THOMAS HARDY

Evening Star, Issue 20196, 8 June 1929, Page 21

THOMAS HARDY

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES ON HIS THOUGHT [Written by Bart Sutherland, for the ‘Evening Star.’] The extent ro which events in He personal life Of Hardy linctnrcu his thought must long have been an intriguing question, alike to admirers and critics of his work. So far only sketchy details of his own fortune have boon available, but in tlie volume new published by his widow C The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1801 ’) something more intimate is given.

His life seems to have been free from any overwhelming catastrophe. He was brought up iu tolerably easy circumstances. His lather has been rather misleadingly described in the aioresaid sketches as a .stonemason. He was really a master builder and mason, and bad a lifehold interest in his house at Bockhamptou and other properties. He was always in sympathy with Ins son’s aims. The mother must have had some appreciation of literature, for when her son started school she gave him ‘Paul and Viiginia,’ Drydeu ‘ Virgil,’ and Johnson’s ’ Rasselas.’ His early home nfe cannot have been Jacking in sympathy and companionship, nor in social joyousness of a sort. Like all his family for generations, the boy loved music, and when quite young learnt, under Ids father's instruction, lo fiddle some hundreds of country dances. He played at village weddings and parties when quite a boy, and no doubt witnessed many scenes winch he painted so delightfully afterwards in ‘ Under the Greenwood Tree ’ and other of his works. There was no striving after education in the way that darkened the soul of Jude the Obscure Hardy went to a good school iu Dorchester, where ho learnt Latin and the usual elementary sciences, and then, at sixteen, he passed easily into a profession, being taken as a pupil by Mr John Hicks, architect, of Dorchester, tor whom Hardy, sen., hud done work. Tins led young Haidy into quite congenial company. for lie’read Greek and Latin with another of Hicks’s pupils, and next door there Jived the Rev. Win. Barries, the Dorset poet and philologist, who often settled points of grammar for Hie young scholars. As his biographer points ont, Hardy at this time was living a triple existence: a rustic life at. Bockhamptou, whence lie walk Or I daily into the town, a life more .n touch with Die world at Dorchester, and an academic life of his own. In 1862 his London life commenced. He spent five years in an architect's office there, but at the end of the period bis thoughts turned to prose fiction as on alternative means of livelihood, tor Il3' felt that he could not push his way with influential people likely to help him to a practice of his own. Apart

from continuing l.is literary studies at odd hours, lie seems to have Jived the usual life of a young middle-class man about town, visiting churches, picture galleries, and the opera, and not Jecling too solemn to dance at Willis's Booms (the Aim tick's of Georgian days). ilardy’s life has been described as uneventful- There is a legend that he Jived a hermit-like life ;n Dorset, giving all his time to writing. As a matter of fact, after Ids first marriage (which was quite a happy one) he spent several years in London, occasicnnl'y visiting the counties. Kvcn when he finally settled at Jla.t Gale, Dorchester, he and his wife spent a few months of each year in Londoi, meeting such literary people as Tennyson, Browning, Waller Besant, Matthew Arnold. .Mrs Plotter (the widow of ‘'Barry Gorawall ”), Du Mauricr, Henry James, and the artists Burne-Jones and AlmaTadema. There were Continental tours, during which scenes in ‘ The Dynasts’ were visualised. A life uneventful in some respects, hut not lacking in mental stimulus. Since Hardy does not appear to have boon subjected to any of ihc blighting influences which render the lives of so many creative geniuses miserable, it is to other than objective causes that wc must trace the gloomy Huge ot ins philosophy. It is very likolv'that he inherited a melancholy outlook from ins mother, who had had some distressing battles with poverty in her youth; but, above all. he possessed the nervous sensibility of genius. While still a tiny child he received hints of extra-mun-dane things, like the gloomy, abnormal, little son of Judo and Sue. He records that when he was only lour there were several dance tunes that moved him to tears. While his father played them he would dance on to conceal his weeping. On wet Sundays lie used to hold a, church service of his own, wrapped up in a table cloth —a tableau which soinehpw calls up the christening scene in Tcss.

There is no denying Hardy’s greatness as a writer, but it seems to me ihat his ideas of the almost automatic action ot man, controlled by late, spring Irom a delect of vision, an overactive faculty of mind, which sees men like ants walking on a plain, as in ‘ The Dynasts,’ liable to be stirred hither and thither at the fickle iamy of the Immanent Will. He says, in a note : “ T often view society gatherings, people in the street, in a room, or elsewhere, as if they were beings in a somnambulistic state, making their motions automatically— not realising what they mean.” Poe, in a chimerical talc, tolls of the terror caused to a man by viewing a tiny insect at an infinitesimal distance from '.he eye; he thought it to he an ominous, prehistoric monster. Hardy’s view is more aerial, more exalted, but it is, not the less, false. Character and temperament play n greater part in solving life's li'l cnKios than lie - allows.