CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ITHACA. N. Y. 14853' URJS UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY PR 4754.836"""""'"™""-"'"^^ The technique of Thomas Hardy. 3 1924 013 478 841 DATE DUE .'-■^IMaiMKUUiik •V'^^i^.it.witM i..ii^*iiir.v "**" 'W»^t»^ J!l?l!hM^i^ T^ f^ra miNTCDlNU.S-A. Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3478841 THE TECHNIQUE OF THOMAS HARDY By JOSEPH WARREN BEACH Author of The Comic Spirit in George Meredith and The Method of Henry y antes ^The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" URIS LIBRARY THE XJNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHJiCAGQ, ILLINOIS COPYKIGHT 1922 By The University op Chicago All Rights Reserved Published September 1922 ii Composed and Printed'^ sixth of November and closely follow upon the Guy Fawkes celebration. In the second book the scenes lead up to and center about the Christmas mumming where ^ first the hero and heroine "stand- face to face." The fourth book centers about, and half the scenes take place ^ upon, the thirty-first of August, the day of the "closed door" and Mrs. Yeobright's death. The whole action of the story is. confined to a j^ear ,; and a day, a very short period for an English novel; and thus observes with considerable strictness what we may call the novelistic unity of time. This was not 98 PROGRESS IN ART so much a matter of course with Hardy and his con- temporaries as, it is with present-day writers like Mr. Swinnerton {September, Nocturne), Mrs. Wharton {Summer), Miss Sidgwick {Hatchways), Mr. Marshall {Exton Manor), Mr. Hergesheitner {Java Head, Cytherea). It is to be accomplished only through the choice of a plot which does admit of being compressed . within narrow limits of time. And it furthermore requires that this plot shall be taken at its climax, and that no attempt shall be made to present the antecedent action save by retrospect, in the way of dialogue or brief summary made naturally in the course of the action presented. This is the method of Sophocles, of Racine, or Ibsen; and if it has come to be a favorite method with novelists like Henry James and Edith Wharton, it is probably the drama chiefly which has shown them the way to such a grace of form.' The Return of the Native, first published in 1878, one year before The Egoist and more than twenty years before The Awkward Age and The Ambassadors, was really, among English novels of its time, a pioneer in this technique. 7 As for the novelistic unity of place, The Return of the Native is in this matter an even more perfect example of the influence of the drama working in the interest of form. Every scene in the book takes place within the horizon of one standing upon Rainbarrow, within the compass of the heath, which is like a great stage gloomily hung for tragedy. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, in A Laodi- ' There is also to be taken into account the influence of the short story. DRAMA 99 cean, in Tess, the range of the action is much wider, comprising all that falls within the more extended experience of the heroines, who have occasion to make journeys, to strike roots in soils diverse, and to undergo a considerable variety of conditions underneath the sky. Only in The Woodlanders is there anything like the unity of tone and atmosphere that prevails in The Native; and in The Woodlanders there is nothing like the intensity and poetic concentration of effect. Every scene of The Native is overshadowed with the gloom, the loneliness, the savage permanence of the heath, which has so obstinate a way of assimilating men to its likeness instead of yielding to their wiU and working. It is clear that Mr. Hardy had very distinctly imagined, and went about very deliberately to evoke, the atmosphere with which he wished to envelop his tragedy. He has not written three pages before he bids us reflect whether this gloomy heath is not more in keeping with modem taste in landscape than "smiling champaigns of flowers and fruits." Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt eilnotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair The new vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking of mankind. And if this author prefers an uncultivated waste for his typical reflection of modem thought, it is mainly in night and storm that he chooses to present it. The loo PROGRESS IN ART story opens, sadly adagio, at cloudy twilight in November, with the darkness of the heath drawing down night upon it before its time; and practically all the scenes that follow in the first book are in the blackness of night out of doors in the desert, starless, moonless, and with only the flicker of seasonal bonfires to add luridness and mystery to the figures of those who dance about the fire on Rainbarrow or talk in tense and muffled tones inside the bank and ditch of Captain Vye's at Mistover Knap. The brightest coloring which Hardy admits into this composition of blacks and browns is the green of fern fronds on a June day, proper to love- making. The story closes on another night in November, with "rain, darkness, and anxious wanderers" feeling their way across the featureless waste by the help of footsoles long used to paths that cannot be seen by the eye, and drawn together about the rain-flooded pool where men and women struggle for life in the dark. No reader of Hardy need be reminded of the massive power and beauty of these scenes in which the darker pigments so predominate; nor of the shining splendor with which the points of brightness from candle or bonfire make their intense and brief assertion of Hght in a world of gloom. Only the etching needle of Rembrandt could do justice to the scene where Wildeve and Christian throw dice for gold pieces by the feeble hght of a lantern amid the vast encompassment of the night-shroucjed heath. First Christian and Wildeve playing by the hght of the lantern; and then, when Christian has lost all, and the candle has been put out by the bhnd fluttering of a moth, Wildeve and Venn throwing dice upon a flat stone by the feebler hght of glowworms ranged in a DRAMA loi circle. And as ever with this poet of landscapes that are the stage of human action, there is the quiet insistence of poetic symbolism, in which the physical circumstances have their suggested counterpart in the disposition of men's hearts. "Both men became so absorbed in the game that they took no heed of anything but the pygmy object immediately beneath their eyes; the flat stone, the open lantern, the dice, and the few illuminated fem-leaves which lay under the hght, were the whole world to them." What we are concerned with here is the unity of tone — the steadiness with which the heath makes us feel its dark and overshadowing presence, so that men and women are but sUght figures in a giant landscape, the insect-fauna of its somber flora. Mr. Hardy was bold enough to begin this grave history with an entire chapter devoted to a description of the heath at twilight; and his choice of a title for the second chapter but serves to signalize the littleness and frailty of man upon the great stage of inhospitable nature: "Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble." It is very quietly and without word or gesture that humanity makes its appearance, like a slow-moving shadow. "Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white." The effect is obtained at this point by means too subtle for analysis. It may be that the gravely cadenced rhythm itself plays a mysterious part in rightly affecting the imagination. More often the effect can be traced largely to figures of speech of definite connotation. I02 PROGRESS IN ART The sights and sounds of man's activity the author is forever comparing to those of extra-human nature, assimilating them to the concert of natural sights and sounds. In one place he has been describing the strange whispering emitted by the myriad, mummied heath bells of the past summer played upon by plaintive November wiiids. It was like the voice of a single person, of a spirit, speaking through each in turn. And then .... Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with aU this wUd rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally with the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distin- guished. The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-beUs had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs. The movements of human beings are sometimes described as seen upon the horizon by someone watching, and in terms that suggest the motions and forms of the lower organic, or even of the inorganic, world. Diggory Venn, for example, has been eavesdropping at a meeting of Eustacia and Wildeve, and at a certain point he loses sight of them. "Their black figures sank and disap- peared from against the sky. They were as two horns which the sluggish heath had put forth from its crown like a mollusc, and had now again drawn in." By various means the people of the story are made to seem, like the heath-croppers or wild ponies dimly discerned in the dusk, but as creatures of the heath. 8 It is Eustacia and Cl)Tn who by their strength of mind and will rise most above the lower orders of nature and most vigorously resist the leveling and absorbing DRAMA 103 forces of the heath. But that is the very source of the tragedy. Where souls content to submit to the stress of circumstance are like briars humbly bowing to the winds of fate, these great ones, obstinate in their strength of will, are broken hke the oak tree of the fable. And it is more carefully for them than for any minor figures that the stage is set and hung by the dramatist. It is, we feel, for Eustacia that, in the first book, the author proceeds with such deliberation to make his massive evocation of night upon the heath. She is the "figure against the sky" that attracts the anxious speculative gaze of the reddleman. She is the "Queen of Night" — the witch, as the superstitious thought her — who dominates the lives of Thomasin and Wildeve. It is her lonely life, for one thing, that has given her that dignity and freedom from vulgarity that add beauty to the force of her emotions. And however much she may long for a gaiety and a largeness of opportunity not afforded by the life of seclusion, there is an artistic congruity between her environment and her dark and unconventional passions, her savage independence of mind. It will be the eternal irony of this poetic figure that no reader will ever be able to dissociate her from the lonely and gloomy setting from which she made her desperate vain attempt to escape. As for Clym, it is another aspect of the heath with which he will be forever associated in the reader's imagination. He will be seen, in his leather garb, cutting furze in the hot afternoons of midsummer in the insect-haunted hollows of the heath. He will be seen as he was seen by his mother, a figure "of a russet hue, not more distinguishable from the scene around I04 PROGRESS IN ART him than the green caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on." He had been pointed out to her, on her journey across the heath, as one who could show her the way to the place where she was going. The silent being .... seemed to be of no more accoxmt in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a gar- ment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss And then .... Suddenly she was attracted to his individuality by observing pecuHarities in his walk. It was a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revealed the man to her, as the gait of Ahimaaz in the distant plain made him known to the watchman of the king. "His walk is exactly as my husband's used to be," she said; and then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son. This obscure way of life was not unpleasant to the man so lacking in wordly ambition. It was not inappro- priate to the philosophy which he had come back to the wilderness to preach. The very monotony of his labor "soothed him, and was in itself a pleasure." And so it happened that his wife could find him, on a siunmer afternoon, singing at his work, a social failure and not ill-content. If his mother was shocked at the humble occupation of the son for whom she had hoped great things, how much sorer was the disappointment and distress of the wife, who in this humiliation could read the death sentence of all her aspirations for herself! The garb and occupation were bad enough in themselves, symbol- izing the return to the narrow way of Ufe she hated. DRAMA 105 But it was the cheerful mood of Clym that was hardest to bear, proving his willing surrender to the captivity of the heath. It was inevitable that hard words should be spoken, that bitterness and pride should come between them, that she should turn again, however reluctantly, to the thought of Wildeve. When the death of Mrs. Yeobright had brought upon her the jealous suspicion of Clym, it was natural that, in her pride, she should have withheld the words that might have cleared up the misunderstanding. And from that point to her suicide she was carried as on a resistless current flowing from her disillusionment. It is thus that Egdon takes its place as the dominating force of the tragedy, as well as its appropriate and impressive setting. So that the unity of place, in itself an artistic value, is but the counterpart of a unity of action rooted and bedded in a precious oneness of theme. Instead of being, as in Far from the Madding Crowd, brought together arbitrarily to make out the prescribed materials of a novel, plot and setting here are one, growing equally and simultaneously out of the dramatic idea expressed in the title. For the first — and almost for the last — time in the work of Hardy, the discriminating reader is deUghted with the complete absence of mechanical contrivance. Contrivance there is as never before in his work, the loving contrivance of an artist bent on making everything right in an orderly composition; the long-range contrivance of an architect concerned to have every part in place in an edifice that shall stand well based and well proportioned, with meaning in every line. PART TWO: MORE CRAFT THAN ART V. RELAPSE The power and beauty of The Return of the Native stand out in most striking relief when it is viewed in connection with the long series of inferior works which followed, works on the whole so commonplace in concep- tion and so flabby in execution that they drive us to some hypothesis of the demands of the market, exhausted imagination, or impaired physical vigor. Even when Mr. Hardy had recovered himself sufficiently to lay out the vigorous canvasses of The Mayor of Casterhridge and The Woodlanders, he was still far from recovering the technical. power exhibited in The Native, or even, it may be judged by some, in earlier novels. Then follows the clear and serene mastery of Tess, to be followed again by the relative weakness of The Well- Beloved before the final triumph of Jude. It might almost seem as if, after each display of knowledge and sureness of hand, the author had dropped back again into the groping experimental stage; and you are led to wonder at times whether he had ever consciously learned the technical refinements of his art, whether perhaps the formal perfection of The Native or of Tess might not be a mere happy accident. One would be practically constrained to this conclusion were it not for the progress in art manifested throughout the series of novels as a whole — The Madding Crowd so much finer than anything earlier, The Native so much finer than that, with Tess and Jude going so far beyond even The Native in perfection of art. log no MORE CRAFT THAN ART This is the most convenient place to take up in a group the six novels in which, at one tinae or another, he falls farthest below the standard set by himself; reserving for separate consideration The Woodlanders and The Mayor of Casterbridge, novels of a much higher quality, but examples of certain backward tendencies in novelistic art. After the grave and beautiful work of Far from the Madding Crowd, Mr. Hardy diverted himself with an essay in comedy of rather dubious effectiveness, The Hand of Ethelherta. This story relates the campaign of Ethelberta Petherwin to dispose of her hand most advantageously. She is the daughter of a butler, but has been lifted into a higher social sphere by marriage with a gentleman, now deceased. The clever widow wishes to marry wealth in order to raise the fortunes of her numerous brothers and sisters. She turns her back on love in the person of a gentleman of good family but poor fortune, a musician. She goes to London and undertakes to scale society by means of her literary talent. She takes with her some of the family. A brother and a sister serve her in the capacities of butler and tire-woman; others are sturdy workmen, who help to decorate her house. With none of them can the would-be lady have any but secret communication. She has great social success, and is sought by various suitors — a distinguished painter, a rich clubman, a Lord of broad lands. She finally marries the Lord. He is an old Silenus; but she tames him, masters him, and has her will. Her nice younger sister Picotee is RELAPSE III happily married to the musician-lover of Ethelberta. Picotee has been in love with him all along; but it is only after losing Ethelberta that he realizes the merits of Picotee. It is likely that Mr. Hardy was aiming at something the tone of Evan Harrington or Sandra Belloni. But he has none of the comic afflatus of Meredith. He cannot command the burlesque vein in which the earher novelist related the means by which the three "Daughters of the Shears" had raised themselves in the social sphere. There is no one to correspond to the Countess de Saldar or to the Pole sisters — no one so funny. Ethelberta is not funny at all, in spite of her comic r61e of social climber. She is merely the object of an irony th^at misses fire. It misses fire because, somehow, the author makes us take her seriously, though without arousing deep interest in her. Even when she goes secretly to inspect the estate of one of her suitors and is caught by him in the act, we are made to feel her chagrin rather than the ludicrous vulgarity of her performance. There is only the most perfunctory suggestion of her being subjected to an ordeal and being found wanting. We cannot feel for her the admiring sjonpathy we feel for Evan Harrington in his tardy triumph over snobbery, nor the amused scorn we feel for Wilfrid Pole when he succumbs to the seduction of a weak sentimentalism. The humor is laid on in superficial patches. There is here and there a touch of satirical smartness that has a forced and hollow ring. It takes nearly a page to des- cribe the boredom of people in a drawing-room compelled to listen to a song. 112 MORE CRAFT THAN ART The sweetness of her smging was such that even the most unsympathetic honoured her by lookmg as if they would be wilUng to listen to every note the song contained if it were not quite so much trouble to do so. Some were so interested that, instead of continuing their conversation, they remained in silent consideration of how they would continue it when she had finished; whUe the particularly civil people arranged their countenances into every attentive form that the mind coxild devise. And so he goes on ringing facetious changes upon this boresome theme. In dialogue the society people are somewhat heavily reminiscent of Congreve; the low comedy people echo weakly the fim of Charles Dickens or Dick Steele. Little fourteen-year-old Joey, the rus- tic butler of Ethelberta, explains the ways of the city to his sister Picotee, timid and fresh from the country. The main evidence of his social forwardness is his use of tobacco. When Picotee begs him not to smoke he answers gravely, "What can I do? Society hev its rules, and if a person wishes to keep himself up, he must do as the world do. We be all Fashion's slave — as much a slave as the meanest in the land!" Much the most interesting part of the story is that toward the end where we are in doubt as to whether Ethelberta will be allowed to become the bride of the dreadful old rake. There is one long passage in which the musician-lover, her brother Dan, her father the butler, and a brother of Lord Mountclere are all making desperate efforts to get to Knollsea in time to prevent the marriage. It has an excitement like that of Around the World in Eighty Days. And then, after the wedding, having discovered something of the character of her husband, when Ethelberta plots with her faithful lover to escape by night and is baffled by the slyness of her RELAPSE 113 Lord, we have the excitement, danger, suspense, and physical action which have won popularity for many a story and many a play. When we say that this is the most interesting thing in the book, we have ade- quately measured the failure of this attempt at comedy. The Trumpet-Major is another essay in comedy. But it cannot be called a failure, nor even strictly speaking an attempt. The author is no longer under- taking the satirical delineation of smart life, but is deal- ing with much more familiar and congenial matter — matter of Wessex indeed. And the historical subject gives scope to that devoted antiquarianism of the hermit of Dorchester which he has indulged in many of the short stories, as well as in the reconstructions of The Greenwood Tree and The Madding Crowd, and, in so scholarly a fashion, in The Dynasts. The story is built around the excitement in a Dorset- shire coast village arising from the anticipated invasion by Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century, the same alarm that led the pacL&c Wordsworth to join a company of volunteers and gave occasion for several of his most ringing patriotic sonnets. It was the time when Majesty visited his favorite watering-place, when there was great drilling of the militia, and troops were encamped on the downs above the village. The heroine is a nice girl, Anne Garland by name, living with her widowed mother in the house of the local miller. The leading men are her three suitors, one a cowardly officer of the yeomanry, the other two brave men and brothers, John and Robert Loveday, the one a soldier and the 114 MORE CRAFT THAN ART other a sailor. John is the better man of the two, faithful, thoughtful, and generous. But it is the light- headed and incontinent Bob who has originally won the heart of the heroine, and who in the end, after various misunderstandings, is awarded the prize of her hand. Readers of Hardy will not be surprised at such an outcome; and it is in the character of Anne and her dealings with the two brothers that he shows himself most like the Thomas Hardy of the great novels. This is all done, however, with a purposeful lightness of touch which bids us pass it over lightly. More care was appar- ently given to the historical details as they were to be gleaned from contemporary newspapers and chroni- cles and from the stories of old men in Mr. Hardy's youth. He takes great pains with the outfit and drilling of the yeomanry, the equipment of the soldiers, the equipage of the King; and it is evident that he introduces with great relish the incident of Nelson's death at Trafalgar — it was as officer upon the flagship "Victory," under Captain Hardy, that Bob Loveday won his spurs. The plot is duly thickened with misunderstandings, and leads duly to moments of exciting action. More than once the heroine is in great danger from the atten- tions of her bullying lover of the yeomanry, and has to flee from him. on foot or on horseback, and with her wits pitted against his in tricks and dodges. One time, by means of a displaced plank, she lands him splashing in the water like any victim of slapstick comedy. More exciting still are the circumstances of Bob Loveday's escape from the press-gang. This adventure involves much leaping out of window, sliding down ropes, and the RELAPSE II' like. But the most remarkable of Bob's feats is having himself raised from story to story of the mill by the chain for hoisting flour-sacks, and then letting go just soon enough not to be dashed against a beam at the top. His pursuers are ever close behind, and arrive at each story just in time to see his "legs and shoebuckles vanishing through the trap-door in the joists overhead." The reader of a certain age will remember having witnessed scenes like this in a type of melodrama now gone out of fashion, not to mention the dime novels of remote boyhood. Two of the characters furnish a large amount of the comedy of "humors." Uncle Benjy, the miser, the sly fox, who is so in fear of his nephew Festus, and always treats him with such a show of affection and admiration; and the nephew Festus, the miles gloriosus, who is so bent upon winning the girl and on getting away with his uncle's money-box — these are traditional characters of EngUsh comedy in novel or play, with nothing to distinguish them from their kind from Ben Jonson down. Festus Derriman is an arrant coward, who is frightened ahnost to death when he hears that Napoleon has landed, but who, when he gets advance information that this is a false alarm, plays the part of a gallant leader for those who still believe the enemy is near. There is considerable broad comedy in the tricks played upon one another by him and his uncle; there are several long dialogues displaying his cowardice in mere anticipa- tion of being called into action against the foe; and other amusing scenes in which his bluff is called. There are good lines for a Joe Jefferson, or one of the old comedians, as in a comedy of Sheridan or Goldsmith. And it is ii6 MORE CRAFT THAN ART all sheer "literature," a passable exercise in a quite ob- solete manner. Much more of Hardy's world are the widow Garland and the miller Loveday. These amiable characters are drawn with mild and faithful himior; and it is a fine touch of country thrift when their nuptials are hastened to take advantage of the good things prepared for the wedding of Bob that failed to come off. In general the tone of the narrative is very pleasing, and especially in the playful and loving treatment of the old buildings and the old furniture, so impregnated with genial human history, and so genially eloquent of the "filings and effacements" of time. No one could have related with a mellower and more sympathetic humor the great housecleaning of the widow Garland ; no one could have described with finer antiquarian gusto the ancient hall of Uncle Benjy. No one could have made us more in love with crack-walled, round-shouldered Overcombe Mill. And it is purely in gratitude that one marks as in the manner of Addison the droll history of Miller Loveday's family. It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires and gammers thus doubled till they became a vast body of Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatly improved the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional pair of millstones. The history as a whole is enveloped in a kind of mist of tender humor like the subtle mist of superfine RELAPSE 117 flour which penetrated all chambers of the miller's house. And through it all there runs a pervasive tone of gentle elegy suggestive of Irving or of Goldsmith. That is also true Hardy; and the reader of The Dynasts will recognize a milder essence of the melancholy of that tragic panorama in the author's reflection on the dis- appearance of the troops encamped upon the downs. They still spread the grassy surface to the sun as on that beautiful morning, not, historically speaking, so very long ago; but the King and his fifteen thousand armed men, the horses, the bands of music, the princesses, the cream-coloured teams — the gorgeous centre-piece, in short, to which the downs were the mere mount or margin — ^how entirely have they all passed and gone! — lying scattered about the world as military and other dust, some at Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse, and Water- loo; some in home churchyards; and a few small handfuls in royal vaults. It is a light and pleasing confection, ingeniously compounded of many diverse materials — a graceful diversion and unbending of genius — not altogether unworthy of the hand that could do so much more serious work. 3 After Desperate Remedies, Mr. Hardy never again wrote a story of ingenuity pure and simple. This element does make its appearance, and rather far down the list of his novels, but always in combination. It appears in the role of dubious assistant to themes of some dignity and point, some real value for art. It is a crutch, a bit of machinery for making a go of stories which might be expected to interest the reader in quite a different way, but which seem unable to stand up, or to make progress, without such artificial helps. ii8 MORE CRAFT THAN ART Such a story is A Laodicean, which comes after The Return of the Native, but which, by this resort to machinery, makes confession of its weaker birth. The theme is one of no little promise. The Laodicean is a young woman of wealth and charm, one Paula Power, who finds herself in possession of a picturesque old castle enriched with family portraits of the Norman De Stancys. She is herself the daughter of a great railroad king who had been a civil engineer and donor of the local Baptist church, an edifice of characteristic ugliness; and she is thus the hereditary representative of everything most opposed to the mellow traditions of her domicile. She is in religion a Laodicean, unable to make up her mind either to be immersed in the proper Baptist fashion or to repudiate her father's faith. Socially and imaginatively she aspires to become every- thing that her castle stands for, and is thus strongly tempted to accept the hand of Captain De Stancy, the heir to the baronetcy. But her heart declares for plain George Somerset, the gifted architect who has been en- gaged to make the castle habitable. It is in this affair of her marriage that she chiefly earns her title of Lao- dicean^ — neither hot nor cold. It is long before the heart asserts its paramount claim. It is a pretty theme, offering ample scope for the delineation of manners or the display of character — a theme for Thackeray, say, or Henry James. But it has not enough of "Wessex" for Mr. Hardy, and it has too much of smart life. Almost from the beginning he must have felt unequal to its challenge. It had already begun its race in the magazine; Mr. Hardy, as he tells us, was not well; the story must be continued, it must RELAPSE 119 be strung out to its five hundred pages. The obvious thing to do was to introduce a villain (or several villains), a mystery (or several mysteries), and to set going complications and misunderstandings which should take time for clearing up and duly put off the hour of the happy ending. Hence the introduction of young Dare, the mysterious wise boy, the illegitimate son of Captain De Stancy, who has the family name tattooed on his breast, and who threatens with his revolver the confederate who discovers that dread secret. It is Dare who steals Somerset's plans for the castle in order to secure his defeat in the contest with a local architect. It is he who manages to inflame his father with love for the heiress. It is he who falsifies photographs and sends "fake" telegrams in order to persuade Paula of the unworthiness of his father's rival. It is he who in the end sets fire to the family portraits and causes the burning down of the castle. And not content with one villain, the author must needs provide another in the person of Paula's uncle Abner — not to mention the half-hearted villain, the architect Havill. Abner Power was no less than a notorious Red and maker of bombs, wanted by the police in most countries of Europe. It is a typical scene of melodrama when the two arch-villains cross swords (or literally pistols) across the vestry table of a church after attending a funeral. Power would like to get Dare out of the country, so as to save trouble for Paula and De Stancy. And he tries to persuade him by threats of exposing his criminal practices. Young Dare retorts by relating, in the form of a dream, the history of I20 MORE CRAFT THAN ART Power, showing how completely, as we say nowadays, he has "got the goods on him." And having come to a deadlock in this form of argument, the adversaries resort to one more urgent and exciting. Dare raised his eyes as he concluded his narration. As has been remarked, he was sitting at one end of the vestry-table, Power at the other, the green cloth stretching between them. On the edge of the table adjoining Mr. Power a shining nozzle of metal was quietly resting, like a dog's nose. It was directed point-blank at the young man. Dare started. "Ah — a revolver ?" he said. Mr. Power nodded placidly, his hand stUl grasping the pistol behind the edge of the table. "As a traveller I always carry one of 'em," he returned; "and for the last five minutes I have been considering whether your numerous brains are worth blowing out or no. The vault yonder has suggested itself as convenient and snug for one of the same family; but the mental problem that stays my hand is, how am I to despatch and bury you there with- out the workmen seeing ?" "'Tis a strange problem, certainly," replied Dare, "and one on which I fear I could not give disinterested advice. Moreover, while you, as a traveller, always carry a weapeon of defence, as a traveller so do I. And for the last three-quarters of an hour I have been thinking concerning you, an intensified form of what you have been thinking of me, but without any concern as to your interment. See here for a proof of it." And a second steel nose rested on the edge of the table opposite to the first, steadied by Dare's right hand. They remained for some time motionless, the tick of the tower clock distinctly audible. Mr. Power spoke first. "Well, 'twould be a pity to make a mess here under such dubious circumstances. Mr. Dare, I perceive that a mean vaga- bond can be as sharp as a poUtical regenerator. I cry quits, if you care to do the same ?" Dare assented, and the pistols were put away.' ' P. 428. RELAPSE 121 This is a good sample of the cool and masterful, the high ironic manner, a la Dumas, in which our villains dehver themselves. It is true that not often in A Laodicean do we have a scene of such intense excite- ment. But there is throughout a quite sufi&cient provision of mystery and melodrama. There is a first- class concatenation of incidents, with well-sustained suspense. The average magazine reader must have been well satisfied; and few so much as realized the submergence, the total eclipse, of the excellent subject. 4 Quite similar is the case of Two on a Tower, the novel that followed A Laodicean. Here, too, Mr. Hardy has a very promising theme, and one much more congenial to his talent. He undertakes to record "the emotional history" of Swithin St. Cleeve, a very yoimg man with a passion for astronomy, and Lady Constantine, older than he and with affections disponibles — ^her unsympa- thetic husband having been long absent in African exploration. On the top of a lonely fir-girt hill upon her Wessex property rises a memorial tower, suitable for the observation of the heavens; and Swithin St. Cleeve receives permission of Lady Constantine to use it for that purpose. There he sets up an "equatorial" glass provided by her munificence; there she visits her prot6ge and is initiated into the mysteries — the ghastly inmiensities — of the stellar universe. There is much of poetry and much of irony in their nocturnal converse. Lady Constantine is indeed more taken up with her own personal affairs than with those "impersonal monsters," the "voids and waste places of the sky"; and yet she 122 MORE CRAFT THAN ART cannot help being impressed and made to feel insignificant by Swithin's graphic exposition of the size of the universe. It is Swithin's ambition to become the Copernicus to the systems beyond the solar system. And while she is falling in love with the Adonis, he is preparing to publish his great discovery in regard to the fixed stars. When he learns that he has been anticipated (by a paltry six weeks) by an American scientist, he falls into despair, lies in the damp, takes fever, is on the point of death, and is passionately kissed by Lady Constantine. He recovers, not, however, because of the lady's kiss, but because he has heard of a new comet, and that gives him a new interest in life. In the meantime Lady Constan- tine learns of the death of her husband, and is free to indulge her love for S within. There follows a sufficiently amusing scene between the lovelorn but modest lady and the naive astronomer, conscious of nothing but the state of the heavens. So there we have the subject of the book. "This slightly-built romance," says Mr. Hardy, "was the out- come of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitestimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men." He has succeeded in setting this history against that background, and perhaps to some degree has imparted to readers the desired sentiment. He has, moreover, set the stage for an amusing little comedy of the Scientist and the Loving Woman unequally yoked together by what Clough calls "juxtaposition." And then he largely abandons the comedy and the stellar background, and RELAPSE 123 even the emotional history, in order to relate the surpris- ing series of events by which the passion of Lady Constantine is baffled. A secret marriage leads to various subterfuges and embarrassments when Lady Constantine is visited by her brother and the Bishop of Melchester. It is still worse when she learns that the death of her first hus- band had occurred actually six weeks after her mar- riage to Swithin, which will accordingly have to be repeated in order to be legal. And then she learns of a bequest made to Swithin for his scientific studies on condition that he remain single to the age of twenty-five. She determines to give him up, and he goes off to the southern hemisphere on a scientific mission of several years duration. After he has gone, poor Lady Constan- tine once more finds herself in trouble. It turns out that she is with child by Swithin, now no longer her husband. She makes a frantic effort to get into com- munication with him. And failing that, she is reduced to marrjdng the Bishop in order to legitimize her child. The record of these events ocjcupies nearly two hundred pages, or more than half the book. The last two chapters bring the history to its conclusion. After several years in Africa, learning of the death of the Bishop, the astronomer returns — being now of the pre- scribed age of twenty-five — to offer his hand to the lady. He finds her upon the tower, together with their golden-haired child. She has grown old and worn ; but he will not fail in his sentimental duty, and he insists that he has come back to marry her. Thereupon Lady Constan- tine is moved too deeply by the consummation of all her hopes; and happiness kills her. Swithin, we reahze, will 124 MORE CRAFT THAN ART marry Tabitha Lark, a blooming yoimg thing who had earher been introduced for this very purpose. The conclusion is characteristic of Hardy in its irony. The general conception is worthy of the master; and there is a considerable flavor of him in the early chapters. But he fails to give us any "emotional history." He has not more than space to make us understand the marvelous concatenation of events. The psychology is of the most conventional, the simplest, and the crudest. Human emotions are secondary, and are manipulated in the most cavaUer fashion so as to make plausible the predetermined acts and combinations of circumstance. The role of Swithin is to be that of a passionate scientist and indifferent lover, yielding reluctantly to the advances of a loving lady. And yet, in order to bring about the marriage called for by the plot — and, I suppose, to preserve the modesty of the lady — he is made to change r61es with her, and to propose their union himself. This is weakly motivated by Swithin's inabihty to carry on his work while uncer- tain of the success of his love. If we had first been convinced of the existence of his love, we should be more impressed with this example of the prime impor- tance for the scientist of being able to do his work. Two on a Tower is the last striking instance in Hardy's novels of the undue dependence upon intrigue, with the consequent obscuration of theme. S If the case is not similar in The Romantic Adven- tures of a Milkmaid, it is simply because that httle story cannot be said to have a theme of any sort. It is, if RELAPSE 125 the truth must be told, the most arrant pot-boiler that was ever turned out by tired and harassed writer of novels.' It is not without its prettiness, especially in the early chapters, and should be prized for its location of the story in the fat valley of the Swenn, early study for Tess's Valley of the Great Dairies. But never was more simple and obvious the intention of carrying a plot through seventeen chapters with the greatest possible amount of change and surprise. Margery Tucker, daughter of the dairyman, starts across the fields in the early morning, with a basket of fresh butter for her granny. Accidentally encountering in a summer house the mysterious foreign baron who has taken the great Place for the season, she saves him from suicide. This favor he repays by gratifying her wish to go to a yeomanry ball. She dresses for the ball in a hollow tree in the middle of the wood, and they roll off to the house of a nobleman in a neighboring county to dance the polka, then the rage, under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Brown. It is only on their return to the hollow tree that the baron learns from Margery of her engagement to Jim Hayward, master lime-burner; and by that time the sentiments, or imaginations, of milk- maid and baron have been somewliat touched. How the baron backs the suit of the lime-burner; how he upsets everything by unwittingly preventing Margery from being present at her own wedding; how he summons her to his supposed death-bed and marries her to Jim, but on condition that she need not hve with ' We ought in fairness to bear in mind that Mr. Hardy makes no claims for this work, which is covered by the apologetic, or deprecatory, tone of his prefatory note to A Changed Man and Other Tales. 126 MORE CRAFT THAN ART her husband till she is ready; how by trickery Jim iinally persuades his bride to come to his home — chiefly with a scarlet uniform and a pretended flirtation — such are the main incidents which bring the story up to the culminating scene of melodrama. The mysterious baron, essentially good and generous at heart, is not without his hability to temptation. And when he finds himself in a coach "blazing with lions and uni- corns," together with a sweet country maid who is being taken, not very enthusiastic, to the home of her husband, what should he do but drive her to the coast and propose to carry her off on his yacht ? Then on a sudden Margery seemed to see all; she became white as a fleece, and an agonized look came into her eyes. With clasped hands she bent to the Baron. "Oh, sir!" she gasped, "I once saved your life; save me now, for pity's sake."' There is a sample of the style at this exciting point in the story. The concluding paragraphs of the story are also good enough to quote. The life of Jim and Margery was a happy one; but the baron, it was rumored, at last effectually took his own life. When she heard of his possible death Margery sat in her nursing chair gravely, thinking for nearly ten minutes, to the total neglect of her infant in the cradle. Jim, on the other side of the fireplace, said "You are sorry enough for him, Margery. I am sure of that." "Yes, yes," she murmured. "I am sorry." "Suppose he were to suddenly appear and say in a voice of command, 'Margery, come with me!'" ' I quote from p. 88 of the edition of the book in the Seaside Library published by George Munro in New York. This text is based on that of the original story in the London Graphic. It has been somewhat modified by Mr. Hardy for republication in 1913, as one may see by consulting p. 404 of A Changed Man and Other Tales. RELAPSE 127 "I believe I should have no power to disobey," she returned with a mischievous look. "He was Uke a magician to me. I think he was one. He could move me as a loadstone moves a speck of steel. Yet no," she added, hearing the baby cry, "he would not move me now." "Well," said Jim, with no great concern (for "la jalousie retrospective," as George Sand terms it, had nearly died out of him), "however he might move ye, my love, he'll never come. He swore it to me; and he was a man of his word."^ Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella — the baron playing the double role of wolf and fairy godmother — and, for the rest, whatever was most to the liking of "The Duchess" and those other lady novelists who maintained throughout the nineteenth century the sentimental and Gothic traditions of the eighteenth! While in A Laodicean and Two on a Tower the theme was overwhelmed by the forced complications of plot, the stiU more amazing pattern of circumstance which makes the plot of The Well-Beloved is, down to the least detail, the means of sharply defining, and we might say demonstrating, the theme. It is an interesting and characteristic theme, worked out with mathematical precision; and the book is worthy of a place on a shelf with the other novels of Hardy. But coming between Tess and Jude, it is wanting in strength and color. The first version, published in a magazine in 1892, is distinctly cruder than the revision of 1897, and strongly suggests the slapdash performance of a busy journeyman who has his bread to make from day to day, and is ' P. 90 in the Seaside Library volume; p. 406 in A Changed Man and Other Tales, somewhat revised. 128 MORE CRAFT THAN ART saving his strength for some more cherished labor. In style and structure the book of 1897 shows a decided effort to raise the whole into a higher class.' But the care in revision cannot alter the fundamental fact that the thing is rather a poetic fantasy than a novel, a somewhat insubstantial, decidedly unconvincing inven- tion, with a strong flavor of the literary. The theme is the stuff of poesy; and the plot which is invented to give it embodiment involves such surprising recurrence of similar situations as to tax the credulity of the most confirmed readers of Hardy. It is a study in the artistic temperament as it is sup- posed to exhibit itself in love. The leading character, Jocel)ni Pierston, is a sculptor, and the descendant of quarriers long settled in the peninsula known as the Isle of Slingers. And his descent from the "curious and almost distinctive people" of that isolated bit of Wessex, cher- ishing as they do "strange beliefs and singular customs," is another explanation of the fantastic dealings he has with the goddess Aphrodite, whose temple, according to tradition, "once stood at the top of the Roman road lead- ing up into the isle." This young sculptor is one of those Shelleyan, platonic seekers of the ideal beauty, for whom it slips from form to form in the most freakish and un- controllable fashion. Already at the age of twenty he has found the Well-Beloved embodied for him in no less than a dozen different women. However it may have been with the ladies involved, the experience was not an unpleasant one to the artist himself; but it was destined to lead to comphcations, ' The diflferences are set forth in detail by Miss Chase in her Master's thesis before referred to. RELAPSE 129 and in the end to bring an ironic nemesis upon the involuntarily fickle man. The man of twenty, on returning to his native isle, finds himself in the, for him, unwonted situation of proposing marriage and becoming engaged to a nice girl of the ancient stock. It is doubtful whether the flitting ideal did ever take up its abode in the person of Avice Caro; but he is drawn to her by ties of intimate spiritual kinship, the growth of their common heredity. It is not long, however, before the true Well-Beloved casts her troublesome shadow over the sensible plans and engagements of Jocelyn Pierston. He falls in love with another daughter of the Isle, named Marcia, helps her in difficulty, takes her to London, and is going to be married to her. But before the marriage Kcense can be obtained, the woman has changed her mind; and she passes out of the story for the space of forty years. Avice Caro marries a cousin of the same family name. Such are the contents of Part First, entitled "A Young Man of Twenty." Part Second is entitled "A Young Man of Forty," and shows us the first instalment of "Time's Revenges" upon the fickle artist-lover. The Well-Beloved has in the meantime had many incarnations; and she finally takes up her abode in a well-connected and accompHshed society woman, who would make an ideal mate for the now distinguished sculptor. But he is not destined to such a tame and wordly-wise conclusion of his amorous career. Learning of the death of Avice Caro, he goes back to the Isle for her funeral. He meets there her daughter Avice, the very image of her mother. And this time there is no doubt that the phantom Aphrodite I30 MORE CRAFT THAN ART has descended upon the daughter of the woman whom he had wronged so many years before. They seem to his imagination one and the same person. His reason argues that it is not so, and that Avice the Second has not the soul nor the refinement of her mother. His reason points him away to the woman of fashion; but his tyrannical imagination insists on his paying court to the little laundress. It is a "gigantic satire upon the mutations of his nymph during the past twenty years." And then, by a further stroke of irony, it appears that this bit of a rustic girl is now, as he had been, haunted by a phantom Well-Beloved, as flitting as his own, and as much beyond the control of her will. She has already loved no less than fifteen different men. The ironic moral was hardly in need of statement. "This seeking of the Well-Beloved was, then, of the nature of a knife which could cut two ways. To be the seeker was one thing; to be one of the corpses from which the ideal inhabitant had departed was another; and this was what he had become now, in the mockery of new Days." But to complete the reversal of the situation, and squeeze out the last drop of irony, one further circum- stance is called for. Avice being much troubled by the complications arising from her unstable imagination, Pierston takes her to London, hoping to save her from her troubles by making her his wife. But when at last he makes this purpose clear to the girl, she has to inform him that she is already married. Her husband is one of the island stock bearing his own surname, from whom she is at present separated because of her love RELAPSE 131 for another man. Jocelyn Pierston has fully paid the penalty — whether to the first Avice for his instabiUty, or to "the love-queen of the isle" for his reversion "from the ephemeral to the stable mood." The best he can do is to restore Avice to her husband and set them up in business on the Isle. Such a plot would surely be remarkable enough in itself, and a sufficient illustration of the theme. But not content with this pretty reversal of parts, Mr. Hardy must needs give us a Part Third, with the hero appearing again as "A Young Man Turned Sixty," and a most miraculous reduphcation of the events of Part Second. After another long interval, Pierston returns again to the Isle, and this time falls in love with Avice the Third, granddaughter of the first Avice Caro. She agrees to marry him to please her dying mother; but the night before the wedding she elopes with a former lover. This lover, by a final stroke of the playful maUce of fate, is the son of Marcia, the beloved of forty years past. She has since been married and widowed, and has seen far countries. And then — to finish off the pattern with the last formal completeness — the artist and follower of flitting love marries the aged woman, loses altogether his sense of beauty, his artistic imagination, and settles down in his native isle as a useful and ordinary citizen. It is all good fun. It is an idea quaintly conceived, and carried through without too much gravity. There is in the treatment of Pierston's obsession a note of levity, of hght irony, rather well sustained. The obsession itself is not treated with any of the religious spirit of "Epipsychidion" or of the ItaUan poets of the 132 MORE CRAFT THAN ART dolce stil nuovo; and we are not expected to take in tragic mood the punishment meted out to the fickle lover. There is a strain of poetry running through, but this is not of a sentimental order. It is found in the fanciful playing with the myth of an amorous divinity long established in the Isle. There are frequent references to the ancient goddess, "Aphrodite, Ashtaroth, Freyja, or whoever the love-queen of his isle might have been." The motif of the penalty recurs in various and not altogether reconcUable forms. And the artist's subjec- tion to the Well-Beloved is itself represented as a kind of punishment. "Sometimes at night he dreamed that she was the 'wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person, bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art." This mythical interpretation is indeed pushed too far. Mr. Hardy is not a Hawthorne; and he proves a Httle awkward in his attempt to suggest a supernatural mystery lurking in the background of his modem story. There is considerable charm in the setting and atmosphere, the quaint stone houses, the quarries, the moan of the sea, the warmth of the rock in the sun — ''that was the island's personal temperature when in its afternoon sleep." In social custom and material feature this is a special variety of Hardy's Wessex. But the local feeling is not so strong as in the greater novels. There is nothing like the dairying of Tess, the furze-cutting of Clym, the sheep-tending of Gabriel Oak, to give substantiahty to the country and a deep local tincture to the characters. The characters are all phantoms, mere figures in the algebra of the theme. RELAPSE 133 It can hardly be otherwise with a plot so elaborately disposed of in so Uttle space (for the book is a short one) ; a plot so marvelous and rigid in pattern, with so sharp an insistence upon so fantastic a theme. It has not the color and fulness of life. It pretends indeed to be no more than "a sketch of a temperament." It is good fun — one of the playful recreations of genius. VI. MOVIE The Mayor bf Casterbridge and The Woodlanders are both works clearly impressed with the seal of genius, the one a work of exceptional power, and the other a work of exceptional charm. But they are both books in which it is hard to distinguish more than the most rudimentary acquaintance with that art in the narrative of events which was at the disposal of any well-read novelist in the years 1886 and 1887. There is only one alternative to this conclusion: that the author may in both cases have deliberately chosen, as proper to his subject or congenial to his readers, a technique of slap- dash facility and looseness. In each case the subject is one giving scope to a dramatic treatment similar to that of The Native; but in each case the actual treatment rprninds rmp f>f fhp„F,1i7:ahpt||p,n rli rpnicle-plav before Marlowe and Shakespeare transformed it into tragedy . The Mayor of Casterbridf^e departs even farther than The Woodlanders from the..inelhod of sober and shapelv drama, remiading one o ften of the moving picture, which has flourished so remarkably during the generation following its appearance. I The Mayor of Casterbridge is a story deah'ng in incidents of more than usual strangene ss and im proba - biUtyj both in themselves and in their combination. It covers a long course of years, and introduces so many important events, so many amazing turns and com- pUcations, that four hundred pages are scarce enough 134 MOVIE 135 to get them told in a manner fully intelligible to the reader. A brief abstract can hardly fail to prove bewildering to anyone unacquainted with the book. The story opens with no less an event than the sale of a wife. It is at a country fair that Michael Henchard, hay-trusser of imagination and of moody disposition, having come to realize how greatly he is burdened with wife and child, and being somewhat disguised in drink, turns jest into earnest, puts up his wife to auction, and knocks her down at five guineas to a seafaring man of chivalrous instincts. When, in soberer condition, he undertakes to recover his lost wife, his searching proves vain. He takes an oath not to touch liquor again within the space of twenty years; and he starts life afresh and unencumbered at the age of twenty. v /^ Such are the contents of the first two chapters. J The story now takes a leap of eighteen years, and shows us Michael Henchard in great prosperity. He has become a prominent grain merchant of Casterbridge and mayor of the city. And by a strange coincidence, on the very night of the mayor's dinner, three strangers arrive in Casterbridge to witness his triumph. One is a young Scotchman named Farfrae, who is on his way to America to seek his fortune. He proves of service to Henchard in a business difl&culty, and greatly takes the mayor's fancy by his pleasing peisonality; and he is persuaded by Henchard to stay in Casterbridge and become his partner. The other new arrivals are no less than Henchard's wife Susan and her grownup daughter Elizabeth- Jane. It seems that the sailor has disappeared, and is thought to be drowned; and Susan has come back to seek out 136 MORE CRAFT THAN ART her lawful husband and secure, if possible, a father for her girl. Mayor Henchard, in spite of an awkward love-affair of his in the Island of Jersey, recognizes his obligation to his wife, and takes measures to give her her dues. He sets up the widow Newson in respectability in the town; and they play out together a prearranged comedy of getting acquainted and then getting married. It is natural for young Farfrae to fall in love with his partner's daughter. But Michael Henchard is not a man whose acts are controlled by reason or good policy. He has grown jealous of the popularity of his partner; he finally dismisses him; and he forbids Elizabeth- Jane to have anything to do with a man who has now become a business rival and, in Henchard's view, "an enemy of his house." This is the situation at the time that Mrs. Henchard, for the convenience of the story, sickens and dies. y;^v And now comes to the fore a complication which is I destined greatly to affect the course of the history. EUzabeth-Jane is not really the daughter of Henchard. His daughter had long since died, and Elizabeth was the daughter of Newson. But Susan, to propitiate the jealous Henchard, has all along allowed him to believe that Ehzabeth is his own flesh and blood. Meantime Elizabeth has been kept by them both in ignorance of the real facts about the original marriage and separation of Henchard and Susan, and of course supposes herself to be (as she is) the daughter of Newson. Wheels within wheels! But after the death of his wife, the lonely man, hoping to win the love of the girl, reveals to her, what he supposes to be the fact, that he is her father. And then, by one of those ironies of circum- MOVIE 137 stance which he is ever provoking by his own perverse- ness, he comes immediately after upon a note from his dead wife confessing that Elizabeth is the daughter of Newson. It is his turn for concealing the facts of her birth; and he does not let the girl know of his mistake. The result is another irony. Elizabeth, who was at first greatly hurt by the thought that Newson was not her father, becomes reconciled to that fact, and turns her affections to Henchard, only to find that he appar- ently hates her. He really does hate her now for not being his daughter; and in this mood he gives Farfrae fuU permission to court her. And next, having done his duty by his wife, Henchard is confronted by his obligations to his mistress. Every- thing repeats itself in the pattern of this plot. And no sooner is one past disposed of than another turns up to plague him. Lucetta, his Jersey love, having come into some money, has moved to Casterbridge and set up an establishment; her reputation has been damaged and she hopes to have it mended by Henchard. And thence grows another irony. For no sooner has Henchard determined to marry Lucetta, who is still attractive and now a person of means, than she has ceased to desire him, having fallen in love with Farfrae, his rival in business. And Farfrae, having received permission to love Elizabeth- Jane, loves instead Lucetta, who — though he knows it not — is so deeply engaged with the other man. The jealousy of Henchard is aroused; and he who had opposed the loves of Farfrae and Elizabeth, now opposes those of Farfrae and Lucetta. He uses his knowledge of Lucetta's past to compel her to promise marriage to himself. 138 MORE CRAFT THAN ART Then at last comes his nemesis upon the man who has sold his wife and made an enemy of his friend. He has reached the summit of good fame; he has been mayor, and is still magistrate. But while he is sitting in dignity to pronounce judgment upon malefactors, a wretched old woman is brought before the court for some low offense. And who should she be, of all persons in the world, but a witness of Henchard's crime of many years before, the very woman who had sold him the drink that had made him reckless in wrongdoing? And what should she do, in her envious hatred of worldly respectabilities, but denounce the judge for his own crimes? Henchard impetuously acknowledges in open court the truth of her charges, and that he is no better than the prisoner at the bar. He is disgraced in the eyes of all men. And now disgraces and disappointments crowd upon him. On the next day he learns of the secret marriage of Lucetta to his enemy. Farfrae has beaten him likewise in the business game, and he becomes a bank- rupt. It is now twenty years since the sale of his wife; the date of his oath has expired, and he takes to drink. He is degraded to a common laborer, and must work for his former rival, whom he had once set up in business, and who now occupies Henchard's fine house and has been appointed mayor. He reaches the lowest depth of humiliation on the occasion of the King's visit to Casterbridge. He has determined to assert his dignity at this time by joining with the honorable Council in greeting Royalty. But in this purpose he is prevented by Mayor Farfrae, and hauled away by the collar in the presence of the whole town. And he hears himself MOVIE 139 described, by the woman to whom he had formerly condescended, as a mere workman employed by her husband. It is at this period that Henchard is sorely tempted to get even with his enemies by violence and treachery. At one time he is on the point of killing Farfrae by throw- ing him out of an upstairs door in the barn; but he repents him before it is too late. At another time he is tempted to betray Lucetta by reading to her husband her old letters to himself. He does go so far as to read the letters to Farfrae; but his heart fails him at the last moment, and he does not reveal the identity of the writer. By mischance, however, he is the cause of disgrace to Lucetta. He undertakes to send back to her the incriminating letters. But the messenger he has chosen is a man with a deep grudge against both him and Lucetta; he reads the letters aloud in a pubhc house. The result is that the scum of the town perform for the mayor's wife the scandalous ceremony of the "skimmity- ride." Following an ancient custom, they parade through the streets the grotesque efl&gies of Lucetta and Henchard, thus publishing their shame. And the disgraced woman dies soon after as a result of her agitation. We now enter upon the last stage of the career of Michael Henchard. Elizabeth- Jane has come to be the comfort of her supposed father. And with her help and by the generosity of Farfrae, Henchard sets up again in a small way as a seed merchant. But now falls upon him another bizarre stroke of destiny; and once again he provokes the worst results by his unscupulous attempt to seize happiness for himself. With the disposal of I40 MORE CRAFT THAN ART Susan and Lucetta, he has still to reckon with the sailor man, the father of Elizabeth. Newson turns out to have been alive all the time, and finally makes his appearance in Casterbridge. Henchard gets rid of him for the moment by telling him that Elizabeth is dead. And for a brief time he settles down to be the gentle father of an affectionate daughter. But Newson comes back again with a knowledge of Henchard's He. And that is not all; for now the ever triumphant rival, in business and love, who had taken his Lucetta from him, is about to take his Elizabeth- Jane. Upon the reappearance of Newson, Henchard has left Caster- bridge; he returns for the wedding of Elizabeth and Farfrae. But the girl's heart has been hardened by the discovery of his duplicity. Against her arraignment he makes no appeal. He leaves her quickly with a promise never to trouble her more. And he dies soon after of a broken heart. It is with such hardihood that the author grapples with the crude stuff of men's Hves, appalled by no cir- cumstances or concatenation of circumstances, however violent and surprising. The reader's breath is almost taken away by the succession of surprising turns of the kind so much prized in a certain kind of romance, and now become the staple of the movies. Everything is so disposed that the story shall never lag, that never shall there be a failure of good things for the lover of movement and novelty. That a man should offer his wife at auction and find a buyer in the first chapter; MOVIE 141 that his long-lost wife should return at the moment of his worldly triumph; that she should be so conveniently disposed of at so early a stage in order to make way for the other woman and all the comphcations that follow in her train; and she in turn for the sailor man, so long held in reserve by ironic fate; that the old woman who witnessed the sale of the wife should turn up so opportunely at the moment when she is required to complete the degradation of Henchard: these are but the most obvious and striking arrangements for pro- viding plot in the highest degree of excitement and comphcation. Some are unusual enough in truth or fiction, and some of ancient hackneyed use in story — ■ the mysteries and dubieties of birth, and the return of embarrassing relatives long put out of mind or thought to be dead. The combination is at any rate intriguing and bizarre. Innumerable are the minor coincidences that con- tribute to the embroilment: that Jopp, for examplej the man discharged by Henchard and refused the favorj of her grace by Lucetta, should by chance have lived im Jersey in the earlier days and known of their lova affair, and that he, the haunter of low taverns, should be the man to whose hands were intrusted the incriminate ing letters. There are many of those coincidences An. which several persons whose fates cross come together strangely in the same place at the same time. Such is the chance by which Susan and Elizabeth are at the Three Mariners Iim on the very evening that Henchard and Farfrae meet there for their momentous interview; the dramatic chance by which Henchard, Elizabeth, and Farfrae meet at Lucetta's home, Farfrae being 142 MORE CRAFT THAN ART unaware of the acquaintance of Lucetta and Henchard; the melodramatic chance by which Henchard finds Lucetta and Elizabeth in the field with the mad bull, so as to save their hves on the very day on which he is to learn of Lucetta's secret marriage. And then there are those chances which throw a light so ironic upon human nature and its ineffectual commerce with fate: such as the return of Newson to deprive Henchard of the affections of Elizabeth just at the moment when the two have come to love each other. And in addition to the ordinary patterns of coinci- dence and irony, there are many special devices sacred to the makers of plots since the beginning of time. Such is the mechanical means by which Farfrae and EHzabeth were brought together by Susan, the duplicate anonymous notes in which each one is requested to repair at the same moment to the same place, a method of bringing lovers together reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado. Twice the author resorts to the old dodge of having one character tell his own story to another without giving names, thus adding a further spice of intrigue to the already much compli- cated plot. And as for the overheard conversation, Mr. Hardy seems to have leaned more heavily on this feeble prop in Casterbridge than in any novel since Desperate Reme- dies. Elizabeth-Jane and her mother overhear the business talk of Henchard and Farfrae at the tavern; Lucetta overhears Henchard's reading of her letters to Farfrae; and Henchard seems always to be so placed behind wall or haystack as to hear news that maddens him and drives him on to fateful action. MOVIE 143 3 All that is an old story with Hardy, though it is an element less in evidence in his more artistic performances. . But the specialty of The Mayor of Casterbridge, and what makes its close affinity to the movie, is the large provision of scenes of violent and surprising action making their appeal directly to the sense of sight. One of the chief and characteristic merits of a moving picture is that it shall tell its story with the least possible help from printed legend. Most perfectly adaptable to such purposes are three exciting scenes in which Henchard is the main actor: that in which he saves the two women from the onset of the bull; that in which he is prevented from greeting the King; and that in which he struggles with Farfrae by the open door of the barn and just fails to throw him down to destruction. No legend at all is required to elucidate the meaning of this kind of picture. It is not a matter of dialogue and debate; it is a simple affair of physical action proper to the Hfe of the "wild west." The skimmity- ride, again, and the scene in which Henchard and Elizabeth discover the telltale effigies in the river, are suitable to that kind of pageantry which sets forth its meaning in visible symbols. Only slightly more in need of explanatory legend are the scenes connected with the sale of the wife — the auction itself in the first chapter, and the denunciation of Henchard for the act in open court — both so well adapted to the tastes of the movie audience by the agreeable shock they give the nerves. There are many other "dramatic" scenes requiring some complement of dialogue, but hardly more than the author actually supplies: the scene at the 144 MORE CRAFT THAN ART mayor's dinner where Henchard is challenged by a voice of discontent in regard to the "grown wheat" and makes his witty defiant reply; that in which he compels Lucetta to promise marriage; and the touching scene of his farewell to Elizabeth- Jane. Mr. Hardy, as we have long since learned, takes firm hold upon the visible and tangible world, and we are at every point well supplied with objects to catch the eye and physical action suited to hold the attention. The device of the overheard conversation is a favorite one in the movies, it gives such scope for that study of facial expression which is so important a feature of movie art. Consider, for example, the picture that Henchard makes as he listens to the love-making of Farfrae and Lucetta, or later to that of Farfrae and Elizabeth. Or consider the opportunity given an "emotional actress" by the part of Lucetta listening to the talk of the servants across the street as they describe the skimmity-pageant. It has been for Lucetta a day of triumph, the day of the King's visit, and she is waiting in the firelight for the return of her husband. Then her attention is suddenly called to the talk of the maids; and gradually as they describe the figures representing herself and Henchard, she comes to realize the horrible significance of this ceremony. We can imagine how her face passes by degrees from an expression of pleased reminiscence and tender pensiveness to one of dread and consternation. And then the action: "Lucetta started to her feet; and almost at the instant the door of the room was quickly and softly opened. Elizabeth- Jane advanced into the firelight." Elizabeth, hoping to spare Lucetta, MOVIE 145 makes an attempt to close the shutters; but she is forcibly prevented by Lucetta, who is determined, in her agony, to hear and see the worst. They struggle together .... Elizabeth- Jane was frantic now. "Oh, can't something be done to stop it ?" she cried. "Is there nobody to do it — not one ?'■ She reHnquished Lucetta's hands, and ran to the door, Lucetta herself, saying recklessly, "I will see it!" turned to the window, threw up the sash, and went out upon the balcony, Elizabeth immediately followed her, and put her arm around hei to pull her in. Lucetta's eyes were straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel, now advancing rapidly. The numerous lights around the two effigies threw them up into lurid distinct- ness; it was impossible to mistake the pair for other than the intended victims. "Come in, come in," implored Elizabeth; "and let me shut the window!" "She's me — she's me — even to the parasol — my green parasol!" cried Lucetta, with a wild laugh as she stepped in. She stood motionless for one second — then fell heavily to the floor.' One imagines perfectly how this would be managed in the moving picture — the alternate showing of the scene in the street and the scene in the house: the grotesque figures representing the exposed man and woman, and the actual face of the woman; the struggle with Elizabeth; the bursting out on the balcony; agair the effigies as she sees them and her white face of anguish the puppet with the green parasol and the crowd ol onlookers; the stepping back from the balcony and hei fall to the floor. Here is no stately and deUberate stage with high antagonists pitted against each other in a wai of measured words that are winged thoughts. Here ii 'Pp. 337-38. 146 MORE CRAFT THAN ART the vivid art of startling pictures full of movement, constantly shifting, and never failing in excitement and variety. 4 It goes without saying that the drama proper is most inadequately put before us. The story is told in outline, just enough so that the reader may keep abreast of the action, may take in what is meant; never linger- ingly, so that he may get the reUsh, the intimate signifi- cance, the sense of being on the inside. The difference will be startlingly apparent to a reader familiar with Trollope or George Eliot, Dostoyevsky or Meredith or Stevenson. Anyone who remembers Mrs. Proudie's reception in Barchester Towers, with the dramatic arrival of the Signora Vicineroni, knows what is meant by the full development of a comic situation. Anyone who has read the account of Hetty's journey in Adam Bede knows how the heart may be wrung by following at length the mental experiences of a human being in misery and despair. Anyone who has read of the visit of the Brothers Karamazov to the holy man, or the rapid succession of dialogues on the lawn following the discovery of Sir Willoughby's secret by Crossjay Patterne, knows how one place and one moment may burgeon out into clusters of scenes each more intriguing than the last. It all comes back to what Henry James calls "economy" in the use of material. Of such economy Mr. Hardy had shown more than a notion in A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Native, as he was destined to show it again in Tess and Jude. But in The Mayor of Casterbridge he wastes his substance in the most riotous fashion. To take one example: the MOVIE 147 feeling of Henchard and Elizabeth toward one another after the death of Henchard's wife and Elizabeth's mother is a subject teeming with possibilities for such imaginations as James's or George Eliot's. It is indeed a subject of the greatest delicacy, and one caUing for the most patient and thoughtful elucidation in order to have any value for story, for psychology, or for art. Above all the emotional experience of Elizabeth on the night following Henchard's announcement that he is her father, and his sudden change of heart upon learning that he is not her father — these are occurrences that need more than the dry statement of fact, the mere assertion by the author in the briefest of terms. Henchard's revulsion of feeling, in particular, would have required, one would suppose, more than a night to bring it about; and it certainly required more than his wife's letter and the glimpse of Elizabeth's features by candle-light to make us appreciate it as a psychological fact. But Hardy is concerned with nothing further, on the side >/ of art, than the irony involved in the double and contrary change of heart; and he leaves the reader almost as pxizzled as Elizabeth- Jane. It is true that we have here some half-dozen pictures admirably adapted to the screen. And something of the sort may be said for the book as a whole. There is matter here for half a dozen novels; but what is given is hardly more than the scenario of a movie. 5 Well then! many a reader will exclaim, so this is no more than a crude counterpart in print of the crude and vulgar art of the cinematograph! And can this be 148 MORE CRAFT THAN ART one of the valued works of a writer of genius, whom we prize among our thinkers and poets? There can be Uttle question that The Mayor of Casterbridge is among the half-dozen most powerful novels of Thomas Hardy, only a little below The Madding Crowd and somewhat above A Fair of Blue Eyes in the serious appeal of its art. And this is almost wholly due to the character of Michael Henchard — the profoimd interest we take in him, and the entire faith we have in his existence. The first thing we realize when we begin to reflect upon any serious work of Hardy's is the unqualified honesty of his treatment of himian nature. However romantic he may be in his plots, however ready to admit the sensa- tional and improbable in combinations of incident, he maintains throughout his realism, his fideUty, in reference [to the characters. The surest thing about Michael Henchard is that he is true to life. What happens to him may be incredible; he never loses, through whatever maze of action and intrigue, the simple integrity of his [nature. Mr. Hardy has never learned, it seems, the polite art of flavoring character to suit the public taste. He has not the recipe for a hero, or the still simpler recipe for a villain. He has none of those easy tricks for enlist- ing our sjmipathy for characters who are later to crave indulgence. The first moral item furnished in regard to Henchard is the evidence in his gait of "a dogged and cynical indifference." We see him trudging along with his wife in complete silence, accepting phlegmati- cally her suggestion as to a place for refreshment at the fair, developing a bitter loquacity under the influence of drink, and sullenly putting through the business of MOVIE 149 auctioning off his wife and child. And yet we are satisfied that we have here no exceptional brute, let alone a despicable villain. We are not asked to look upon this man as a Daniel Quilp or a Bill Sikes. The author does not get excited, does not by word or gesture call upon us to take sides against him; but by a kind of sober evenness and candor of tone suggests that here is something sad and not uimatural, which has its explana- tion in familiar experience. We can even feel the weight of what the young hay-trusser has to urge about his early imprudent marriage, and how it has prevented him from getting on in life. It is not Henchard but an impartial philosopher in the company who puts forth the suggestion that "men who have got wives, and don't want 'em, should get rid of 'em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses." And public opinion is not made to interpose a protest from any of the rustic company who witness the transaction. And as Hardy does not raise an outcry over the seUing of the wife, so he does not expatiate on the good- ness of heart of Henchard in his long search for the lost woman. It was a matter of course that he should have more than spent in trying to find her the five guineas he had received from her buyer; that he should have followed patiently until the trace grew faint at the edge of the ocean. It was what any man would have done who had any feeling, any sense of obligation. It was what any decent man would have done. And Michael Henchard was decidedly a decent sort of man. The author does not tell us that in so many words, but he creates an atmosphere of truth, of fairness, in which we form an opinion not colored by romantic predilections. I50 MORE CRAFT THAN ART It is not often that an English author is so frank about his hero. And the absolute frankness of the author has much the same e£fect upon a thoughtful reader as frankness on the part of the character himself. It prepossesses the reader in favor of the character. And, for that matter, Henchard is frank enough, and severe enough, in judging of his own behavior. This was reahzed by Elizabeth when, after her wedding, she discovered the bird cage with the dead goldfinch, his neglected tribute of affection. The caged bird, she realized, "had been brought by Henchard as a wedding gift and token of repentance. He had not expressed to her any regrets or excuses for what he had done in the past; but it was a part of his nature to extenuate nothing, and live on as one of his own worst accusers." Altogether characteristic, again, was his acknowledg- ment in open court of the charge of the furmity woman. It had been pointed out by the other magistrate that her revelation had no bearing on the case before them, and the clerk had declared it to be a concocted story. It might easily have been denied by Henchard. But instead, in excess of self-abasement, he made his impetu- ous confession, and even agreed with the obscene creature that it did prove him no better than she and having no right to sit in judgment upon her. And he was capable of much harder and less theatrical a method of self-punishment. His remarriage with Susan was dictated by conscientious and almost morbidly sacrificial motives. But it is by his warmth of nature that he takes hold upon our feelings. He is of the race of Tom Jones and not of Blifil. He can be cruel and violent, but never MOVIE 151 with deliberation. He may plot revenge and meanness; but when it comes to the scratch, he is constrained to fairness and generosity. He treats himself to the grim pleasure of reading to Farfrae the letters of the false Lucetta, and hearing her condemnation from the mouth of her husband and his rival; he has anticipated the delight of reading out her name with grand effect as the catastrophe of this drama. "But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it. Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his eimiity." And so with his sparing of Farfrae's Hfe in the barn. Only think how he must have suffered in his vanity from the successes of Farfrae, whose very kindnesses were dagger-stabs to the sensitive self-respect of the fallen man! And now he has him at his mercy, the enemy of his house, who has taken away his woman, whom he has to obey as his master, and who has shamed him in the sight of all the town! Farfrae bids him take his hfe. "Ye've wished to long enough!" Henchard looked down upon him in silence, and their eyes met. "O Farfrae!— that's not true!" he said bitterly. "God is my witness that no man ever loved another as I did thee at one time And now — though I came here to kill 'ee, I cannot hurt thee! Go and give me in charge — do what you wiU — I care nothing for what comes of me!" There is the simple accent of Bible truth. It is true that Henchard had loved Farfrae with all the heat of a passionate nature. He had carried Farfrae off his feet in the beginning by the naive charm of his sudden 152 MORE CRAFT THAN ART affection. He had taken possession of him — ^not so much because he needed him in business as because he craved him in his lonely heart. He had taken possession of him, as friend took possession of friend in the early ages of the world, in places beyond the reign of caution or convention; he had taken him to his bosom, and loaded him with favors, and set him in high place Only at last to grow jealous and unreasonable, to thrust him away in his perversity, and force him into the posi- tion of a foe! For Michael Henchard was not a man governed by good policy. It would have been the best policy to secure Farfrae for his son-in-law. "But such a scheme for buying over a rival had nothing to recommend it to the mayor's headstrong faculties. With all domestic finesse of that kind he was hopelessly at variance. Loving a man or hating him, his diplomacy was as wrong-headed as a buffalo's " It is this indeed which makes him so picturesque a figure, so good a hero of romance after all. He has not the colorless monotony of the business man who follows sure ways to success, who has conformed to every rule of conventional wisdom, and made himself as featureless as a potato field, as tame as an extinct volcano. Michael Henchard is the volcano in action. His is the impetuous, undis- ciplined, self-revealing nature of a child. And he fascinates us like the childish, picturesque people of Gorky and Dostoyevsky. Like the characters of the Russian novel, Henchard gives the impression of being unreasonable and incon- sistent. We come to expect of him freakish action, and to take it as a matter of course. But a careful MOVIE 153 examination of his conduct will show it is not at bottom inconsistent. His acts are wrong-headed enough, show- ing an incorrect analysis of the situation, inaccurate reading, or wilful ignoring, of their natural effects. But they all have their root in what is perhaps the most constant and powerful of all human passions — the passion of vanity. It is with him the frank vanity of a child — the craving for dignity and consideration which, in maturity, finds so many indirect expressions and disguises. There is little nobility in it, and little baseness. We all, when we are honest, recognize it in ourselves as perhaps the governing motive of action. And Hardy makes us honest. So that we are bound to have for his protagonist an indulgence like that we accord ourselves. And then he is so blundering and childish in his struggle for consideration ! He is his own worst enemy, the well-meaning author of his own failure. His failure is so complete and pathetic, and his acknowledgment of it couched in terms so simple and absolute! When they came upon his body in the lonely hut on Egdon Heath, Elizabeth and Farfrae found with it a penciled will, to the following effect: That Elizabeth- Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on accoimt of me. & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me. To this I put my name. ^ ^ Michael Henchaed' ' P. 404- 154 MORE CRAFT THAN ART How pitifully he makes renunciation of all the posthumous dignities and satisfactions of mortality! jSTone can harden his heart against him now . However he may have repelled us by his perversities in earlier stages of his career, he has at last won by his sufferings and his humanity a sympathy as whole-hearted as that we accord to King Lear, another violent and unreason- able figure of Wessex story. And if Michael Henchard is a convincing and appeahng figure, he is one well cast for his part in a story that is so like a moving-picture film. He is, after all, beneath his civil garb and chain of office, the original caveman, ever readier with blows than words. He is, amid the conventions and refinements of polite inter- course, a bull in a china shop; and his gentlest movement is accompanied by the crash of breaking crockery. He is more given to feeling than to thought; he does not arrive at decisions by the deliberate and tortuous route of reflection, reaching his position by due and gradual stages of approach. In a world of talk, he is almost inarticulate. And we cannot expect to find, in any exchange of sentiments in which he takes a part, that slow arrival at the point at issue, that feeling of the way, that jockeying for position, that long ghostly fencing-match of allusion, before the opposed parties come to a grapple, which gives its breathless interest to so many a dialogue of Paul Bourget or Henry James. There is seldom any swaying back and forth of the opposed interests, any sustainment of the struggle by the arrival of reinforcements to one side MOVIE 155 or the other. The battle is soon Joind and quickly over, and the field cleared for a new engagement. Michael Henchard is not the man to inailge in pre- liminary flourishes or diplomatic pourparler. If he is not ready to do business, he has nothing to say. he stays at home. When he goes forth, it is because he's ready to do business. It might be imagined that when he saw Luc6ta again after so long a time, however well he may have made up his mind to propose the marriage that she has come to Casterbridge to bring about, he might have made his approaches to the subject with some decency of ceremony; he might have allowed their long-interrupted friendship a chance to re-establish itself. Any other author would have shown us his characters reaching out to one another with groping gestures. In Henry James, in Mrs. Wharton or Mr. Moore, there would have been some pretense, on one side or other, of tenderness, of lingering affection, before the matter was brought to a strictly business basis. But this is not the way of Michael Henchard. On his first visit to Lucetta — on the first occasion when he can speak to her alone — he marches straight up to his lady, brushes aside her "nonsense" about his politeness in calling, and delivers his precise and compact statement of intention. "I've called to say that I am ready, as soon as custom will permit, to give you my name, in return for your devotion, and what you lost by it, in thinking too little of yourself and too much of me; to say that you can fix the day or month, with my full consent, whenever in your opinion it would be seemly: you know more of these things than I." 156 MORE CRAFT THAN ART So there you have it, all in a breath. There is not much left to be said. And we read on the very next page that, as the result of a still more direct question of Henchard's, "Lucetta had the move." As we know, she did not at that time want to make the move, since her interest in Farfrae had come to make her indifferent to Henchard. There are endless possibilities of dramatic feijcing in that circumstance; but within another page Our impatient author has got rid of his impatient hero, and has left his heroine to make a final picture for his storied screen. He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa, and jumped up again in a fit of desperation. "I will love him," she cried passionately [meaning Farfrae]; "as for him — he's hot-tempered and stern, and it would be madness to bind myself to him knowing that. I won't be a slave to the past — I'll love where I choose!" On his next visit Henchard meets Farfrae at Lucetta's and cannot talk to her alone. And there is no further interview recorded until one night many months later. It is after Henchard has witnessed the love-making of Farfrae and Lucetta in the harvest field; and she finds the jealous man awaiting her in her house. She complains of the impropriety of this late visit; and there is mutual recrimination to the extent of a little more than a page, bringing them to the subject of her reluctance to marry Henchard. He makes at last a reference to Farfrae, "The man you are thinking of is no better than I." And suddenly we arrive at the stage of the cinema. "If you were as good as he is you would leave me!" she cried passionately. MOVIE 157 This unluckily aroused Henchard. "You cannot in honor refuse me," he said. [And then, as if there were nothing more to be said on that subject, and without further introduction:] "And unless you give me your promise this very night to be my wife, before a witness, I'U reveal our intimacy — ^in common fair- ness to other men!"' AH in a nutshell — reduced to the dimensions of a movie legend. Nothing more is said. "Without another word she rang the bell, and directed that Elizabeth-Jane should be fetched from her room." In the presence of Elizabeth- Jane the distracted woman agrees to marry Henchard and straightway falls into a faint. There is some bewilderment and protest on the part of Elizabeth; but in less than a minute her father is gone, and Lucetta has begged her to "let it all be." So that is what Mr. Hardy does with the one situation in his novel that offers an opportunity for "scenical" development. That is all the use he makes of the delicate and dramatic relationship between his leading man and his leading woman. It is a waste of material at which other novelists would stand aghast — a want of refinement in method which must have been the amazement of certain of his contemporaries. And yet who shall say it is not in its way effective art ? Who shall say that Michael Henchard is not made to live as few figures live in history or fiction? Have we not seen him in action, in a hundred characteristic poses ? So vivid is the presentation by this method of pictured moments, so complete and moving the illusion of life, that we well nigh forget the rude contrivances and violent shifts by which a plot was patched together. ' P. 236. VII. CHRONICLE It is our somewhat invidious task in this part of our study to measure the comparative failure of a great artist in some of his work by the standard of achievement set by himself in his best. We are particularly engaged in this and the preceding chapter in tracing the lapse in The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders from the dramatic ideal as embodied in The Return of the Native. In The Mayor of Casterbridge we dwelt upon certain features suggestive of the moving picture. The Wood- landers, though wanting a Michael Henchard, is very similar to its predecessor in narrative technique; and we shall be occupied in this chapter with the illustration, from the later book, of other points in which both books fall short of the dramatic ideal — ^points which suggest indeed a kind of play which had its vogue in England before the evolution of a better form. The theme of The Woodlanders has many points of likeness to that of The Return of the Native. The story concerns a young woman born to the rude and simple life of the remote woodland country, and attached to this life by all that is deepest in her emotional nature, but, through education and the ambition of her well- to-do father, turned aside from woodland ways and woodland associations, and aiming at a hfe of higher worldly standards. Such is Grace Melbury, daughter of the timber merchant, Just returning, as the story is8 CHRONICLE 159 opens, from her fashionable school to her father's home in Little Hintock. And the opposed ideals of the worldly and the woodland life are embodied in her two suitors, Edgar Fitzpiers, the local physician, philoso- pher, gentleman, and hbertine, and Giles Winterborne, modest planter of trees and presser and seller of cider from the apple orchards. Giles is himself the object of a hopeless passion on the part of Marty South, a poor girl of the neighborhood who often helps him in his planting. At first her father favors Grace's union with Giles; but when he sees the great transformation wrought in her by her schooling, he begins to regret the spending of so much money upon her only that she may sink back again to their own social level. And when, by the death of an old man, upon whose life depended Giles's title to certain land, the woodlander becomes a man without property, Melbury uses all his influence with his daughter in favor of her more promising suitor. In the meantime Grace herself has been somewhat offended in her cultivated tastes by the awkwardness and social inexperience of her rustic lover. And she is brought gradually and reluctantly to a marriage with Fitzpiers. She soon comes to realize that she cannot live up to his standards of social aloofness, that she entertains a fondness for rustic persons and manners which her gentleman husband disdains. And Fitzpiers, falling in love with a lady of ardent temperament who occupies the manor house of Hintock, takes advantage of his profession of doctor to carry on a love affair suitable to the standards of smart society. In the end he goes abroad to Hve with his Mrs. Charmond; and the i6o MORE CRAFT THAN ART remorseful timber merchant busies himself to get a divorce for his abused daughter so that she may marry her honest and devoted woodland lover. Before this can be accomplished — and indeed it was not, we know, possible of accomphshment — Mrs. Charmond has been murdered by another jealous lover, and Fitzpiers comes home to his wife. But by this time her disgust for him and her love for Giles have gathered strength; and upon the return of her husband, she takes flight into the forest, to Giles in his little hut. There the chivalrous man turns out of his home to give her shelter, though he is suffering himself with fever; and as a result of lying in a leaky lean-to, he becomes mortally sick. When Grace finally realizes his condition, she takes him into the cottage and summons the doctor. The doctor is her husband, and the situation is a strange one. It is made the stranger by her proud perverse declaration to Fitzpiers that she has been, in the full sense of the word, the lover of Giles. After the death of Giles, it is but a matter of time and favoring circumstance till husband and wife make their explanations, and come together again for life with chastened passions and a will to conformity. But the last word is for Giles; and it is spoken by Marty South, the other pure and unmixed type of the poetry of the woods and of the humble hfe. For many months, ever since the death of Giles, she and Grace had come once a week by night to lay flowers on his grave. But now Grace has failed her in their tryst, and she alone is faithful to the man they had both loved. So there in the moonlight she stoops above the CHRONICLE i6i grave, a slight girlish figure, and talks in whispers to the dead man: "Now, my own, own love, you are mine, and on'y mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died. But I — whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the yoimg larches I'U think that none can plant as you planted; and when- ever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and Heaven! — But no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good ra&n, and did good things." 2 This is poetry. And everything that is finest in the book is poetry. It lies in the special charm of this district, rendered with such affectionate penetration, a district which must be more like what Mr. Hardy knew as a child than any other kind of country of which he has given account in his variegated Wessex. Even more than Egdon Heath or the Greenwood Tree, this is a region "outside the gates of the world"; and the dweller in towns who makes his way hither must leave the forsaken coach road where the trees "make the way-side hedges ragged with their drip and shade, " to follow an even more secluded lane into the heart of the woodland. We have not here the pastures and grain fields of The Madding Crowd and Tess. Here we have the vegetable world not so much dominated by, as dominating, man. It is a place where men nestle like birds under the heavy thatch of horizontal branches, where the sun is not seen complete till mid-day, and the rain drips long from the fringe of boughs upon the garden plots, where men in motion are seen with "leaf- shadows running their quick succession over their forms." The most open country here is that of the orchards, 1 62 MORE CRAFT THAN ART ancient apple trees, dappling the ground with shadow. But we are more likely to find ourselves among the mossed and fungused ashes and elms of the sunless forest, or "amid beeches under which nothing grew," their leaves "rustling in the breeze with a sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled Jamvid wood." Here is the reign of trees, who are like sacred beings; and Winterborne is their priest or tutelary god. In the time of his absence, He rose upon Grace's memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation, sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the plantation; sometimes cider-stained, and with apple pips in the hair of his arms, as she had met him on his return from cider making .... with his vats and presses beside him. Giles and Marty, from their long labors together, had possessed themselves of all the finer mysteries of the woods, those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the hght lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quahty of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. There was even a mystic sympathy between the trees and Winterborne by virtue of which he could make them grow better than other men. And it was by a wonderful stroke of the poetical imagi- nation that the author made the destiny of his woodland minister depend upon the life of a tree. In the beginning of the story Winterborne is the owner of several houses CHRONICLE 163 with their orchards and gardens. But, by a strange inequitable arrangement, which has been elsewhere employed by Mr. Hardy in the ironic entanglement of men's fates, his ownership or lease is made to hang upon the Hfe of another woodlander, the father of Marty South. And the sick brain of old Mr. South is possessed of a superstitious notion, not confined to Wessex or the nineteenth century, that his Hfe is somehow botmd up with that of another being, in this case, a great elm tree growing before his dwelling. It is his notion that in his youth he had in some way made an enemy of the ancient tree, and that now it threatens his Ufe every time the wind blows. So rooted is his obses- sion that to the doctor it seems that the tree is actually frightening the old man to death; and he orders it felled to save his patient's life. It is Winterborne who cuts it down. But instead of saving his Hfe, the dis- appearance of the tree actually paralyzes the sick man with amazement, and he dies on the same day as the sim goes down, like some fabled hero whose Hfe continues only with the flaming of a torch or the flourishing of a flower.' And with the death of the old man, the young man loses possession of aU his houses and lands, and so of his prospective bride — his fate, too, being determined by the dumb decree of the woodland creature whose Hfe he had himself cut short. 3 It wiU be seen how beautifully the theme has been developed and bodied forth on the side of poetry. But the author was bent himself on its employment for the 'Perhaps Hardy, who was a reader of Shelley, remembered the death of the poet in Alastor, exactly as the sun went down. 1 64 MORE CRAFT THAN ART purposes of drama. It is at the very start that he reminds us of the dramatic possibilities of his woodland scene: "one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world .... where, from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdepend- ence of the lives therein." If this is taken for the author's account of the action that is to follow, the reader will be sorely disappointed, so far does the drama of Grace Melbury fall short of Sophoclean imity and grandeur. One reason for this at once occurs to the reader. It is the want of those concentrated passions that give their grandeur to Sophoclean tragedy, as they do to the tragedy of Eustacia Vye, of Jude the Obscure. Edgar Fitzpiers and FeHce Charmond are persons of weak character and voluptu- ous imagination, who suffer themselves and cause pain to others. And the woman pays indeed the penalty of coquetry and volatihty. But in neither case are we given the impression of a large and deep nature capable of the stirring of a grand passion. The woman is an idle sentimentalist; the man a fanciful Platonist, a sensualist, and a snob. Much more serious and deeper rooted are the sentiments of Grace and Giles; but they are truly senti- ments rather than passions, and however lovely they may be in their delicate woodland fragrance, they are not of force to break through barriers with the imperious rush of passion. Grace is too easily persuaded to marry the man she does not love to give us at that stage of the story even the impression of strong character. After CHRONICLE 165 the death of her lover, she is too easily persuaded to go back to her husband to give us the impression of deep feeling. Her flight to the woods on the return of Fitzpiers was not an assertion of passion for Giles; this was "the Daphnean instinct, exceptionally strong in her as a girl .... not lessened by ... . her regard for another man." She did not seek out Giles as a lover, but as a trusted friend; he would help her to make her way to a schoolmate in a distant town. And it was the accident of the storm which compelled her to occupy the lone cottage, and led to her presence at the death of Giles. It was an exciting moment when she took flight, and another when she had to summon her husband to the bedside of the man she loved. But exciting moments do not together make up drama. There was one more truly dramatic occasion earlier, when Giles, knowing already that she could not be legally separated from Fitzpiers, that she could not be his own, yet broke through all the restraints of his primitive chastity, and allowed himself that momentary embrace which Grace beheved to be iimocent. But several dramatic occasions in the course of a story are far from making up drama of Sophoclean unity and grandeur. Passions must be not merely "concentrated" upon a single object; they must be shown in concentration, in continuous action, to give rise to drama. 4 This is the great failure of The Woodlanders, as it was of Casterbridge, a failure in technique, the want of concentration, of continuous dramatic action. It is shown on the surface of both novels by the want of that 1 66 MORE CRAFT THAN ART division into parts which gave The Native an exterior resemblance to drama, and signahzed the thoughtful massing of the subject-matter. And with no separation of parts, there can be no use of dramatic headings for the main divisions — ^no "Fascination," no "Closed Door." The author does not even take advantage of the division into chapters to attach significant titles to them. There is little promise of dramatic form; and the performance is not greater than the promise. The unities of place and time are less regarded than in The Native, especially the latter. The action of The Woodlanders covers three whole years, and is about evenly distributed over the whole of that time. And instead of being developed in a small number of scenes in which there can be an acceleration and growing weight of interest, the action is dispersed through a great number of separate occasions, each one very briefly treated and dismissed. The ingenuity of the author is taxed to the utmost to provide phrases to denote transition from one place to another, from one point of time to another. "Meanwhile, in the wood they had come from"; "it chanced a few minutes before this time"; "at the same hour, and almost at the same minute, there was a conversation about Winterbome in progress in the village street"; "later in the evening"; "the next morning at breakfast"; "often during the previous night" — so they follow one another in quick succession, often within the chapter, as the author goes forward or backward, to add some new item or take up some dropped thread of the story. Often the transition is made, and often within the chapter, with no phrase of warning, and the new picture CHRONICLE 167 takes the place of the old with disconcerting suddenness. The author is forever telHng us, too, of the change of seasons which carry the story along with them: "Spring weather came on suddenly"; "The leaves over Hintock grew denser in their substance"; "It was the beginning of June, and the cuckoo . . . ."; "The leaves overhead were now in their latter green Summer was ending." These indications, again, occur as often as not within the chapter, thus signalizing the progress from one stage of the story to another without even the formal starting of a new division in the narrative. It is some- time's very hard to see upon what principle the division of chapters is made. A large number of consecutive scenes are grouped together, with little regard to the period of time included, scenes in which the place and the actors are constantly changing, and which are cut o£f, it might almost seem, simply after a certain average of pages has been covered. No hint is given that the author has ever taken into account any principle in regard to the point of view from which the story is to be told. In a general way, as in all fiction, we see and know and are concerned about what the main actor sees and knows and is concerned about. But numberless are the exceptions to this rule. Often we caimot be sure for more than a few sentences as to who is the main actor; and even within these limits we may have something presented from the point of view of a different person, or from that of the community as a whole. And then we are constantly passing, it may be within the sentence, from what a person thinks and sees on a particular occasion to a 1 68 MORE CRAFT THAN ART general statement in regard to his character, or human nature in general, or to some truth or circumstance known only to the omniscient manipulator of puppets. The reader is given no chance to follow for any length of time with growing interest the mental or' emotional experience of a given character, his particular adventure. The center of interest is constantly shifting, and the picture is correspondingly blurred and indistinct. Dialogue is constantly in use at all points in the story. But the passages of dialogue are very short, and con- stantly interspersed with description and with the narrative of action and event. Just as the reader is getting a relish for the words of men's mouths, they fall silent, and he is whisked away to be witness of the deeds of their hands, or to view the landscape in which they appear. Very seldom is a dialogue given entire; and very often the author, as if in haste to get on with his story, gives us the gist of the talk in his own words. The same bafHing method is applied to action, whether upon a particular occasion or over a period of time — it is given in arid summary. There are so many things to be told, so many httle happenings to be recorded, so many little explosions into speech. There are so many threads of interest to be woven into the pattern. The goal is so far off, and we must not h'nger by the way. 5 Let us take as a specimen the fifteenth chapter, which relates what follows upon the death of old Mr. South. We are first presented with Mr. Melbury and his perturbation over the probable loss of property by Winterbome. "When Melbury heard what had hap- CHRONICLE 169 pened he seemed much moved, and walked thoughtfully about the premises He was quite angry with circumstances for so heedlessly inflicting on Giles a second trouble when the needful one inflicted by himself was all that the proper order of events demanded." He exclaims over the situation to his daughter; but he gives her to understand all the same that Giles cannot be thought of as a son-in-law. Then we have a sudden shift to the point of view of Grace as observed by the author, who knows the secrets of her heart. "At that very moment the impracticability to which poor Winter- home's suit had been reduced was touching Grace's heart to a warmer sentiment on his behalf than she had felt for years concerning him." And then at once, after less than a page, we turn to a new scene altogether. Giles, "meanwhile, was sitting down alone in the old familiar house which had ceased to be his, taking a calm if somewhat dismal survey of affairs." He examines the legal dociunents bearing upon his ownership and reahzes that, whatever in fairness may be his right to the property, his legal claim depends upon the mere caprice of a woman whom he has offended. Three short paragraphs, and then a new scene. "While he was sitting and thinking a step came to the door, and Melbury appeared, looking very sorry for his position." Melbury urges him to write to Mrs. Charmond and throw himself upon her gener- osity. "'I would rather not,' murmured Giles. 'But you must,' said Melbury. In short he argued so cogently that Giles allowed himself to be persuaded," says the chronicler, summarizing the debate; and then, summarizing the action that followed, "the letter to 170 MORE CRAFT THAN ART Mrs. Charmond was written and sent to Hintock House." The following paragraph shows us Melbury going home content with his good act, and Giles left alone in suspense; as well as bringing in what villagers thought about the matter. The next three pages give us a glimpse of Marty South on the nights preceding the burial of her father, and dispose of the burial of South and the airrival of Mrs. Charmond's letter, together with the views of Winter- borne, Melbury, Grace, and the countrymen upon the subject. The rest of the chapter is a huddled record in three pages more of circumstances which, by mere chance, determine the fates of Grace and Giles. In the evening Giles discovers on the front of his house a scribbled rime to the following effect: "O Giles, you've lost your dwelling-place, And therefore Giles, you'U lose your Grace." Thereupon he writes a note to Melbury, giving up his claim to his daughter, takes it to the timber dealer's house, and thrusts it under the door (all this in three paragraphs) . Melbury gets up in the morning and reads the note (one paragraph). In the early morning, Grace passes by Giles's house, sees the inscription, rubs out the word "lose," and substitutes the word "keep." She believes she is seen by Giles, and that he can draw the inference that she is still his (one paragraph). A paragraph is devoted to Grace's feelings. At breakfast her father shows her the letter from GUes, and she thinks her fate is sealed. Then follows nearly a page of dialogue between Giles and Marty South — ^it was she CHRONICLE 171 who had inscribed the rhyme — the upshot being that the change in the verse leaves it without sense, and that probably it was some idle boy that made it. The results for the two young people are very briefly summed up in a final paragraph — how Giles "retired into the background of human life and action thereabout," and how "Grace, thinking that Winterbome saw her write, made no further sign, and the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded and lost." It will be realized what an ineffectual patchwork is here offered to a reader eager for the excitement of a weU-told story, for the intellectual stimulus of a thought- ful study, or the aesthetic gratification of a dramatic scene adequately presented. There are three main persons in whose interest the events might have been recorded, and the reader's concern thoroughly aroused by following throughout the chapter the feelings of any one of them. But instead, the interest is divided about equally among the three, Giles, Grace, and Melbury; and the reader's sympathy is dissipated still farther by his having his attention drawn to the feelings and affairs of Fitzpiers and Marty South, not to speak of the villagers en masse. There are three main events to any one of which the whole of a chapter might well have been devoted in order to develop its latent possibilities of suspense, of dramatic strain, of the display of charac- ter. One is the long-waited arrival of the letter which determined for Giles whether he was rich or poor; the second is the scene between him and Melbury in which the latter announces his attitude toward the former's 172 MORE CRAFT THAN ART suit; the third is the alteration of the scribbled verse and the circumstances by which it fails to carry its message to Giles. As a matter of fact, in each case there is a languid and feeble attempt to do justice to the particular event, soon dropped as if from weariness, want of resource, or a fatal compulsion to hurry on. "Eleven times had Winterborne gone to that corner of the ride, and looked up its long straight slope through the wet grays of winter dawn On the twelfth day the man of missives, while yet in the extreme distance, held up his hand, and Winterborne saw a letter in it." Such is the tribute paid by the author to the convention of suspense aroused by successive disappointments. It is in similar ineffectual fashion that, in a later chapter, he tries to make us feel the fatal passing of the days that lead to the unhappy marriage of Grace. "The interim closed up its perspective surely and silently Day after day waxed and waned The narrow interval that stood before the day diminished yet The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear She awoke: the morning had come. Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers." These are the rustiest springs of ancient melodrama, the sorriest apology for a story not told! As for the strong potential scene between Melbury and Giles, only the opening remarks are given, and the author shies at the critical point like a horse shying at a fence too high for him. The alteration of the verse by Grace and the writing and delivery of the letter from Giles were presumably accompanied by lively feelings on her side and on his; but the nearest we come to an CHRONICLE 173 adequate presentation of anything concerned with this matter is the bit of dialogue between Giles and Marty, as the briefly recorded result of which, "Winterborne said no more, and dismissed the matter from his mind." There is evidently no attempt to distinguish between major and minor incident, between significant and non- significant point of view, no attempt to select for presen- tation those scenes which are capable of being presented with effectiveness, that point of view which shall do most for enlightening the reader or working on his sympathies. Everything is of equal importance; every event is brought on the scene to be dismissed before its effect is produced. There seems to be no notion of that scenic art, that art of representation, which was the constant preoccupation of Stevenson and Henry James, and which has been sedulously cultivated by their successors, by Mr. Conrad, and Mr. Walpole and Mrs. Wharton. The facts are given, to be sure; and so given as to suggest that it is the sole concern of the author to inform us of the facts — to get them in the record, hke entries in some ancient chronicle. But more often than not, they are facts for the understanding merely, and by no means pictures for the imagination. We know them to be facts; but we do not realize them, are not con- vinced by them, have not taken them into our hearts. 7 We are frequently reminded throughout this book of Mr. Hardy's extreme fondness for facts. A fact is always gold to him; and it makes httle difference whether it is rough in the ore, and mingled with worthless matter. 174 MORE CRAFT THAN ART or whether it has been separated and stamped with the king's stamp. Without the aid of ponderable facts he seems to be helpless and without resource; there is something touching about the way he leans upon them, his naive faith that in them salvation is to be found. Such, in The Woodlanders, are the circumstances leading to the death of FeUce Charmond. That she should die is in itself not necessary to the reunion of Grace and Fitzpiers; stUl less the complicated machin- ery by which her death is brought about. Altogether disproportionate in the story is the attention given to Marty South's sale of her hair to Mrs. Charmond; and in the end it serves no purpose but to motivate the separation of Fehce and Fitzpiers, which might so much better have been motivated — without machinery— by the natural decay of a selfish and sentimental love. Charmingly naive and characteristic is the impulse of Marty to serve Grace by reveahng to Fitzpiers that his mistress' hair is not her own. But crude enough is the obtrusion upon the strictly sentimental problem of Fitzpiers and Grace of this hard, unassimilated bit of information about the lovers' quarrel which grew out of Marty's letter. Still cruder and more in the line of melodrama is the intrusion of that mysterious gentleman whose jealous passion was the death of Mrs. Charmond. And one is perhaps the more amazed upon considering the deliberate forethought with which a cunning fabri- cator of plots has made his "plant" in the early stages of the story. There, in the midst of pertinent matter, we stumble upon a chapter introducing "a short stout man in evening-dress, carrying on one arm a light overcoat and also his hat." He had walked over from CHRONICLE 175 the hotel at Sherton and was seeking the lady of Hihtock House. When he arrived at her home past midnight and found she was not there, he swore bitterly, it was observed, and "sighed three times before he swore." Winterborne, who had directed him upon his way, had asked him who he was, and he had replied in that compact, business-like style so often found in the speech of characters whom Hardy wants to dispose of briefly: "I am an Italianized American, a South Carolinian by birth. I left my native country on the failure of the Southern cause, and have never returned to it since." This pitiful lay figure never puts his nose into the story again except to account, in such huddled and belated fashion, for the altogether unnecessary demise of Fehce Cha'rmond. How different from that other Europeanized American and South Carolinian by birth who makes so effective an entrance and so indispensable a figure in the pattern of The Arrow of Gold, and who de- scribes himself so proudly and succinctly as "Americain, catholique, et gentilkomme" ! Another unnecessary character is Suke Damson, the vulgar mistress of Fitzpiers before his marriage. The author doubtless felt he needed her to interpose a difficulty between Grace and her suitor. What he wants to make us feel is the qualified reluctance with which she turns from her rustic lover to the cultivated man of the world whom her father has chosen; what he offers is a poor bit of suspense over a question of facts, which does delay the marriage for the space of one chapter. It is about equally unsatisfactory as development of theme and as story-telling pure and simple. 176 MORE CRAFT THAN ART The critical reader never ceases to wonder at the disparity between such a triumph of art as The Native and such bungled narrative as The Woodlanders. He recognizes indeed in the latter the characteristic pre- occupation of this author with matter of fact. But he cannot understand how, when he had once invented or stumbled upon the method of significant drama, he could so relapse to the no-method of rambhng chronicle. ) ) PART THREE: ART AND CRAFT AT ONE VIII. PITY And now, from amid the tangle of themes bizarre and the bewildering complexity of orchestration, rises, unannounced, a voice so simple and pure that the hearer sits up in wonder and delight. The mind, re- lieved of the strain of a music overlabored, goes out eagerly to greet this theme so clear, so full, so deli- cately curved, and so masterfully simple in its move- ment. We had supposed that, in The Return of the Native, our author had come as near as one could ever hope to the abandonment of all factitious con- trivance for compUcation of plot; that there he had grouped his characters so cunningly, in a series of figures circling about a single dramatic situation, as to satisfy our utmost craving for significant unity of design. And we were not wrong in our supposition. But now we learn that such a dramatic pattern may in itself, by contrast, have somewhat the effect of artifice. The very ingenuity with which the dramatic balance is created and maintained, the very artistry shown in the grouping of the half-dozen players and the steady conduct of their story to its destined catastrophe, is a sort of contrivance. It is structural art of the highest power, an art concealing art; and as such it excites our admiration and our wonder. It is the perfection of its kind, and a great achievement in novelistic technique. It is only when we turn to the greater work succeeding that we are reminded of the possibility of a further refinement in the art of story-telling, of still another 179 i8o ART AND CRAFT AT ONE kind of art, making an even stronger appeal, in which the author can do without even this legitimate measure of contrivance. I The story of Tess is one of extreme simplicity. A beautiful country girl, Tess Durbejr&eld, or D'Urber- ville, becomes the victim of a young gentleman, her employer. Alec D'Urberville, to whom she resorts in the hope of helping her poverty-stricken family. She returns to her home, and becomes a mother; but her child does not live, and she eventually takes heart to begin hfe anew. She obtains employment as milker in a great dairy, and there she meets another young gentleman of fine character, Angel Clare, who is learning the business of a farmer. They fall in love; and in spite of her conviction that she is unworthy to marry, she is persuaded to engage herself to him. She makes a great effort to inform him of her past experience, but finally yields to the temptation to let it go until their marriage night. She is then encouraged to tell her secret by his volunteering a similar confession. But in spite of his generally liberal views, he cannot overcome his prejudice against a "ruined woman"; he leaves his wife, and goes to South America. Tess leads a hfe of great hardship; meets her old lover; and finally, in order to save her family from starvation, and persuaded that Angel will never return, consents to become Alec's mistress. Angel does come back, and finds her living with Alec. In her tragic distress she kills her seducer. She and Angel go into hiding for a time in the New Forest, but are soon taken by the police; and Tess is duly made to pay the penalty of her murder. PITY. i8i Simplicity unique in the novels of Hardy! In the finer stories of the middle period, if the plots are graphically represented by a figure showing the relation of the half-dozen major characters, it will be seen how closely they are all bound together by attrac- tions and rivalries, each one linked to every other one at least indirectly in the tangle and balance of interests resulting. Thus: The Return of the Native Wildeve— Eustacia— Clym / Thon asm— ^y"^ Mrs. Yeobright / / Vennr' The Mayor of Casterbridge ^ Susan — H en9hard-HL,ucetta / / / Elizabeth— 7*^ Farfrae / / Newsofi The Woo]>landers Grace — Eltzpiers — Mrs. Chaxmond /- Gii es— Melbury .- I ar Marty- 1 82 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE When we undertake to figure Tess in this way/ we find that there are but three characters to be charted, and that it is impossible to put together even these three in a single chart without giving a misleading impression of their relations. There was never any true rivalry be- tween Alec D'Urberville and Angel Clare, since, with the exception of one evening, which claims two chapters of the last book, the two men were never brought together in the history of Tess. The first book is exclusively the record of Tess's snaring by Alec; the third, fourth, and fifth books are taken up with the loves of Tess and Angel, with Alec entirely out of it; the sixth book relates the second pursuit by Alec, with Angel in South America. The last book belongs again to Tess and Angel, to their final love song under the shadow of death. So that a true representation of the plot can only be made in a series of charts, in which the successive stages of the story are shown as involving the relation in each case of but two persons. 1. (Book I) Tess Alec 2. (III-V) Tess ^Angel 3. (VI) Tess ^Alec 4. (VII) Tess ^Angel How simple a plot-pattern this is may be indicated by making a similar chart for the successive moments (or books) in the story of The Native. In no case are there fewer than three major characters grouped in the situation of the moment. Almost every book finds a new character in the central position, between others ' Diagrams of this character were used by Professor H. C. Duffin, in his Thomas Hardy: a Study of the Wessex Novels, with the object of show- ing the prominence of love-aflEairs in Hardy's plots. PITY 183 who exert a pull in opposite directions. It is a closely woven pattern of many diverse threads— an elaborate study in counterpoint. In the later book, Tess is in every case one of two characters only whose relations are the theme of the moment. It is a pattern as open as that of the simplest folk-tune. I . Thomasi n — Wildeve— ^ystacia Veiltr"Mrs. Yeobtight II. Wildeve— Eustacia— Clym Thotmasin III. Eustaciar-Clynif— Mrs. Yeobright IV. Wildeve — ^Eustacia — CWm Mrs. Yeobright V. Wildeve — Eustacia— Clym The same openness of pattern appears in the setting and the chronology. In Tess, the setting sympathizes with the action, the place and season changing with the fortunes of the heroine. And it is not without pre- meditation that the growing passion of Tess and Angel is set in the simimer foisoning of the rich dairy country, that the woman is made to "pay" in the wintry bitter- ness of a hard and cruel district, that it is among the ancient and awesome monuments of Stonehenge that 1 84 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE the law steps in to put an end to their brief clouded romance. All this is not without premeditation, not without a great refinement of art. But this is the usual course of a story — a ballad or a tale — ^flowing like a stream through changing country, with the natural vicissitudes of landscape. And it actually puts less strain upon the reader's attention than a design, like that of The Native, in which all threads of plot are made to cross in one place, beneath one sky and within the hmits of one fixed horizon. It gives less the impression of design, or contrivance. And the same thing is true of the greater extension in time allowed to the story of Tess. The events leading to her seduction are made to cover one summer; and it is not until two years later, after a time of retirement with her disgrace, that Tess goes forth again to battle with life and to hope. All summer is given to the growth of her love for Angel, and it is not till New Year's that they are married. There follows the bitter winter of their separation, and then their brief reunion in the spring; so that the arrest and execution of Tess takes place fully three years after she first started out from Marlott to seek her fortune in the world. This is not an arrangement suitable to a drama, in which the Hnes of many lives, long converging, are to be shown at the point where at last they cross and tangle. But it does seem more like life: life that holds its issues in abeyance; life so full of seeming conclusions and new starts; life that, when it once conceives a grudge against one of its creatures, loves so to play at cat and mouse with him — to let him go and then catch him again, leaving time for recovery between one seizure and the next. PITY 185 It is not drama now that Hardy wants, but pathos. It is not the conflict of wills among antagonists chosen for their strength. It is the struggle of weakness and innocence in the clutch of circumstance. And this accounts for the transcendent appeal of the story of Tess. No matter how much we may admire the cunning workmanship of the earlier novel, no matter how breathlessly we may have followed the march of destiny in the story of Eustacia Vye, embracing in bur concern the desperate nostalgia of Eustacia, the jealous mother- liness of Mrs. Yeobright, the unworldly aspirations of Clym — we cannot feel for any of these the simple love and grief that Tess inspires; no fates of theirs can make us so cry out against the cruelty of hfe. It may be an irony hard for the artist to stomach. Not all his originahty of conception, not all the devices of structural art, not all the resources of his wisdom and science avail him so well with the mass of his readers as the direct appeal of one heart to another. I do not wish to imply that Tess is in any way inferior in art to The Native. But it is an art supremely free from self-consciousness, and making the reader uncom- monly at ease. And quite irrespective of the degree of art displayed, the fact remains — let it be palatable or unpalatable to artist or critic — that the greatest element of appeal in Tess is the pathos inherent in its story, and after that the heat of feeling with which the author traces the sufferings of his heroine. And it is this pathos, and this heat of feeling — voicing itself in accents of great beauty — that make the superiority of Tess, I will not say merely to The Native, but to any other English novel of its period. 1 86 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE Not but what the story of Tess has its elements of drama, its long passages of tension about a joined issue. There is one series of chapters devoted to a steady progressive action, leading to a dramatic climax, the continuous development of a single situation, abs6lutely without interruption, longer than anything of the sort in any novel of Hardy's. This includes the third and fourth books and the early chapters of the fifth, and covers the whole history of Angel and Tess from her arrival at Talbothays to their separation after the bitter honeymoon. The third book is wholly devoted to the leisurely record of their growing love. It is here that Mr. Hardy has taken time for once to do fuU justice to his story, to give a complete representation of a process instead of indicating it in cramped and huddled shorthand. The result is that we are given the completest sense of the reahty of these lovers and their passion, we are charmed with the fresh and flower-like beauty of its unfolding, and we are touched with awe by its steady progress "under the force of irresistible law." There is no more hurry than in the accompanying progress of the seasons from May to midsummer, and from mid- summer to the dog days; and no more likelihood of retardation or reversal of the process. It is with little flourish that Angel is first introduced in the cow-barton, commenting (scholar-like) on the medieval character of the dairyman's anecdote, and occasionally "uttering a private ejaculation" (gentle- man-like) over the hardness of the milking. The next impression Tess receives of his character is through his PITY 187 ranging the cows so as to give her the easier ones. And then comes the soundless June evening, and their sUght exchange of sentiments on the fearsomeness of "life in general," when each wonders that the other "should look upon it as a mishap to be alive" — he "a man of clerical family and good education, and above physi- cal want," and she "but a milkmaid." "They were mutually puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods. .... Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his." They could not help meeting; and somewhat weird and out of the ordinary were the conditions under which they met, making for a kind of breathless suspension on the edge of passion, and for a strangely ideal represen- tation of one another. They met daily in that strange and solemn interval of time, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early here Being so often — ^perhaps not always by chance — the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world The spectral, half- compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead im- pressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim, inceptive stage of the day, Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness, both of disposition and physique, and almost regnant power The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade, his companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were 1 88 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the northeast; his own face, though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her. It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman — a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fancifiil names, half- teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them. " CaU me Tess," she would say, askance; and he did. Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being who craved it.' Thus far there has been no dramatic tension, since no issue has arisen. But a very critical issue is poten- tially present in Tess's determination, taken on her second setting out in the world, that she would never allow a man to marry her and her past. And the" issue is brought to the fore by two slight incidents: the humor- ous anecdote of Dairyman Crick about the girl seduced by Jack Dollop, which revives the sense of her unworthiness, and the overheard talk of the three milkmaids aU in love with Angel. From this time on, life is for Tess a continual battle. She determines not to be a rival to the other girls. Clare, on his side, is determined not to take any unfair advantage of his position, to act with due deliberation and regard for the woman of his love. And then comes the heat and stagnancy of August to bring to fruition both vegetable and human loves. There comes the afternoon when they were milking in the meads for coolness, and Clare, from under his ■Pp. 145-47. PITY 189 cow, watching the tranced beauty of her profile, felt a stimulus "like an annunciation from the sky." Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his paU to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic cry. But this is only the beginning of the struggle for Tess. Angel is too conscientious, even now, to take advantage of her momentary yielding, and he does not kiss her. It is not until his return from a visit to his parents that he asks her to be his wife. She can find no better reason for refusing than the probable disapproval of his father and mother, though she hints at "experi- ences" which she ought to let him know. Angel makes hght of her "experiences"; but he does want an answer, a reason. More than once she puts off her explanation; and when at last it cannot be put off again, she falls back on the very lame reason of her D'Urberville descent. She is really come, she tells him, of an old family, "all gone to nothing, " and she has been told that he "hated old families." "At the last moment her courage had failed her, she feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct of self-preservation was stronger than her candor." The struggle proceeds from this moment of failing courage through its harrowing stages of intensification. Having at last acknowledged her love for Angel, Tess I90 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE now desperately appeals to her mother for advice; and her mother advises, nay conjures and commands her not to let anyone know her secret, reminding her of a promise to that effect made by Tess on her leaving home. And thus "steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calm." She contents her conscience with putting off the date of the wedding. But that will not serve for long; and at last, The word had been given; the number of the day written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more extensively with natural phenomena than their fellow- creatures ; and she accordingly drifted into that passive responsive- ness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic of the frame of mind. But she was not wholly pacified in spirit. She wrote again vainly to her mother. When her wedding gown arrived, she remembered the ballad of the guilty Queen, and she thought: "Suppose this robe should betray her condition by its changing color, as her robe had betrayed Queen Guenever." Then comes the visit to a neighboring town where Tess is recognized by a man from Trantridge, the scene of her affair with Alec. The man, upon receiving a blow from Angel, hastens to declare that he is mistaken, and Angel thinks nothing more of the matter. But Tess is once more aroused to the need of action, and she makes her attempt to reach him with her written confession. It is not till the wedding morning that she discovers the missing note where it has lain unobserved under the edge of the carpet; and then she makes one PITY 191 more effort, in their brief moment on the landing, to tell him of her "faults and blunders." But her courage so naturally melts away under his urgency! — let them not spoil the day with confession of faults, but leave them till they are settled in their house. And so the day passes swiftly with its activities and ill omens, the knot is tied fast, and they find themselves in the evening alone before the fire. Her way is made easier by Angel's confession, and at last she summons strength to tell her story straight. But we are still to be held in suspense through the terrible days and nights while Angel is making up his mind. We have hopes that he will be moved by the humility and the manifest loveliness of her character; that her suggestion of a divorce, though made in igno- rance of the law, will convince him of her nobility; that his sleep-walking tenderness is a sign of relenting. And we are not released from our suspense until we read : "When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own way, and did not know that he loved her still." So ends that part of the story which recounts the growing loves of Tess and Angel, their marriage and separation. It is the heart of the story, and what gives dramatic force to the whole narrative, having rniade us for good and all hot champions of Tess and sorely sensitive to the pathos of all her sufferings. Technically it bears considerable resemblance to the second and third books of The Native, which recount the love-making and marriage of Eustacia and Clym. But 192 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE there are several important points of difference. The dramatic tension is not one created by conflicting wills or hopes of persons opposed to one another; it is for the most part a struggle within the breast of the heroine, in which the antagonists are Passion and Conscience. While, therefore, the reader is held in suspense, and receives a strong impression of the strain upon the will and the heart of Tess, he watches here no marshaling of interest against interest, of character against character, such as peoples the stage in The Native. We are not so much taken up with the play of forces as with the moral suffering of a woman in the grip of a dilemma, who cannot enjoy the supreme happiness withia her reach because of an honorable scruple in regard to her past. Moreover, this long passage of strain does not grow directly, like that of The Native, out of a dramatic situation already developed, nor lead directly into the dramatic climax of the story. It is the second of three major episodes in the life of the heroine: the story takes a new start with her rally from the first experience, and again with the beginning of the "pajanent" which leads to the "fulfilment." This is another feature of the non-dramatic, the loose-patterned or epic style of narration,' appropriate to a tale of suffering. 4 And, strong as may be the hold upon the reader of this central episode, the strongest scenes are yet to come. He has still before him those parts of the story where ' This distinction between the epic and dramatic types in Hardy's novels has been made by Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his Thomas Hardy: a Critical Study. PITY 193 he can scarcely read for tears, and where he cannot possibly read aloud for very shame of his choking voice. For the main appeal is not to our dramatic sense, but to our hearts. It is really so throughout the book. It is with our hearts that we respond to the picture of the helpless Durbeyfield children, those "half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail" with their parents in the crazy Durbeyfield ship. It is our hearts that contract at the killing of tJteir horse Prince, their breadwirmer, when Tess and Abraham were driving him to market with the beehives. More pathetic than dramatic are indeed the scenes in which we behold Tess awaiting the decision of Angel, after her confession. For while we are made to feel that her case is a good one, that there were "many effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal," we can but witness her weakness and prostration of spirit in a situation she is so helpless to control. From this point on the pathos deepens steadily to the end. The hardships of the winter labor in the turnip field, the persecutions of her brutal employer, the depressing comments of Angel's brothers, so unluckily overheard by Tess, and that most unlucky encounter with Alec, the convert — these follow one another so rapidly, and yet with such convincing simplicity and sobriety in the manner of their setting forth, that we grow positively tremulous with emotion, ready to yield our tears to any direct appeal. And such direct appeal is made by the two despairing letters of Tess to Angel. One knows not which is the more moving of the two. First comes the long letter in which she says, "I must cry to you in my trouble — I have no one else," a letter 194 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE of self-justification, full of intense longing, fear, and pain. "The daylight has nothing to show me, since you be not here " And then, some time later, as she sees herself being forced back relentlessly into the power of Alec, she writes in haste those lines of passionate reproach: "0, why have you treated me so monstrously. Angel! I do not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! .... I will try to forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!" Here the reader's feeling of pity is mingled with exultation over the utterance for once of the bitter truth by the long-suffering woman. But more tj^ical, and more pathetic, is her usual spirit of tender submissiveness and hopefulness. There is the picture of her singing in the fields, perfecting the ballads that Angel had seemed to like best in their milking days. Like Cljon at his furze-cutting, she would sing of "the break o' the day," only in rude English instead of elaborate and elegant French. Arise, arise, arise! And pick your love a posy, All of the sweetest flowers That in the garden grow. The turtle doves and small birds In every bough abuilding, So early in the spring-time, At the break o' the day! It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these ditties, whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this cold, hard time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the simple, siUy words of the songs resound- ing in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.' ' P- 393- PITY 195 We have next to follow the dreary exodus of the Durbeyfields from their home on the death of the father, their pilgrimage to Kingsbere, and the ironic encampment of the homeless, poverty-stricken family under the wall of the church within which lay the vaults of the knightly D 'Urbervilles. Within the church Tess has her encounter with the ubiquitous Alec, with his sinister offers of assistance; and upon his departure, she bends down over the entrance to the vaults with her cry, "Why am I on the wrong side of this door?" The next we see of Tess is in the lodgings at Sand- bourne, where Angel found her living with Alec, and the two " stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality." It was very little that either could find to say on facts so irreversible; and before we know it, the scene is over. It is to Alec that she. addresses her most passionate words of reproach and hatred and self-justification. This is the climax of the book; it is meant to prepare us for the murder of Alec, and the raving words are suited to the tongue of the most tragic of emotional actresses. But it is not drama in the strict sense which here holds us in thrall. It is the pathos of inexorable fate; it is the tears in things. ". . . . And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... . and I did not know it ! . . . . And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... . and you would not stop using it — no — ^you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and my mother's needs — they were the things you moved me by .... and you said my husband would never come back — never; and you taunted me, and said what a simpleton I was to expect him And at last I believed you and gave way! .... And then he came back!" 196 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE It is to Alec that Tess addressed her words, and it is against him as an individual that she rouses her fury to the point of action. But for our part, we hardly take him into account. We are not concerned with the assignment of responsibility, the estimate of merits in the case. We have not place in our hearts for any other sentiment than compassion. Or if we are moved to rage, it is against that impersonal order which makes possible such a pitiful frustration of happiness. There follows the brief respite of the time of hiding, and then the awesome arrival of Angel and Tess at the monstrous temple of Stonehenge. She lies down upon one of the great stones, which Angel beheves to be an altar. They discuss the religious character of the place, and so she is reminded of the question of immortahty. Realizing that her days on earth are numbered, she wants to know if Angel thinks they will meet again after they are dead. It is the old pitiful question of mortals striving against the conditions of their mortality, a question that recurs with such increase of pathos since the low tide of Christian faith, in our present days of dubiety. But never can it have been put under more affecting conditions than here by this murderess about to be apprehended, this poor girl addressing her lover from whom she had been so cruelly separated, resting now a moment in the presence of these mysterious monuments whose timeless permanence so dwarfs, but cannot suppress, the hopes and aspirations of hviman creatures. Even at such a moment. Angel cannot bring himself to give her comfort; but she falls asleep on the rock, tired out with their long flight. And then we have the most touchingly beautiful scene, perhaps, 3:3^ TY 197 in all English fiction^ — the scene of her arrest at day- break, and the last recorded words of these ill-starred lovers. Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer; and they were again silent. In a minute or two her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep. The band of silver pale- ness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sim-stone beyond them; and the stone of sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hoUows of the stones lay still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward — a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the hoUow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight towards the circle of pillars in which they were. He heard something behind him, the brush of feet. Turning, he saw over the prostrate column another figure; then, before he was aware, another was at hand on the right, under a triUthon, and another on the left. The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest man was upon him. "It is no use, sir," he said. "There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared." "Let her finish her sleep! " he implored in a whisper of the men as they gathered round. When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars around. He went to the stone, and bent over her. 198 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE holding one poor little hand; her breathing now was quick and small, Uke that of a lesser creature than a woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the stones glistening a green- gray, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, a ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her. "What is it. Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me ? " "Yes, dearest," he said, "They have come." "It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad — ^yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!" She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. "I am ready," she said quietly.' 5 This is not the pathos of a professional compeller of tears. It is the inadvertent yielding of one who looks upon weeping as an unmanly weakness, and whose effort has always been to state the painful truth in the dry style of matter of fact. It is remarkable that never once in the dozen novels which preceded Tess had Hardy ever offered so direct an invitation to tears, as here we meet so many times. Only once perhaps in all that earlier record of human experience does even a sensitive reader feel constrained to tears — by the last words on the subject of Cl3an Yeobright and his itinerant preach- ing. His preaching was variously received. "But everywhere he was kindly received, for the story of his life had become generally known." It is only then, and through those simple words, that we are made to ' Pp- 4S3-SS- PITY 199 feel in its full poignancy the sadness of this "story of his life." Equally simple, in general, is the pathos of Tess, as simple as her quiet words to the officers, "I am ready." It is the accumulated feeling of a lifetime that overflows in this culminating work of art. A glance at the dates may here be enlightening. Heretofore his production of novels had been extremely rapid. From Desperate Remedies in 187 1 to The Wood- landers in 1887, Mr. Hardy had turned out a novel almost every year, with never more than a two-year interval. He must have been deeply immersed in the business of inventing plots and creating characters, too busy with creation, it might be thought, to have time for mature reflection. Especially from the time of The Native he had been pouring out novel after novel in ahnost feverish haste. But with the completion of The Woodlanders he rested from this labor for the extraordinary space of five years. One volume of tales was collected and published in the interval, and another was put forth in the same year with Tess. But we cannot suppose that these would demand the same long strain of thought as the construction of a novel. It is like a period of retirement. The philosopher, the student of Ufe, has industriously collected his materials, like a Wallace or a Darwin in his voyage to the South Seas; and now he goes into his retreat to muse over what he has found and to extract its secret essence. As he allows things to fall into due perspective, many details are lost to view, many complications cease to obtrude them- selves; the lines of life become more simple, and every- thing begins to present itself in the light of one great dominant feeling. The general beauty and pitifulness 200 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE of life gather about the fonn and history of a certain poor girl, and all his thought and feeling on the subject of human destiny join in one flood of compassion for one typical human being. It is the old theme of a woman's secret to be told or to be suppressed, the sort of theme which had by this time perhaps become shopworn in the great mart of paper-covered novels. And Mr. Hardy was moving, consciously or unconsciously, in that current of sentiment which makes the popularity of women novelists whose names do not often appear in the bluebooks of literature, but who make the fortunes of the publishers of Sea- side (or Bertha Clay) Libraries — the "Duchesses" and Charlotte M. Braemes, who were names to conjure with long before Mr. Hardy became the subject of literary study ! The pure woman, the innocent country girl, cheated or forced into a false position; the secret to be told or to be kept silent, and in any case sure to be the source of trouble and misery; a world which will not give fair trial or a second chance to a woman with a past — are not these the very stock in trade of the paper-covered novel, which still finds its passionate readers in so many kitchens and hall bedrooms? The Wife's Secret, Beyond Pardon, A Woman's Error, One False Step, The Shadow of a Sin: such are a few of the suggestive titles out of hundreds credited to the sole pen of one Charlotte M. Braeme, author of Dora Thorne, and for sale at twenty-five cents each in the eighties and nineties. It is true that these stories seldom come out tragically, like that of Tess. It is true that the heroine is seldom permitted to be even technically in the wrong, like her. PITY 20I But it is significant that, in the magazine version of Tess, addressed to the family circle, Mr. Hardy allowed his heroine to pass for absolutely impeccable. In place of the seduction of Tess by Alec, the magazine reader was informed of a "fake" marriage by which the inno- cent girl was entrapped. And even in the book she appears sufficiently in the light of a victim to make sure appeal to the Saxon chivalrous instinct. And with due allowance for the insipidity called for in a paper-covered novel, one recognizes in these machine- made tales the primary elements of Hardy's great work of art. There is no absolute divorce between "literature" proper and the literature of the dime novel. Themes which receive their crudely sentimental and melo- dramatic treatment in the one are sure to appear above the surface, somewhat refined, it may be, but recogniz- able. Meredith, when he put forth Rhoda Fleming, showed in his chapter headings a consciousness that he was writing somewhat in the maimer of East Lynne or suchlike melodrama. And Tess of the D'Urbervilles came at a time when, in serious literature, especially in plays, a great deal of attention was being paid to the subject of the declassie-r-the woman who would come back, the woman who lives under "the shadow of a sin," the woman who has to pay for "one false step." The Second Mrs. Tanqueray will suffice to suggest the currency of a theme which is treated by such other notable hands as Oscar Wilde and Henry Arthur Jones. So that Hardy's subject was timely from the point of view of the "high brow" as well as popular in the original sense of the word. And that one of his novels 202 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE which is most satisfying to the critic for the beauty and seriousness of its art is at the same time the one to make, from the time of its first appearance, an appeal to the widest circle of readers. All along, the theme of a woman's secret had appealed to the imagination of Hardy, and he had more or less nibbled at it in several novels. In his very first book there is in the background the case of Cytherea Aldclyffe, who met too late the man she should have married, but who, fearing the results of a confession, "withdrew from him by an effort and pined." His second novel rings down the curtain on his heroine thinking of "a secret she would never tell," of her brief infidelity in thought toward her lover when she came under the spell of the gentlemanly clergyman and his brilliant offers. In The Hand of Ethelherta and The Mayor of Casterbridge, it is quite a different sort of secret which is suppressed: in the one case, Ethelberta's humble status, in the other, the fact that Elizabeth- Jane is not really the daughter of Henchard. It is in A Pair of Blue Eyes that we find the nearest anticipation of Tess. For there we have the heroine similarly declaring to the leading man that she has a confession to make, similarly putting it off, and then at the last moment losing heart and confessing to something else of quite insignificant importance. But this is, after all, no very close approximation to the theme of Tess. It is the real seriousness of the thing to be confessed, the fact that Tess does finally make her confession instead of leaving the truth to be discovered through the revelations of some Mrs. Jethway, and the very heavy "payment" exacted, which give the latter its specific character. PITY 203 It may seem strange that the author who had worked so deliberately the traditional themes and devices of the popular story-teller, one who was so clearly bent on producing something that would satisfy the public, should have been so long in taking up for serious treat- ment a subject the like of which had proved effective in sentimental novels without number. It was probably to a large degree his consideration for Victorian prudery that led him so long to fight shy of the subject of Tess. But it was also, no doubt, that grave seriousness with which, after all, he had always approached at least the subject-matter of his art. He was willing to adopt many of the conventions and the standard procedure of his trade; but he would not consent to falsify human nature if he could help it, and he would not lower himself to make a deliberate bid for tears. One is inclined to believe that, in taking up at last this hack- neyed theme of the fatal secret and the "soiled dove," Mr. Hardy was by no means fully conscious how straight he was aiming at the bull's-eye of popularity. He was perhaps unaware of the wide currency of his theme; perhaps it was an infection which he took, like any simple reader, because it was in the air. He no doubt thought he was telling the story of Tess not because it was popular but because it was true. He had himself first succimibed to the pity of it, and that is why his readers so inevitably succumbed. It is, in the last analysis, because he shared to such a degree the popular psychology that he was able to score so great a popular success. It is certainly not because of any deliberate working of the pathetic possibilities of the subject. One does not 204 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE see how, short of suppression, he could have disposed more simply of the scene of Tess's execution, of the meeting of Tess and Angel at Sandbourne, or the picture of Tess singing her ballads in the wintry field. The story does not seem to be constructed so as to lead to these scenes and bring them into prominence. They rather fall as it were casually, by the way; and we pass on quickly to what follows. It is this very economy of statement, carrying with it a sense of matter of fact, that makes the passages so convincing to the intelligent reader. There is even a kind of detachment, an almost scientific manner of statement, that might interfere with the effect of any pathos less seriously grounded, as in the way of referring to Tess and explaining her appearance during the christening of her baby. "The emotional girl" he calls her, almost as if to forbid us to take the incident sentimentally. He looks upon her more objectively than would suit the purposes of the professionally pathetic writer, showing her to us as she is seen by her brothers and sisters. "The children gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and awful^ — a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common." In this scene the pathos is somewhat qualified, it may be, by the satirical bias with which the author regards the rite of infant baptism and the beliefs in regard to it which so tortured the girl-mother. This fear of the child's damnation is, of course, what gives its peculiar force to the act, as the doubt of immortality PITY 205 is what gives its poignancy to Tess's question at the end of the story. But in the earlier case, at least, there is a note of philosophic scorn in the terms in which the author refers to "poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil" and to the "kind of heaven" which would be lost to him by an irregularity in his baptism, which detracts from the simplicity of feeling ordinarily going with pathos. There is indeed a philosophic coloring to the whole narrative which denotes a degree of reflection generally fatal to pathos. These are the only terms on which this author will condescend to the moving of tears. Not content to relate the loss of Prince and the grief of the Durbeyfields, Hardy is impelled to give to the incident a wider significance by the reference to blighted stars. In their nocturnal drive, Tess has been giving Uttle Abraham what information she commands on the subject of the stars. "They sometimes seem to be like apples on our stubbard tree. Most of them splendid and sound — a few blighted." And to his question as to what kind we live on, she replies, "A blighted one." That was before the terrible accident. Afterward, in their despair, Abraham recalls his astronomy, and asks, "Tis because we be on a blighted star, not a sound one, isn't it, Tess?" In the same spirit as inspired this beautiful poetic invention, Mr. Hardy is prone, less happily, to heap his scorn upon the great poets of his century for their ready faith in providence: upon the early morning optimism of Browning's Pippa; upon Wordsworth's assumption of "Nature's holy plan," and his pious sentiment about our arrival "trailing clouds of glory," in which lines, 2o6 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE "to Tess, as to some few millions of others, there was ghastly satire." One knows not whether to wish away or to welcome these skirmishing shots of a late-Victorian novelist disgusted with the easy optimism of early- Victorian and Georgian poets. At least they serve to guarantee the seriousness of the work, and to signalize it as of a late- Victorian order of pathos. The sufferings of Tess, at any rate, are impregnated with a moral significance which does not attach to those of Little Nell or Paul Dombey or Little Em'ly. The first two are helpless children who suffer and die, and that is pathos pure and simple. There is nothing more to be said. In the case of Little Em'ly there might have been more to be said, but the contemporaries of Dickens did not want to hear it said; and so she remained just "Little Em'ly," with no more significance than Little Nell. In Tess Durbeyfield we have a pathos of high moral significance; there is neces- sarily in her case a greater weight and volvmie of feeling. For she is a grownup woman, a responsible moral be- ing, with intense desires, high aspirations, liable to temptation, and fearfully liable to suffering. Moving as is the history of Tess in its mere incidents, it is made doubly moving by the beauty and strength of her personality. Hardy's characters are in general remarkable for their vitality; they are picked specimens of the fruit of human kind, whom we recognize as fit to represent us. But Tess is, of them all, the most full of life. With her somewhat exceptional physical endowment, she was more than usually susceptible to PITY 207 those sensations in which the beauty of sound and color and snaell comes to us as the voice of our spirit. While Angel played his harp in the summer evening, Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at wiU by gazing at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she imdulated upon the thin notes as upon bUlows, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden, the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of color mixed with the waves of sound. The same capacity for sensation adds intensity to all her joys and griefs, her fears and shames and hopes. Hardy's women are — as with most novelists of his time — his most convincing and attractive characters. And Tess is the crown of all his women. Eustacia was a wonderful creation, a poetic invention, of strange exotic beauty, fit to be the wicked queen of tragedy. There is nothing of the exotic or nocturnal about our milkmaid, walking out at daybreak with her companions, or working in the harvest fields at noonday with the men and women of Marlott. She has the force of passion of Eustacia without her unscrupulous and somewhat perverse idealism. Among the earlier characters, she has more of Bathsheba than of Elf ride, being a creature of the fields and barns instead of the drawing-room and the study. She is even more deeply tinctured than Bathsheba with the ocherous contact of the earth. She has a dignity of bearing like Bathsheba's; but being no independent farmer but the merest proletarian, she has more than the helplessness of her sex, and is the 2o8 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE marked victim of an economic order that spares its Bathshebas. She is beautiful, and real, too. For her beauty is not too perfect, and not too fully inventoried. Her eyes and mouth are the only features about which her painter is specific — her "large innocent eyes," her "large tender eyes," of indeterminate color, and her "mobile peony mouth." There is one peculiarity of her mouth upon which he dwells more than once — the way her lower lip had "of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word." It was this that was so maddening to Angel on the afternoon when he watched her at the m ilkin g till drawn to her as by an irresistible charm. Her Hps were beautiful but not perfect; "and it was the touch of the imperfect upon the intended perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity." It is that which convinces us that the author was here drawing from the life. The same conviction is forced upon us by the charming colloquialism of her speech, bits of ancientry that slipped through the web of her National School training; and above all by the "stopt- diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her." There is something in the phrasing here that makes one sure the author is speaking of an actual woman, whose voice he has heard and cannot forget. She has every quality to make us admire her: her modesty, her sensitiveness to the disgrace of her father's drunken ways, her motherly concern for her brothers and sisters, the simple earnestness and patience with PITY 209 which she perfonns the hard tasks imposed upon her, and the scrupulous conscience that brings her so much pain. Above all we find beautiful the wholeness of her devotion to the man she loves, in its combination of qualities traditionally distinguished as proper to woman and to man. " Clare knew that she loved him — every curve of her form showed that — but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single- mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaran- teed — what honesty, what endurance, what good faith." 7 This is a good woman for whom our tears are asked. "A pure woman" he calls her in his title; an adjective he defends in the Preface to one of the later editions. Heretofore Mr. Hardy has been content in his novels to make a "tacit assumption" of the conventional standards of morality. But here, in the interest of truth or of his story, he is impelled to interpose over and over again his own passionate defense of his heroine's character. He represents Tess, in the time of her disgrace, as encompassed with a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of GuUt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But aU the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accep ted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. It is a very frank appeal to the law of nature from the law of society. As expressed in the more rustic language 2IO ART AND CRAFT AT ONE of Mrs. Durbeyfield, "Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose. 'Tis nater, after all, and what do please God." But if the author is so bold in his appeal to nature, he nevertheless takes pains to clear his heroine of too much responsibility for her experience. It may be merely a social law which she had broken; but he wants us to understand that it was only through her extreme ignorance that she "had been made" to break it. It is with great feeUng that Tess reproaches her mother for not telling her "there was danger in men-folk." Her fellow-workers in the fields, watching her nurse her baby, reckon that "a little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in the Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along." The circumstances of her betrayal were evidently thought out with great care so as to make her seem almost, if not quite, helpless. It is here if anywhere in the book that we hear the creak of the machinery. Whatever he might think himself of the relative validity of the laws of nature and those of society, the author had still to reckon with his public of Saxon readers; and he must at all cost save his heroine from the slightest imputation of- — well — sensuality. The trick, if such it be, was on the whole very neatly turned. It is far from the crude violence of movie and melodrama, in which the heroine is betrayed by mere force or deceit, agreeable to the Saxon persua- sion^ — -at least for purposes of romance — that no decent woman ever can be seduced by any other means. It is equally removed from the somewhat low-creeping PITY 211 realism of George Moore; and Tess may take her place in a higher category of character and pathos than Esther Waters.' The upshot of the whole matter for Mr. Hardy seems to be that the reproach for such an act is in proportion to the degree of responsibility, and that degrees of responsibility are infinite in number. As for Tess, her responsibility is represented as practically nil. She was "an almost typical woman, but for a slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race." A slight incautiousness of character, and that inherited, can hardly amount to the tragic fault in a protagonist regarded as essential to justify the ruling powers. It would not suit the purposes of Sophocles, of Shakespeare, of Hawthorne, or George Eliot. This is not tragedy in the traditional sense ; and the modernity of the author is shown in his bold impiety. "'Justice' was done," he says on recording the execution of Tess, "and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess." Mr. Hardy, in his Preface, defends his exclamation against the gods with a quotation of Gloster's words in Lear, As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. He does not quote the words of Gloster's son, The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us. More in Gloster's vein, again, is Marian's reply to Tess's suggestion that her unhappy life is fair payment ' A recent re-reading of Esther Waters and other novels of Mr. Moore leads me to doubt the justice of this statement. The greatness of Hardy does not require the dispraise of a great contemporary. 212 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE for her own wrong-doing. "Wives are unhappy some- times; from no fault of their husbands — from their own," says Tess. "You've no faults, deary; that I am sure of," is Marian's reply. "So it must be something outside ye both." It is not immorality of which Hardy should be accused, as he is accused, for example, by Professor Duf&n. His offense is a more modern one — the great modern crime of impiety. We are here concerned only with his artistic offense — that against realism — the venial offense, when all is said, of taking for his heroine an exceptionally fine woman, a woman with no other fault than a slight incautiousness of character. 8 Far deeper crimes than this we can forgive to an artist who knows how to envelop his story in such a dense and shining atmosphere of poetry. We have never had a novelist who made so beautiful a use of that time-vision which is one of the richest resources of the poet. This is not the faculty of reviving in romantic tale the glittering figures and events of a time long past. It is the more elevated and poetic faculty of setting the plainest figures of today in a perspective of ages, in a shadowy synthesis that, while it dwarfs the present scene, yet lends it a grandeur, too, a dignity and a noble pathos borrowed from those of time itself. And even deeper magic is sometimes taken on by this time-vision from the mystery that lies in shadows, the thick and palpable object being contemplated not in itself but in the spectral copy of itself drawn by the sun upon some face of wood or stone. It is adding the mystery of substance to the mystery of time. It is PITY 213 thus that Hardy shows us the patient row of milkers in the barton sketched on the wall by the lowering summer sun. There and thus it threw shadows of these obscure and un- studied figures every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been the prdfile of a Court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as diUgently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble fagades long ago, or the outUnes of Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs. A special element of wonder is added to the daylight wonder of Stonehenge by the way it is approached by Tess and Angel, in the darkness of their furtive midnight journey, and ignorant of their whereabouts. Unable to make out anything by sight, they are guided only by the booming sound of the wind playing upon the gigantic edifice, as it plays upon the Egjrptian stones of Memnon, and by the sense of touch which informs them of the shapes of pillar and altar stone. It is with a great shiver of awe that they and the reader come at last to the conclusion that "this pavilion of the night" is Stonehenge, the ancient temple, " older than the centu- ries; older than the D'Urbervilles." If anything was needed to give a sense of greater depths of time lying behind them, it was the realization that this edifice was probably dedicated to the worship of the sun. For in this reference back to primitive ritual and myth, one measures time not by years and centuries but by the vast cycles of man's religious sense. Many times in the story of Tess we have this appeal to our ultra-historic imagination: the "old-time heliolatries" being suggested to the author by a hazy sunrise in August, when "the sun, on account of the 214 t ART AND CRAFT AT ONE mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression"; the May-day dance of the women of Marlott being traced to the ancient rites of the local Ceres. As usual. Hardy is very precise in his notation of those geological diversities that antedate Stonehenge and Cybele, and yet give their present expression to the landscape. There is even more occasion than usual for such science in this book, since the changing fortunes of Tess take her into such various parts of the country, and her sympathetic creator is anxious to make us feel the difference, for example, between the rich alluvial character of the Valley of the Great Dairies, where she spent the days of her happiness and the flinty rudeness of the upland where her life was bitter. In her slow journeys on foot or by wagon, the earthy substructure of the scene is always present to her sense, "perceptible to the tread and to the smell." Neither she nor her peers are ever seen as other than a part of the landscape. The milkers at the dairy are not merely shadows on the wall of the barton. The barton itself is lost in the meadow in which the buildings are set. "Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley — a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten." The sense of encompassment by nature is made even stronger by the author's insistence on the remoteness of his scene from the intrusions of civilization. Espe- cially tender is his treatment of the sleepy Vale of Black- moor and the limited view of the peasant girl for whom this shut-in nook of country is the world. This was PITY 215 " the vale in which she had been born, and in which her Ufe had unfolded. The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its inhabitants the races thereof. From the gates and stiles of Marlott she had looked down its length in the wondering days of infancy, and what had been mystery to her then was not less than mystery to her now " It is by such means that the figures of the story are all invested with a tender light as of the end of day, with contours softened and every rudeness refined, as in the paintings of Millet or the sculptures of Meunier. It is thus that they sink into the beauty of their setting, at least for us who behold the picture, and half the soreness of life is taken away by the very pathos of their insignificance. 9 It is in Tess of the D'Urbervilles that Hardy's pathos culminates — the general envelopment of human nature with his yearning tenderness. It is not merely Tess and her misfortunes that move him. He takes every opportunity of extending his compassionate regard to any creature within his view. He loves to dwell upon the minor solacements which mortals find for anxiety and pain. He dilates more than once upon the comfort of strong drink, which, while it only serves in the long run to deepen trouble, yet for the moment creates an illusion of well-being. Thus he describes the sensations of Mrs. Durbeyfield when she would go to hunt up her shiftless husband at RoUiver's, and "sit there for an hour or two by his side, and dismiss all thought and care of the children during the interval A sort of halo, an Occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles 21 6 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere cerebral phenomena for quiet contemplation." Still more touching, if possible, with its discreet note of irony, is the account of the sensations of the young men and women of Trantridge coming home by moonlight from their revels in the neighboring town. It is just after he has recounted the vulgar quarrel with Tess that Hardy indulges in this description of the idealizing effects of liquor. And then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field path; and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one's head, a circle of opalized hght, formed by the moon's rays upon the glittering sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; tiU the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night's mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine. But Hardy loves also to dwell on the more healthy solace of nature to sore spirits. He loves to think of Tess, in the time when she hid her shame, watching from under her few square yards of thatch, "winds, and snows, and rains, and gorgeous sunsets, and successive moons at their full." He loves to think of her as taking her solitary walk at the exact moment of evening "when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty," when "the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions." And he must have taken PITY 217 a sad joy in her moment of satisfaction when she lay before daybreak upon the stone altar of Stonehenge. .... "I like very much to be here," she murmured. "It is so solemn and lonely — after my great happiness — • with nothing but the sky above my face. It seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two " And so it is that the poet throws about his pitiful creatures the purple mantle of his compassion. And we can almost forget the pain of the story in its loveliness. The rage and indignation pass; the tenderness remains. And if we say, how pitiful! it is to say, in the next breath, how beautiful! IX. TRUTH In Tess of the- D'Urhervilles it is the simple pathos of the story that makes the main appeal, and almost completely takes the place of complication and surprise as guiding principle and source of interest. In Jude the Obscure the guiding princip le and source oflnterest are found in pitiless and searching trufii. Not but what Mr. Hardy had generally been a truth-teller, particularly in regard to human nature, and not least in Tess. And not but what Jude is a sufficiently sad story from beginning to end. But there is here an intensity and single-mindedness in following the truth which are unique in the work of Hardy, and which leave us little energy for any less scientific emotion. No beauty in the picture, no heroism in character or action is allowed for a moment to divert us from the pursuit of this grim quarry. I Jude the Obscure is the history of a young man who grows up in a little village from which at night he can see in the distance the lights of Christminster (Oxford). Under the influence of an admired teacher, he early conceives the idea of going to the university town and living the splendid dream-life of a scholar; and he painfully teaches himself the learned languages while pursuing the trade of a stone-cutter. But Jude is weak and without knowledge of Ufe; and he falls victim to the wiles of a vulgar woman, whom he marries under the persuasion that he must 218 TRUTH 219 save her from disgrace. This is practically the ruin of his hopes. It is only after they have quarreled and Arabella has left the country that he manages to make his way to Christminster, hoping that he may still get admission to the university and realize his dream. But the officers of the university give him no encouragement. At Christminster Jude meets his cousin, Sue Bride- head, as well as his old master Phillotson. These two he brings together, and Sue becomes an assistant teacher with Phillotson. Jude, meantime, has fallen in love with her; but, as a married man, he cannot make advances, and he grows despondent when he finds that Phillotson is making love to her. He gets drunk, disgraces himself in a tavern, and returns to Marygreen, an acknowledged failure. He gives up his dream of being a scholar, and determines to be a mere curate, a humble man of religion. The first of his aspirations has failed, largely because of Arabella; the second is destined to failure through the other woman. Jude now goes to live at Melchester (Salisbury), where Sue is a pupil at a Teachers' Training School. He works at his trade, and studies faithfully his Greek New Testament. Sue is engaged to marry Phillotson, planning to be his helper in teaching after she has completed her course. Jude has never had the courage to tell her of his being married; and the two cousins see much of one another, and live on terms of sentimental intimacy, leading eventually, through an accident, to her being compromised and dismissed from the Training School. It is only then that Jude tells Sue of Arabella; and soon after she marries Phillotson. But their union turns out badly; and the generous 220 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE husband releases the wife who cannot endure his embraces, finally setting her free by getting a divorce. Meantime she has gone to live with Jude, and this is the cause of his giving up his dream of being a Christian priest: such a profession is inconsistent with his unholy love. There are still left for Jude the ordinary joys of life, - with the love of Sue. But even these he is destined to miss. And the rest of the story is one of gradual degra- dation and discouragement, leading to a miserable death. Sue Bridehead is a strange creature. She is devoted to Jude, happy to live with him; but she will be neither his wife nor his mistress. It is only the return of Arabella from Australia and the fear of losing Jude that makes her yield to his passion, and then (when he has divorced Arabella) make an effort to marry him. I say effort; for, with the best of intentions, these lovers cannot bring themselves to enter what seems to them the sordid estate of legal matrimony. And they have to pay the penalty of social ostracism, which drives them to a miserable itinerant life. But Jude has never quite given up his dream of the scholarly life; and they drift back at last to Christ- minster, where is played out the last act of Jude's tragedy. They ^ have now three children, the oldest being the son of Jude and Arabella, born in Australia. He is a precocious child, who looks upon life with all the pessimism of disillusioned maturity. He realizes that he and his brothers are a cause of trouble to their parents; and when he learns from Sue that there is to be another baby, he takes matters into his own hands and puts an end to the lives of himself and brothers. TRUTH 221 Sue is thereupon smitten with remorse, and imagines this to be a stroke of heaven upon them for their sins. All the time that Jude has known her she has been a thorough rationalist, an unbeliever, and one who regards marriage as a human, an unnecessary, and degrading arrangement. She has even brought about the con- version of Jude to these advanced views. But now she suffers a complete revulsion to the religious and even High Church sentiment of earlier days. Marriage she comes to regard as a holy and sacramental bond which cannot be dissolved : she is still, in the eyes of God, the wife of Phillotson. And back to him she goes, at first to be his companion only, but at last, with great loathing, to make the supreme sacrifice of wifely duty. Jude, being sick and in despair, falls once again into the clutches of Arabella. Once again he is tricked into marrying her, this time with the help of strong drink. But his health is gone, and he has not long to live. He dies alone while Arabella is enjoying herself on a univer- sity holiday; the sounds of an organ concert at one of the colleges and the cheering from the Remembrance games drifting in at his window as he whispers the terrible words of Scripture, "Let the day perish wherein I was bom, and the night in which it was said, ' There is a man child conceived.' .... Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul ?" And while he lies dead at home, Arabella is being embraced by a quack doctor, a man as vulgar as herself. That is the end of Jude, who dreamed of being a priest and scholar, one of the company of Paley and Butler, of Keble and Pusey and Newman. 222 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE 2 The bare recital of the main facts of the story in outhne will give the reader some notion of the realism of this work; but only the text itself will make him feel the deliberate and uncompromising spirit in which the author followed out his purpose. Not merely has he d eclined to avail h imself o f the poetr y_.aLXhe Wessex background which goes so far to mitigate the sadness of earlier stories; he insists on forcing upon us the dreary prose of town and country seen in their least preposses- sing light. He wanted to present in vivid contrast the Ujeauty of Jude's aspirations and the ugliness of the actual ' ''circumstances of his life. And this ugliness he felt Bound to present not merely on its moral side but in the physical detail which makes a kind of sjTnbolic counterpart. The woman who first ensnares the would-be sage is a coarse and undistinguished daughter of a pig breeder; and she first attracts his attention, while engaged with other girls in washing chitterlings in a brook, by throwing at him for obscene token a "lump of offal" from her butcher's meat. The whole setting of her home, the scene of her wooing, is sordid in the extreme, type of the j)ure]y animal love which is destined so iron ically jtojhackl e Jude injhe pursuits of themind. And when Jude comes to tell the story later to the woman he loves, the companion of his spirit, the author has chosen for setting a filthy market-place, where "they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsalable refuse." Nowhere in the work of Mr. Hardy — nowhere before perhaps in English fiction — had the subject of sex been TRUTH 223 treated in a manner so little co lored by romantic conven- tion. It was essential to his theme to set forth the affair of Arabella altogether free from the glamor of sentiment. There was here to be none of the deference to the reader's sensibiUties shown in Tess. The woman in the case was "a complete and substantial female human — no more, no less." She set out deliberately to catch a man by sexual incitements, and to cheat him into marrying her by false representations. Nor was it on his side what we call "love" that thus caught and lamed him. It was something that seemed to care little for his reason and his wUl, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent school-master a school-boy he has seized by the collar, in a direc- tion which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own except locality. What many readers will find most offensive of all is the absence of even that Puritan moral sentiment which may indeed consent to record such facts, but solely for the purpose of condemnation. The author does not even allow himself the shudder of disgust. The affair is not indeed related in a tone of comedy, like certain of the adventures of Tom Jones. But the manner is equally remote from that of Richardson. Jude is no different from other men, except as his aspirations are higher and his sensibilities more fine than the ordinary, so that the results of his weakness are to injure him more in his feelings and his career. He is not treated as a vicious person, but as the subject of a material force which, working physiologically, is a drag upon his spirit. If any wrong is imputed, it is to the social requirement of II 224 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE marriage in a case having so little to do with permanent moral relations. There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labor, of foregoing a man's one opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing his units to the general progress of his generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness. And this might be pardoned or even approved by certain earnest readers who cannot pardon the later relapses of Jude. Those who are willing to acknowledge that the instinct in question may be transitory, and even have nothing in it of the nature of vice, may yet be most strenuous in the denial of any possibility that such a man as Jude — so fine, so high-minded — could be caught again, as he was by Arabella, and at times when his sentiment was all, however hopelessly, engaged by Sue. And then — for there are as many ways of offending in the treatment of sex as there are varieties of tempera- ment — another class of readers may be willing to accept the whole story of Arabella, as at least natural, who will repudiate all that relates to Sue as tainted with morbidity and going beyond all decent bounds of frankness. Morbid and unnatural they will find the epicene nature of this woman, whom Jude calls "a distinct type," a creature "intended by Nature to be left intact." Inde- cently frank and revolting they will find the author's mention (however delicately phrased) of her relation to her husband, her loathing of his contact, and her final sacrifice to what she conceives her religious duty. TRUTH 225 Nor is the "disagreeable" character of the book confined to the physical realism and the moral realism in the treatment of sex. If that is of a nature to arouse disgust in many readers, the general outlook on human destiny is of a character more discouraging, more withering to faith and hope. The death of Uttle Father Time and his brothers is in a grimmer vein, grim and austere to the point of tragedy. And the more so as it is deliberately made to typify the spirit of the time, the rooted maladie du Steele. "The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us," says Jude — "boys of a sort unknown in the last generation — the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming uni- versal wish not to live." This is not a new note in Hardy. He has long been occupied with what he takes to be the special cast of modern thought. And years before, in The Native, in his account both of Egdon Heath and of Clym Yeobright, he referred to the more sober taste in art which is coming in with the gloomier outlook upon life. In Clym Yeobright's face could be seen the typical coimte- nance of the future. Should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its Pheidias may produce such faces. The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will be accepted as a new artistic departiire. But it remained for his last novel to give such fearful embodiment to this idea as to make the naturalism of the earlier books appear as white compared with black. 226 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE 3 This militant naturalism is one symptom of the preoccupation with a philosophy of life which has already become absorbing in Tess, but which does not take full possession until the time of Jude. In the earlier books Mr. Hardy has been accustomed to make frequent comment upon the general conditions of life and the ways of destiny. But his first consideration has always been for the story itself, the interesting happenings, the dramatic conflicts, the moving fortunes of his characters. Even in Tess the author's reflections rather serve to heighten the pathos than to enlighten us on the general problem involved. It is first in Jude that the problem takes rank with the story itself as a subject of interest and excitement, so that at every step we are first and most intensely concerned with the truth. It is here for the first time that Mr. Hardy's philosophy becomes a prime consideration in the study of his technique. The story of Jude is that ojE a man st ruggling _to reaKze fine ideals, 15ut struggling vainly against a current too strong for him. In the special fineness of lusTdealsTieTs no doubt~S:ceptional; in his weakness, in the oversensitive nature that makes him an easy victinrTjf-xireumstarneesTiieis'not perhaps the average, but he is artype-ofthe-modern mind as elsewhere pictured by Mr. Hardy in Clym Yeobright and Angel Clare, and which, in little Father Time, produced the grim catastro- phe. And his whole career is but the last and most depressing instance of the lifelong persuasion of Mr. Hardy that the dice of the gods are loaded and man is bound to lose. TRUTH 227 Many and various are the terms in which this idea has been expressed. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, it appears as "a fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, .... that inexorable circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts." In The Mayor of Caster- bridge, the author speaks in his own character of "the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum." In Tess, again in his own words, he speaks of the two opposing forces, "the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment." And finally in Jude, he puts into the mouth of Sue a sweeping statement as to the activity of a hostile power in the lives of her and Jude. "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!' First it said, 'You shan't learn!' Then it said, 'You shan't labor!' Now it says, 'You shan't love!'" It seems clear that Mr. Hardy feels more strongly than most English novelists the strength of the forces against which men have to make their way, and the many chances of failure. The world is for him no "Woods of Westermain," in which it takes but courage and love and intelligence to secure the backing of all the forces of nature. The world is a battleground of forces indifferent or even hostile to men, ^ard'at'ahy rate to understand and to get upon one's side. And hfe is indeed a struggle for existence. 4 There has been much talk about the fatalism of Hardy, but not so much definition of terms. Fatalism is the mental attitude of one who feels that what happens to us, 228 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE or what we do, is necessitated by the nature of things or by the decree of some mysterious power over which we have no control. It is ah attitude of mind natural to men who have been defeated in their struggle with the world in spite of the best they can do, and who, in their despair of being able to affect the course of things, exclaim with Clym Yeobright, "Well, what must be will be," or with Jude, "Nothing can be done. Things are as they are, and will be brought to their destined issue." Jude was quoting from a chorus of the Agamem- non. He was tired of the conflict and ready to give in, not with the religious exaltation of the true fatalist, but with the same surrender to necessity. The peculiar note of fatalism is that it takes no account of the causes which produce a given result. Jude was not_byjtiature a fatalist, though hje may have been a determimst The determinist may be equally impressed with the helplessness of man in the grip of strange forces, physi- cal and psychical. But he is distinguished from the fatalist by his concern with the causes that are tEelinFs in the chain of necessity. Determinism is the scienHfic counterparfoF' fatalism, and throws more light on destiny by virtue of its diligence in the searching out of natural law. Mr. Hardy is rather a determinist than a fatalist. When he speaks most directly and unmistakably for himself, it is to insist on the universal working of the laws of cause and effect. " That she Tiad chosen for her afternoon walk the road along which she had returned to Casterbridge three hours earlier in a carriage was curious — if anything should be called curious in a concatenation of phenomena wherein each is known to have its accounting catise." TRUTH 229 The point in w hich detemiinism and fatalism agree is the helplessness of theindividual will ayainst the will"" in th ings. Only the determinist conceives the will in things as the siun of the natural forces with which we have to cope, whereas the fatalist tends to a more reUgious interpretation of that will as truly and literally a will, an arbitrary power, a personal force like our own. Sometimes Mr. Hardy allows his characters the bitter comfort of that personal interpretation. "Hench- ard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him. Yet they had developed naturally." It was so that Eustacia Vye, wishing to escape the responsibility for the shutting out of Mrs. Yeobright, imagines a spiritual power upon whom to put it. "Instead of blaming herself for the issue she laid the fault upon the shoulders of some indistinct, co- lossal Prince of the World, who had framed her situation and ruled her lot." What giv es rise to such n otions i s the iron ic dis- crepancy between what we seek and what we secure, • between what we do and what follows from it. We have control of so very few of the factors that go to determine our fortunes that we^an hardly help imagining behind the scene a capricious and malignant contriver of con- tret^ It is generaIiy"'to his characters that Mr. Hardy ascribes such interpretations. Thus in A Pair of Blue Eyes, he tells us that, to the West Country folk. Nature seems to have moods in other than a poetical sense; predilections for certain deeds at certain times, without any apparent law to govern or season to account for them. She is 230 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE read as a person with a curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, but heartless severities and overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice. And sometimes the author lets himself fall into a manner of speaking not strictly scientific. It is true that the order of nature is one that does not regard the wishes of men; that what we are after and what nature is after make two distinct systems, which often enough interfere and collide to our distress and bewilderment. And it is hard for the most sober of writers to find terms of prose for expressing what is a general and legitimate philosophical notion — that of the sum of forces with which we have to reckon. Mr. Hardy is not the most sober of writers, but a poet of vivid imagination, a satirist intensely conscious of the incongruities in the nature of things. Is it not natural that he should speak, in refiective mood, of "Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to" Knight upon the cliff? of "the waggery of fate which started Clive as a writing clerk" and "banished the wild and ascetic heath lad [Cljon] to a trade whose sole concern was with the especial symbols of self-indulgence and vainglory " ? of " an unsympathetic First Cause" which allowed Tess but one chance in life ? — and that he should speak with tears of indignation in his voice of "the President of the Inamortals" and "his sport with Tess" ? He is but using the handy per- sonifications by which we all attempt to characterize as a whole the principle lying behind the action of natural law. He does not mean to say that Nature is a lady with evil designs upon Mr. Knight, or to predicate the exist- ence of a deity bent on torturing Tess. He is neither a fatalist nor one urging belief in the governance of God. TRUTH 231 It is truet hat Mr. Hardy does jive us a more than usuar sense of_the pi xsterious a nd inscrutable character of destiny. And this is partly from his use of poetic imagery drawn from religion. "The ways of the maker are dark." According to one of the most pene- trating of his critics, "C'est ce pouvoir de suggerer le mystere metaphysique, si nous pouvons parler ainsi, derriere les actes les plus ordinaires, qui donne aux ceuvres de M. Hardy leur cachet particulier et distingue leur auteur des autres romanciers de son epoque.'" But, more and more as he goes on, Mr. Hardy makes it clear that it is not really a metaphysical mystery that lies behind his tragic_ stories, but the wholly natural mystery of maladjustments in the very nature of things. It might all be summed up in that highly imaginative — but in no way "metaphysical" — account in Tess of " the universal harshness" out of which grow the particu- lar harshnesses of men with women and women with men. These harshnesses, he says, "are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day." One must not overlook the accent of irony in his use of terms for the divinity. He takes frequent occasion to insinuate his scorn of the unthinking optimism of an easy faith. It is this perhaps which leads to his cham- pioning of Eustacia against the Supreme Power which had placed "a being of such exquisite finish .... in circimistances calculated to make of her charms a curse ' F. A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste (Paris), p. 172. 232 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE rather than a blessing." And this ironic reaction to the prevailing religious optimism is perhaps responsible for his one covert suggestion of a First Cause " of lower moral quality than [our] own." He may have been reading the posthumous essay of J. S. Mill in which are presented the possible alternatives (granting the exist- ence of God) of a deity benevolent but not all-powerful and a deity all-powerful but not benevolent. But this must not be taken as more than the momentary fling of a spirit made somewhat sour by the sweetness of Victorian sentiment. Biit there does remain one practice of Mr. Hardy which is liable to give rise to the impression of his being a fatalist. Mr. Hedgcock in particular is impressed with the fatalistic cast given to so many of his novels by the large use in them of accident and coincidence, forcing the hands of the characters, taken together with the use of personifications like those mentioned above. But the two things are not necessarily con- nected. It is not in the novels in which he has contrived most ingeniously a fatal chain of causes that he has the most to say of the First Cause or the Supreme Power. The forced sequences of surprising event in Two on a Tower, the bizarre recurrences of identical situations in The Well-Beloved, are almost wholly unaccompanied by any reflection upon the guiding principle of the universe; while it is in Tess, almost entirely free from the intrusion of accident, that the author dilates upon the activity of "an unsympathetic First Cause," upon "cruel Nature's law" and "the circiunstantial will against enjoyment," TRUTH 233 and takes his final fling at the sport of "the President of the Immortals." Again, it is in some of the stories in which the largest part is played by accident and coincidence that Mr. Hardy makes the most unqualified assertions of the reign of natural law. It is in Casterbridge, with its apparently fatal chain of occurrences, that he insists most on the law of cause and effect in the concatenation of events. In Two on a Tower and The Well-Beloved the few philosophical references to be found are to the processes of nature. The excessive use of accident and coincidence by Mr. Hardy seems to have been from motives of art rather than philosophy. It is not so much to illustrate a theory of life as for the sake of an interesting plot that he tangles up his characters in such a web of circum- stance. This is obvious enough in a book like A Laodi- cean, where the outcome is happy, and where the complications and difi&culties serve, as in any romance, as hurdles for the hero and heroine to clear in their race for happiness. And as the aim is artistic rather than philosophical, so does the objection lie rather on grounds of art than on grounds of truth. Everyone knows, as a matter of daily experience, that we have not complete control of our fortunes, that the general order of events is constantly interfering with our particular set of aims. An accident is simply a happening in the general order which comes to favor us or to upset our calculations. It intrudes upon our order with the shock and disaster of the housewife's broom sweeping away a spider's web. It is, as Hardy 234 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE expresses it, in reference to a misfortune of the Durbey- fields, a thing which comes upon us "irrespective of will, or law, or desert, or folly; a chance external impinge- ment to be borne with; not a lesson." There can be no objection on grounds of truth to the recording of such accidents. But on the other hand, they can have little value for literary art. For they have no moral significance; they throw no light upon human nature or the social order. And they are accordingly just so much waste material, just so much of a weight for the author to carry. If such an accident is a major event, it has to be set forth at some length; it has to be accounted for. And that takes a portion of the author's precious time, of the reader's precious store of energy. If there are many such events, and much complication of the action, the story becomes unwieldy; the author has not space to turn round in, as Henry James would express it. The true subjects of his study must be neglected for tiresome and unilluminating explanations. The miracle of The Mayor of Casterbridge is that, with such a stagger- ing burden of overhead expenses in the way of mere plot, the author can still pay dividends on the income from character. 6 There is a great difference between positive interfer- ence from the external order in the shape of unfortunate accident, and a mere failure to favor the hopes of men. It is chiefly in the latter form that the hostility or indifference of nature shows itself in the later novels. Thus in Jude, when the boy was so painfully devoting himself to the learning of Latin and Greek, the author TRUTH 235 remarks that somebody might have come along to help hrai in his difficulties. "But nobody did come, because nobody does." This is, of course, the very opposite of coincidence; it is a denial of all the marvels of romance, ' always on the lookout for angel or knight-errant to save one from the dungeon of ennui and incompetence. Of the same character is that want of design in the adjustment of the man to the hour, etc., of which Mr. Hardy expatiates so at length apropos of the affair of Tess and Alec. In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coin- cides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to a poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and- seek has become an irksome, outworn game In the present case, as in millions, the two halves of an approximately perfect whole did not confront each other at the perfect moment; part and coimterpart wandered independently about the earth in the stupidest manner for a while, till the late time came Here is no accident, no coincidence, no fatal chain of events, no case of skilful and ingenious contrivance on the part of destiny. Here is simply a total want of any contrivance for the benefit of the human beings con- cerned. It is but a negative hostility, or indifference, of the external order, which is here displayed; and there is no objection to be entered in the interest either of truth or of art. 7 But when it comes to positive motivation, it is gener- ally better art to ignore altogether the operations and dispositions of an extra-human order, which are so hard :i36 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE to trace and chart, and confine one's self to familiar human nature. Only so can one avoid the arbitrary and freakish, and leave one's self free to study the significant and himianly interesting. If we must have a villain, or antagonist, outside the r61e of the characters, let it be that odious abstraction,~Society, or Convention. It is largely so in both Tess and Jude; and that is why these novels have so very modern a tone among the works of a somewhat old-fashioned writer. If Nature is sometimes referred to in these books as a cruel step- mother, she more often appears as an enlightened champion against the obscurantism of Social Convention. In Tess it is to the convention of the "fallen woman" that Mr. Hardy opposes the now familiar figure of the really "pure" woman become the victim of a natural instinct, and then the more pitiful victim of the "fallen woman" superstition. In Jude the great antagonist is the institution of marriage, especially in its sacramental High Church aspect. Marriage appears as a mischief-maker in the cases of both Jude and Sue; and in Jude's case it was both in relation to Arabella and to Sue. It was a disastrous mistake for him to marry Arabella in deference to the social convention of legalizing their union, of making her "an honest woman." His life was ruined by the fundamental error of basing "a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a life-long comradeship tolerable." He was permanently crippled in his career as a scholar. And what was left of hope and idealism was nullified by the illegaUty and impiety of his later passion for Sue. TRUTH 237 Strange that his first aspiration — towards academical pro- ficiency — ^had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration — towards apostleship — ^had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into deviUsh domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?" As for Sue, her misery in the wedded state is equally attributed to a contravention of nature. "^It is none of the natural tragedies of love," she says, rather sententiously, "that's love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting." Throughout the book there is much irony Jn_the treat- ment of the mamagevow^, onlEepaHIBoth of the charac- ters and of the author. And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore. There is a frequent suggestion in the talk of Jude and Sue of the "advanced" modern views of marriage. But in the end Sue underwent a change of heart; and it was the sacerdotal view of marriage as an indissoluble bond which led her back to Phillotson and brought about the final sordid ending. 8 Whatever is done in deference to convention or upon religious conviction is done in accordance with human nature itself. And such motivation is well 238 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE within the circle of familiar psychology, completely shut off from the world of accident external to our wills. Much of the action in Jude again is to be referred not to conventional or religious motives taken by themselves, but to the interaction between them and instincts simply human and natural. Quite the most interesting parts of the story, and those which meet best that ideal of scenic representation which reigns in Tess and The Native, are the long series of scenes between Jude and Sue in the third and fourth books, and again in the last book, in which the ticklish uncertainty of their relation is exhibited in long-drawn- out dialogues of great intensity of feehng. Even before Jude has told Sue of his being married, these scenes have begun. Jude is in love with Sue, but conscious of being fettered by his marriage to Arabella. Sue is half in love with Jude. She loves to be loved, and is unusually sensitive to indifference or disapproval. Btit she does not want to go too far. She does not want a love affair. And besides, she is engaged to Phillotson, not to speak of the cousinship with Jude, and the long tradition of marital unhappiness in their family. And so their commerce is one continuous succession of advances and retreats on one part or the other, of Httle quarrels and ardent reconciliations. Sue takes everything in so personal a way! She is so easily hurt, and must be comforted ! She so hates to be thought conventional, and so longs for tenderness and intimacy! Jude is hurt on his side by her callous rationalism in the treatment of his religious beliefs; and then she must hasten to make up for her want of considerateness. She is always parting from him in TRUTH 239 coldness, and then writing him the wannest of notes. They are both so easily made jealous! There is so much excitement in their handclasp; so much emotion in her contralto throat-note under stress of feeling; and then: "She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast." The climax of these scenes of cat-and-mouse playing with love comes in the fourth book, after her marriage to Phillotson, when Jude and Sue meet at Marygreen for the funeral of their Aunt Drusilla. It is impossible, short of quoting the long dialogue, to give a notion of the tense dramatic play of feeling between them, as Sue suggests the hypothetical problem of a woman with a physical aversion to her husband, and then arrives at a confession of her own unhappiness with the schoolmaster — how Jude guesses she is unhappy and she denies it; how Jude's religious doctrines are at variance with his instinct in the matter; how for each concession to the tenderness between them they have to put forward the justification of cousinship, or that of innocent consolation, which provokes a corresponding reaction of jealousy; and so on and on through rising degrees of agony. Even after they have said goodnight, the cry of a wounded animal brings them together again. Jude is wakened by the squeak of a rabbit, and goes out to give it release from its pain. And so he comes to talk with Sue, who is also troubled by the rabbit, and whom he finds looking out of the open casement. There is no reference between them to what must have been for both the symbolic character of the trapped beast. But there is more talk of her unhappiness and his doctrines; there is kissing of hands; and finally. 240 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE "in a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon his hair, weeping." It was not, however, until the following day that Jude and Sue yielded at last to the passion they had so long held away from them. Upon her departure from Marygreen an incident occurred. They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and passionate moods had led to bewildered inqmries of each other on how far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and she had said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell, as he now wished to do. Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss would be nothing; all would depend upon the spirit of it. If given in the spirit of a cousin and a friend, she saw no objection; if in the spirit of a lover, she could not permit it. "Will you swear that it will not be in that spirit ? " she had said. No; he would not. And then they had turned from each other in estrangement, and gone their several ways, tUl at a dis- tance of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round simul- taneously. That look behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less maintained. They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most unpremeditatedly, kissed each other. When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.' It is a pity that Mr. Hardy should have seen fit to give thus in summary — ^in the tame pluperfect — what might have been, in full presentation in dialogue form, the most moving scene in all his work. But we ought not to complain, considering that we have, in the scenes that go before, and in those that follow, abnost the greatest treasure of dramatic dialogue which he or any other English novelist has bestowed upon us. ' Pp. 256-57. TRUTH 241 The scenes that follow, on the train and in the hotel at Aldbrickhajn, bring into prominence an element in the character of Sue which cannot be blamed upon convention, since Nature is made solely responsible for it. She was "intended by Nature to be left intact"; and however much she may crave to be loved, it is only with extreme reluctance that she can give herself even to Jude, whom she loves. It is only remotely that this affects the problem of the book; but it does contribute to the artistic interest by prolonging the scenes of tension between her and Jude. It is her reluctance to go through the ceremony of marriage, after she has been divorced from Phillotson, that brings upon her and Jude the condemnation of the world; and so we come again to the opinion of the world — to the "conventions" and "moral hobgoblins" — as the provoking cause of the action. It is this which causenEB" death" oT the children, and all that follows. The great drama of the final book lies in the renewed strain between Jude and Sue owing to her conversion back to the religious point of view. And now recurs, on the altar steps of St. Silas and at her chamber door, the harrowing alternation of sternness and tenderness in her treatment of Jude that makes the drama of this relentless history. 9 Seldom had Mr. Hardy-drawn his effects so straight from human nature. It is true that he is keenly con- scibusTiere, as in Tess and in The Native, of this and that "flaw in the terrestrial scheme." But these flaws, in so far as they affect the action of the story, are found in character itself, or in the social arrangements which 242 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE are the collective expression of the will of men. Jude and Sue are both frankly represented as hu manly weak, as more than ordinarily sensitive to pain, and il l adapted to an order that calls for a certain callousness as a condition of survival. They and the children are living in a world which doer not want them. Sue is perhaps to be regarded as a positively morbid type. But such perversity of character is a very different thing from that perversity in things themselves which breeds capricious and unaccountable accident and weaves a web of fatal events " irrespective of will, or law, or desert, or folly." And for the most part, the action is the clear and inevitable outcome ofjhe social_order ofjehich the characters are a part, now as rebels and now as more or less loyal subjects. So that everything that happens is characterisfic and full of meaning. It is true that we haive a fairly liberal allowance of major happenings to be disposed of: marriage, divorce, remarriage, and death. But there is an almost complete absence of those minor complications so much in evidence in Two on a Tower and The Mayor of Casterbridge, even in so fine a work as The Native. There are no intrusions fro m without; ,, everything comes about naturally fr.Qm the stated conditions of the problem. And none of the aiuthor's precious time must be wasted upon the setting of traps and the unraveling of mysteries. The pattern is large and bold, but simple and unforced; and each development in the plot is followed through in leisurely fashion and with satisfying amplitude of detail. Many readers will put Jude above Tess as a work of art. It is clearly not so beautiful. For one thing, the author has denied himself the glamor and richness TRUTH 243 of the Wessex background, a want but ill supplied by the insubstantial rainbow vision of Christminster. And then the characters themselves are not of the same radiant and heroic mold as Tess and Angel Clare. They are the stunted growth of modern life, with all its maladjust- ment, discontent, and restless, craving intellectuality. They are poor creatures of an urban industrial order. Beside the ordinary characters of English fiction, and in the light of Victorian poetry, they carry a strong sugges- tion of the pathological. The first instinct of a reader coming to these two novels from his Tennyson and Browning, his Thackeray and Meredith, is greatly to pre- fer the melodious pathos and undimmed ideah'sm of Tess. But later impressions do better justice to Jiide. We find ourselves more and more gripped by the plain truthfulness of the record. Upon reflection, we like the complete freedom from melodramatic features Uke the seduction of Tess and the murder of Alec. In the persons of Jude and Sue we recognize the human nature of our unheroic experience. We follow the course of their lives with a breathless suspense not so much over what shall happen to them as what the truth shall prove to be. This is the note of the time that was coming in. The reader fresh from Ibsen and Flaubert and Tolstoi may even prefer the drab and biting realism of Jude to the shimmering poetry of Tess. He will probably find it to be a more characteristic expression of the time. 10 It stands in any case as one of the three great achieve- ments of the art of Thomas Hardy. Mr. Hardy as a novelist was liable to a kind of diabolic possession by 244 ART AND CRAFT AT ONE the demon of plot/ He was forever being ridden and led astray by the very British notion that a story, to be interesting, must be complicated and full of exciting events. In several cases he found release from this obsession by yielding himself to the control of some brighter spirit, some power that made for simplicity and naturalness as well as for a more profoundly human appeal. In each case the result more than justified his tardy boldness in abandoning the antiquated machinery of his trade. The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure prove to be the most interesting as well as the best made of his novels. Art and craft were in their fashioning identical. It is not always perhaps that the relative appeal of a novelist's works is so directly in proportion to their relative excel- lence in technique. ' I have recently received comfort and support in this view of the matter by an opinion expressed by Mr. Edward Gamett in his Friday Nights. Mr. Gamett is particularly impressed in the case of The Mayor of Casterbridge with the damage done to Hardy's art by overcomplication of plot. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ' The fullest and most satisfactory bibliography of Thomas Hardy is that by A. P. Webb, published by Frank Rollings, London, 1916, and in the same year by the Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This book con- tains a full description, up to the year of publication, of "First Editions," of "Nugae and Privately Printed Books," and of "The Wessex Novels" ; together with lists of Mr. Hardy's "Contributions to Books," his "Contribu- tions to Periodicals and Newspapers," lists of "Critical Notices, Essays, and Appreciations [of Hardy's work] in Books, and in Periodicals," a Ust of plays based on his books, and an appendix describing certain autographed poems of Hardy. In the same year appeared Henry Danielson's The First Editions of the Writings of Thomas Hardy and Their Values: a Bibliographical Handbook for Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians and Others, published by Allen and Unwin. And still in this same year of 1916 there appeared, as appendix to Harold Child's Thomas Hardy ("Writers of the Day Series," London: Nisbet; Boston: Holt), "A Short Bibliography of Thomas Hardy's Principal Works," by Anmdell Esdaile, together with a brief American bibhography. Mr. Esdaile briefly describes the collected editions. These include: (i) The Wessex Novels, a series begun by Osgood, Mcllvaine and Co. in 1895, and continued successively by Harpers and Macmillan, with the volimies of poems uniform, a series which "may be considered as still in progress"; (2) new and cheaper Uniform Edition, 247 248 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 1902, etc., "the familiar ^s. 6d. edition in blue-grey covers, with the map of Wessex, " Macmillan (in America, Harpers); (3) Pocket Edition, 1906, etc., "a re-issue on small India paper, of the Uniform Edition" (Mac- millan, Harpers); (4) Wessex Edition, The Works of Thomas Hardy, 1912, etc., with a general Preface, "con- taining the author's revisions," including several vol- mnes of verse, and the Wessex Novels rearranged as: "I. Novels of Character and Environment," "II. Ro- mances and Fantasies," "III. Novels of Ingenuity," "IV. Mixed Novels." As for the "author's revisions," by the way, the reader should be warned that many such were introduced in several of the earlier editions. References in my text are to nmnber (2) above, with which, I beheve, the paging of (3) is identical. The only important volumes by Thomas Hardy, not reprints of earlier work, pubhshed since 1916 are Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, Macmillan, 191 7, and Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses, Macmillan, 1922. His Collected Poems were pubhshed in one volume by Macmillan in 1919, Selected Poems ("Golden Treasury Series," Macmillan) appeared in 1916. The epic-drama of The Dynasts (originally 1903, 1906, 1908) was pubhshed in a single volmne by Mac- millan in 1920. Certain special American editions of novels may be mentioned as follows : The Return of the Native, edited with introduction by Professor J. W. CimlifFe, Scribner, 191 7; The Mayor of Casterbridge, with introduction by Joyce Kihner, Modern Library of the World's Best Books, Boni and Liveright, 1917; Far from the Madding Crowd, with introduction by Professor William T. Brewster, Harpers, 1918. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 249 The most important studies of Hardy are the follow- ing: The Art of Thomas Hardy, by Lionel Johnson, Lane, 1894; Essai de Critique: Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste, by F. C. Hedgcock, Paris, 1911; and Thomas Hardy, a Critical Study, by Lascelles Abercrombie, Martin Seeker, 191 2. Since 1916, the following volumes have appeared: Thomas Hardy: a Study of the Wessex Novels, by H. C. DuflGin, Longmans, first edition, 1916, second edition, with an appendix on the poems and The Dynasts, 1921; Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist, by Samuel C. Chew, "Bryn Mawr Notes and Monographs, " Longmans, 1921; Thomas Hardy: the Artist, the Man and the Disciple of Destiny, by A. Stanton Whitfield, Gra,nt Richards, 1921. Other volumes since 1916 devoted in part to Hardy are: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, by L. W. Berle, Kennerley, 1917; Moderns, (pp. 103-59), by John Freeman, Crowell, 191 7; English Literature during the Last Half Century, by J. W. Cunliffe, MacmiUan, 1919. I will add for the convenience of students a Hst of the novels with dates of first publication both in book and in periodical form. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE NOVELS 1871. Desperate Remedies. Tinsley 3 vols. 1872. Under the Greenwood Tree. Tinsley 3 vols. 1872-73. A Pair of Blue Eyes. Tinsley's Magazine, September, 1872, to July, 1873. — 1873. Tinsley 3 vols. 1874. Far from the Madding Crowd. Cornhill Magazine, Jan- uary to December. — 1874. Smith, Elder 2 vols. jgyj_^5. Xhe Hand of Ethelberta. Cornhill Magazine, July, 187s, to May, 1876. — 1876. Smith, Elder 2 vols. 250 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 1878. The Return of the Native. Belgravia, January to De- cember. —1878. Smith, Elder 3 vols. 1880. The Trumpet-Major. Goo(ZPFo»-rfj, January to December. — 1880. Smith, Elder 3 vols. 1880-81. A Laodicean. Harper's Magazine, European Edition, December, 1880, to December, i88r. — 1881. Sampson, Low, Marston and Co. 3 vols. 1882. Two on a Tower. Atlantic Monthly, January to De- cember. —1882. Sampson, Low, Marston and Co. 3 vols. 1883. The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. Graphic, Sum- mer Number; Harper's Weekly, June 23 to August 4. — 1884. George Munro, i vol., paper wrapper. The curious bibliographical history of this little novel is set forth in my note in the Nation (New York) XCIV, (1912), 82-83. 1886. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Graphic, January 2 to May 15. — 1886. Smith, Elder 2 vols. 1886-87. The Woodlanders. Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1886, to April, 1887. — 1887. MacmiUan 3 vols. 1891. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Graphic, July 4 to Decem- ber 26. — 1891. Osgood, Mcllvaine 3 vols. 1892. The Well-Beloved. Under the title of "The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved," in Illustrated London News, Octo- ber 1 to December 17. — 1897. Macmillan. 1894-95. Jude the Obscure. Under the title of "The Simple- tons," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, European Edition, December, 1894. Continued under the title of "Hearts Insurgent" in the same magazine January to November, 1895. — 1896. Osgood, Mcllvaine. INDEX INDEX Abercrombie, Lascelles, Thomas Hardy, a Critical Study, v, 192 n., 249 Addison, 72, 116 Aeschylus, 85 Austen, Jane, vii, 87 Balzac, vi Bazin, Ren6, 55 Beach, Joseph Warren: The Method of Henry James, vi; article on "Bowdlerized Versions of Hardy," 9 n.; note on first edition of Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, 250 Berle, L. W., George EUot and Thomas Hardy, 249 Bourget, Paul, 154 Braeme, Charlotte M.: Dora Thome, 200; Beyond Pardon, 200; One False Step, 200; The Shadow of a Sin, 200; The Wife's Secret, 200; A Woman's Error, 200 Browne, Sir Thomas, 66 Browning, Pippa Passes, 205 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 86 Chase, Mary EUen: Doctor's thesis on versions of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbermlles, and Jude the Obscure, 9 n., 51 n.; Master's thesis on The Well-Beloved, 9 n., 128 n. Chew, Samuel C, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist, v, 249 Child, Harold, Thomas Hardy, 247 Clay, Bertha M., 200 Coleridge, "The Three Graves,'' 42 Collins, WiUde, 41; The Moon- stone, 10; The Woman in White, 10, 23 Congreve, 112 Conrad, Joseph, vi, 173; The Arrow of Gold, 175 Cunlifie, J. W., introduction to edition of The Return of the Native, 7 n., 248, 249 Danielson, Henry, The First Edi- tions of the Writings of Thomas Hardy, 247 Dickens, 9, 42, 96, 112; Bleah House, 10; David Copperfield, 86-87, 206; Dombey and Son, 206; The Old Curiosity Shop, 149, 206; Oliver Twist, 149; Our Mutual Friend, 10 Dostoyevsky, 152; The Brothers Karamazov, 146 Dryden, 83, 85 "The Duchess," 128, 200 Duffin, H. C, Thomas Hardy: u, Study of the Wessex Novels, v, 182 n., 212, 249 Dumas, ^/j, 83; Le Demimonde, 85 Dumas, pere, 84, 85, 121 Eliot, George, 34, 96, 147, 211: Adam Bede, 88, 146 Esdaile, Arundell, "A Short Bib- liography of Thomas Hardy's Principal Works," 247-48 Euripides, 83 Fiflding, 13, 86; Tom Jones, 150, 223 Flaubert, vi, 243 Frank, Waldo, vii Freeman, John, Moderns, 249 253 254 INDEX Galsworthy, John, vii, 83, 89; The Country House, 90; Frci- ternity, go; Justice, 85; The Man of Property, 90; The Pa- trician, 90 Gamett, Edward, Friday Nights, 24411. Goldsmith, 72, 115, 117 Gorky, 152 Gosse, Edmund, 10 n. Gray, 77 Griffith, D. W., 31 Hardy, Thomas: Changed Man and Other Tales, A, 125 n., 126 n., 127 n.; Collected Poems, 248; Desperate Remedies, chap, i; 1,3,4, S, 10, 14 n., isn., 36, 41, 117, 142, 199, 202; Dynasts, The, 113, 117, 248; Far from the Madding Crowd, chap, iii; 3, 6, 7, 14 n., 18, 32, 43, 80, 90, 105, 109, no, 113, 148, 161; edition with introduction by Professor Brewster, 248; Hand of Ethelberta, The, chap, v, sec. i; 3, 5, 14 n., 15 n., 202; Jude the Obscure, chap, ix; 8 n., gn., 13, 14 n., 16-17, 18, 23, 43,"5SrT5ni;7-ro9, 127, 146, 164; Laodicean, A, djap. v, sec. 3; 4, 8, II, IS, isn., 98, 233; Late Lyrics and Earlier, 248; Mayor of Casterbridge, The, chap, vi; 8 n., 9 n., 11, 14 n., iSn., 16, 34, 3S, 55, 109, no, 158, 165, 181, 202, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 242, 244 n.; with introduction by Joyce Kilmer, 248; Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, 248; Pair of Blue Eyes, A, chap, ii; 14 n., iSn., 17, 45, S6, 61, 63, 64, 98, 146, 148, 202, 227, 229-30; "Profitable Reading of Fiction, The," s 1-, 6 n.; Return of the Native, The, chap, iv; 4, 6, 7, 8n., gn., 11, isn., 18, 32, 34, 55, S8, 63, 64, 72, 73, 109, 118, 146, 158, 161, 164, 176, I7g, 181, 182, 184, 185, igi, ig2, ig4, 198, igg, 22s, 226, 228, 230, 231, 238, 241, 242, 244; edition with introduction by Professor Cun- liffe, 248; Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, The, chap, v, sec. s; 4, II, 14 n., isn., 16; Selected Poems, 248; Tess of the D'Urbermlles, chap, viii; ^, 8 n., gn., II, 14 n., 17, 18, 23, 43, 55, 60, 64, 98, log, I2S, 127, 146, 161, 218, 223, 226, 227, 230, 234, 23s, 236, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244; Trumpet-Major, The, chap, v, sec. 2, II, 15 n.; Two on a Tower, chap, v, sec. 4; 11, 14, 14 n., isn., 127, 233, 242; Under the Greenwood Tree, chap, iii, sec. 6; 14 n., 36, s6, S7, 61, 113, 161, 202; Waiting Supper, The, 14 n.; Well-Beloved, The, chap. V, sec. 6; 8 n., 9 n., 14 n., 109, 233; Woodlanders, The, chap, vii; 11, 14 n., s8, 61, 64, 98, log, no, 134, 181, igg Hawthorne, 132, 211 Hedgcock, F. C.:Essai de Critique: Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste, v, 32, 231, 24g Hergesheimer, Joseph, 89 Hope, Anthony, 8s Howells, William Dean, vi Hudson, W. H., 66 Hugo, 96 Ibsen, 83, 92, 243; The Master Builder, 8s Irving, 117 James, Henry, vi, viii, 8, 96, 118, 146, IS4, iSS, 173; The Ambas- sadors, 8g, 98; The Awkward Age, $6, 8g, g8; The Golden Bowl, g4; The Spoils of Poyn- ton, 8g Jefferies, Richard, 66 Johnson, Lionel, The Art of Thomas Hardy, v, 24g INDEX 255 Jones, Henry Arthur, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, 201 Jonson, Ben, 115 Lesage, Gil Bias, 86 Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction, v, vi Maeterlinck, 85, 93 Marivaux, 85 Marshall, Archibald, Exton Manor, 98 Meredith, George, v, viii, 8, 93; On Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, 88; Diana of the Crossways, 59; The Egoist, 56, 88-89, 93> 94) 98, 146; Evan Harrington, in; Rhoda Flentr- ing, 201; Sandra Belloni, in; "The Woods of Westermain," 227 Mill, J. S., 232 Moore, George, vi, 8, 89, 155; Esther Waters, 211, 211 n. Pinero, Arthur Wing, The Squire, 6 Racine, 83, 85 Richardson, Dorothy, vii Richardson, Samuel, 223 Schnitzler, 83; Der Einsame Weg, 85 Scott, vii, 12, 87 Shakespeare, 9, 72; As You Like It, 52; King Lear, 15, 211; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 69; A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 52; Much Ado about Nothing, 142 Shelley, "Alastor," 163 n.; "Epi- psyciddion," 131 Sheridan, 115 Sidgwick, Ethel, Hatchways, 98 Sinclair, May, 90 Smollett, Roderick Random, 86 Sophocles, 211 Steele, 112 Stevenson, 146, 173 Swinburne, v Swinnerton, Frank: Nocturne, 98; September, 98 Synge, J. M., The Playboy of the Western World, 85 Thackeray, 42, 118 Tolstoi, 243 TroUope, 42; Barchester Towers, 87, 146 Verne, Jules, Around the World in Eighty Days, 112 Walpole, Hugh, 56, 89, 96, 98, 173 Webb, A. P., Bibliography of the Works of Thomas Hardy, 247 Wharton, Edith, vii, 155, 173; The Age of Innocence, go; The House of Mirth, 90; Summer, 98 Whitfield, A. Stanton, Thomas Hardy: the Artist, the Man, and the Disciple of Destiny, 249 Wilde, Oscar, 201 Wood, Mrs. Henry, East Lynne, 201 Wordsworth, 77, 205 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. V