ed. John Middleton Murry

THE
NEW ADELPHI

VOL. I. No. 3.

MARCH, 1928

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THOMAS HARDY.—Thomas Hardy died in the evening of Wednesday, January 11, at the age of eighty-seven. His appeal to the love and veneration of men for the most part yet unborn when his greatest work—in prose at least—had already been accomplished, was peculiarly intimate. The unflinching integrity—"If way to the better there be, It exacts a full sight of the worst"—which put his reputation in jeopardy thirty-five years ago, unspeakably endeared him to a generation which passed through the European War. He stood, in their eyes, clean apart from all other English writers of his time.

What there was, if any, of extravagance in this admiration other generations will decide. We are scarcely capable of the necessary detachment. But those of us who were privileged to know him must bear our witness that he possessed to a rare degree the quality that idealism demands of the spiritual hero. He was perfectly simple.

We have heard the word "naive" spoken of him; but it was by those who did not know him well. But he had the simplicity of one whose ways are not as our ways. The manners of megalopolis had passed him by. They seemed to him, as they seemed to anyone in his company, frenzied and stupid—an opening of the body to the seeds of decay, a closing of the soul to an awareness of fundamental things.

Therefore we rejoice at the final decision that his heart should be buried at Stinsford in his own country. Not only was it his own deeply felt and often expressed desire that he should rest there; but, had it not been so, many of those who loved him would have felt an unfading regret that his career had been denied its consummation. For Hardy, like Shakespeare in other things, was like him not least in this: that he was to the core a countryman, and his heart was with his own place and his own people. Who, that has made the pilgrimage to Stratford, is not glad that Shakespeare was buried there and not in London; or having walked by Avon and stood by the altar in Stratford Church, does not understand something in Shakespeare that he never understood before? So it will be with Hardy. His lovers in years to come will need to seek him in the spaces and the silence of his own country; and there they will find him.

1

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**HARDY AND THE ENGLISH CHURCH.**—It was fitting no less that he should have been honoured by a national funeral in Westminster Abbey. Even though he may not have satisfied the standards of “idealism” necessary for the Nobel Prize, it was felt, and rightly felt in this country that there was no incongruity in the burial of the great “pessimist” in the central shrine of the English Church. The feeling may have been inarticulate but it was widespread that in Hardy we have lost one of the most Christian minds of our time. We may refine and refine in our definitions of what Christianity is, but we have not much doubt in our hearts that the true Christian is he

To whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let him rest.

Of this high compassion Hardy and his works were full. And not the least reason why the Christian Church is fallen into disrepute among us is that it is felt that it tithes the mint and cummin and neglects this weightier matter of the law, and that those who do not neglect it—like Hardy—are generally to be found not within the Church, but outside it.

Yet not wholly outside. I remember in the summer of last year Hardy's saying to me one afternoon that, when he was a boy, there had been a possibility of his entering the Church. Circumstance decided otherwise. "But I," he said, "have often regretted it." I was, for the moment, astonished; but when, in the evening, I came to think over his words, I felt that they showed a faith in the English Church which I would give much to share. Whether or not Hardy was right in supposing that room could have been found for his beliefs within the Church—and the difficulties are not so great as they at first sight appear—he paid the Church a noble tribute in "hoping it might be so." And I have little doubt that all through his life Hardy in a real sense regarded himself as a member of the Church of England.

**THE REJECTION OF THE NEW PRAYER BOOK.**—The attitude of an Englishman towards the English Church, expressed in Hardy's words and symbolized by his burial in Westminster Abbey, is one that is easily forgotten in the subtleties of theological dispute and ritual practice. But we have been reminded most potently of its stubborn persistence by the unexpected action of the House of Commons in rejecting the New Prayer Book, and by the general welcome in the country which that action has received. In this matter the House of Commons voiced the dormant sentiment of the nation. Hundreds of thousands of men and women who scarcely ever take part in a Church service are concerned for and attached to the Church of England. It is a strange situation, and one that must seem intolerable to the more specifically "religious" people who are assiduous in worship. Certainly it is almost unthinkable save in an English country. But the situation exists, and we may be glad of it. It means, among other

## THE SUPREMACY OF THOMAS HARDY *

INDUBITABLY the most singular phenomenon in the history of English literature during the last twelve or fifteen years was the rise of Thomas Hardy to a position of undisputed pre-eminence among contemporary writers.

Hardy had become, in the fullest sense of the word, the national writer of England. Of no English writer since Dickens could that be said with certainty. Tennyson and Kipling were the acknowledged spokesmen of phases of the national sentiment; but the phases have passed away, and those writers endure by virtue of qualities quite independent of those which brought them popularity. Tennyson, the prophet of Victorian optimism, Kipling, the noisy poetic apologist of an aggressive British imperialism—these have long since been forgotten; there remain only Tennyson, the young lyric poet, and Kipling, the prose-writer of genius. What was popular in their work has completely decayed; only their art endures.

Hardy, on the contrary, conquered his popularity, inch by inch; he extorted it from an unwilling people. For the great heart of the public (in England, at least) is optimistic: Hardy was not. It does not like to be pained: Hardy is a painful writer. He imposed himself upon the public by force of sheer veracity. Nor was he, in his long career, aided by the critics. Indeed, except for the last dozen years, it may fairly be said that Hardy was ignored by English criticism; it resolutely preferred other idols—Meredith, Stevenson, Henry James, Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Conrad. In comparison with these more brilliant and metropolitan stars Hardy was reckoned dim and provincial.

And, let us freely and frankly admit it, *ad majorem gloriam*, Hardy is provincial, more provincial even than Shakespeare was. Hardy is, even less than Shakespeare, of the town. But the collocation of his name with the great name of Shakespeare is inevitable, if only to show how deep is the English tradition to which he attaches, and to emphasize his singularity among English writers of to-day. For like no other writer of comparable magnitude since Shakespeare, Hardy is saturated in the life of the English countryside. Compared to his great predecessor, Hardy is clumsy, narrow, heavy; he is very far from possessing that astonishing sinuosity of Shakespeare's language which is the marvel of English literature, and the despair of every English writer since Milton; nor has he the profundity of Shakespeare's thought, which was content to reveal the unutterable.

* This essay was written two years ago to serve as introduction to a volume of tributes to Hardy by French men of letters. It was therefore primarily addressed to French readers, and traces of its original destination will be found in it.

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Under whatever aspect we compare the genius of these two men, Shakespeare is indisputably the master. Nevertheless, instead of being annihilated by the comparison, Hardy emerges fortified by it. An essential similarity is manifest.

The attempt completely to define this similarity would be arduous in the extreme. Here one can only indicate the chief points of contact between them. They are three; the first is that sheer creative power, in virtue of which the substantial, almost physical reality of a character abides in the mind and becomes as it were a permanent inhabitant of the reader's world. The second is the steady increase in the capacity to envisage the problem of human life: the amazing speculative crescendo from *Hamlet* to *Antony and Cleopatra* has its counterpart in the succession of Hardy's later novels from *The Return of the Native* (1878) to *Jude the Obscure* (1897) and onwards to *The Dynasts* (1903). The third, which is the most immediately obvious likeness to an English reader, is, alas, the most difficult of all to convey across the Channel—that indefinable fragrance, as of an English apple-orchard, that inscrutable mellowness, as of a stubble-field in early autumn sunshine—some essence that to the Englishman is England's secret, and, when he finds it in one of Shakespeare's “comedies,” or in a Hardy novel, makes the exiled Englishman's heart ache for home. *Dulces reminiscitur Argos*.

It is the pervasiveness of this last simple and mysterious quality in Hardy's work which more than any other of his excellences conquered for him the supreme position which he now holds. It is this which makes the simple-minded readers endure the torments which Hardy inflicts upon them—torments in themselves the less endurable because Hardy has chosen, unlike Shakespeare, to stage his comedies and his tragedies in the same rustic scene. The tragedy of Shakespeare, in this respect of the Greek tradition, befalls the great ones of the earth: they have tasted the splendours of sovereignty and command. The naive justice of the heart is somehow satisfied, and leaves the mind a spirit free to contemplate. Not so in Hardy. In his work the simplest children of the earth are crushed by inexorable destiny: not the proud and secular oak crashes to the earth in the splendour of lightning; but the small and lovely woodland flower is cut down by the monotonous sweep of a common scythe.

This denial of its dearest hopes the simple heart endures because it trusts Hardy; and it trusts him because it knows that he, more than any other writer of his time, is sensitive to the loveliness of the simple creatures and things of the earth. His austere philosophy—his unremitting awareness of the omnipotence of “crass casualty”—is forbidding, even terrifying, to the ordinary man; but he knows, from his experience of Hardy's faithfulness and tenderness in the little things, that Hardy cannot fail him in the great things. He is not making sport, like some malign Olympian, with human destinies; he

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is only following the love, which makes his scenes of country life warm with the radiance of the sun, to its uttermost conclusion. His love for his fellow-men is but a part of his love for the truth, and in that love of the truth finds its consummation.

> If way to the better there be
> It exacts a full sight of the worst.

Hardy, who has something of Shakespeare's completeness, was, like Shakespeare, autochthonous. Country-born and country-bred, largely self-educated, his vision was never clouded by the sweeping generalizations and facile optimisms which are the product of great cities. A sense of the concrete and particular reality of human existence never left him, so that theories, whether of life or art, had singularly little influence upon him. He was concerned from first to last to utter his experience of life—the joys he knew, the pains he knew—in forms that should not betray it. He gladly accepted the form prevalent in his time, the solidly constructed Victorian novel, with its well-knit plot, and its instinctive avoidance of the attempt to capture half-lights and overtones: he seems, indeed, to have had an intuitive sense, like Shakespeare's, of the popular form to which he must accommodate himself, if he was to address himself successfully not to the elite but to the general. The Shakespeare who abandoned the writing of courtly poems like *Venus and Adonis* to conquer in the rough-and-tumble of the Elizabethan playhouse, has his obvious counterpart in the Hardy who gave up composing poems of singular beauty and perfection of diction to take his place in the ranks of Victorian novelists.

It is too often forgotten, even in England, that Thomas Hardy at twenty-four years of age was already one of the most accomplished and original of English poets. I have heard him called, by a French critic of more valour than discretion, *un esprit primaire*; and something of the same condescension, though concealed, lurks behind the reluctance of elegant criticism to accept the work of Hardy as whole. When his position and achievement were no longer to be gainsaid, English criticism lulled its conscience by representing that Hardy the poet, who had not begun to appear publicly as a poet until his last novel was written in 1897, was a wholly different writer from Hardy the novelist. The distinction was obviously preposterous; but for the moment it passed muster, and it enabled the critics to explain to their own satisfaction why they had ignored or belittled the great succession of novels from 1871 to 1897 and yet saluted the poet of 1900 as a master. Perhaps with some sardonic intention (for Hardy had no great love of critics as a tribe) he took the next opportunity of publishing a handful of poems written in the days before his career as a novelist had begun. They were astonishing: they were just as individual, just as completely unlike the poetry that was being written in 1864 (to which year the earliest of his poems belongs) as his poems in 1900 were individual and unlike the poetry written at that time. So it was quietly revealed

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that Hardy had been from the beginning essentially the same Hardy:
only the fashion, and, above all, the fashion in criticism, had changed.

It must not be supposed from this that at any point in his career
Hardy was unknown to, or ignored by, the general public. Although
his first novel, *Desperate Remedies*, written when he was twenty-six
and published in 1871, may fairly be called amateurish,* his second,
*Under the Greenwood Tree*, published in the following year, was a minor
masterpiece. For richness of humour, for solidity of character-drawing,
this production of a young man was astonishing. With it he con-
quered a certain following among ordinary readers. But the critics
and the *intelligentsia* were not interested. The *intelligentsia* were
engaged in lauding Meredith to the skies, while the alert critics and the
critically minded writers were infinitely more concerned with the
developments of the realistic novel in France than with the appearance
of a new master in England. Hardy was accounted a mere journeyman
in the trade of novel-making. His technique offered no point of
interest; he was completely indifferent to style in the Flaubertian
sense: and since he thus waived all claim upon the merely intellectual
attention (which is always quicker to utter itself than the spiritual-
emotional response to pure artistic creation) he was neglected by the
educated public in favour of more "cerebral" authors, and classed
among the host of respectable purveyors of Victorian fiction—the
Blackmores, the Besants, the Broughtons.

It is strange in the extreme to reflect that a novelist who had written
two such novels as *Under the Greenwood Tree* (1872) and *Far from the
Madding Crowd* (1874) by the age of thirty, should not have been
immediately recognized for what he was. But it was not for the
first time in the history of English literature that the common folk
displayed a surer judgment than the intellectual leaders of opinion.
Shakespeare himself was, in the opinion of his intellectual contem-
poraries, the manifest inferior of Jonson and Daniel; it was not till
more than fifty years after his death that it began slowly to be recognized
that he was of a different order from that of his more educated rivals.
Shakespeare's substantial success was won not among the nobility,
but the plebs.

Fortunately Hardy lived long enough to watch the process of his
own immortality, and to find himself all but universally acclaimed as
both the greatest of contemporary novelists and the greatest of con-
temporary poets. The old and familiar criticisms—that his technique
is clumsy and the range of his experience narrow—are as true to-day
as they have ever been. But what was not realized thirty years ago,

* In a conversation which took place after these words were written, Hardy told me that the first part of *Under the Greenwood Tree* was written before *Desperate Remedies*. He put it aside at the suggestion of Meredith, who advised him to write a sensational story. (“A thing which Meredith never did himself,” murmured Hardy ironically.) So that the “amateurishness” of Hardy’s first published novel can scarcely be ascribed to himself.

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but is recognized to-day, is that Hardy belongs to that order of creative
literary genius which can easily carry a host of minor imperfections—
nay, more, that the excellence of his work is of that absolute kind
which apparently excludes the possibility of minor perfection. He
is a writer in whom the creative endowment is so rich and overflowing
that the patient labours of the file are impossible. There is a sense
in which Mr. George Moore's criticism that Hardy "cannot write" is
true: neither Dickens, nor Balzac could write, in this sense. What is
important to recognize is that they do not need to.

Hardy was compelled to abandon the writing of poetry for prose in
1868; he did not resume writing poetry for thirty years. Then,
having earned a measure of economic freedom, he set himself to accom-
plish a work over which he had been brooding for many years—a vast
epic-drama of the Napoleonic wars in which his vision of human
destinies should find complete expression. To expound the structure
and philosophy of *The Dynasts* (1903) is impossible in these pages: it
must suffice to say that in this extraordinary poem, which ranks with
(and to my own mind above) Browning's *The Ring and the Book* as
the most memorable achievement of English poetry during the last
fifty years, Hardy succeeded by an adaptation of the technique of the
Greek chorus, in giving expression to his own austere and subtle
philosophy of life. It is held by some, whose opinion is worthy of
respect, that *The Dynasts* marks the supreme point of Hardy's achieve-
ment. This opinion I cannot share. It is by far his most ambitious
work; indeed, it is one of the grandest attempts ever made in English
literature. Nevertheless, it lacks something, as compared to his
finest novels, and his finest lyric poems, of that essential spontaneity
which distinguishes Hardy's work from that of all his contemporaries.
The intellectual element predominates, and Hardy's genius is not
intellectual.

Neither is it unintellectual; it is simply creative. The contemplation
of life by which his work is informed is never abstract. That is why,
though many critics have made the attempt, it has proved impossible
to systematize what is vaguely known as Hardy's "pessimism."
He had not, nor ever claimed to have, a systematic philosophy; he
claimed no more than to have rendered, with a minimum of falsification,
the substantial truths of life as he has experienced it. Moreover, he
frankly admitted that he was more responsive to the sombre aspects of
human life than others apparently are. His eyes were keener to detect
the dark thread in the pattern. That, he confessed, was a matter of
temperament: but it was not for him as a conscientious artist, to correct
the bias of his own nature. A novelist who takes his work seriously,
and aims less at providing an amorphous public with entertainment
than at satisfying his own conscience, must build his work upon those
aspects and incidents of life which awaken in him the profoundest
response. To build upon more superficial perceptions is to build upon

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a foundation of sand. A true artist must tell the deepest truth he knows; therefore he must represent life by the medium of those aspects and happenings which for him contain the maximum universality and significance.

This, from first to last, Hardy did. His great work rests upon the sure foundation of the utter veracity of a creative soul. And it is surely no paradox, for those who have an understanding of the creative as distinct from the merely speculative mind, that just as no modern English writer has so ruthlessly rendered the undeserved pains of suffering humanity, so none can compare with him for the joyousness of his instinctive response to the physical beauty of life. For, in the truly creative mind, the sense of tragedy must spring directly from "a more than ordinary organic sensibility" (in the famous phrase of Wordsworth) to the delight and wonder of things mundane.

Aye, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

It is appropriate that we should be compelled to quote from Keats to define the quality and secret strength of Hardy, for Keats now takes his place with Shakespeare and Chaucer as one of the three poets who are most deeply native to the English soil and the English soul. Their common quality is the most difficult to convey to a foreign reader. But they, more than any other of our poets, repay the attempt to understand. Hardy belongs to their succession; and, like them, he has slowly conquered for himself a place in the intimate affections of the English people, from which he will never be dislodged.

J. MIDDLETON MURRY.