THOMAS HARDY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 351, 11 May 1928, Page 14

THOMAS HARDY

Promethean Challenge

This is how John Cowper Powys, English novelist, literary critic, and lecturer, concludes an article on Thomas Hardy in an American magazine:—

“As one compares the piety of earlier Victorian writers with Hardy's Promethean challenge to the opposeless will, the change of tone serves us as a memorable striking of the dark clock of Time. If the sceptical doubts of the among us fall upon sadder, grayer, more tolerant ears, as they reach us to-day, than they carried when the ‘lllustrated London News’ could not bring itself to publish ‘Tess* in its entirety, the difference is due no less to him than to the great scientific writers. Like some lonely woodpecker’s beak repeating its blows upon the bark of a sapless tree his unconquerable hostility to the illiberal beats upon the most indurated and knotted heads. “The Wessex novels form a kind of classic viaduct from the ponderous forums of the Victorian age to the hurly-burly of the modern marketplace. But the final overtone of Hardy’s attitude to life hovers above all these changing fashions. The soil to which he remained faithful all his days, and in w'hich his heart has now been laid, rewarded him for his stubborn fidelity. By a passionate love of the Particular he attained the Universal. By an intense scrutiny of the hedgehog upon his lawn he approached the secrets of the Zodiac!”