Books
A laurel for Hardy
Roy Fuller The Genius of Thomas Hardy edited by Margaret Drabble (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.50)
The Hardy industry continues to flourish, the editor remarks in her introduction to this collection of essays, adding frankly that the book is an example of it. The volume is in the near children's annual format favoured by these publishers, and while the fifteen contributors are by no means preponderantly middlebrow or journalistic, fresh critical opinion and original scholarship are somewhat lacking. However, even Hardy devotees may profit in some way from the book and it should surely be useful and stimulating to near beginners—the intelligent sixth-former, say. There are three sections of good illustrations: biographical, topographical and social.
Several contributors refer to the rather dramatic graph of Hardy's reputation, and Gregory Stevens Cox (himself a notable toiler in the industry before referred to) sketches it for us in his essay here. I am just too young to recall Hardy as a national institution who inspired uninvited visitors, picture postcards and cigarette cards, and an enormous correspondence from both the famous and the obscure (some 4187 of these letters, Mr Cox tells us, are preserved in the Dorset County Museum). I was only sixteen when Hardy died in 1928, an event that may have led me to The Dynasts, which I certainly read at that age. But neither then nor for a number of years after did I regard him as a great poet.
That indubitable fact was not brought home to me until 1940 when I read, or read in, the brilliant Hardy centenary number of the Southern Review (the literary quarterly, happily going still, published by the Louisiana State University). Of course, Hardy was then universally thought of as a great novelist but how rigid and conventional criticism of him had been even in this field may be seen from the opening paragraph of the excellent contribution to that centenary number by Allen Tate (now to be found in his Essays of Four Decades), where, among other startling things, he cites Lionel Johnson's book of 1894 as one of the two worthwhile critical works on Hardy!
Even now the nature and extent of Hardy's poetic and prose achievements are in debate. Some (not Geoffrey Grigson, whose essay on the poems here is characteristically alert) still have it that Hardy's verse contains a deal of prosy rubbish and needs drastic selection to make it acceptable. Others, of whom I am one, believe the contrary and look forward to the longrequired new edition of the poetry, which I understand is to be published soon. As to the fiction, it seems to me that old attitudes, or attitudes somewhat irrelevant to the modern reader's experience of fiction, are still being taken critically. The 'Wessex' syndrome is common, though Denys Kay-Robinson, who writes sensibly about the disguises in topography and nomenclature in Hardy, says justly that identifying the reality is merely a "pleasant game". The danger is a pervasive critical cosiness that blurs evaluation, as happened with Hugh Walpole's novels about the Lake District. There is danger, too, in too great a critical attention to Hardy's 'philosophy' (a danger J. I. M. Stewart does not entirely avoid in his essay on the major novels, though he writes well). Hardy's sexually shocking qualities (which, in terms of his reputation, preceded his status as sage or oracle) do not now obtrude and surely it is time that the notorious pessimism was taken for granted—after all, the objection to his 'gods and flies' view of human destiny was formed when evil and suffering were less pervasive in civilised parts than they are today.
"Everything about Hardy was oldfashioned," A. 0. J. Cockshut observes in his intelligent piece on this very subject, Hardy's philosophy. Yes, but Hardy is— we feel it intensely—a 'modern' writer. Though he began as a poet in the 1860s, his poetry rightly figures in many current anthologies of modern verse. Despite Mr Stewart being able to say that "in Hardy we are never many pages away from eruptions of slap-dash writing by a fatigued hack", and Thomas Hinde pointing out implausibilities in Tess, and Hardy's fictional compromises with the taste of his day, referred to several times in this book, it seems to me that he is a 'modern' novelist, too. Part of the quality comes from his unrelenting ironic scepticism: there is no 'bull' in Hardy in this important area. Another part comes from his poetic particularities, which Mr Grigson illustrates so well from the verse but which also of course exist in the novels. Tess on the last night in the Marlott cottage after her father's death:
She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement, where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of glass. Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement.
Surely touches of this quality not only make the girl indestructibly real, but also enable the author to get away with neglecting aspects of his narrative and personae which interest him less or not at all, as for instance in the characterisation of Alec. Though Under the Greenwood Tree was subtitled A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, one might say that in general the novels were more like great cartoons. And, not dissimilarly, the murder in Tess is made utterly convincing by a poetic stroke of a kind quite otnri; (as perhaps the best poetic strokes essentially are):
Her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had never noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she first observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her hand, and then she could perceive that it was red. The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.
Mr Grigson quotes a sentence from Hardy which succinctly expresses his modernistic character: "The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things." Also apropos is Hardy's devisal of his "phantasmal Intelligences", extremely well described here by Harold Orel in his essay on 'Hardy and the Theatre'.
A good proportion of The Genius of Thomas Hardy is biographical. I must admit that in addition to finding his work congenial I think his character and doings endlessly fascinating. There are paradoxes here also, for he had a long and quietly unhappy first marriage, an uneventful second, an early period of crude lionisation (to which, surprisingly, he responded), and a later (and longer) period as a near-recluse. Such things as his parsimony only make him, of course, the more interesting: in a brisk, sensible piece Sheila Sullivan tells us that at Max Gate half a pound of liver had to lo for four people.
As to the mysterious early affair with Tryphena Sparks, we are presented here merely with the views of the extremists, Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman, and miss the presence of the latest sifter of the sparse facts, Robert Gittings. There is no doubt that this episode, and the death of his first wife in 1912, made Hardy's verse into something much more than the nature poetry, the poetry of social nostalgia and personal observation, that he was congenitally capable of. The post-1912 poems are quite Rilkean in the overwhelming pressures that brought them into being (a pity the editor couldn't have got Mr Grigson and Dr Rowse to agree approximately how many poems there are about the first marriage). And their copiousness is one reason why a Selected Poems can never satisfy.
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