The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
Ferment (1863-1870)
FOR more than a generation England had been swimming easily along through a sea of spiritual compromise, ruffled only by the solitary cries of Carlyle and the lesser Carlylites. The rising groundswell of reform had now and again caused fears of upheaval, but these had been astutely laid to rest by the Queen's sober statesmen. The church had been riding high and free on the Oxford Movement. Applied science was progressing along lines that might have been called satisfactory. Railways were tapping the country, newspapers were spreading information—of a kind.
It was pure science that finally shook this seemingly secure world to its foundations. The elements of revolt had all been there but had been awaiting only the snap of a mental firing-pin.
The explosion occurred in 1859, with the publication of The Origin of Species. Instantly the peaceful scene of mid-Victorian Britain became the setting for riotous turmoil. At Oxford, Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley damned each other roundly, while women fainted under the tension. At London, an intellectual triangle spread confusion: the High Church corner was held by Liddon at St. Paul's; Stanley at Westminster Abbey thundered liberalism; at the Royal Institute, Huxley continued to discourse uncompromising scientific agnosticism. The Essays and Reviews (innocuous reading for Twentieth Century eyes) were perused as evidence of the weakening of the religious and social fabric. The volume raised a "sandstorm" of heresy-trials, as a result of which "hell was dismissed with costs." Herbert Spencer announced the scheme of his rationalistic "synthetic philosophy"; backed by Kingsley, George Eliot and Froude, he engaged to apply a single key-conception to the whole material universe, including mankind; he saluted Darwin as the verifier of his own generalities; he attracted the bitter fire of Gladstone and of Martineau.
Thus did the Annus Mirabilis 1860 precipitate a vast unrest and disturb the placid lives of millions. With the dogmatic cosmology of the Old Testament going all to pieces, nothing seemed safe any longer. And matters did not mend. Mild people armed themselves fiercely and went out to champion their beliefs, old or new. Philosophic calm became a rare commodity. Kingsley's pragmatism ignited Newman’s mysticism and created the Apologia. Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, in 1865, followed by his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, in 1869, extended the boundaries of the tournament-lists. John Morley, editing the Fortnightly Review, made it the organ of "fighting-rationalism"; Leslie Stephen followed in his path with the Cornhill. And Ruskin, who might have gone on indefinitely as an art-critic, began to look away from Turner and Venice and into the hearts of men; his Unto This Last led off the line of his sociological essays.
Literature, submerged in this flood of doubt and livid rage, paused irresolutely as at a cross-road. Literature, one may say, almost came to a standstill. Writers of the older order were dead or as good as dead; and the newer order had not yet found its voices. Tennyson had given his best, and now went on, beautifully embodying a lifeless chivalric ideal in the lavender verses of the Idylls. Browning was doing little better: "All's right with the world!" scarcely sufficed to check the world's anxious search for truth, even if unpalatable; Rabbi Ben Ezra and The Ring and the Book were merely interesting continuations of a curiously tortured optimistic reaction to tragic life; few people found themselves able to collect faith through blind energy. Arnold, ceaselessly smiting the Philistines with his polished battle-axes, aroused a larger quantity of aspiration—but his aspiration was sunk up to its chin in placidity.
It was not until 1866 that the smoldering heat of poetic revolt burst out into the liquid fire of Swinburne's first Poems and Ballads, to be followed in 1870 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Latinesque searchings for voluptuous beauty, while conventional morals withered by his wayside.
The more vigorous of the older fictional spirits were also dying out. Charlotte Brontë was dead, Thackeray died in 1863, Mrs. Gaskell two years later. Dickens, having completed his effective career with Our Mutual Friend, shuffled off this mortal coil in 1870. The stage was held by a troupe of second-raters: Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope. Mrs. Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman was feeding the bourgeoisie with middle-class tradesmen's ethics. Against her dire influence on the public taste and morals, only two voices could be heard, both faint: George Eliot's, fading out with Adam Bede, and George Meredith's, just becoming audible with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel—both sounding in the year of the publication of The Origin of Species.
The decade of the Sixties, then, was a period of agitated transition; everywhere the old order was evacuating its familiar citadels with tears and imprecations; it created vacua, drew after it turbulent and unresolved novelties. England itself was changing its countenance: from a feudal, agricultural, conservative state, it was shifting into a commercial, industrial, democratic nation. And realism was displacing sentimentality in thought and art, just as geology was displacing the literal interpretation of Genesis.
* *
*
From 1862 until 1867 Hardy lived at No. 16, Westbourne Park Villas, in the sluggishly beating heart of Bayswater respectability. Slowly he was emerging from his architectural shell, from his artistic chrysalis, and beginning to sniff with eagerness the tainted gales set up by the chaotic movements of those spacious days. Sentimentally, he was strongly attached to the good old society that was falling to bits everywhere; but vividly and intellectually he found himself yelping with the enthusiastic youthful pack. Thus his heart and his brain were at war in his soul.
This struggle manifested itself in his growing imptience with architecture and in his growing ambitions to write. He composed verses—sonnets, for the most part. In 1864 he began also to toy with prose. A little story, or more properly a narrative essay based on personal experiences, called How I Built Myself a House, was set down and dispatched to Chambers's Journal. It was accepted by the editors and appeared anonymously on March 18, 1865. It was a genial and graceful account of the troubles and pleasures experienced by a man with a small family in having a house designed and built for himself. The architect's point of view is very much in evidence, together with a rather disillusioned ground-tone, otherwise, the piece possesses little distinction. It certainly does not foreshadow the stylist of whom Stevenson said, "I would give my right hand to be able to write like Thomas Hardy."
The spirit-searchings of the young man were fully and eloquently recorded, however, in the lyrics which he indited at this time. Many of them, fortunately, survived the vicissitudes of thirty or more years, in spite of their constant rejection by editors, and appeared, properly dated, in the series of poetic volumes which began to see publication in 1898, with the Wessex Poems.
In general, these extant early poems, from which, one may be sure, the chaff has been carefully winnowed out, show such a self-conscious but natural art, and are for the most part based on such a definite intellectual scheme that one may feel fairly safe in judging the majority of them as expressions of deep and lasting convictions.
Amabel is the only surviving poem of the year 1865. There is clearly traceable in it the influence of the Tennysonian tradition. It forms one of the very few links that connect Hardy with some of the aspects of Victorianism in thought and art which flourished during his youth, and of which his writing is usually so independent. In its refrain, the iterated name, "Amabel" and in its sentimentality it reminds one somewhat of Tennyson's ballad of Oriana. These resemblances in form and content, however, prove to be rather superficial echoes, underneath which there is discoverable a strong dash of the real Hardy. In the opening stanza, for instance,
Her custom-straitened views,
And asked, "Can there indwell
My Amabel?"
one can find the refrain and the sentimentality, but also such an uncommon verb as indwell, a foreshadowing of the free compounding process later used by Hardy in the word-formations of The Dynasts, and an "enlightened" scorn for "custom-straitened views." The lament is not, as in Tennyson, for the death of the poet's beloved, but for the dying out of the passion itself through the effects of changing circumstances and the action of "Time, the tyrant fell," although it causes the poet to wish "to creep to some housetop and weep" in typical mid-century fashion. The fourth and fifth stanzas are of interest as the first illustration of another dominant Hardy-theme:
I sang ere warmth did wane?
Who thinks its numbers spell
His Amabel?"
Love's race shows no decrease,
All find in dorp or dell
An Amabel.
Love is here considered as an objective force rather than a subjective emotion—as a universal phenomenon subject to certain universal laws rather than as an individual passion. The stanza is in striking harmony with one of Schopenhauer's fundamental ideas, that of the absolute subordination of the individual to the species, and with his conception of love as the mysterious working of the Immanent Will bent upon the preservation of the race. This viewpoint has little in common with the romantic or so-called "poetic" notions prevalent at the time. The young poet is colder because he sees himself no longer as isolated from the forces which drive on the external world, but as a real part of them. Likewise, in the two concluding stanzas, the usual sentimental vows of eternal fidelity give place to the logical but more disagreeable conclusions of "heartless" disillusion:
That love like ours had died),
"Fond things I'll no more tell
To Amabel,
And fling across the gate,
'Till the Last Trump, farewell,
O Amabel!'"
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!"
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
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 is no less vital to the mental processes of Hardy than to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, is the cause of the bewilderment with which the ordinary commentator of the Hardy novels is filled at the apparently illogical simplicity with which the idea of chance is constantly introduced into a fatalistic universe, rigidly frozen in time and space. The hint of Hardy's conception of the First Principle underlying the phenomenal world as a vast, blind Impersonality and not as a personal Deity was a distinct foreshadowing of the climactic "Immanent Will" which dominates the action of The Dynasts. The word "un-blooms" shows the characteristic use of the privative prefix, persisted in throughout his poetry, as is the expression "Casualty," used as the personification of the idea of circumstance or the conjunction of events. Time, personified and casting dice, is a natural development of the more auspicious figure already encountered in Barnes. The notion of Time as an assistant and abettor of circumstance is an idea that Hardy strongly emphasized in his early career but did not stress in the maturer poems and novels, with the possible exception of The Woodlanders and the title Time's Laughingstocks. That these abstractions are termed Doomsters is in perfect harmony with his fundamental conceptions. The poem is already so well and favorably known that it is quite superfluous to comment upon the power and conviction that speak through its telling dramatic form and expression, resulting in an artistic product of real value and beauty.
The sonnet, In Vision I Roamed, a cosmic adventure, calls to mind George Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight, in which the poet also soars through the firmament at night. The underlying idea, and the conclusion of Hardy's poem, is far simpler, however, and is the expression of a personal feeling rather than a philosophical concept, as is the case with Meredith. The sad effects of the separation of kindred spirits on earth are diminished by the poet's enlarged vision after having penetrated in spirit "to the last chambers of the monstrous Dome." This attempted largeness of world-view marks the first step towards the all-embracing vision that conceived the Overworld-scenes of The Dynasts. Although he quickly returns to earth, the poet has taken his first journey into the unknown heights and depths of the universe. The sonnet is technically perfect, and contains many phrases both striking and felicitous. The expression, "ghast heights of sky," shows a handling of the adjective which is Shakespearean in its freedom, but the effect achieved fully justifies the liberty taken with the standard language.
At a Bridal, sub-titled Nature's Indifference, and also cast in sonnet-form, is a lover's lament for the marriage of his mistress "at the Mode's decree," a common situation in the Hardy poems. The drama, or story, although it is the "occasion" for the poem, gives way at the end to philosophical meditation on the indifference of "the Great Dame whence incarnation flows" to such a situation. Similar to this in tone are the four stanzas forming the little piece called Postponement. Here, however, the situation is all-important, and no abstract reflection takes place. The obvious symbolism of a bird's threnody on the fickleness of its mate is employed, and the effect is heightened through the very skilful use of the alternating refrains: "Wearily waiting" and "cheerfully mating!"
Confession to a Friend in Trouble, an adventure in psychology, is a sonnet that foreshadows the "magician in character" of the later novels in its attempt to get at a half-hidden and subtle moral and mental phenomenon. It is the expression of a vague and shamefully selfish half-thought, which has visited the poet uninvited, and is a striking monument to his great and, in the end, successful struggle against a total loss of faith in human nature.
In Revulsion, a very fine presentation of a theme that is not very pleasing to the general reader, one can observe how early a disillusioned conception of the emotion of love had taken hold of the writer. Realizing that love is the great disturber and tormentor of man, through the agency of alluring woman, the poet shrinks from feeling its devastating power, and prays:
And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.
In this Schopenhauerian outcry against the instinct of love which brings only distress and trouble in its wake, Hardy hints at a conscious renunciation of life, with all its toil, passion, tragedy, and beauty, as being unworthy of the pain and distress encountered in living it—and this is the very essence of his early pessimism.
The tender emotion is not quite so drastically or callously treated in the series of four sonnets entitled She, to Him, in which the ideas and the situation are about equally important. The motif of the first is one found frequently in the poems, even in those of the twentieth century, but is seldom encountered in the novels. It is a lament for the fading of personal beauty and attractiveness while the fires of love within the heart rage on undiminished. Here also time is personified and anathematized: "Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill." The second and third are more in the vein of pure lyric, and express her absolute devotion and faithfulness to her love, to whom she seems to be but a thought. In the fourth she indulges in a malediction of her younger and more successful rival, and is not deluded by any chimera of unselfish renunciation, but concludes:
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise
—again a sentiment rather unpopular among romantic idealists.
A characteristically ironic comment on life is found in The Two Men. This ballad of modern life tells the story of one man, who resolves to dedicate his life to the good of mankind, who, in consequence, falls into poverty, generously renounces his love for her own good, and dies a pauper. The other man schemes to live off society, also falls into poverty, renounces his love in hopes of marrying a richer woman, which intention fails, and he also dies a pauper. So far the tale is common enough, but the real sting comes in the concluding stanza:
As "dust to dust" anon was read
And echoed from each coffin-lid,
"These men were like in all they did."
The Bride-Night Fire, a Wessex tradition told in ballad-form, is one of the few pieces that actually saw the light of publication before the Wessex Poems came out finally in 1898. It had appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine for November, 1875, under the title The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's. Like the other poems here under consideration, it was first written down in 1866. Although of no very great significance for the development of Hardy's thought, it is of considerable interest as an early humorous treatment of an incident, serious enough in itself, in the life of characteristic Wessex folk. It is also practically the only poem that shows throughout the direct influence of the work and spirit of William Barnes, both in content and in form. The entire piece is in dialect, and not the dialect encountered in the novels, but the more exact Dorset speech found in Barnes. The Barnes-tricks of more exact phonetic spellings of dialect words are also used, and footnotes give the English equivalents of all the more unusual Dorset words. The metre is regular, the quantities are always correct, the mood is always calm, and no philosophy is advanced, or even hinted at. The poem might well have been written by Barnes himself in an inspired moment, but it shows considerably more narrative power than do any of his own humorous bits of verse. This completes the poems of 1866 in the volume of Wessex Poems.
There is but one of this date in Poems of the Past and Present: The Ruined Maid, which may be regarded either as a very sympathetic or as a half-flippant treatment of its subject, depending on the emphasis,—tragic, sardonic, or naïve,—with which the final lines of each stanza—the debauched town-girl's answers to the innocent queries of her former friend from the country—are read. At the close, the country girl says to her former playmate:
And a delicate face, and could strut about town!—
and she gets this answer:
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined, (said she.)
A Young Man's Epigram on Existence, which closes Time's Laughingstocks may be bracketed with the sonnet on Hap, as it strikes the note of youthful disillusionment common to nearly all of the early verses:
Our lives, that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.
This bit of verse-philosophy is the last of the poems of this memorable year which were chosen for preservation. The great variety of styles and subjects, and the finish shown in their treatment, seem to indicate that these are but the scanty remains of an intense and very productive poetic activity of the young architect.
The poetical reliques of the next year (1867) are rather scanty, but include a few memorable pieces, chief among which is the curious and vivid Neutral Tones, expressing the remembrance of a striking but dreary landscape which reflected a very bitter moment in his life. Love is regarded as the tormentor who deceives and "wrings with wrong." It shows also the author's desire to have the mood of nature correspond always to the mood of the human situation treated.
In Heiress and Architect the situation is highly artificial and unreal, but the idea, the "vanity of human wishes" is strongly emphasized. All of the heiress's hopes, fancies, and enthusiasms are frowned upon and waved aside by the cold and knowing architect, experienced not only in his profession but also in the school of life, who insists on designing her mansion with a view to the requirements of the more bitter moments in life. The pattern chosen for the stanzas of this poem is a rather unusual one, but is very appropriate to the thought contained in it:
Some narrow winding turret, quite mine own.
To reach a loft where I may grieve alone!
It is a slight thing; hence do not, I pray,
This last dear fancy slay!
Such winding ways
Fit not your days,
Said he, the man of measuring eye;
I must even fashion as the rule declares,
To wit: Give space (since life ends unawares)
To hale a coffined corpse adown the stairs;
For you will die.
* *
*
This intense and idealistic spiritual life, animated by Shelleyan visions in the midst of the gay and picturesque surroundings of the place, is probably reflected in a poem that he planned at this time: At a Seaside Town in 1869. Rewritten "from an old note," it was finally included in Moments of Vision:
Spelled the dark sky
And ship-lights nigh,
And grumbling winds that passed thereby.
And there, above
All, shone my Love,
That nothing matched the image of.
And saw the free
Life by the sea,
And folk indifferent to me.
Thereafter, where
But she was; care
For one thing only, her, hid there!
I had to look,
And then I took
More heed of what I had long forsook:
The laughing crowd;
Light-hearted, loud
Greetings from some not ill-endowed;
Hailings and halts,
The keen sea-salts,
The hand, the Morgenblätter Waltz.
Forward she came,
Sad, but the same
As when I first had known her name.
Outwardly wooed
By contacts crude,
Her image in abeyance stood. . . .
Shall not endure;
I'll seek the pure
Thought-world, and bask in her allure.
Scanned with keen care
The temple where
She'd shone, but could not find her there.
Has not since thrown
Upon my own
One beam! Yea, she is gone, is gone.
The romantic idealism herein reflected proved to be more than a fleeting fancy, to be toyed with and cast aside. Hardy later confessed that this train of thought haunted him for years, and supplied the motif for his last completed novel, The Well-Beloved.
To add color and passion to the youth's imagination came his first really important and lasting personal relationship. He met Miss Emma Lavinia Gifford, a proud, strong-willed, mentally resourceful girl, the daughter of T. Attersall Gifford and the niece of Dr. Edwin Gifford, a London archdeacon. He threw himself at this rather disdainful lady's feet, extracted half-promises from her, and under the stress of his emotion poured out a succession of memorable love-lyrics and tragic verses.
The Ditty to Miss Gifford (1870) has already been mentioned in connection with Barnes's Maid o' Newton, which may well have provided its formal inspiration. Its graceful lyric measure and its refrain produce an atmosphere more delightful than any of the older poet's efforts could call forth; yet the mood is a Barnes-mood, and rather free from the usual sting of the Hardy train of thought. The last stanza contains the essence of whatever pure meditation there is in the entire piece:
To recall
What bond-servants of Chance
We are all.
But I found her in that, going
On my errant path, unknowing,
I did not outskirt the spot
That no spot on earth excels,
—Where she dwells!
It is a poem that does not suffer by comparison with the best of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, (She Dwelt among Untrodden Ways) though the touch of pathos is lacking.
She, at his Funeral (187—) is a striking little dramatic monologue, which illuminates a single moment in a tragedy with great vividness:
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger's space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I.
Unchanged my gown of garish dye,
Though sable-sad is their attire;
But they stand round with griefless eye,
Whilst my regret consumes like fire!
At Waking (Weymouth, 1869) is likewise a dramatic monologue, cast into a rather curious stanza-form. The theme is the transitoriness of love, the realization of which comes suddenly upon a husband at dawn, when he sees his wife as one of the common crowd, and not a prize, but a blank in life's lottery. The Dawn After the Dance, written in the same year and at the same place, is remarkable for its rather colloquial language, and its swinging measures, somewhat like those of Locksley Hall, but with the addition of ingenious internal rhymes. Disillusion is again the keynote, this time the reflection that the last year’s vows of man and maid have proven "frail as filmy gossamere."
The last poem which can be definitely included in this early group is the sonnet The Minute Before Meeting (1871), a pure lyric, expressing the pain of lovers' past and future separation and the ecstasy of "expectance" as the time of meeting approaches. In thought and expression it seems to possess spiritual kinship with the amorous verses of the greater sonneteers of the Elizabethan epoch:
Seemed hopeless hills my strength must faint to climb,
But they are gone; and now I would detain
The few clock-beats that part us; rein back Time
In change for far expectance closed at last,
So harshly has expectance been imposed
On my long need while these slow blank months passed.
Will all have been in O, so short a space!
I read beyond it my despondency
Thereby denying to this hour of grace
A full-up measure of felicity.
In all these permanent remains of the poet's period of experimentation, one can notice the complete predominance of sense over sound in the choice of words. The language is usually that of natural common speech, used with a freedom from mechanical restraint and with a gift for memorable utterances. The undisturbed and almost uncanny quiet that distinguishes his prose style throughout, even in its tensest moments, is also felt in these poetical efforts, giving an impression of detachment that nearly always heightens rather than diminishes the dramatic effect of the situation treated. The principle of hard and clear utterance, adhered to by most good poets since Robert Browning, was adopted by Hardy very early in his career and retained by him in times of the increasing popularity of the painted phrase. Wherever at all possible, he used the exact word to convey his meaning, and sometimes he manufactured the exact word especially for his momentary purpose, just as Æschylus and Shakespeare had done before him.
The most obvious example of this indulgence in freedom with the standard language, is the curious and unusual use of the prefixes "in" and "un," to signify an absence, and not a reversal of the action, as in "unrecognize" in The Dawn After the Dance. With regard to this practice and to his rather arbitrary occasional manufacture of compounds, showing a general Elizabethan sense of liberty in the treatment of word-forms, it is of importance to note that Hardy treated the language as an essentially flexible medium, and as an instrument that had not yet become rigid and fixed. He did not recognize any established use of words and expressions which would make for a stereotyped literary product. In dealing with the general questions of language and usage in his poetical works, we are fortunate enough to possess a clear expression of his own opinion, as delivered to William Archer:
I have no sympathy with the criticism that would treat English as a dead language—a thing crystallized at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and hidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it has a future. Purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, always means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before language. And as for the English vocabulary, purists seem to ignore the lessons of history and common sense.
In Hardy's natural style, his colloquialism, and in his occasional use of the dramatic monologue, we can find many points of contact with the system of poetical expression adopted and developed by Browning. But with regard to situations selected for presentation, and underlying ideas and ideals, the two poets show an antipodean dissimilarity that makes any comparison an absolute impossibility.
The sonnet-form predominated in this early verse, and great skill was exhibited in its employment, both in the Italian and Shakespearean types of structure. The texture of these admirably compact examples usually carries one backwards rather than forwards in time, and reminds one strongly of the atmosphere evoked by the cycles of the greater sonneteers of the later Sixteenth Century in England. In addition there are encountered several very unusual stanza-forms, which seem to he original combinations with Hardy. Their general metrical regularity gives evidence of a thorough schooling in the models set for him by Tennyson and William Barnes, but one can already find traces of an aversion to the pursuit of liquidity and smoothness of versification for its own sake. Now and then the reader can detect the free displacement of accents, the syncopations, and other liberties that foreshadow the more advanced technique of his later poetry.
The situations treated in the more dramatic pieces are very seldom ideal from the romantic point of view—more often they are the more painful and disagreeable moments in love and life. This liking for sordid themes shows the point of view usually classed as "realistic," but the invariably humanly sympathetic treatment goes far to redeem the cruelty and coldness exhibited in the selection of material. There is also a curious coldness and aloofness that can be felt throughout even the more deeply conceived lyrics. The underlying poetic fervor is never found on the surface in extravagant rhetorical outbursts, but the inner force of the author’s personality is only discoverable underneath the external calm of the expression.
Sincere realism in the choice and treatment of situations is an evidence of a heroic and honest search for truth, whatever it may prove to be, and a refusal to accept optimistic conclusions on any point unless supported by reasoning derived from the facts of life. If it is true that, as Emerson once said, "God offers to every mind his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both," then Thomas Hardy has forever forsworn the delights of repose and calm. Particularly in his earlier work, the scientific spirit of fearless inquiry which, in its psychological bearings, he applied to his literary creations, often led him to the expression of conclusions concerning the heart of man and the government of the universe that have served to brand him as the arch-pessimist of his time.
This spirit has certain resemblances to the earlier stages of Shelley's revolutionary enthusiasms, in which the doctrines of Necessity, Atheism, and Vegetarianism roughly correspond to Hardy's ideas of Time and Chance, the Unconscious Will, and Pity for all living beings. The Romantic poet, however, later showed that he had scarcely digested the iconoclastic arguments which he advanced with such fervor, and by the time he was writing The Triumph of Life, he had outgrown nearly all of his early and half-baked agnosticism and pessimism. Hardy's early conceptions, derived chiefly from himself, and representing a reaction to the spirit of his time rather than to a reading of exotic literatures as was the case with Shelley, kept growing with him, finding always a wider application to the life of humanity and the world, and means of expression ever increasing in beauty and force.
The extreme unpopularity of the attitude and system of ideas adhered to by Hardy might have made him the leader of a later "Satanic school" of poetry had his early verses been published soon after their writing. hardly be said, however, to have attempted to carry on the Byronic tradition, despite his diabolical predilections for the things that seem bizarre and shocking to the sensibilities of modern society. Nothing could be more foreign to his nature as a poet than that air of the swashbuckling poseur so skilfully and successfully assumed by Byron. His temper was very different: very rarely indeed did he throw dignity and seriousness to the winds, and sincerity was his very breath of life.
His revolt against the optimism and superficial sweetness of his age reminded Mr. Gosse of Swinburne's similar attitude, but his reaction against convention and insincerity was, if anything, exceeded by his renunciation of the sensuousness so freely indulged in by Swinburne and the "fleshly school." Note what qualities in Swinburne he singled out for particular admiration in the tribute he wrote in 1909 (A Singer Asleep—in Satires of Circumstance):
When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,
I walked and read with a quick glad surprise
New words, in classic guise,—
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.
In poetic execution, also, these two poets exhibit the greatest possible contrast, Swinburne's delight in the manipulation of sounds for producing effects of languor and passion being an evident inheritance from the young Keats, one of the few great English lyrists who do not seem to have held the slightest interest for Hardy. The author of the verse that has been here analysed never could have written it with a view to creating a certain kind of measured music that would delight the ear as mere sound when read aloud. The musical effects of his poetry can be sensed by an attuned ear, but they are never felt as the primary purpose of the composition. They are a natural outgrowth of the underlying situation or meditation treated.
It will be observed that the poems of 1865-1870, taken as a whole, present a generally complete and entirely Hardyan attitude towards the world—through the employment of typical Hardy-situations, ideas, images and expressions. The poet has considered the universe and has found it to be lawless; he has thought of a Higher Power, and he has discovered it to be—malignant, or indifferent, or unconscious; he has experienced human emotions and has concluded that good impulses are transitory and that passion is a snare. There is here developed and unified to some degree the whole system of thought presented through the notion of Time, Chance and Circumstance, Destiny, Pessimism, and Pity for humanity, that has become recognizable as characteristic of Hardy's mind through its employment as the intellectual basis for the Wessex novels. The early poems, however, present "Hardy" in much more condensed and characteristic form than either of the first two novels, Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, which immediately followed his first period of poetic activity. One must then be very careful in applying the term "evolution" to the development of Hardy’s ideas and expressions from the beginning of his career as a writer to its close. His experiences throughout his life seem never to have modified to any considerable degree the underlying ideas with which he began to write. Many of the conceptions upon which the philosophy of The Dynasts was built can be found to exist in embryo in his first writings, however much they became enriched and mellowed through the intellectual and real experiences of the writer throughout the thirty-five years of his development as a writer and thinker. The greatest landmark of "Hardyism" in all his work is The Dynasts, the really complete and entirely mature expression of all the aspects of his art and thought. In this crowning work of his career can best be studied the apparent inconsistencies as well as the things that make for unity in all his writings. It is not of very great importance to get the poems subsequent to 1870 dated to any degree of accuracy, inasmuch as foreshadowings of The Dynasts can be found nearly everywhere in Hardy. However, by following the chronological line wherever feasible in an analysis of both his prose and his poetry, it is possible to observe how modifying influences asserted themselves at various times, becoming assimilated into, and enriching, his great and ever-increasing body of ideas, and how they kept supplying new technical and artistic aids to the poet. It is quite safe to add that if Hardy had not in his later years come in contact with the work of Schopenhauer, The Dynasts could never have assumed its present form, largely determined by the characteristic expressions that run through its "Overworld" scenes.
The year 1870 marks Hardy's temporary abandonment of the poetic muse, and his turn to the writing of fiction, equipped with the training of an architect, the reading of an eclectic, and a full-grown philosophy of life. Already thirty years of age, he had not yet found his métier, but was still "feeling his way towards a method." In the period that followed he was destined to win fame as novelist, but kept up the practice of poetry just as he had done during his architectural training. When he finally, in the last twenty-five years of his life, devoted all his energies to his beloved poetic composition, he had behind him an experience and training of such breadth and depth as fall to the lot of but few men while their spirits and faculties are still at their height. His powers of observation and expression seem to have increased rather than diminished with the accumulation of years—and if his last poetry really represents the best that was ever in him, it is only another evidence of the truism that a man does best what he likes best to do.
* *
*
Towards the end of Hardy’s residence at Weymouth, the economic pinch made itself felt more and more. His poems were unsalable. Yet he had to live—and if possible, by literature. It was really necessary that he make some sort of mark in the world. Emma Gifford expected it of him. Her family possessed at least academic and ecclesiastical distinction; Hardy's, so far as could be seen, possessed none whatever. It was a case of the poor man and the lady, both extremely conscious of their relative positions.
In this emotional dilemma, the rising figure of George Meredith loomed up as a timely and useful inspiration. Meredith had also begun as a lyricist, but had as yet failed to awaken any large appreciative response. He had turned to fiction, had created Shagpat and Feverel, and was well on his way to distinction. Novel-writing, in those flat fiction days, seemed the easiest and surest route to success.
In 1869, therefore, Hardy set himself to the composition of a first novel. Into it he wrote his notions of the social structure of the times, a structure in which he personally felt himself to be rather hopelessly enmeshed. From it he rigorously excluded all lyric ecstasy.
It turned out to he a “purpose story,” full of that overheated, unripe revolutionary doctrine which one learns to expect from a powerful but slowly maturing mind. Its general tone was akin to that of Shelley's notes to Queen Mab, which Shelley himself later saw to possess more historical than intrinsic value. Hardy's idolatry of the pure-spirited young Romantic rebel thus showed itself in another aspect.
The story, when completed, was called The Poor Man and the Lady. Hardy himself piquantly described it as "a kind of incoherent manuscript, which fell into the hands of John Morley and George Meredith, who both counseled me strongly to write a novel." As a matter of fact, it was scarcely a real novel, being rather a crude, sentimental recounting of a complex plot of intrigue after the then popular manner of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, added to a brave tableau of paragraphs which set themselves to mention all the things that had come under the Victorian taboo.
Hardy sent it first to Constable's, where Meredith read it and returned it promptly. Undiscouraged, Hardy forwarded it to Chapman and Hall without delay. There it was accepted for publication. Meanwhile, however, Meredith had sent for the author, and in a memorable conference advised Hardy not to publish this Poor Man—at least not in its original form. He urged the inclusion of still more incident and a rigid elimination of all propaganda-talk—curious advice from such a source. The young novelist was later to recall the impression of that fruitful first interview, in the verses which he composed on the occasion of Meredith's death. They were published in Time's Laughingstocks under the title G. M., 1828-1909:
That since has perished out of mind,
I heard that voice and saw that face.
A morning horn ere men awake;
His note was trenchant, turning kind.
And riddle to the very core
The counterfeits that Time will break. . . .
The luminous countenance and rare
Shone just as forty years before.
His shape unseen by his green hill,
I scarce believe he sits not there.
Through the world's vaporous vitiate air
His words wing on—as live words will.
Hardy had the good sense to take Meredith's advice, and accordingly withdrew and rewrote the book, adopting a gentler mode of approach for his first attempt to win public favor. But even in its revised form the story failed to please its creator, and it remains unpublished to this day. The manuscript is at present in the possession of Mrs. Hardy.
* *
*
Now definitely embarked on a fictional career, Hardy continued to "feel his way towards a method." He summoned his best powers and was soon completely absorbed in the first of what was destined to be known as the Wessex novels. The ambitious plan of recreating a whole geographical and spiritual Kingdom gradually materialized.
His mental equipment was of course varied and unique. Poetic passion, adequately restrained, was already his, and could be depended upon to flower into a genuinely individual narrative prose style. A philosophy based equally on experience and reading, and animated by a discerning power of insight into human characters, was to provide an intellectual framework which would unify the general impressions under development. The setting, properly restricted in time and space, was already there, to fulfil the last of the Aristotelian requirements of the prose epic.
Finally, a broad comprehension of all the more important activities of the human mind: this must be examined in a few of its details, as it worked itself out during the quarter-century which followed.
Hardy's independent reading, for instance, was distinguished from the start for its thoroughness and depth. Take the Bible. Hardly any writer of our day has shown as close an acquaintance with the Bible as has Hardy—with both the Old and New Testaments. Not only is this shown in the great frequency of his direct quotation—a kind of pious demonstration of familiarity with the Scriptures considerably cheapened since Satan himself first showed the purposes to which it could be applied—but in many a turn of phrase that could have become ingrained into his own style only through the most enthusiastic and persistent perusal of the King James version. When Hardy was once asked his opinion on the question of the effect of the war upon literature, he referred his questioners to a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In addition to his familiarity with the Bible, he showed at times more than a slight smattering of the methods and materials of ecclesiastical argumentation. In his Memories of Church Restoration he related his own personal experiences with a strict Protestant bishop's objections, on purely church-doctrinal grounds, to the erection of a new rood-screen in a church in which the old one had been removed and destroyed by an ignorant builder. Likewise young George Somerset's acquaintance with the arguments and counter-arguments for infant baptism which he displays in his discussion with the aged Baptist parson in A Laodicean seems to reflect similar encounters on the part of Hardy with the polemic paraphernalia of modern organized religion. Here not only the Bible, but the works of the Church Fathers are handled with a fair degree of familiarity. In dealing with Hardy's attitude on religious questions as encountered in his poems and in his fiction, it will be seen that his equipment for their attack is decidedly not that of a shallow dilettante or of a superficial amateur.
His information was not acquired, nor his opinions developed, in the usual or conventional ways, with the single exception of his study of architecture. Just as his great interest in religion was plainly not fostered by his attentive listening to pious pulpit discourses from the position of an occupant of a pew in church, so was his philosophical reaction to life formed independently of any influence from intellectual books or journals. Throughout his life he seems to have observed or read nothing that would cause him to change materially the viewpoint he instinctively assumed when he began to write—or even before, although there are evidences that he gradually developed a philosophical phraseology for the expression of that viewpoint, in close relationship to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Of great importance to the study of his development is his interest in music, although in this field the technical terms do not flow from his pen with anything like the same frequency and ease as they do when he discusses painting and archæology. The names of composers are seldom invoked to assist in the creation of the proper atmosphere in descriptive passages, while those of painters are often used—with fine effect when the reader is sufficiently acquainted with the styles of art they represent. In Hardy's work art-music is forced to give way to folk-music, just as with many modern composers who find greater inspiration in collecting and arranging popular folk-tunes that still survive in less cultivated and semi-barbarous communities than in the study of classic masterpieces.
The church organ is almost the only modern instrument for which he shows a decided liking. One of his principal characters, Christopher Julian in The Hand of Ethelherta, is an organist and composer, and reflects the knowledge of organ-construction and organ-music gained by Hardy during the period of his study of ecclesiastical architecture. His use of the technical terminology of music is sometimes rather bewildering to a practical musician; yet some of the finest effects in The Dynasts are secured by the invocation of music, tersely but eloquently described for the mind’s ear of the reader. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of a poet's acquaintance with, and love for music, and this is particularly true in the case of Hardy, not only because he, as well as other modern poets, sometimes imitated in his verse the free and natural rhythms of modern music, but also because he has so often been accused of indulging in a total disregard for melody, fluency, and general beauty of sound in his poetry.
Finally, his wide knowledge and great skill in the technique of both metrical and narrative form was picked up and highly developed by him without any outside assistance worth mentioning. Largely self-educated in literature, art, and science, he showed at times the small and characteristic defects of training usual to those who have been thrown back upon their own resources for a higher education; hut these faults were greatly outweighed by the advantages which such conditions usually prove to present to ardent and creative spirits: an imperishable interest in knowledge for its own sake, and a continually fresh desire for the investigation of anything and everything that seems to possess beauty or utility—a desire that was never dulled or oversatiated by the blight of the rigid enforcement of the uncongenial academic point of view.
It is not surprising to find that his tastes ran to Greek tragedy, with which his own work has been compared more often, perhaps than has that of any other modern English author. Of the three great tragic writers of Athens, he showed a marked preference for the earliest and most austere, Æschylus. It is perhaps remarkable that he did not develop a greater enthusiasm for the more unorthodox and revolutionary Euripides, but he must have felt a closer kinship between himself and the oldest member of the illustrious triumvirate, preoccupied as the latter was with the problems of Destiny and the justification of the ways of Providence to man. There is also a decided affinity of poetical style between the two, both having been much criticised by their contemporaries for their harshness, obscurity, and general unconventionality of language. Among Latin authors Hardy found no such heroes or models, although now and then he betrayed an interest in Horace, whose lyrical odes were certainly models for many of his early poems, it being doubtful whether his erudition had extended so far as to include a reading of the Æolic dialect of the Sapphic fragments or of Alcæus.
The smattering of French picked up from his governess was improved upon by his study in the evening classes at King's College. His knowledge of the language does not seem to have led him to investigate the literature of France very carefully, however. Except for a few scattered expressions, the quotation of the French source of his poem The Peasant's Confession, and a popular Parisian ditty sung by Clym in The Return of the Native, no Gallic influence is traceable in his work. His interpretation of "the French character" he presented in what he termed the "romantic" figures of Francis Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd, of Damon Wildeve in The Return of the Native, and of Felice Charmond in The Woodlanders. His German was picked up while he was engaged upon the writing of fiction, as is shown by the increasing number of allusions to the literature of that language in the later novels. Goethe alone of the poets seems to have attracted him, although the idealistic philosophers greatly fascinated him towards the end of the fiction-episode in his career.
The entire field of English lyrical poetry was familiar ground to him. His third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, contains chapter-mottoes drawn from more or less familiar poems ranging from the Earl of Surrey to Tennyson. In his last published novel, The Well-Beloved, the sections are headed by lyrics from Crashaw, Wyatt, and Shakespeare. His comparative indifference to the Euripidean pity for humanity and spirit of revolt was atoned for in his intense admiration for Shelley, more frequently quoted in his writings than any other single poet. His attachment to the youthful and tragic figure of the "master of those that sing" has a certain significance apart from the purely literary influence of the earlier poet on the later. The two temperaments show striking affinities.
* *
*
With this apparatus at hand, Hardy began to perform the most effective and successful tasks of his career. It will be interesting to observe later how his equipment was enlarged and polished by the time he was approaching the turn of the century and returning to the abandoned embraces of his lyric muse. But meanwhile, there are events of importance to relate.