.\^ .u^ V' 0^ .^^ ^^^ :%^. <^' ^r^. ^' V ■^^ .■^^ ^^^ ^^ ,^% ,#' ^ \0q^ ^x^^' '^ ^^" .%: .^-> -''^^ ..-^^ "^y. <^ -^ 't-- v^^~''~"- :> .-lV "■' A^ ,# o .- ■> "■^^ V*' ^ 1 6 ^ •?; .V X^^x. 8 I T .^0• kV ^ 1% I ,^ ^*. X' ^^ M' •^\/ Oo -^^ ' ^<^ ■A' V ^^' s"* '* r '"^ X" \ *-,<' "?■> ''/ c S^^. ..0^ ■ 0- '/-■ o 0^ -->. -r^. BRYN MAWR NOTES AND MONOGRAPHS III THOMAS HARDY POET AND NOVELIST THOMAS HARDY POET AND NOVELIST By. A^ SAMUEL G. CHEW w Professor of English Literature in Bryn Mawr College Still nursing the unconquerable hope BRYN MAWR COLLEGE Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras 1921 Copyright, 1921, by BRYN MAWR COLLEGE OCT -7 '2 g)aA624677 POET AND NOVELIST V PREFACE A FEW paragraphs in the following Study are reprinted from an article, ''Homage to Thomas Hardy," published in The New Republic of June 2, 1920, on the occasion of Mr. Hardy's eightieth birthday. For permission to include them here thanks are due to the editors of that journal. The writer desires to express his grati- tude to Mr. Hardy for the permission, gen- erously accorded, to quote such passages from his writings as were necessary to illustrate the points made in this book. These passages are taken from the defini- tive Wessex Edition of the Novels and Poems, published by Macmillan and Com- pany. S. C. C. March, 1921. BRYN MAWR NOTES III vi THOMAS HARDY III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. EARLY LIFE 1 IL A SURVEY OF THE NOVELS ... 24 III. SOME MATTERS OF TECHNIQUE AND STYLE 109 IV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WESSEX 141 V. MEN AND WOMEN: PEASANTS. . . 169 VI. THE POEMS 191 VII. "a TENTATIVE METAPHYSIC" . . 240 NOTES . 255 AND MONOGRAPHS Vll III Vlll THOMAS HARDY ni BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 1 I EARLY LIFE In a remote, humble Dorsetshire cottage, on the border of Bockhampton Heath about three miles from Dorchester, Thomas Hardy was born on the second of June. 1840. His father, like the father of Stephen Smith in A Pair of Blue Eyes, was a mason. The statement, still often met with, that Nelson's flag-captain was an ancestor of the novelist is incorrect; Captain Hardy belonged to another branch of the same stock. The Hardys are an old county family, formerly of importance but at the middle of the nineteenth century fallen in fortunes. Thomas Hardy has mentioned them frankly as analogous to the D'Urber- villes in their decline from great estate. From his mother Hardy received his earliest education, supplemented presently by the mediocre instruction afforded by the Birth AND MONOGRAPHS III 2 THOMAS HARDY Impres- sions of Nature and of the Past Dorchester schools. The first impressions upon a mind unusually sensitive to sur- roundings were those of Nature and of the Past. Wandering over the heath before the cottage door, or through the woodland behind, beside the Froom and the Stour, within sound of the rushing weirs, among the apple-orchards and corn-fields, upon the lush, placid dairy-farms, in hamlets and larger villages, he observed not only the silence and the calm, but also the rivalry and the struggle of animal and vegetable life. The cruelty of Nature and her beauty impressed him deeply and the sense of this contradiction abides in his writings. All about him were memorials of the Past: Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Danish: venerable tracts of forest-land like the Chase in Tess, "where Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks"; amphitheatre and round earth-work; tumulus and fortress; Druid-stones and strange, rude monoliths whose origins were shrouded in mystery and festooned with folk-traditions. As a youth he must have often climbed about the gigantic, grass-grown ruins of Mai Dun III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 3 near Dorchester; and it was perhaps the very greatness of the effect upon his mind that hindered him from turning this enor- mous relic of antiquity to imaginative account, for save in one brief sketch no scene of his stories is laid in the fortress. Like the older inhabitants of Casterbridge of whom he has written, he too may have seen upon the slopes of the Roman amphi- theatre "a gazing legion of Hadrian's sol- diery as if watching the gladiatorial com- bat," a fleeting vision evoked by the in- tense imaginative appeal of the spot. And like his own Clym Yeobright, he must often have peopled the heaths with their ancient inhabitants. Like Clym, too, he picked up many a flint tool and arrow-head in the course of his wanderings. When, later in life, he built himself Max Gate, the house in which he still lives, the excavation for the foundations laid bare pottery and jewelry of times long past, and in prepar- ing a driveway workmen exhiuned the skeletons of five Roman legionaries. In a tender little poem Hardy has memorialized the maternal care that guided his stumbling AND MONOGRAPHS III 4 THOMAS HARDY Folk- customs childish feet along the Roman Road — the Via that is trodden by so many of the characters in the Wessex novels. Thus life-long associations and age-long memorials have bound Hardy's individual existence to the long record of humanity. The very names of near-by places called up memories of ''the long drip of human tears" and it is among such reminders of past civilizations that he has spent his life. The peasantry of his youth-time had not yet learned to despise old ways and words. Then the molten image was still used to blast an enemy's life, and maidens still re- sorted to the woods of an Old Midsummer- Eve in quest of a vision of their future partners for life. Fortunately for those who reverence such records and customs Hardy's young manhood came at a time when it was still possible to observe in abundance and to store away in memory for future chronicling many folk-survivals that were soon to begin to fade out before the sophisticating influences that have crept into the South of England. The re- peal of the corn-laws, the introduction of III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 5 railways, and later the enforcement of urii- fonn education have brought changes into Dorsetshire and even before the Great War old customs and traditions and landmarks and types were fast disappearing. What '•progress" had not entirely accomplished by 1914 the ruthlessness of military "ne- cessity" has of late, it would seem, thor- oughly performed, if we may judge by the fact that a recent pilgrim to Wessex found one of the heaths that served as a model for Egdon torn and scarred, the ancient ways defiled, the furze-bushes uprooted, and the barrows desecrated by multitudes of "tanks." Around the young Hardy were remind- ers of a more recent Past. Then Waterloo veterans were still to be met with. There were vivid recollections of the stirring days when "there were two arch-enemies of mankind — ^Satan as usual, and Buona- parte, who had sprung up and eclipsed his elder rival altogether." The threat of Napoleon's invasion left an impression upon the Channel counties in a way to which the Midlands and the North afford AND MONOGRAPHS III 6 THOMAS HARDY Archi- tecture no parallel. Ruined huts on high points of land still marked the places where dwelt the beacon-keepers who should signal the landing of tlie French. The seeds that half a century later brought forth the mag- nificent literary fruitage of The Dynasts were sown in Hardy's mind in his child- hood. Other vestiges of the comparatively re- cent Past — Georgian residences, fragments of Elizabethan manor-houses, old inns, barns that had once been portions of old conventual groups, ruined abbeys, and a multitude of churches that were soon to undergo ''the tremendous practical joke" of restoration — must have helped to turn his mind towards the profession which at the age of sixteen he adopted and which left so marked an imprint upon his books. In 1856 Hardy entered the office of an architect named Hicks at Dorchester. It was the period of the English Gothic Renaissance. As a secondary result of the Tractarian Movement old churches, crum- bling and often crude enough, but interest- ing memorials of local faith and local art, III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST were being "battered past recognition in the turmoil of the so-called restoration." Like Ruskin, Hardy protests repeatedly in his books against this lack of reverence and good taste. The architect under whom he studied was commissioned to superintend a good deal of such reconstruction, and (like Stephen Smith) Hardy was sent to sketch and measure many such edifices be- fore their old, familiar lines disappeared forever. The frequent journeys that these tasks necessitated helped to familiarize him with the country-side. The study and practice of architecture gave to the author of the Wessex novels, it is not fanciful to say, his evident grasp of the essentials of proportion, design, finish, selection, and exactitude. The structural excellence of the plays of Sir John Vanbrugh affords a like instance of the influence of strict training in design upon a literary artist. More obvious traces of Hardy's early pro- fession are the detailed and at times too technical descriptions of thQ buildings in and around which his scenes are laid. AND MONOGRAPHS III 8 THOMAS HARDY Literary studies Thence too comes, less happily, a crowd of similes and comparisons. These were years of study far beyond the boundaries of his chosen calling. There is evident self -portraiture in some of the characteristics of Clym Yeobright and Angel Clare, young men upon whose brows thought has too early set furrows; and there are suggestions of autobiography in that yearning for academic distinction that is part of the tragedy of Jude Fawley. But, more fortunate than the obscure so- journer in Christminster, Hardy found in Dorchester a companion a little older than himself and, it is said, of more regular edu- cation, with whom he pursued studies in the classical and modern literatures and in the- ology. The character of Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes (the most autobiographical of all the novels) seems to be drawn from this fellow-student; and the aid and en- couragement afforded by him to Thomas Hardy is perhaps memorialized in the reverence and gratitude evinced for Knight by Stephen Smith. It is impossible to detennine the exact III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 9 degree to which his studies of Greek Utera- ture influenced Hardy; but it is easy to see that from these studies comes the Sopho- clean tone of the greater novels, the power over Irony, the grasp of the principle of Total Effect, the ability to universalize the application of a contracted series of events. An intimate familiarity with the Bible, especially with the Old Testament, and of the several books, especially with Kings, Job, and Ecclesiastes , turned now to serious, now to humorous, purpose, per- vades Hardy's writings. Knowledge of pa- tristic literature and of modem theological disquisitions is evident in various places, especially in Jude the Obscure and in the extraordinary debate on baptism in A Laodicean (surely unique in romance among the methods whereby the hero comes to the aid of the damsel in distress). There is an oft-repeated anecdote of how Hardy about this time defended certain Anglican doctrines against strictures advanced by his unorthodox friends. Readings in Eng- lish poetry stored his mind with the allu- sions, at times apt, at times rather forced, AND MONOGRAPHS III 10 THOMAS HARDY that recur constantly in the novels. With Wordsworth he had much in common and in Tennyson he must have found a sym- pathetic fellow -observer of the minutiae of the natural world; but the general trend of his thought led him far away from Browning, and the references to all three in the novels are uniformly disapproving in tone. Allusions to Swinburne occur con- stantly and it is evident that Poems and Ballads and Songs Before Sunrise were in- fluential in his intellectual growth. Hardy has himself admitted that the poetry of Crabbe helped suggest to him the choice of his subject-matter, but the outlook of the two men upon village and peasant life is in marked contrast. To Shelley go out Hardy's warmest tributes to an English poet; the Shelley an conception of Love is found, as we shall see, in two of the novels. A minor poet who revealed to Hardy the almost untouched literary possibilities of Dorsetshire was his fellow-townsman Wil- liam Barnes. After that poet's death Hardy published an obituary notice of him and many years later he edited a volume III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 11 of selections from his verse, perhaps exag- gerating the merits of this dialect poetry. Many other English poets are referred to from time to time: Shakespeare, Beau- mont and Fletcher, Herbert, Milton, Con- greve, James Thomson the First, Chatter- ton, Coleridge, Rossetti, Whitman — but without any particular significance attach- ing to the allusions. It is remarkable how free from literary traditions and schools Hardy's own verse is. The connection be- tween his own early poetry and James Thomson's ("B. V.'s"), and Swinburne's is rather the result of independent minds being affected by the same tendencies in thought than of any closer bond of influ- ence. There are, as has just been said, slight but definite connections with Crabbe and Barnes. But in so far as the literary ancestry of Hardy's poetry can be traced at all, the scant clues lead rather to the so-called metaphysical poets of the seven- teenth century than to any writer of his own day. * * * AND MONOGRAPHS III 12 THOMAS HARDY London Knowledge of paint- ing In 1861 Hardy left Dorchester for the metropolis, there to study architecture un- der Sir Arthur Blomfield. While engaged in professional work he attended evening classes at King's College, thus rounding out his earUer, irregular education. In 1863 he won prizes for architectural theory and design from the Royal Institute of British Architects and from the Architectural As- sociation. He widened his acquaintance with the other arts and in particular gained the familiarity with painters of the most opposed schools which he uses for purposes of comparison and description, now clum- sily, now with amazing exactitude and felicity, throughout his writings. This matter is of sufficient importance to justify a brief digression. In his first published novel, for example, may be found descrip- tions such as these: 'A narrow, bony hand that would have been an unmitigated de- light to the pencil of Carlo Crivelli"; and: "The reflection from the smooth, stagnant surface tinged his face with the 'greenish shades of Correggio's nudes." Mr. Penny, in Under the Greenwood Tree, is likened to III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 13 *'a framed portrait of a shoemaker by some modern Moroni." "The green lea," he writes in Tess, "was speckled as thickly with [cows] as a canvas by Van ALsloot or Sallaert with burghers." After his separa- tion from Tess, Clare's attitude towards life is set before us thus : Humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museimi, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers. Among other artists whose works are al- luded to here or there are: Raphael, Ru- bens, Greuze, Guido Reni, Turner, Ter- burg, Gerard Douw, Danby, Nicholas Poussin, Flaxman, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Lely. Del Sarto, Spagnoletto, Sassoferrato, Reynolds, Carlo Dolci, and Sebastiano — the disregard of chronology in this list affording perhaps some faint indication of the wide range of Hardy's allusions. It is no mere parade of knowledge that Hardy offers, of course; rather it is an effort to AND MONOGRAPHS III 14 THOMAS HARDY Disillusion present an exact pictorial description of per- sons and scenes; and as in the case of the crowd of similes drawn from architecture and from the world of nature, if he misses his mark, as occasionally he does, he falls into the awkward or the grotesque; but on the contrary, when successful, he brings home to the reader his scene or person with matchless vividness. A promising career as an architect was opening before him. But already he was hesitating, uncertain as to the wisdom of his choice of a profession. Beyond doubt he puts his own experience into the mouth of Edward Springrove, one of the architects in Desperate Remedies: Those who get rich [as architects] need have no skill at all as artists. — What need they have? — A certain kind of energy which men with any fondness for art possess very seldom indeed — an earnest- ness in making acquaintances, and a love for using them. They give their whole attention to the art of dining out, after mastering a few rudimentary facts to serve up in conversation. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST Even before going up to London Hardy had begun to write verse and in London this occupation was continued. Again Hke Springrove, who was "a, poet himself in a small way," he despised the "pap-and- daisy school of verse" — the allusion is ob- vious. ''If anything on earth," Springrove remarks, ''ruins a man for useful occupa- tion, or for content with reasonable success in a profession or trade, it is the habit of writing verses." Fifty years later, in no such covert form. Hardy revealed the fact that he could find no publisher for the poems written during these years; and in current editions of Who^s Who will be found the significant statement that he "had to drop verse for prose about 1868." It is said that many of these poems were afterwards destroyed. The themes of some, rewritten in prose, found their way into Desperate Remedies. But a large num- ber of them, some in the form in which they originally stood, others revised, others built up from fragments and "old notes," have been given to the world during the last two decades. The quality of this 15 Early verse AND MONOGRAPHS III 16 The New Science and the Old Religion III THOMAS HARDY work can be judged not only from the por- tion that remains, but from a description of the verses of Robert Trewe, the poet who figures in the short story of ''An Imagina- tive Woman": He was a pessimist in so far as that char- acter applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition. Being little at- tracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he some- times, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he ought not to have done. These sentences sum up, quaintly enough and with a characteristic tinge of irony, the characteristics of the writer's own early verse. This small body of thoughtful, sensitive and artistically immature poems exhibits the influence of the new forces which were changing the face of things in the sbcties, destroying an old world while the new was BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 17 powerless to be bom, extending the life- history of mankind into "the dark back- ward and abysm of time," and peering out beyond what had once been the flaming ramparts of the world. The stronghold of orthodoxy was being assailed without and within. The Oxford meeting of the British Association and the publication of Essays and Reviews were events of the immediate past. The poetical atmosphere , among those who could not find refuge in a resur- gent Cyrenaicism, became charged with pessimism, at times melancholy, at times in despairing revolt. Arnold voiced such feelings in ''Dover Beach," and men found images of their own thoughts, cloaked in gorgeous Eastern drapery, in Fitzgerald's translation of Omar. In such a mood Swinburne inserted amid the earlier per- fervid erotics of "Anactoria" the passage of flaming indignation against the gods that gives moral significance to the poem, and in the same mood wrote the middle choruses of Atalanta in Calydon. It was of such spiritual experiences that W, K. Clif- ford wrote a little later: "We have seen AND MONOGRAPHS III 18 THOMAS HARDY The effect of the con- flict upon Hardy the spring sun shine out of an empty- heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead." The despair of one such spirit is recorded in the ma- jestic rhetoric of The City of Dreadful Night. Similar feelings lend a new depth to Ruskin's prose, in the preface to The Crown of Wild Olive. In this welter of con- flicting purposes and ruined symbols some voices — Harriet Martineau's and George Eliot's, for example — were urging the sub- stitution for duty to a dimly descried or al- together unknown God the reHgion of hu- manity, the charity that "seeketh not her own." It was among these shaping influ- ences that Hardy began to write. Even in these early poems a preoccupa- tion with the mystery of the world is seen shadowing Hardy's thought with what Meredith later called his "twilight view of life." This mystery is confronted from the point of view of one who is wont to analyze his own sensations and ideas. From the known microcosm of the poet's individual- ity he looks out upon the macrocosm, the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 19 Great Unknown. He finds no hint of or- derliness in the universe; no sign of direc- tion is apparent, no evidence of plan. Thus there begins the contrast, expressed so often in his writings, between the un- weening Cause and the individual human consciousness that has somehow been evolved in certain of the creatures of that Cause. Very impressive is his cry for a First Cause, even malign, in place of the purposelessness of ''crass Casualty." His is not the poetry of intellectual revolt like that of Swinburne; nor is his the merely puzzled and wandering mentality of such as Clough. Hardy has already reached a negative position, like that of James Thom- son, though in the occasional introduction of what looks like a malign fatalism there is evidence of repugnance to accept the evi- dence for mere determinism, a repugnance the more natural in a mind trained in such traditions of direction and plan as are given by architecture. One must note also that though the point of view is almost al- ways that of Leopardi and of ''B.V.^^^ sheer personal ill luck has no part in framing AND MONOGRAPHS III 20 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's more generalized indictment of the world. And in this connection it may be said, once for all, that mere physical suffer- ing plays a small part in his novels and poetry. Moreover, in contrast to such men as Beddoes, who revel in what may be called literary pessimism, there are already meditations upon the pathos of unbelief. The gayer and more humorous poems of Hardy belong for the most part to a later period of his life. Here broodings upon death are constant. In 1867 the grimly grotesque piece "Heiress and Architect" was written. The dedicatory initials that follow the title of this poem suggest a per- sonal application, but back of any individ- ual experience there is certainly allegory; the heiress being a representative of hu- manity, full of hopes and ideals, and con- fronted by the architect, *'an arch-de- signer," who typifies the rigor and indif- ference of the universe. One by one, as she indicates now one plan and now an- other, he shatters her illusions, until she pleads at last for a ''narrow, winding tur- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 21 ret," reaching to a loft where she may sit alone and grieve: "Such winding ways Fit not your days," Said he, the man of measuring eye; "I must even fashion as my rule declares, To wit: Give space (since life ends un- awares) To hale a coffined corpse adown the stairs; For you will die." The man who at the age of twenty-seven could write this strange meditation upon the Trionfo delta Morte must have cast off many illusions. In this and in many other poems there is a sense of le grand sommeil noir that enfolds the little waking moment called life. One feels in them a desolating consciousness of isolation — "Yes! in the sea of life enisled" — a consciousness of the impenetrable wall that shuts off individual from individual. The island of life is compassed about by the sea of oblivion, and in certain poems Hardy seems to cry with Leopardi: E il naufragar m^e dolce in AND MONOGRAPHS III 22 THOMAS HARDY questo mare! In other poems temporary joy is found in love and friendship. But ever3rwhere there is a complete repudiation of the Carlylean remedy of action for despondency. Other poems still, for des- pair is wont to veil itself in cynicism, are jarring and disagreeable in tone, distrust- ful of humanity, sneering at its efforts and ideals in a manner out of accord with the essential sympathy and tenderness that, certain passages in the novels notwith- standing, are at the basis of Hardy's view of life. Many poems are studies in the freaks and pranks of the ''purblind Doom- sters" who mismanage human fate. In all one finds already a refusal, characteristic of all Hardy's writings, of false consolation and empty hope; a detennination to look at "the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition"; a deliberate and courageous posing of difficult questions. Here he differs from Clough and from the Arnold of the earlier years, who are grop- ing and perplexed, anxious to retain emo- tionally the ideas and hopes that they re- pudiate intellectually. And Hardy's lim- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 23 itations are already as apparent as are his excellences. His steady view of life does not embrace the whole of life. It was not till towards the close of his career that he admitted (in the General Preface to the Wessex Edition of his works) that his has been a nature becoming vocal at tragedy rather than at comedy. "The truths of midnight," as James Thomson admitted to George Eliot, "do not necessarily ex- clude the truths of noon-day." But from these early poems there is no evidence to be drawn that, though undemonstrative be- fore a contrasting side of things, Hardy was not unperceiving. AND MONOGRAPHS III 24 THOMAS HARDY First experiment in fiction II A SURVEY OF THE NOVELS In 1865 Hardy published in Chambers' Journal his first short story: ''How I Built Myself a House." Here he employs in fiction for the first of many times his knowledge of architecture. He tells in hu- morous vein (suggesting the influence of Dickens) of the experience of a young couple who, dissatisfied with the villa in which they live, build a dwelling according to their own plans and specifications. In the course of its construction various im- provements are worked into the original plans, and when at last it is finished they are by no means satisfied with it. The passage in which the supposed narrator describes his dizziness as he stands on the high scaffolding of the half-built dwelling and the warnings of the carpenter lest he fall, anticipates the use made of the same III BRYN MAV^R NOTES POET AND NOVELIST situation in the sensational accident at the beginning of Desperate Remedies. Not- withstanding the trivial humour of the story there is a duly subordinated suggestion of the futility of human efforts; the outcome of our plans rarely measures up to our ex- pectations. Very seldom in later stories and never in the novels does Hardy employ the first-person form of narrative here used. He has never reprinted this slight piece. The distractions of literary pursuits and an inability to stoop to meretricious means of gaining patrons must have strongly af- fected Hardy's attitude towards architec- ture during his last years in London. He came to despise "society" (in the narrow sense of the term). A misunderstanding that is out of accord with his usual toler- ance and sympathy towards humanity in general plays a part in this contempt. From his experiences in the social world are derived the feeble satiric sketches in the London portions of A Pair of Blue Eyes and the attempts, extraordinary only in their weakness, to portray that world in The Hand of Ethelherta, A Laodicean, Two on a AND MONOGRAPHS 25 He leaves London III 26 THOMAS HARDY The first novel Tower, and elsewhere. In 1867 he left London, settled at Weymouth, and began his first novel, while still practising his profession. The Poor Man and the Lady was sub- mitted to the publishing house of Chapman and Hall in May, 1869. Many years later Hardy himself described this story as an incoherent production full of revolutionary and anti-social theories. According to the well-known stor>% George Meredith, the publishers' reader, granted Hardy a per- sonal interview and advised him to with- draw the manuscript; but there is some reason to believe that it was rejected out- right. Forty years afterwards, when Mere- dith died, Hardy recalled the trenchant words, turning to kindness, of this inter- view. It is said that Meredith urged him to quit introspection and philosophizing in fiction and to try his hand at a novel of complicated intrigue. Hardy made no further effort to get The Poor Man and the Lady published. It is still in existence in manuscript. 1 * * * III BRYN MAWR NOTES i POET AND NOVELIST Hardy followed Meredith's advice and, accepting frankly the code of the popular "sensation novelists" of the day, composed Desperate Remedies. There is no truth whatever in the statement quite recently reaffirmed^ that this book is a mere revision of his first rejected story. It is an entirely independent work of a quite different order. A companion error to the effect that this second novel was accepted on Meredith's recommendation is refutable by reference to any bibliography of Hardy. Desperate Remedies was published anonymously in 1871 by the firm of Tinsley Brothers. Hardy himself had to finance the under- taking and advanced seventy-five pounds for that purpose.'' The writer of one monograph upon Hardy* puts Desperate Remedies aside as a sort of Titus Andronicus among the Wessex novels, unworthy of any consideration. This is quite uncritical. It is an immature and in some respects disagreeable book,» a tale of mystery, crime, startling coinci- dence, and melodramatic incident, which in its use of entanglement, suspense, and AND MONOGRAPHS 27 First published novel The disciple of Wilkie Collins and of Charles Reade III 28 THOMAS HARDY Anticipa- tions of the greater novels moral obliquity reveals the strong influence of Wilkie Collins. Its opening words de- scribe it as "a long and intricately in- wrought chain of circumstance." Sensa- tional incidents like the burning of the inn and the midnight burial indicate very defi- nitely the indebtedness to Charles Reade and Collins. This is seen also in the ever- present intention to ''keep the reader guessing," in the division of the events of the story according to periods of time, and in the written confession left by the villain of the piece, which turns up after his death. The portrayal of the brutal animalism of Manston's love for Cytherea is remarkably frank considering the date, and seems to follow the lead of Reade's Griffith Gaunt (1866) in its efforts to break through the conventions of Victorian prudery. But though obviously the work of an imitator, the book offers, both in structure and in character-drawing, certain adum- brations of some of the most typical traits of the later novels. Hardy gradually abandoned the employment of mystery and suspense in favor of the equally effective III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 29 and perhaps more philosophical method of tragic anticipation; but these — not neces- sarily, but in Hardy's hands — cruder means of sustaining interest did not disappear im- mediately after Desperate Remedies. Al- ready he exhibits his ability to weave a highly complicated plot while keeping a sure grasp upon every strand of the tangle of purposes and interests. There is little in the character of the heroine, except her inability to stand firiii against external in- fluences, to suggest the type of woman later peculiarly associated with Hardy; she is franker, less indirect, less subtle, and on the whole more stable. She and Miss Ald- clyffe are immature studies in contrasting types of forcefulness and deHcacy. The illicit love-affair of Miss Aldclyflfe's youth is the first of many such incidents in the novels. Manston, her natural son, faintly suggests Hardy's most powerful study of a man in the grip of an oveiniastering passion — Boldwood. It is noteworthy that his temperament is in part accounted for by the circumstances of his birth. Contrasted with him is the less egoistical, more self- AND MONOGRAPHS III 30 THOMAS HARDY controlled Springrove. We have thus the beginnings of a theme to which Hardy often recurs: animal selfishness against self- sacrificing devotion matched in a struggle for the possession of a loved woman. The two scenes mentioned above indicate the possession of great strength in depicting startling incident. But there is no sweet- ness in the book, and subtlety only in those passages which are obviously mere transcriptions of early poems. Such para- phrases often take the form of disconnected aphorisms of a philosophic sort and in sombre vein, generally stiffly and awk- wardly expressed. But there is no large philosophic implication that raises the in- terest above the level attained by a merely ingenious plot. Beneath the conscien- tiously documented external "realism" of Budmouth and Knapwater House there is a thoroughgoing romanticism of treatment; and even the realism of setting is of a sort that Reade could produce any day from his scrap-books and pigeon-holes. In this respect Hardy had a long way to go before he became master of the art that is visible III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 31 in the living presentation of Dorchester seen in The Mayor of Casterhridge. An ex- ception must be made, however, of the modest but convincing beginning of his transcripts of country life, in his reproduc- tion of the dialogue and characteristics of the peasantry. The occasional rustic scenes — the inn-keeper and his friends, the postman, and the bell-ringers — are not only promising but excellent in themselves. Though almost ignored by the public (a second edition was not called for until 1889), Desperate Remedies obtained some qualified praise from the critics. Indecision was expressed with regard to the author's sex, the knowledge of female character seeming to denote a woman, "the occa- sional coarseness of expression" a man. The West Country characters were singled out as the best part of the book by judicious reviewers, one of whom declared them to be "almost worthy of George Eliot." This remark is the first appearance in print of an idea that has haunted critics of Thomas Hardy. Lately an entire book has been devoted to a comparison of him The appearance of the peasants Reception of the book AND MONOGRAPHS III 32 THOMAS HARDY Digression: a compari- son of Hardy and George Eliot with George Eliot, the contrast there drawn being entirely in favor of the woman. But as a matter of fact the dissimilarities are far more marked than the resemblances. Each writer uses the novel as a medium for the communication of ideas, and in each the tendency to philosophize becomes more outspoken in later books. But the views of life that they set forth are poles asunder. The tragic conflict in George Eliot's con- ception is between desire and conscience; it is an internal war. Conscience plays a small part in Hardy's books. He envisages life as a struggle between will and destiny. Man is master of his fate in George Eliot; the problem is a moral one. Fate, accord- ing to Hardy, is beyond human control. The one preaches action and resistance; the other submission, quietism. In both writ- ers hereditary taints and the contamina- tions of environment play a part; but in George Eliot their influence is preponderat- ing, in Hardy they do not determine the outcome.^ Both introduce the rustics of their native counties into some of their novels, the yokels disappearing from III BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 33 George Eliot's later fiction as they do from Jude the Obscure. Such peasant characters of equally remote districts are bound to possess in common many traits of manners and beliefs. But the older novelist's care- fully realistic studies of country life lack the lightness, relief, and flavour afforded by the undertone of quiet amusement which while it lessens the realism enhances the charm of Hardy's country scenes. Never- theless it may well be that observation of her success in delineating the peasantry of Warwickshire suggested to Hardy to turn to artistic account the customs and tradi- tions of the Southron folk among whom he had grown up and whom he best knew. Blackmore, too, whose Lorna Doone had appeared in 1869, may have helped to guide Hardy into Wessex. At all events it was this vein of his genius, and quite evidently following the lead of George Eliot, that he worked ex- clusively in his next story. Under the Green- wood Tree, which was published anony- mously in 1872. This is unpretentious in scale and theme and far removed from the "A rural painting in the Dutch School" AND MONOGRAPHS III 34 THOMAS HARDY complexities of Desperate Remedies. It is an intimate, detailed, humorous and deli- cately ironical story of a rural courtship. Then and until long afterwards it required, as one of Hardy's characters remarks else- where, "a judicious omission of your real thoughts to make a novel popular"; and it would have been a shrewd critic who could have detected at the time the under- tone of bitterness in the portrayal of the indecision and deceptiveness of the win- some heroine, Fancy Day. It is, indeed, possible to exaggerate the significance of this undertone, for as a whole the tale is blithe enough.^ The simple love-story is set against a background of village life. The gloom of the early poems is put aside in the contemplation of these lives that ac- cept with serenity the countless links that bind them close to Nature. Never, save in Far from the Madding Crowd and in some of the Wessex scenes of The Dynasts, has Hardy surpassed the quaint humour of the rustic talk. The original title of the book (preserved as a subtitle in recent editions) was "The Mellstock Choir." III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 35 This is appropriate, for the comedy of Fancy Day's love-affairs is interwoven with the problem confronting the rustics of how to forestall or at least postpone the introduction of an organ-player in the vil- lage church in place of the time-hallowed west-gallery choir and band. This innova- tion, seemingly so unimportant, is typical of the revolutionary influences that were creeping into Wessex from the outside world. The choir's visit of protest to the vicar is unforgettable in its sweet good- humour, verging upon, but never quite de- generating into, farce. No less excellent are such scenes as that of the Christmas "wake" and the dance (the first of many dances in the Wessex novels) at William Dewy's. The tale is not, and does not pre- tend to be, a great work of art. But the art, unpretentious as it is, is masterly; the charm, however homely, is inimitable; and there are more profound implications, per- haps, than appear on the surface. The first book to bear Hardy's name upon its title-page was A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). The obvious immaturity of this AND MONOGRAPHS III 36 The third novel: the period of apprentice- ship is drawing to a close The excessive use of coincidence III THOMAS HARDY story has been admitted by its author. In the contrasting scenes of comedy and pathos there is evidence of the influence of Dickens, though the alternations are ac- complished with more dexterity and re- finement than the master was generally capable of. And too much of the influ- ence of Wilkie Collins still remains. Sen- sational events and coincidences are too frequently resorted to in order to sustain the interest. It is unnecessary to set down here a full list of these devices, but the use of coincidences which in their number stretch to the limit the reader's willing sus- pension of disbelief is so significant for Hardy's development and philosophy that some notable examples must be given. Mr. Swancourt chose the same day for his secret marriage that his daughter selected for hers. The one person whom Elfrida and Smith met on their return from London was the old woman whose hatred of El- frida made that meeting doubly unfor- tunate. Knight, the person who be- friended Smith, was the reviewer of El- frida's romance and was also the second BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 37 Mrs. Swancourt's cousin. Elfrida found her missing ear-ring, looked for previously in vain, at precisely the most awkward moment possible. The church tower fell just after Elfrida had indicated it as the very symbol of steadfastness. Mrs. Jeth- way, Elfrida's enemy, was buried beneath its ruins. Knight and Smith, acting inde- pendently, returned to Devonshire by the same train that carried the body of their loved one. Chance is certainly over- worked, and the artist, several times barely escaping the farcical, has not sufficient mastery to render acceptable so formidable a conglomeration of its freaks. But one must bear in mind the part that "Hap" plays in Hardy's scheme of things and per- haps regard these strangely juxtaposed events as extreme illustrations of the whim- sicality of chance in disposing of human affairs. ''Hap" does not change char- acter; it alters the course of events. More- over, the long chain of disastrous circum- stances begins, not in chance, but in El- frida's moral cowardice, her inability to clear up and make straight at once a dis- and comments thereon AND MONOGRAPHS III 38 THOMAS HARDY 1 agreeable situation. In this moral coward- ice Smith has his share. And we shall see later that it is in part responsible for the ruined lives of Tess and Jude. But in A Pair of Blue Eyes these shortcomings of character account only in part for the re- sulting tragedy. There are whims and aberrations of chance that are external to human character and irrespective of human effort. It is not merely in themselves that the personages of the story "are thus and thus"; the outcome is in part controlled by external circumstances, the meeting with Mrs. Jethway and the lost ear-ring for example. And, finally, it is not fantastic to suppose that Hardy's insistence upon the marvellous in coincidence is intended to take the place to some degree of the supernatural element of earlier fiction, Hardy's evident feeling for the supernat- ural being held in check by the rational- istic tendencies of his time. What he could do in the way of suggesting the super- natural, without yielding himself wholly to its fascination, may be seen in various later stories: in the short tale of *'The III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST Withered Arm" and in certain episodes of The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterhridge. A Pair of Blue Eyes marks a distinct ad- vance upon the two former novels. There was no telling that the author of Desperate Remedies would ever accomplish anything of genuine worth; and Under the Green- wood Tree, for all its charm, promises only such things as The Trumpet-Major, some of the short stories, and the rustic scenes in other books. The philosophic implications of the present story, on the other hand, are harbingers of many of Hardy's most mature ideas. Human action is seen to be fettered by Cause on the one side and by Effect on the other. The human will, thinking it- self free, is nevertheless bound fast by the ''purblind Doomsters" that unthinkingly ordain what is to be. The line of thought is similar to that of many of the early poems. The famous episode on the cliff when Elfrida saves Knight from a terrible death is the first full indication of Hardy's powers in swift, tense narrative. These powers of concentration upon essentials, AND MONOGRAPHS 39 The novel a distinct advance upon its predeces- sors III 40 THOMAS HARDY* The characters of proper grouping of details, of imparting to the reader that same dread of immense height which one finds in the familiar lines in King Lear, need only to be expended upon less melodramatic themes to be first- rate. Several of the characters are note- worthy. Elfrida Swancourt is a clearly de- fined study of the type of woman faintly outlined in the sketch of Fancy Day: perilously attractive (irony lurks beneath the apparently trivial title of the book), indecisive, intellectually quick but shallow, not heartless but frail, impatient of oppo- sition yet quite unable to face a situation determinedly. The creature of impulse, quick to respond to every wind of persua- sion, she yet possesses a certain definiteness of character that anticipates with varia- tions Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine of Hardy's next book. Smith, the young architect, is a sHghtly drawn boyish figure. But Knight, the journalist, is the first of several thoughtful men in the novels who imagine themselves to be emancipated and liberal-minded but who are more enmeshed by tradition and convention than they are III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 41 aware. The footsteps of such men are dogged by tragedy. Clym Yeobright be- longs with this group; Angel Clare is the capital example of the type. Knight de- mands unsullied maidenliness in his bride; and when the indiscretions of Elfrida are revealed to him his cloudy ideal, veiling the light of her essential purity, obscures the circumstances in which she had been en- trapped. He leaves her. The story thus presents what Hardy later called "the ro- mantic stage of an idea" used again in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. A Pair of Blue Eyes takes the reader, in its setting, farther westward than do the other novels, to the wild country around **lone Camelford and Boscastle divine" which Swinburne has described in one of the most beautiful of his elegies. The carefully subordinated picture of the rus- tics gives a realism that the book might have lacked had it dealt only with the personages of a higher social stratum. One rustic scene, that in the church vault where the yokels are preparing for the burial of Lady Luxellian, is hardly to be matched in Setting AND MONOGRAPHS III 42 THOMAS HARDY The auto- biograph- ical element • Hardy's writings for rich huiiiotir mingled with grimness. . William Worm, Mr. Swan- court's man-of -all-work, is the first (except poor Thomas Leaf) of the thin-witted, slack-limbed, wambling fellows that are pitied and patronized by their sturdier associates. At this late date, when all the circum- stances of Hardy's life are of interest to his admirers, it cannot be amiss to say frankly that some details of the courting of Elfrida by Stephen Smith are indubitably drawn from the writer's" own experiences. The heroine is fashioned in part, as we know on good authority, s from his future wife. Miss Emma Lavinia Gifford; the hero, like Hardy, is an architect and the son of a mason; and the background of the court- ship is, both in locality and social circum- stances, much like Hardy's own. A com- parison of the descriptions of the country in which the comedy and tragedy of El- frida's life and fate are played out and the reminiscences of the same landscape in the touching and curious poems written after the death of Hardy's first wife ("Poems of III BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 43 1912-1913") will fully confirm this sup- position. What the novel lacks is just that quality that Hardy was later to possess to a degree equalled by no other English novelist: the ability to read into a series of happenings to a group of unimportant people in a re- mote district a universal application, a sug- gestion of the inescapable one-ness that en- folds all human affairs. The style, when it seeks to be urbane, is still often awk- ward and ungracious; sentiments intended to be of tragic import are generally merely harsh and bitter; the "strong" scenes sometimes overreach themselves and barely escape being ludicrous. But there is a sure command of his medium in the land- scape drawing and in the dealings with the peasantry. On the whole there is a relapse from the flexible and confident grasp of Under the Greenwood Tree; but it is a re- lapse that comes from essaying a more dif- ficult feat of the novelist's art. A Pair of Blue Eyes was the first of Hardy's novels to appear in serial form be- fore publication as a book. It appeared in Final judgement of A Pair of Blue Eyes AND MONOGRAPHS III 44 Definite abandon- ment of architecture Popular acclaim III THOMAS HARDY Tinsley^s Magazine between September, 1872, and July, 1873. Thereafter each of the novels, though often not in final form, was published first in one magazine or an- other. The success of this story was suf- ficiently marked to warrant Hardy's aban- donment of architecture, and thenceforth he committed himself wholly to imaginative literature. An invitation from Leslie Stephen now resulted in the great popular success of Far from the Madding Crowd, which was pub- lished anonymously in the Cornhill during the whole of 1874. At the conclusion of its serial run it was issued in book-form with Hardy's name on the title-page. In the same year Hardy married Miss Gifford. He moved from Weymouth to Stour- minster-Newton, thence some years later to Wimborne, and finally in 1885 to the outskirts of Dorchester. In Far Jrom the Madding Crowd many sides of Hardy's genius are shown fully de- veloped. There are still flashily sensa- BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 45 tional incidents such as Troy's exhibition to Bathsheba of his skill at the sword-exer- cise (a scene much in the manner of Charles Reade) and the same soldier's snatching of the note from his wife's hand at the fair. The structural mastery is by no means flawless, else would have been avoided so stale and out-worn a device for temporarily getting rid of a character as the supposed drowning of Troy while bathing. Nor is it typical of Hardy's art to leave a loose end ungathered up as he does in the incon- clusive confinement of Boldwood in an in- sane asylum ''during her Majesty's pleas- ure." Such flaws as these are commented upon with characteristic impudence in George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man. But the many excellences of the novel insured not only its immediate suc- cess (which carried with it the incon- venience of attaching to its author's name the reputation of being a first-rate story- teller, thereby obscuring for a generation his significance as a thinker) but its per- manent place among the classics of the English novel. These merits were espe- Period of master- craftsman- ship begins AND MONOGRAPHS III 46 THOMAS HARDY Its many merits cially the variety and vivacity of the moods and interests; the power of devising a series of convincingly connected yet siir- prising situations ; the insight into char- acter, especially the character of a certain type — ^for Hardy always the preeminent type — of woman; the minutely detailed and sympathetic nature-description in which the interrelationship of man and the natural world is brought out with a force- fulness that revealed to many contempo- rary readers the significance of this con- nection in the author's view of life; and the passages of intensely vivid narrative such as the burning of the rick, the bring- ing home of Fanny's body, and the doings of the gargoyle during the rain-storm. In the picture of the shearing -supper — Oak piping on his flute while the shearers re- cline at their ease in the gathering twilight — a scene redolent of the bucoHc tradition of all ages, Hardy almost transcends his meditun and approximates to those effects of light and colour and composition that are accomplished by the sister-art of paint- ing. In no other book are his peasants III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST more delightful or their humour more fra- grant ; he has in great measure shaken off the too literary flavour, the suggestion of Shakespearean imitation, that to a certain degree harms the effectiveness of, say, the remarkable scene in the church- vault in .4 Pair of Blue Eyes. The pervading theme of Far from the Madding Crowd is one that is to reappear with slight variations and subtle shiftings of emphasis in two later books and of which reminiscences are found in others still. The motive is that of the contrast between self-seeking passion and faithful, unselfish devotion, controlling not only judgement but emotion (which is a harder matter). The latter type of love is embodied in the shepherd Gabriel Oak. Some readers may observe a certain hesitation in the initial conception of his character; the picture of Oak with which the book opens presents a peasant who is rather more of a hind, rather more of an uncouth yokel, than Oak turns out to be. But probably, though this is not made very clear, it was intended that the maturing influence of misprized AND MONOGRAPHS 47 Its theme Its characters III 48 THOMAS HARDY love and of financial ruin should be ac- cepted as effecting the contrast between the shepherd of the first chapters and the shepherd of Bathsheba's farm. Those critics are in error who declare that Oak's character is undifferentiated from that of Venn in The Return of the Native and that of Winterbome in The Woodlanders. There are points of difference. Oak is more masterful, more confident than Giles; from the very beginning of the tale the reader experiences an undefined feeling that he will be able to work through his difficulties and disappointments to contentment. And he is a less mysterious figure than Venn, without the almost mystic temperament that leads Venn to adopt his queer calling after disappointment in love and that makes him almost an incarnation of the spirit of Egdon Heath. But all three men, as well as John Loveday in The Trumpet- Major, are cast from the same mould. In contrast to Oak are two representatives of selfish passion: Troy, the romantic, fas- cinating trivialist, who has yet in him something not altogether ignoble; and the III BRYN MAW^R NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 49 sombre, violent Boldwood, brooding, intro- spective, uncontrolled. These men are variants of the type that includes, with important individual differences, Wilde ve in The Return of the Native and Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders. Bathsheba Everdene is the best representative of Hardy's belief in a woman's inability to press steadily and independently towards the goal that she has set before her. Despite herself, Bath- sheba, with all her determination to man- age her estate for herself, is dependent upon Oak, and though impatient of minor conventions she is sobered and rendered discreet by calamity in the brief space of a few months. As a foil to her there is Troy's sweetheart Fanny, but the contrast is not so fully developed as is done in the case of the juxtaposed women in the two 1 17 novels that have so much in common with T ( Var from the Madding Crowd. The story is really of the loves of three men of widely contrasting temperament for one woman. One should note that the apparently gay title veils as deep meaning as did the light name of the preceding book. "Along the AND MONOGRAPHS III 50 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's fame assured The ebb and flow of genius cool, sequestered vale of life" as passionate natures may be encountered, as high trag- edies may be enacted as upon the highroads of the world. This book established Hardy's place among the foremost living novelists. In- deed a contemporary reviewer declared that certain characteristics of the book secured him "a high place among novelists of any age." He did not have to undergo any such disheartening experience as Mere- dith's of a laborious climb to recognition not attained until his last years. As a partial offset to this good fortune his pop- ularity entailed some lowering of 'his im- agination's ideals to meet the demands of a great body of magazine readers. * * * Comment has frequently been made upon the apparent fluctuations in Hardy's genius, which, instead of developing stead- ily from apprentice-work to masterpiece and thence to another masterpiece, has produced between novels of great strength and profundity other stories that already III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST the world would be forgetting but for their connection with the five or six books of acknowledged excellence. This ebb and flow is due to the need of replenishment and refreshment after the severe intellectual and spiritual strain demanded by the major novels, after each of which (with one exception) several years follow. The phenomenon is similar to that observed in the career of Joseph Conrad. Between Nostromo and Chance came two tales, one dealing with Russian, the other with Eng- lish, anarchistic plots, which must be judged comparative failures. Such mate- rial is as foreign to Conrad's true field as is The Hand of Ethelberta to Hardy's. To gain renewed strength by turning to other and lighter themes is a wiser course, how- ever, than to exhaust fecundity in the first rush of genius as Dickens so nearly did. The novel just named was published in 1876. It has been suggested that the, to us, almost incomprehensible strictures that were passed at the time upon Hardy's studies of rustic life (concerning which more will be said in a later chapter) may 51 AND MONOGRAPHS A venture into Meredith's domain III 52 THOMAS HARDY have suggested the sudden change of sub- ject-matter. Hardy appears here to be venturing into the domain of George Mere- dith, just as Meredith, in Rhoda Fleming, grapples with a subject better suited to the genius of Hardy. Meredith might have done well with the theme of a low-born girl's attempt to establish herself in the situation thrust upon her by a marriage into ''high life" followed swiftly by pre- mature and almost penniless widowhood, and in so doing to found the fortunes of her father and his large family. But it did not suit Hardy. Some of the scenes are rather lively and the portraits of the resourceful heroine's sister and brother are attractive; but the high-born lords and l9,dies are quite wooden and are not con- vincing even as rough sketches seen from the point of view of the servants' hall. The story begins amusingly enough; but it soon drags and as a whole it is quite insignificant. * * * III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST The novel which in the opinion of many- critics is Hardy's most nearly perfect work of art as well as his most profound and least biassed study of human nature is The Return of the Native. This was published in 1878. Notwithstanding its admirable qualities it was not so well received as some of its forerunners, one reviewer even pro- nouncing it ''distinctly inferior to anything of his which we have yet read. ' ' The situa- tion presented is. that of Far from the Mad- ding Crowd with certain variations : a love- entanglement between three men and two women. Two of these persons — ^Eustacia and Wildeve — are highly complex natures, impulsive, passionate, selfish, but not with- out some qualities that in other circum- stances might have been turned to good; two others — Thomasin and Venn — are steady, simple, and courageous. The first two are at odds with life and in violent war with the conditions among which they are placed; the second two are steeped in, and in harmony with, their environment. One may well question the grim note which Hardy has lately, in the definitive edition AND MONOGRAPHS 53 The first of the four great novels The theme and the leading characters III 54 THOMAS HARDY of the book, appended, to the effect that only the exigencies of periodical publica- tion caused him to arrange an ending with the marriage of the two children of the heath and requesting readers of "an aus- tere artistic code" to imagine that Thom- asin remained a widow and that Venn dis- appeared from the country-side. A pro- test against the conventional "happy end- ing" was needed at the time and would have been wholesome. But to have ended this particular story in such a manned would have eliminated the catharsis, the cleansing of the passions, which is part of the function of tragedy. As the book stands, the implied lesson is effectively brought home by the destruction of the two rebels against circumstance in contrast to the serene content awarded those who sub- mitted themselves to circumstance. There is a greater emphasis than heretofore upon the power of environment over the fortunes of humanity. The novelist develops with full and confident strength the line of thought somewhat crudely adumbrated in A Pair of Blue Eyes, for the tale is a tragedy III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 55 of the human will, believing itself free yet ceaselessly entangled and thwarted by ex- ternal forces. Egdon is the type of that Power that moves the world, a Power which is not inimical (for hostihty implies inten- tion, and intention consciousness) but in- different to man. In some later novels and in many poems Hard}'' tends to differ- entiate more completely between Nature — that is, the natural world — and the Will or Force which governs it as well as man. All phenomena come to be looked upon as fellow-sufferers with man under a con- scienceless and implacable despotism. . Clym Yeobright, "the Native/' though entangled in the meshes that drag Eustacia and Wildeve to destruction, stands in a different relation to his environment from that of the two rebels and of Venn and Thomasin. Education has guided his aspirations to a height above his oppor- tunities. Yet experience of the outer world, far from alienating him from the surroundings in which he has been brought up, has intensified his love of the heath. He is Hardy's most careful study of what The view of Nature Clym Yeobright AND MONOGRAPHS III 56 THOMAS HARDY Eustacia he conceives to be the modern man, worn and saddened by thought. He is one who holds ''the view of Hfe as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations." For "old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws and see the quandary that man is in by their opera- tion." (In such remarks as these we see Hardy feeling his way cautiously towards an explicit statement of the view of life in- herent and implicit in the novels.) Yet Clym, too, when his aspirations become subdued to the possibilities of his position, is not, one imagines, positively unhappy; doubtless his work as an itinerant preacher brought him a fair degree of content. In Eustacia there is the conflict between stern, limited actualities and romantic imaginations. She is a more passionate Emma B ovary, far removed from the sor- didness of a provincial French town, yet looking towards the vulgarities of Paris for the romance to which she is blind in the great heath around her; satisfying (like III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 57 Emma), or attempting to satisfy, this craving for romance in a commonplace amour. The Return of the Native reveals a deep and most moving love of the natural world, founded on the surest knowledge. The famous prelude-like opening is of course one of the most magnificent pieces of modern prose, reaching a level to which Hardy but seldom attains. The descrip- tion of the heath enfolded by the night gradually resolves itself into the human business of the story. And throughout the book, ever and anon, a curtain seems to lift behind the actors, and we catch glimpses of the heath, impassive and enduring amid the tragedy that is so intense for the actors therein and yet is so light when set in the balance against natural forces. ^ ^ ^ After the concentration required in the creation of this great romance refreshment was found in writing several books of slighter build. The first of these is The Trumpet-Major, published in 1880. This The back- ground Three slighter novels AND MONOGRAPHS III 58 THOMAS HARDY The appearance of the Napoleonic theme tale is to be associated with JJyider the Greenwood Tree as a study of feminine in- decision between two lovers,, set against a background of rustic life. As a whole it has been very variously estimated. A temporarily enfeebled imagination is ex- hibited by the presence of several "stock" literary types; the miles gloriosus, the miser, the faithful soldier and the fickle sailor. These last two remind one of the "faithful friends" or "two noble kinsmen" of so much earlier literature. The story is the first large sign of Hardy's interest in the period of the Napoleonic Wars; he has himself said that it was the consciousness that he had here barely touched the fringes of the great theme that kept him contin- ually pondering upon it till at length it found full expression in The Dynasts. (The earliest notes for the epic-drama, it may be said here, date from the later seventies.) The Trumpet-Major is a re- markable resurrection of the life of a by- gone time of crisis; the atmosphere of the village and of the old mill, the tranquil setting against the background of war are III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIwST 59 accomplished with a pleasing, quiet art. Hardy here gives freer rein than usual to imagery, to description for its own sake, to racy dialogue that has little bearing upon the action. As a whole his books lack the quality of gusto; that quality is certainly present here. The story is too protracted, but it leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth, and in tone it is the sweetest and serenest of all the novels. The feminine flux of fancy portrayed in this book becomes the chief motive of A Laodicean (1881), by all odds the weakest of Hardy's books but in the consideration of which criticism is handicapped by the author's statement that it was in large part composed during convalescence from severe illness. The reappearance of a whole group of architects (absent from the novels since .4 Pair of Blue Eyes), with lengthy dis- quisitions upon the problems involved in the restoration of old buildings, together with a return to something of the technique of Desperate Remedies, points to a con- tinued abeyance of the imaginative powers. The opening scene of the baptism, pre- Feminine indecision AND MONOGRAPHS III 60 THOMAS HARDY The stellar gauge senting, in a fashion better than any de- tailed description could have done, the vacillating heroine, is excellently done and was probably written before the illness that forced the author to fulfil as best he might the contract for serial publication to which he had agreed. The involved love-story is not worth untangling. De Stancy is a conventional figure, and his revolting bastard is of a type associated with the "Gothic" novel. The only noteworthy motive in the book, apart from that of feminine indeterminateness, is the influx of modern ideas and methods into Wessex; Paula, the heroine, comes of new commer- cial stock, but she lives in an old castle that embodies or symbolizes the dignity and ro- mance and memories — and discomforts — of past times. A third slight and in some respects rather tiresome story. Two on a Tower (1882), is notable for the manner in which the human emotions are projected against a background of infinite space, for the young hero is an astronomer; and a "stellar gauge" is thus afforded whereby may be III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 61 measured the infinitesimal insignificance of the actions and emotions of such apparent importance to the actors themselves. The function of Egdon Heath in an earlier novel is thus assumed here by the starry universe. The suggestion that it is a malign fatalism that conducts human affairs, just hinted at in previous books, is here marked; after Two on a Tower this idea, a relic of the an- thropomorphic notions of Hardy's boy- hood, yields place to a strict detenninism. The theme of an older woman's beauti- ful, unselfish and half-maternal devotion to a young lover is suggestive of Balzac, who would have developed it, perhaps, with greater profundity and certainly with more elaboration but hardly with greater deli- cacy. In some characters of earlier novels, especially in his portrait of Bathsheba Everdene, Hardy had indicated his sym- pathy with those who rebel against the lesser social conventions. Here this sym- pathy becomes outspoken and there appear definite attacks upon the restraint imposed by society upon the individual in a manner that points forward to Tess and Jnde. The theme suggestive of Balzac AND MONOGRAPHS III 62 THOMAS HARDY Four fallow years These attacks inspired what Meredith in another connection once called /'the low growls of British prudery. "^ The grounds for unfavorable comment were what seemed to Victorian minds an over-frank- ness in the portrayal of sexual emotion and sexual relations, an apparent attack upon the sanctity of marriage, and a supposedly satiric intent in the portrait of the Bishop of Melchester. But there is no fighting quality in the book, no defiant hostility to society. The outlook upon life is tenderly meditative and melancholy. It lacks force. And there is a detachment from life that seems to envelop the actors in the story in a sort of nebulous haze, as though events were seen through gauze curtains, that suggests the manner of Pater in the Imaginary Portraits. * * * For four years now Hardy published nothing except an article on "The Dorset- shire Labourer" (1883) to which reference will be made in a later chapter, and the pretty but fantastic and unimportant III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 63 Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid (also 1883), a mere novelette which may be dis- missed with two remarks. The milkmaid's lover is a lime-burner; he recalls Venn, the reddleman, in the way in which his per- sonality has been subdued to what he works in. The landscape is evidently a prelim- inary study for the elaborately wrought representations of similar country-side in the middle part of Tess . . . .These fallow years were also in part occupied with the pleasant task of building Max Gate, the house on the outskirts of Dorchester to which the Hardys moved in 1885. Then came The Mayor of Casterhridge (1886), an astonishing rebirth of power in thought and art. Interest in this book is not divided over a group of four or five people all portrayed with about the same amount of detail, but is concentrated in a manner that antici- pates the technique of Tess and Jude upon a single man who represents, as Jude was later to represent still more harshly, the conflict of reason and impulse. The trag- edy of Henchard's life does not lie in com- Changes in technique AND MONOGRAPHS III 64 THOMAS HARDY Character is Fate • binations of external circumstances, though they play their part. His environment casts no such blight upon his hopes as did Eustacia's upon hers. He carries his fate with him and had opposition arisen it would have worked itself out in much the same manner elsewhere as in Casterbridge. Character is Fate. Henchard's shrewd, proud, illiterate, forceful, generous, pas- sionate nature dashes itself to pieces against its own qualities. To the lines in Lear which Hardy cites in the preface to Tess: As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, They kilh us for their sport — the clear-sightedness of Henchard and his humility would have compelled the reply, from the same tragedy: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 65 For the outcome is as inevitable as if it had been Egdon Heath that he dashed himself against. Fortune does not favor him; but the directing Force of the universe uses his own pride and high temper and stubborn- ness to work his ruin, notwithstanding his many splendid qualities of heart and head. This conception reaches to the very heart of tragedy, and the belated humility of his last visit to his foster-daughter renders the tragedy more poignant still. The other characters are less strongly imagined, and intentionally so in order to throw the pic- ture of Henchard into high relief. The first Mrs. Henchard is afrail, pitiful shadow. Elizabeth-Jane, the sport of contending forces, wins happiness in the end through no effort of her own but as it were through the caprice of chance that awards indif- ferently caresses and blows to humanity. Lucetta is quite conventional and theat- rical, a sort of dejected Mariana awaiting in her grange in the Channel Islands the return of another than Angelo, and later behaving as Hardy's fickle women are wont to behave. Farfrae, Henchard's Scotch AND MONOGRAPHS III 66 THOMAS HARDY Farfrae steward and presently his rival, is uncon- vincingly drawn. Hardy knows his South- ron; he does not know the Scot. But the idea behind the conception of Farfrae is an important one and connects The Mayor of Casterbridge with .4 Laodicean. When Farfrae takes charge of Henchard's busi- ness he introduces new and revolutionary methods into the conduct of affairs. As one of the townsmen remarks : " 'Twas verily Fortune sent him to Henchard. His accounts were like a bramblewood when Mr. Farfrae came. He used to reckon his sacks by chalk strokes all in a row like garden-palings, measure his ricks by stretching with his arms, weigh his trusses by a lift, judge his hay by a chaw, and settle the price with a curse. But now this young, ac- complished man does it all by ciphering and mensuration." In his Northern canniness and energy and accuracy, contrasting with the easy-going, tradition-ridden, unambitious ways of the Southern folk, he thus typifies the ingress III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 67 of new methods and ideas into Wessex. With him the Modern comes and before him the Immemorial has to yield. In the impression that the novel makes of logical development, reserved strength, remorseless logic, artistic restraint, and control of materials there are found strong claims for regarding it as Hardy's most artistic achievement. One should mark such matters as the intimate but never ob- trusive picture of the people and customs of the market-town; the subtle distinctions of shading to indicate the relative impor- tance of the principal characters ; the grad- ual decline of Henchard's fortunes, arrested for a moment with an irony that makes the outcome all the more bitter; the impression given of inevitability, as in that fine use of tragic anticipation when it is quietly an- nounced that the years of Henchard's self- denying ordinance against liquor are al- most up. It would be difficult to find an incident that is out of place or that has not its share in the outcome. The whole is thoroughly thought out and finely com- Many regard The Mayor as Hardy's masterpiece AND MONOGRAPHS III 68 THOMAS HARDY Reversion to earlier technique The characters posed. What it lacks is charm, sweetness, poetry. Two of these qualities, and something of bitter-sweetness as well, are present in the next novel, the most tender of all Hardy's books. The two phases of Hardy's period of master-craftsmanship overlap, for The Mayor of Casterhridge was quickly followed by a book that one is tempted to believe preceded it in conception, if not in compo- sition. The Woodlanders (1887) belongs in theme with Far from the Madding Crowd and, even more closely, with The Return of the Native. For a third time we are pre- sented with two contrasting pairs of men and women: Fitzpiers and Mrs. Charmond, Giles Winterborne and Marty South. Fitzpiers, the sensualist, has in him a cer- tain intellectual quality that raises him a stage above the position of Troy and Wild- eve and accounts in part for the merciful- ness of Hardy in leaving it at least an open question whether the experiences that he has undergone may not make his later life a not altogether useless one. Felice Char- mond is less elaborately portrayed than III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 69 Eustacia Vye, less romantic, more worldly, more hardened, even more misplaced in the forest than is Eustacia on the heath. Giles and Marty are the counterparts of Venn and Thomasin with this difference, that whereas in the earlier story the tragedy in which the heath-dwellers are involved leaves them scarred but whole, the wood- landers are destroyed by the capricious destiny that spares the two principal causes of their ruin. Apart from these four peo- ple, yet intertwined in fortune with them, is Grace Melbury, a female counterpart of Clym Yeobright. Like Clym she has been raised by education above her surround- ings; like him this involves her in tragedy; like him, though with characteristic femi- nine indecision, she becomes subdued again to her native environment; unlike him, and like a woman, she turns back to the outer world. It is left to the chorus of rustics to speculate upon her possible chances of hap- piness elsewhere. Apart from its tran- scendent interest as a story, the significance of the book hes in the exquisitely observed and minutely recorded woodland scenes and Its significance AND MONOGRAPHS III 70 Short stories III THOMAS HARDY customs, in the sense now clearly implied that Nature and man are fellow-sufferers from the burden of life, in the overflowing sympathy apparent beneath the reticence of the account of Giles's death, in the pathetic figure of Marty South, and in the fact that here for the last time the novelist's "objectivity" is retained and his personal opinions kept austerely unexpressed. For several years past, ever since 1879, Hardy had been publishing short stories from time to time. Some of these were now collected in the volume called Wessex Tales (1888), which was followed by three other similar collections : .4 Group of Noble Dames (1890), Life's Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man (1913). In the defin- itive Wessex edition of Hardy's works there has been some rearrangement of these tales. Disregarding chronology for the moment, one may consider these four vol- umes together before going on to the last three novels. BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 71 In its employment of the marvellous and the fantastic ]Vessex Tales harks back to Hardy's earlier years and is in striking contrast to Life's Little Ironies. Three stories are particularly memorable in this first set. These are "The Three Stran- gers," ''The Withered Arm," and ''The Distracted Preacher." The first two of these, and several others in the book, are studies in the freaks of coincidence. The well-known tale of "The Three Strangers," which has been successfully dramatized, narrates the extraordinary chance meeting of a hangman and his intended victim and the victim's brother at a shepherd's hut. It ma}^ well be taken as a model of what the short story should be. The setting is clear- cut, picturesque and in ironical contrast to the circumstance of the meeting; the situa- tion is deftly and rapidly outlined; the epi- sode proceeds swiftly to a sensational but logical climax, and then the stormy night shuts out the scene. The suppressed terror of the escaped thief; the uncon- scious cheerfulness and professional pride of the hangman; the dumbfounded dis- Three memorable tales AND MONOGRAPHS III 72 THOMAS HARDY tress of the thief's brother— all are placed ironically against the background of the shepherd's Christening feast. "The With- ered Arm" tells of the chance simultaneous occurrence of a dreadful dream or hallu- cination of an incubus and of the beginning of a terrible disease. The coincidence is so tremendous that, though it can be ac- counted for rationally, it almost forces the acceptance of a supernatural explanation. It shows the degree to which the power to suggest mystery and dread may take the place, in a rationalistic age, of the down- right supernaturaHsm of an age of romance. Here the various elements of the tale — the vengeful spirit of the cast-off mistress who has turned witch, the deformity of the bride and her gradual alienation from her husband, the dreadful counsel offered her by the conjuror, and the husband's grow- ing, wistfiil remorse at his abandonment of his bastard son — are kept well apart until they are suddenly brought together in the overwhelming climax at the hangman's cottage. "The Distracted Preacher" is the product of a very different mood. It III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 73 is a delightfully humorous story, the irony for once being put to the service of laughter. The setting reminds. one of the opening pages of Conrad and Hueffer's Romance. For the story is of a conscientious young preacher who becomes enamoured of a fascinating young widow engaged in the trade of smuggling liquor from France. Love leads his moral sense far astray, but he has his revenge, for in later years, when he has won her for his wife, the one-time smuggler writes edifying tracts against the shady occupation in which she had formerly been so expert. Here, as in The Trumpet- Major, Hardy makes use of material de- rived in very large part from the actual past of his country-side. Such material is again employed in .4 Group of Noble Dames, a second collection of brief narratives published serially in 1890 and in enlarged form in 1891. Nowhere else in his fiction, save in The Trumpet- Major, does Hardy rely to such an extent upon country records and current local traditions. The tales, as the title indi- cates, concern the fortunes and misfortunes Chronicles of Wessex AND MONOGRAPHS III 74 THOMAS HARDY The frame- tale of various great ladies of Wessex. They are, as one would expect, a series of studies of feminine psychology, of women acting in immediate obedience to emotional im- pulse. All center in marital difficulties and entanglements. The first few end happily enough (the first of all romantically so); but as the book progresses the tone of the stories becomes more and more sombre and the last are tragic indeed. The stories are held together by a very channing variety of the "frame-tale," a device of long lit- erary ancestry which had never become obsolete, as Mrs. Gaskell's Round the Sofa can witness, and which has of late been used again in Mr. Hewlitt's New Canter- bury Tales. The Casterbridge antiquarian club is prevented from taking its annual walking-tour by a heavy storm, and to be- guile the rainy afternoon and evening one member after another relates a story of the neighborhood. The various narrators are not particularly individualized nor is there any obvious attempt to suit the several stories to their tellers. The touch is light and there is no pretence of psychological III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 75 profundity or any effort to a broad and comprehensive view of life such as is found in the Decameron and in Chaucer. But, following these great models, there are brief interpolated discussions by the mem- bers of the club; and the change in the character of the tales as the afternoon wears on suggests a successful imitation of Boccaccio. The philosopher in Hardy is here in abeyance, but the craftsman is splendidly confident of his command over his materials. Another and even simpler form of the '' frame-tale" is used in the series of col- loquial sketches entitled ''A Few Crusted Characters" in Lifers Little Ironies. These sketches form a little masterpiece of ''re- gional" literature. In grace, delicacy, hu- mour, felicity of setting, and knowledge of the folk-background they recall Under the Greenwood Tree. People who associate Hardy overmuch with gloom shotild turn to these tales. The stories contained in Life's Little Ironies were written between 1889 and 1893. They are of a more philosophical AND MONOGRAPHS III 76 THOMAS HARDY The short story used for deeper purpose cast than are the earUer short tales. Most of them are further illustrations of the point of view set forth in The Mayor of Casterbridge, that "Character is Fate." The "irony" comes generally from no for- tuitous combination of external events but from the inherent qualities of the pro- tagonist. It shows the perversion of men's purposes and the destruction of their hap- piness by circumstance working through some innate weakness in the character of the individual upon whom the interest is centered or through the prejudices and timidity of some one else which block his plans and hinder him from setting to rights the little world in which he moves. "On the Western Circuit" and "For Con- science's Sake " illustrate this. In the very powerful tale of "A Tragedy of Two Ambi- tions " Hardy borrows the terrible theme of Gwendolen's refusal to throw a rope to the drowning Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. He justifies the borrowing, for the use that he makes of the idea in this story of the two ambitious curates whose aspirations are thwarted by their drunken father is mas- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 77 terly. The teehnique of these stories is everywhere about the same : the protagon- ist is set in the midst of a situation outhned with swift, deft strokes; this situation works up rapidly to a climax; there is a crash, followed by a new adjustment of the com- ponent parts of the original situation. The bitterly ironic tone of almost all the tales connects this volume with the series of ''Satires of Circtmistance " in verse, pub- lished twenty years afterwards. There is no such unity of tone in the miscellany called A Changed Man which contains little of importance. The tale which gives the general title to the book, like several others therein, is in a general way like the stories in Life's Little Ironies but less meritorious than they. "A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork" is noteworthy as being almost the only place in his writ- ings where Hardy has made imaginative use of the gigantic ancient fortress of Mai Dun. ''Alicia's Diary" differs from all his other stories, except his first juvenile ex- periment, in being written, as the title in- dicates, in the first person. But the book A miscellany AND MONOGRAPHS III 78 THOMAS HARDY The implicit as opposed to the explicit Two manifestos as a whole must be regarded merely as a gathering together of the by-products of a great career. These four series of short stories best show the side of Hardy's genius that has been content to leave unexpressed the im- plications that reside in the arrangement of human affairs that he sets forth. There is no room for expansion, no opportunity for explicit comment. The artistic unity thus achieved is often of a high order. But there is loss as well as gain. * * * The first notes for Jude the Obscure were jotted down in 1887, and it cannot have been much later that Hardy began the composition of Tess of the D^Urhervilles. That he set about the writing of these books with a ftiU consciousness that they would occasion adverse comment and dis- turb many minds is seen by the fact that before Tess appeared he published two articles that are in the nature of mani- festos. These are: "The Profitable Read- ing of Fiction," published in The Forum III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 79 (New York) in 1888; and "Candour in English Fiction/' which appeared in The New Review in 1890, the latter being part of a discussion to which Sir Walter Besant and Mrs. Lynn Linton also contributed articles. The greater part of Hardy's earlier essay is taken up with matters to which attention will be devoted in the next chapter; but two sentences quite evidently prepare the way for Tess : It is unfortunately quite possible to read the most elevating works of imagination in our own or any language, and, by fixing the regard on the wrong side of the sub- ject, to gather not a grain of wisdom from them, nay, sometimes positive harm. What author has not had his experience of such readers? — the men- tally and morally warped one of both sexes, who will, where practicable, so twist plain and obvious meanings as to see in an honest picture of human nature an attack on religion, morals, or institu- . tions. The later article is so direct as to make it certain that Hardy had in mind, in speak- AND MONOGRAPHS III 80 THOMAS HARDY ing so plainly, the novel he was about to send forth. He pleads for sincerity; the writer of fiction should have liberty to ex- press candidly the same opinions that are expressed everywhere in society. He should be allowed to give full weight to the passions. It should be recognized that some novelists write not for school-girls or for the circulating libraries but for adult thoughtful men and women. Within his sphere should be permitted to come mature and balanced consideration of such matters especially as the relation of man to woman, as the position of man in the universe, and as the problems of religious beliefs. Hardy is here evidently giving vent to his indigna- tion against those conventions of serial publication that necessitated the bowdler- ization of several of his novels when they appeared in the first magazine version. Equally obviously, he is contrasting his own purposes and ideals with those of, say, Sir Walter Besant and other writers of novels which (as the French book-lists have it) ''peuvent 6tre mis entre toutes les mains." III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 81 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the most widely read of all his books, was published in com- plete form (save for a passage accidently overlooked at the time and not incorpor- ated in the novel till 1912) in November, 1891, several parts of the book having pre- viously appeared in magazines. A tale of calamity as old as human nature, or at any rate as old as social conventions, is told with tender and sympathetic sincerity. Hardy here follows in the footsteps of the various Victorians who with greater or less tact and assurance have told of seduction: one has in mind especially Dickens, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, and Meredith. Of one of his former books a critic of the time had remarked that Hardy '4ike a true artist, never attempts by any indication of his own preferences to bias his reader's judgment." In Tess Hardy abandons the ''objectivity" that used to be described as "essential." He forsakes his impassivity; he has a thesis to propound, and he does so in a recriminating fashion. This is not to say that to employ the novel as a means of promulgating a writer's views is neces- The abandon- ment of objec- tivity AND MONOGRAPHS III 82 THOMAS HARDY sarily and inherently wrong. But in so doing Hardy left behind him one of the characteristics of the earlier Wessex novels that was most impressive. The point of his development in lengthy fiction is reached where he is emerging from the im- plicit to the explicit in the illustration and expoundmg of his view of life. This change may well have been prompted by the recep- tion of former romances by a public that greeted him as a capital story-teller while refusing to recognize the sub-stratum of philosophic implication. The explanation suggests a comparison with Meredith's development in the face of public indiffer- ence. Therefore, though, as has just been said, Tess is Hardy's most widely known book, neither it nor Jude is really thor- oughly characteristic. The mysterious light which, like that which appears ever and anon in The Dynasts, is shed over the action of The Return of the Native or of The Woodlanders, giving an effect approx- imating that of the supernatural, has al- most disappeared. Hardy is more modern, more didactic, more realistic, less a part of III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 83 the half -pagan primitive peasantry among whom he grew up — in a word, less Hardy. It is possible, by setting certain passages in Tess over against certain others, to in- volve Hardy in a maze of self-contradic- tions. Nature is depicted at times as cruel and without sympathy; yet there are re- peated suggestions of advocacy of the free play of natural impulses. The very measures that have been taken for the protection of society against the merciless- ness of Nature are harshly attacked. And this attack is in itself an admission (which Hardy has elsewhere indicated as the centre of his practical philosophy) that man can ameliorate the conditions in which he lives. Yet man is not a free agent. It is possible so to follow Tess's career — and in fact the Spectator's reviewer at the time did so — as to make her out very largely the victim of her own stupidity and needless timidity. But these very qualities are part of her nature and beyond her control. Other critics have denounced the execution of Tess as an impossible extravagance. This, however, is to forget the severity of The impression of inco- herence AND MONOGRAPHS III 84 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's optimism the penal code as it existed of recent years in England; one may compare the exaction of death for sheep-stealing in "The Three Strangers." Other episodes can be picked out in which the writer seems to lose his self-control, the capital instance being the sketch of the vicar who refuses burial for Tess's baby in consecrated ground. In general an effect of incoherence is produced by the indiscriminate blows rained now upon ephemeral remediable wrongs, now upon the very nature of things. And yet, when all is said, the impression that Tess leaves upon almost every candid and clear-sighted reader is one of power and insight and sympathy and beauty — and hopefulness. The conclusion we are asked to draw is that passivity, quietism, is the only remedy for the ills of human life. But we do nothing of the sort. We deny that the book presents any general indictment of life. For these evils are not inherent in the nature of things. They are open to cure. Already, in the three decades that have passed since Tess appeared, sentiment has made some progress. And the world III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 85 is not altogether wrong that has in it such a place as Talbothay's dairy, and a woman of such native loveliness of character as Tess, and, indeed, a man of such qualities as he who tells her story. If at times the presentation of some episodes is not con- vincing, the presentation of other episodes is profoundly so. It is difficult to accept as in keeping with Tess's character the first sojourn with Alec following the night in the Chase. In spite of his emphasis upon her innocent and unsuspecting adolescence, Hardy fails to give a convincing analysis of the motives and impulses that drew her to Alec. But note, as one of the many off- sets to this, the exquisite art with which the passionate love of the dairy-maids for Angel Clare is kept from slipping over either into the maudlin on one side or the farcical on the other. The character-drawing is gen- erally of a high order, the chief exceptions being the two brothers of Angel Clare and Tess's father and young sister. Alec D'Urberville is portrayed in really mas- terly fashion. He is the arch -sensualist of the novels, without Troy's remorse, or The characters AND MONOGRAPHS III 86 THOMAS HARDY especially Alec Fitzpiers's intellectuality, or Wildeve's courageous last moments. The subtle way in which his conversion is ascribed to a slight shift of point of view under the in- fluence of the same sensual temperament, is perhaps Hardy's finest achievement in psychological analysis, however much of suggestion it may owe to a passage in Madame Bovary: It was less a reform than a transfigura- tion. The former curves of sensuous- ness were now modulated to lines of de- votional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Pag- anism Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. ^ - Equally subtle — and a more diffictilt task — is the delineation of Angel Clare. His III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST nearest analogue in the novels is, of course, Knight in A Fair of Blue Eyes, but he be- longs with all those men who have par- tially shaken off the tyranny of convention and yet, while fancying themselves intel- lectually free, are bound faster than they realize by the conventions which they pride themselves upon having put by. The much-criticized episode of Clare's sugges- tion to Izz to accompany him to Brazil is in reality thoroughly in character. The suggestion comes in a moment of revolt against those conventions obedience to which has ruined his life. It is sudden, not reasoned; and it is checked in a mo- ment by the return of thought. His is a limed soul that, struggling to be free, is but the more engaged. He is thus portrayed and the function of admiration or con- demnation is left to the critics, who have accordingly divided, Mr. Abercrombie, for example, repudiating him utterly while Mr. Duffin writes of "the celestial beauty" of his character. If, bearing in mind that he refused to extend to Tess the very for- giveness that he asked of her and received AND MONOGRAPHS 87 and Angel Clare III 88 THOMAS HARDY Other comments "Poor wounded name!" — Knight at least exacted of Elfrida only what he was ready and able to offer her — one is inclined to exclaim of Clare, Guar da e passa! it must be remembered that Hardy himself does not pass judgement on him. Of the other characters it is not neces- sary to speak here; something will be said later of the elder Mr. Clare. Nor is it necessary to comment in detail upon the very beautiful descriptions of Nature, the Wessex background, particularly of the Chase, of the life on the great dairy-farms, and of Stonehenge. In some of the earlier books place and season had been to some extent fitted into accord with the action of the story. In Tess this adjustment is managed with the highest art. But con- sideration of this matter also is postponed for the present. When all these merits of character-drawing and nature-description and artistic construction have been recog- nized, the final appeal of the novel is never- theless not one of thought or of art but of feeling. The memory of Tess that abides, one dares say, in the mind of nearly every reader, is of Hardy's tenderness. Ill BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 89 Along with the great popular success of Tess (which was reinforced when it was promptly turned into a play) went, as is still well remembered, a clamour from those whom prudery or conventionality or tim- idity rendered unfit to comprehend its pur- pose. In an addition to the original pref- ace Hardy divulged his sensitiveness to these criticisms. Another and more nat- ural accompaniment of its success was the appearance of two critical studies of Hardy's works: Lionel Johnson's The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894) and Annie Mac- donell's Thomas Hardy (1895). The former book, now long out of print, is a carefully wrought, elaborate, Pateresque, perhaps over "literary" monograph by a man of delicate sensibilities, whose catholic sym- pathies in literature enable him to rise above the fundamental philosophic differ- ences that divide him from Hardy. The latter book is an unpretentious and popular presentation of certain phases of Hardy's work. It is noteworthy that so late as 1895 Miss Macdonell could summarize Hardy's claims to recognition as '^ story-teller, pic- Mono- graphs on Hardy begin to appear AND MONOGRAPHS III 90 A Platonic fantasy III THOMAS HARDY ture-maker, humorist," directly denying him any special gifts as poet or thinker. It was just this reputation that for so long re- tarded the comprehension of his thought and that prepared the way for the outcry raised by Jude the Obscure. The Well-Beloved, originally called The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, appeared seri- ally in 1892 though it was not put into book-form until 1897. It marks another of those periods of re-creation that we have observed several times before. The theme is Shelleyan: In many mortal forms I rashly sought The shadow of that idol of my thought. The possibilities of this theme had been suggested in the character of Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders. ''Human love," says Fitzpiers, ''is a subjective thing. ... It is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object." And again, at the first sight of Grace, his thought takes this turn: "Nature has at last re- BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 91 covered her lost union with the Idea." In more than one poem Hardy recurs to this subject, particularly in that phase of the experience when the light of the Idea is vanishing from the face and form which it had previously illumined and which is then found to be as commonplace as any other. In The Well-Beloved this theme, which lies back of Fitzpiers's amatory flittings from Grace to Sue and to Mrs. Charmond, and to who knows whom in later unrecounted phases of his history, is worked out in in- genious but, before the end, wearisome de- tail in the story of Jocelyn Pierston as he pursues la Jiglia della sua mente, I- amoroso idea, the only true well-beloved, from mo- mentary incarnation to incarnation, as it lends its divine light now to some woman of society, now to a peasant girl, and as it dwells more persistently in the persons of the three Avices — grandmother, mother, and child — whom the disciple of the Vita Nuova and Epipsychidion has loved in youth, in manhood, and in old age. The conception of Pierston as a sculptor has meaning in it, for his art is only another AND MONOGRAPHS III 92 THOMAS HARDY phase of the same pursuit. The mention of the Vita Nuova suggests perhaps a false analogy, for in Dante's experience love has been roused by the image of perfection and can never forsake its object; in Pierston's life it is roused again and again only by the hope, destined ever to disappointment, that perfection will be found in one or another of the succeeding objects of his desire. Shelley goes farther yet, for he loves the Idea which, as he is well aware, will quit each separate incarnation in turn. The Well-Beloved plays cleverly with a subtle theme, but it would have gained, not lost, had Hardy discarded the unconvincing at- tempt to account in part for Pierston's temperament by the peculiar and isolated environment of his youth. Nor does his marriage with a faded woman of the world whom long since the Idea had temporarily transfigured in his imagination help mat- ters. Irony is out of accord with fantasy. But the fantasticality and dullness (in- which the lack of any variety of interest plays a great part) must not blind the reader to the book's significance in the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST history of Hardy's development. In any later novel one must expect a sub-stratum of allegory. Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, parts of it having already appeared serially. To attempt to appraise it is a difficult task. It has been ridiculed; it has been seriously controverted; it has been indulgently re- garded as an unfortunate blunder on the part of a once-great artist; it has been called ''one of the most illustrious things in literature." This much may be safely said, that the judgement of posterity upon it will be partly determined in accordance with whether the novelist's function is held to be the impartial and impassive reflection of life or whether he may take as his mission the promulgation of new and important ideas. By the old test, the test of ''objec- tivity," Jude fails to a degree greater even than does Tess, for though there are no such philosophic digressions as occur in Tess, the novelist is here even farther re- moved from austere self-control. By the AND MONOGRAPHS 93 The last novel III 94 THOMAS HARDY The technique of Jude other test it may be regarded as a milestone of advance, for it opens up new avenues of thought, it poses dehberately and cour- ageously questions that all the world now faces. It caused a storm of protest on its appearance. Not the least insult that was heaped upon its writer was the classing of him with Grant Allen as a member of ''the anti-marriage league" (the phrase is Mrs. Oliphant's). This hostility has persisted, and within the last couple of years a writer who claims to be a historian of the English novel has spoken of the " Hardy-Caine " school of fiction, a bracketing that needs no comment. The only permanent harm that the onslaught did was that, as Hardy has definitely stated, the experience completely cured him of any further interest in novel- writing. Structurally Jude belongs mid-way be- tween The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native on the one hand, and The Mayor of Casterhridge and Tess on the other. Like the latter books, it concentrates attention upon one leading figure; yet, as in the former books, there is a complex situation III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST arising out of the love-life of four closely allied people: two men and two women. A certain stiffening of the imagination is apparent in the repetition of situations from the earlier novels. This repetition is of another sort from that seen in Tess which reworks in a graver, more mature, more realistic way the leading motive of A Pair of Blue Eyes. In J tide the repeti- tions seem to be unconsciously done. The relationship of Jude and Phillotson is analogous to that of Smith and Knight. The grim story of Jude's forbears recalls the legend of the D'Urberville coach. Jude is reluctant to tell Sue of his connection with Arabella just as Tess makes repeated and half-hearted efforts to acquaint Clare with her history. Arabella turns up (by a coincidence that strains probabihty to the limit) at the crisis of Jude's fate like Alec at the time of Tess's abandonment. Jude returns to Arabella as Tess had returned to Alec. In Tess herself there had been something of the precocious pessimism that is exaggerated in Jude's son to the point of caricature. The unity of place — certainly 95 AND MONOGRAPHS III 96 THOMAS HARDY The tragedy of unrealized aims no sine qua non but magnificently adhered to in the novels of the middle years — is discarded more completely than in Tess and without the counterbalancing advantage there seen of harmonizing the event with the place in which it occurs. There is far more matter in Jude than can possibly be condensed into a paragraph or two, more perhaps, as Hardy confesses, than the novelist consciously put there. But it is possible to indicate very briefly some of the lines of thought. The central theme is "the tragedy of unrealized aims." This had been the motive of many of the tales in Life's Little Ironies. Here we are presented with a man who is well-meaning and who holds a high ideal before him. But he comes of tainted stock, he is of low birth and narrow circumstances, and he is constantly being dragged down by his tem- perament. In the very hour of his visions of Christminster, the "City of Light," seen now in his dreams, now in reality far off at sunset, there rushes upon him an ir- resistible inclination towards women and presently he is entrapped into a sordid III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 97 marriage. Jude experiences to the full ''the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity";^" and behind the temptation of sexual passion lurks an- other: the desire for strong liquor. Some hostile reviewers charged Hardy with put- ting to the credit of this man every as- piration, every fine yearning, and to the blame of circumstance each backsliding, each error, each yielding to desire. The charge misses the point of the whole trag- edy: the book is not a denial of the exist- ence of those happy souls who rise above temptations to the realizations of their ideals. It is the story of a man who (in Burns 's most pathetic self -condemnatory words) is "a poor, damned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool, the sport, the miserable victim of . . . hypochondriac imaginations, agonizing sensibility, and bedlam passions." The wearisomely repeated attacks upon the permanency of the marriage bond are of secondary importance, for the handicap of an unwise union is merely the instru- AND MONOGRAPHS III 98 The Will- to-Live and the wm-Not. to-Live III THOMAS HARDY ment of circumstance for thwarting Jude's aspiring desires. But the special prom- inence of the marital relation in this book can be connected closely with the philo- sophic systems of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann (of which something more must be said later). As they watch a newly married couple Jude says to Sue: ''We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred years the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as 'shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,' and will be afraid to repro- duce them." One is reminded of Schopenhauer's famous and terrible indictment of lovers as "traitors to the race." For beneath the harsh realism of the story there is evi- dently allegory. The Will-Not-to-Exist is on the increase. The Intellect (which realizes the uselessness of life) is encroach- ing upon the domain of the Heart (which contains the instinct of reproduction). In BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 99 Jude, the male, the rational element is more highly developed, though it is ever and anon dragged down by the body. Arabella, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of Schopenhauer's view of woman as set forth in the famous essay. She is the mere instrument of the Will-to- Live. Sue is intended to represent the modern type of woman that is slowly emerging, one in whom the reason is assert- ing itself with a consequent approximation to the position of modem man. There is no half -allegorical implication in her final lapse; in returning to her husband she merely re-enacts the inability to press on in a chosen independent direction which one expects in Hardy's women. Between the two women, between Reason and Instinct, as between the Good and Evil Angels of the old moralities, stands Jude. The atrocious little figure of "Father Time," his murder of Sue's babies and his own suicide, are prophecies of the future gen- erations, foretold by Von Hartmann, who will thus rid themselves of the burden of the mystery of the world. A fog of AND MONOGRAPHS III 100 THOMAS HARDY The hope- lessness of the book thought, perhaps one should say a miasma of despair, has settled down over the life depicted in this book. Through it the figures move dimly, sordidly, confusedly. The clear-cut outlines of earlier novels have disappeared. Jude the Obscure is the only one of Hardy's books through which there gleams no hope at all. The ciutain falls in Far from the Madding Crowd upon Oak and Bathsheba, less ardent, less joyous than before their bitter experiences, but con- tent. At the end of The Return of the Native Venn's fidelity is rewarded and Clym finds comfort in his work as a lay mission- ary. The Woodlanders closes as Fitzpiers and Grace go off the scene with a chance at least of future happiness, while Marty South at the grave of Winterbome is a pathetic rather than a tragic figiu-e. The Mayor of Casterbridge concludes with the deliberate statement of Elizabeth-Jane's ''unbroken tranquility" in adult life. We have already noted the hopefulness, put there consciously or not, in Tess. But in Jude there is no hope, no cleansing of the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 101 passions, no sense of "calm of mind, all passion spent." The darkness is utterly unrelieved; the humour of the earlier books is gone; no one is ever thoughtless or light-hearted. The words of Job which are upon Jude's dying lips seem not suffi- ciently despairing, for Job could say "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Here we are brought to think rather of the grand chorus of the dead in Leopardi : In te, morte, si posa Nostra ignuda natura; Lieta no, ma sicura Deir antico dolor. . . . Pero ch' esser beato Nega ai mortali e nega a' morti il fato. One cannot leave this great and terrible book without noting the power that has kept remorselessly to one theme, that has held the attention unswervingly upon one character, that has refused to lighten the burden of the story by the factitious means of making that character, or indeed any person in the book, attractive, appealing. AND MONOGRAPHS III 102 THOMAS HARDY or anything but drab and commonplace, and that has carried through the whole story in monotone. In moments of cool analysis one may be tempted to ask whether it is not the author himself who has doomed his puppets to disaster, for there is little individuality in the several characters who are differentiated one from another by little save differences in opinion. But the un- questionably powerful impression made is an answer to that criticism. Almost the opening words describe Jude as ''the sort of man who was bom to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his un- necessary life should signify that all was well with him again." Here we have the final example in Hardy of the substitution of the instrument of tragic anticipation for the instrument of tragic suspense. The theme is announced immediately; and the heart-aches, the needlessness, the falling curtain, and the return to "dateless ob- livion and divine repose" succeed each other like movements in a sombre sym- phony. Nor, finally, can one leave Jude without mention of the wonderful scene of III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST his first evening in ''the City of Light" when there throng around him memories of Chris tminster's illustrious dead and he seems to hear their voices, in diverse tones but all suggesting the way towards intel- lectual triumphs. His interest in creative romance failing him, Hardy turned to poetry. The poetic gift, though hidden almost completely from the public, had not been allowed to rust in him unused through all these years. He now entered upon the second portion of his career and produced a body of verse of merits entirely independent of his work in fiction. This verse must be considered later in a separate chapter. For the sake of convenience, however, the present chap- ter may conclude with a brief account of his life since the publication of The Well- Beloved, the last novel to appear in book- form. In 1898 Wessex Poems appeared with il- lustrations by the author. There followed in 1901 Poems of the Past and the Present. AND MONOGRAPHS 103 The later years: the abandon- ment of fiction and interest in poetry III 104 THOMAS HARDY Before either of these collections was pub- lished Hardy had laid down, about 1897, the general plan and had begun the com- position of the tremendous epic-drama of The Dynasts (three parts : 1904-6-8) which occupied most of his attention till its com- pletion in September, 1907. Since then he has issued three more volumes of miscel- laneous verse: Timers Laughing-Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), and Moments of Vision (1917). In 1912 he supervised the publication of the Wessex edition of his writings in prose and verse, contributing to it a new general preface, additional prefaces to many of the novels, and a few notes. In this definitive edition the novels are arranged not chronologically but in accordance with a not altogether satisfactory scheme in three divisions as "Novels of Character and Environment," "Romances and Fantasies" and "Novels of Ingenuity." As an after-thought there was added in 1913 the voltime of so-called "Mixed Novels" already referred to. In 1919 a second supplementary volume was published, containing the two collections of III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 105 verse put forth since the edition was orig- inally prepared. The position of preeminence that Hardy- has held among living English writers since the death of Swinburne and A''Ieredith has been recognized, though it has been a matter for regret to his admirers that his fame upon the Continent has been insuffi- cient to bring to him the Nobel Prize. After Meredith's death he succeeded him as President of the Society of British Authors. In 1910 the Order of Merit was bestowed upon him. In 1912 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literatiu-e, an honour rarely given. A trib- ute of a different kind is the increasing num- ber of critical studies of his writings that have appeared. Several recent ones sup- plement and in part supersede the earlier monographs by Lionel Johnson and Annie Macdonell. The most brilliant of these is by Lascelles Abercrombie (1912) who has the advantage of a poet's imaginative sym- pathy with a fellow-craftsman and who has achieved a book noteworthy for its archi- tectonic skill. The most ambitious is The greatest living English writer Critical studies of his writings AND MONOGRAPHS III 106 THOMAS HARDY F. A. Hedgcock's Sorbonne dissertation, Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste (1910) which, inquiring more deeply than does Mr. Abercrombie,. brings the sex-conflict that forms so large a part of Hardy's sub- ject-matter into proper relation with the philosophic doctrine of the struggle between Intellect and Intuition. Unfortunately many pages of this bulky book are occupied with mere summaries of the plots of the novels. Besides other dissertations, Eng- lish and American, there are also studies by Harold Child and by H. C. Duffin (both 1916), the former a brief but excellent sum- mary, the latter a larger and enthusiastic but rather ill-balanced piece of work. F. 0. Saxelby has produced a Thomas Hardy Dictionary of the names and places in all the writings, a monument of patient in- dustry. There is a host of books about the Wessex country: Wilkinson Sherren's The Wessex of Romance; C. G. Harper's The Hardy Country (which has some ex- cellent illustrations, including " several of peasants at their work); B. C. A. Windle's The Wessex oj Thomas Hardy (which con- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 107 tains many pleasant line-drawings by E. H. New); Sidney Heath's The Heart of Wessex; and, most authoritative of all, Hennann Lea's Thomas Hardy^s Wessex which is issued as a supplementary volume to the Wessex edition of the works. In December, 1912, Mrs. Thomas Hardy died. The group of '' Poems of 1912-1913," destined, one hopes, to be known by the better title Veteris vestigia flammae, which Hardy wrote in her memory are both touching and extraordinary, quite unlike any other elegies in the language. In 1914 Hardy married again, his second wife being Miss Florence Emily Dugdale, an old friend, who has been herself favorably known as a writer of books for children. During the Great War Hardy published a number of poems on public events as well as a letter to the Times on the bombard- ment of Rheims Cathedral. To-day, though he still contributes an occasional poem to The London Mercury or some other journal, we must regretfully suppose that his work is finished. In 1920 the mag- nificent Mellstock edition of his works be- Datur hora quieti AND MONOGRAPHS III 108 THOMAS HARDY gan to appear. Late in that year there was unveiled at Dorchester a tablet to the memory of the townsmen who had fallen in the War. This was designed by Thomas Hardy and bears the following words from one of his poems as the motto: None dubious of the cause, none mur- muring. Could better words have been found to in- scribe above the names of those who fell in battle? III BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST III SOME MATTERS OF TECHNIQUE AND STYLE The titles of some of the monographs upon Hardy mentioned towards the close of the last chapter indicate the emphasis that critics have laid upon the artistic qualities of the Wessex novels, their structural ex- cellence. To deal adequately with Hardy's technique would require space beyond the limits of this brief survey. But the sub- ject cannot be entirely disregarded. In the too-little-known essay on "The Profit- able Reading of Fiction," which, if re- printed, would take its place with the pref- ace to The Nigger of the Narcissus as one of the most important recent pronounce- ments by an English novelist upon his art. Hardy notices the general lack of apprecia- tion of matters of craftsmanship in a novel as compared with the attention devoted to AND MONOGRAPHS 109 Hardy's fame as an artist III 110 But adverse comments have been made on the art of the novels particularly (1) the peasants THOMAS HARDY HI matters of content. It behoves us, there- fore, to pay what attention there is room for to this side of his achievement. There have been those who have raised scruples against the justice of the adjective "artistic" as applied to the Wessex novels, and it may be well to deal with these strictures at once. In general such pro- tests have been directed against those books in which the scene lies in great part beyond the country that Hardy has made partic- ularly his own and which depict a part of society with which he is not especially familiar. Enough has been said in the foregoing survey of the novels to indicate sympathy with those who regret the waste of effort upon the romances, or scenes from romances, that transcend for any length of time the boundaries of Wessex. On the other hand, strangely enough, frequent objections were offered by con- temporary reviewers to the lack of veri- similitude in Hardy's portrayal of the Wes- sex peasantry. Such critics singled out three points in particular: the rather ob- vious Shakespearean imitation in the draw- BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 111 ing of some of the rustic characters; the incredible amount of wit and wisdom con- centrated in small gatherings of yokels; and the hybrid nature of the dialogue, part dialect, part standard English. The first objection (if it be an objection) may be granted. There is Shakespearean imita- tion in some of the rustic scenes, especially in the earlier books. The scene in the church-vault in A Pair of Blue Eyes; the drilling of the raw recruits in The Trumpet- Major; the constable's pursuit of the skimmity riders in The Mayor of Caster- bridge; and the constable and his crew in the short story of "The Three Strangers" are instances in point. But the flavoin- of literary reminiscence has chaiiiied many readers and is not in itself a thing to be deprecated; to catch the tone and manner of Shakespeare's rustic humour is no mean accomplishment. And the scenes and characters inspire a satisfactory answer to the only important questions in judging works of the imagination: Do they please? Are they genuine? Of the second objec- tion it may be said that the lack of a reg- Shake- spearean echoes The wit of the yokels AND MONOGRAPHS III 112 THOMAS HARDY The compromise in the use of dialect ular education, even the fact of illiteracy, does not preclude the possibility of possess- ing mother-wit, and often rather sharpens such wit. In part, too, as in Shakespeare, the humour of the scene grows, not out of the wit, but out of the dtimbness of the speakers. Moreover it depends in large part upon Hardy's ironical comments and interpretations. And in any case art is justified in heightening effects that exist, though in more subdued form, in life. Hardy himself has taken the trouble to answer the criticism directed against the compromise that he has employed in his use of dialect. He writes -.^^ An author may be said to fairly convey the spirit of intelligent peasant talk if he retains the idiom, compass, and charac- teristic expressions, although he may not encumber the page with obsolete pro- nunciations of the purely English words, and with mispronunciations of those de- rived from Latin and Greek. ... If a writer attempts to exhibit on paper the precise accents of a rustic speaker, he disturbs the proper balance of a true rep- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 113 resentation by unduly insisting upon the grotesque element. This is certainly true. Hardy has suc- cessfully accomplished a much more diffi- cult effect than the mere phonological re- production of dialect, which is a feat not above the abilities of any Sam Slick or Josh Billings. And in adopting this compromise he opened the way to a far wider audience than could have been reached by any lit- erary work, hoM^ever excellent, in dialect form. How few people — to take an exam- ple from Hardy's own country — know the beautiful verse of William Barnes, who committed his fame to the keeping of a fonn of speech, of dignified ancestry it is true, but local and obsolescent. The ver- dict of entire success now everywhere meted out to Hardy's rustic scenes is the final comment on these adverse criticisms. Another objection is more serious. It concerns the excessive use of coincidence throughout the novels. We have already had occasion to note how often such freaks of fortune occur in .4 Pair of Blue Eyes. (2) the use of coinci- dence AND MONOGRAPHS III 114 THOMAS HARDY It is needless to give an exhaustive list of instances from other books; but here are a few striking examples. Upon the chance of Fanny's going to the wrong church the whole train of disasters in Far from the Madding Crowd follows. Upon the dicing adventures of Wilde ve, Christian Cantle and Venn, and Venn's consequent error about the ownership of the guineas, hangs the tragedy of Clym's irreconciliation with his mother, while the last possibility of saving Eustacia was lost by the chance that Captain Vye failed to hand Clym's letter to her. This motive of the unre- ceived letter plays an equally important part in Tess. In that novel there is a whole series of might-have-been-otherwise events, of points where a slight turn in the scale of chance would have mitigated or thwarted the tragedy. Such extraordinary juxtapositions of events have their parallels in each one of the novels. Moreover Hardy often wrings the last drop of improbability out of such situations. The dicing scene in The Return of the Native, for example, might have been worked out to the same III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 115 conclusion, with the same bearing upon the course of events, without such extraordi- nary fluctuations of fortune and especially without the last two throws (an ace, fol- lowed by a blank or zero caused by the die splitting and falling with both cleft surfaces upwards). An instance of how this sort of scene may be conducted without such absurd exaggeration is the adventure of Rastignac in the gambling-house. Frankly, it must be admitted that Hardy often fol- lows his natural bent towards the mysteri- ous and improbable to the point where he overreaches himself in the employment of coincidence. But two pleas may be en- tered in his behalf. One — it is hardly valid — is that he never completely shook off the literary influences of his apprentice- ship to the school of "sensation novelists" who made abundant use of the same device. The other and stronger plea is the fact that Hardy senses, and in the endeavor to bring it home to the reader exaggerates, the factor of chance in life. His indictment against life is that it is so ordered that such chances as occur again and again in the AND MONOGRAPHS III 116 THOMAS HARDY (3) sen- sational devices novels dictate often the misery or happi- ness of human creatures. Of the same literary origin as his use of coincidence is Hardy's employment of sen- sational devices and situations. Of this, too, he never wholly rid himself. Des- perate Remedies, as we have seen, is filled with such: mystery with regard to birth, burning buildings, murder and a walled-up corpse, midnight spies, mysterious sounds thrice foretelling important events, and much else. In one place the use of capital letters to convey to the reader the excite- ment of the speaker betrays clearly the in- fluence of Charles Reade. The later books are never so dependent on sensationalism, but most of them offer the same commodity at one time or another in concentrated fonn: the cliff episode in A Pair of Blue Eyes; the rick-burning, Troy's sword-exer- cise, and the murder of Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd; the gambling episode in The Return of the Native; the burning of the castle in A Laodicean; Clare's sleep- walking with Tess in his arms; and the death of the children in Jude are examples III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 117 that come quickly to mind. Such scenes are admissible in novels of another sort, but in general they are out of accord with the austere control exhibited by Hardy in other respects. Moreover they are in act- uality of too rare occurrence to be repre- sentative of life; and the novel vshould re- flect the great norm of existence, not the isolated exceptional phenomena. In re- cording these points of disapproval one must not forget that in the essay referred to at the beginning of this chapter Hardy pleads for a slavish belief in the author on the part of his reader "however profusely he may pour out his coincidences, his mar- vellous juxtapositions." When all is said, the scattered melodramatic episodes sink to insignificance among the crowd of in- teresting, picturesque and thrilling scenes that yet remain within the limits of artistic verisimilitude. In projecting a series of novels the action of which occiu-s for the most part within a narrow stretch of country, a district over * The links between the novels AND MONOGRAPHS III 118 THOMAS HARDY much of which it is possible to walk in the course of a week-end excursion, there must have been some temptation to connect the several books together by introducing the same characters into two or more of them. Zola employed this method through a long series of stories dealing with the fortunes of various members of the same family. In the Comedie Humaine a vast crowd of people come and go, and there is presented now one phase and now another in the career of various principal personages, with a resultant confusion that requires a sort of guidebook if we are properly to follow the lives of such outstanding characters as, say, Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, Vautrin, or the Baron Nucingen, The Barchester novels are similarly, though less complexly, woven together. Thack- eray uses such linlcs hardly ever; Dickens, so far as one remembers, not at all. Hardy, except for one purpose, has avoided this possible mode of procedure, the unity of background being depended on to link the series of tales together. The exceptions occur when some one is introduced as a III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 119 minor character, to reinforce the impression of time and place, as part of the locaHty (as it were) in one story who in another story is of psychological importance. Thus Conjuror Trendle, who is a principal actor in "The Withered Arm," is just men- tioned in Tess, the time and general local- ity of the two tales being thus fixed as about the same. In Tess, too, occurs an amusing anecdote (to be referred to again in the next chapter) of William Dewy's youth, thus connecting that novel with Under the Greenwood Tree in which Dewy appears as an old man. Farmer Shinar, one of Fancy Day's lovers in the latter story, appears as one of the agriculturists in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Darton, the chief character in "Interlopers at the Knap," is likewise mentioned in that book. And the appearance of Farmer Everdene and "a silent, reserved young man named Boldwood" among Henchard's creditors fixes the date of The Mayor of Casterbridge as some fifteen or twenty years earlier than that of Far from the Madding Crowd. It is pleasing (glancing ahead for a moment to AND MONOGRAPHS III 120 THOMAS HARDY Links between the novels and the poems the poems) to come across a Wessex volun- teer in The Dynasts named Cantle, for it is a reminder of how old Granfer Cantle in The Return of the Native used to recall memories of his warlike youth in "the Bang-up Locals." Again in The Dynasts Bob Loveday is mentioned as among the sailors who walked in Nelson's funeral procession; and this brings to mind mem- ories of The Trumpet-Major. And the appearance of Solomon Longways connects the epic-drama with the lowly tragedy of The Mayor of Caster bridge. Between the short poems and the novels there are sev- eral such links. "Tess's Lament" is an attempt (more successful perhaps than some critics have allowed it to be) to render in quintessential form Tess's feelings after Clare's abandonment of her. '*'The Pine- Planters" is an exquisite reverie upon two motives in The Woodlanders. "The Moth- Signal" calls to" mind a scene in The Return of the Native. "Friends Beyond" and "The Dead Choir" memorialize Tranter Dewy and his fellows in Under the Green- wood Tree. The verses called "The Well- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 121 Beloved" are a meditation upon the theme illustrated at large in the novel of the same name. There are other less definite con- nections between the two portions of Hardy's work. He has thus with faint, fine, infrequent touches linked together the persons of his imagination, without ever approaching the point where such links be- come confusing entanglements. In the essay already referred to several times, Hardy remarks: "To a masterpiece in story there appertains a beauty of shape, no less than to a masterpiece in pictorial or plastic art"; and he instances The Bride of Lammermoor as an almost perfect specimen of form, dwelling also upon the constructive art of Richardson, while questioning the validity of the claim of Tom Jones to pre- eminence in this regard. The remark opens up a wide field for discussion concern- ing the Wessex novels. Only a few out- standing matters can be touched on here. A certain method of opening his stories — used occasionally by Scott, who, however, To a masterpiece in story^ there P appertains a beauty of shape AND MONOGRAPHS III 122 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's openings did not realize its possibilities — may be observed in Hardy's novels to an extent which makes it almost a mannerism. It is justified, however, by the effect that it pro- duces. The story begins on a road or path along which some person is moving. Here are some typical examples. In Under the Greenwood Tree the choir-men are walking along the road; in Far from the Madding Crowd Oak meets Bathsheba as she drives along; the first human beings who appear in The Return of the Native are Venn and the occupants of his van; The Mayor of Casterbridge first presents us with Henchard and his family on their way to the fair- grounds; in The Woodlanders we first see the barber on his way to the cottage of Marty South; in Two on a Tower it is Lady Constantine in her landau; in Tess, the antiquarian clergyman accosts Durbeyfield on the road; in "Fellow-Townsmen" Barhet meets Downe on the turnpike; Fanner Darton is discovered at the begin- ning of "Interlopers at the Knap" riding towards the home of his bride-to-be; Pierston in The Well-Beloved is walking III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 123 along the street of Wells as the story- opens; in the second chapter of A Pair of Blue Eyes Smith is seen driving towards the vicarage; in the second section of ''The Withered Arm" Lodge is discovered driv- ing home with his wife. These instances are sufficient for our purpose. What is the effect produced by such a beginning? In almost every case the reader seems, if it may be so expressed, to be moving with the protagonists or with those connected in fortune with them, into the theatre of action. The scene whereon the coming tragedy or tragi-comedy is to be displayed is thus gradually unfolded, the outer coun- try is left behind, the unity of action is strengthened, and the unity of place. A similar device is employed in several books in which there is a sort of prologue in one locality after which the action moves to another place around which it clings and which it seldom, sometimes never, leaves again. Examples of this are: Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. In The Woodlanders the unity of place is almost The eflfect produced by these openings AND MONOGRAPHS III 124 THOMAS HARDY inviolate; note how the London episode of the divorce proceedings is reported by letter and how Mrs. Charinond's death on the Continent is narrated by one of the char- acters. In The Return of the Native this unity is absolute and the unfolding of the action uninterruptedly on the heath adds greatly to the impressiveness of a tragedy in which environment plays so overwhelm- ing a part. One should remark also in the same book the swiftness of the blows of Circtimstance, for the entire action takes place in a year and a day, thus preserving in some sort the unity of time. The ob- servance of such once-styled ''rules" is of course by no means an essential part of the novelist's art, but beyond question in these particular cases it aids greatly in producing the desired effect. Admirable also are such contrivances of structure as that of The Woodlanders which begins and closes upon the solitary figure of Marty South, self-sacrificing in the first scene for her father and loyal in the last to the memory of Winterbome. Henchard leaves Caster- iDridge in the same forlorn and outcast state III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 125 as that in which he had arrived twenty- years before. The Return of the Native ex- hibits at the opening the form of Eustacia upon Rainbarrow and ends with Clym upon the same gaunt hillside. It is un- deniable that there is some loss of artistic excellence in Tess and particularly in Jude in which the action seems to jerk as it moves from place to place. Just as Hardy gradually leads his reader into the story by means of an opening seene upon the road or by a kind of prologue in one place before the removal of the action to its permanent seat, so does he gradually unfold the appearance and characteristic traits of his principal personages. There are no long, prolegomenous, set descriptions such as occur so often in some other novel- ists, notably in Balzac. One finds no such full-length character-portraits at the begin- ning of his books as that of "The Chief" in Meredith's Vittoria. Even the sketch of Oak with which Far from the Madding Crowd begins is expanded in an exceptional manner. One may contrast the technique of Smollett, Scott and especially Dickens. The drawing of character AND MONOGRAPHS III 126 THOMAS HARDY Their elaborate descriptions of characters on their first appearance go back through the eighteenth-century essay to the "char- acter-writers" of the seventeenth century. To introduce such full-length portraits into a novel is psychologically bad. One does not really follow this order in observing people. In reality the eye first lights upon some one particular thing — an individuality or oddity of dress or manner or speech — and it is aroimd this quality that other char- acteristics gradually accumulate. Hardy is well aware of this. He avoids most suc- cessfully the common error of describing at once and in great detail the appearance of persons in whom the reader is not yet in- terested. This is generally accomplished by letting the reader come across the char- acter, as it were, much as any stranger in the book might chance upon him. Very often the scene is at night, or else in some place where shadows veil details. Thus — to take two instances only out of many — Oak passes Bathsheba on the road and the reader is furnished with just so much de- scription of her as could come within Oak's III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 127 observation of her on that occasion. Again: Eustacia first appears outlined against the sky on Rainbarrow, a slim, ro- mantic figure only. Presently the light of the November bonfire reveals her features fitfully and mysteriously. Her appearance becomes more fully descried by the light in her grandfather's house on her return home. But it is only the next day, by which time our interest is fully aroused, that the morn- ing light enables one to discern clearly her form and features and to read thereon the characteristics of her nature. In no way are Hardy's sense of propor- tion and his feeling for relative values more finely shown than in the comparative amounts of detail that are worked into his character-drawing. In all the great novels the full light is thrown upon a few central figures, and even within that narrow circle there are different degrees of illumination. Hardy is here at the opposite pole from Balzac, who portrays not only minor figiures but often merely incidental persons, peo- ple who are but parts of the background and have no influence upon the course of Hardy's feeling for relative values AND MONOGRAPHS III 128 THOMAS HARDY The exclusion of non-essen- tials events — the woman who sells nuts to Cesar Birotteau, for example — with an elaborate care equal often to that expended upon his principal personages. It is amusing to imagine to what lengths of digression the peculiar genius of Balzac or of Dickens would have been led in the portrayal of Eustacia's grandfather, the old sea-faring man, whom Hardy is content to leave quite in the backgroimd. Throughout the Wes- sex novels it would be easy to chart the degrees in the descenrling scale from such commanding figures as, say, Henchard or Jude or Tess, through secondary people like Farfrae or Phillotson or Boldwood, to the crowd of fanners and merchants and other people of a superior social order, and, apart from them, to the .background of rustics. Moreover, in drawing his portraits Hardy practises a rigid exclusion of non-essentials. We hear nothing of Clym's life in Paris and only so much of Smith's journey to the East as is needed in order to understand his relations with Knight and Elfrida. Boldwood's young manhood does not con- cern the fortunes of Bathsheba and there- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 129 fore nothing is told of it. A second Mrs. C. C. Clarke might write a "Girlhood of Hardy's Heroines" with opportunities for the display of sentimental fancy equal to those afforded by Shakespeare. What wil- ful, naughty, high-strung children they must have been! Yet Hardy tells us nothing of their early life. His unbroken rule is to tell just so much of the life-.story of his characters as it is necessary to know to follow his theme. Thus, after Tess's departure from Alec, the course of her seducer's life is ignored save for the meet- ing with the elder Mr. Clare, which is told by Angel to Tess and which, as it brings about Alec's "conversion," is of tre- mendous importance to her. There was tragedy in the life of Phillotson dtiring the years between the time that he took leave of Jude to study for the ministry and his reappearance as a poor school-master — but of this we hear nothing; it does not concern Jude Fawley. Again: the motives that led Farfrae to come to Casterbridge and the coiu-se of his career after Henchard's death are both interesting subjects; but AND MONOGRAPHS ! . — III 130 THOMAS HARDY Selection and sub- ordination of incidents they have no bearing upon Henchard and are consequently omitted. Certainly the historian of Cesar BiroUeau and La Maison Nucingen would not have resisted the temptation to recount the steps by which Henchard made his fortune; but Hardy's reserve is equal to this test also. There is a similar subordination (though this is more difficult to illustrate) of details to the total effect in the matter of incidents and episodes, and all events are stressed in proportion to their importance for the gen- eral theme. To this rule there are two jus- tifiable exceptions. As a means of sustain- ing interest some spectacular events, such as Knight's accident or the rain-storm on the night of Fanny's burial, are more minutely portrayed than is strictly neces- sary for the conduct of the story. And there are, of course, the rustic scenes in which the peasants comment upon the doings of their superiors, which are intro- duced as a sort of interlude. In many of the novels great care is taken to harmonize the setting with the event that takes place therein. Contrast, for III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 131 example, Bathsheba's meeting for the first time with each of her three lovers. Oak she first sees while he is occupied with his ewes in the lambing season. Boldwood rides up to her door and away again im- petuously. Troy she encounters on a dark path and her skirt is caught by his sword. In The Woodlanders Marty is seen for the first time in the lonely cottage and for the last time by the lonely grave. In ^4 Group of Noble Dames as night comes on the stories told by the members of the anti- quarian club become darker in tone. In Tess the adjustment of place and season is accomplished with the highest art. It is spring-time at the beginning of the tale. Tess goes to the home of the pseudo-D'Ur- bervilles in high summer and returns from Alec amid autimmal decay. It is summer again on the dairy-farm and winter on the wedding-day and again at Flintcomb-Ash. So also the action moves in appropriate places. The initial tragedy of Tess's life takes place in the gloomy woodland called the Chase; the courtship of Angel and Tess goes on amid the imconventional, bright Harmoniz- ing of setting with event AND MONOGRAPHS III 132 THOMAS HARDY The isolated setting sensuousness of Talbothay's dairy; the wedding-night passes in the dark ancestral manor-house of the D'Urbervilles and in the ruined abbey near by; Tess, the de- serted wife, supports herself on the harsh and unsympathetic Flintcomb-Ash farm; the murder of Alec occurs in a tawdry sea- side boarding-house; and the last night with Clare passes at Stonehenge, Tess the destined victim of social conventions shel- tering herself in the ruins of the pagan tem- ple where, thousands of years before, her ancestors had been sacrificed upon the altar of a barbarous religion. The rural setting of the novels in a se- questered vale of life, though it greatly re- stricts Hardy's range of subject and char- acter, possesses corresponding advantages. It confirms the unity of effect. It accounts plausibly for the close interconnections of the various personages. It explains the absence of various conventions that have been imposed on more ''advanced" com- munities and gives ample room for the ex- pression of individuality without the check that arises from the power of the reason III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST when strengthened by convention. Hence it is the appropriate ground for men and women yielding to the dictates of instinct; warm, elemental, vigorous human beings who are close to earth. From the setting, too, comes the sense of detachment and separation from the outside world that makes each novel seem complete in itself and unlike the imaginary scene of many other writers whose novels seem mere frag- ments of a larger world. There is a con- sequent loss of breadth, perhaps, but there is a gain in intensity. Analogies suggest themselves from the graphic and plastic arts where certain compositions contain lines that seem to reach out beyond the limits of the subject while certain others are so grouped as to possess only curves that turn harmoniously inward. Hardy, as we have seen, never relies upon the su- pernatural, yet the remoteness and self- sufficiency of his setting remove him far from the realists. His art sheds a sombre ''light that never was on sea or land" over his scene ; he is constantly upon the borders of the Unknowable. AND MONOGRAPHS 133 III 134 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's style If his books are read with proper atten- tion to their technique, it will be admitted, then, that in his greater works he has real- ized his own ideal of imparting to master- pieces of story a beauty of shape such as is found in masterpieces of pictorial or plastic art. There is a like attention paid to grouping, selection, subordination, em- phasis, and harmonious composition. The lines of the stories may be traced and they will fall into large, simple, unabrupt curves. The growth of the story proceeds gradually; the interest rises towards the centre; and there is an equally gradual subsidence of emotional tensity at the close. In these large matters of structure and design Hardy's art at its best is almost impec- cable. But what about the medium in which he works? * * * Hardy is not a "stylist" in the sense of the word as it is used of De Quincey or Ruskin or Pater or Meredith or James. He does not display that sheer delight in the use of language for its own sake, beauti- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 135 fully or forcefully or subtly or cleverly, which is the mark of the virtuoso. He is interested in what he has to say far more than in the way in which he says it. He is willing at times to sacrifice elegance and grace to precision. The aphorisms scat- tered through the novels (such as the many comments upon women to be found in Far from the Madding Crowd) are not, like Meredith's polished jewels, exotics valued for themselves, but are of importance as integral parts of the writer's theme. His literary allusions and those to the fine arts are not learned appendages but are intro- duced to render more vivid the situation or to cast additional light upon the character he is drawing. If Meredith is an artist in m.etaphor, then is Hardy equally an artist in simile. The contrast is more real than are most of the comparisons that have been made between the two men. The use of simile is to be expected from so keen an observer as Hardy. A telHng number of forced and harsh and ugly similes can easily be gathered from the novels; but they are more than offset by the host of those that His similes AND MONOGRAPHS . III 136 THOMAS HARDY • are apt and often exquisite. The point to be made here is that just as metaphor in the hands of Carlyle becomes itself a metaphor of his transcendentalism, so is simile appropriate to Hardy, for by his use of this figure of speech he suggests on every page of his writings the intimate interrela- tion of human beings and human affairs with the natural world around them. Take a single instance of this : To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow; it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. There is a cosmic quality in this. With the reference to the fading twilight and to wintry darkness a curtain seems, as it were, to rise for an instant behind Eustacia and we catch a glimpse of the vast, un- known stretch of the universe beyond her. In a moment it falls and we are face to face with humanity again. In the same novel the comparison of Eustacia's sun-lit mouth to a red tulip calls up far-reaching III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 137 suggestions of a different order, and the tenderness with which the boy holds her hand — ''like that of a child holding a cap- tured sparrow" — of a different kind still. It is easy to pass over single instances of these kinds without stopping to analyze them; but as they occur again and again there comes to be a growing impression of how each individual life contains in little the characteristics of the Whole, of how in any small series of events there are implica- tions as wide as the universe. This im- pression, as we shall see, is one of the most powerful produced by Hardy's poems. It has just been said that Hardy's is the style, or the absence of style, that comes from a man intent upon what he has to say. From this fact flow two consequences. When he is bored by his subject he be- comes, not slip-shod, not hurried and scamping, but plodding, conscientious, sometimes dull. He is then rigid and di- dactic and it is then that there come those over-technical descriptions to which refer- ence has already been made. Then, too, are found the passages of uninspired phil- AND MONOGRAPHS III 138 THOMAS HARDY Narrative style Dialogue osophizing that remind one of George Eliot. On the other hand, he invariably rises to the heights demanded of great situations in narrative. Knight's accident on the cliff; Fanny's burial; Mrs. Yeobright's re- turn across the heath; Henchard's wed- ding-gift to his daughter; the Midsummer Eve in the forest; Tess in the Chase; the death of Jude — ^the insight and strength and exactitude of such scenes is tremen- dous. Here, as in the large design of the books, so in the choice of words, there is a strict exclusion of non-essentials, a selec- tion of the precise words required. . And he has mastered the opposing principles of the exactitude demanded of the naturalist and the power of suggestion expected of the romancer. His descriptive and nar- rative powers reach their height in the ex- traordinary prose stage-directions in The Dynasts. But he is by no means so nearly faultless in dialogue. This weakness ac- counts in part for the impression of im- maturity made by A Pair of Blue Eyes in which much of the story is conveyed in dialogue (a bit of technique that Hardy III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 139 fell heir to from Reade and Collins). The situation between Clym and Eustacia fol- lowing the boy's revelation of the circum- stances of Mrs. Yeobright's death is con- vincing beyond the abilities of almost any English novelist; the train of circum- stances leads unbrokenly and unhesitat- ingly to the catastrophe; it was unques- tionably a scene a faire; but the words put into the mouth of Clym and of his wife lack an undefinable something of reality. They are literary. The vision is not abso- lute. They are what a husband and wife would be expected to say in such a situation rather than what Clym and Eustacia must necessarily have said on that particular morning. The same is true of the great scene between Clare and Tess on their wedding-night and it might be paralleled in many other places in the novels. Yet even Thackeray, who is a far finer master of dialogue than is Hardy, did not quite succeed in the dialogue of the scene between Rawdon and Becky and Lord Steyne; and where Thackeray has fallen short of com- plete success it is no dishonour to Hardy to AND MONOGRAPHS III 140 THOMAS HARDY have nearly failed. Balzac might have succeeded; but who else? These strictures with regard to dialogue do not hold good of the rustic scenes. There Hardy is uniformly successful. It is almost a paradox to say that in the dialogue that owes most to literary reminiscence he is nearest to life, to the impression of actuality; but it is true of the talk of his yokels. The ease and lightness, the per- fect haiinonizing of effort with the result achieved, is one proof of how well Hardy knows the country of his birth. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 141 IV THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WES- SEX Hardy knows the Southern counties as Gilbert White knew Selborne; the towns and villages, their history and inhabitants and customs as Mr. Bennett knows the Five Towns. The minutest objects and occur- rences of the country-side are as familiar to him as to Richard Jefferies and his range is far more extensive. He is the natural his- torian of Wessex. He follows the Brontes, George Eliot, Trollope, WilHam Black, and Blackmore in the development of the lit- erary genre known as ''Regionalism" and is thus related to such English writers as Mr. Bennett and Mr. Phillpotts, to the various exploiters of Ireland, the High- lands, Wales, Shropshire, the East Coast, and the Isle of Man; and in France to Henry Bordeaux among others. He Regional- ism AND MONOGRAPHS III 142 THOMAS HARDY ^ knows Wessex as Balzac knew Paris and Touraine, as Scott knew the Border Coun- try, as Dickens knew London. But he never seems to go forth into new locaHties seeking what has come to be called "local coloiu*," as Dickens went forth, note-book in hand, into Yorkshire. One cannot imagine Hardy subjecting himself to a severe course of " docimientation " as did Flaubert. Nor could he have disguised himself, like Zola, as a workman in order to gain experiences of the slums of a great city; or — again like Zola — conscientiously take dejeuner with an actress in order to become acquainted with the demi-monde. But Hardy's knowledge of the life of Casterbridge or Mellstock or Budmouth is kept subservient to the purposes of his story. He reproduces only such portions of a village's multifarious activities as are needed for his theme. There is no such impression of the confusion and bustle of the little world of a small town as we find in Balzac. Gissing knew the East End of London as intimately as Hardy knows Wessex, but there is tragedy in that in- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 143 timacy, for the slums were forced upon Gissing and, hating the people, he por- trayed their life only because it was the material for fiction that he had ready to hand. Hardy, on the contrary, is steeped in, and loves, the heaths and farms and woodlands, the customs and traditions and superstitions among which he lives and which are enshrined in his writings. He describes them, not as the carefully obser- vant tourist would do, from the point of view of an outsider, but as one familiar with them through a lifetime. His knowl- edge is accurate in detail; but that is not all. He has imaginative sympathy and a consciousness of the close relationship of man and the natural world amidst which he moves and of which he is a part. Though his mind has been impregnated with modern ideas, his temperament is es- sentially rustic, primitive, pagan. His de- scription of Angel Clare applie^s to himself : *' Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an unconquerable and al- most unreasonable aversion to modern town life." There is no urban element in The limitations of his world AND MONOGRAPHS III 144 THOMAS HARDY his nature and therefore a vast field of human experience is almost hidden from him. For Hardy's counsel Meredith might have written the sonnet called ''Earth's Secret": Not soUtarily in fields we find Earth's secret open, though one page is there; Her plainest, such as children spell, and share With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind. Nor where the troubled passions toss the mind, In turbid cities, can the key be bare. It hangs for those who hither thither fare, Close interthreading nature with our kind. It is quite true, as Hardy writes in his General Preface, that the objection that novels that evolve their action on a cir- ctunscribed scene cannot be inclusive in their exhibition of human nature, does not hold good in respect of the elementary passions. But the passions and motives III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST and manners of sophisticated society form no part of his world. Every book and essay on Hardy devotes much attention to his 'treatment of Na- ture." Three stages in this attitude may be roughly indicated: at first Nature is regarded, with something of the "pathetic fallacy," as a conspirator against Man; later as a fellow-sufferer with Man; and at length Nature gradually disappears from the field of Hardy's interest — in Jude en- tirely so, though there is a recurrence to her in many of the poems. Passages illustrative of Hardy's powers of observation and description have been quoted by all writers upon him. But no matter how often it has been done no sur- vey of Hardy's achievement can pretend to completeness that does not call atten- tion again to this side of his work. Bear- ing in mind, however, the great amount that has been written on this subject, one may avoid the temptation to gather to- gether a whole anthology of exquisite word- pictures of heath and orchard and meadow- land; of moth and rabbit and hedge-hog AND MONOGRAPHS 145 The develop- ment of his attitude towards Nature III 146 His powers of observa- tion III THOMAS HARDY and all the creatures of the country; and one may be content with noting a few typ- ical instances only. The mere turning of his pages will quickly supply a hundred more. Of the dwellers in the woodland he says that they possess "an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon." The re- mark applies to himself, and his horizon is all Wessex. Throughout the novels the sights and sounds and smells, the birds and beasts, the trees and brooks and flowers, are recorded with a light, deft touch, neither over-scientific and technical, nor inaccu- rate and vague. No natural phenomenon is too grand for his pen. He watches the motions of the constellations and tells the hour by the position they have attained. He records the progress of the storm, the contrasting and increasing brilliance of the lightning, the various rollings of the thunder. Nor is any event too small for his sympathy. The humble toad seeking shelter and the spiders that drop from the BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 147 ceiling are signs of the coming stonn. He notes the "musical breathings" of the pine which begin as soon as the young tree is set in the ground. He describes the "tiny- crackling of the dead leaves" as they re- turn to their proper position after the passage of feet over them. As a sign of coming spring he records that "birds be- gan not to mind getting wet." What in- timate affection is in that remark! Hu- morous but loving comprehension of a dog's nature is seen in the account of the well- meant but disastrous exertions of Oak's younger sheep-dog. He is tolerant of the only half -angry bull that annoys Elizabeth- Jane and admires the splendour of its puz- zled rage when it is trapped in the barn. The ways of cows are revealed in Tess and of sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd. With a humour that is akin to pathos yet has in it nothing of Sterne's sentimentality he narrates the death of the Durbeyfields' horse. Cats are not so highly honoured as they deserve to be in the Wessex novels; but it is pleasant to know that Max Gate shelters several and that they have been as BRYN MAWR NOTES III 148 THOMAS HARDY much loved by Hardy as by Samuel Butler and George Moore. He never tires of recording the changes in the animal and vegetable worlds as the seasons pass over them. He sets down in detail ''the change from the handsome to the curious which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months." The urge and stir of returning life in the spring never fail to move him. He contrasts the sound of rain-drops as they fall on different kinds of ground: "Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that the rain fell upon some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling plash announced the naked arable." He can differentiate between the various sounds of the wind as it blows through trees of different species, and as it passes over various parts of the heath. Signs of com- ing rain and of returning fair weather are clear to him. From him we can learn the contrasting appearance of bonfires accord- ing to the sort of wood or brush that is being btunt in them. He loves fires — par- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST ticularly at night. Night in all her moods is familiar to him; and dawn no less than twilight. One of the most beautiful pass- ages in the novels is the description of dawn on the Froom meadows when Angel Clare is reminded of the Resurrection hour. Another almost equally lovely is the pic- ture of the woods at the hour of Bath- sheba's awakening there. And as a pic- ture of the decline of day turn to the de- scription of the forest at nightfall in The Woodlanders. In the beautiful recent poem *' Afterwards" Hardy voices his hope that if, when he is gone, men remember him at all, it will be as one who noticed the loveli- ness of the spring, to whom the hawk and the thorn were familiar sights, who strove to protect the little creatures of the coun- try-side from harm, and who had an eye for the mysteries of the full-starred heavens. Hardy is wont, in a manner more re- cently associated with his disciple Eden Phillpotts, to centre his stories around some one or other of the trades and occu- AND MONOGRAPHS 149 Wessex trades III 150 THOMAS HARDY pations of Wessex. In Tess we watch the life of the Great Dairies: the milking, skimming, churning, cheese-making, and the minor occupations of the dairy-hands such as the charmingly described task of uprooting the few strands of garlic that were tainting the milk. Later in the same book one reads of harsher and less pic- turesque work like ''hacking," reed-draw- ing, and threshing. Far from the Madding Crowd is set amidst the cares and pleasures of shepherds : lambing, washing and shear- ing, the shearing-supper (an unforgettable scene), and the sheep-fair. Bathsheba appears at the corn-market, an episode that connects this book with The Mayor of Casterbridge in which the corn-and-hay trade is depicted. Life in the timber and orchard districts is the background of The Woodlanders; quarriers and stone-sawyers appear in The Well-Beloved; furze-cutting is the austere and lonely occupation of many of the peasants in The Return of the Native. The story of The Trumpet-Major moves in and around an old flouring-mill. The questionable trade of smuggling is III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 151 amusingly portrayed in ''The Distracted Preacher." The doings of the old string band (not a trade but formerly an impor- tant occupation) forms a large part of the theme of Under the Greenwood Tree. * * * Customs change slowly in Wessex. In "The Fiddler of the Reels" Hardy says that 1851, the year of the Great Exhibi- tion, "formed . . . an extraordinary chron- ological frontier" between old ways and new. Many of the Southern folk, journey- ing up to London, then saw the outer world for the first time. From that period on old habits began to disappear and new ways, the ways of the drab, undifferen- tiated, board-school English labourer every- where, began to creep in. The dialectical peculiarities began to be levelled out and many of them are now becoming obsolete. The older people who use them, are snubbed by the younger generation educated at the National Schools. Hardy has commented upon these changes in the preface to his volume of selections from the poems of Wessex customs AND MONOGRAPHS III 152 THOMAS HARDY William Barnes. But modern ways are not yet completely dominant, for many tradition customs still linger, "only in a metamorphosed or disguised fonn." In Who's Who Hardy sets down "old church and dance music" among his hobbies or recreations, for he takes an affectionate in- terest in these memorials of the old times. The lovely old custom of the Christmas "wakes" is described in detail in Under the Greenwood Tree and is the theme of the touching poem "The Dead Choir." Allu- sions to hymn-books and to the instrttments of the players occur constantly. The vicar's training of one such choir forms an amusing scene in Two on a Tower. Hardy speaks often of old hymn-tunes and psalm- tunes, notably in the inn scene in The Mayor of Casterhridge when Henchard forces the singers to perfonn the terrible commination psalm. No English writer has described the joy of dancing with more gusto than Hardy. He speaks of the twist- ing of old folk-airs and the doctoring of them so that they reappear as new music-hall ditties, and of "country jigs, III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST reels, and 'Favorite Quick Steps' of the last century — some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, where they are recognized by the curious." Instances of such decayed survivals of old folk-customs are common in the novels. The club-revel or "club-walking" on the Tuesday after Whitsunday which forms the opening scene of Tess is mentioned several times elsewhere by Hardy. It is a folk- survival, the ''club" being a degenerate form of the old May Day dance. "Frag- ments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names have been forgotten," he says in The Return of the Native, "seem ... to have survived mediaeval doctrine." Two chapters in the novel just named form a locus classicus for students of folk-drama. These contain an account of the Christmas Mtimmers'-Play of Saint George as it was still acted annually about 1840, Typical of the last stages of folk-custom is the way in which the party assembled at Mrs. Yeo- bright's received the performance: 153 AND MONOGRAPHS III 154 THOMAS HARDY The remainder of the play ended. . . . Nobody commented, any more than they would have commented upon the fact of mushrooms coming in autumn or snow- drops in spring. They took the piece as phlegmatically as did the actors them- selves. It was a phase of cheerfulness which was, as a matter of course, to be passed through every Christmas; and there was no more to be said. Folk-play is the last stage in the process of degeneration from sacrifice through cult. It has here been reached.^^ Similar sur- vivals that are recorded are the skimming- ton or skimmity ridings ("satiric proces- sions with effigies") of which a full ac- count occurs in The Mayor of Casterhridge and to which there is an allusion in the poem "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's." According to Mr. Sherren a skimmington took place in a Dorset village in 1884. In another remote district, it may be added, a skimmity ride was in progress as late as the summer of 1917 when it was broken up by the police.i^ This cruel custom seems to Jhave arisen in the early years of the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 155 seventeenth century as one of the methods of deaUng with witches. In earUer in- stances a man and woman impersonated the couple who were caricatured, whereas in Hardy's reproductions of the custom effigies are made that grossly satirize the imfortunate people. A good example of the more prmiitive form may be found towards the end of Heywood and Brome's Late Lancashire Witches (1634), a play that is a mine of superstitions about witch- craft. Returning to Hardy, one may note the pretty custom of the wedding march around the village or hamlet which takes place in two of the novels. The sig- nal at the outbreak of a fire is the ringing of the church bells backwards. When a death occurs it is announced by the tolling of the bell with a system of changes accord- ing to the age and sex of the deceased. These two uses of the bells still survive in some districts. A barbarous relic of a less civiHzed age is the wife-selling episode with which The Mayor of Casterbridge begins. It has been objected that such an occur- rence is too improbable to form the basis of AND MONOGRAPHS III 156 THOMAS HARDY Wessex folk-lore a novel's plot. But Havelock Ellis has gathered together many examples of this custom^* and J. E. Vaiix has recorded two well-authenticated cases in England in the nineteenth century. ^^ A still grimmer relic of the past is the burial of a suicide at the cross-roads with a stake driven through his heart, which is the subject of the short story of "The Grave at the Handpost." * * * Many superstitions survived in Wessex in Hardy's earlier years and have even yet not entirely disappeared. "These smoul- dering village beliefs," says Hardy, are "sentiments which lurk like moles under- neath the visible surface of manners." The Wessex novels are a mine for the f olk- lorist and Hardy has been cited by many such as a recognized authority on the sub- ject. Tess and her mother represent the contrast between the younger generation whose belief has been undermined by edu- cation, though by no means obliterated as yet, and the elder with its "fast-perishing lumber of superstition, folk-lore, dialect. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 157 and orally transmitted ballads." "Fast- perishing" quite probably; but still to be found in out-of-the-way districts where there is even to-day implicit trust in charms as remedies for tooth-ache, St. Vitus's dance, and other ills, and where old- fashioned farmers still prefer the services of a ''charmer" to those of a veterinary when their cattle are ill. A collection of some of the reHcs of ancient credulity that are recorded by Hardy sheds light upon a side of his work over which critics have passed without detailed comment. The best known of these superstitions and the one that from the time of Theoc- ritus has been most often turned to ac- count in imaginative literature is the melt- ing of a wax image, shaped to represent an enemy, the life of the enemy fading away with the melting of the image. The most familiar example of this theme in English literature is of course Rossetti's Sister Helen. References to it occur fairly often in the Jacobean drama. ^® The reader may like to be reminded of the chaiiii which Nance Redferne mutters over the clay The waxen image AND MONOGRAPHS III 158 THOMAS HARDY image, stuck full of pins, of James Device in Ains worth's Lancashire Witches, a ro- mance founded upon the same documents that suggested the theme of their play to Thomas Hejrwood and Richard Brome. Later in that wild romance the witch causes the grave-digger to put in the ground an image of the woman she hates, saying ''Bury it deep, and as it moulders away, may she it represents pine and wither." The terrific nature of this bit of folk-belief appealed to Hardy and he uses it twice. When Henchard is experiencing the rapid decline of his fortunes he wonders whether some one has been shaping an image of him and setting it before the fire. The idea is used terribly and dramatically in The Re- turn of the Native where Susan Nunsuch melts the image of Eustacia on the very evening of the latter's death. The same woman, on an earlier occasion, had pricked Eustacia's arm and drawn her blood as a means to stop the suspected bewitching of her children. Had no blood come it would have been proof positive that Eustacia was a witch. Thus, a character in Ainsworth's III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 159 book declares that "your witch should be put to every ordeal. She should be scratched with pins to draw blood from her," etc. And in the poem "A Witch" by Hardy's fellow-townsman, William Barnes, one reads: An' I've a-heard the farmer's wife did try To dawk a needle or a pin In drough her wold hard wither'd skin, An' draw her blood, a-comen by: But she could never vetch a drap. For pins would ply an' needles snap Agean her skin; an' that, in coo'se. Did meake the hag bewitch em woo'se. Witches and devils are the familiar neigh- bors of the Wessex yokels. Dr. Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders is charged with having sold his soul to the devil — the usual accusa- tion brought by the ignorant and the credulous against one of superior intellec- tual attainments, especially if he is an empiricist. The exhausted condition of the mare which in reality Fitzpiers had used secretly is explained as being due to its having been "hag-ridden." The older AND MONOGRAPHS III 160 THOMAS HARDY inhabitants of the woodland tell strange tales of sights seen in times past, of witches black and white. The beautiful Vale of Blackmore is said to teem with beliefs in ''green-spangled fairies that 'wickered' at you as you passed." The fact that Barnes is comparatively Httle known will excuse one for offering part of his chaiiiiing little poem "The Veairies" as an illustration of this. Long years ago the fairies used to come to the narrator's grandfather's house where they danced upon the floor around the fire. One night they found a keg of mead and one fairy drank so much that he could not remember the words that had to be said to make him small enough to pass through the keyhole: He got a-dather'd zoo, that after all Out t'others went an' left en back behind. An' after he'd a-beat about his head Agean the keyhole till he were half dead, He laid down all along upon the vloor Till gramfer, comen down, unlocked the door: III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 161 An' then he zeed en ('twer enough to frighten en) Bolt out o' door, an' down the road lik' Hghtenen. In other poems Barnes makes equally de- lightful use of these beliefs. Hardy touches the borders of the super- natural in "The Withered Arm" where there is a hint, and a hint only, of a pos- sible rationalistic explanation of the in- cubus. In the same story Conjuror Trendle recommends to the afflicted hero- ine that she lay the withered member across the neck of a man newly hanged. The idea here would seem to be that the vitality of the man just dead, passing out through the wounded portion of his body, will have a restorative effect upon the ail- ing Hmb. In former times the same cure was often used for skin diseases and for epilepsy. The lonely dwelHngs of such conjurors are found in various parts of Wessex. Bodements and omens are looked for by the peasantry on all occasions. The AND MONOGRAPHS III 162 THOMAS HARDY Omens and signs breaking of a key or a looking-glass is a dreadful sign. A ringing in the left ear or the sight of a magpie foreshadows a com- ing mtirder. As Tess is returning from her sojourn at the Chase a thorn-prick upon her chin gives her great concern. After the wedding of Tess and Clare, as they are departing in the afternoon upon their hon- eymoon, the cock crows thrice, and the alarmed household endeavor to explain away this grim portent by holding that it is a mere forecast of change in the weather. On several occasions Tess hears the rumble of the spectral D'Urberville coach — ^which foretells coming disaster. The maidens in Under the Greenwood Tree follow the direc- tions in the "witch's book" in order to catch a glimpse of their future husbands; and in The Woodlanders there is a scene of wonderful sensuous charm in which the young girls of the neighborhood go to the forest on Old Midsummer Eve for this pur- pose. The future is elsewhere divined by means of a Bible and a key (as in Hey- wood's Wise Woman of Hogsden) and else- where still by looking into the cloudy white III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 163 of an egg. This last method of "scrying" is a substitute for the more usual crystal- gazing. A copy of The Compleat Fortune- Teller or some other such book was often in the possession of peasant families ; Joan Durbeyfield stood in such awe of this book that she feared to leave it in the house over night and had it put in the wood-shed every evening. There are many superstitions connected with death; in "Interlopers at the Knap," for instance, we see the sister, after the death of her brother (which hap- pens during the night) , slip out of the house and passing along the row of bee-hives wake each swarm in turn; were that not done the bees, too, would die. In the brief tale of "An Imaginative Woman" Hardy connects folk-beliefs with the possibility, admitted by modern science, of pre-natal influence upon physical characteristics, and turns the idea to the uses of irony. Sim- ilar cases are recorded in great number in the final volume of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex. And as an in- stance of the venerableness of the belief among the English peasantry, the foUow- AND MONOGRAPHS III 164 THOMAS HARDY Various curious beliefs ing scrap of dialogue in Lyly's Mother Bombie (I, i) may be quoted: Memphio: Rascall, doest thou imagine thy mistress naught of her body? Dromio: No , bu t f antasticall of her mind ; and it may be, when this boy was be- gotten she thought of a foole, and so conceiued a foole. Hardy records many superstitions of a less sombre sort than those noted in the preceding paragraphs. In Jude Vilbert, the quack doctor, sells love-philtres dis- tilled from the juice of doves' hearts. (One recalls that "dust of doves' hearts" is listed by Burton among love-potions.^^) Vilbert, like Venn the reddleman and the nimierous conjurors, is himself a survival from the far past. Christian Cantle, the "slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight fool "of The Return of the Native, had the misfortune to be born when there was no moon, thus amply confirming the old say- ing "No moon, no man." When Farmer Crick's cows (in Tess) do not give their milk abundantly various explanations are III BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 165 offered. *' 'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," says one. "I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," a dairy-maid suggests ; but a bright- minded fellow refutes this by pointing out that the cows whose horns are cut off are as ungenerous as the rest. ''Folks," says Farmer Crick, ''we must lift up a stave or two — that's the only cure for't." Upon which "the band of milkers . . . burst into melody — ^in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity." Apparently the milk then came in satis- factory quantities. On another occasion the butter will not "come." "Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," one hand remarks ; and consultation with vari- ous neighbouring conjurors is suggested. A pleasant interlude in Tess is the tale of William Dewy of Mellstock (the same person who appears as an old man in Under the Greenwood Tree). In his youth he channed a bull by playing on his fiddle as he ran away from it; but he could not manage to climb the fence because to do so he had to stop playing, until he hit upon AND MONOGRAPHS III • 166 THOMAS HARDY the plan of playing the "'Tivity Hymn," when the bull, hearing the familiar melody and thinking it must be Christmas-Eve. knelt down, and before it realized that it had been fooled Dewy was safely over the fence. The same charming bit of folk- belief is employed for a very different pur- pose in one of Hardy's most moving poems, "The Oxen": Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel, "In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. III. BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST A mediaeval legend analogous to this be- lief forms the subject of the poem called "The Lost Pyx," which gives one tradi- tional explanation of the origin of the strange stone pillar at the head of Black- more Vale called "Cross-and-Hand," an- other explanation of which occurs in Tess. Education has not so much rooted out these old beliefs as it has hidden them away beneath a mantle of shamefacedness and pretended scepticism. This fact is well illustrated by the conference that Henchard has with the conjuror and weather-prophet near Casterbridge, whose clients feign to consult him merely as a whim but who is consoled for the super- ficial irony of their manner towards him by his confidence in their fundamental belief in his supernatural powers. The foregoing account of the customs and superstitions recorded in the Wessex novels must not be permitted to give a false impression of the place and prominence they occupy therein. Hardy is no mere anthropologist or folk-lorist. These quaint and curious beliefs are never introduced 167 AND MONOGRAPHS The effect of educa- tion on these beliefs The place of folk-lore in the novels III 168 THOMAS HARDY into the stories for their own sakes alone. They are a part of the "atmosphere," of the "local colour" (to use two well-worn terms at once) of the novels and contribute their quota to the total effect much as do the descriptions of the natural features of the country-side. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 169 V MEN AND WOMEN: PEASANTS The pea,sants who cling to the behefs which we have been discussing do not form a class completely apart from the other char- acters in the Wessex novels, for by almost imperceptible gradations, through such persons as Oak and Winterborne, the back- ground or chorus of yokels is connected with the principal characters who are higher in the social scale. Nevertheless there are traits in the peasantry which differentiate that class from the rest. Though they possess some qualities in common among themselves the rustics are often individualized. Hardy has pro- tested more than once against the city- man's view of the undifferentiated " Hodge." He contributed an illuminating letter on this and kindred subjects to Longman's Magazine, July, 1879 ("The The peasants AND MONOGRAPHS III 170 THOMAS HARDY Dorsetshire Labourer"). In A Pair of Blue Eyes he insists that it is only in cities that the attrition is so great as to change the unit Self into a fraction of the larger unit Class. In Tess he remarks that these rustics are "beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here or there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere." The importance of these people varies with the social strata in which the several stories are set. In Under the Greenwood Tree we are in the midst of them; in The Woodlanders they play a great part; in The Return of the Native rather less; in Far from the Madding Crowd and still more in The Mayor of Casterbridge they serve rather as part of the background and as a sort of chorus that observes and comments upon events; in Tess, save in the dairy-farm scenes, the humour associated with them is becoming acrid — there is grimness in the picture of John Durbe5rfield; in Jude there is hardly a trace of interest in them, and III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 171 with their disappearance goes also the humour that accompanied them. The Ufe of such men and women is close to earth. They live among the sights and sounds and smells of the natural world. Their being is permeated with them. Con- sider the description of Winterborne which admirers of Hardy have always delighted to quote: He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn- flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and ever3rwhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an in- describable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards. One could parallel this passage with others showing peasants among their lambs and ewes, or cutting furze upon the heath, or milking, or threshing, or what you please. Their closeness to earth AND MONOGRAPHS III 172 THOMAS HARDY They are part of the landscape. They are thoroughly at ease in their world. The signal for an assignation is a stone thrown into a pool imitating the sound of a plung- ing frog. Another is a moth let loose into a room to beat itself against the lamp. Oak tells the hours by the grand wheel of the constellations. He recognizes the signs of coming rain. He is alert and efficient when confronted with Bathsheba's flatu- lent sheep. There is no self -consciousness in this knowledge. The peasants lead un- speculative Uves close to Nature, never re- belHng against Circumstance. If they complain at all — and it is only the feeble among them that do so — ^it is of small physical ills of little moment: Thomas Leaf of his lack of brains (of which he is rather proud than otherwise), William Worm of his deafness, Christian Cantle of his cowardice, and so on. Hardy shows no concern for their " social condition . ' ' Often he seems to be out of sympathy with the advance of so-called education, believing that the National Schools obliterate more of value than they give. He lays no stress III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 173 upon their poverty; in fact in the article referred to above he declares that their misery has been much over-estimated. It is the rustics in the Wessex novels who are happy, for the secret of happiness, as is said in The Woodlanders, lies in limiting the aspirations. They are quietists without being aware of the fact. Not that they are necessarily unintelligent. Many are shrewd, some witty, nearly all uncon- sciously humorous. The humour, as we have seen, is merely an exaggeration, touched with literary reminiscence and artistically justifiable, of qualities to be met with in real life. Often of course they are not so much humorous as the cause of humour in Hardy who juxtaposes their primitive manners and quaint conceits to the ideas and behavior of more educated people. Their humour consists largely in comments upon the broad, general experi- ences of humanity: birth, and courtship, and marriage, and death, and success or failure in enterprise. To a great degree it depends upon homely perversions of the sort of learning that, heard Sunday after Their humour AND MONOGRAPHS III 174 THOMAS HARDY The clergy Sunday all their lives, has become part of themselves — the moral and devotional ex- hortations of their clergymen, the more picturesque portions of the Scriptures and the Prayer-book, and the good old un- sophisticated hymns the staves of which they lift with such a good will. * * * Among those who play a prominent part yet are of secondary importance there is one class of men who stand apart from the rest: the clergy. Hardy's portrayal of them, like George Eliot's, has been a sub- ject for frequent adverse comment, espe- cially during the years when the novels were appearing. It is quite incorrect to say that he is uniformly hostile towards them. Towards the Establishment, vested with social, political and intellectual prestige, and containing traces of former persecuting privilege, he is consistently and defensibly hostile. But his individual clergymen fall into two well-defined groups. On the one hand are the sincere, ardent, hard-working believers who exercise an III BYRN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 175 energetic, practical, humane influence upon their people; on the other hand, the in- sincere, generally younger, men who enter the church as a means of social and intel lectual advance. The elder Mr. Clare is portrayed with a gentle sympathy un touched by the remotest irony ; his portrait is worthy of comparison with those of the ministers of the gospel drawn by Chaucer and Dryden and Goldsmith. Mr. Raun- ham in Desperate Remedies not only gives sensible advice to the Grayes but is capable of directing the work of salvage at the fire. Mr, Maybold in Under the Greenwood Tree behaves in a very manly fashion towards Fancy Day. Mr. Torkingham in Two on a Tower is a sensible person though a little in awe of his bishop; it is this latter char- acteristic only that is mildly satirized. Hardy denies any satiric intent in his por- trayal of the Bishop of Melchester in this novel; but he has not conquered his pre- judices and one cannot but feel that the picture is a caricature. But on the whole all these clerics must be set off as counter- balances against such men as the worldly AND MONOGRAPHS III 176 THOMAS HARDY Mr. Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes (a prevalent and very human type); Mr. Cope in the short story ''For Conscience's Sake"; the two elder brothers of Angel Clare; and especially the two sons of a drunken father in "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions." Hardy does not always re- main clear-sighted and fair. There is angry satire in his portrait of the vicar in Tess. And in the powerful short story just referred to one of the brothers remarks to the other : "To succeed in the Church, people must believe in you, first of all, as a gentleman, secondly as a man of means, thirdly as a scholar, fourthly as a preacher, fifthly, perhaps, as a Christian." This is not only bad art (for it is the writer who speaks here through the mouth of a character who cannot even be imagined as uttering such sentiments) ; it is manifestly unjust. In such general indictments of the motives that now-a-days draw young men into the ministry Hardy recalls and exaggerates the opinions of George EHot. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST It is noteworthy, finally, that in several of the most important novels there is prac- tically no mention of religion or of religious usage at all. Little attention is paid to the other pro- fessional classes. The architects who figure so largely in the earlier books have of course their interest as individuals, but the fact of their profession is of autobiographic, not of psychological, interest. Lawyers are hardly ever heard of, save incidentally as in the divorce proceedings in The Wood- landers. Fitzpiers is the only physician who plays a prominent part, and he is drawn rather as an intellectualist in gen- eral than with particular regard to his pro- fession. As for the crowds of merchants and farmers, their fate depends upon their temperament and circumstances far more than upon their calling. Education, widening their mental hori- zon, has entered in greater or less degree into the lives and characters of most of the 177 Other professions AND MONOGRAPHS III 178 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's women leading personages of the novels; and with knowledge come sorrow and complexity. To understand Hardy's conception of women one must relate it to an important part of his general metaphysic, premising that he himself has indicated that this metaphysic is to be regarded as purely tentative. The enormous number of mar- ital complexities in the novels and short stories and poems is due to the connection of the sexual relation with his general thought. It must be remarked what a little part such Balzacian passions as greed or ambition play in Hardy's world. They are superficial and in a measure conven- tional passions, a product of civihzation. And in his world we are equally far from Meredith's or James's subtle analyses of the delicate motives of refined and artificial people. The love-instinct, on the con- trary, reaches to the core of human nature; and the problem of that instinct becomes almost an obsession with him. Troubles arising out of both regular connections and illicit unions are constant. There are at least a dozen seductions in the books. To III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 179 Hardy's credit it must be said that he does not mince matters. He had to permit cer- tain concessions in the first magazine ver- sions of several of the novels, but in their final form we meet with frankness and no prudery. It is important to consider here his views on marriage. At the root of his polemics are his sense of the injustice of imposing a permanent bond as the penalty for a passing desire and his knowledge of the numberless instances in which love has been stifled by obligation. But two ques- tions suggest themselves: Just what rem- edy does Hardy propose? And: Does he imagine that a mere *' return to Nature" would be a practicable solution in the modem world? On the whole he seems to advocate merely a greater freedom of divorce; and the development of sentiment during the last thirty years has been in line with his ideas. His final opinion is well summarized in a postscript to the preface to Judc. A marriage, he says, "should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties — being then essentially and morally no marriage." His views on marriage AND MONOGRAPHS III 180 THOMAS HARDY He protests elsewhere against marriages of convenience, especially between persons of very different ages. "The necessity of getting life-leased at all costs, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach," leads to such unhappy and unsympathetic unions as that depicted in "An Imaginative Woman." In another of Life's Little Ironies he speaks of the belief of "the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure." Two notes, added in the recent definitive edition of his writings, are protests against the old de rigtieur ending of a story with a marriage and life happy ever after. These notes may be found at the close of "The Distracted Preacher" and at the point in The Return of the Native where Thomasin announces her engagement to Venn. Mar- riage, he says elsewhere, is not the goal of life, but a milestone on the path. Yet it does not necessarily bring unhappiness. There is tragedy enough in all conscience; but it comes from mis-mating, not from mating; from accepting as a lasting feeling III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 181 what in many cases is but a momentary impulse. The true solution comes when good-fellowship is added to love. "The compound feeling," he writes with grave beauty towards the close of Far from the Madding Crowd, "proves itself the only love which is strong as death." Nowhere do we find either a sentimentalizing of love (as in Scott), or an intellectualizing (as in Meredith), or an idealization (as in Browning) ; but a fiim acceptance of it for what it is — a physical passion, a sexual attraction, carrying with it the hope, but only the hope, of a permanent bond of affection based on common interests and common ideas. Hardy is here much more in line with the female novelists of the nineteenth century than with the male. If in the marriage of Fancy Day and Dick Dewy and of some other couples, notably Grace and Fitzpiers, there are suggestions and more than suggestions of coming un- happiness, no such clouds overcast the marriage of Bathsheba and Oak or that of Farfrae and Elizabeth -Jane which was, Hardy records, uniformly happy. And AND MONOGRAPHS III 182 THOMAS HARDY perhaps it does not bring the matter to too personal a close to note that in the verses called "A Poet" — and the allusion is un- mistakable — Hardy asks that the memory of him shall be that "two thoughtful women loved him well," On the whole, however, Hardy's attitude towards women is unfavorable ; his opinion of them is bitter. They have many good qualities of heart, but they are fickle and vain, insincere, conscienceless, and se- ductive. Almost all are passionate and passion leads invariably to grief. Char- lotte Bronte and George Eliot had led the way away from the Rowenas and Doras and Amelias of earlier fiction. Meredith, too, had broken the old bonds, but, as con- trasted with Hardy, he had over-intellec- tuahzed his women. His revolt from senti- mentalism and from "the charity of chiv- alry" was in itself an unconscious yielding to sentiment. In Hardy there is nothing of this. It has not hitherto been remarked how few children appear in the Wessex novels. It is almost a childless world. Even the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 183 many love-children are either grown-up, or play a passive part, or die in infancy. The boy who holds Eustacia's hand as a reward for the services rendered her is a preco- cious youth unconvincingly drawn. The wretched son of Jude and Arabella suf- fers, among his many other miseries, from the responsibility, one is tempted to say, of being an allegory. Nowhere is there shown such a healthy, noniial relationship as that existing between Richmond Roy and his son Harry. But Meredith had the intimate pleasures of association with his son Arthur before their alienation; and Hardy has had no children. Is it fanciful to find in this strange and great omission from Hardy's world one reason for the lack of sweetness in the novels? They are often tender and almost always sympa- thetic; but they are hardly ever sweet. The absolute omission, of which something has already been said, of all non-essentials necessitated the sacrifice of beautiful op- portunities. What was Clym's childhood with his strong-minded and foiniidable but devoted mother? What was Elizabeth- A childless world AND MONOGRAPHS III 184 THOMAS HARDY The promptings of the Will Jane's life with her kindly sailor-father before she appears at Casterbridge? What, even, were the happy hours that Jude and Sue must have spent with their babies? The omission is the more remarkable in that the function of child-bearing is the central idea in Hardy's view of women. The business of life is to reproduce life; existence is for the sake of existence. Nature, seeking only to prolong the species, has give this function preeminently to woman. Hence woman's instinctive as- sertion of charm against which the intelli- gence of man revolts but to which his in- stincts succumb. What has been called the "capriciousness" of Hardy's women is in reality their immediate and instinctive obedience to emotional impulse, without the corrective control of the intelligence. It is one form through which the All- Mover, the Prime Impulse, works, darkly, unreasoningly. What in these women seems a lack of volition is due to their being possessed by the Will. Love, the sexual attraction, foniis the chief motive in Hardy's tragedies both because its passion- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 185 ate force brings out the individual in most uncontrolled revolt against the social norai and because it embodies the conflict of reason and intuition. The earlier novels, in which these ideas were already implicit, were written before Schopenhauer was known in England, but the resemblances between the later books, notably Jude, and the teachings of the Gernian philosopher are so close as almost to rule out of con- sideration the possibility of their being due simply to coincidence. Hardy's women are all of one type, differing only in degree. They are essentially Cyrenaics. The prin- ciple of calculation they are unaware of. The happiness of the moment blinds them to the hypothetical disaster of the morrow. They ask for the intensity of experience in the present rather than for the future satisfaction that comes from self-control. Those who consider Hardy ''voluptuous" fail to see that (to borrow Swinburne's simile) like a mediaeval preacher, while on the one side he places Love on the other he places Death. It is the difference in^,de- gree of this impulsiveness that makes AND MONOGRAPHS III 186 THOMAS HARDY Hardy's women individuals. There are some women of the lower social order, liv- ing close to Nature and meeting bravely the struggle of daily life, who in a measure re- ject the attributes of sex and represent, as it were, an undifferentiated humanity. Thomasin and Marty South are examples of this type. There are shades of difference between women who are in essentials much alike, as between the worldly and disillu- sioned Mrs. Charmond and the educated but not ignoble Grace, the one out of har- mony with her environment, the other reaching back towards an accord which has been marred, though not as yet de- stroyed, by contact with the outer world. In some there are approximations to judi ciousness and self-control. The determina- tion of Bathsheba to manage her posses- sions independently gives her a measure of such judiciousness. In Eustacia there is a force that seeks to compel circumstances into accord with the world of her dreams. And then there is the gentle bewilderment of Tess. And there is the downright ani- malism of Arabella. Mr. Dufiin has set III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST ■ 187 down in diagrammatic form the relation- ship of the leading women with their sev- eral lovers, and Mr. Hedgcock gives a list of some thirteen women who play fast and loose with thirty-three lovers. The ex- tremes meet in Jude the Obscure, Ara- bella, as we have seen, is the tool of the Will-to-Live. She is thus free from the prudent reserves that retard though they do not successfully control the love-instinct in women of more education like Eustacia. Sue, suggestions of whose self-control are seen in Elizabeth- Jane and Ethelberta, rep- resents the modem growth of self-regard- fulness and intellectuality as opposed to the older complacent obedience to instinct. But even Sue breaks down in the end. Fundamentally the same qualities, char- acteristic of undifferentiated human na- ture, are found in Hardy's men as in his women, though with a wider distribution of self-control and with an at least occa- sional triumph of reason over instinct. Setting aside the numerous young men whose characters are not yet fixed, one notes that his men fall roughly into three Hardy's men AND MONOGRAPHS III 188 THOMAS HARDY classes. On the one side are the sensual- ists of whom the arch instance is Alec D'Urberville, the unabashed rake. Fitz- piers, Wilde ve, and Troy belong in this group, though each has certain traits that partially redeem him: Fitzpiers his in- tellectual attainments, Wilde ve (micanly though he has lived) the unhesitating cour- age of his last moments, Troy a certain picturesque dash and touch of romance. In Bold wood, Henchard and Farfrae the sexual emotion vipsurges through the stratum of interest in their professional pursuits. On the other side are the rigid intellectualists like Knight and Angel Clare who err in the reverse direction. The self- ishness of this type of man is best illus- trated by the character of Swithin St, Cleeve, the young astronomer in Two on a Tower. Between the two extremes comes the Aristotelean mean, the honest middle group, the men who are not passion's slaves but who subordinate desire to the other demands of life, who have the power, in Hardy's words, ''of keeping not only judgement but emotion suspended in III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 189 difficult cases." There is of necessity less variety in this type than among the sen- sualists. These men are Wordsworthian in quality. They are able to subdue per- sonal aspirations and to regard self-grati fication as secondary in importance to their task of service. Through service they pay homage to the beloved object. Such men are John Loveday, Gabriel Oak, Giles Winterborne, It is of the last of these that Hardy says: ''How little acquirement and culture weigh beside sterling personal char- acter!" It is in his portrayal of men of this stamp that the best evidence lies for what has, perhaps paradoxically, been called "the optimism of Thomas Hardy." Fortuitously or otherwise Life has pro- duced beings with courage, resourceful- ness, patience, endurance, clear-sighted- ness, tenderness, tolerance, forbearance, and unselfishness. The admiration lav- ished upon them and the elaborate care employed in their portrayal are the proper answer to the foolish and uncritical opinion that Hardy is scornful of human nature. Shakespeare, Moliere, Scott, Balzac, • AND MONOGRAPHS III 190 THOMAS HARDY >i Dickens, and in less degree such writers as Fielding and Thackeray — each offers us a world filled with contrasting types of men and women. Their art is expended upon the realization of the infinite number of minute differences between individuals. Hardy, on the contrary, seeks to show how closely akin all men are. He thus re- duces to a minimum individual differences and emphasizes the traits that are possessed in common by all. Hence, as compared with these older masters and from this point of view, his is the merest fragment of a world. Th^ eccentricities Of individuals are levelled out into a general humanity moved by a common basic impulse and suffering, each person in his way, from the fundamental fact of the tragedy of the con- flict of reason and instinct. How severe the tragedy, or how merciful the mitiga- tion of it, depends in part upon whether that impulse be given free rein or be held in check. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 191 VI THE POEMS Poetry has a way of outlasting prose, and though there are still good judges who deny to Hardy equal rank as a poet with that which he holds as a novelist, though his poetry has not yet obtained the uni- versal recognition to which it is entitled, and though several of the novels have as good a chance of "immortality" as any fiction of the last half-century, neverthe- less the "concise and quintessential ex- pression" attained by rhythmic form makes it likely that in Hardy's case, as in Mere- dith's, the poetry will outlast the prose, though Time will do its accustomed win- nowing. The volume of Wessex Poems was pub- lished at a fortunate time. Had verses that enunciated clearly the view of life that is only implicit in the earlier novels been AND MONOGRAPHS III 192 THOMAS HARDY issued at the beginning of Hardy's career, they would, in the words of Darwin's illus- trious predecessor, have '^ anticipated twenty or thirty years of the march of honest feeling." They would have met with the same reception, or lack of recep- tion, that was the lot of The City of Dread- ful Night. At the close of the century not only was Hardy famous and therefore not only were verses of his likely to arouse curiosity, but honest feeling was better prepared for such poems as "Hap," and "Heiress and Architect," and "The Im- percepient." For the sake of clearness the titles of Hardy's later volumes of mis- cellaneous verse are here repeated: Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Timers Laughing-Stocks (1909), Satires of Circum- stance (1914), and Moments of Vision (1917). The reader must also be reminded that even before Wessex Poems appeared Hardy had laid down the general plan of The Dynasts, the first part of which ap- peared in 1904 and the third and last in 1908. Some survey of the short poems may precede consideration of the epic-drama. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 193 It surprised many people when Hardy, a novelist of established reputation, branched out into a field of work that, so far as the public knew, was almost untried. It is not surprising, of course, to those who know his history. At no time in his career did he wholly give over the writing of verse; especially remarkable, for example, are the 'Toems of Travel " written in 1887. Early dates are attached to many poems pub- lished lately, and below many others one finds the legend "From an old note." What is extraordinary is that there has been no falling-off in power in the suc- cessi^^e volumes of meditative, narrative and lyrical verse, but that on the contrary in his latest volume, published at the age of seventy-seven, are to be found some of his ripest, most appealing and most char- acteristic pieces. The gnomic utterance, the compressed expression of a definite thought, the clumsiness that comes from conscientious grappling with subjects re- bellious to form, the intensity of feeling, the wistful melancholy alternating with harsh irony, the sympathy beneath the General charac- teristics AND MONOGRAPHS III 194 Why were such poems written? Ill THOMAS HARDY cynicism, the quiet melody underlying the ruggedness — these are qualities of the ear- liest poems that are present still in the latest. Why has Hardy written verses that are often cynical, satiric, ironic, sinister; often despairing; almost always melancholy and disillusioned? If, as he says, Faiths by which my comrades stand Seem fantasies to me, were it not better done as others use to rest in silence, and to leave, as a very dif- ferent poet has counselled, unquestioning faith to those who find comfort and sup- port therein? The answer is twofold. "B.V." phrased it in the proem to The City of Dreadful Night: Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter, old and wrinkled truth Stripped naked of all" vesture that be- guiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of vouth ; BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 195 Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living words howe'er uncouth. It is, in other words, in the first place the instinct of the artist, seeking expression; and, in the second, the feeling that Truth for its own sake is to be prized ''though a whole celestial Lubberland were the price of Apostasy." Huxley speaks in one of his letters of the satisfaction derived from ''the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts." To those whom such work alaims and of- fends Hardy answers in the words of Saint Jerome: "If an offence come out of the truth, better it is that the offence come than that the truth be concealed." This is the burden of Hardy's dignified sonnet "To a Lady, Offended by a Book of the Writer's." And the thought often occurs that the poet and those who think like him are but the precursors towards a point of view that will be ever more generally approached as time AND MONOGRAPHS III 196 THOMAS HARDY goes on. His sense of the toughness of the battle in this righteous cause is voiced in the verses written in Gibbon's garden at Lausanne : A spirit seems to pass, Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand: He contemplates a writing in his hand, And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias. Anon the leaves are closed, With ''It is finished!" And at the alley's end He turns, and when on me his glances bend As from the Past comes speech — small, muted, yet composed. "How fares the Truth now? — 111? — Do pens but slily further her ad- vance? May one not speed her but in phrase askance? Do scribes aver the Comic to be Rever- end still? III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 197 "Still rule those minds on earth At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled: 'Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth'?" Hardy is not didactic; he has no desire to force opinions upon others; he puts for- ward a series of personal impressions, set down at different times, under different circumstances, and in widely contrasting moods. Like Thomson, he writes, not for the young, nor for those who grow fat among the shows of life, nor for . .pious spirits with a God abo^^e them To sanctify and glorify and love them; and only in rare moments for "sages who foresee a heaven on earth." "None un- initiate" will comprehend. Hence his par- ticular appeal to the type of mind that has been affected by the determinism so rife during the closing years of the nineteenth century. The value for humanity at large His audience AND MONOGRAPHS III 198 THOMAS HARDY His range lies in this: that Hardy's poetry moots questions generally put beyond discussion, that it probes into conventions, that it stimulates to a new estimation of old stand- ards and symbols and formulas. It has, of course, merits of another order, for it stirs the emotions while it quickens the intellect, else it would not be great verse. Hardy's hope was that the poems "in dramatic, ballad, and narrative form should include most of the cardinal situations in social and public life, and those in lyric form a round of emotional experiences of some completeness." But he is fully aware of "the little done, the undone vast," and in the poetry that he has composed, though its range is not so narrow as some critics contend, he by no means covers all the cardinal situations of life. Rather he tends to return often to one or another of a few particular situations, viewing them now from one angle and now from another. The scene of most of the short poems is laid in Wessex and the characters are often Wessex peasantry. But the application is III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST general. In the essay on "The Profitable Reading of Fiction" he has written: All persons who have thoughtfully com- pared class with class . . . are con- vinced that education has as yet but little broken or modified the waves of human impulse on which deeds and words de- pend. So that in the portraiture of scenes in any way emotional or dramatic — the highest province of fiction — the peer and the peasant stand on much the same level. This is equally true of narrative poetry. Accordingly universal human nature is portrayed in the particular guise of Wessex life. Some of the ballads and narrative pieces are cheerful in tone, occasionally quite rollicking: ''The Bride-Night Fire," for example (one of the few poems, by the way, written in dialect), or ''At Caster- bridge Fair," or "The Homecoming" with its unexpectedly hopeful ending develop- ing out of the dismal setting. But many others are pathetic or tragic, and of these a large inumber, as one would expect, deal 199 AND MONOGRAPHS The com- edy and tragedy of marriage III 200 THOMAS HARDY with love-entanglements and marital diffi- culties. "The Burghers" suggests the situation of Sue Bridehead and Phillotson, for it is the tale of a husband who not only- spares his unfaithful wife but allows her to leave him for her lover. The wife in "The Dame of Athelhall" repents of her rashness in running away from her husband with her lover and returns home secretly, only to overhear her husband congratulating him- self on being rid of her. Irony of a lighter sort is used in "The Curate's Kindness," an amtising piece, the kindness being the curate's intercession with the workhouse authorities on behalf of an old couple, that they might live together instead of being placed in different wards; the irony being that the old man's hope which had recon- ciled him to the shame of the workhouse had been that there he would be separated from the forty years' burden of his wife's company. A husband's temperament, the contrary of that portrayed in "The Burgh- ers," is shown in the grim piece called "A Conversation at Dawn." A few poems — "The Duel," "The Dark-Eyed Gentle- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 201 man," and "One Ralph Blossom Solilo- quizes," for example — support the state- ment that Hardy is moved to cheerfulness only by "the triumphant indulgence in sexual desire." The cynicism of some pieces is so dark as to overreach itself and touch on the farcical, as in many of the "Satires of Circumstance," in "The Statue of Liberty," and in the horrid verses that begin "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" In one such piece it is told how an admirer of a great preacher peeps into the vestry-room after the service and sees him re-enacting before the mirror the ges- tures that had so moved his congregation; in another, a lover, returning for his for- gotten walking-stick, overhears his sweet- heart berating her mother ferociously; in still another a stranger newly come to town overhears a company in a bar-room telling anecdotes of the past disreputable life of the woman, well known in that locality, whom he has just married. Such things as these — reluctant though one is to say it in a book that is based on reverence and admiration of Hardy — are cheap and un- Cynicism AND MONOGRAPHS III 202 THOMAS HARDY Love- poems worthy of a great poet. But by contrast they reveal not only those qualities in which his genuine merit rests but also the qual- ities of great poetry, which never debases and sneers at human nature but which exalts and uplifts. To offset these cynical verses there are, fortunately, many others ; passionate lyrics and meditative pieces that exhibit a deep realization of the lastingness and loyalty of love: ''Her Immortality" and ''Her Death and After" in Wessex Poems, or "The Clock-Winder" in Hardy's latest collection. This last poem, which illustrates his terseness, instinct for "atmos- phere," halting music, and deep feehng, may be quoted. It is dark as a cave, Or a vault in the nave When the iron door Is closed and the floor Of the church relaid With trowel and spade. But the parish-clerk Cares not for the dark As he winds in the tower At the regular hour III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 203 The rheumatic clock. Whose dilatory knock You can hear when praying At the day's decaying, Or at any lone while From a pew in the aisle. Up, up from the ground Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The machinery is, With its tick, click, v/hizz, Deliberately measuring Each day to its end That mortal men spend In sorrowing and pleasuring. Nightly thus does he climb To the trackway of Time. Him I followed one night To this place without light. And, ere I spoke, heard Him say, word by word, At the end of his winding, The darkness unminding: — "vSo I wipe out one more, My Dear, of the sore AND MONOGRAPHS III 204 THOMAS HARDY Sad days that still be. Like a drying Dead Sea, Between you and me!" Who she was no man knew : He had long borne him blind To all womankind; And was ever one who Kept his past out of view. A like sense of the value of human kindli- ness is found in many poems: ''A Plaint to Man," "In a Wood" (where such kind- liness is contrasted with the cruelty of Nature), and in that most beautiful of all Hardy's lyrics, "To Meet or Otherwise": Whether to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams, Or whether to stay And see thee not! How vast the dif- ference seems Of Yea from Nay Just now. Yet this same sun wijl slant its beams At no far day On both our mounds, and then what will the difference weigh ! III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make The most I can Of what remains to us amid this brake Cimmerian Through which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache, While still we scan Round our frail, faltering progress for some path or plan. By briefest meeting something sure is won; It will have been : Nor God norDaemon can undo the done, Unsight the seen, Make muted music be as unbegun, Though things terrene Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene. So, to the one long-sweeping symphony From times remote Till now, of human tenderness, shall we Supply one note. Small and untraced, yet that will ever be Somewhere afloat Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life's antidote. 205 AND MONOGRAPHS III 206 THOMAS HARDY War poems The harshness — one is tempted to say the hideousness and repulsiveness — of such poems as *'The Newcomer's Wife," "The Rival," The Statue of Liberty," and "The Dead and the Living" must not blind one to the fact that these things are transcripts from life where such things are possible or to the existence of other poems such as the two just quoted that present a con- trasting view of things. Two closely allied groups of poems have a particular interest now. These are the verses inspired by the Boer War and those concerning the Great War of 1914-1918. In the earlier series there is not a sign of the jingoism that found its most charac- teristic expression in Kipling's poems or of that extravagant denunciation of the Boers that disgraced Swinburne. On the other hand there are no protests against the South African excursion of British Imperi- alism such as vSir William Watson and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt voiced in verse. Hardy's interest is not in rival policies and conflicting claims. He expresses the pathos of parting; the irony of the arrival of III BRYN MAWR NOTES .POET AND NOVELIST 207 letters home after the news has been re- ceived of their writer's death; the loneli- ness of a northerner's grave under the southern stars; the joy of re-union. The foul anachronism of War "in this late age of thought and pact and code" is de- nounced, and he sees as a hopeful sign that the old view of War as a romantic adven- ture is dying out. ''The Sick Battle-God " is an impressive rendering of this theme. In the later series the very uncharacteristic confidence in the perfect justice of Eng- land's cause suggests that Hardy may have been pressed into the propaganda service; but there is still a prevailing sense of the pathos of the break-down of efforts towards international goodwill. In the sonnet called "The Pity of It" he tells how he walked through Wessex lanes and heard "man}'- an ancient word of local lineage" like "Thu bist," "Er war," "Ich woll"; and he curses those, whoever they be, who separated kin-folk, kin-tongued. Some of these poems of the war are obviously merely occasional; others are as charac- teristic of Hardy as any he has ever com- AND MONOGRAPHS III 208 THOMAS HARDY posed. "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations,'" for example, expresses the idea so frequently in his mind of the contrast between the apparently and the really great, between war's annals and falling dynasties, and the man at the plough, and the maiden and her lover who wander whispering by. The very powerful "Quid hie agis?" presents the poet's personal re- action to the conflict. His final judgement upon the world-upheaval is heard in "The Blow": That no man schemed it is my hope — • Yea,. that it fell by will and scope Of That Which some enthrone, And for whose meaning myriads grope. For I would not that of my kind There should, of his unbiassed mind, Have been one known Who such a stroke could have designed; Since it would augur works and ways Beneath the lowest that man assays To have hurled that stone Into the sunshine of our days ! III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 209 And if it prove that no man did, And that the Inscrutable, the Hid. Was cause alone Of this foul crash our lives amid, I'll go in due time, and forget In some deep graveyard's oubliette The thing whereof I groan, And cease from troubling; thankful yet Time's finger should have stretched to show No aimful author's was the blow That swept us prone. But the Immanent Doer's That does not know. Which in some age unguessed of us May lift Its blinding incubus, And see. and own: **It grieves me I did thus and thus!" With that practical meliorism which is the paradox of his philosophy Hardy looks for- ward to an era of international under- standing. The series of "Poems of Travel" and the scattered elegies and memorial poems on AND MONOGRAPHS III 210 THOMAS HARDY Poems of travel various poets are good examples of certain qualities of Hardy's verse. vSince Byron invented the form with Childe Harold there have been innumerable poems of places. Hardy has accomplished something in the same order of subject-matter yet quite unlike other poems of the sort. This group of poems well shows how fertile Hardy is in ideas, how he has never had to cast around for themes as Tennyson so obviously did. He does not ''sing but as the linnet sings" but because he has some- thing definite to say, a clear-cut thought to express in rhythmic form. In the old theatre at Fiesole a child brings him an ancient coin; straightway he recognizes that he has discovered others of like stamp in Dorsetshire; and the vast panorama of European history and "the power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome" flash upon his mind. "At the Pyramid of Cestius" contrasts the seeming importance with the real importance of the Roman whose deeds are all forgotten but whose monument now serves to beckon pilgrim feet to the tombs of Shelley and Keats. In III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 211 "Shelley's Skylark" one finds Hardy's favorite thought of the contrast between humble causes and often great effects, for somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leghorn where he writes there lies "a tiny pinch of priceless dust" which is all that remains of the lark that inspired Shelley to win "ec- static heights in thought and rhyme." Other poems on poets are nearer to the fonnal elegy. One is the exceptionally beautiful elegy on Swinburne called "A Singer Asleep," an example of that sort of laudatory criticism in verse with which Swinburne himself so often experimented and of which Sir William Watson is the acknowledged master. It is remarkable for its apt appreciation of the poet's tem- perament and particularly for its remin- iscences of the stoiiiiy reception of the Poems and Ballads: It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun. Elegies A,N D MONOGRAPHS III 212 THOMAS HARDY In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria's formal middle time His leaves of rhythm and rhyme. that far morning of a summer day When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, 1 walked and read with a quick, glad sur- prise New words in classic guise, — The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears; Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who Blew them not naively, but as one who knew Full well why thus he blew. The last three lines are a sharp and exact estimate of Swinburne's mood in 1866. The latest written of this group of elegiac poems is ''To Shakespeare After Three Hundred Years." A comparison of this poem with the other tributes gathered to- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 213 gether in the tercentenary volume of hom- age to Shakespeare brings out strikingly the originality of Hardy's genius. He ap- proaches even so well-worn a theme from an angle that demonstrates his idiosyn- crasy. The motive is once more the con- trast between the apparent and the real significance of human endeavour. What did Shakespeare's fellow-citizens know of his greatness? Hardy pictures two Strat- ford men chatting together on the day of his death: "Ffaith, few knew him much here, save by word, He having elsewhere led his busier hfe; Though to be sure he left with us his wife." —"Ah, one of the tradesmen's sons, I now recall . . . Witty, I've heard. . . . We did not know him. . . . Well, good- day. Death comes to all." Many of Hardy's poems are broodings upon the coming on of age, at times wist- AND MONOGRAPHS III 214 THOMAS HARDY Old age Death ful, at times cynical. The contrast between the passion of- youth and the faint relics of an old fire is what gives such extraordinary and pathetic quality to the amazing self- revelatory poems on his wife's death. Other such pieces are ''The Two Rosa- linds," "The Revisitation," "Middle-Age Enthusiasms," and "Autumn in King's Hintock Park." Many poems are medita- tions upon the various aspects of death. Some of these pieces, as would be expected, are among Hardy's most distinguished achievements in verse. The early poem "Heiress and Architect" puts, as we have seen, into allegorical form the universal ex- perience of disillusion and decline and death. But he muses not only upon the inevitability of death; he sees its dignity. In a Casterbridge church pew are carved the initials of three captains who went to the wars, only one of whom returned. For a moment the survivor felt triumphant in the thought that only he had lived: Yet saw he something in the lives Of those who'd ceased to live III BRYN MAWR NOTES i POET AND NOVELIST 215 That sphered them with a majesty Which living failed to give. Transcendent triumph in return No longer lit his brain: Transcendence rayed the distant urn Where slept the fallen twain. And with its dignity its repose: lieta no, ma sicura. "Jubilate" and "While Draw- ing in a Churchyard" both tell of the ex- periences of- living persons who become aware of the contentment of the dead. In the former weird poem it is told how the snow in a churchyard becomes transparent one night and a chance wanderer overhead sees the dead below, foreshortened as though he watched a stage from the gallery. They are stepping a stately dance, singing meanwhile: "We are out of it all! — yea, in Little-Ease cramped no more!" In the other piece the yew tree is heard com- menting upon the error of the living in misjudging the lot of those "whom kindly earth secludes from view": - AND MONOGRAPHS Ill 216 THOMAS HARDY "They ride their diurnal round Each day-span's sum of hours In peerless ease, without jolt or bound Or ache like ours. ... *' 'Now set among the wise,' They say: 'Enlarged in scope, That no god trumpet us to rise We truly hope.' " The same motive is employed very touch- ingly in "Friends Beyond," a poem in mem- ory of Wessex men of Hardy's youth-time. The only tragedy that can touch the dead, he says in another mood, is their defense- lessness under misrepresentation. He hears the "Spectres That Grieve": "We are among the few death sets not free, The hurt, misrepresented names, who come At each year's brink, and cry to His- tory To do them justice, or go past them dumb." "Go past them dumb" — that is the fate that awaits all but the greatest of men. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 217 It is "The Second Death." In the poem of that title, in "The To-Be-Forgotten," in "His Immortality," and in the beautiful verses "Her Immortality" Hardy applies to ordinary humanity the cold consolation offered by the Positivists, the promise of life "on lips of other men." The bereaved lover, wandering through the meads, comes to the place where he had seen his Beloved for the last time, and there comes to him there a vision of her, and in utter grief he cries that he will kill himself and join her ghost. But she dissuades him, saying: "A Shade but in its mindful ones Has immortality; By living, me you keep alive, By dying you slay me." The lover dismisses his distaste for life and promises to guard himself from harms in order that her immortality in his memory may endure. But his grief grows with the passage of years, for he knows that when he dies the second death will come to his Beloved. Other poems connected by definite lines AND MONOGRAPHS III 218 THOMAS HARDY other groups Summary of thought might be grouped together. There are those of nature-description; poems of despair; poems in which there are traces of a strange hopefulness ; many that present aspects of the Will that moves the universe; many that may be described as Cosmic Questionings. To leave them aside here is to risk giving a false impression of the range of Hardy's genius and poetic thought; but they may all be best con- sidered in our final chapter as illustrations of Hardy's tentative metaphysic. * * * What then, in sum, weighing the qual- ities of these miscellaneous short poems, may one say in support of the contention that Hardy must be reckoned among the great English poets? In the first place, though in his earlier poems there are some pieces (notably those in the sonnet form) that are obviously felicitous echoes of Shakespearean ideas and phraseology, his work is from first to last bound fiiiiily to- gether as the product of one strong mind, independent in style and thought. In the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 219 earliest poems there are anticipations of the latest. This is not to say that Hardy has stood still. The development has been from the particular to the universal. His poetry shows abundantly the ability to sense "the abiding in the transient," the universal import of matters that on the face of them are of mere individual significance, the applicability to all men of personal experiences. Just as in many passages in the novels a curtain seems to rise for an instant and we see the vastness of things encompassing the human actors, so in the poems one finds very often a suggestion of larger issues than those that appear on the surface. The saddening thought that it was only by hap that the lover took the path that led him to meet his love, and that he might just as well have gone an- other way, suggests humanity enslaved to chance whether for happiness or for dis- tress. The meeting with the "girl of my dreams" (in the poem quoted above) sug- gests the general "symphony of human tenderness " to which that meeting supplies one note. This poetry is impersonal in the AND MONOGRAPHS III 220 THOMAS HARDY ^ sense that the issues involved are larger than personality; it is immensely personal in the impression it makes of profound emo- tion behind it. The sorrow, the anger, the cynicism, the despair, the faint flickering hope are Hardy's own; but they are more. Humanity itself is heard piping in fields and groves its solitary anguish. When we read these voicings of the pathos of unbelief, or of the lost enthusiasms of youth, or of the fading memories of the dead, or of the irony of the conflict between purposes and re- sults, we mourn, not for the poet only who has experienced them, but for ourselves. What he offers is something besides tech- nical mastery of verse or profundity of thought. The something further is in our- selves. Now from one facet and now from another he reflects the sorrow a^d hope of the ages. In quintessential form he voices human experience. Whether we accept the implications which he himself draws there- from is not his concern; unlike nearly all his contemporaries he is not didactic. The '' broken arc" may present to some minds the promise of the "perfect round" in an- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 221 other sphere of existence. Other minds may see with Hardy the quandary in which humanity labors. It is not the anger or the despair or the consolation of one Self that matters. Let each individual acqui- esce or rebel according to his reaction to Circumstance. The Fact remains. It is this sense of the Fact that dominates Hardy's thought. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith — each presses upon us his solu- tion of life; and each solution is satisfac- tory to some minds, rejected by others. Hardy does nothing of the kind. What he gives is a clear-sighted, determined fac- ing and examination of the worst con- tingencies as well as of the best in the human condition. As in the novels, he poses questions, he confronts problems, he opens up new avenues of thought. He faces Fact; and not the separate isolated fact alone. Each experience is part of a larger one, in broadening circles till it em- braces the Infinite. Thus are the Past and Present linked together, the meanest in- sect with the farthest star. Thus is a AND MONOGRAPHS III 222 THOMAS HARDY The Dynasts stellar gauge given wherewith to measure the place and pretensions of humanity. The Self — and this is the more remarkable because of the passionate practical indi- viduaUsm of the novels — is made subor- dinate to the Whole; the particular parcels of the Will are seen as portions of Its Im- manence. * * * Turning now to The Dynasts, one must premise that the epic-drama is so charged with the full weight of Hardy's metaphysic that consideration of its philosophy must be postponed to the next and final chapter and that here we are concerned with it as a dramatic poem, a chronicle play on an enonnous scale. Some years before he began the drama Hardy explained to the pubUc why he did not attempt to write plays. But there is nothing surprising in the fact that at length he turned to that medium. Every considerable poet of the nineteenth century yielded at one time or another and to a greater or less extent to the lure of the drama. Moreover there III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST was always a kind of dramatic quality in Hardy's genius, as may be seen in the way in which his stories can be resolved into a succession of firmly articulated scenes. It was said earlier in this study that the period of the Napoleonic Wars stamped a deep impression upon the memories of the people of Southern England and that Hardy grew up among relics and stories of that time. A group of short poems purposely left unconsidered in the previous section of this chapter deals with Napoleonic themes. Of these pieces perhaps the most striking is "The Peasant's Confession." It is in the form of a dramatic monologue, a form which may be regarded as the most typical genre contributed by the Victorian period to poetry. A dying peasant is imagined as telling the real circumstances of Grouchy's failure to keep Bliicher away from Wellington according to the orders sent him by Napoleon before Waterloo. The tale is of course purely fanciful but it illustrates again Hardy's idea of the great consequences that often flow from insig- nificant motives, for the peasant who 223 The attrac- tion of the Napoleonic theme for Hardy AND MONOGRAPHS III 224 THOMAS HARDY guided the officer carrying Napoleon's dis- patch learned from him that if Grouchy- met Bliicher the resultant battle would be fought over his own f aim and to prevent its ruin he purposely misdirected the officer. Another poem, "Leipzig," is a narrative of the Battle of the Nations by a veteran of Geiman descent living in Wessex. Several stanzas of this piece were afterwards in- troduced into corresponding scenes of The Dynasts. "The Alaim" is a tale founded on the rumor of Napoleon's successful land- ing on the Wessex coast, a report that is also introduced into The Trumpet-Major and into a very vivid scene in The Dynasts. The short story of "A Tradition of 1804" tells of a shepherd who saw Napoleon and some of his staff land one night on the English coast to choose a fit landing place for the army that was in preparation across the Channel. The novel just named was Hardy's first considerable imaginative treatment of the period. He has himself stated that on completing it he felt that he had touched only the fringes of the great subject. A foot-note in The Dynasts on the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 225 location in Brussels of the hall where the ball before Waterloo was held reveals the fact that as long ago as the seventies Hardy was an "enthusiast" on the subject of the Wars'; and it has been stated by Mr. Gosse that ''an old Note-book," dating also from the seventies, exists which con- tains a rough sketch of the plan of the epic- drama. In the preface to The Dynasts Hardy says that one motive for writing it was his conviction that England's share in the struggle had not been sufficiently em- phasized in previous imaginative render- ings of the theme. But back of any such patriotic motive and back of his life-long interest in the period was undoubtedly his chief purpose: the choice of the largest possible theatre of action whereon to ex- hibit all men in the grip of Circumstance, those on the topmost heights of human glory along with the peasants of the ob- scurest Wessex hamlet. The Dynasts thus illustrates explicitly and on the largest pos- sible scale the deterministic philosophy in- herent in the later novels. While entirely independent of them and to be judged for AND MONOGRAPHS III 226 THOMAS HARDY Sources of The Dynasts itself alone, it elaborates many hints and suggestions in the novels and shorter poems. Certain admirable scenes connect it with Wessex. It owes a good deal to the chron- icle play of Elizabethan England; a good deal to Meredith's interpretation of Na- poleon's character in the *'Odes in Con- tribution to the Song of French History"; something to Stendhal; something to Hugo; something to Tolstoy's War and Peace; much to Faust; and a vast amount to patient study of contemporary source- material and of the researches of special- ists. In the scene of the burial of Sir John Moore, Hardy successfully challenges com- parison with one of the most popular of all English poems; in the scene of the Duchess of Richmond's ball, with Byron and Thackeray, to say nothing of Charles O^Mally. This book, however, is not a suitable place for quellenstudien. But though its antecedents can be traced out with some distinctness, The Dynasts re- mains a thing apart from other works of literature, a new and successful experi- ment and departure. The first instalment III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST was greeted with mingled praise and doubt ; but from the time of the appearance of Part Three it has grown in reputation and is now held by all good judges to be the greatest work of literature produced dur- ing this generation, grand in scope, pro- found in thought, sure and subtle in grasp. The historic period covered by The Dy- nasts is ten years: from Napoleon's corona- tion at Milan and the renewal of the war in 1805 to his final defeat at Waterloo. The first part is concerned mainly with England's checking of Napoleon at Trafal- gar and the Emperor's triumphant course upon the Continent to the climax of Auster- litz. The second presents the overthrow and humiliation of Prussia, the develop- ment of the Peninsular Campaign, and the efforts of Napoleon to establish his dynasty firmly upon the throne of France through the divorce of Josephine and the marriage to Maria Louisa of Austria. The third part exhibits the Russian campaign and disaster, the battle of Leipzig, Napoleon's first abdication, the Congress of Vienna, the escape from Elba, and the final campaign 227 The general plan of the epic-drama AND MONOGRAPHS III 228 THOMAS HARDY of Waterloo. The scenes of each part are thus grouped around a few outstanding events: Trafalgar and AusterUtz; Jena. Wagram, the Peninsular Campaign, and the divorce of Josephine; Moscow, Leipzig, Elba, and Waterloo. The reaction of ordi- nary life, in high and low degree, to these stupendous activities is shown in a great variety of scenes in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Moscow — and Wessex. The do- mestic troubles and intrigues of Napoleon, of the Queen of Spain, and of the Prince Regent; the private conferences and bur- dens of ministers of state; the *'grim romance of war" as experienced by the private soldier and by the stragglers be- hind the armies; and the faint, confused reflex of far-off events that comes to the Wessex peasantry are all portrayed. The action at times descends to the point of view of some Parisian salon or London ball-room or theatre, or Parliamentary de- bate, or wretched hut in which straggling soldiers find shelter, or metropolitan street in which stodgy citizens congregate, or re- mote Wessex heath where beacon-keepers III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 229 hold their watch. And again the action soars aloft to the *' Over-World" whence all Europe can be surveyed, stretched out in an insignificance whereon whole armies move like crawling worms and individuals of greatest moment, humanly speaking, are reduced to meanest humility. The various scenes differ as markedly in their interest as in their method of pre- sentation. It has been said by some critics that the parliamentary debates and dip- lomatic discussions are dull — but is not that true of such debates and discussions in actuality? Again it has been said that the battle-scenes are over-numerous, one crowding upon the other, too unrelieved in horror — who living between 1805 and 1815 would have denied that such was the reality of war? As in the novels, so in The Dynasts it is easy to perceive where Hardy is not fired by his subject and is the con- scientious workman rather than the in- spired poet. But without exception he rises magnificently to the great occasions that his theme so frequently presents. The death of Nelson and the battle of AND MONOGRAPHS III 230 THOMAS HARDY ' Austerlitz; the interview between Napo- leon and the Queen of Prussia when he gives her the rose in Heu of Magdeburg; the retreat to Coruna and the burial of Sir John Moore; the announcement to Jo- sephine of the planned divorce; the burn- ing of Moscow; Leipzig; and the entire group of scenes that depict the battle of Waterloo — all are incomparably vivid, grasping alike the largest implications and the most minute details of the events. Yet quite as memorable are many of the scenes that present side-issues of the Clash -of Peoples. One may call to mind the alarm in Wessex over the rumoured landing of the French and that other Wessex scene of the burning of Napoleon's effigy; the com- ments of the. London citizens with which the Trafalgar act closes (here Hardy intro- duces the grim tradition of the "broach- ing" of the cask in which Nelson's body was brought home); the squalid huts wherein lie deserters from Wellington's army in Spain; the scene depicting the in- sane George the Third in the care of his physicians; the gala performance at the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 231 opera in honor of the Czar's visit to London . when the mob hoots at the Regent and cheers the wronged Queen; the death of the frozen soldiers on the Russian plains; the ball before Waterloo; the scene in the woman's camp behind the English army during the progress of the last great battle. There is but one strange omission from this great panorama of life, and that omission the student of literature must always re- gret. Statesmen, soldiers, lawyers, phy- sicians, men and women of all classes of society find their place here, except the world of letters; and one cannot but re- member that in the years between 1812 and 1815 there was one Englishman who held the attention of Europe to a degree that rivalled that bestowed on Napoleon. That man was of course Byron — and he is never mentioned. Except for this all life sweeps by us. We have used the word "pano- rama" — it is Hardy's own modest term — - but there is detail and order and grasp and unity such as no panorama could give. The Dynasts is an epic-drama of humanity — of humanity in its grandeur and its hu- AND MONOGRAPHS III 232 THOMAS HARDY The inter- pretation of Napoleon's character mility. In reading it one is constantly re- minded of the great sentence in Sartor Resartus: "Thus, Hke some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artil- lery, does this mysterious Mankind thun- der and flame, in long-drawn, quick-suc- ceeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep." And of that other sentence: "Napoleon, too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made night hideous, flitted away?" It would be interesting, were there room in this brief study, to consider in some detail Hardy's interpretation of Napoleon, and to compare his portrayal of the Em- peror with that of other poet§^ One can but offer a few suggestions. The closest analogy to Hardy's portrait is that in Meredith's Ode "Napoleon." It seems likely that Hardy had studied it with care. Meredith's analysis is not more subtle though it is decidedly less lucid. Sec- tions nine and ten of the Ode deal with the relations of Napoleon and France: his love III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 233 for her, ''more than Httle, less than much," as the tempered weapon with which he hewed through all impediments; the lim- itations of his ambitions; the pettiness and selfishness behind the grandeur and un- scrupulousness. Hardy's own view of him is summed up in the magnificent last soliloquy of the Emperor after Waterloo, which is too long to quote entire and from which excerpts could not be made without doing injury to the impression made by the entire speech. A comparison might also be made with Lord De Tabley's fine and too-little-known Ode "Napoleon the Great" which presents a similar analysis and which in like fashion contrasts the deeds of the Emperor, world-shaking yet transient, with the quiet and enduring English country-side. It may not be amiss to say that the present writer has received statements from more than one specialist in the field of Napoleonic research en- dorsing completely the historical accuracy and psychological insight of Hardy's pic- ture of the Emperor. AND MONOGRAPHS III 234 The Spirit- Intelli- gences THOMAS HARDY in The historical or chronicle play is, as it were, a play-within-the-play, for the hu- man action is watched over by a crowd of great Intelligences that range above this mortal state and that embody the various possible attitudes of the mind towards life — ^the passionless wisdom of the ages, the cynicism of despair, the fluctuating ner- vous pity of the human heart. To these spirits is given the function of providing the essential comment upon life, upon man, and upon the Power that moves mankind and the natural world alike; and in their elaborate massive debates Hardy has set forth his ripest views of the world and has accomplished his grandest poetry. They are spectators above the smoke and stir of this dim spot called earth and from their place of vantage are able to magnify seem- ingly small matters to the size warranted by their significance to mankind, and to minimize great events to the pettiness they assume when measured by infinity. They move with the swiftness of thought from place to place; mists, cloud-curtains, rain, BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST and darkness shut off the human tragedy as the scenes close. The language of The Dynasts has not re- ceived the general praise accorded to the strength and vividness of its imaginative presentation of the action. It varies from scene to scene, becoming conscientious and plodding when the action drags, rising to majestic heights when the subject inspires it. Of what great poem may not this be said? As one would expect from a perusal of the novels, the dialogue in the soldier and peasant scenes is uniformly racy and realistic. There is a swift and confident control of the vernacular in all the scenes of low life; there is a less certain mastery of society-talk. The parliamentary de- bates, military orders and proclamations, and diplomatic documents are tedious only because the original archives from which they are transcribed with just so much change as was necessary to put them into verse-form are tedious also. But over and over again the language is not only ade- quate (an adjective that damns with faint praise) but transcendently fine, the utter- 235 AND MONOGRAPHS Language III 236 THOMAS HARDY ance exhibiting that perfect sensing of a situation which Watts-Dunton called "ab- solute vision." One of the many excellent instances of this is a passage drawn from the scene on the Victory where Nelson lies dying: Nelson {suddenly): What are you think- ing that you speak no word? Hardy {waking from a short reverie): Thoughts all confused, my lord:— their needs on deck, Your own sad state, and your un- rivalled past; Mixed up with flashes of old things afar — Old childish things at home, down Wessex way, In the snug village under Blackdon Hill Where I was bom. The tumbling stream, the garden, The placid look of the grey dial there, Marking unconsciously this bloody hour, And the red apples on my father's trees, Just now full ripe. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 237 Here there is the same feeling that we have already noted so often, of the close inter- connection of all human things, the hum- blest with the greatest, Trafalgar with Blackdon Hill. Or note the Dantesque directness, mingled with simplicity and power, of the report of a Russian soldier to his general concerning the French soldiers found dead around an extinguished camp-fire: They all sit As they were living still, but stiff as horns; And even the colour has not left their cheeks, Whereon the tears remain in strings of ice. — It was a marvel they were not consumed : Their clothes are cindered by the fire in front, While at their backs the frost has caked them hard. Or consider, finally, these indescribably solemn words of the Spirit of the Years to Napoleon after Waterloo : AND MONOGRAPHS III 238 Lyrics and choruses III THOMAS HARDY Worthless these kneadings of thy narrow thought, Napoleon; gone thy opportunity! Such men as thou, who wade across the world To make an epoch, bless, confuse, appal, Are in the elemental ages' chart Like meanest insects on obscurest leaves But incidents and grooves of Earth's unfolding; Or as the brazen rod that stirs the fire Because it must. There are charming lyrics in The Dy- nasts: ''Budmouth Dears" and *'My Love's Gone A-fighting," for example, or the song that closes the Trafalgar act. They are redolent of the war-spirit of a people, stressing emotion rather th^p. thought. Some of them have been set to music. And many of the spirit-choruses are Hardy's highest performances in verse. It is impossible to name them all here, but one may recall the Albuera chorus in which the terror and pity and splendour of fiery gallantry are chanted; and the chorus (a rondeau — a new use for this old and in BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 239 other poets' hands trivial form of verse) beginning ''The skies fling flame on this ancient land"; and the Hymn of the Pities in the After-Scene; and the chorus before Waterloo — perhaps the most won- derful thing in the whole drama — begin- ning "The eyelids of eve fall together at last" — in which is voiced once more the close relationship of all things, the coneys and moles and wonns and snails having their share in the sufferings that are about to fall upon the armies of France and of the allies. AND MONOGRAPHS III 240 THOMAS HARDY Man's place in the universe VII "A TENTATIVE METAPHYSIC" Man, in Hardy's novels and poems, be- comes only one of the many phenomena of interest to the imaginative interpreter of life. The old anthropocentricity is gone. In a sonnet on the Matterhom he muses upon the defiance with which the granite block has withstood the onset of centuries while events of tremendous import for poor humanity have had their day and ceased to be. Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon Thou didst behold the planets lift and lower; Saw'st, maybe, Joshua's pausing sun and moon, And the betokening sky when Caesar's power III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST Approached its bloody end; yea, even that Noon When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour. By implication this contrast is impressively set forth at the close of A Group of Noble Dames when, the stories all told and the club members departed to their homes, darkness reigns over the room in the mu- seum where they had met: The curator locked up the rooms, and soon there was only a single pirouetting flame on the top of a single coal to make the bones of the ichthyosaurus seem to leap, the stuffed birds to wink, and to draw a smile from the varnished skulls of Vespasian's soldiery. So also in the otherwise nearly negligible novel Two on a Tower the feverishness of human passion is set impressively against a background of starry distances. Says the young astronomer to his mistress: "The actual sky is a horror. . . . You would hardly think, at first, that 241 AND MONOGRAPHS III 242 III THOMAS HARDY jjOrrid monsters lie up there waiting to e discovered. . . . Monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of com- parison. . . . Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their in- terspaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than mon- sters of shape, namely, monsters of mag nitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky." Swithin's very words find echoes in one of the great discourses of the Spirit of the Years in The Dynasts. A meditation upon a lunar eclipse takes the form of contrasting the petty preten- tiousness of our concerns — Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, Heroes, and women fairer than the skies — with the imperturbable serenity of the seg- ment of shadow cast upon the moon, that sole stellar gauge of the real worth of BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 243 ''Heaven's high human scheme." "A thousand years in Thy sight" — so Hardy seems to address the Will — "are but as yesterday." The monsters of the eocene become companions of man. The Napo- leonic Wars dwindle in that scale to micro- scopic insignificance. In the After-Scene of The Dynasts the Spirit of the Years ut- ters the necessary comment : Yet but one flimsy riband of Its web Have we here watched in weaving — web Enorme, Whose furthest hem and selvage may ex- tend To where the roars and plashings of the flames Of earth-invisible suns swell noisil}^, And onwards into ghastly gulfs of sky, Where hideous presences churn through the dark — Monsters of magnitude without a shape, Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness. Thus viewed, Christianity becomes "a local thing" AND MONOGRAPHS III 244 THOMAS HARDY Beyond whose span, uninfluenced, un- concerned, The systems of the suns go sweeping on With all their many-mortaled planet train In mathematic roll unceasingly. Men — ^whole nations — are moved like fig- ures on a lantern-slide, drawn to and fro by the halyards of the all-pervading Will, the intertwisted strands of which are re- vealed in certain scenes of The Dynasts to the on-looking Intelligences. And the grandest phenomena of Nature, though they reduce to insignificance the wildest turmoil of humanity, are no more free. In the poem called ''The Subalterns" the leaden sky, the North wind, disease and death, disclaim responsibility for the func- tions which they are compelled to perforin. Some few men, Napoleon among them, discern the workings of the Will that har- ries them on, fulfilling or baffling that which they imagine to be their own pur- poses. Yet in the act of planning they are as much under compulsion as in outward action. The Power that moves the uni- III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST verse is shadowed forth under a variety of august names: The High Influence, the Eternal Urger, the Rapt Determinator, the Immanent Unreckoning, the Great Fore- sightless, the Unconscious. As in the scheme of things adumbrated by Schopen- hauer, phenomena, in all their multiplicity, are but the appearances which hide the one reality, the Will. It is to this Primal Force that in the final analysis all the shows of the world reduce themselves; Man is but the highest expression of It. In lines that have already become famous Hardy describes the way in which It works : Nay. In the Foretime, even to the germ of Being, Nothing appears of shape to indicate That cognizance has marshalled things terrene, Or will (such is my thinking) in my .span. Rather they show that, like a knitter drowsed, Whose fingers play in skilled unmindful- ness, 245 The Primal Force AND MONOGRAPHS III 246 Colloquies with God III THOMAS HARDY The Will has woven with an absent heed Since life first was; and ever will so weave. So speaks the Spirit of the Years, repre- sentative of the insight and experience of the ages. A number of the shorter poems are concerned with cosmic questionings, some of them in the form of colloquies with God in which, with a boldness that sug- gests the work of Mr. James Stephens and other younger poets, Hardy presents an indictment of the faith in an anthropo- morphic deity. Perhaps some primeval disaster cleft the original scheme of things apart. Perhaps the Will's "mindlessness of earthly woes " may be due to. Its interest in other worlds, being wearied out with the ceaseless turmoil of earth. Perhaps the Godhead is dying downward, heart and brain all gone save for the last flicker of consciousness that abides in man. Or maybe man's consciousness is a foretoken of coming consciousness directing all things everywhere. BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST Men gained cognition with the flux of time. And wherefore not the Force informing them? Through some accident that rests unex- plained mankind, ''emerging with blind gropes from impercepience by listless se- quence," has achieved consciousness and a moral sense. Our incorporeal sense, Our overseeings, our supernal state, Our readings Why and Whence, Are but the flower of Man's intelligence; And that but an unreckoned incident Of the all-urging Will, raptly magni- potent. A sentence towards the end of Jiide the Obscure anticipates precisely and suc- cinctly the philosophy of The Dynasts: Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue . . . that the world re- sembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence, but hope- 247 AND MONOGRAPHS III 248 THOMAS HARDY lessly absurd at the full waking; that the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terres- trial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a devel- opment of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity. The little poem called ''In a Wood" con- tains the very crux of Hardy's tentative metaphysic. It recites such evidences of strangled aspiration, thwarted desire and blind conflict as those noted also in The Woodlanders: gnarled trunks, twisted branches, stunted growths, and bare and blighted ground (for Hardy n6yer errs, as does Dickens, by imputing his own kindli- ness to the scheme of things). These evi- dences lead the poet to this c9nclusion: Since, then, no grace I find Taught me of trees. Turn I back to my kind, Worthy as these. III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 249 There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found Life-loyalties. Captious critics always note Hardy's in- consistency in ascribing to a purposeless and conscienceless Will the creation of beings in whom purpose and conscience have been evolved. But those critics are in error who accuse him of unawareness of this inconsistency. On the contrary he returns again and again to meditations upon "the intolerable antilogy of making figments feel." How the faculty of reason came about is inexplicable; b;it it exists. Henceforth, for good or ill, two natures contend within man's bosom. For Hardy falls short of complete acceptance of the materialistic monism which he so often aflfinns. In humankind there is a struggle between in- tuition, the Will-to-Live, which is in ac- cord with the blind Immanence that exists only for the sake of existing, and intellect, the Will-Not-to-Live, which knows that Dualism AND MONOGRAPHS III 250 THOMAS HARDY The uncon- querable hope existence is not worth prolonging. We have found this doctrine expressed in al- most allegorical form in Jude the Obscure. The connection with von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious is obvious. In the rivalry between Being and Not- Being the Will is still in control, but the power of Reason is growing and will one day prevail. Then the problem will be solved by a voluntary lapse into uncon- sciousness. Man will be healed of the wound of living. Were this Hardy's final word his would indeed be ''a twilight view of life." What more may be said? Can any contradiction to this view be found in his writings? Little at best, and that, little must be weighed against the many evidences of re- volt and despair. But at least he seems to hesitate upon the brink, and with a sacrifice of logic introduces among the crashing chords of his pessimism a note of hope. What if his view of life be the re- sult of limited vision? ''The Darkling Thrush," that beautiful poem, describes a gaunt, wintry country-side from amidst III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIvST 251 which in the gathering gloom there bursts forth the full-hearted even-song of a bird : So little cause for carollings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. And even if his interpretation of life is sound? Hope still resides in the possibil- ity that the process that has led life up from the primal ooze to man may be yet func- tioning so that in the far future a conscious sympathy may form a link between the Will and Its creatures. The awakening of consciousness, w^hich seems the bitterest whim of the Will — may that not be the first stirrings in man of a power for good that will one day permeate the vast framework of things? By some still close-cowled mystery We have reached feeling faster than he, AND MONOGRAPHS III 252 THOMAS HARDY V But he will overtake us anon, If the world goes on. So Hardy writes in a recently published "Fragment"; and it is noteworthy that the masculine pronoun is restored in this allusion to the Fundamental Energy. Else- where he expresses his awareness of That enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows The world's amendment flows. And elsewhere still, in one of his grandest poems, the poet who has so often shaped weak phantasies of the blind and dumb Wilier raises his voice in praise because here and there old wrongs are dying out. Is there no hopefulness in this? Can it be that a "ripening rule" will transcend the "ancient rote-restricted ways," That listless effort tends To grow percipient with advance of days. And with percipience mends? No concession to the wishes of the novel- reading public, such as suggested the "happy ending" of The Return of the III BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 253 Native, compelled Hardy to close The Dy- nasts as he did. It is of the utmost sig- nificance that the last word is given, not to the Spirit Sinister (the exponent of a cy- nical pessimism) nor to the Spirit of the Years (who interprets the events of the human tragedy in accordance with a strict determinism), but to the Spirit of the Pities, the symbol of human sympathy and of the undying fire, the unconquerable hope of humanity. If the evils suffered by those whom the Will quickens can be neither curbed nor cured (so the final chorus sings), then let the Will darken swiftly to extinc- tion. But the chorus ends otherwise: But — a stirring thrills the air Like to sounds of joyance there That the rages Of the ages Shall be cancelled, and deliverance of- fered from the darts chat were. Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair. The events of the Great War might have been employed by this sombre thinker as AND MONOGRAPHS III 254 THOA/[AS HARDY III unqualified illustrations of the truth of a deterministic philosophy; and indeed, as we have seen, he attaches the blame to no man but rather to ''the Immanent Doer That does not know." But again the final word has hope in it, for the Thing respon- sible for the dire crash . . . in some age unguessed of us May lift Its blinding incubus, And see, and own: "It grieves me I did thus and thus." And the "Men who march away" are up- held by the faith within them that "Vic- tory crowns the just." Hardy's grandest gift is that "double vision" of which one of his best critics has spoken, whereby, while seeing life as trivial and futile, he can see it also as heroically sublime. The universe is not hopeless of betterment that has produced the sort of men to whom Hardy gives his meed of praise — and that has produced the sympathy and tenderness with which he cries, not to Tess only but to all humanity, "Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed shall lodge thee!" BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 255 NOTES 1 At a meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club in July, 1895, Meredith and Hardy were both present and each made interesting reference to this early association. Hardy described his rejected first story as "very wild," where- upon Meredith called out: "Promising!" See S. M. Ellis: George Meredith (1920), p. 209. 2 See J. W. Cunliffe: English Literature Dur- ing the Last Half Century (1919), p. 40. In- formation kindly supplied me by Mrs. Thomas Hardy enables me to contradict this, as also to state that the manuscript of this first novel is still in existence. 3 See the letter from Hardy to Tinsley, dated from Bockhampton, December 20, 1870, which is reproduced in facsimile in A. Edward Newton's Amenities of Book-Collect- ing (1918), p. 12. * See H. C. Duffin: Thomas Hardy (1916), p. 3. ^ Note especially the morbid episode of Miss Aldclyffe's visit to Cytherea's room at night (pp. 88-97 of the Wessex edition). « For a well-reasoned contrast between Hardy and George Eliot see F. A. Hedgcock: Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste (1910), pp. 338 f. AND MONOGRAPHS III 256 III THOMAS HARDY 7 See Harold Child: Thomas Hardy (1916), pp. 53 f. 8 See Hermann Lea: Thomas Hardy's Wes- sex (1913), p. 171. 9 See especially The Spectator, No. 55, 1882. 10 Will it be believed that Mr. Duffin (op. cit., p. 130) interprets this as meaning "the desire for knowledge, or (specially) for aca- demic distinction"? In reviewing Mr. Duf- fin's book {Modern Language Notes, Decem- ber, 1 9 1 6, p. 5 1 2) the present writer remarked : "At least one aspirant towards knowledge — and one not altogether unconscious of the last infirmity of professorial minds — envies the academic repose, 'calm, sad, secure, be- hind high convent walls,' evinced by this gloss upon Mr. Hardy's text." 11 In a letter on "Dialect in Novels" (The Athenaeum, November 30, 1878, p. 688). 12 In the autumn of 1 920 the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society produced a dramatic version of The Return of the Native, adapted by Mr. T. H. Tilley from the novel. According to the newspaper account of this production the most interesting thing in the play proved to be the "Masque of St. George." "As regards words and costumes it is a perfect cameo of the rustic folk-play as performed in most English villages at Christ- mastide a hundred years ago." 13 See The Athenaeum, December 3, 1920, p. 771. 1* See Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vi, 403. BRYN MAWR NOTES POET AND NOVELIST 257 ^5 See Church Folk-Lore, second edition, p. 146. ^® For example, in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; Middleton's The Witch; Fletcher's The Custom of the Country; Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (here the image is buried that it may rot in the ground) ; and Shirley's The Traitor. 1^ The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Section 2, Mem. iii. Sub-section 5. AND MONOGRAPHS III Printed for BRYN MAWR COLLEGE BY THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO. Philadelphia, Pa. y A O' V) V * ^ 'o- V' '^ .r^ '^ - O^ V °'^\.xr^ " '^' ^ rx'v^ ^ V ' « /, "<<, Cranberry Township, PA 16066 ^ CP \^ .v?^ -? 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