O my lords
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced
forward.
Or
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much
wither’d.
With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia.
Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him: he must tame his swiftness to sluggardry, keep his eyes on the ground, not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing
Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true,
he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the undertakers’ men snuffling past in four-wheelers. How then can we compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual and recognize the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the separate: shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the
soul like a ship in a black storm,
… driven I know not whither.
So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as we shut our Elizabethan play. But what then is the exclamation with which we close War and Peace? Not one of disappointment; we are not left lamenting the superficiality, upbraiding the triviality, of the novelist’s art. Rather we are made more than ever aware of the inexhaustible richness of human sensibility. Here, in the play, we recognize the general; here, in the novel, the particular. Here we gather all our energies into a bunch and spring. Here we extend and expand and let come slowly in from all quarters deliberate impressions, accumulated messages. The mind is so saturated with sensibility, language so inadequate to its experience, that, far from ruling off one form of literature or decreeing its inferiority to others, we complain that they are still unable to keep pace with the wealth of material, and wait impatiently the creation of what may yet be devised to liberate us of the enormous burden of the unexpressed.
Thus in spite of dullness, bombast, rhetoric, and confusion, we still read the lesser Elizabethans, still find ourselves adventuring in the land of the jeweller and the unicorn. The familiar factories of Liverpool fade into thin air, and we scarcely recognize any likeness between the knight who imported timber and died of pneumonia at Muswell Hill and the Armenian duke who fell like a Roman on his sword while the owl shrieked in the ivy and the duchess gave birth to a still-born babe ’mongst women howling. To join these territories and recognize the same man in different disguise we have to adjust and revise. But make the necessary alterations in perspective, draw in those filaments of sensibility which the moderns have so marvellously developed, use instead the ear and the eye which the moderns have so basely starved, hear words as they are laughed and shouted, not as they are printed in black letters on the page, see before your eyes the changing faces and living bodies of men and women – put yourself, in short, into a different but not more elementary stage of your reading development – and then the true merits of Elizabethan drama will assert themselves. The power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. Theirs is the broad humour which was possible when the body was naked; impossible, however arduously the public-spirited may try, since the body is draped.
Then at the back of this, imposing not unity but some sort of stability, is what we may briefly call a sense of the presence of the gods. He would be a bold critic who should attempt to impose any creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists; and yet it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the jungle and the wilderness the compass still points.
Lord, lord, that I were dead!
they are for ever crying:
O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber –
The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the world is vanity –
glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying: on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity.
To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment:
All life is but a wandering to find home,
When we’re gone, we’re there.
Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama, which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees, and ivory; of dolphins and the juice of July flowers; of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath; of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks, and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most reckless and abundant, they reply
Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,
No root in comforts; all his power to live
Is given to no end but t’have power to grieve.
It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of the gods.
So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan drama. So we consort with emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns, and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering of one of Tolstoy’s flies. Wandering almost suffocated in the maze of the impossible and tedious story, suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a world full of tedium and delight, pleasure and curiosity; of extravagant laughter, poetry and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, What then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so persistently that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile, as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own darkness, not the bright lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne, to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne – all keepers of the keys of solitude.
Thomas Hardy’s Novels
When we say that the death of Thomas Hardy leaves the art of fiction in England without a head we are speaking the most obvious of truths. So long as Hardy lived there was not a writer who did not feel that his calling was crowned by the unworldly and simple old man who made not the slightest effort to assert his sovereignty, yet stood for more to this generation than it is possible for any single voice to say. The effect of such a presence is indeed incalculable. His greatness as a writer, his standing among the great of other ages, will be judged perhaps more truly by critics of a later day. But it is for the living to bear witness to another sort of influence, hardly less important, though bound in the nature of things more quickly to disappear. His was a spiritual force; he made it seem honourable to write, desirable to write with sincerity; so long as he lived there was no excuse for thinking meanly of the art he practised. His genius, his age, his distance might remove all possibility of intercourse; the plainness and ho
meliness of his life lent him an obscurity which neither legend nor gossip disturbed; but it is no exaggeration to say that while he lived there was a king among us and now we are without. Of no one, however, would it be more unfitting to write in terms of rhetorical eulogy. His only demand upon us, and there is none more exacting, was that we should speak the truth.
Our task, then, as we consider the seventeen volumes of fiction which he has left us, is not to attempt to grade them in order of merit or to assign them to their final station in English literature. Rather we must try to discover the broad outlines of his genius, to distinguish between those qualities which are and those which are not still forces in the life of the present moment, to content ourselves with conjectures rather than attempt the more exact and measured estimate which time will bring within our reach. Let us go back to the beginning, to the year 1871, to the first novel, Desperate Remedies, and make our starting point there. Here is a young man, as he says in his preface, ‘feeling his way to a method’; a young man of powerful imagination and of sardonic turn; book-learned in a home-made way; who can create characters but cannot control them; obviously hampered by the difficulties of his technique, and driven, both by maladroitness and by an innate desire to pit his human figures against forces outside themselves, to shape his book by an extreme and even desperate use of coincidence. He is already possessed of the conviction that a novel is not a toy, or an argument, but can deal faithfully with life, and record a truthful, if not a pleasing, account of the destinies of men and women. Had there been in those days a critic of abnormal perspicacity he might have said that the most remarkable thing in this first book was not character or plot or humour, but the sound that echoed and boomed through its pages of a waterfall. It is the first manifestation of that power which was to grow to such huge dimensions later. It is not the power of observing nature, though already Hardy knew how the rain falls differently on roots and arable, how the wind sounds differently through the branches of different trees; it is the power of making a symbol of nature, of summoning a spirit from down or mill-wheel or moor which can sympathize or can mock or can remain a passive and indifferent spectator of the drama of man. Already that gift was his; already in this crude story the involved fortunes of Miss Aldclyffe and Cytherea are watched by the eyes of the gods and worked out in the presence of nature. That he was a poet should have been obvious; that he was a novelist might still have been held uncertain. But the year after, when Under the Greenwood Tree appeared, it was clear that much of the effort of ‘feeling for a method’ had been overcome. Something of the stubborn originality of the earlier book was lost. The second is accomplished, charming, idyllic compared with the first. The writer, it seems, may well develop into one of our English landscape painters, whose pictures are all of cottage gardens and old peasant women, who lingers to collect and preserve from oblivion the old-fashioned ways and words which are rapidly falling into disuse. And yet what kindly lover of antiquity, what naturalist with a microscope in his pocket, what scholar solicitous for the changing shapes of language, ever heard the cry of a small bird killed in the next wood by an owl with such intensity? The cry ‘passed into the silence without mingling with it’. Again we hear, very far away like the sound of a gun out at sea on a calm summer’s morning, a strange and ominous echo. But as we read these early books there is a sense of waste. There is a feeling that Hardy’s genius was obstinate and perverse; first one gift would have its way with him and then another. They would not consent to run together easily in harness. Such indeed was likely to be the fate of a writer who was at once poet and realist, a faithful son of field and down, yet tormented by the doubts and despondencies bred of book-learning; a lover of old ways and plain countrymen, yet doomed to see the faith and flesh of his forefathers turn to thin and spectral transparencies before his eyes.
To this contradiction nature had added another element likely to disorder a symmetrical development. Some writers (as readers we know it, though as critics we may fail to explain it) are born conscious of everything, others unconscious of many things. Some, like Henry James and Flaubert, are able not merely to make the best use of the spoil their gifts bring in, but beyond that they control their genius in the act of creation, they remain aware and awake and are never taken by surprise. The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why. Among them – it is the source of his strength and the source of his weakness – we must place Hardy. His own word, ‘moments of vision’, exactly describes those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book that he wrote. With a sudden quickening of power which we cannot foretell, nor he, it seems, control, a single scene breaks off from the rest. We see, as if it existed alone and for all time, the wagon with Fanny’s dead body inside travelling along the road under the dripping trees; we see the bloated sheep struggling among the clover; we see Troy flashing his sword round Bathsheba where she stands motionless, cutting the lock off her head and spitting the caterpillar on her breast. Vivid to the eye, but not to the eye alone, for every sense participates, such scenes dawn upon us and their splendour remains. But the power goes as it comes. The moment of vision is succeeded by long stretches of plain daylight, nor can we believe that any craft or skill could have caught the wild power and turned it to the best advantage. The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are hewn rather than polished; and there is always about them that little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of freshness and margin of the unexpressed which often produce the most profound sense of satisfaction. It is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did, as if his consciousness held more than he could produce, and he left it for his readers to make out his full meaning and to supplement it from their own experience.
For these reasons Hardy’s genius was uncertain in development, uneven in accomplishment, but when the moment came, magnificent in achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far from the Madding Crowd. The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which, however fashions may chop and change, must remain one of the great English novels. There is, in the first place, that sense of the physical world which Hardy more than any novelist can bring before us; the sense that the little prospect of man’s existence is ringed by a landscape which, while it exists apart, yet confers a deep and solemn beauty upon his drama. The dark downland, marked by the barrows of the dead and the huts of shepherds, rises against the sky, smooth as a wave of the sea, but solid and eternal, rolling away to the infinite distance, but sheltering in its folds quiet villages whose smoke rises in frail columns by day, whose lamps burn in the immense darkness by night. Gabriel Oak tending his sheep up there on the back of the world is the eternal shepherd; the stars are ancient beacons; and for ages he has watched beside his sheep.
But down in the valley the earth is full of warmth and life; the farms are busy, the barns stored, the fields loud with the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Nature is prolific, splendid and lustful; not yet malignant and still the Great Mother of labouring men. And now for the first time Hardy gives full play to his humour, where it is freest and most rich, upon the lips of country men. Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass gather in the malthouse when the day’s work is over and give vent to that half-shrewd, half-poetic humour which has been brewing in their brains and finding expression over their beer since the pilgrims tramped the Pilgrims’ Way; which Shakespeare and Scott and George Eliot all loved to overhear, but none loved better or heard with greater understanding than Hardy. But it is not the part of the peasants in the Wessex novels to stand out as individuals. They compose a pool of common wisdom, a fund of perpetual life. They comment upon the actions of the hero and heroine, but while Troy or Oak or Fanny or Bathsheba come in and out and pass aw
ay, Jan Coggan and Henry Fray and Joseph Poorgrass remain. They drink by night and they plough the fields by day. They are eternal. We meet them over and over again in the novels, and they always have something typical about them, more of the character that marks a race than of the features which belong to an individual. The peasants are the great sanctuary of sanity, the country the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear, there is no hope for the race.
With Oak and Troy and Bathsheba and Fanny Robin we come to the men and women of the novels at their full stature. In every book three or four figures predominate, and stand up like lightning conductors to attract the force of the elements. Oak and Troy and Bathsheba; Eustacia, Wildeve and Venn; Henchard, Lucetta and Farfrae; Jude, Sue Bridehead and Phillotson. There is even a certain likeness between the different groups. They live as individuals and they differ as individuals; but they also live as types and have a likeness as types. Bathsheba is Bathsheba, but she is woman and sister to Eustacia and Lucetta and Sue; Gabriel Oak is Gabriel Oak, but he is man and brother to Henchard, Venn and Jude. However lovable and charming Bathsheba may be, still she is weak; however stubborn and ill-guided Henchard may be, still he is strong. This is fundamental; this is the core of Hardy’s vision, and drawn from the deepest sources of his nature. The woman is the weaker and the fleshlier, and she clings to the stronger and obscures his vision. How freely, nevertheless, in his greater books life is poured over the unalterable framework! When Bathsheba sits in the wagon among her plants, smiling at her own loveliness in the little looking-glass, we may know, and it is proof of Hardy’s power that we do know, how severely she will suffer and cause others to suffer before the end. But the moment has all the bloom and beauty of life. And so it is, time and time again. His characters, both men and women, were creatures to him of an infinite attraction. For the women he shows a more tender solicitude than for the men, and in them, perhaps, he takes a keener interest. Vain might their beauty be and terrible their fate, but while the glow of life is in them their step is free, their laughter sweet, and theirs is the power to sink into the breast of nature and become part of her silence and solemnity, or to rise and put on them the movement of the clouds and the wildness of the flowering woodlands. The men who suffer, not like the women through dependence upon other human beings, but through conflict with fate, enlist our sterner sympathies. For such a man as Gabriel Oak we need have no passing fears. Honour him we must, though it is not granted us to love him quite so freely. He is firmly set upon his feet and can give as shrewd a blow, to men at least, as any he is likely to receive. He has a prevision of what is to be expected that springs from character rather than from education. He is stable in his temperament, steadfast in his affections, and capable of open-eyed endurance without flinching. But he, too, is no puppet. He is a homely, humdrum fellow on ordinary occasions. He can walk the street without making people turn to stare at him. In short, nobody can deny Hardy’s power – the true novelist’s power – to make us believe that his characters are fellow-beings driven by their own passions and idiosyncrasies, while they have – and this is the poet’s gift – something symbolical about them which is common to us all.
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