THOMAS HARDY 1840-1928 "The Ruined ML nists, and in all concerned Hardy denied who believes the sign of meliore the one he wrote trate the perver poems or by clegiae feeling rounded in teristic modo by chance, while first wife in 191 loss area of southwest England that he was to make the Wessex of his fiction homas Hardy was born in the Dorset hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, in the poetry. The son of a stonemason, the young Hardy was kept mostly at home, where he closely observed and came to love the surrounding countryside, the rhythms the seasons and the songs, stories, and foll beliefs of a still predominantly alcal ture. He attended local schools until the age of sixteen, when he was apprentices Dorchester architect in whose office he remained for six years. In 1862 he med to London and found a position as a draftsman in the office of Arthur leading architect of Gothic-style buildings. Meanwhile, as Hardy was completing his general education informally through his eclectic reading, he began to stay and write poetry. His first novel, seen as an attack on upper-class pretension, rejected by publishers in 1868, though one of the readers, George Meredith, sed Hardy to write another work of fiction, with a more complicated plot. The real was the sensational novel Desperate Remedies (1871), which was followed by a tale of rural life, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The serialization of his next two novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-73) and Far from the Modding Crowd (1874,pe vided him with sufficient income to abandon architecture for literature. He contin ued to write novels until the sexual frankness and religiousness of his last novel Jude the Olrscure (1895), resulted in a hostile critical reception, including in headed "Jude the Obscene" and "Hardy the Degenerate Financial security finally enabled Hardy to make his long-desired return to poetry, Straddling the Victoria and modern periods, he published all his novels in the nineteenth century, and 2 but the first of his poetry collections, Wessex Pormes and Other Verses (1898), in the twentieth. His remarkable epic drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, come Hardy's verse on first reading like many mode sonances, and ity and sponta adhering to the creates irregul deliberately w torts, vigorous genres such as Though rooted of poetie form The sadness his sense of the when faced w mood, found ald's Rundt attitudes towa disappearance raries, not leas death, at age 87. out in three parts between 1903 and 1908, and he continued to write verse until his In Hardy's fiction, set in the predominantly rural "Wessex," acutely observed and richly detailed, the forces of nature outside and inside individuals combine to shape human destiny. Against a background of immemorial agricultural labor, with ancient monuments such as Stonehenge or a Roman amphitheater remindings of the past, he presents characters at the mercy of elements beyond their control their emotions or sexual impulses, and the barriers of social class and restrictions of social mores. Men and women in Hardy's fiction are rarely masters of their fates walking long distances across a landscape that dwarfs them, they may be subjected to the indifferent forces that manipulate their behavior and their relations with others. They can achieve dignity, however, through endurance, heroism, or simple strength of character. Most of his fiction is tragic or at least tragicomic, observing humanity with a mixture of cold detachment and searching empathy, and exploring the bitter ironies of life with an almost malevolent staging of coincidence to emphur size the disparity between human desire and ambition, on the one hand, and, on the other, what fate-often determined by the character's very nature has de of England simply as the theory of eve century liter Arnold was "Dover Beach sterner, more news, this rue its formal was even occasio reputation as anything abc with this test Thomas Har major figure ential Oxford store. One of the darkest of Hardy's novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (18911, is the story of an intelligent and sensitive young woman, daughter of a poor family who is of events and circumstances. Published in the same year as Tess, the story anthol driven to murder, and thus to death by hanging, by a painfully ironic concatenation woman deceived by a sophisticated city man; her "ruin" (see also Hardy's porn gized here. "On the Western Circuit," similarly has at its center a young country 1914 THOMAS HARDY 1915 all concerned. The Ruined Maid) leads--contrary to the good intentions of the three protago nists, and again as the result of bitter irony -to Inis ruin and a lifetime of misery for Hardy denied that he was a pessimist, calling himself a 'meliorist-that is one who believes that the world can be made better by human effort. But there is little sign of meliorism in either his fiction or his poetry. A number of his poems, such as the one he wrote about the Titanic disaster. "The Convergence of the Twain," illus trate the perversity of fate, the disastrous or ironic coincidence of events. Other poems go beyond this mood to present, with quiet gravity and a carefully controlled elegiac feeling, some aspect of human sorrow, loss, frustration, or regret, always grounded in a particular, fully realized situation. "Hap" shows Hardy in the charac teristic mood of complaining about the irony of human destiny in a universe ruled by chance, while "The Walk" one of a group of poems written after the death of his loss. first wife in 1912) gives, with remarkable power, concrete embodiment to a sense of Hardy's verse, like his prose, often has a self-taught air about it, both can seem, on first reading, roughly hewn. He said he wanted to avoid the jewelled line," and like many modern and contemporary poets, he sought instead what he called "dis- sonances, and other irregularities in his art, because they convey more authentic ity and spontaneity. "Art is a disproportioning ...of realities," he declared. While adhering to the metered line, Hardy roughens prosody and contorts syntax, and he creates irregular and complex stanza forms. His diction includes archaises and deliberately awkward coinages les "Powerfuller" and "unblooms" in "Hap). He dis- torts, vigorously revises, and sometimes forces together conventions of traditional genres such as the sonnet, the ballad, the love poem, the war poem, and the elegy. Though rooted in the Victorian period, Hardy thus looks ahead to the dislocations of poetic form carried out by subsequent poets of the twentieth century. The sadness in Hardy his skepticism about the existence of a benevolent God, his sense of the waste and frustration involved in human life, his insistent irony when faced with moral or metaphysical questions-is part of the late Victorian mood, found also, say, in A. E. Housman's poetry and earlier, in Edward FitzGer ald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyum, published when Hardy was eighteen. Although his attitudes toward the sacred remained tangled and vexed, what has been termed the disappearance of God" affected him more deeply than it did many of his contempo raries, not least because as a young man he seriously considered becoming a Church of England priest. Yet his characteristic themes and attitudes cannot be viewed simply as the reaction to the scientific and philosophical developments (Darwin's theory of evolution, for example) that we see in many forms in late nineteenth- century literature. The favorite poetic mood of both Tennyson and Matthew Arnold was also elegiac (e.g., in Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and Arnold's "Dover Beach"), but the mood of Hardy's poetry differs from Victorian sorrow; it is sterner, more skeptical, as though braced by a long look at the worst. It is this stern ness, this ruggedness of his poetry, together with its verbal and emotional integrity, its formal variety and tonal complexity, its quietly searching individual accent and even occasional playfulness, that helped bring about the steady rise in Hardy's reputation as a poet. Ezra Pound remarked in a 1930 letter "Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died. W. H. Auden begins an essay with this testament to the effect of Hardy's verse I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him. And Hardy appears as the mntial of Pool of Tuyntieth-Century English Verse (1973). major figure with more poems than either Yeats or Eliot-in Philip Larkin's influ-
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