Thomas Hardy: The Complete Novels + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Thomas Hardy.

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of Thomas Hardy in the chronological order of their original publication.- Desperate Remedies- Under the Greenwood Tree- A Pair of Blue Eyes- Far From the Madding Crowd- The Hand of Ethelberta- The Return of the Native- The Trumpet-Major- A Laodicean- Two on a Tower- The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid- The Mayor of Casterbridge- The Woodlanders- Tess of the D’Urbervilles- Jude the Obscure- The Well–Beloved

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Thomas Hardy

THE COMPLETE NOVELS

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Table of Contents

Thomas Hardy — An Extensive Biography

Desperate Remedies

Under the Greenwood Tree

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Far from the Madding Crowd

The Hand of Ethelberta

Return of the Native

The Trumpet-Major

A Laodicean

Two on a Tower

The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid

The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Woodlanders

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure

The Well-Beloved

Thomas Hardy — An Extensive Biography

by Annie MacDonell

Chapter 1 — Introductory

Chapter 2 — The Progress of a Novelist (1)

Chapter 3 — The Progress of a Novelist (2)

Chapter 4 — Storywright

Chapter 5 — Men and Women

Chapter 6 — Humourist

Chapter 7 — Prose Writer

Chapter 8 — Painter of Nature

Chapter 9 — Wessex

Chapter 10 — Point of View

Chapter 1 — Introductory

Therecan be no attempt at finality in a criticism of Mr. Hardy: he is now in the full vigour of his genius, and he has well prepared us for surprises. But the volume of his work is already large; and there is a natural delight in counting and sifting a heap of treasure, even though the pile is being added to while our hands are in it, and its net value being possibly altered. And if this — be it personal gratification, or pious homage to the source of the treasure — is not reason enough for one more attempt to appraise it, I have no other. Mr. Hardy is lucid: he needs no explanation; no apology: his work can defend itself; and he has probably all the popularity he desires. But he presents abundance of points for study, and though his unexpected developments have been many, and his caprices not a few, some distinctive features are clearly enough traceable from his earliest to his most recent page to prevent a criticism of his work being a thing of . shreds and patches.

Touching and influencing the main streams of art and thought to-day at certain points, at others standing far apart from them, Mr. Hardy holds just now a position of special interest; and in the long line of English novelists his is a noticeable figure. He has made really new departures which are no mere accidents of the day he has lived in; he has resisted some impulses of his time as sturdily as in other directions he has been a revolutionary. You may quote him as an example of the observance, and as a warning against the breach, of the same canons of criticism if you happen to hold with any. He is that interesting subject, a writer that cannot be labelled. Ready-made theories about realism, naturalism, and romanticism, are misfits as applied to him: his methods are as wayward as the loves of his heroines.

In spite of the modern habit of diligently searching for a writer’s literary parentage, a criticism of Mr. Hardy may start from himself. The sun and wind of other minds shone and blew on him, of course, and fed his growth, and there are marks for all who read closely that certain men and books have left on him strong imprints. But he has been nobody’s docile pupil. He has disciplined himself well in thinking and observing, and his eye and ear are naturally quick and true. But for style and form, pattern and tone, he has gone to school just when and where he liked. The worse for the smoothness of the web, and its value among dealers who judge by rule of thumb. But there are other tests.

Among the many blunders that line the path of the random art of literary criticism, perhaps none has been more unintelligent than that which attributed Mr. Hardy’s first widely-known story to George Eliot. The guess seems wild now, but the notion still remains that her influence was great in the shaping of his literary methods. So it may have been: it is a point better settled by information than by internal evidence, which is far from distinct. In a few instances his humour looks as if it had meant to be after a George Eliot pattern, but had turned out something entirely different. The best novels of both have rustic backgrounds; both have made prominent the speech and humours of English peasants; both are marked by a strong intellectual fibre. But in aim, style, and temperament, it would be difficult to name two writers of fiction more dissimilar. And of no other novelist does he call up a clear remembrance: certainly no very profitable comparison can be made between him and his contemporaries. In one point, in his representation of the ceaseless warring of human nature with itself and fatal circumstance, his final aim, he puts us in mind of Balzac, and as soon as the likeness is named the great differences in their methods rise up to obscure it.

Kinship he has with other writers, but they are not writers of fiction, and they are of another time than ours. He has borrowed; but his borrowings have been open and audacious. Where he is not looking with his own peculiarly independent gaze at the world, it is nobody less than Shakespeare that has lent him eyesight. This, of course, does not affect Mr. Hardy’s rank in literature: whatever it may be he has earned it by other qualities than skill in adaptation. Nor has it reference to the fact that the novelist at his supremest moments is a tragedian. It is Shakespeare’s lighter vein, as ‘fancy’s child,’ that the skill of the storyteller has adapted to the interpretation of an England two and a half centuries older. Some of Mr. Hardy’s much loved and exasperating heroines are Shakespearian. His rustics are of his own Wessex soil, but perhaps Shakespeare gave him the courage and example to extract and distil their wit in defiance of what stands for probability in minds of conventional experience. Fancy, a rare quality, plays out and in persistently amid the gloomiest scenes of the Wessex stories; for the novelist of to-day whose final aim points most clearly to the tragedy of life, is yet the one of all others who best recalls that the careless airy brightness of an earlier world is unexhausted yet — a brightness, by the by, having nothing to do with happiness, being rather a gleam of outside sunshine, elfish and irresponsible, taking little account of the reason for living or of its futility, but very nearly concerned with its possibility.

Mr. Hardy began his literary career with a stock of thoughts and a view of life considerably in advance of, or different from, those of the majority of his contemporaries. The distinctly intellectual quality of his genius has hardly been adequately recognised, and indeed this feature is apt to be ignored in a novelist, save where it is out of proportion to the imaginative powers, as in the case of George Eliot. Fearless thinking and a sense of humour having been his from the first, he has rarely been taken unawares and captured by the fashions and crazesamong his fellow-craftsmen at any moment. In his time we Have had the psychological, the historico-romantic, the neurotic, the erotic, the photographic, and many another school, and each has looked on itself as the advance guard. Mr. Hardy has contributed to more than one, and joined none. Yet he is still, admittedly, in England, the leader into freer paths. Peculiarly unprofessional in tone, he never echoes the literary club, coterie, or review, and in a generation fussily proud of all its little efforts at thinking, which makes continual discovery of problems, and many solemn statements of them, he has not very often worn his serious purposes on his sleeve. But you will find good thought and earnestness wrought closely into the fibre of his work — enough of these to bar his way to any very wide popularity — and he has impressively dramatised a problem or two, neither particularly new nor old, but of a kind to be met with so long as our present civilisation lasts. Now standing aloof from the time, and again its ally, but never enrolled in the regular army, he has been a valiant freelance.

Chapter 2 — The Progress of a Novelist (1)

Thomas Hardywas born near Dorchester, June 2, 1840, and he lives in Dorchester now. That only a little portion of his life has been spent away from that neighbourhood is the most significant fact of his biography. Wessex, with its natural beauty, its remoteness, its lingering old world customs, has been not merely a picturesque background to his tales. They have grown in Wessex air, and he has dug them out of Wessex soil. In most other novels the scenery could be altered with little effect on the action or the characters. In Mr. Hardy’s it is always inevitable and organic. There has been in recent years a strong revival of local sentiment, and folk-lore, fiction, and pictorial art have reflected it. The very restlessness of modern life has nourished a love for some abiding-place, where the heart and the imagination can turn to for a home and for repose; and regret for the old world so quickly passing away has inspired many picturesque chroniclers. The spirit of nationalism, one of the strongest motive-powers of the century, has had this as its local counterpart. But Mr. Hardy’s attachment, and his choice of habitation for the creatures of his imagination, are almost too personal to be set down to the contagion of a movement. White has not Selborne more precisely in his eye; Wordsworth has not with greater love interpreted the soul of the hills and lakes he was born amongst; Burns and Ayrshire have not a closer association. And no other writer of fiction has been at once so truthful and so poetic a historian of his county. You will more easily find a parallel among painters than among men of letters.

It was perhaps fortunate that Mr. Hardy’s education enabled him to be early obedient to his own instincts. He could never have been one of the ‘hall-marked young men,’ lightly satirised by himself, one of ‘the unimpeachable models turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition’: his humanity and originality would always have been stronger than his education. With a strictly conventional training he might have been more of the man of letters; he might have been considerably less of the dramatist of life. In his seventeenth year he was articled to an ecclesiastical architect in Dorchester, and the traces of this apprenticeship, and of his studies for his profession, are plainly evident in his writing, in the precision with which he describes a building or a neighbourhood, and notes position, distance, and proportion. Very probably it strengthened his love of pictorial art, and indirectly had not a little to do with the fact that he comes nearer to having the vision and using the methods of a painter than any other novelist one could name. His work, too, gave him roving errands about the county — when he stored another kind of capital than professional skill — for to his master had been entrusted the restoration of many of the old South Dorsetshire churches.

But architecture did not, even in those early days, absorb all his thoughts and energies, and for the next four years he was a diligent student of literature, more especially of classics and theology. At the age of twenty Mr. Hardy came to London, to pursue his profession, and there attached himself to the modern Gothic school, working under the distinguished architect Sir Arthur Blomfield, and helping him in the restoration of several churches in the neighbourhood of London. Sir Arthur Blomfield is painter as well as architect, and probably his influence over his pupil was still more in the direction of fostering his love of art than of training him in design. In 1863, the prize and medal of the Institute of British Architects was awarded to the competitor who wrote, under the motto, ‘Tentavi quid in congenere possem,’ an essay on ‘Coloured Brick and Terra Cotta Architecture.’ This was Mr. Hardy’s first public success, and in the same year he received Sir W. Tite’s prize for architectural design. These are all his recorded separate efforts in his early profession, though he continued to pursue it seriously for some years, and the final choice between architecture and literature was probably not made till 1874.

On his arrival in London he had entered as a student of modern languages at King’s College, and side by side with his profession literature was asserting claims on his time and interest. A little paper, ‘How I built myself a House,’ which appeared in Chambers’ Journal, in 1865, is probably his first published work. It is not technical, as might be supposed from its title, but a slight and humorous sketch of the experience of two enthusiastic young housekeepers, with awful warnings as to expenses and unexpected happenings in the dangerous amusement of house-building. But the leisure of the years that elapsed between his coming to London and the publication of his first novel was devoted to poetry, not to fiction. There is probably more in this than the mere conventional beginning of almost every literary career. Mr. Hardy is first of all a poet, if his other gifts and ambitions sometimes tend to obscure the fact, and though the world has not had much chance of gauging his skill in metrical form. Publishers behaved just as usual, and made no eager move to welcome another young man’s verses. The album verse in ‘Desperate Remedies’ is not his only metrical composition in print, but the magazines were not very hospitable to what consumed the best ardour of Mr. Hardy’s mind for several years; and the book of poems that has been so frequently the future prose writer’s introduction to the world, in his case mostly remained in manuscript.

At last he took to novel-writing, and ‘Desperate Remedies’ was published anonymously, by Messrs. Tinsley, in 1871. Though it had its share of abuse, its reception was such as to place him within the first outposts of success. But his years of patient training, and his observant youth in Wessex, had soon a finer result. By one of the unaccountable leaps, some backward, some forward, which have marked Mr. Hardy’s progress, this vigorous but somewhat awkward story was followed, a year after, by another, which for beauty of workmanship and charm he has never surpassed, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree.’ ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ appeared in 1873. It was not, however, till the practically unqualified success in 1874 of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’ which appeared in Cornhill in that year, that Mr. Hardy’s career seemed to be finally settled. Five years later this novel, perhaps, not even excepting ‘Tess,’ the most popular of his works, was dramatised by himself. A version of it, written in collaboration with Mr. Comyns Carr, in which occur some modifications of the plot, was performed, in February 1882, at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Liverpool, Miss Marion Terry playing Bathsheba, that part being taken by Mrs. Bernard Beere when it appeared on the London stage, at the Globe, in May of the same year. His only other dramatised work is ‘The Three Wayfarers,’ based on ‘The Three Strangers,’ one of the ‘Wessex Tales,’ performed, with four other one act plays, at Terry’s Theatre in June 1893.

Since his renunciation of architecture his literary life has not been spent in London. Returning to Wessex he finally settled at Dorchester, where he now lives. Mr. Hardy’s developments may yet be many, and only one thing can be foreseen with any degree of certainty, that Wessex will still be the stage where his dramas will play. Not only has he old memories to fall back on and suggest his scenes and stories: by choice, all his present working days are spent where Wessex cannot be out of sight or mind. Just below him, on the north, lies the Frome Valley, with glimpses of the wild heath country beyond; towards the sea, Blackdown with his namesake’s monument stands conspicuous to the right; nearer on the same side are the great ramparts of Mai-Dun, and in front the rolling downs of ‘The Trumpet Major.’

There he has written with regularity, but not too prolifically, the order of his works, after those already named, being, ‘The Hand of Ethelberta,’ 1876; ‘The Return of the Native,’ 1878; ‘The Trumpet Major,’ 1880; ‘A Laodicean,’ 1881; ‘Two on a Tower,’ 1882; ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ 1886; ‘The Woodlanders,’ 1886-7; ‘Wessex Tales,’ 1888; ‘A Group of Noble Dames,’ 1891; ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ 1892; ‘The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved,’ 1892: ‘Life’s Little Ironies,’ 1894. Mr. Hardy has been also an infrequent contributor to periodical literature in other directions than fiction. Among his more notable articles are, one on ‘ The Dorset Labourer ’ in Longman’s Magazine of July 1893 — an interesting commentary on the material for the Wessex novels, and an obituary notice of the Rev. William Barnes, the Dorset poet, which appeared in the Athenaeum of October 16, 1886. Barnes was his near neighbour — two fields only divide his house from the rectory of Winterborne Came — and the difference in age, temperament, and point of view, did nothing to prevent a warm friendship between the two men who, each in his own way, have finely interpreted the life and character of the county they have both loved so well. Dorset has been singularly fortunate in the loyalty as in the gifts of two such sons.

Chapter 3 — The Progress of a Novelist (2)

Therepublication of ‘Desperate Remedies’ in 1892 gave a new and wider circulation to Mr. Hardy’s earliest work of fiction. Markedly unlike most of the later books in its surface tones, the difference is yet mainly one of season rather than of climate; and as the story contains the germs of almost every idea, talent, and tendency to be found in his work since its appearance, it is as worthy of close attention as some of the better books.

‘Desperate Remedies ’ was published anonymously in 1871. On its title-page it bore a quotation from Scott, a manifesto in defence of its construction rather than a motto, — ‘Though an unconnected course of adventures is what most frequently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality.’ And indeed he has selected, arranged, and adapted the events with much thoroughness. It is a story of plot and sensation, the incidents precisely adjusted to a complicated plan, workmanlike rather than attractive, the novel of one who, making up his mind to construct an elaborate plot, straightway did it without bungling or breakdown, but not with the convincing success of an equally complicated story of sensation, say, by Wilkie Collins. A feature, or perhaps, a freak of the book, its divisions into sections headed, ‘The Events of Thirty Years,’ ‘The Events of a Fortnight,’ ‘The Events of a Day and a Night,’ and so on, has a look of being part of the painstaking plan. Whatever its intention, it serves but a slight purpose, though it marks a precision which Mr. Hardy afterwards transferred, and with greater effect, from time to place. It is also a novel of character; there are no puppets, though some of the more important personages are a little rigid in their movements. A Wessex story, the rustic humours and humourists, to many readers the most prominent feature of Mr. Hardy’s tales, are here already, and Clerk Crickett, the ‘kind of Bowdlerised rake,’ is surpassed by few of the later wits.

The frankness of conception and of language, more or less a determined purpose all along, began in this earliest novel. The story turns largely on the secret breach of the social code of morality by a young and inexperienced woman, who afterwards came to such a position as made the discovery of her secret dangerous; on her contrivance to introduce her unrecognising son into her employment; and her resolve to effect a marriage between him and the daughter of a later, honourable, and disappointed lover. The design, joined in by Mansion, the son, who has already a wife, leads to deep plotting and eventually to murder. Such a story can hardly be called agreeable, but the insistence is on the dramatic action rather than on the sordid detail of the tragedy. In the recent edition there has been considerable verbal revision, for the most part unimportant, the Bowdlerisation of a word or two not being of a character to give any particular interest to the earlier version. The complacency with life and the tragic despair of it that mark most young men’s novels are both absent, an austere facing of its ills taking their place. In the melodramatic parts even, a firm intellectual grip of life is felt, and the philosophy not dramatised into situations or characters, if a trifle wordily expressed, is firsthand and never flimsy. A Nature painter of the rarest kind he proved himself from the beginning, and the love of picturesque circumstance which has inspired some of his greatest moments, as it has also allied itself on less fortunate occasions to melodrama, is already a feature. In a story where sorrow and evil assert themselves in their full power, and with a forbidding aspect, the little scene is gratefully remembered where, on Cytherea’s wedding-day with Mansion, she and Springrove touch hands and bid farewell with the flowing stream between them. The style is vigorous and ambitious, but it is also that of a bookish man whose pen has not gained agility. It is a style that Mr. Hardy readopts from time to time, suggesting conscientious drill more than spontaneous exercise; it is the language of dissertation and exposition rather than of art.

Such is the novel Mr. Hardy first sent out to the world, for the material in it, for its throughness and grip, remarkable in itself, but specially interesting read in the light of the later work. For a first book by an anonymous writer, it was not received badly. Indeed the Saturday welcomed it with enthusiasm. It was dubbed ‘unpleasant’ but ‘powerful’ by another leading organ of literary opinion, the reviewer being a little puzzled as to the sex of the writer, though he hoped it was not by ‘an English lady.’ For a certain outspokenness of language it was duly reproved.

‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ is called on its title-page, ‘A Rural Picture of the Dutch School,’ and there is in it a good deal of the vigorous trust in homely detail that reminds one of Jan Steen and Van Ostade. But the transcript has been made by a poet’s hand. To not a few the book appears as Mr. Hardy’s surest claim to recognition in another age, inasmuch as it is least coloured by the dusty complexion of ours. All but flawless in workmanship, its tone and humour are of the kindliest. Nature and human nature, in sleepy woodland hamlets, are seen, not with the vagueness of a roving lover of the picturesque, but with an eye that has noted how the light falls upon the leaves at all the hours and all the seasons, and read the minutest meaning of the smiles that play round rustic lips. You may put it on the shelf with the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’and Walton and ‘As You Like It,’ but its piquancy will make it best neighbour to the last. It is an untraditional idyll: Arcadia with a savour.

For all the intimacy with rural habit and character it reveals, Mr. Hardy is not amongst the literalists. ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ is the picture of a mood, of the conscious glee and the unconscious humour of country life, a mood of which the sum is large enough, counted by the broken experiences of it in every country heart, but which needs, as well as a light hand to paint it, an eye that can divert itself for a time from yesterday’s pain and the view of to-morrow’s drudgery, and see it as it exists to each, at happy times, the sole mood of all the world. The story bubbles over with pure fun; its romance is as fresh and gentle as a spring morning. It is the comedy of country life meeting its lighter poetry. The shadows lying outside the sunny spot never obtrude. You can’t make a tragedy out of Fancy’s ‘I like Dick, and I love him; but how poor and mean a man looks in the rain, with no umbrella, and wet through!’ and you needn’t out of ‘those beautiful eyes of hers — too refined and beautiful for a tranter’s wife; but, perhaps, not too good.’ And the shadow creeps no nearer among the leaves and scents of Yalbury wood and the sunshine of simple hearts, amid the buzz of cottage mirth and the twang of fiddles at Christmas merry-makings.

‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ is not a Wessex novel, the scene lying in a remote Cornish parish and in London. Sophisticated folks play parts in it, and play them indifferently. It holds its place in readers’ affections by its strange love story, by the vagaries of the heroine, and the genuine unaccented pathos of the end. Elfride is one of Mr. Hardy’s special maidens. Whatever her deservings, she is remembered by readers as she is treated by her creator, with the tenderness called out by beautiful things that die young. A charming child, who ‘says things worthy of a French epigrammatist, and acts like a robin in a greenhouse,’ she has the variableness of a subtle nature and the promise of a woman of passion; she fibs, makes terrible mistakes, and yet deserves somehow by her nature, if not by her acts, the love of the three men who mourned over her in the Luxellian family vault. It is a story of memorable scenes, and with much beauty in the circumstances and the setting. The tragic note of the battle with the inevitable in nature is first struck here with a deep sound. Technically less elaborate, it is still, from a craftsman’s point of view, a great advance on ‘Desperate Remedies,’ to which it seems naturally the successor, and it stirs one’s sympathies much more readily and lastingly.

Turning back now to ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ its most interesting feature is seen to be the foreshadowing in it of Angel Clare’s part in Tess’s tragedy. Knight, though a priggish London reviewer, is a robuster, if less picturesque figure than Angel: but their point of view is the same. Personally Knight had a better case for himself, but according to social conventions, in spite of Elfride’s fibs, he had less cause for his prudish cruelty. The situation wants the tragic circumstances that occur in ‘Tess’; otherwise it is the same: the casting off of the warmest love by a man who finds that an earlier story, into which he did not enter, contains what does not fit in with his conventional code for the ideal of womankind.

Perhaps ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ is still, as it was for long, the most popular of Mr. Hardy’s stories, in spite of the fact that it exemplifies all the qualities, though not all of them at their strongest, by which he has given offence. When it appeared in book form, his name for the first time on a title-page, his recognition as a writer of unusual vigour was immediate; it was a recognition, nevertheless, modified by so much criticism, that the succeeding books had still to fight their way. It presents a greater variety of moods than any of the others. The range and room of English country life for purposes of fiction he first proved in this story, which is at once comedy, tragedy, idyll, rustic chronicle, and shepherd’s calendar. Into no other book has he put such close and lavish work; none is more vivacious, more characteristic; it contains the essence of his genius. In reading it first of all — and it has introduced Mr. Hardy to many — you have the feeling of crossing or climbing something before reaching the level of full appreciation, a sensation to some extent, of course, marking every first acquaintance with a writer of originality. The feeling is not experienced in the same degree in any of the other novels. His individuality lies in his ‘humour,’ to use the word in its older sense, in his love for the unexpected, the impulsive, the vivid, in human nature and incident, in his delight in upsetting the minor proprieties, and making mock of the solemnity of petty conventions. Bathsheba’s prank of sending the valentine to Boldwood is typical of this somewhat impish temper. His ‘humour’ is what those critics have in mind who accuse him of a want of taste. There is something bristling in Mr. Hardy; there is little or no placidity; and not only in his defiant temper do you feel this. His very virtues add to the effect, the vividness of his pictures, the complex interest of his characters, the heat of the emotions he expresses. He is always awake and strenuous; there is hardly a comfortable sleepy corner in one of his stories. Perhaps that is why he jars on some nerves, though his holding the conventions as mostly of little account has been his chief cause of offence. In his novels the middle classes have their due share of representation, and I do not call to mind any passage in which he has gibed at them, or treated them otherwise than honourably. But he is not their novelist. The calm orderliness, the prudence, the respectability — the conditions by which they keep their comfortable position — are not the qualities he finds most interesting. Bathsheba so typifies his unconventionality in minor matters that ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ is an excellent starting-point for making his nearer acquaintance, apart from the fact that it represents his powers at their full compass, though not at their mellowest.

In ‘The Hand of Ethelberta,’ a London and a Wessex story, light satire is the prevailing note. If the Society scenes are not admirable, they, at least, provide the contrast that makes the piquant comedy in the history of the heroine. Ethelberta is the daughter of a highly respectable family butler, shoved up into an equality with the great folks whom her father waits on, by her graces and talents more even than by her marriage with an aristocratic minor who died in their honeymoon. For the sake of a numerous band of lowly brothers and sisters she fights for position, and lives in a perpetual conspiracy to hide or disguise their existence and the other postscenia vitae for the sake of that same position. The much sought lady of many suitors, her difficulties never give her heart a chance, and she ends as the wife of an old noble rake. The bitterness of the facts is hardly expressed in the tone, and the underside of the beautiful and vivacious Ethelberta, a dogged family faithfulness, keeps her history wholesome. A very lively story is made out of the shifts of the household which she rules as mistress, and where brother Joey is page-boy, and sisters Gwendoline and Cornelia are cook and housemaid, and out of the contrasts of her two lives, one spent in regulating the minutest details of the life of her humble family, the other in charming London drawing-rooms by her poems and wit. The Anglebury rustics as well as the Chickerel family, supply humorous by-play, and the London scenes some smart gibes at fashionable frigidities. Here, as in ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ the weary strife against the senseless class feeling, in English society is dramatised, but true to the note struck in the sub-title, ‘A Comedy in Chapters,’ and to the essentially practical nature of the heroine, neither this struggle nor the worldly marriage that ends it is presented in a tragic light. On the whole it is an amusing story, rising occasionally to brilliancy. Wherever the scenes are not merely conventional they are full of vigour: the journey of the Honourable Edgar and Sol Chickerel, builder, together into Wessex, each determined to prevent a mésalliance, the one of a noble brother to a beautiful low-born adventuress, the other of a beloved, if remotely understood, sister, to an old rakish aristocrat, candidly uncivil fellow-travellers, compelled by desperate necessity to act together even to the joint frying of bacon in their forced stopping-place, is one of the finest bits of narrative in all the stories.

Then came a book which gathered up the undertones of much of Mr. Hardy’s previous work. But in ‘The Return of the Native’ they are no longer undertones, but swelled, concentred, and urged into burning, tense, and reverberating expression. They are never long absent from the later work, but their fullest articulation is in this book that misses just criticism and nice valuation by its tremendous appeal to sympathies which are either knit in with the very fibres of life, or remote, or non-existent. It is a tragedy of temperaments; it is likewise one in which Nature and man have that rare but always fateful meeting where they wholly blend or endlessly struggle. Sea and moorland are the everlasting plains where such meetings take place, where Nature aggressively pits herself against man, or receives his fullest allegiance; and never have the battle and the blending been more hauntingly pictured than in this story of Egdon Heath. The great struggle of Lear on the same wild land is more of an incident in another kind of tragedy. Here the heath has a personality, a temperament, far more forcible than any of its dwellers; it is a brooding, pervasive presence acting on them always, stinging them to revolt, encircling and hushing them. One forgets willingly enough the incidents of the story, to remember it only as the expression of the dark, resisting, untameable mood of nature, set to a human tune.

Society has been left far behind, which never means with Mr. Hardy — or any one else not tainted with literary west-end provincialism — the absence in the characters of complex human motives. Outer and inner experiences are by no means always coextensive. One of the principal actors is a son of the soil, who has left Paris and worldly success to find something better to do than selling trinkets in a suffering world, and who comes back to the heath to find his work, which he does, first in furze-cutting, and eventually in preaching. The other is an exotic, perfervid woman, craving the light and glitter of the outer world, with an original brain and a mean soul, made tragic by her terribly alien circumstances. They are not ordinary characters, but they are as likely to be found on a heath as elsewhere, and when they are, a tragedy is in the making. ‘The Return of the Native’ is the old tale of the new, the slight, the vulgar, struggling against the old, the strong, the real; of passion warring, now against passion and now against thought; of ambition and idealism in their ever futile striving. Round about like wild-flowers growing in blithe confidence on the edge of a roaring torrent, are the quaint humours, the unthinking repose, of Grandfer Cantle, of Christian, and the mummers. It is a book of striking incidents and powerful dramatic situations, but it is easy to find blemishes and incongruities in it. ‘Wuthering Heights,’ though it outrages human probabilities far more in its characters, has, in the simplicity and boldness of its construction, a great advantage over this kindred book. Both are poems rather than novels; but ‘The Return of the Native’ has the ambition to be completely a novel, too, and the narrative is not always on a level with the spirit enwrapping it — a spirit that were more fittingly set to a wild metre and music. The youthful mood of the world was reflected in ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’; ‘The Return of the Native’ reflects, not the aged, perhaps, which may be less sensitive and gentler, but father maturity, with its emotions at their strongest, and its eyes at their full courage, looking unshrinkingly on the struggle at its darkest and bitterest. Mr. Hardy has written cleverer novels, and novels where the ills of life have had more pathetic expression. But by its poetic force and its conquering spirit over those whom it touches at all, it contains the finest of his work.

In ‘The Trumpet Major’ you descend to a cooler air. Tragedy keeps off, or you see but a gentle shadow of it as John vanishes into the darkness, a smile on his lips and a tear in his eye for sweet Anne Garland. Virtue, in the shape of as fine a hero of chivalry as ever sat at the Table Round, is not rewarded; but that is too much of a commonplace to make a moan over, and the tone of the story is as clear and ringing as the notes from John’s own trumpet. Love is still the lord of all, and a most arbitrary, inconsequent lord, too, with whom it’s no use arguing, to whom it’s no use showing certificates of character, or records of service. And really, when he favours Bob Loveday, who has a word to say against him? That half-suppressed fun and that rare humour of the eyes that Mr. Hardy reveals every now and again, with lapses into grimness, from ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ to ‘A Few Crusted Characters,’ play round every scene and character in this book, in a kindly mocking commentary, in satire without a sting.

In this, as in the shorter stories where another age is pictured, there is no insistence on detail by way of proving historical acquaintance with the epoch; but the stirring days when Boney was nightly expected to land his army on our coast in flat-bottomed boats, and rustics drilled with pikes and hurdle-sticks and cabbage-stumps on the Downs, are present to our eyes and ears. Unintentionally, and therefore the more vividly, it is an unforgetable page in history. Of all the groups in the novels, the mill folks, the kindly miller, the inconsequent Mrs. Garland, maidy Anne, John and Bob, are those we are on most familiar terms with. They are our veritable neighbours; we have none in our street or parish we know better.

‘The Trumpet Major’ is the tersest of the longer stories, the fullest of nervous vigour, the most literary. The reviewer Knight in ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ says: ‘It requires a talented omission of your real thoughts to make a novel popular.’ Whether that be so or not, it requires some such omission to make a novel a perfect work of art, in the narrower sense of the term. A novelist in a personal mood, confessing himself to the world, or evangelising it, may be fulfilling the greatest in him; but full revelation of emotion and opinion tends to diffuseness, and to the ups and downs of style and arrangement coincident with the swell and the exhaustion of the emotions expressed. It is not, therefore, in ‘Tess’ that Mr. Hardy shows himself most of a practised and perfect craftsman, but in the stories revealing fewer layers of his mind, and made of material to be more coolly dealt with, in ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ in some of the shorter stories, and especially in ‘The Trumpet Major.’

If Mr. Hardy’s progress were to be traced weather-chartwise, here would occur a great depression. The next two novels are inferior to the rest of his work, and one of them only in a passage or two recalls the writer’s real powers. Dulness is the last quality to be associated with Mr. Hardy; but ‘A Laodicean’ is dull. It begins excellently, and the episode of the baptism in the Methodist chapel, where the courage of the lady of the manor is not equal to the strain put upon it by devotion to her pious father’s memory, is piquant and full of promise. But Paula, the least charming of ail the vacillating heroines, is forcible enough to give tone to the book; and the central fact about her being her sense of the precariousness of her social position as parvenue lady of the manor, the tone is one of extreme rigidity. As worldly as Ethelberta, she has none of Ethelberta’s fire and dash, nor the excuse of her desperate fortunes. A Wessex and a society novel, it has the excellencies of neither. The tortuous love-story is not very interesting; De Stancy is an unwholesome bore; the constant click of the excitable telegraph and the chase of the lovers, all at cross purposes, across the Continent, grow wearisome. Yet there is good and close work in it: indeed, it has the appearance of having been written in an industrious fit of unowned exhaustion. And it could not be Mr. Hardy’s without being redeemed in some way from mere commonplace. It has an interesting side, this ‘Story of To-day.’ The substitution of modern energy and brains, expressed in money, for the old feudal prestige, is the idea at the bottom of it. Brains and wealth have conquered. The engineer takes possession of the De Stancy castle and lands, and bequeathes them to his daughter. Not only is there a De Stancy ready to love her with a fierce devotion and to give her the only thing she lacks; but the very castle has a personality. It saps her modern faith, and rouses longings in her for that old romance that money cannot buy. His own castle walls, no longer his, fight on De Stancy’s side: the De Stancy ghosts are the real rivals in her heart to Somerset’s claims. Indeed, so strong is this that the walls have to be burnt to the ground before you are fully assured of her loyalty to the architect hero. The castle is the most interesting character in the book.

Not much above ‘A Laodicean’ in general excellence, and of slighter build, ‘Two on a Tower’ has at least a charm which the other lacks. The situation is somewhat morbidly unreal, but it provides a few excellent situations. Besides, the characters — they are few — draw out one’s sympathies more than do the frigid ones of the preceding book. Lady Constantine and Swithin are not rustics., but their isolation and peculiar temperaments have stripped them of conventionality. The lonely woman suffering from neglect and the cruel restrictions forced on her life, feeding on her own heart till she falls in love with the much younger Swithin, whose emotions are of the most rudimentary kind, and whose intellectual interests are of the most absorbing, is the victim of one of those ironical situations in which life delights, according to the observation of Mr. Hardy. The plot is ingenious: the personages are extricated from, or entangled in, the situations of difficulty with fine skill; and if the book is, on the whole, thin and disappointing, and if there are few or no great passages, there is, at least, Swithin. Never has science, notoriously the most disinterested of human pursuits, been so attractively personified as in the beautiful young astronomer. Rarely has its cool, clear temper, its truthful spirit, and its limitations of sympathy, had a keener-sighted presentment.

The line of progress which had run down, now shoots up again with rapid decision in the novel published four years later than ‘Two on a Tower,’ ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge.’ With less of terse vigour than ‘The Trumpet Major,’ and one or two characters, Lucetta and Farfrae, shaky in their reality, it is yet strong in human interest, dramatic in its incidents, and in the rise and progress of its action. No unreality clings round the Mayor, who is as living to us as if we had been browbeaten by him, or been the recipients of his large capricious favours. In this story of ‘the life and death of a man of character,’ the central figure dwarfs, with intention, the rest of the personages, and to some extent the events, not from any inhabitual slightness of the incidents, or from weakness in the characters in general. Henchard was made by nature to be the principal feature and obstacle in his own and his neighbour’s views, and his biographer expresses the fact. He plays the overmastering part, tempered by human fragility and instability, that the heath does in ‘The Return of the Native’ and the woods in ‘The Woodlanders,’ a part that Mr. Hardy rarely assigns to his human personages. His personality so affects the course and complexion of the story as to make its construction worth the closest examination. His contradictory emotions, his savagery and sentiment, each have their harmonic counterparts in the incidents: the lurid ones, like the selling of the wife at Weydon Priors and the skimmity-ride, standing out strong against the lonely death of the Mayor, and the quiet walk and conduct of the still-natured Elizabeth-Jane.

‘The Woodlanders’ must be placed just after Mr. Hardy’s greater novels, ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’ ‘The Return of the Native,’ ‘The Trumpet Major,’ ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ and ‘Tess.’ In all his best work there is something recognisable beyond the story, a poetic idea or intention of which the narrative serves as illustration and commentary. The idea or intention never fails in greatness, but sometimes the illustration halts, and this is truer of ‘The Woodlanders’ than of ‘The Return of the Native.’ For its description of country life, and for its central conception — which may be interpreted as the effect of the woodlands on their own children, refining by their isolation and beauty Giles and Marty, and on aliens, driving Felice to revolt and selfish passion — the book deserves a high place. But Grace’s story comes as a weaker note. There is something in her earlier character, at least, that does not answer to Mr. Hardy’s touch. He is in fuller sympathy with less conventional, more passionate, more vivacious natures. The taint of fineladyism is about her and her story: and gentle satire would have been the most effective treatment for her troubles, arising out of the differences between her home-surroundings and her education. Such little difficulties, made so much of in life, give a novelist his chance of teaching a sense of proportion. Fitzpiers, too, is not one of his author’s happy presentations of intellectual men. He talks more insufferably than he acts. The quiet of the woods rouses despair and revolt in Felice: it only breeds conceit in the doctor. In spite of weaknesses, the book claims our sympathies strongly in other directions, and many of its descriptive passages, Midsummer Eve in the woods, for instance, Sherton in the cider season, the barking of the trees, the view from Rubdon Hill over the blue apple valley, are of a kind to cling to the memory as do only a few of the scenes that have met our bodily eyes.

‘Tess’ has been pushed to the front because of the problems it deals with, but perhaps the place assigned to it is the right one, for, judged by the strength of its appeal to human sympathies, it is doubtless his greatest book. ‘Sent out in all sincerity of purpose,’ its author said of it in his first preface, but sincerity seems hardly to express the intense and burning earnestness with which his championship of Tess is filled. This very earnestness has shaken his hand now and again, and prevented an idyll of singular beauty, a tragedy of force enough to drive complacency out of the smuggest, from being a complete artistic success. Its greatness is proved by its lovers mostly forgetting its defects in their memory of the whole. Only in summoning a judicial mood do they call to mind that there are improbabilities in the story — and Angel’s proposal to Izz to go with him to Brazil is not a slight one; why, if he wished to ‘rule his future domesticities himself, instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention,’ didn’t he go and fetch Tess? Then the drivelling John Durbeyfield drivels a little too much, and Tess and Angel talk too big. Very likely a definitive edition of the book is wanted. It may be a matter of question whether the murder, or the madness its cause, or the hanging its consequence, be strictly necessary. It is a book that holds both cheeks ready for the smiting of the little critic, as do not a few of the great books of the world, till tradition has raised a fence of reverence about them, and they become fetishes. But, in no carping mood, one must own that, apart from the central figure, it is poorer than any of the other great novels in strong presentations of character, as it is richer, .or, at least subtler, in its interpretation of Nature.

Mr. Hardy meant the book to be a battleground, and it has been so. Had he merely appealed to sentiment, omitted the violent acts of the end, and made claims for Tess’s loveableness, not for her virtue, he might have carried all his readers with him. Many would have been tender-hearted enough to be sorry for Tess, who treat her author’s insistence on her purity either as an outrage or a quibble. He preferred to make war. The omission of the murder and its consequences would have left the problem stated, certainly, of the woman undergoing her undue share of suffering; but Mr. Hardy does not feel his business stop at the statement of problems. He gives their working-out in individual lives. First he shows Tess as grievously wronged, and then how such wrong may be, by the meekest natures, thrown back with awful violence in the world’s face, a fact worth exemplifying at the cost of readers’ feelings.

The chief cause of offence besides the sub-title ‘A Pure Woman,’ or rather because of the sub-title, is Tess’s return to D’Urberville. It has been said to be improbable. It has also been said to prove her impurity. Surely here Mr. Hardy was pointing to one of the great facts of life which ethics are bound to face, a fact neither moral nor immoral, that the human will has limits of vitality, which means limits of resistance, that, only let the struggle be terrible enough for any individual, he will give in. The power of resistance varies infinitely in weak and strong, but so does the strength of the attack; and a sensitive nature has less chance of victory than a stolid one. The surrender — in the virtuous chiefly physical — may mean, in fortunate cases, death, but it may mean, unless suicide be resorted to, a continuance of exhausted life, in which circumstances easily win. And saints are subject in like manner, if not in like degree, as sinners, to this law of human limitation, which is as inevitable as the coming on of old age, and has its examples beyond what are known as the temptations of life. Every man who has given up, for weariness, the ideals of his youth, has experienced this mastery of the spirit by the weakness of the body. The surrender took place, it is said, because Tess was pagan, and so the miracle could not happen. But does the miracle give more than the utmost of one’s own strength sublimated by imagination or faith? Fatigue is not a condonation lightly to be put forward for weakness, but it is a cogent plea in that final court of appeal to which only the great suits and struggles of life are carried. Tess presents the type of woman for generations dear to her condemners, ready to merge her whole being in another’s, in perfect devotion and trust. The other miserably failed her. Angel’s shoddy idealism stuck at one fact, and ignored all the rest of his knowledge of her. There was nothing else in life, and the brothers and sisters prevented death from being an alternative: her domestic affections combined with exhaustion and completed the surrender, such as it was. Then Angel came back — proof she had been lied to. The world returned, but with it the streak of madness in her blood awoke, and she had revenge on what had cursed her life.

Condonation or explanation of this kind does not mean the substitution of an easier code. Mr. Hardy has, inferentially, adopted a harder one and a higher one than the world is likely to reach for some time, namely, that the measure of purity, and of the reverse, is in the heart’s intentions and desires. His thesis is that Tess’s desires were pure: so, therefore, was she. In estimating the morality of his point of view, it may not be unhelpful to read, by way of contrast, the words of a reviewer in a well-considered organ of literary opinion. ‘Angel Clare is a good man, just and not unduly severe. It is natural that he should discard his wife, not unnatural, considering her sensual attractions, that he should come back to her, and not notice the lemon-coloured finery.’Even his hardest critics — save only this one — will recognise here a depth to which he has not sunk.

Whether he has proved his case or not, he has, with more courage and chivalry than any other, thrown down his glove in defence of the woman who, be she good or bad, in the particular catastrophe, always pays the whole penalty of suffering and disgrace. He has tilted hard against conventions and the timid silences, and he has made himself be listened to. It is not pity he asks for Tess. Philanthropy has long pitied her. He would draw her ‘poor wounded name’ from obloquy, and raise her to the level where the innocency of her intentions gives her a right to dwell. But if he claims justice rather than pity, he bestows pity on her abundantly himself, and on Tess, more than on any other of his creations, has he poured out his humanity.

A word as to the shorter stories, dealt with elsewhere. ‘Wessex Tales,’ a collection of five, contributed to various periodicals from 1879 to 1888, and published in the latter year, includes some work at his best level, ‘The Three Strangers,’ since successfully dramatised, ‘The Distracted Preacher,’ and ‘The Withered Arm.’ The two others, ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ and ‘Fellow Townsmen,’ in greyer tones and minor key, contain some subtle reading of motive and character. ‘A Group of Noble Dames,’ published in 1891, is a collection of piquant stories made out of some family legends of his county. A storm-bound Field and Antiquarian Club, being unable to visit, as they had planned, the antiquities of the neighbourhood, the local historian tells the tale of ‘The First Countess of Wessex,’ as a substitute for ‘the regulation papers on deformed butterflies, fossil ox-horns, pre-historic dung-mixens, and such like, that usually occupied the more serious attention of the members.’ His example is followed, and the comments of the members contribute not a little to the abundant humour which is a feature of the stories, notwithstanding the fact that only two out of the ten can be classed as comedy. The conversational style in which they are told keeps the atmosphere cool, and gives opportunity for that light mocking tone which Mr. Hardy can adopt with much skill when he would show the humour of serious situations, and which, being neither bitter nor hilarious, has no incongruity in tales of sadness. ‘Life’s Little Ironies’ — published in March 1894 — consists of stories contributed to magazines from 1882 to 1893. ‘A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four’ which is hardly an ‘Irony,’ and the bubbling fun of ‘A Few Crusted Characters,’ the second part of the book, mitigate the gloom of the rest, which is of every complexion of sorrow, ‘The Son’s Veto,’ and ‘For Conscience Sake’ being of the subdued order of ‘Fellow Townsmen,’ while ‘A Tragedy of Two Ambitions ’ and ‘To Please his Wife’ have more of unrestrained bitterness about them. ‘On the Western Circuit’ and ‘The Fiddler of the Reels,’ two powerful studies of morbid mental and moral conditions, have been followed by another in the same strain, ‘An Imaginative Woman,’ not yet included in a volume.

Since ‘The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament,’ which appeared as a serial in The Illustrated London News in 1892, has not yet been published in book form, perhaps we may hope the ending given to the story is not the inevitable one. The weary Jocelyn, tossed to and fro all his life by his homeless emotions, might surely at last find the rest he sought beneath the waves, and not be picked up only to meet a ghastly reminder of one of his many failures to realise his dream. The fickle hero, a sculptor, is constancy itself to one never-fading vision in his mind. In his search for its realisation he loves here, there, and everywhere, but the vision flees at the approach of the earthly beloved, and he will make no compromise. Late in life he finds his ideal bound fast in the grandchild of one of his early temporary loves; but his tardy faithfulness is unrewarded, for his young wife, his beloved, has her own vision, which is not a picture of himself. His conduct in the circumstances is of a generosity the law would frown on. ‘The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved’ is full of Mr. Hardy’s peculiar sympathy with complexities of the soul, and his pity is not ill-spent on the hero, who was no professional breaker of hearts. The roll of his loves has yet something of the comic about it: a shorter one had amply served as manifestation of his temperament. But the ugliness that might lurk in such a story is killed by the conviction forced on us of the reality of Jocelyn’s ideal.

Chapter 4 — Storywright

Of all Mr. Hardy’s gifts, that of making pictures occurs most readily to one’s mind at the mention of his name, though in the conception of some characters, and in the ideas at the back of some stories, he has revealed a higher imaginative power. His invention of incidents — both those of the character-revealing order and those that flash on the vision, delights of colour and grouping, complete in themselves — is of the readiest and the most inexhaustible. Nearly all his situations give the idea of actually having been seen rather than having been thought out by their inventor; our sight of them is the more vivid. This special talent generally urges its possessor to writing novels of the heroic sword-and-cloak order, but Mr. Hardy has used it mostly for lighting up the life of modern days. His colouring is bold, his detail precise, and grouped with conscious art; his high lights are emphasised. It is through this emphasis, by which he sometimes attacks rather than persuades the eyes, that he now and again goes wrong. The commonplace in incident has not often satisfied him; he loves to drag his personages into bizarre situations, where they grow desperate or light-headed, where circumstances stand to them in strong contrast, mark their isolation, prove their weakness or their strength. In the sequestered vale of Wessex life it is as often the struggles and catastrophes he has presented as the even tenor of rustic ways.

His plans of structure in his stories are various, but a plan there always is; there are no stray disjointed sketches. ‘Under the Greenwood Tree,’ ‘The Trumpet Major’, and ‘The Woodlanders’ are not built on a dramatic plan, but they have complete pictorial unity. In ‘Desperate Remedies,’ and ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’ of much more elaborate mechanism, the separate parts fit in with rare precision. The three tragedies, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge,’ ‘The Return of the Native,’ and ‘Tess’ are of the traditional five act build. It would be easy to divide the first into the stages of a regular drama: Act 1. — The sale of the wife atWeydon Priors Fair, Henchard’s remorse and his vow. Act 2. — The prosperity consequent on his keeping the vow, and on his strenuous ambitions and endeavours, eccentricity and weakness, nevertheless, creeping in and paving the way for his troubles in Act 3., where Farfrae outrivals him in love and business, the rivalry provoking the worst in the mayor’s character, and bringing on the days of adversity and degradation in Act 4. There, having drunk misery to the lees, the good in him comes to the surface under the companionship of that still soul Elizabeth-Jane, his chastened happiness, nevertheless, preparing the further wretchedness in the last act, when Newson returns to steal her affections from him, and when, bereft of love and hope and fortune, he shoulders his workman’s tools again, wanders in a circle round and round the spot where his heart still lives, till, wearied out, he lies down in his old servant’s hut in Egdon to die.