THOMAS HARDY

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 17

THOMAS HARDY

All England will join in the honour that Wessex has just paid to Thomas Hardy, the more, readily because the lime has now come when it is possible to get into some sort of perspective Hardy's very considerable achievement, says "The Christian Science Monitor." In company with Scott alone amongst tho chiefs of English literature, Hardy, established a firstclass reputation as a worker both in prose and in verse. But here the parallel ends. Scott, chronologically, was a poet first and a novelist after- - wards) but it is as a novelist that he is remembered. Hardy devoted the opening part of his career to fiction, but his main achievement, as ho himself always recognised, was in tho realm of

A. few years ago a distinguished professor of literature at one of the English universities suggested that Hardy, because ho developed a consistent outlook- on human existence- in his stories., was the only .British novelist worthy of ranking with the- Continental masters. Not many readers, however, would subscribe to' this view to-day. His poetry also has not ineonsidorable faults. Iv particular, his verso contains a collection of verbal infelicities and stiff expressions unique in the works of a writer of the front rank. But he is the author of a number of lyrics of tho most exquisito beauty* that will doubtless, go. singing their way down the ages. His "Dynasts," too, though in execution often feeble and disappointing, is, in scale and niagnituclo of poneeption, perhaps tho most massive and ambitious work undertaken by any English • imaginative - writer sinco Milton laid out the gigantic plan of "Paradise Lost." It is on these two branches of his work that Hardy's reputation will most securely rest.

How Thomas Hardy was nearly lost to the world was told by Sir James Barrie when unveiling at Dorchester a life-size statue of the man of letters. "When the child Hardy was born," he said, "the doctor thought him dead and dropped him into a basket. That was an anxious moment for this country. But a woman slipped forward to make sure, and found he was alive. A statue to tliis woman—the sculptor could have done worse than give us that. What interests mo still moro is this: Was Hardy shamming in the basket'? If so, it was the only time in his lifo that ho ever shammed. Yet knowing what we know of him now, we may think that at his first sight of lit"p he liked it so little that he lay very still. Thero was never any more faltering. The undoubted mind. That was Hardy. That is \ho statue- I see."