There is a common misconception that a pessimist is a man who looks at things with the distorting eyes of a melancholic imbecile. He is, of course, nothing of the sort. He is merely a man who makes less than the usual allowance for the general and genial habit of wearing pink spectacles for flooding a dull world with cheerful light. He is not a man who calls black white, as confirmed optimists are thought to do; he does not even call white black, which is what he is accused of doing. He merely calls everything universal grey. Hardy himself once defined pessimism as “a reasoned view of effects and probable causes deduced from facts unflinchingly observed.” And, true to the type of the pessimist who sees himself the one sane man in a world of foolish faces, wreathed in perpetual grins, he described optimists as. wearing “too much the strained look of the smile on a skull.”
Hardy was a perfectly complacent pessimist. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the word “pessimistic ” should be reserved for the intention of his books and the word “humorous ” both for their manner and for him.
For some reason the word “pessimist ”—especially in the last century when it was taken simply to be a mishearing of the word “atheist”—exercises an infectious fascination over the mind. People talk of Hardy as though he were merely a lugubrious guide to the gloomier parts of Wessex, continuously weeping because a piece of local colour had become lodged in his eye. They forget how much he enjoyed the Oaks and Leafs and Poorgrasses and Worms, and all the buffoons who travel across Wessex in his novels, making it into a circus. If Jude and Tess had never been written, and the public had not been given something new to think about, there would still have been that sequence of novels extending backwards from The Mayor of Casterbridge to Far From the Madding Crowd, which would have earned Hardy a reputation for the immense sympathy that was the fount of everything he wrote.
Within his mind Hardy was philosophic with a painful tenderness that is remote from the grey half-hatred of the pessimist. It was in the world outside that he saw those things that saddened and sickened him. If he had stayed within the four walls of his study he would have remained all his life the shy architect contentedly drawing. “So far as my experience goes,” he once wrote, “conclusions about the universe do not affect the spirits, which are a result of temperament. What does depress me is the sight of so much pain in the world, constant pain; and it did just as much when I was an orthodox churchman as now; for no future happiness can remove from the past sufferings that have been endured.”
Both Tess and Jude were written as though cruelty to others were a raging tooth set in the writer’s head. They were written when despair at the world’s pain had mounted within Hardy’s mind to a desperate defiance; at a moment when he had the invalid’s instinctive hatred of the robust.
In calling Tess “a pure woman ” Hardy displayed a rather aggressive broad-mindedness. Nowadays, when the word “pure ” is almost an archaism, we should suffer no special incredulity in hearing Hardy call her such a thing. But those who objected at the time really had a quite good case. Her mind may have been white as freshly driven snow—such was obviously Hardy’s view—but it was one of the innocent minds that led its owner on a devil’s dance through life. A bastard and a murder are awkward entries to appear on the credit side of purity. And it did not help either Hardy or Tess that Hardy should have adopted the attitude: “Don’t blame me, or Tess. If you must blame anyone, for this ghastly mess, blame God. He arranged it—I didn’t.” That sentence at the end of Tess in which “the President of the Immortals ” “ended his sport with Tess,” put Hardy definitely on the other side of conventional morality. And his ingenuous defence of the sentence by citing Shakespeare’s words in Gloster’s mouth in Lear,” As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,” does suggest that perhaps Hardy was a little deaf in the orthodox ear, that he did not realise that it was the startling and stimulating blasphemy of the sentiments that had attracted orthodox Christians so irresistibly.
Actually the blame on God in Tess of the D’Urbervilles was more than a little unfair. The truth is that Hardy had got into the habit of hurting Tess, and apparently could not get out of it. It was Hardy, who wanted to sear our hearts by showing us a woman hanged, who made Tess stick the knife into D’Urberville. God would probably have been content with something less sensational than that ironic bright blob of blood that leaked through the floor, and printed itself like a gigantic ace of hearts on the landlady’s ceiling beneath.
The drip, drip, drip which the landlady heard when she applied her ear to the keyhole of the room in which Tess had been so demonstrably asserting her purity is an historic sound, like the report with which Ibsen’s Nora slammed the front-door on the home behind her, and made the whole world her prison.
Both were a part of the work of the New Spirit in Woman; the work of wives who had thrown-over, or overthrown, their husbands. Tess paid the penalty on the gallows for being a New Woman without the New Education. She was, indeed, about midway between the New Woman and the Noble Savage. It was Jude’s cousin Sue, the girl who could say “Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t you think it is destructive to the profession whose essence is its gratuitousness,” who was the complete New Woman with the New Education, even though she had been unable to throw off all the instinct of the older Eve.
Strangely enough, to mention the legal obligation in marriage is one of the easiest ways of annoying the very people who see salvation for the world through the sacrament of marriage and the office of the law. And annoy them Hardy did. His obstinate way of showing marriage both in Tess and Jude as hallowed, but unholy, and illicit love as holy but unhallowed, naturally enraged the orthodox.
A Scottish reviewer wrote that “Swinburne planteth, Hardy watereth and Satan giveth increase,” a reader in the Antipodes posted Hardy a packet purporting to contain the ashes of Jude the Obscure, and an American reviewer intending to admonish Hardy, unintentionally insulted three other writers of genius:
When I finished the story I opened the windows and let in the fresh air, and I turned to my bookshelves and said: “Thank God for Kipling and Stevenson, Barrie and Mrs. Humphry Ward.”
It was in a sudden anger against criticism of that sort that Hardy exclaimed:
If this sort of thing continues no more novel writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.
And in his Diary Hardy describes how he and Swinburne condoled with each other on having been the two most abused of living writers, Swinburne for Poems and Ballads and Hardy for Jude the Obscure.
The last years of the last century will be regarded by future historians as one of the Ages of Abuse. Huge issues have always meant high voices; and when Hardy raised great questions, voices on both sides were raised as well. By the time he had published Jude, Hardy had managed to direct half the stream of abusive public criticism from Ibsen to himself. Without searching for resemblances like a forewarned passport officer, and certainly without indulging in the popular and pernicious habit of rechristening, by giving Hardy some such title as the Dorchester Ibsen, it remains for us to comment on some notable and obvious common aims and methods and qualities and deficiencies common to Hardy and Ibsen.
Both preached a new morality; a morality founded not only on having seen the orthodox God, but on having seen through him. Both wrapped up their gospel of “facing life unflinchingly ” in a covering about as comfortable to the average touch as a porcupine’s. Both regarded the denial of love as the ultimate crime of Life. Both saw Society built on Deceit as Venice is built on piles, ready to collapse at a shake. Both saw Religion as a deceit; a promise of dividends without reasonable security. And both saw that man willingly and wilfully deceives himself long after the first innocent deceit of ignorance is past. Both, therefore, set upon the demolition of the soul of society with the energy of housebreakers, just as Lassalle and Karl Marx had already started to demolish its body. In their method of w
ork Hardy and Ibsen were both bold with the broad bravery of the man to whom boldness is not itself an end, but a means of arriving. Both achieved a mastery of form that only the remarkable nature of the material itself concealed. And both—but here it is necessary to invoke the aid of Genius as an explanation—managed to invest mean individual occurrences with a noble universal significance; to promote the small hardships of men into the whole tragedy of Man. Thus when Tess stabbed D’Urberville it was not merely a sordid George Gissing kind of lodging-house affair in which the first-floor front happens to be a bad lot. It was a huge event in which all Womankind rose against its male oppressor, and did mad deeds for love. It was not News of the World but news of the World. Jude is not the prematurely wrinkled President of the Union of a correspondence college, but is the divine spirit weighed down by the whole human weight of the flesh. Like Ibsen’s Nora and Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, Jude and Tess are creatures not so slavish as to be patently symbolic, yet who cast a shadow of symbolic size.
Hardy was a “regional ” novelist who kept to his boundaries with the scrupulousness of an ordnance survey map. Yet confining the implications of Hardy’s novels to Wessex, by saying that at this point and at that the map ends, would be as futile as the erection of the wall with which the Wise Men sought to imprison the cuckoo and preserve eternal Spring. Egdon Heath somehow spreads out until it is hard to say where the Great World begins and where the Heath stops; the woods of The Woodlanders stretch across half England, appearing in odd, idyllic hollows in strange places many miles from Wessex; and though Hardy’s characters talk with a local burr they speak with the large voice of mankind.
The scenery in Hardy’s novels is one of the strangest things in fiction; it is well painted but not apparently well beloved. Often it seems as though Hardy were unhappy in it; certainly less happy than Meredith among the shrubs of Surrey. There is something in Hardy of the man who is irresistibly attracted yet more than a little miserable in his attraction; like a man who goes to the Lakes each year grumbling about the rain.
So much for the qualities in common between Ibsen and Hardy. If there are defects in Ibsen and Hardy to be looked for, they will be found I think in the tags of contemporary philosophy and thought they carry with them; such as a rather pathetic confidence in heredity. Indeed there would at least be a precedent for an idiotic line of inquiry into Darwin’s authorship of Hardy.
Again in a labouring of points such as “the coming universal wish not to live,” as the “outcome of new views of life,” which is how the doctor explained the baby butchery in which Jude’s son indulged when he murdered his brother and sister, the philosophy bears its date brightly upon it. Little Jude is a victim of just that same death which carried off little Bertha in the attic menagerie where the wild duck lodged: both were helpless children with a load of more than adult cares. And both Ibsen and Hardy were writers of an immortal genius that was the immediate and inevitable product of nineteenth century Protestantism. They were children who happened to dislike their parent, but who nevertheless bore a strong family resemblance to him. They were black sheep in a white flock; but undeniably and recognisably sheep all the same.
Hardy remained artistically agnostic to the end. He died to a verse from ‘ Omar Khayyam read to him before an open window listening to bells his ears were too drowsed to catch:
Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n in Paradise devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Men
Is blackened—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!
Thus did Thomas Hardy salute the President of the Immortals—impolitely.
Henry James
Within the last generation the novel has tended to change from being a record of events into being a record of the causes of events. The name psychological has been applied to it, and it has become conscious, even self-conscious, of its new duties and responsibilities. For the new duties of the novel have demanded a new form, and when novelists spend their time talking about a New Form, as Conrad did, it is a miracle when they produce anything finer than a freak.
Certainly the old novel was about as well adapted to its new duties as a cart-horse for steeplechasing, and the work of a notably important section of writers during these years was that of breeding a new and volatile creature which could clear the ditches and hedges that divide the physical world from the mental.
No author better illustrates what the psychological novelists were trying to do than Henry James. Joseph Conrad might seem an equally good example. But in his case the mind of the critic cannot help straying into wondering how it was that Joseph Conrad Kurzeniowski, the Pole, wrote such nearly perfect French novels in English. And it is Henry James, the naturalised American who ends by becoming more nearly the typical new English novelist.
Henry James, at first, inevitably puts one in mind of those parties of American tourists, with pale, flat, childlike faces, who stand in groups about the Temple during the summer months pondering profoundly on Art, Architecture and Antiquity. But he is like the one member of the party who not only knows where Elia was born, but even knows Elia, having read him in some far Western university. And possibly—quite probably, in fact—has published an immense volume of detailed and minute Elian criticism.
Henry James came to Europe from the wrong side of the Atlantic, and spent thirty-seven close, painful years in showing those born on the right side how crude, barbaric and colonial they were. He was driven out of the United States, as remorselessly as if he had been deported, by the sheer material pressure of ambitious, immature life. And he was as miserable in consequence as a gigolo in a farmyard. His mind moved always as though it were in the thinnest of dancing-shoes. It drew back appalled when it found that a single step would carry it clean off the narrow pavement of culture. There was something rather ridiculous in his having been born in an unfinished country. And he realised it. It was as artistically absurd as the thought of Fenimore Cooper in a salon.
Europe glittered on the horizon of his imagination, stately with age, strangely alluring with the euphonious names of the south, and with plenty of pavement everywhere. Henry James visited it with that sleep-defying thoroughness of intention that is the unconcealed secret of his work. In paradoxical inversion of the natural law, Henry James came to Europe as the emigrant from America because Europe seemed the more promising land. And in becoming the perfect European he showed himself the born American; the man who is at home anywhere outside his own house, the true pioneering Colonial.
That the United States should have produced so physically useless a creature as Henry James is due to the fact that strange lands have always meant strange religions, and that strange religions have always occupied men’s minds to exclusion. Henry James the elder was a Swedenborgian whose mind walked naturally with ease amid the abstract and mysterious. His son, William James, was the founder of the philosophy of Pragmatism, that theory of life which in its combination of psychological and physical elements satisfies no one completely, and reminds the European mind of philosophy at play.
It has often been remarked that William and Henry seemed to share a common genius for the subtle and the psychological; that they wrote their books—William his Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking, Henry his Wings of the Dove—as two brothers who do their school homework together, without any clean dividing line between the results.
A legend has grown up around Henry James that he is, if not actually unreadable, at least readable only in a quiet room, with the aid of ice-packs, grammars and a reverent nature. In that, James is simply a victim of himself. He is like a man who gets a reputation for an ass simply because he has deliberately cultivated an extreme mannerism in youth, and cannot throw it off in age; there is about him a suggestion of grey hairs and corsets. The trouble is that Henry James’s later books have obscured his life’s work.
He is judged by The Golden Bowl and not by Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller; which is as patently
unfair as judging a supreme talker like Coleridge by what he said on his death-bed.
Henry James’s was a mind of remarkable lucidity. He had a tight-rope walker’s nerve, and could keep his head in traversing the thinnest threads of narrative suspended over vertiginous deeps of psychology. Unfortunately for his success, he did not realise that other people simply lacked the nerve, and that after a few steps they halted and turned back to try again—or fell floundering right out of the bottom of the tale.
Consider a typical passage from The Wings of the Dove.
It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the creature’s greatness. She would have been content so to leave it; unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest account of her, and none but a big clearly would do.
That short explanation of the conduct of a soul contains both what is typical of Henry James’s qualities and shortcomings. Even raped from its context the thought remains perfectly intelligible; it proceeds elaborately and usefully.
The grammar on the other hand, is moderately baffling. It is clearly that of a very clever man—or of a man who works at his prose like a child practising scales on a piano, going over it again and again, so that he meets the reader on unfair terms, having prepared all the difficult bits beforehand. There is that awkward ellipsis in the opening sentence, clumsily repaired by the insertion of the words “that of”; there is the doubt in the mind as to whether “consciously ” should, or indeed can, be modified by “very,” and the further doubt as to whether “practically ” should come before or after “giving up ”; and at the end there is that horrible murder of words, by poison drawn from metaphysical text-books, “none but a big clearly would do.” To complete some of the ellipses the mind must hop like a frog, and to appreciate the method of speaking in terms of philosophic abstractions the mind must also be able to hover over certain words and phrases like a hawk. At times, and in such a sentence as, “To be the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to arrive at the type, in the light on the whole most becoming,” the syntax and the punctuation are bad to wickedness.
The Facts of Fiction Page 19
