2 June: Boreham on Thomas Hardy

A Painter in Sombre Shades
Thomas Hardy, whose birthday anniversary this happens to be, deserves to be remembered as the last of the great Victorians. Of his genius there can be no shadow of doubt; his fiercest critics would hesitate to deny him a place of honour in the pantheon of English letters. In the temple of fame he occupies a niche peculiarly his own, and it is not altogether an enviable one. In his passionate love of colour, in his remarkable faculty for vivid and realistic description, in his vigorous and confident delineation of the most complex characters, in his pitiless analysis of human passions, impulses, and emotions, and in his faithful reflection of the droll humour and poignant tragedy of the countryside, Hardy stands almost without a rival.

Yet, for all that, he was an incorrigible pessimist. He knew it and even gloried in it. It was an essential ingredient in his art. With Puck-like perversity he revelled making us all miserable; and, regarding our wretchedness as his crown triumph, he clapped his hands in glee as he witnessed our distress. To make matters worse, he figured as a pessimist in an age that had little or no sympathy with pessimism. Byron, born half a century earlier, was a pessimist ; but the temper of the time was such that Byron's pessimism became phenomenally popular. Every depressing word that fell from his languishing lips awoke an immediate and almost universal response. The whole world wept deliciously when Byron disconsolately wailed. But times change, and, in this case, they changed for the better. In Hardy's day, optimism walked in golden slippers, courted by princes, chanted by poets, and applauded by the populace. Pessimism, dejected and forlorn, shivered at the corner of the market-place, an object of general abhorrence and contumely. And the extraordinary achievement of Thomas Hardy is represented by the fact that, in an age so completely alienated from the chilly pessimism that all his works express, he won for himself an indulgent hearing and a deathless renown.

Were Poet's Eyes Turned In Wrong Direction?
Like all men who find themselves at war with the universe, Thomas Hardy was the greatest sufferer from his own acerbity. His dismal outlook made it impossible for more cheerful or more robust spirits to understand him. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for example, had no patience with him. In those days, most people linked the name of Thomas Hardy with that of George Meredith. Chesterton would not hear of it. "It is due to Meredith," he writes, "to say that no one outside a few of the great Greeks has ever interpreted Nature as naturally as he did; and it is just as true to say that no one outside a lunatic asylum has ever interpreted Nature as unnaturally as Thomas Hardy has done." Hardy, Chesterton declares, went down to botanise in the swamp while Meredith climbed towards the sun.

How are we to account for Hardy's unconquerable gloom? In his "Makers of Modern Fiction," Mr. W. J. Dawson attributes it to the solitude of country life. Hardy spent all his days in a spot so secluded that even the villagers could scarcely find their way across the meadows to the hermit's home. He brooded too much; lived too much with his own thoughts; and yielded too readily to the tendency to morbid introspection. The man who leads a broad, busy, adventurous life Mr. Dawson points out, is seldom given to pessimism. But Hardy's lonely mind was far too long turned in upon itself; it lost the perspective of reality, things appeared to him out of their just proportion, he became splenetic and morose. Mr. Dawson thinks that if, like Shakespeare, Hardy had left the hamlet and lived for a few years in the city, he would have been a happier man and a more finished artist.

A Masterly Painter Of The Rural Scene
Still, while grey was Hardy's favourite tint, he did occasionally splash upon his splendid canvas with brighter hues. We have a few rainbows of his making, a few hints of the gorgeous things that might have been. As long as the language lasts, or at least as long as the stately Victorian novelists continue to charm, men will admire Thomas Hardy as a most excellent storyteller; they will delight in his quiet and unaffected style; they will exult in the sure touch with which he reproduces the tranquil spirit of the English lane, the English moor and the English woods; and they will revel in his skilful delineation of uncouth and uncultured country characters. Mr. John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, says that Hardy is the strange, vital repository of the old traditions, legends, and memories of the singular but sturdy personalities that walked the green fields of the English counties for five generations.

Mr. Masefield is no less enamoured of Hardy's verse. "Hardy's poetry," he affirms, "has meant a great deal to the younger singers of today. He stands as the most powerful influence for good in the shaping of English poetry since the days of Robert Browning. He brought to his writing an extraordinary knowledge of the countryside and its past; and, at the same time, he invented more methods of writing verse than any other member of the brave company of English poets." Coming from a Poet Laureate, this is eloquent and noble praise. Moreover, in addition to all that can be said about his work, both in prose and in verse, there remains the indisputable circumstance that Hardy possessed a personality that captivated men of strangely different types. Lawrence of Arabia delighted in his company; so did the Duke of Windsor; and so, too, did some of the most eminent statesmen and artists of his time. Yet nobody loved him more than the ploughmen, shepherds, waggoners, and village folk of that Wessex woodland that he has so vividly portrayed and amidst which his entire life was spent. Because of this, it was conceded that while in accordance with a popular demand, his body was to rest with the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey, his heart should be interred in the tiny churchyard that, in life was so familiar to him.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Hardy