SOURCE: Chew, Samuel C. “Homage to Thomas Hardy.” New Republic 23 (2 June 1920): 22-6.

[In the following essay, Chew presents a brief biography and a tribute on the occasion of Hardy's eightieth birthday.]

Thomas Hardy, the foremost living English poet and novelist, attains the age of eighty years on the second of June. A birthday tribute to the man whose achievement in prose has deepened the thought, widened the horizon and rectified the structure of the novel, and whose verse has appealed profoundly to many minds in these later years, may well take the form of a survey of the many-sided excellencies that make it appropriate to observe the occasion publicly.

Born in a remote humble Dorsetshire cottage, of a family formerly of importance, but (like the D'Urbervilles) fallen in fortune, Thomas Hardy received the first impressions upon a mind unusually sensitive to surroundings from nature and from the past. Upon the heath before the cottage door and in the woodlands behind, beside the Froom and the Stour, among the apple-orchards and corn-fields, he observed not only the silence and the calm but the rivalry and struggle of animal and vegetable life. All about him were memorials of the past: venerable tracts of forest-land like the Chase in Tess [Tess of the d'Urbervilles], amphitheatre and round, tumulus and fortress, Druidstones and strange rude monoliths whose origins were shrouded in mystery and encumbered with folk-tradition. As a youth he must have often climbed about the gigantic grass-grown ruins of Mai Dun; and, like the inhabitants of Casterbridge of whom he has written, he, too, may have seen upon the slopes of the Roman amphitheatre “a gazing legion of Hadrian's soldiery as if watching a gladiatorial combat,” a momentary vision evoked by intensity of imagination. Like his own Clym Yeobright, he picked up flint tools and arrow-heads in the course of his wanderings over the heaths. 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 preparing a drive-way there were exhumed the skeletons of five Roman legionaries. The peasantry of his youth-time had not yet learned to despise old ways and words, though the year of the great exhibition, 1851, was, as Hardy has remarked, “an extraordinary chronological frontier” between the old manner of life and the new.

Many of the Southern folk then saw the outer world for the first time. From that date old habits began to disappear and new ways, the ways of the drab undifferentiated English laborer everywhere, began to creep in. The phenomenon of the levelling of dialectical peculiarities commenced and many fine old local words are now obsolete. The older people who use them are snubbed by the younger generation educated at the National Schools. Tess and her mother represent the contrast between the younger people whose beliefs have been undermined by education and the older with their “fast-perishing lumber of superstition, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmuted ballads.”

Fortunately for those who reverence such memorials of the past Hardy's young manhood came at a time when there was still ample opportunity to observe for future chronicling many folk-survivals that are now being obliterated by sophisticating influences. For what “progress” had not entirely accomplished by 1914 the ruthlessness of military necessity has of late, it would seem, thoroughly 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 reminders 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 Buonaparte, who had sprung up and eclipsed his elder rivals 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 no parallel. Ruined huts on high points of land still marked the places where dwelt the beacon-keepers who should signal the expected landing of the French. The seeds that began to germinate in the eighteen-seventies and that in the first years of this century brought forth the magnificent literary fruitage of The Dynasts were sown in Hardy's mind in his childhood.

Other vestiges of the comparatively recent past—Georgian residences, fragments of Elizabethan manor-houses, old inns, barns that had once been portions of ancient conventual groups, ruined abbeys, and a multitude of churches that were soon to undergo “the tremendous practical joke of restoration”—helped turn his mind towards the profession that he adopted at the age of sixteen and that left so marked an impression upon his books. He entered the office of an architect in Dorchester. Under the direction of his master Hardy was sent to sketch and measure many churches about to be reconstructed, and these frequent journeys helped to familiarize him with the country-side. The study and practice of architecture during ten formative years gave to the future author of the Wessex Novels, it is not fanciful to say, his evident grasp of the essentials of proportion, design, finish 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.

In 1861 Hardy came to London where, presently, having won prizes in architectural theory and design, he could look forward to a promising career in his chosen profession. But already he was hesitating, uncertain as to the wisdom of his choice. Beyond doubt he puts his own experiences into the mouth of one of the architects in Desperate Remedies, who declares that it is not skill as artists that architects need in order to succeed, but “an earnestness in making acquaintances, and a love for using them.” With an inability to stoop to meretricious means of gaining patrons went the distractions of literary pursuits (for he was already writing poetry) and a profound interest in the new forces of thought which in the sixties were changing the face of things, extending the history of mankind into “the dark backward 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 poetic atmosphere, among those who could not find a refuge in a resurgent Cyrenaicism, became charged with pessimism, at times melancholy, at times in despairing revolt. Arnold voiced such feelings in “Dover Beach”; and men found spectres of their own thoughts, cloaked in gorgeous Eastern drapery, in Fitzgerald's translation of Omar. Of such spiritual experiences Clifford wrote a little later: “We have seen 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 majestic rhetoric of “The City of Dreadful Night.” In this welter of conflicting purposes and ruined symbols some voices were urging that for duty to a dimly described or altogether unknown God there be substituted the Religion of Humanity, the Charity that “seeketh not her own.” It was amid these shaping influences that Hardy began to write.

In his early poems a preoccupation with the mystery of the world is seen shadowing his thought with what Meredith later called his “twilight view of life.” He voices his failure to find a hint of orderliness in the universe; no sign of direction is apparent, no evidence of plan. Many of these pieces are studies in the freaks and pranks of “the purblind Doomsters” who mismanage human fate. In many there is a sense of le grand sommeil noir that enwraps the little waking moment of life, and in certain poems Hardy, conscious of the sea of oblivion around this fleeting moment, seems to cry with Leopardi: E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare! Everywhere there is a refusal, characteristic of all Hardy's writings, of false consolation and empty hope: a determination to look “at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition”; a deliberate and courageous posing of difficult questions. At that time he had not realized the truth of “B. V.'s” admission that “the truths of midnight do not necessarily exclude the truths of noon-day,” though at the end of his life he has declared that his is a nature that has become vocal at tragedy rather than at comedy and that though undemonstrative before a contrasting side of things he has not remained unperceiving.

For this verse he could find no publisher and was “compelled” (the word is his own) to turn to prose. After an unsuccessful attempt, rejected, as has been often told, on the advice of George Meredith, the publishers' reader, he issued his first novel, Desperate Remedies, in 1871, at his own financial risk. The statement often made that this was a revision of the earlier abortive effort is untrue; The Poor Man and the Lady was an entirely independent work. The limits of this brief survey do not admit of a chronological account of the Wessex Novels. The facts are well known or easily accessible. For our purposes it is sufficient to say that after three tentative efforts along contrasting lines Hardy won his first popular success with Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874; that his mature power is first apparent in The Return of the Native (1876); that in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) there appears a change in technique, interest being no longer divided between four or five characters all drawn with about the same degree of detail, but concentrated upon a single individual; and that the outcry occasioned by Jude the Obscure in 1895 “cured him,” as Hardy has recorded, “of any further interest in novel-writing.” Comment has been frequently made upon the fluctuations in Hardy's genius, which instead of developing steadily has produced between novels of great strength other stories that already 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 strain demanded by the major novels, between each of which (save between one pair) several years intervene. The phenomenon is similar to that observed in the career of Joseph Conrad. To regain strength by turning to other and lighter themes is a wiser course than almost to exhaust fecundity in the first rush of genius as Dickens so nearly did.

It is possible, however, to trace out several lines of development. For the use of entanglement, mystery and tragic suspense, inherited from Wilkie Collins and the other “sensation novelists,” Hardy gradually substituted the instrument of tragic anticipation seen at its profoundest in almost the opening words of Jude [Jude the Obscure] which describe Fawley as “the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again.” The rustic humor, which covers the whole canvas of Under the Greenwood Tree and which appears as a series of exquisite interludes in Far from the Madding Crowd, gradually becomes scantier and more acrid; and from Jude this element has disappeared altogether. The interest in natural phenomena, which produced such memorable scenes as the storm and the shearing-supper in Far from the Madding Crowd, the marvellous mid-summer night episode in The Woodlanders, the gaunt landscape of The Return of the Native, and the sensuous charm of the dairy-scenes in Tess, has never failed Hardy, but this element, too, is removed to the far background of Jude. In thought the development is from a malign fatalism, akin to the passage of flaming indignation against the gods which Swinburne inserted amid the perfervid erotics of “Anactoria,” to a strict determinism which is suggested in The Return of the Native and first definitely stated in Jude. Noteworthy, too, is the gradual change from an implicit to an explicit statement of his view of life. In one paragraph of Jude the “tentative metaphysic” of The Dynasts is succinctly enunciated.

Structurally, notwithstanding certain severe strictures upon the excessive use of coincidence in them, the Wessex Novels offer opportunities for ample comment, for Hardy is a great artist. Here there is room only for a few remarks. In projecting a series of novels the action of which takes place within a narrow stretch of country, there must have been some temptation to connect the several novels together as did Zola in the Rougon-Macquart series and as did Balzac to an extent that makes a sort of guidebook necessary if we are properly to follow the fortunes of the principal characters in the Comédie humaine. Hardy, depending upon unity of background to link the tales together, has avoided this mode of procedure save when some person is introduced as a minor character, to reinforce the impression of time and place, as part of the locality (as it were), in one story who in another story is of psychological importance. Thus, Conjuror Trendle, a principle [sic] character in the short story of “The Withered Arm,” is just mentioned in Tess, the time and general locality of the two tales being thus fixed as about the same. Again, the appearance of “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. There are similar links between the novels and the poems and The Dynasts. One must leave it to the happy reader to trace out all these connections by which, with faint fine infrequent touches, Hardy holds together the persons of his imagination without ever approaching the point where such links become confusing entanglements.

In his excellent and little-known essay on “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” Hardy remarks that “to a masterpiece in story there appertains a beauty of shape, no less than to a masterpiece in pictorial or plastic art.” Such formal beauty is a preeminent characteristic of his own work. In a score of instances the story begins on a road or path along which some person is moving; and the reader seems, if it may be so expressed, to be moving with the protagonists, or with those connected with their fortunes, into the theatre of action. The scene whereon the tragedy or tragi-comedy is to be enacted is thus gradually unfolded, the outer country is left behind, the unity of action is strengthened by an approximation to the unity of place. In similar fashion does he reveal the appearance and traits of his personages. There are no long prolegomenous set descriptions such as occur so often in other novelists, notably in Balzac. He avoids the error of describing at once and in great detail persons in whom the reader is not yet interested. Very often the opening scene is at night or in some place where shadows veil details. Thus, Eustacia first appears outlined against the sky on Rainbarrow, a slim romantic figure only. Presently the light of the November bonfire reveals her features fitfully. Her appearance is more fully described in the light of her grandfather's house on her return home. But it is only the next day, by which time the reader's interest is fully aroused, that the morning light enables one to discern clearly her form and face and to read thereon the characteristics of her nature.

Hardy's sense of proportion and feeling for relative values are shown in the comparative amounts of detail which he expends upon his character-drawing. In all the greater novels the full light is thrown upon a few central figures, and even within that narrow circle there are different degrees of illumination. Similarly, there is a like subordination of details to the total effects in the matter of incidents and episodes. And in many of the novels care is taken to harmonize the setting with the event that takes place therein. Contrast, for example, Bathsheba's first meeting with each of her three lovers; or trace out the beautiful adjustments of place and season to the events in Tess. Moreover, the natural background of woodland and meadow and heath, and the pictures of the trades and recreations of the peasantry impress one not as extraneous formal descriptions but as part of the warp and woof of the tales. Hardy's disciples, copying his obvious “regionalism,” have not grasped the secret of this close interthreading of nature with our kind.

Of his rustics Hardy remarks that they possess “an almost exhaustless biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon.” This is true of the novelist himself; and his horizon is all Wessex. He watches the march of the constellations and records the progress of the storm, the contrasting and increasing brilliance of the lightning, the various rollings of the thunder. He contrasts the sound of rain-drops as they fall on different kinds of ground; and of the wind as it blows through trees of different species. From their dissimilar flames he can distinguish the sorts of wood used in the November bonfires. Night in all her moods is familiar to him; and dawn no less than evening. One of the most beautiful passages in the novels is the description in Tess of dawn on the Froom meadows; another is the picture of the forest at dusk in The Woodlanders. No event is too small for his sympathy. He notes the “musical breathings” of the pine which begin as soon as the young tree is set in the ground. The toad seeking shelter, and the spiders that drop from the ceiling are signs of the coming rain. The indifference of the birds to a wetting is a token that spring is on the way. He understands the mentality alike of Oak's impetuous misguided young sheep-dog and of John Durbeyfield's poor decrepit horse. The urge and stir of returning life in spring is a rapturous and ever-new experience to him which he delights to picture. In a recent poem he expresses his hope that if, when he is gone, men remember him at all, it will be as one who noticed the beauty of the spring, to whom the hawk and the thorn were familiar sights, who strove to protect the little creatures of the country-side from harm, and who had an eye for the mysteries of the full-starred heavens.

The novels are redolent of the customs and superstitions of the peasantry. Folk-survivals appear like the “club-walking” at the opening of Tess (which is a degenerate form of the old May Day “garlands”), the Christmastide wakes and mummers' play, the skimmity-ridings, the pretty custom of the wedding march around the village, and such grimmer relics of the olden time as the selling of a wife and the burial of a suicide at the cross-roads. “Smouldering village beliefs” which “lurk like moles underneath the visible surface manners” play their part in creating the atmosphere of the tales. The old superstition of blasting an enemy's life by melting a wax figure, shaped in his likeness, before the fire—a belief that, as Frazer shows, is current throughout the world and that has been turned to literary use time and again since Theocritus—is employed with dramatic effect in The Return of the Native. Witches and devils are the familiar neighbors of the peasantry; the beautiful Vale of Blackmore teems with beliefs in “green-spangled fairies that wickered at you as you passed.” Bodements and omens are looked for on all occasions; the breaking of a key or a looking-glass, a ringing in the left ear or the prick of a thorn or the sight of a magpie or the crowing of a cock in the afternoon—all are dreadful signs. Divination is expertly practised. In The Woodlanders there is a scene of wonderful charm in which the young girls of the hamlet go to the forest on Old Mid-Summer Eve in quest of a vision of their future partners for life. Elsewhere the future is divined by looking into the cloudy white of an egg. There are various superstitions connected with death and others of a less sombre sort. A pleasant interlude in Tess is the story of William Dewy who in his youth charmed a bull by playing on his fiddle as he ran away from it, but could not manage to climb the fence, because to do so he had to stop playing, until he hit on the plan of playing the Nativity Hymn, when the bull, thinking it must be Christmas-Eve, knelt down and before it realized that it had been fooled Dick was safely over the fence. The same bit of folk-belief is employed for a very different purpose in Hardy's recent poem “The Oxen.” But to set down in proper order all the folk-elements of the novels and poems would be a fascinating task, too long for this survey.

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. But he had in fact at no time in his career wholly given over the writing of verse. What is extraordinary is that in the volumes of miscellaneous verse that have succeeded the Wessex Poems of 1898 there has been no falling off in power, but that on the contrary in his latest volume, published at the age of seventy-seven, are to be found some of his poems in technique most excellent and in thought most appealing. The gnomic utterance, the compressed expression of a definite thought, the intensity of feeling, the wistful melancholy alternating with harsh irony, the sympathy beneath the cynicism, the quiet melody underlying the ruggedness—these qualities of the earlier poems are apparent in the most recent. The metaphysic that he offers is confessedly tentative; he puts forward a series of personal impressions, set down in different moods, under different circumstances, at different times. Time will do its customary winnowing among its mass of work; but the permanent value for humanity of a large portion of it lies in this: that Hardy's poetry moots questions too often put beyond the pale of discussion, that it stimulates to a new estimation of old standards and symbols and formulas. And it has merits of another order, for it stirs the emotions as well as it quickens the intellect, else it would not be great verse. This poetry is impersonal in the sense that the issues involved are larger than personality; it is intensely personal in the impression that it makes of deep emotion behind it. The sorrow, the despair, the anger, the cynicism, the faint flickering hope are Hardy's own; but they are more. Humanity itself is heard piping in fields and groves its solitary anguish. Reading these voicings of the pathos of unbelief, or of the lost enthusiasms of youth, or of the irony of the contrast between purposes and results, we mourn, not for the poet only who has experienced them, but for ourselves. Each experience is part of a larger one, in broadening circles till it embraces the infinite. The Self—and this is the more remarkable because of the passionate practical individualism of the novels—is made subordinate to the Whole; the particular parcels of the Will are seen as portions of Its Immanence.

Man, in Hardy's writings, becomes only one of the many phenomena of interest to the imaginative interpreter of life. The old anthropocentricity is gone. In his pictures of Egdon Heath and in his sonnet on the Matterhorn he muses upon the defiance with which these grim impersonalities have 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
Approached its bloody end; yea, even that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

So also in the otherwise nearly negligible novel Two on a Tower the feverishness of human passion is set against a background of starry distances; and a meditation upon a lunar eclipse takes the form of contrasting the petty pretentiousness of our concerns with the imperturbable serenity of the segment of shadow cast upon the moon, that sole stellar gauge of the real worth of “Heaven's high human scheme.” In that scale the Napoleonic Wars dwindle to microscopic insignificance; in the after-scene of The Dynasts the Spirit of the Years utters the essential comment:

Yet but one flimsy riband of Its web
Have we here watched in weaving—web Enorme,
Whose furthest hem and selvage may extend
To where the roars and plashings of the flames
Of earth-invisible suns swell noisily,
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.

Men—whole nations—are moved like figures on a lantern-slide, are drawn to and fro by the halyards of the all-pervading Will, the intertwisted strands of which are revealed in certain scenes of the epic-drama to the onlooking Intelligences. This Principle that moves the universe is shadowed forth under a variety of august names. The High Influence, the Eternal Urger, the Rapt Determinator, the Imminent Unreckoning, the Great Foresightless, the Unconscious. A sentence towards the close of Jude sums up the philosophy of The Dynasts:

Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue … that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence, but hopelessly 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 terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity.

A number of the shorter poems are concerned with this problem. 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. Perhaps the Godhead is dying downward, heart and brain all gone save for the last flicker of consciousness that still abides in man. Or maybe man's consciousness is a foretoken of coming consciousness directing all things. Through some accident that rests unexplained mankind, “emerging with blind gropes from inpercepience by listless sequence,” has achieved consciousness and a moral sense. Hardy is not unaware (as some critics have accused him of being) of the inconsistency of thus ascribing to a purposeless and conscienceless Will the creation of beings in whom consciousness and […] have been evolved. On the contrary he returns again and again to “the intolerable antilogy of making figments feel.” Henceforth, though the origin of human reason remains inexplicable, two natures contend in man. There is a struggle between intuition, the Will-to-Live, which is in accord with the blind Immanence that exists only for the sake of existing, and intelligence, the Will-Not-to-Live, which knows that existence is not worth prolonging. This doctrine is expressed in almost allegorical form beneath the harsh realism of Jude the Obscure. Indeed all the later novels are founded upon a recognition, not incompatible with minute realism, of the applicability of a deterministic system of philosophy to the facts of life. 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 wound of living will be healed by a voluntary lapse into unconsciousness.

Were this Hardy's final word his would indeed be a “twilight view of life.” But he introduces among the crashing chords of his pessimism a note of hope. The song of the thrush in December suggests the existence in the bird's heart of some blessed Hope of which man is as yet unaware. Elsewhere the poet 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, he who had long shaped weak phantasies of the blind and dumb Willer raises his voice in song because here and there he sees old wrongs dying out. No concession to the novel-reading public, such as compelled the “happy ending” of The Return of the Native, forced Hardy to close The Dynasts as he did. It is therefore of the utmost significance that in his epic-drama the last word is given, not to the Spirit Sinister (the exponent of a cynical pessimism) nor to the Spirit of the Years (who interprets events in accordance with a strict determinism), but to the Spirit of the Pities, the symbol of human sympathy, of the Undying Fire, the unconquerable hope of humanity.

The events of the World War might have been employed by this great and sombre thinker as unqualified illustrations of the truth of a deterministic philosophy; and indeed he attaches the blame to no man but to “the Immanent Doer That does not know.” Again the final word has hope in it, for the Thing responsible 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 upheld by the faith and fire within them that “victory 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 also see it 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—Giles Winterborne, Gabriel Oak, John Loveday—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!”