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The Life of Thomas Hardy

The poems of 1866 are headed by the most important sonnet called Hap—a real piece of versified philosophy, and one that sounds the distinctive tonality of all of the author's subsequent work:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Here is the first expression of the idea of the essential malignity of chance and circumstance, coupled with a deterministic tendency of thought. The great significance of this poem lies in the remarkable fact that Hardy expressed in it a typically Schopenhauerian idea at a time when he could not possibly have been acquainted with the writings of this philosopher—the idea that chance and necessity are not mutually exclusive and contradictory terms, but that chance is the manifestation of necessity. The failure to grasp this fundamental conception, which

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