BOOKS Has Hardy Dated?

By JOHN HOLLOWAY HAS Hardy dated? His novels belong intri- cately to their Wessex world; and if that has now no bearing on the world of today, we must find out whether his work can speak to us still. Shakespeare—to risk a loose comparison or so—does not retain his place for insight into royal legitimacy, nor Milton for his Protestant- ism, nor Dickens just on account of his lively eye for Victorian London.

With Hardy, it is not merely that the surface of rural life has changed. The possibility is of a deeper irrelevance. The admirer of Wordsworth faces a like challenge. Wordsworth's intact and archaic Lakeland prompted him to see the norm of human good in a distinctive way. He saw it as the serene and thoughtful life of a pastoral community whose terrain was dominated by its scenically spectacular but economically unde- veloped areas. Soon there will be no such mode of life on the planet; so one has to think again.

Neither Hardy's community, nor his terrain, are like Wordsworth's; and neither are his find- ings. Hardy's terrain had not a pastoral but a labouring population; its waste places impressed less through grandeur than through featureless severity; and it formed the subject of his work during the first decades of the Great Agricul- tural Depression. Full, true enough, of beauty and picturesque detail, its final impression is nevertheless one of hardness and difficulty. Men live successfully if they bow to life's constraints. `The secret . . . of making limited opportunities endurable' is the typical wisdom.

Hardy's picture therefore takes in much of the thought of his time; for it is a remarkable thing that spectacular advances in material knowledge and power brought to Victorianism not a smoother and more confident, but a harsher and more sombre vision. The sciences began to offer a full and reasoned comprehension of man's place in nature, but what that seemed to invite was courage before an unfeeling and all-powerful externality. The social sciences brought not growth economics but Malthus and the Iron Law of Wages; the physical sciences, something like that swing from optimism to final nothing- ness which intrudes so starkly at the end of Spencer's First Principles; and the biological, Darwin, the discrediting of the Bible, and nature as universal war. But if Darwin applied Malthus to nature (as he said), Hardy reversed the pro- cess, and applied Darwin back to man.

Man's mastery of nature was then a mastery

of comprehension. Men thought they truly saw, for the first time, the great objective forces within which they had to live. But the twentieth cen- tury has passed, to a degree not then envisaged, beyond comprehension to manipulation; and its accompanying temper of mind has changed accordingly, into the buoyant, social-engineering busy-ness where Right vies with Left today. In view of this, one may ask where Hardy can still touch ourselves. Henchard, escaping half-crazed, at the end, dogged by the faithful half-crazy Whittle ('in the blue o' the morning, when 'twas hardly day, I looked ahead of me, and I zeed that he wambled and could hardly get along'); Tess plodding twenty miles, in boots like a Vamp's, to see her in-laws; young Jude on the muddy upland all day, scaring the birds with a wooden clacker; the old man 'white-headed as a mountain,' tramping the white road over Egdon, and getting a lift in the reddleman's cart. . . . These details are not idle local colour. They build up, and I hope they bring swiftly to mind, the essence of Hardy's Wessex: its nearness to nature, its severity, how the impersonal in it broods always just behind the personal. What has this to do with an age of psychiatric treat- ment on the NHS, STD, motorways, country buses everywhere, rationalised transport and in- dustrial farming? Has Hardy dated?

Professor Weber's book* is for those whom the question does not trouble. This solid and detailed biography first appeared in 1940. The author points out that since then he has edited three volumes of Hardy's letters; but his `thoroughly revised' edition seems to draw on only one of them, and his references to some important works on Hardy since 1940 (books or editions, say, by A. J. Guerard, Douglas Brown, or Evelyn Hardy) are negligible. So is the terse note on the fascinating boys' story, Our Exploits at West Poley, rediscovered only in 1952. It is not the revision one might have hoped for, but one is glad to have a useful book in print again.

Conceivably, it is The Dynastsf which, of all Hardy's work, has retained real topicality. Hardy had to go back a century to find a full-scale European war. His readers had to wait only a third of that time, for two; and The Dynasts stands with The Red Badge of Courage in its modern treatment of the battlefield. Moreover, Hardy's attempt to relate public life and grand strategy to the private lives of both great and small, and his sense of history as the working out of moral and more particularly philosophical ultimates, are more than the continuation of some major modes of nineteenth-century thought. They relate to our large-scale-organisation world more widely than anything else in our verse. Hardy's measure of success--and radical failure of style—help to set, say, the Cantos or Paterson in perspective. Mr. Wain writes suggestively of how The Dynasts is like a film-script, but other- wise it seems not much to have interested him.

Mr. Morrell, in his thoughtful and distinctive book,I does indeed provide an .answer; because he propounds a new Hardy, an anti-fatalist, exis- tentialist one, whose theme is often 'not the disaster but the disaster's unnecessariness,' and who, as the apostle of 'where there's a will there's a way,' is re-seen by Mr. Morrell in the buoyant, activist pattern of our time. There is a good deal of pepperiness and sarcasm in this book, which I perhaps find more obtrusive than others will, because Mr.• Morrell does me the honour

of casting me as his principal opponent. There

are also enough rhetorical questions, digressions, and jumping from issue to issue, in part to con-

ceal how much close argument the book contains. The Will and the Way is often right: right • HARDY OF WESSEX. HIS LII E AND LITERARY CAREER. By Carl J. Weber. (Routledge, 40s.)

t THE DYNASTS. With an introduction by John Wain. (Papermac, 10s. 6d.)

THOMAS HARDY: THE WILL AND THE WAY. By Roy Morrell. (0.U.P., 42s. 6d.) to dismiss views like Mr. Wain's: `. . . a tragic fatalist, holding it useless to struggle' (for Hardy, the struggle against destiny, just as much as there is of it and no more, is almost one of destiny's donnges); right to stress that Hardy sees weak sides to rural life; right (against myself) at least to the extent that the word 'Nature' tends, to raise as many issues as it settles; and right that Hardy thought intelligence could 'bend a digit the poise of forces.' But although 'character is destiny,' Hardy is a world away from thinking this means it erases destiny. The principle invites 11) one further layer of understanding, not the reprimanding censoriousness ('things could have been made to happen in time,' little excuse for not knowing,' had the girl taken stock . . . she would not have become pregnant,' Hardy con- centrates on the one area of blame') that Mr. Morrell metes out to Hardy's characters as freely as to his critics. If Hardy condemns, he com- prehends first; first, and more. 'Character is destiny' leaves only a `digit'-hold for 'blame.'

True enough, Hardy had advice to give abdut conduct; and Mr. Morrell clearly understands at least the activist part of it. But it was a marginal addition to a vision of life inviting less of ex- hortation than of sad if braced acceptance. In this book, the exhorting is sharply stressed, but the realistic acceptance and tragic vision fade. out of sight. Perhaps it is in the end a matter of what we think we need. I learnt the need for `just that degree of greater effort and courage' at my mother's knee. I value Hardy for things she could not do. And if 'we can make sense ofd) all Hardy's writings only if we see [them] as intended to tone up . . . to create . . . war- time alertness'—well, for me, Hardy has dated after all.

The nineteenth-century vision of system and objectivity has by now -got blurred. In Sartre or Camus, new exhortations proceed from anew vision. Man has choice and freedom precisely because he is a deracing in a random and absurd world. Mr. Morrell links Hardy strongly with them, and sees him as an exhaustive explorer of the psychology of choice. What, then, is left to say of Henry James? True to the spiiit of the nineteenth century, Hardy usually sees not choice in all its openness, but its maimed neigh- bour, choice turned into quasi-choice by power- ful circumstances and formed character. If he does not date in our century of man's exploding manipulative powers, it is because, although the immediately conspicuous limits of life may not be iron laws but mere inconveniences now being rectified, that limits of some kind always remain —always return—is an iron law still. If that myth, too, can be exploded, the old tragedy and the old realism both become unreal: we shall be a new species, and shall set them aside.