[In the following essay, Muller argues that, despite their faults, Hardy's novels survive because of the dignity of their characters and the universality of their appeal.]

In this knowing age, centennials are apt to be rather trying for the spirits of the departed. Critics come not to praise or to bury the artist but to “revalue” him; and in this performance they often treat his work primarily as a cultural symptom, a by-product of an age, an issue of deep unconscious forces—as an incidental illustration of something larger or more serious than the individualized imaginative creation that meant everything to him. The historical perspective is necessary, of course, for his sake as well as ours; it would be unfair even to Shakespeare to read his plays as if they were written by a timeless spirit, not by a popular playwright of Elizabethan England. But this approach may also be unfair to the artist. Critics are usually looking for particular historical tendencies, and their value judgments are loaded accordingly. “To see a ‘century’ in a cathedral or the revolt of the masses in a play,” remarks George Boas, “is believed to be a more valuable experience than to see something else in them.” Hence literary reputations rise and fall with social or political theory—as William Dean Howells has gone up since Granville Hicks discovered that he had some perception of the class struggle. In general, critics tend to abstract a few generic traits and ignore the unique quality of the work as a whole, just as physicists ignore the color, feel, and particularity of things in order to measure and weigh them.

Now, Thomas Hardy is not, it seems to me, in crying need of revaluation—at least as a novelist. Upon rereading his novels I can discover no unsuspected depths or complexities, no reason for considering him more or less significant or pertinent; I discover chiefly the problem of how to avoid merely quoting myself. His virtues and his faults are plain, and for some time have ceased to stir controversy. He has been seen clearly enough against the transition from the Victorian to the modern age, aligned with enough tendencies, adequately labeled, sufficiently “explained.” He is unusually poor material for Marxist or Freudian interpretation, or for subtle analysis in any mode. Although his pessimism might be regarded as a sign of the decay of capitalistic society, or a symptom of psychic maladjustment, such explanations would have to lean heavily on the unconscious in Hardy; at best they would be marginal notes, explaining little or nothing about his greatness as an artist. Yet they are pretty sure to be offered, and then to prejudice or confuse judgment of his art. Hardy is likely, indeed, to suffer considerably from prevailing critical attitudes. His greatness is of an elemental kind to which one cannot easily pay tribute in the precise language—or pseudo-precise jargon—now demanded of critics; his limitations appear more serious because of current preferences in beauty and truth; in general his interests and attitudes now seem so old-fashioned that contemporaries seldom give themselves up to him, seldom have had the sustained intimacy with his work that makes possible a justice beyond the letter of critical law. And so there is, after all, more reason for returning to Hardy than the sentiment of this occasion.

Even for pious purposes, however, it is well to have done at once with his serious faults. Most obvious is his mania for hounding his characters to the grave and for employing the most fantastic means to get them there. Only the disenchanted sophomore can be deeply impressed by Hardy's view of life. Although it was an outcome of the new scientific views, it now seems like a simple variant of supernaturalism. The President of the Immortals, the First Cause, the Great Foresightless, even the It he so proudly invented for The Dynasts—these are but different names for God, arbitrary inventions that find no place in any scientific scheme; his conception of evil as an absolute and ultimate reality, not merely a human judgment with reference to human purposes, is as naïvely anthropomorphic as any religious dogma. And although Hardy properly objected to treating his fiction as a “scientific system of philosophy,” the trouble is that he often wrote as if it were. The scheme of his novels is typically all too rigid and diagrammatic, their argument all too formal and explicit. Hence one protests as much against his last novels, in which the governing ideas are more valid by contemporary standards. By now Hardy perceived that Society as well as It was responsible for human misery and that an inexorable determinism lay behind blind chance; but the discovery of another villain and a more relentless machinery so exasperated his resentment at the conditions of life that his own machinery became more relentless. Jude the Obscure is at once the most and the least convincing of his novels. The serious objection, at any rate, is not to his philosophy per se, the dismal generalizations he illogically induces from the extraordinary actions he invents. It is to his artistry, the inventions themselves.

This objection is deepened, moreover, because of Hardy's simple conception of the duties of a story-teller, which was further simplified by the custom of serial publication that demanded a wallop in every instalment. The “real” purpose of fiction, he once said, is “to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience.” Hence the grotesque accidents that seemed to him the natural workings of Providence would also give readers their money's worth. Hence his novels are over-stuffed with incident, especially with mistaken identities, untold secrets, miscarried letters, and all the forced misunderstandings without which there would be “no story”—and which are not at all uncommon to readers of popular fiction. Few important novelists have worked their characters so hard, made them sweat through so many theatrical situations. And again, when Hardy came to introduce a more logical chain of events, he also introduced a new kind of artificial contrivance. In his last novels his characters have to sweat through formal disputation, get their arguments by heart. (Sue Bridehead “exclaims” in a moment of passion: “It is none of the natural tragedies of love that's love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting!”) Harassed as he was both by the demon Plot and the demon gods above, Hardy too seldom maintained entire responsibility to his characters.

These faults are obtrusive enough, and they are the more irritating because they are so externalized, detachable, in a way unnecessary. The primitivism of Lawrence, the superrefinement of James, the neurotic hypersensitiveness of Proust—such qualities may be objectionable in themselves, but they are nevertheless the source of the peculiar power of these novelists. What is most objectionable in Hardy is not so intrinsic and seems almost perverse. Yet it does point to defects in the quality of his mind: some bluntness of perception, coarseness of discrimination, crudeness of response to the possibilities of experience. These limitations also appear as a degree of provincialism. The strangers to his little land of Wessex, the more worldly types like Fitzpiers and Troy and Alec D'Urberville, are often stagey, never have the vitality of the natives. Furthermore they are usually his shabbiest or most vicious characters; he always tried to be fair to them, but like his rustics he distrusted them. And despite his gloominess he tended to exaggerate the humble virtues, romanticize the simple annals of the poor.

One may note other flaws in Hardy's fiction: some stiffness and awkwardness of style, a deal of perfunctory and mechanical journeywork, the usual lapses into mediocrity or downright banality (as in “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid”). One may even say that he was not altogether at home in the novel; in an earlier age he probably would never have deserted poetry, his first and last love. Nevertheless contemporaries are apt to dwell too much on his limitations. The fault is partly an incomplete analysis, an overstress on certain aspects of Hardy's work and a neglect of the work as a whole. It is especially, however, a disposition to undervalue even the total or final effect of his art. And so I believe that we cannot do him justice merely by a conscientious tribute to his specific virtues, balancing accounts by listing his nature poetry, the rich humor of his Shakespearean rustics, the vivid re-creation of Wessex, etc. We need to reconsider the assumptions that govern our whole response.

“Criticism,” Santayana writes, “surprises the soul in the arms of convention.” Criticism is too often caught there itself. It is caught, more specifically, in the two-sided, sheep-or-goat concept of truth expressed in Aristotle's law of the excluded middle: a thing is either A or not A, a statement is either true or not true. Its proper logic is rather the principle of the included middle: the recognition that generalizations about literature are both true and not true, that qualities and values lie on a scale between A and not-A and can be described accurately only in relative terms. In practice there is both a “good” way and a “bad” way of describing everything. Regionalism, for example, appears to be a relatively simple adaptation to life, a return to the familiar meanings of the family and the home. It may accordingly be stigmatized as an evasion of the problem of assimilating the complex material of modern life, a shirking of responsibility, an “escape”; it may also be applauded as a return to the grass roots of art and life, a recovery of deep natural pieties, a means of stabilizing a confused, giddy generation. These descriptions of motives and values are the poles of a sliding scale. Ideally, then, the critic will command the whole scale as he tries to locate a given writer, remembering that motives are never pure and values never absolute. The natural tendency of critics, however, is to take a stand at one end, as if it were the absolute A of beauty and truth, and then to describe all writers in its terms.

In this way Hardy suffers today: our special interests and attitudes predispose us to the “bad” description of many of his qualities. He confined himself to the little world of Wessex, a world at that already vanishing. Few critics, I imagine, would say that nostalgia was the matrix of his art, accuse him of seeking refuge from the pressing problems of his society. But many are prone to regard his novels as a temptation to nostalgia: to dwell on the quaintness and coziness of his rustic scene, to stress his failure to enter either the drawing room or the industrial arena of modern society, to consider his drama remote or even irrelevant to our problems. Nevertheless his main themes—the elemental passions against the elemental background of nature, the timeless problems of life and death—are still pertinent because they are elemental and timeless. If Wessex is a little world, it is still a world; and the final stress should be upon the vast dimensions he gave it—a kind of spaciousness not to be found, for example, in the whole continent of John Dos Passos. That American pilgrims to the Hardy country are apt to be disappointed by the patch of ground he called Egdon Heath is the clue to his achievement. He invested these few acres with grandeur, he erected on them one of the sublime conceptions of fiction. At his best, in short, he was not confined to Wessex. He realized his ideal conviction, that the tragedy of obscure men far from the stage of momentous events could be endowed with a majesty “truly Sophoclean.”

Still more are we likely to condescend to Hardy's simplicity. We are very fond of subtlety, we are obsessed with complexity; when we return from James, Lawrence, or Virginia Woolf, not to mention Proust or Joyce, Hardy seems woefully obvious and uncomplicated. Although he did a respectable job of psychologizing in Jude the Obscure, his typical characters are compounded of relatively few elements and his issues are relatively naked. Above all, his methods are simple. Where more recent novelists weave back and forth in space and time, he marches in a straight line; where they evoke, intimate, render impressionistically, present character by indirection, carefully consider point of view, he is always the omniscient author, presenting directly and in so many words. He is indeed too omniscient and explicit. His simplicity is in one aspect, again, a lack of fineness of discrimination. Yet it is also the source of his dignity and strength. He did have a firm hold on the basic elements of character, render eloquently the primary passions, dramatize powerfully the major crises; and he did not oversimplify. Great passion may have mysterious sources and intricate ramifications, but it appears as a whole and remains primitive; all the fine consciences have to deal with the same elemental necessities and face the same final issues of mortality. Like the Greeks, at any rate, Hardy was concerned with the primal, the ultimate, the common destiny, and he as freely made large statements about life and death and the gods. To sophisticates and lovers of the three dots, this ancient tradition may seem naïve, crude, a little embarrassing. Nevertheless they have no reason to feel so superior to it—least of all at a time when bombs fall on subtle and simple alike.

Even our judgments of Hardy's plots may be too harsh. In our more advanced fiction, plot has been scrapped with the other simplicities. A well-regulated, unbroken, finished action appears to falsify our complex experience, with its waver and scatter and incessant flux; formal contrivance, the stock-in-trade of the most austere artists in the past, is suspect as mere trickery and trumpery. Hence the contrivance of Hardy, often mechanical or sensational as it is, will be especially offensive to cultivated tastes. But even the magnificent architectural structure of The Return of the Native may now seem too artificial, and his most powerful scenes melodramatic.

The chief source of suspicion, however, remains Hardy's general ideas; and it raises an issue that we need to consider at greater length. “The truest philosophy,” T. S. Eliot declares, “is the best material for the greatest poet.” It sounds like a reasonable principle—until he begins to specify the true philosophy. Doubt grows when from other quarters comes the same doctrine, but with different specifications. Thus Ralph Fox asserted that without Marxism “there is no approach to that essential truth which is the chief concern of the writer”—in one sentence making a clean sweep of the world's acknowledged masterpieces. Everywhere critical discussion now centers about the writer's “ideology,” everywhere he is judged according to its “soundness”—just as professional moralists and simple readers judge him by the plainness and wholesomeness of his moral. This concern is no doubt a tribute to the effectiveness of literature as a social force; but when critics themselves fail to get together on the common garden variety of truths, much less the “essential truth,” the responsible writer must be in a quandary.

Now, an obvious objection to Mr. Eliot's attitude is what D'Avenant called “such saucy familiarity with a true God”; when he laments that Shakespeare stuck fast in an “inferior philosophy,” Santayana answers properly that what Shakespeare stuck fast in was the facts of life. Moreover, Mr. Eliot would not commit himself to the theory implied by his concern for the true philosophy, that the expression of ideas is the primary purpose of art. But the record of fiction is alone sufficient answer to all these manuals of what every great writer must know. Hardy knew that man is the butt of wanton celestial jokers; Balzac knew that religion and monarchy are the eternal twin-principles of the good society; Dostoievsky knew that intellect is a false god and that Soul alone matters; Zola knew that there is no Soul and that an absolute determinism governs human behavior. From such testimony truth would seem to come out nowhere. Yet in our experience with these novelists something valuable comes out everywhere. Plainly, then, the enduring value of their work cannot lie in their soundness as philosophers or sociologists. It must lie in what they have in common; and this, in necessarily general terms, is the vividness and vitality of their concrete representations of life. It is the significance, not of their general ideas, but of their felt response to the immediate data of experience. Like the events in “real life,” the characters and actions they create may be interpreted differently by different observers, but the creations have a life independent of these interpretations.

This is by no means to deny the novelist the luxury of a philosophy. Inevitably he has one and unquestionably he needs one: to order his immediate materials, to focus his creative energy, to enable him to be nourished instead of simply confused or dismayed by the activity of his age. The quality of his thought, furthermore, has much to do with the aesthetic value of his work: a shallow, confused, trivial, sentimental, or distorted view of life will obviously limit his felt response, weaken his command of immediate experience. But these adjectives are to be got by no rule of thumb, no consultation of the critic's own tastes in philosophy. The value of art lies not in the specific ideas and ideals expressed but in the power to suggest and nourish other ideas and ideals. The value of an artist's thought lies not in its essential truth but in the possibilities it permits him of so dealing with experience as to transcend any specific version of essential truth. And the serious objection to his thought arises in so far as it literally cramps his style.

Similarly the most serious objection to the excessive concern with a writer's general ideas is not that it warps the critic's judgment but that it narrows and impoverishes his actual experience in art. So naturally sensitive a critic as Paul Elmer More became simply unable to experience the values in most modern literature; Granville Hicks openly confessed what ideology has done to him: “There is no bourgeois novel that, taken as a whole, satisfies me.” In this way, at any rate, not only Hardy but his contemporary readers are likely to suffer; and in this view one can make out more clearly the values that survive his obsessions.

Aside from his annoying habit of periodically translating the poetry of his imaginative creations into a crabbed, literal prose, dropping the reader into the world of the “village atheist,” Hardy's philosophy was clearly a limitation. It tended to cramp his imagination, blunt his perceptions, mechanize his responses, harden his aesthetic arteries generally. It sapped his fictions of some vitality: his characters are at times slighted or manhandled for the sake of wildly improbable events, the relations between character and plot seem at times mechanical and arbitrary rather than organic and inevitable. Yet his obsessions were not fatal. Hardy survives because his poetry and drama are not confined within the angular frame of his plots and his syllogisms, his imaginative reach and emotional force are not measured by his intellectual convictions. Logically, his philosophy makes all self-assertion futile, leaves no room for self-realization; his characters should be the puppets that in The Dynasts he specifically tells us all men are. Actually, his characters at best have a vigorous life of their own; they have dignity and force, they aspire and assert themselves passionately, their full measure is taken. And his own vigorous creative activity makes nonsense of his philosophy. With all his limitations, Hardy was not one of our frustrate spirits. He was gnarled but whole, flawed but ripe on the bough; few contemporaries have more fully realized their potentialities.

It follows, too, that Hardy's tragedies are not finally so depressing as many readers still believe. Few of his heroes achieve the final reconciliation of Tess, who at the end can say simply, “I am ready”; Michael Henchard and Jude Fawley die in an appalling bitterness of spirit, some episodes culminate in a sheer horror that numbs all pity and awe. The immediate impact of his tragedy is at times, indeed, terrific. But more important are the after-effects of the whole experience. What is explicitly stated in his novels is a gospel of despair: life is only a thing to be put up with, and mute resignation is the only wisdom. What is eloquently represented, however, is not only a deep compassion but a deep faith: a natural reverence for man, an illogical ideal belief that he is superior to the forces that destroy him, above all a conviction that at stricken moments (in the words of Robinson Jeffers) he “can shine terribly against the dark magnificence of things.” Although Hardy's heroes do not have the stature or force of the ancient heroes, they do have this capacity for feeling greatly, and although he had a low opinion of the gods, the poet in him invested them with this dark magnificence. Hence the bitterness passes. There remain the qualities “truly Sophoclean.”

And so, too, with the “universality” of his stories. The past always changes with the present, is never seen or felt exactly as it was lived; and in this ceaseless process nothing is affected more surely than versions of universal, eternal truth. Few readers today will accept Hardy's specific ideas, any more than they will the gods that ordained the fate of Oedipus or the angels that sing Hamlet to his rest. In any event his novels could not have precisely the same meaning for us that they had in the last century or will have in the next. Yet process has its logic and its laws, and in human affairs its underlying uniformities: the primary desires and emotions, the basic patterns and rhythms of experience, the laws that give all behavior continuity and consequence, exact payment from all men in accordance with their capacity for feeling. Of these Hardy has given a vivid and compelling account. His theme of the rise and fall of Michael Henchard is significant for any culture. In art as in science, which alike represent a dynamic, unfinished world, the universal is to be sought not in particular truths but in modes of truth-making.

At the end it is well to return to the obvious. Hardy exists, when countless “sounder” writers are dead. If we have no satisfactory explanation of genius, we have no substitute for it; as Schelling said, it is to art what the ego is to philosophy, “the only supreme and absolute reality.” Hence Hardy survives the most damaging criticism—as he survives this labored apology. His greatest achievements in fiction have a poetic, elemental quality that calls for the lyrical appreciation of simpler days. One could argue, indeed, that we could now do with more of the old specialists in adjective and epithet, who expressed very vague ideas but who might communicate very live emotions. In this hyper-technical, hyper-practical, hyper-critical age one encounters too little whole-hearted enthusiasm and reverence for literature, too much worried introspection and nervous rationalization of its effects, too much suspicion of its “emotive” function or semantic impurity, too much fear of letting oneself go. We have a laudable desire to be precise and never to be taken in. But the precious difference between great art and the good second-rate escapes precise verbal definition; and it is our loss if our admiration of the subtler, finer, more brilliant art of modern novelists should make us fearful of being taken in by the simple but majestic fictions of Thomas Hardy.