cornhill Magazine, vols. xxix. and xxx., Jan. to Dec. 1874,
Far FROM THE MappiInc Crowp. (Unsigned.) 12
Illustrations by H. Paterson (Mrs. Wm. Allingham).

Second Edition, exactly similar, except that the words
‘Second Edition’ appear on the title-pages.

Third Edition (first one-volume edition).

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD | By |
Tuomas Harpy | Author of | ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’
‘The Hand of Ethelberta,’ etc. | New Edition | With
Six Illustrations | London | Smith, Elder & Co., 15
Waterloo Place | 1877 | LAW rights reserved.| Large
crown 8vo, pp. vii 407.

Fourth Edition, a reprint of the Third Edition by
Smith, Elder & Co., 1878; transferred to Sampson
Low & Co., Feb. 1882, and by them reprinted Nov.
1884, Apl., Aug., and Sept. 1889, May 1892, and
May 1893 (with a new photogravure portrait of the
author).

xii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xv., November 1875, pp.
552-555, THE Fire at TRANTER SWEATLEY'S: A
Wessex Ballad, by THomas Harpy.

(Reprinted in this volume by permission.)

xili T
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA | A Comepy In
Cuapters | By | THomas Harpy | Author of ‘Far
from the Madding Crowd,’ etc. | Vite post-scenia
celant—Zucretius | With Eleven Ilustrations | In
Two Volumes | London | Smith, Elder, & Co., 15
Waterloo Place | 1876 | [A rights reserved] Demy
8vo. Vol. L, pp.viil 322, with six full-page Illustrations
by George du Maurier; Vol. II. pp. viii 318, with
five full-page Illustrations by George du Maurier.

Cornhill Magazine, vols. xxxii. and xxxiii., July 1875 to
May 1876, THE Hanp or ETHELBERTA. 12 Iilus-
trations by George du Maurier.

Second Edition (first one-volume edition).

THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA | A ComEpy IN
Cuapters | By | THomas Harpy | Author of ‘Far
from the Madding Crowd,’ etc. | Vite post-scenia
celant—Lucretius | New Edition | With Six Tlustra-
tions | London | Smith, Elder, & Co., 15 Waterloo
Place | 1877 | [AM rights reserved] Large crown
8vo, pp. vii 412.

Reprinted by Smith, Elder & Co., 1878.

Transferred to Sampson Low & Co., January 1882,
and by them reprinted June 1888, May 1890, Jan.
1892, and 1893.

xiv
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THE | RETURN OF THE NATIVE | By | Tuomas
Harpy | Author of | ‘Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ ete. |

*To sorrow

I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind ;

But cheerly, cheerly,

She loves me dearly ;

She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her,

And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.’ |

In Three Volumes | London | Smith, Elder, & Co.,
15 Waterloo Place | 1878 | (AW rights reserved| Post
8vo. Vol. L, pp. vi 303; Vol. II., pp. vi 297;
Vol. III., pp. vi 320.

Belgravia, vols. xxxiv., XXXV., XXXV1., xxxvii., Jan. to Dec.
1878, THE RETURN OF THE Native, by THomas
Harpy. 12 Illustrations by Arthur Hopkins.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. | By | THomas
Harpy, | Author of | ‘Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ etc. |

‘To sorrow

I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind ;

But cheerly, cheerly,

She loves me dearly ;

She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her,

And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.’ |

xV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

New Edition, with Frontispiece. | London: | (
Kegan Paul & Co., 1 Paternoster Square. | 1880.
Pp. vi (with map, viii) 412.

Transferred to Sampson Low & Co., June 1884, an
by them reprinted July 1890 and June 1893.

xvi
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

New Quarterly Magazine, vol. x. (Chatto & Windus),
April to October 1878, pp. 315-378, AN INDISCRE-
TION IN THE Lire or AN HErREss, by THomas
Harpy. Part I, pp. 315-347; Part II., 347-378.

(Not reprinted.)

from ‘The Atheneum, Nov. 30, 1878.
* DIALECT IN NOVELS.

‘A somewhat vexed question is re-opened in your criticism of my
story, ‘‘The Return of the Native”; namely, the representation
in writing of the speech of the peasantry, when that writing is
intended to show mainly the character of the speakers, and only
to give a general idea of their linguistic peculiarities.

* An author may be said to fairly convey the spirit of intelligent
peasant talk if he retains the idiom, compass, and characteristic
expressions; although he may not encumber the page with obsolete
pronunciations of the purely English words, and with mispro-
nunciations of those derived from Latin and Greek. In the print-
ing of standard speech, hardly any phonetic principle at all is
observed ; and if a writer attempts to exhibit on paper the precise
accents of a rustic speaker, he disturbs the proper balance of
a true representation by unduly insisting upon the grotesque
element ; thus directing attention to a point of inferior interest and
diverting it from the speaker’s meaning, which is by far the chief
concern where the aim is to depict the men and their natures
rather than their dialect forms. Tuomas Harpvy.’

(Wot elsewhere reprinted.)

xvii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

New Quarterly Magazine, vol. ii. (new series), pp.
469-473, unsigned Review of ‘Poems of Rural Life,
in the Dorset Dialect,’ by Wm. Barnes, amongst the
‘Selected Books’ of the quarter (Oct. 1879).

(Not reprinted.)

Xviii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THE TRUMPET-MAJOR | A Tate | By | THomas
Harpy | In Three Volumes | London | Smith, Elder
& Co., 15 Waterloo Place | 1880 | [AY rights re-
served| Post 8vo. Vol. 1, pp. vi 295; Vol. IL,
pp. vi 276; Vol. III., pp. vi 259.

Good Words, Jan. to Dec. 1880, THE TRUMPET-Major,

by Tuomas Harpy. 32 [Illustrations by John
Collier.

Second Edition.

THE TRUMPET-MAJOR | A Tate | By | THomas
Harpy | Author of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’
etc. | New and cheaper Edition | London | Sampson
Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington | Crown Build-
ings, 188, Fleet Street, E.C. | 1881 | [Ad rights
reserved] Crown 8vo, pp. iv 428.

Reprinted by Sampson Low & Co., Sept. 1887, March
1892, and June 1893.

xix
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

A LAODICEAN; | or, | THE CasTLe oF THE DE
Stancys. | A Story or To-Day.| By | THomas
Harpy, | Author of | ‘Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ etc. | In Three
Volumes. | London: | Sampson Low, Marston, Searle
& Rivington, | Crown Buildings, 188, Fleet Street, |
1881. | [4d rights reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol. L,
pp. 312; Vol. II, pp. 275; Vol. III., pp. 269.

Harper's Magazine, European Edition, vols. 1, 2, and 3,
Dec. 1880 to Dec. 1881, A LaopicEan, by THos.
Harpy. 13 Illustrations by George du Maurier.

Second Edition.

A LAODICEAN ; | or, | THE CasTLE oF THE DE
Stancys. | A Story or To-Day. | By | THomas
Harpy, | Author of | ‘Far from the Madding
Crowd,’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ etc. | New Edition. |
London: | Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Riving-
ton, | Crown Buildings, 188, Fleet Street, E.C. |
188 . | [Ad rights reserved.| Crown 8vo, pp. (vi) 374.

Reprinted by Sampson Low & Co., Jan. and July 1890,
Nov. 1892, and 1893.

xX
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

TWO ON A TOWER. | A Romance. | By | THomas
Harpy, | Author of ‘ Far from the Madding Crowd,’ |
‘The Trumpet-Major,’ etc. | In Three Volumes. |
London: | Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Riv-
ington, | Crown Buildings, 188, Fleet Street. | 1882. |
[Ad rights reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol. 1. pp. 246;
Vol. II., pp. 240; Vol. IIL, pp. 223.

Atlantic Monthly (Boston, U.S.A.), vols. xlix. and 1,
Jan. to Dec. 1882, serial issue of Two on a Tower,
by THomas Harpy.

Second Edition, also in 3 vols., exactly similar, except
that the date is 1883.

TWO ON A TOWER. | A Romance. | By | Tuomas
Harpy, | Author of ‘ Far from the Madding Crowd,’ |
‘The Trumpet Major,’ etc. |

‘Ah, my heart ! her eyes and she
Have taught thee new astrology.
Howe’er Love’s native hours were set,
Whatever starry synod met,
*Tis in the mercy of her eye
If poor Love shall live or die.’
CrasHaw: Love’s Horoscope.

Third Edition. | London | Sampson Low, Marston,
Searle & Rivington | Crown Buildings, 188, Fleet
Street, E.C. | 1883 | LA rights reserved] Crown 8vo,
pp. (iv) 346.

Reprinted by Sampson Low & Co., Aug. 1888, June
1890, November 1891, and 1893.

xxi
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

TWO ON A TOWER. | By | THomas Harpy, |
Author of ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ ‘ Under the Green-
wood Tree,’ | ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’ ‘ The
Return of | the Native,’ ‘The Laodicean,’ | etc., etc. |
London: | Tribner and Company, | 57 & 59
Ludgate Hill. | 1882. | Ad rights reserved. | Part L,
8vo, pp. 21; Part IV., 8vo, pp. 59-78; Part V.,
8vo, pp. 79-98.

The above are in the British Museum, but there are no other
parts there: the issue appears to have been made in order to
secure copyright.

xxii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

The Graphic, Summer Number for 1883, THE RomAnric
ADVENTURES OF A MILKMAID, by THomas Harpy.
3 full-page Illustrations by C. S. Reinhart.

This Tale has not been reprinted in England. The
JSollowing is the collation of the American edition :-—

THE ROMANTIC | ADVENTURES OF A MILK-
MAID. | A Novet. | By THomas Harpy. | ‘Where
are you going, my pretty maid?’ | ‘I’m going
a-milking, sir,’ she said. | New York: | George
Munro, Publisher, | 17 to 27 Vandewater Street. |
Crown 8vo, pp. 90. Jan. 25, 1884 [from paper cover].

xxiii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY
Longman’s Magazine, vol. ii., July 1883, THE Dorser-

SHIRE LABOURER (article), by THomas Harpy, pp.
252-269.

XXIV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THE | MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE: | Tue Lire
AND DzaTH oF A | Man or Cuaracter. | By|
Tuomas Harpy, | Author of | ‘Farfrom the Madding
Crowd,’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’etc. | In Two Volumes. |
London: | Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place. |
1886. | [Ad rights reserved.| Post 8vo. Vol. I.,

pp. 313; Vol. IL, pp. 312.

The Graphic, Jan. 2 to May 15, 1886, THE Mayor or
CASTERBRIDGE, by THomas Harpy. With 20 Illus-
trations by Robert Barnes.

THE | MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE | A Story
or A Man oF Cuaracter | By | THomas Harpy |
New Edition | London | Sampson Low, Marston,
Searle & Rivington | Crown Buildings, 188 Fleet
St., E.C. | 1887 | [AW rights reserved) Crown 8vo,
PP- 432.

The bastard-title and title leaves form pages 1, 2, 3,
and 4.

Reprinted by Sampson Low & Co., October 1889,
November 1892, and 1893.

The Atheneum, Oct. 16, 1886, Article (obituary) on
Tue Rev. WILLIAM BARNES.

(Reprinted in this volume by permission.)

xXxXV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THE WOODLANDERS | By | THomas Harpy | In
Three Volumes | London | Macmillan and Co. | and
New York | 1887 | Zhe Right of Translation and
Reproduction ts Reserved. Post 8vo. Vol. IL, pp.
302; Vol. IL., pp. 328; Vol. III., pp. 316.

Macmillan’s Magazine, vols. liv. and lv., May 1886 to
April 1887, THE WooDLANDERS, by THomas Harpy.

THE WOODLANDERS | By | THomas Harpy |
Author of ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ ete. |
London | Macmillan and Co. | and New York |
1887 | Zhe Right of Translation and Reproduction ts
Reserved. Crown 8vo, pp. (iv) 352.

Reprinted 1889.

XXVI
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

WESSEX TALES | Strancr, Livety, anp Common-
pLAcE | By | THomas Harpy, | Author of ‘The
Woodlanders,’ etc. | In Two Volumes | London |
Macmillan and Co. | and New York | 1888 | Ad
rights reserved | Globe 8vo. Vol. L, pp. 247 ; Vol.
IIL., pp. 212.

Contents of Vol. I.

The Three Strangers.
The Withered Arm.
Fellow Townsmen.

Contents of Vol. IJ.

Interlopers at the Knap.
The Distracted Preacher.

WESSEX TALES | Strance, Livery, anD Common-
PLACE | By | THomas Harpy | Author of | ‘The
Woodlanders,’ ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ etc. |
London | Macmillan and Co, | and New York |
1889 | Ad! rights reserved. Crown 8vo, pp. (vi) 276.

Reprinted 13893.

New Quarterly Magazine, vol. i. (new series), C. Kegan
Paul & Co., Jan. and April 1879, pp. 324-376, THE
DISTRACTED YOUNG PREACHER, by THomas Harpy.

New Quarterly Magazine, vol. iii. (new series), C. Kegan
Paul & Co., Jan. and April 1880, FELLow-TowNSsMEN,
by THomas Harpy, pp. 335-383.

Longman’s Magazine, March 1883, THE THREE
STRANGERS, by THomas Harpy, pp.569-588.
xxvii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

English Mlustrated Magazine, vol. ii. (1884-5), INTER-
LOPERS AT THE Knap, by THomas Harpy, pp. 5or-
14.

Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1888, THE WITHERED
Arm, by THomas Harpy, pp. 30-48.

XXViii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Murray's Magazine, vol. iii., Jan. 1888, THE WaItInc
SuprEr, by THomas Harpy, Chaps. L-V., pp. 42-67;
Feb, 1888, Chaps. VI-VIII., pp. 199-218.

(Wot reprinted in England.)

Littell’s Living Age, March 17, 1888, 5th series, vol.
Ixi, THe WaiTinc SupPeR, by THomas Harpy
(from Murray's Magazine), Chaps. 1.-V., pp. 669-682;
March 24, Chaps. VI.-VIII. (end), pp. 719-729.

The Forum (New York), March 1888, vol. v., Article,
THE PROFITABLE READING OF Fiction, by THos.
HARDY, pp. 57-70.

(Wot reprinted.)

XXIX U
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

New Review, Jan. 1890, vol. ii., Article, CANDOUR IN
EncuisH Fiction. I. By WaLTeR Besant. II. By
E. Lynn Linton. III. By THomas Harpy, pp.
15-21.

(Not reprinted in England.)

Eclectic Magazine, New York, March 1890, CaNnDoR
In EncuisH Fiction: A Symposium. I. By WALTER
Besant. II. By Mrs. E. Lynn Linton. III. By
Tuos. HARDY, pp. 315-318.

XXX
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

THREE NOTABLE STORIES | Love anv Perit |
To Br, or Nor To BE | THE MELANCHOLY
Hussar | Respectively by | THE Marquis oF
Lorne, K.T. | Mrs. ALEXANDER | THomas Harpy |
London | Spencer Blackett | 35, St. Bride Street,
Ludgate Circus, E.C. | 1890 | [4 rights reserved]
Crown 8vo, pp. 211. [THE MELANCHOLY Hussar,
by THomas Harpy, pp. 151-211.]

XXXi
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

A GROUP OF | NOBLE DAMES | By | THomas
Harpy | That is to say | The First Countess of
Wessex | Barbara of the House of Grebe | The
Marchioness of Stonehenge | Lady Mottisfont, The
Lady Icenway | Squire Petrick’s Lady | Anna, Lady
Baxby | The Lady Penelope | The Duchess of
Hamptonshire | and | The Hononrable Laura |

‘, . . Store of Ladies, whose bright eyes

Rain influence.’
L Allegro. |

Publishers’ Device | (and on back of title) James R.
Osgood, | M‘Ilvaine & Co., | 45 | Albemarle Street, |
London. | 1891. Post 8vo, pp. (vi) 271.

Harpers Magazine, December 1889, pp. 20-43, THE
First CountTEss OF WEssEX. With 8 Illustrations
by Alfred Parsons and C. S. Reinhart.

Longmans Magazine, vol. xv., Jan. 1890, THE Lapy
PENELOPE, by THomas Harby, pp. 279-287.

The Eclectic Magazine, New York (new series), vol. li.,
Feb. 1890, THE Lapy PENELOPE, by THos. Harpy,

pp. 217-222.

The Graphic Christmas Number, 1890, A GROUP OF
Nose Dames, by THomas Harpy.

PRELIMINARY—-A COLUMN.

This is considerably altered in the volume, passages
being omitted, added, or rewritten, in order, perhaps,
XXxii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

to make the prologue fit in better with the complete
series. In the volume a start is made straightway
with ‘The First Countess of Wessex,’ by the local
historian, a story which does not appear here; and
following it comes the revised prologue as a kind of
connecting link between it and the subsequent tales.

The order of the ones actually appearing in this Christ-
mas Number is as follows :—

i,
ii,
iii.
iv.

v.

vi.

Barbara (daughter of Sir John Grebe), by the Old Surgeon.

The Lady Caroline, afterwards Marchioness of Stone-
henge, by the Rural Dean.

Anna, Lady Baxby, by the Colonel.

The Lady Icenway, by the Churchwarden.

Squire Petrick’s Lady, by the Maltster. (‘Crimson
Maltster’ in the vol.)

Lady Mottisfont, by the Sentimental Member.

The Christmas Number closes, like the volume, with
a sort of epilogue, consisting of a remark or two on
the narrators, which, like the prologue, is altered in
the volume.

The sequence of the tales being altered and others
added, the connecting links vary considerably in the
two printed versions.

XXXili
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

New Review, April 1891, THE SCIENCE OF FICTION, pp.
304-319. I. By Paun BourGET, pp.304-309. II. By
WALTER BESANT, pp. 305-315. III. By Tuomas
Harpy, pp. 315-319.

(Not reprinted in England.)

Liclectic Magazine, New York, June 1891, THE SCIENCE
oF Fiction, a Symposium, by (i.) Paut Bourcer,
(ii.) WALTER Besant, and (iii.) THomas Harpy:

pp. 854-856.

XXXiV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

TESS | OF THE D’URBERVILLES | A Pure
Woman | FAITHFULLY PRESENTED By | THomas
Harpy | In Three Volumes |

‘, . . Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed

Shall lodge thee.’
W. SHAKSPEARE.

Publishers Device | All Rights | Reserved. | (and on
back of title-page) James R. Osgood, | M‘Ilvaine and
Co., | 45 | Albemarle Street | London, | 1891. Post
8vo. Vol. I, pp. (viii) 264; Vol. IT., pp. (viii) 278;
Vol. IIL, pp. (vi) 277.

In this form the book ran through four editions.

The Graphic, July 4 to Dec. 26, 1891, TESS OF THE
D’URBERVILLES, by THomas Harpy. With 25
Illustrations by Professor Hubert Herkomer, R.A.,
and his pupils, Messrs. Wehrschmidt, Johnson, and
Sydall.

TESS | OF THE D’URBERVILLES | A Pure
Woman | FAITHFULLY PRESENTED BY | THOMAS
Harpy |

‘, . . Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee.’
W. SHAKSPEARE.
Publishers Device | All Rights | Reserved | (and on
back of title-page) James R. Osgood, | M‘Ilvaine &
Co., | 45 | Albemarle Street | London, | 1892

Contains, besides the explanatory note to the First
Edition, a new ‘Preface to the Fifth Edition,’ of
four pages, and a portrait of Hardy as frontispiece,

XXXV
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

with facsimile signature beneath. Crown 8vo, pp.
xil 519.

National Observer, Special Literary Supplement, Nov.
14, 1891, SATURDAY NIGHT In ARcapy, by THomas
Harpy (an episode from ‘ Tess’), about six columns,

Fortnightly Review, vol. xlix. (new series), May 1891,
THE MipNIGHT Baptism, A STUDY IN CHRISTIANITY,
by THomas Harpy (an episode from ‘ Tess’), pp.
695-701.

Eclectic Magazine, New York, June 1891, THE Mip-
NIGHT BAPTISM, A STUDY IN CHRISTIANITY (episode
from ‘Tess’), by THomas Harpy, pp. 826-831.

XXXVI
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Pail Mall Gazette, August 31, 1892, Article, Way I
pon’T WRITE Piays. The first contribution is by
Tuomas Harpy.

(Not reprinted.)

Llustrated London News, Oct. 1, 1892, to Dec. 17,
1892, THE PURSUIT OF THE WELL-BELOVED, a Sketch
of Temperament, by Tuomas Harpy, Author of ‘ Far
from the Madding Crowd,’ ‘Tess of the D’Urber-
villes,’ etc. With a Portrait; and a Headpiece and
24 Illustrations by Walter Paget.

Part First—A Younc Man or Twenty. Chapters
I.-XII.

Part Second—A Younc Man or Forty. Chapters
XIII.-XXXIII.

(Not reprinted.)

XXXVii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Lhe English Llustrated Magazine, Christmas Number,
1893, ANCIENT EARTHWORKS AT CASTERBRIDGE, by
Tuomas Harpy. With 4 Illustrations from photo-
graphs by W. Pouncy, Dorchester. Pp. 281-288.

(Not reprinted.)

XXXVili
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

STORIES | FROM | ‘BLACK AND WHITE’ | By |
W. E. Norris. | W. Ciarx RUussELL. | THomas
Harpy. | Mrs. E. Lynn Linton. | James Payn. |
J. M. Barris. | Mrs. Oripuant. | GRanT ALLEN. |
With Twenty-seven Illustrations. | London: Chapman
& Hall, Ld. | 1893. Crown 8vo, pp. viii 349.
The third contribution is To PLease His Wire, by
Tuomas Harpy, pp. 99-145. With Portrait and
2 Illustrations, the latter by W. J. Hennessy.

XXXIx
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

LIFE’S | LITTLE IRONIES|A Set or Tates |
with | Some Colloquial Sketches | entitled | A Frew
CRusTED CHaracTeRS | By | Tuomas Harpy |
(Publishers device from block) | All rights | reserved

On Back of Title.

Osgood, | M‘Ilvaine and Co., | 45 |
Albemarle Street | London, | 1894

Contents.
(‘ Life’s Little Ironies.’)

The Son’s Veto.

For Conscience’ Sake,

A Tragedy of Two Ambitions.

On the Western Circuit.

To Please his Wife.

The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion.
The Fiddler of the Reels.

A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four.

(‘A Few Crusted Characters.’)

Tony Kytes, the Arch Deceiver.

The History of the Hardcomes.

The Superstitious Man’s Story.

Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk.
Old Andrey’s Experience as a Musician.
Absentmindedness in a Parish Choir.

The Winters and the Palmleys.

Incident in the Life of Mr. George Crookhill.
Netty Sargent’s Copyhold.

Crown 8vo, pp. (vi) 301.

Universal Review, vol. ii., 1889, pp. 537-560, A TRAGEDY
or Two AmBiTIONS, by THomas Harpy. With 6
Illustrations.

xl
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Harper's Magazine, March to June 1891, vols. xxi. and
xxii, European Edition, Wessex Fox, by Tuomas
Harpy. With 8 Illustrations by Alfred Parsons and
Charles Green.

Contents.

Prologue.

Tony Kytes, the Arch Deceiver.

The History of the Hardcomes.

The Superstitious Man’s Story.

Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk.
Andrey Satchel’s Experiences as a Musician.
Absentmindedness in a Parish Choir.

The Winters and the Palmleys.

Incident in the Life of Mr. George Crookhill.
Netty Sargent’s Copyhold.

fortnightly Review, vol. xlix. (new series), March 1891,
For Conscience Sake, by THomas Harpy, pp.

370-382.

Eclectic Magazine, New York, May 1891 (new series),
vol. liii., FoR CONSCIENCE’ SAKE, pp. 610-619.

Black and White, vol.i., June 27, 1891, TO PLEASE HIS
Wirz, by THomas Harpy. With 2 Illustrations by
W. Hennessy, and a Portrait of the Author, pp.
678, 682.

English Illustrated Magazine, vol. ix., December 1891,
ON THE WESTERN CiRcuIT, by THomas Harpy.
With Illustrations by Walter Paget, pp. 275-288.

xli
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

Lilustrated London News, Christmas Number, 1891,
THE Son’s VETO, by THomas Harpy. 2 Illustrations
by A. Forestier, pp. 20-25.

Scribner's Magazine, May 1893, THE FIDDLER OF THE

REELS, by THomas Harpy. With an Illustration by
W. Hatherell, pp. 597-609.

xiii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

The Pall Mall Magazine, April 1894, AN IMAGINATIVE
Woman, by THomas Harpy. With Headpiece and
6 Illustrations by A. J. Goodman, pp. 951-969.

(Not reprinted.)

xliii
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

PLAYS.

FaR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, a Pastoral Drama in
Three Acts, by THomas Harpy and Comyns Carr.

Produced at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Liver-
pool, 27th February 1882.

Produced at the Globe Theatre, London, May
1882.

THE THREE WAYFARERS (a dramatisation of ‘The
Three Strangers’), by THomas Harpy.
Produced at Terry’s Theatre, London, 3rd June 1893.

xliv
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

ARTICLES ON THOMAS HARDY’S NOVELS.

New Quarterly Magazine, vol. ii. (new series), July and
October 1879 (C. Kegan Paul & Co.), Article entitled
Mr. Harpy’s NovELs, pp. 412-431.

British Quarterly Review, April 1881, vol. lxxiii., Article,
Mr. Harpy’s NovELs, not signed, pp. 342-360.

Westminster Review, April 1883 (new series), vol. lxiii.,
Article, THomas Harpy’s Noyes, not signed, pp.
334-364. Vart Dhl tee

Contemporary Review, July 1889, vol. lvi., Article
entitled Tuomas Harpy: THE HIstTorian oF
WESSEX, by J. M. Barrie, pp. 57-66.

Eclectic Magazine (New York), August 1889, Article
entitled THomas Harpy: THE HIsTorian oF
WESSEX, by J. M. Barrie.

The Speaker, Sept. 13, 1890, ‘The Speaker’s Gallery,’
No. viii, THomas Harpy (three columns). [By
Edmund Gosse. ]

National Observer, Feb. 7, 1891, ‘Modern Men.’ This
week the subject is THomas Harpy—a little over two
columns—an ‘appreciation.’

The Bookman, October 1891, THomMas Harpy’s WEs-
SEX. With a Map, pp. 26-28.
xiv x
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS HARDY

The Bookman, December 1891. THE WorK OF THOMAS
Harpy, by Professor Minto, pp. 99-101.

Litustrated London News, October 1, 1892. Article
entitled THe Gernius or THomas Harpy, by
Frederick Greenwood, p. 431. With a View of Mr.
Hardy’s house, and a View of Dorchester (Caster-
bridge).

xlvi
WILLIAM BARNES
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
AND
THE FIRE AT
TRANTER SWEATLEY’S

A WESSEX BALLAD
BY

THOMAS HARDY
THE REV. WILLIAM BARNES, B.D.
By THomas Harpy.

(Reprinted, by permission, from The Atheneum
of October 16, 1886.)

UNTIL within the last year or two there were
few figures more familiar to the eye in the county
town of Dorset on a market day than an aged
clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-
breeches, and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel
slung over his shoulders, and a stout staff in his
hand. He seemed usually to prefer the middle
of the street to the pavement, and to be thinking
of matters which had nothing to do with the
scene before him. He plodded along with a
broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the slight
stoop occasioned by his years. Every Saturday
morning he might have been seen thus trudging
up the narrow South Street, his shoes coated
with mud or dust according to the state of the
roads between his rural home and Dorchester,
and a little grey dog at his heels, till he reached
the four cross-ways in the centre of the town.
Halting here, opposite the public clock, he would
pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob,
and set it with great precision to London time.
xlix
WILLIAM BARNES

This, the invariable first act of his market visit,
having been completed to his satisfaction, he
turned round and methodically proceeded about
his other business.

This venerable and well-characterised man was
William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet and philo-
loger, by whose death last week at the ripe age
of eighty-six the world has lost not only a lyric
writer of a high order of genius, but probably
the most interesting link between present and
past forms of rural life that England possessed.
The date of his birth at the very beginning of
the century is less explanatory of his almost
unique position in this respect than the remote-
ness, even from contemporary provincial civilisa-
tion, of the pastoral recesses in which his earlier
years were passed—places with whose now obsolete
customs and beliefs his mind was naturally im-
bued. To give one instance of the former tardi-
ness of events in that part of the country: it
was a day almost within his remembrance when,
amidst the great excitement and applause of the
natives, who swept the street with brooms in
honour of its arrival, a stage-coach made its first
entry into Sturminster Newton, the little market
town nearest to the hamlet of Bagbere, the home
of his parents. And there used to come to a
little bridge, close to his father’s door, till quite
recently, a conjurer or ‘white wizard, who cured
afflicted persons by means of the toad-bag—a
small piece of linen having a limb from a living
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
toad sewn up inside, to be worn round the
sufferer’s neck and next his skin, the twitching
movements of which limb gave, so it was said,
‘a turn’ to the blood of the wearer, and effected
a radical change in his constitution.

Born so long ago as February 22nd, 1800 (1801
has been given, but I believe incorrectly), amid
such surroundings, a thorough son of the soil, and
endowed with great retentiveness and powers of
observation, it is no wonder that Barnes became
a complete repertory of forgotten manners, words,
and sentiments, a store which he afterwards turned
to such good use in his writings on ancient British
and Anglo-Saxon speech, customs, and folklore ;
above all, in the systematic study of his native
dialect, as a result of which he has shown the
world that far from being, as popularly supposed,
a corruption of correct English, it is a distinct
branch of Teutonic speech, regular in declension
and conjugation, and richer in many classes of
words than any other tongue known to him. As
an instance of the latter he used to mention the
pronouns with particular pride, there being no
fewer than four demonstratives to set against the
current English two. He would also instance
any natural object, such as a tree, and show that
there were double as many names for its different
parts in the Dorset dialect as those available in
the standard tongue.

It was a proud day for young William Barnes
when, some time in the year 1814 or 1815, a

li
WILLIAM BARNES

local solicitor, the late Mr. Dashwood, entered
the village school and inquired if there was a
boy clever enough with his pen to come and
copy deeds in his office in a clerkly hand. The
only lad who at all approximated to such a high
description was Barnes, and the scene of testing
him with the long quill pen and paper, and his
selection by the lawyer, must have been one to
which Mulready alone could have done justice.
The youth thus found himself at a  solicitor’s
desk, and, what was more, in a position to help
himself in some degree to the grammars and
glossaries his soul desired, and by whose diligent
perusal at odd hours through many laborious
years he became familiar with an astonishing
number of languages and dialects. A more
notable instance of self-help has seldom been
recorded, considering the date in the century,
the young man’s circumstances, and the remote
place of his residence, for it appears that he still
lived on at the hamlet, walking to and from the
town—or rather townlet—every day. In later
years academic scholars were sometimes found
to remark upon the unsystematic character of
his linguistic attainments, but it cannot be gain-
said that he was almost always ready with
definite and often exclusive information on what-
ever slightly known form of human speech might
occur to the mind of his questioner, from Persian
to Welsh, from the contemporary vernaculars of
India to the tongues of the ancient British tribes.

li
A BIOGRAPHICAL, NOTE
Over and above these subjects, his mind was
occupied after his removal to Dorchester, to judge
from his letters to old local newspapers, with in-
vestigations of Roman remains, theories on the
origin of Stonehenge, and kindred archeological
matters; while among his other hobbies about
this time was engraving on wood and on silver,
crests and initials upon old pieces of plate in the
neighbourhood still remaining to testify to his
skill in the art.

Though Barnes’s first practical step in life had
brought him to the office of a solicitor, his in-
stincts were towards tuition; and when, some
years later, he had become well settled in the
county town he opened a school. As school-
master he was fairly successful from the first,
and as time went by and he obtained, as a ten
years’ man, his university degree and took orders,
the school grew highly popular. It was during
this period—from early in the forties onwards—
that he wrote at intervals the first, second, and
third series of those sweet rustic poems by which
his name will be best remembered.

He used to tell an amusing story of his ex-
perience on relinquishing the school at Dorchester
to retire to the country rectory of Winterbourne
Came, in which he has ended his days. About
the very week of his translation, so to call it,
the name of one of his pupils appeared in the
Times and other papers at the head of the
Indian examination list, a wide proportion of

liii
WILLIAM BARNES

marks separating it from the name following
The novelty of these lists lent a keen interest
to them in those days, and the next morning
Mr. Barnes was deluged with letters from all
parts of the country, requesting him at almost
any price to take innumerable sons, and produce
upon them the same successful effect. ‘I told
them it took two to do it,’ he would say, adding,
“Thus a popularity which I had never known
during the working years of my life came at
almost the first moment when it was no longer
of use to me.’

To many readers of these pages the charming
idyls known as Barnes’s ‘Poems in the Dorset
Dialect’ are too familiar to need description or
eulogy. Though locally distinguished on the
title-page by the name of the county at large,
the chief scenes of their inspiration lie more pre-
cisely in the limited district to the north and
north-west of Dorsetshire, that is to say in the
secluded Vale of Blackmore, whose margin formed
the horizon of his boyhood, and was, as he him-
self sings in one of the poems, the end of the
world to him then. This fertile and sheltered
tract of country, where the fields are never brown
and the springs never dry, is bounded on the
south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces
the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow,
Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury, and High-Stoy.
The prospect northwards from each of these
heights is one which rivals, and in many points

liv
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
surpasses, those much admired views of Surrey
and Buckinghamshire from Richmond Hill and
the terrace at Windsor Castle, while the portion of
the landscape immediately beneath the spectator
is the abiding-place of the people whose daily
doings, sayings, and emotions have been crystal-
lised in the poet’s verse. Occasionally, it is true,
we find among the men and women presented
in Mr. Barnes’s volumes some who are housed
in hamlets lying nominally beyond the Vale,
but to my mind these characters are in a great
measure Blackmore people away from home,
‘bearing with them still the well-marked traits
which distinguish the Vale population from that
of the neighbouring uplands. The same may be
said of his backgrounds and scenery. Moreover,
when, moved by the pervading instinct of the
nineteenth century, he gives us whole poems of
still life, unaffected and realistic as a Dutch
picture, the slow green river Stour of the same
valley, with its deep pools, whence the trout
leaps to the may-fly undisturbed by anglers, is
found to be the stream dearest to his memory
and the inspirer of some of his happiest effusions.

Unlike Burns, Béranger, and other poets of
the people, Mr. Barnes never assumed the high
conventional style; and he entirely leaves alone
ambition, pride, despair, defiance, and other of
the grander passions which move mankind great
and small. His rustics are, as a rule, happy
people, and very seldom feel the sting of the rest

lv
WILLIAM BARNES

of modern mankind—the disproportion between
the desire for serenity and the power of obtaining
it. One naturally thinks of Crabbe in this con-
nexion ; but though they touch at points, Crabbe
goes much further than Barnes in questioning
the justice of circumstance. Their pathos, after
all, is the attribute upon which the poems must
depend for their endurance; and the incidents
which embody it are those of everyday cottage
life, tinged throughout with that ‘light that never
was, which the emotional art of the lyrist can
project upon the commonest things. It is im-
possible to prophesy, but surely much English
literature will be forgotten when ‘Woak Hill’
is still read for its intense pathos, ‘Blackmore
Maidens’ for its blitheness, and ‘In the Spring’
for its Arcadian ecstasy.

Notwithstanding the wide appreciation of his
verse both here and in America, so largely local
were the poet’s interests that it may be questioned
if the enthusiasm which accompanied his own
readings of his works in the town-halls of the
shire was not more grateful to him than the
admiration of a public he had never seen. The
effect, indeed, of his recitations upon an audience
well acquainted with the xwances of the dialect
—impossible to impart to outsiders by any kind
of translation—can hardly be imagined by readers
of his lines acquainted only with English in its
customary form. The poet’s own mild smile at
the boisterous merriment provoked by his droll

Ivi
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
delivery of such pieces as ‘The Shy Man, ‘A
Bit o’ Sly Coorten,” and ‘Dick and I, returns
upon the memory as one of the most characteristic
aspects of a man who was nothing if not genial ;
albeit that, while the tyranny of his audience
demanded these broadly humourous productions,
his own preferences were for the finer and more
pathetic poems, such as ‘ Wife a-lost,’ ‘Woak Hill,
and ‘ Jady a-past.’

To those who knew Mr. Barnes in his prime,
it may have been a matter for conjecture why
a man of his energies should not at some point
or other of his career have branched off from
the quiet byways of his early manhood into the
turmoils of the outer world, particularly as his
tastes at that time were somewhat general, and
the direction of his labours was dictated in the
main by his opportunities. The explanation
seems to be that the poetic side of his nature,
though not always dominant, was but faintly
ruled by the practical at any time, that his place-
attachment was strong almost to a fault, and
that his cosmopolitan interests, though lively,
were always subordinate to those local hobbies
and solicitudes whence came alike his special
powers and his limitations.

Few young people who have seen him only
in latter years, since the pallor and stoop of old
age overcame him, can realise the robust, upright
form of his middle life, the ruddy cheek, and the
bright quick eye. The last, indeed, dimmed but

lvii
WILLIAM BARNES: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

slightly, and even on his death-bed his zest for
the subject of speech-form was strong as ever.
In one of his latest conversations he became quite
indignant at the word ‘bicycle.’ ‘ Why didn’t they
call it “ wheel-saddle” ?’ he exclaimed.

Though not averse to social intercourse, his
friendships extended over but a small area of
society. But those who, like the present writer,
knew him well and long, entertained for him a
warm affection; while casual visitors from afar
were speedily won to kindly regard by the sim-
plicity of his character, his forbearance, and the
charming spurts of youthful ardour which would
burst out as rays even in his latest hours.

iii
THE FIRE AT TRANTER SWEATLEY’S

A WESSEX BALLAD
By THomas Harpy (written 1867).
(Printed, by permission, from the original MS.)

[4V.8.—A bowdlerised version of this ballad appeared in
The Gentleman's Magazine for November 1875.]

THEY had long met o’ Sundays—her true-love
and she—
And at junketings, maypoles, and flings ;
But she bode wi’ a crabbed old nuncle, and he
Swore by noon and by night that her husband
should be
Naibour Sweatley (a man often weak at the knee
From taking o’ sommat more cheerful than tea),
Who tranted, and moved people’s things.

She cried, ‘O pray pity me!’—Nought would he
hear ;
Then with wild rainy eyes she obeyed.
She chid when her Love was for clinking off wi’
her:
The pa’son was told, as the season drew near,
To throw over pulpit the names of the pedir
As fitting woone flesh to be made.
lix
THE FIRE AT TRANTER SWEATLEY’S

The wedding-day dawned and the morning drew
on:
The couple stood bridegroom and bride:
The evening was passed, and when midnight had
gone
The folks horned out ‘God save the King, and
anon
To their home the pair gloomily hied.

The lover, Tim Tankens, mourned heart-sick and
drear
To be thus of his darling deprived :
He roamed in the dark ath’art field, mound, and
mere,
And, a’most without knowing it, found himself near
The house of the tranter, and now of his dear,
Where the moving lights showed they ’d arrived.

The bride sought her chimmer so calm and so pale
That a Northern had thought her resigned ;
But, to eyes that had zeed her in seasons o’ weal,
Like the white cloud o’ smoke, the red battle-
field’s vail,
That look spak’ of havoc behind.

The bridegroom yet laitered a beaker to drain,
Then reeled to the linhay for more ;
When the candle-snoff kindled the chaff from his
grain—
Flames spread and rush upwards wi’ might and
wi main
And round beams, thatch, and chimley-tun roar.
Ix
A WESSEX BALLAD

Young Tim away yander, aroused by the light,

Through brimbles and underwood tears,
Till he comes to the orchet, where slap in his sight,
Beneath a bowed codlin-tree, trimbling wi’ fright,
Wi nought but her shimmy ’tween her and the

night,
His gentle young Barbree appears.

Her cold little buzzoms half naked he views
Played about by the frolicsome breeze ;
Her light-tripping totties, her ten little tooes,
All bare and besprinkled wi’ Falls’ chilly dews,
While her great frightened eyes through her ring-
lets so loose
Sheened like stars through a tangle o’ trees.

She eyed en ; and, as when a weir-hatch is drawn,
Her tears, penned by terror afore,
Wi’ a rushing of sobs in a shower were strawn,
Till her power to pour ’em seemed wasted and
gone
From the heft of misfortune she bore.

‘O Tim, my own Tim I must call ’ee—I will!
All the world hev turned round on me so!
Can you help her who loved ’ee, though acting so
ill?
Can you pity her misery—feel for her still ?
When worse than her body so quivering and chill,
‘Is her heart in its winter of woe!’
lxi Y
THE FIRE AT TRANTER SWEATLEY’S

‘I think I could almost hev borne it,’ she said,
‘Had my griefs one by one come to hand ;

But O, to be slave to an uncle for bread,

And then, upon top o’ that, driven to wed,

And then, upon top o’ that, burnt out o’ bed,
Is more than my nater can stand!’

Tim’s soul like a lion within en outsprung—
(Tim had a great soul when his feelings were wrung)
‘Feel for ’ee, dear Barbree?’ he cried:
Then his warm working-jacket about her he flung,
Made a back, horsed her up, till behind him she
clung:
Like a chiel on a gipsy her figure up-hung
As the two sleeves afore him he tied.

Over piggeries, and mixens, and apples, and hay,
They stumbled, straight into the night,
And finding at length where a bridle-path lay
By dawn reached Tim’s house, only zeed on their
way
By a naibour or two who were up wi’ the day;
But they gathered no clue to the sight.

Then tender Tim Tankens he searched here and
there
For some garment to clothe her fair skin ;
But, though he had breeches, and weskets to spare,
He had nothing quite seemly for Barbree to wear,
Who, half scrammed to death, stood and cried on
a chair,
At the caddle she found herself in.
Lxii
A WESSEX BALLAD
There was one thing to do, and that one thing he
did,
He lent her these clouts of his own,
And she took ’em perforce ; and while in ’em she
slid
Tim turned to the winder, as modesty bid,
' Thinking, ‘O that the picter my duty keeps hid,
To the sight o’ my eyes mid be shown!’

In the tallet he stowed her ; there huddled she lay
Suiting sleeves, legs, and tails to her limbs,

But most of the time in a terrible way,

Well knowing that there’d be the devil to pay

If twas found that, instead o’ the elements’ prey,
She was living in lodgings at Tim’s.

‘Where’s the tranter?’ said men and boys, ‘where
can he be?’

‘Where’s the tranter?’ said Barbree alone,
“Where on earth is the tranter?’ said everybod-y:
They sifted the dust of his perished roof-tree,

And all they could find was a bone.

Then the nuncle cried, ‘Lord, pray have mercy on
me!’ ‘
And in terror began to repent :
But before ’twas complete, and till sure she was free,
Barbree drew up her loft-ladder, tight turned her
key—
Tim bringing up breakfast, and dinner, and tea—
Till the news of her hiding got vent.
Ixiii
THE FIRE AT TRANTER SWEATLEY’S: A WESSEX BALLAD

There was skimmity-riding wi? rout, shout, and
flare,
In Weatherbury, Drouse, and out Egdon way, ere
They had proof of old Sweatley’s decay :
Whereupon decent people all stood in a stare,
Saying Tim and his lodger should risk it, and

pair :

So he took her to church. And some laughing
lads there

Cried to Tim, ‘After Sweatley!’ She said, ‘I
declare

I stand as a maiden to-day !’

 

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at the Edinburgh University Press
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1894

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editions of belles-lettres.'.—Dazly Chronicle, Sept. 24, 1892.

Referring to MR. LE GALLIENNE'S ‘English Poems’ and
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very simplicity make a harmony which is satisfying to the artistic
sense.’ —Sunday Sun, Oct. 2, 1892.

‘Mr. LE GALLIENNE is a fortunate young gentleman. I don't
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in an age as stony to poetry as the ages of Chatterton and Richard
Savage, we find the full edition of his book sold before publication,
How is it done, Messrs. ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE?
for, without depreciating Mr. LE GALLIENNE’'S sweetness and
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‘To Messrs. ELKIN MATHEWS AND JOHN LANE almost more
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especially due; for it is they who have managed, by means of
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St. James's Gazette.
March 1894.

List of Books

IN

BELLES LEITRES

(Lucluding some Transfers)

PUBLISHED BY

Elkin Mathews and John Lane

Che Borlep bead
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N.B.—The Authors and Publishers reserve the right of reprinting
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ADAMS (FRANCIS).
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ALLEN (GRANT). :
THE Lower Stopes: A Volume of Verse. 600 copies.

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ANTAUS.
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500 copies. Feap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. [Very few remain.

MARSTON (PHILIP BOURKE).

A Last Harvest: Lyrics AND SONNETS FROM THE
Book oF Love. Edited by Louise CHANDLER
MOULTON. 500 copies. Feap. 8vo. 5s. net.

Also 50 copies on large paper, hand-made. os. 6d. net.

[Very few remain.

MARTIN (W. WILSEY).
QuaTRAINS, LIFE’s MYSTERY AND OTHER POEMS. 16mo.
2s. 6d. net. [Very few remain.

MARZIALS (THEO.).
THE GALLERY OF PIGEONS AND OTHER POEMS. F cap.
8vo. 4s. 6d. net. [Very few remain.
Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.

MEYNELL (MRS.), (ALICE C. THOMPSON).
Poems. Second Edition. Feap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. A
few of the 50 large paper copies (First Edition) remain,
12s. 6d. net.

MEYNELL (MRS.).
Tue RuytuM oF LIFE, AND OTHER Essays. Second
Edition. Feap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. A few of the 50
large paper copies (First Edition) remain. 12s. 6d. net.

MONKHOUSE (ALLAN). :
Booxs anD Piays: A Volume of Essays. 400 copies.
Crown 8vo, 5s. net.
MURRAY (ALMA).

PortTRAIT AS BEATRICE CENcI. With critical notice
containing four letters from ROBERT BROWNING.

8vo, wrapper. 2s. net.
10 THE PUBLICATIONS OF

 

NETTLESHIP (J. T.).
ROBERT BROWNING: Essays and Thoughts. A Third
Edition is in preparation. Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
Half a dozen of the Whatman large paper copies
(First Edition) remain. £1, Is. net.

NOBLE (JAS. ASHCROFT).

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND AND OTHER Essays. Title-
page and Cover Design by AUSTIN YouNG. 600
copies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

Also so copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net.

NOEL (HON. RODEN).
Poor PEOPLE’S CHRISTMAS. 250 copies. I6mo. Is. net.
[Very few remain.
OXFORD CHARACTERS.

A series of lithographed portraits by WILL ROTHENSTEIN,
with text by F. York PowELt and others. To be
issued monthly in term. Each number will contain
two portraits. Parts I. to V. ready. 200 sets only,
folio, wrapper, 5s. net per part; 25 special large
paper sets containing proof impressions of the por-
traits signed by the artist, 10s. 6d. net per part.

PINKERTON (PERCY).
GaLEazzo: A Venetian Episode and other Poems.
Etched Frontispiece. 16mo. 5s. net.
[Very few remain.
Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.

RADFORD (DOLLIE).
Sones. A New Volume of Verse. [Zn preparation.

RADFORD (ERNEST).
CHAMBERS TWAIN. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANE.
250 copies. Imp. 16mo. 5s. net.
Also 50 copies large paper. os. 6d. net. (Very few remain.
RHYS (ERNEST).
A Lonpon Rose AND OTHER RHYMES. With Title-page
designed by SELWYN IMAGE. 500 copies. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
ELKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE It

 

RICKETTS (C. S.) anp C. H. SHANNON.

HERO AND LEANDER. By CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
and GEORGE CHAPMAN. With Borders, Initials, and
Illustrations designed and engraved on the wood by
C. S. Ricketts and C. H. SHANNON. Bound in
English vellum and gold. 200 copies only. 35s. net.

RHYMERS’ CLUB, THE BOOK OF THE.
A second volume will appear in the Spring of 1894.

SCHAFF (DR. P.).
LITERATURE AND Poetry: Papers on Dante, etc.
Portrait and Plates, 100 copies only. 8vo. ros. net.

STODDARD (R. H.).
Tue Lion’s Cub; WITH OTHER VERSE. Portrait.
100 copies only, bound in an illuminated Persian
design. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net. [Very few remain.

STREET (G. 5S.).
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A Boy. Passages selected by
his friend G. S. S. With Title-page designed by
C. W. FURSE. s00copies. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

SYMONDS (JOHN ADDINGTON).
In THE KEY OF BLUE, AND OTHER Prose Essays.
Cover designed by C. 5. RicKETTs. Second Edition.
Thick Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

THOMPSON (FRANCIS).
Porems. With Frontispiece, Title-page and Cover Design
by LaurRENcE Housman. Fourth Edition. Pott 4to.
5s. net.

TODHUNTER (JOHN).
A Sicit1an IpyLL. Frontispiece by WALTER CRANE.
250 copies. Imp. 16mo, 53s. net.

Also so copies large paper, fcap. 4to. os, 6d. net. .
[Very few remain.
12 THE PUBLICATIONS OF

 

TOMSON (GRAHAM R.).

AFTER SUNSET. A Volume of Poems. With Title-page and
Cover Design by R. ANNING BELL. Fcap. 8vo. 5s.
net.

Also a limited large paper edition. 12s.6d.net. [lx preparation.

TREE (H. BEERBOHM).

THE IMAGINATIVE FacuLty: A Lecture delivered at the
Royal Institution. With portrait of Mr. TREE from
an unpublished drawing by the Marchioness of Granby.
Fcap. 8vo, boards. 2s. 6d. net.

TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE).
Cuckoo Soncs. With Title-page and Cover Design by
LAURENCE HOUSMAN. 500copies. Feap. 8vo. 5s.
net.

VAN DYKE (HENRY).
THe POETRY oF TENNYSON. Third Edition, enlarged.
Crown 8vo. §s. 6d. net.
The late Laureate himself gave valuable aid in correcting
various detatls.
WATSON (WILLIAM).
THE ELoPpING ANGELS: A Caprice. Second Edition.
Square 16mo, buckram. 3s. 6d. net.

WATSON (WILLIAM).
EXCURSIONS IN CRITICISM: being some Prose Recrea-
tions ofa Rhymer. Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

WATSON (WILLIAM).
THE PRINCE’S QUEST, AND OTHER PoEMS. With a
Bibliographical Note added. Second Edition. Feap.

8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

WEDMORE (FREDERICK).
PASTORALS OF FRANCE—RENUNCIATIONS. A volume of
Stories. Title-page by JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I.
Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 53s. net.
A few of the large paper copies af Renunciations (First Edition)
remain. 108. 6d. net.
ELKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE 13
WICKSTEED (P. H.).

DanTE. Six Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. net.
WILDE (OSCAR).

THE SPHINX. A poem decorated throughout in line and
colour, and bound in a design by CHARLES RICKETTS.
250 copies. £2, 2s. net. 25 copies large paper.
45> 58. net.

WILDE (OSCAR).

The incomparable and ingenious history of Mr. W. H.,
being the true secret of Shakespear’s sonnets now for
the first time here fully set forth, with initial letters
and cover design by CHARLES RICKETTS. 500 copies.
Ios. 6d. net.

Also 50 copies large paper. 1s. net. (x preparation.
WILDE (OSCAR).

DRAMATIC WoRKS, now printed for the first time with a
specially designed Title-page and binding to each
volume, by CHARLES SHANNON. 500copies. Small
4to. 7s. 6d. net per vol.

Also 50 copies large paper. 158. net per vol.
Vol. 1. LADY WINDERMERE’S Fan: A Comedy

Four Acts. [Ready.
Vol. 1. A Woman oF No Importance: A Comedy
in Four Acts. [ Shortly.
Vol. 11. THE DucHEss oF Papua: A Blank Verse
Tragedy in Five Acts. [ln preparation,

WILDE (OSCAR).

SaLomé: A Tragedy in one Act done into English.
With 11 Illustrations, Title-page, and Cover Design
by AUBREY BEARDSLEY. 500 copies. Small 4to.
15s. net.

Also 100 copies, large paper. 308. net.

WYNNE (FRANCES).

WHISPER. A Volume of Verse. With a Memoir by
Katharine Tynan and a Portrait added. Feap. 8vo.
2s. 6d, net.

Transferred by the Author to the present Publishers.
14 PUBLICATIONS OF ELKIN MATHEWS & JOHN LANE

 

The Hobby Horse

A new series of this illustrated magazine will be published
quarterly by subscription, under the Editorship of Herbert
P. Horne. Subscription £1 per annum, post free, for the
four numbers. Quarto, printed on hand-made paper, and
issued in a limited edition to subscribers only. The
Magazine will contain articles upon Literature, Music,
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts;
Poems ; Essays ; Fiction; original Designs; with reproduc-
tions of pictures and drawings by the old masters and
contemporary artists. There will be a new title-
page and ornaments designed by the Editor.
Among the contributors to the
Hobby Horse are :

The late MATTHEW ARNOLD, _ F. York Power.

LavuRENcE BInyon. Curistina G. Rossetti.
Wirrip Buiunt. W. M. Rossetti.

Forp Mapox Brown. peri Ruskin, D.C.L., LL.D.
The late ARTHUR BurGEss. REDERICK SANDYS.

E. Burne-Jones, A.R.A. The late W. Bey Scott.
Austin Dosson. FREDERICK J. SHIELDS.
Ricuarp Garnett, LL.D. J. H. SHORTHOUSE.

A. J. Hipkins, F.S.A. The late James SMETHAM.
SeELwyn IMAGE. SIMEON SOLOMON.

LIonEL JOHNSON. A. SOMERVELL.

RicHaRD LE GALLIENNE. The late J. ADDINGTON Symonps.
Sir F. Lercuton, Bart., P.R.A. KATHARINE TYNAN.

T. Hore McLacuian. G. F. Watts, R.A.

May Morris. FREDERICK WEDMORE.

C. Husert H. Parry, Mus. Doc. Oscar WILDE.

A. W. PoLvarp,
Prospectuses on Application.

 

THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
‘Nearly every book put out by Messrs. Elkin Mathews &
John Lane, at the Sign of the Bodley Head, is a satisfaction to
the special senses of the modern bookman for bindings, shapes,
types, and papers. They have surpassed themselves, and
registered a real achievement in English bookmaking by the
volume of ‘* Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical,” of Lord De Tabley.’

Newcastle Daily Chronicle,

‘A ray of hopefulness is stealing again into English poetry
after the twilight greys of Clough and Arnold and Tennyson.
Even unbelief wears braver colours. Despite the jeremiads,
which are the dirges of the elder gods, England is still a nest
of singing-birds (¢es¢e the Catalogue of Elkin Mathews and John
Lane).’ —Mr. ZANGWILL in Pall Mall Magazine.

‘All Messrs. Mathews & Lane’s Books are so beautifully
printed and so tastefully issued, that it rejoices the heart of a
book-lover to handle them ; but they have shown their sound
judgment not less markedly in the literary quality of their
publications. The choiceness of form is not inappropriate to
the matter, which is always of something more than ephemeral
worth. This was a distinction on which the better publishers
at one time prided themselves ; they never lent their names to
trash ; but some names associated with worthy traditions have
proved more than once a delusion and a snare, The record of
Messrs. Elkin Mathews & John Lane is perfect in this respect,
and their imprint is a guarantee of the worth of what they
publish.’—Birmingham Daily Post, Nov. 6, 1893.

© One can nearly always be certain when one sees on the title-
page of any given book the name of Messrs Elkin Mathews &
John Lane as being the publishers thereof that there will be
something worth reading to be found between the boards,’—
World.
 

Edinburgh: T. and A. ConsTABLE
Printers to Her Majesty
 

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