The Evening Star SATURDAY, JANUARY 14, 1928. THOMAS HARDY.

Evening Star, Issue 19764, 14 January 1928, Page 6

The Evening Star SATURDAY, JANUARY 14, 1928. THOMAS HARDY.

Thomas Hardv is to be buried in Westminster Abbey. That honor will be approved by the Jiving. The Abbey is the great Pantheon of the nation’s illustrious dead. Mr Hardy was unquestionably our greatest Jiving novelist after the death of Meredith. When he ceased writing novels thirty years ago and turned to poetry, many thought him a still greater poet. The detractions which were visited upon two, especially, of his works of fiction have Jong ceased to bo heard, save for solitary echoes. They were not criticisms which reflected upon his literary preeminence, but only on his philosophy of life. For at least a quarter of a century before his death the place which he occupied in the minds of his countrymen, and especially of younger writers, was one of admiration, and almost veneration. His novels alone would have deserved that homage. They gave to the name Wessex a moaning which it had not had since the days of Alfred. “Hardy’s country’’ was made no less real, and hardly less important, to the lover of literature than the country of Scott. The characters he described, as apart from his philosophy, were all typically and racily English. They are types which must pass away, if they have not already passed, with the progress of the now inventive age, and can only be preserved in Ids pages. If the novels were a monumental work in their entirety ‘The Dynasts,’ which succeeded them, was in its singleness. It showed, as Mr Galsworthy has shown again in his ‘ Forsite Saga,’ that, in an age which is often ca lied one of little men, there are Englishmen who do not shrink still from designs of greatness. And there have been the shorter poems, a great output, since the “Dynasts.” Mr Hardy himself, we can imagine, would not have cared much that he was to be buried in the Abbey. He was a simple man. When the fame of his prose works, at least, had reached its climax ho was known best to his rural neighbors for the pigs that he bred. He had a desire to rest in the old country churchyard, that of “ Mellstock,” with William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledbury, and the rest, who he imagined had a way of whispering to him at “mothy curfew tide” from their humble graves. Will he hear them as well among the Abbey’s vaults? In another of his poems he tells of the gratification of homely souls that the friend they had known bad ordered his funeral for a Monday, instead of a Sunday, which would give them a longer holiday. From that viewpoint of pleasing others he would probably have been satisfied with this pomp and ceremony. Our great novelists have gone generally in pairs; first Fielding and Richardson, then Dickens and Thackeray, next Meredith and Hardy. George Meredith, whom it is a fashion to disparage now, except as a poet, was among the earliest to recognise his brother craftsman’s genius. When he was u professional reader it fell to him to pronounce upon Hardy’s first novel submitted for publication, ‘ Desperate Remedies.’ He told the young author that his work was promising, and he said it in such a way that the two men became lifelong friends. There was no jealousy between them. Years afterwards Meredith said that he regarded Hardy ns the real leader of contemporary English novelists, and Hardy wrote a. poem on Meredith’s death which is one of the finest of appreciations. It was a difference between the two men, to the disadvantage of the younger in his slow winning of popular esteem, that one saw life always hopefully, with a fixed faith of his own, and the other could take no more than a grey view of the universe. Hardy could see no evidence of a divine power guiding and protecting man’s footsteps. He was impressed by “ life’s little ironies,” the cruelties and misfortunes against which men contend. He showed as much ingenuity, it has been said, in contriving unhappy endings for his stories as the authors who were most popular when he began to write showed in devising happy ones. There were times when his revulsion against the cruelties of fate made him bitter against established beliefs, but ho always pitied men and admired their courage. Ho was also one of the closest students of Nature. Those who assailed him, in effect, as being of the “ fleshly school ” did not realise how sex would be exploited, to a degree at which Hardy would have shuddered, by a later generation. He was not concerned with the betrayal of Tess apart from the consequences that followed it, which he thought far too heavy a punishment for one who was a mere victim and not a transgressor. His answer to the charge of pessimism was that he refused to pass facts by as tbe Levite passed the afflicted, and that, in any event, “ If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” There is evidence that he desired the faith in some divine government of the universe for man’s good, which ho could not reconcile with his observation of its working. The poem of ‘ The Oxen ’ suggests so much. But he would not pretend to beliefs that he had not. After their sincerity and their earnestness the construction and the proportion of Hardy’s novels are tbe prime qualities of his literary art. He was not a great master of words. His stylo is adequate; seldom inspired or imaginative in tbe highest sense. But it has been truly said: “However dark may be his conception of life, Mr Hardy’s sense of humor is unexcelled by his contemporaries in its subtlety of feeling and charm of expression. His rustics, who have long received and deserved the epithet ‘ Shakespearean', ’ arouse in every reader harmless and wholesome delight. The shadow of the tragedy lifts in these wonderful pages, for Mr Hardy’s laughter reminds one of what Carlyle said of Shakespeare : it is like sunshine on the deep sea. The childlike sincerity of those shepherd farmers, tbe candor of their repartee and their appraisal of gentle folk are as irresistible as their patience and equable temper. Everyone in the community seems to find his proper mental and moral level. And their infrequent fits of irritation are as pleasant as their more solemn moods. We can all sympathise (I hope) with the despair of Joseph Poorgrass: ‘ I was sitting at home looking for Ephesians, and says I to myself, ‘ ’Tis nothing but Corinthians and Thessalonians in this danged Testament.’ ” It is not improbable that the tendency has been to rate Hardy’s

poems, apart from ‘The Dynasts,’ too highly in recent years, as an unconscious compounding for injustice done by some criticisms of the last novels. The best impression will be gained of them from tho selection published in the Golden Treasury series, which excludes the most sardonic and is quite surprisingly cheerful. He wrought hard, one imagines, at verso making, giving his stanzas a great variety of forms to make them appear easy and flexible, but words are often intractible in his poems, which seldom sing. At times they have a harsh music of their own, and he blends greatly, on occasion, the 'individual sight or incident noth the eternal, which is one of the great achievements of poetry. Still one doubts much whether all but a few of his po&ms would have been as acceptable in the ’sixties, when ho commenced to write them, as they have been in recent years. Tho ’sixties were an ago of great poets. It was not with the glories of Westminster that Hardy’s spirit had its most natural kinship. He has suggested the epitaph which he would have liked for himself in a poem from which we quote three stanzas:— When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Deiicatc-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say, “ He was a man who used to notice such things”? If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over tho lawn, One may say, “ He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no ham, But he could do little for them, and now he is gone.” . . . And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a now hell’s boom, “He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?