"HARDYISMS”

Evening Star, Issue 20510, 14 June 1930, Page 2

"HARDYISMS”

FROM A WIFE'S BIOGRAPHY Mrs Hardy cannot fail to be gratified with the reception of her life of Thomas Hardy of which the second volume, covering the years 1892 to , 1928. has just been published. It is always difficult for relatives rightly .to value the virtues and failings of those near and dear to them, but Mrs Hardy deftly gets over this difficulty by letting her famous husband speak through his own writings. The hook is full of what may bo termed Hardyisms. Here are a few taken almost at random from the volume;— “Courage has been idealised; why not fear?—which is a higher consciousness, and based on a deeper insight. “ Repartee is a gift for saying what a wise man thinks only.” “There are certain questions which are • made unimportant by their very magnitude. For example, ( the question whether we are moving in space this way or that; the existence of God, - etc.” “ Let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience. He will not he able to escape using terms and phraseology from earlier philosophers, but let nun avoid adopting their theories, if he values his own mental life.” “A pessimist’s apology. Pessimism (or what is called such) is; in brief, playing a sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.’-* “Critics can never be made, to understand that the failure may be, greater than the success. . . .To have strength to roll, a stone weighing a- hundredweight to the top of the mount is -a success, and to have tho strength ; to roll a stone of ten hundredweight only halfway , up that mount is a failure. But the latter, is 1 two or three times as strong a deed.” HARDY ON POETRY AND FICTION. Here, top, are views of poetry and fiction “There is a latent musig in tho sincere utterance of deep emotion, however expressed, which fills ths place of the actual word music in rhythmic phraseology on thinner emotive sub-, jects, or on subjects with next to nope at-all. And supposing, a total poetic effect to be represented by a unit, its component fractions may, he either, say— - “ Emotion three-quarters, plus expression one-quarter, or ‘ ‘ Emotion one-quarter, plus expression three-quarters.” _ • “This suggested conception seems to me to be the only one which explains all cases, including those instances of verse that apparently infringe all rules, and yet bring unreasoned conviction that they are poetry.” “ My opinion' is that a poet should express the emotion’ of all ages and tho thought of his own.” “The poet (in England) is likfi ono who enters and mounts a platform to give an adress as announced. He opens his; page, looks around, and. finds tho hall empty.” _ “ A writer’s works should be judged as a whole, and not from picked passages that contradict them as a whole.” “ The whole secret of. fiction and the drama—in the constructional part —lies (he wrote) in the adjustment of things unusual to things eternal and universal. The writer who knows exactly how exceptional and how non-, exceptional his events should ho mads the key to the,art.” ; once wrote of Hardy as “ a realistic, novelist who . . . has a, grim, determination to go down to posterity ■ wearing the laurels of a poet.”On this,Mrs Hardy very shrewdly comments : “Thomas Hardy was always a person with' an unconscious, or rather unreasoning, ‘ tendency,’ and the poetic tendency had been his from the earliest. "J ' . At this tixxxe the real state of his mind was, in his own words; that ‘a sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in xne. At tho risk of ruining all my‘ worldly prospects I dabbled in it . . ! . was forced out of it. , , It' eaine back upon me. ... All was of the nature of being led by a mood, without foresight or regard to whither it led’ ” GENERAL BELIEFS. : There are, of course, references to other general things of interest in addition to.literature. Hardy says in one case:— “Though.my life, like tho lives of my contemporaries, covers a period of more .'material advance in the world than any of the same length can have done in Other centuries, I do not find that real -civilisation has advanced equally. '; “People are not more humane, so far as I can • see; than they were in the year of Tny birth. Disinterested! kindness is less. Tho spontaneous kindness is less. “The spontaneous goodwill that used to characterise manual workers seems to have departed. One day of late'a railway porter said to a feeble bid lady, a friend of ours: ‘ See to your luggage yourself.’ . ■ . ' “ Human nature had not sunk so low; as that in 1840.” An entry in 1893 runs: “Heard 'a curious account of a grave that was ordered (by telegraph?) at West Stafford arid dug. But no funeral ever cariic, the person who ordered it being unknown, and the grave had to be filled up.” The following year ho wrote; “1 have heard of a girl, now a very old woman, who in her youth was seen. followiug a goose about .the common all the afternoon to get a quill from the bird, with which the parish clerk could write for her a letter to her lover.” . “ CANNOT BE TICKED OFF.” Hardy “cannot be ticked off,” say* ‘ The Times.’ “He was always voyaging through seas of thought alone, no matter how many others had found their own course through them; and thought with him was never,_ as men say, pure, but always conditioned by his feelings and his imagination. Only in his works could the three come together to create the life which soma believe to transcend ‘ real ’ life in reality as well as in beauty and fitness.”