With a name suggestive of the purest English origin, Mr. Hardy has
become identified with that portion of England where the various
race-deposits in our national "strata" are most dear and defined. In
Wessex, the traditions of Saxon and Celt, Norman and Dane, Roman
and Iberian, have grown side by side into the soil, and all the
villages and towns, all the hills and streams, of this country have
preserved the rumour of what they have seen.
In Celtic legend the country of the West Saxons is marvellously rich.
Camelot and the Island of Avalon greet one another across the
Somersetshire vale. And Dorsetshire, Hardy's immediate home, adds
the Roman traditions of Casterbridge to tragic memories of King
Lear. Tribe by tribe, race by race, as they come and go, leaving their
monuments and their names behind, Mr. Hardy broods over them,
noting their survivals, their lingering footprints, their long decline.
In his well-loved Dorchester we find him pondering, like one of his
own spirits of Pity and Irony, while the moonlight shines on the
haunted amphitheatre where the Romans held their games. He
devotes much care to noting all those little "omens by the way" that
make a journey along the great highways of Wessex so full of
imaginative suggestion.
It is the history of the human race itself that holds him with a
mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes,
under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous
"ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries--to
what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic
pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow
one point of the little jest the gods play on us--the little long-drawn-out
jest--to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertness
he skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at their
work. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from the
same reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf of
humanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune that
all the Satyrs dance.
I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can
do justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering to
city people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, or
they over emphasize its "miching-mallecho." They do not catch the
secret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner"
is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commit
himself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himself
at all! There is something that looks to them--so they are tempted to
express it--like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about his
attitude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance,
with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing it
wholesale like Shelley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth--and
always with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice.
The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitely
sorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign.
The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against the
decrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton,
bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruel
Powers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel.
The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of
destiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to the
palate of the gods in such "merry jests." These two tendencies seem
to have grown upon him as years went on and to have become more
and more pronounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens.
Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtive
recoil, from the queer trap we are all in,--his little private method of
retaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselves
when they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal life
mellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life grows
less personal and more objective as they get older. They become
balanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles."
The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression.
He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint.
Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of a
great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last,
in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is most
personal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit.
It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the
Obscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had such
sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless
wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would
never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of God to
this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more
than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.
But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative
grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare"
and we forget both Titan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to put
into words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at any
rate, an intensification of our general consciousness of the
Life-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific,
light, and yet with the scientific facts,--they also not without their
dramatic significance--indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying of
our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. It
is a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fate
into a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls into
perspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escape
for a moment from "the will to live."
At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, we
see, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the world
and the glories of them." Then it is that we feel the very wind of the
earth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpable
hand.
And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feel
at once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strives
for. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for Man. This
bewildered animal--wrestling in darkness with he knows not what.
And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what we
behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever
becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to
have outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the
Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which,
while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it.
He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which
weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him.
And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at
"God," but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. How
should it not be so? "All may be permitted," but one must not add a
feather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones."
It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modern
fiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one's
imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy--even the facts of geology
and chemistry--are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that
gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity
itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have
appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his
brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken for
granted," and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.
But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the
poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great
religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic
Tower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He
may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those
queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never
leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same
reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical
processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is
always being driven to _personify_ these ultimate powers; to
personify them, or _it,_ as something that takes infernal satisfaction
in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging
them to madness.
Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and
unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the
graves of those Wessex churchyards, or watching the twisted threads
of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand
village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" at
this damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how
can one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machinery
into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably
greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these
Wessex novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion"
which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation.
The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence
of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social
readjustments and all ethical reforms.
While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women
will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long
after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the
present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents
will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant
enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows
that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we
are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us
on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour.
Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness
which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable
touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it
peculiar to himself--threatening and silencing; a thunderous
suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes,
again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not
unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas
Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.
The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of
the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is
like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be
noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel
stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.
One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not love
Form more than Colour is a coward." For it is, above all, Form that
appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives
pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the
architectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualize any scene out
of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons
concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them,
these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the
edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness
re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a
refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a
quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion"
like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath,
and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes
of men have felt it since the beginning.
The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave
over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and
artistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"--not even
"God"--except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural
elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this
uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard
to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in
railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess
the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not
understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than
be deprived of his _right_ to suffer the bitterness of love.
It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic
about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects
that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks
over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked,
"talking to herself," across the blasted heath; such things as the
mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere
accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.
Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us,
for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it is
an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left
interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare,
and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of
such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.