On Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, the maker of great tragedies, had through all his life learned the noblest lesson of the grand Greek tragedies of whose high thunders his voice was perhaps the last reverberation. He may be called a heathen rather than a heretic j for he was never near enough to Christianity to contradict it. But in none of his contradictions, such as they were, was there anything of that special sort of insolence against which the Greek tragedy warned heroes and kings. He was often provocative j but he was never proud. Down to the last days when he received a universal veneration as the greatest of living Englishmen, he retained a splendidly unconscious simplicity. An editor of a magazine told me that Hardy sent in his poems almost timidly, like a beginner, apologizing for crudity, even offering to correct mistakes. Even without the great work, that would convey something of the atmosphere of a great man.

The valuable word "atmosphere" has been somewhat vulgarized and overworked like other words of the kind. In criticism, for some time past, we have rather lived in an atmosphere of atmospheres. It might be correct to call the Celtic Twilight an atmosphere 3 for in the particular mood in which "love is less kind than the grey twilight" it is natural that even the figure of the lover or the lady should be a shadow even mistier than the mist. It is natural to speak of the rich narcotic atmosphere of certain passages of Poe or De Quincey. But the phrase does some injustice to work in which the air is clear enough to be ignored. It does some injustice to scenes in which the objects are solid enough to be seen and even handled. There is a sort of description that gives us something much more positive and satisfying than a concert of strange smells in a dark room. And when literary critics say that the tales of Thomas Hardy are full of the "atmosphere" of Dorsetshire or of WesseXj they do some injustice to what is really powerful in his prose. He had in fact a great love of shapes that are not shadows. He can make a picture which is something more than a picture j because it is not flat. It is like a picture full of coloured statues, and has the depth of a stage. There is something symbolic of him in that minor episode in TesSy when the rascal returns as a revivalist, and paints all along the wide fence across the country-side the large and flaming letters of his gospel. Hardy's gospel could hardly be mistaken for good news. But he painted it in much the same large open-air alphabet j generally as picturesque but always as plain. His novels and poems are full of a sort of solid antics that stick to the memory almost apart from the meaning. They might be called the practical jokes of a pessimist. A very typical example is the poem about the prodigal who, returning home, thinks he sees his father the huntsman afar off, conspicuous by his red coatj when his father has long been dead and a red coat is hung on a scarecrow. That, of course, is very characteristic of Hardy in every aspect: the view of life which is something more than tragic irony and approaches sometimes to a sort of torturers' mockery. But though the dark story is very dark, the red coat is still very bright. The actual technical method is at once lively and materialistic j and it is a little misleading to talk of it as atmosphere. The point is rather in that very vividness and objectivity with which the vermilion coat glows across the empty air. In that little tragedy there is a mistake, but nothing so merciful as a mist. Hardy has not only given us, as is so often said, the air of the West Country 3 it is but just to say that he has given us the earth, the common clay, the stones and certainly the thorns and weeds. But there is another sense in which we may accept and even carry further the judgment of those who talk of the atmosphere of Hardy's Wessex. There was in one sense a special atmosphere, a spiritual atmosphere, though it was probably not so much the atmosphere of Wessex as the atmosphere of Hardy. And about that it is much more difficult to speak impartially, since it is impossible to speak impersonally. We have in Hardy a man of great sincerity and not a little simplicity 3 such a man could not but work from deep if not always conscious convictions 3 and anybody equally rooted in the opposite convictions will find it difficult to write of him without controversy. He was not a neutral or a non-combatant, and can never have wished to be treated as one. I will not pretend to sympathize with his philosophy as a truth j but I think it is quite possible to sympathize with it as an error, or, in other words, to understand how the error arose.

What we call the pessimism of Thomas Hardy had two roots. Both, I think, were rather historical than personal j in other words, I doubt whether he himself knew where they came from. The first cause was the neglect and decay of English agriculture. Anybody living in the ancient and beautiful English counties, during the last century or so, was living in a dying civilization. He was like a man hopelessly loving and inevitably losing the last traditions of the Old South in America, which had so many better things along with its aristocracy and its slavery. We also in England have an Old South. That also ran too much to aristocrats and not a little to slaves. But that also has been left to slide into poverty and decay, while the great industrial towns drank the life-blood of the land. And among the hundred signs of that historic oblivion or betrayal this is one: the pessimism of the poets. The Songs of the Shropshire Lad have the same dreary tang as those others that were the Songs of a Dorset Lad. Housman is a better poet than Hardy, simply considered as a poet 3 some may say because he is more of a scholar and less of a rustic. But whichever is the greater poet, it would be hard to say which was the greater pessimist. Both could doubtless give reasons for the unfaith that was in them 3 but I doubt whether the reasons would be the causes. And I suspect that one of the causes was in the general social aimlessness of the deserted countryside 5 of men that had lost the shrine of the peasant and never found the forum of the citizen. They had neither private property as a peasant understands it nor public property as a citizen understands itj they were the servants of the rich — when the rich were growing poor.

The other root of the philosophy would need an exposition m^erely philosophical — not to say theological. It was the final effect of the strange interlude of Calvinism. It will be noted that Hardy's pessimism was never really agnosticism. It was not even atheism. It was a strange sort of demoniac monism, which conceived a cosmic centre immediately responsible for the most minute and remote results of everything, and which he was always angrily reproaching with its responsibility. This was the inevitable ultimate effect of that total disappearance of the noble conception of Free Will, that had been the most Christian thing in all Christian theology. The Puritans abolished the larger liberty of the soul in fighting for the smaller liberty of the sect or the printing-press or the vote. Thus it came natural to Hardy to think, in a truly Calvinistic style, that the deity must have predestined Tess to damnation, instead of damning the people who treated her badly 5 and it could not be long before such a deity was treated as a devil. Between these two things — the subconscious sorrow of the dying fields and the old heathen sense of doom, that had returned to England in the Puritan form of damnation — Hardy grew up as the heir of tragedy. It is well that even that history and that heresy produced one great man before they perished.

It must also be remembered that it was long ago and during a pessimistic fashion that he labelled himself a pessimist. There is much to show that he mellowed in later life and grew acquainted with more gracious moods. His own personality was always in the best sense gracious, being full not only of humanity but humility. Bitterly as he had quarrelled with a demon who did not exist — a demon whom he did not even believe to exist — he never quarrelled with the human beings who do exist, and are therefore so much more aggravating. And he seems himself to have come to doubt whether he had not wasted on the former quarrel a fire that should have been given entirely to the latter sympathy:

" 'You have not said what you meant to say,' Said my own voice speaking to me: 'That the greatest of things is charity.' "

Certainly there is no greater thing to say, and he often said it greatly. But his provincial traditions hid from him a larger meaning of the word, in the mouths of the older mystics who spoke of charity towards God.

THE END

J