THOMAS HARDY'S CENTENNIAL Tribute From 2YA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 49, 31 May 1940, Page 11

THOMAS HARDY'S CENTENNIAL Tribute From 2YA

Thomas Hardy, novelist. and poet, was born on June 2, 1840, The National Broadcasting Service plans to celebrate this centennial with a short programme of talks and song, frotn 2YA on Sunday afternoon, June 2. G. Gabites will give a talk on Hardy, and settings of some of Hardy’s poems will be sung. The Society of the Men of Dorset in New Zealand will pay a tribute to Hardy in the Dorset dialect. of Thomas Hardy inquired about him in the Dorchester district where he lived, he found he was better known as an architect than as a novelist. The story has some significance. It suggests that literary fame was of less account in that ancient history-crowded countryside than in more sophisticated societies, and it points to Hardy’s roots in Dorset and his early training there. Hardy is a common Dorset name, and Thomas Hardy was born, the son of a local builder, in the village of Upper Bockhampton, in a thatched cottage almost hidden by a slope of the downs and the garden bushes. In this cottage his mother lived until her death at the age of ninety. Thomas Hardy, then, came of the very soil of Dorset. and grew up among the peasants and yeomen and townsfolk from whom he took so many of his characters. Apprenticed to an ecclesiastical architect in Dorchester, he was taken by his work ik is said that many years ago, when an admirer

into many of the neighbouring villages, and thereby widened his knowledge of rural types. Many of his admirers may not know that he won some distinction as an architect, for as a young man he was awarded two prizes. He worked at his profession in London, but he began to write, and in his early thirties he definitely abandoned architecture for literature and London for Dorset. There he lived until his death at the age of: eighty-eight.

Gallery of Rustic Types Dorset, we have ‘said, but Hardy’s country was really Wessex, the Wessex of the Saxon Heptarchy. Places as wide afield as Oxford and Salisbury, Winchester, Taunton and Exeter, are identifiable in his novels. In these stories he presents an incomparable picture-gallery of rustic and small-town types. It has been said that if there are any tales that are racy of the soil, they are Hardy’s stories of Wessex life and manners. But, so it is added: "His chiefest characteristic is perhaps his determination at all risks to present in all its width and depth the tragedy of human life, perhaps to err on the side of regarding life as too terribly and inevitably sad and sombre." The end of "Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ when Tess is hanged in Winchester, is often quoted as an example of this. "‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport wth Tess." And in " Jude the Obscure," about which there was considerable outcry, there is the murder of the children by " Father Time "-‘ Done because we are too menny "-and Jude’s invocation of Job’s curse on the day he was born. ; Humour As Well As Sadness But there is a lot of humour in Hardy, and if he is a pessimist he is a manly one. His sadness about the doubtful doom of human kind is a sadness that comes out of the good earth and is not the product of stale city cafés. Hardy is not a cynic. His fame grew slowly, and " Tess" and " Jude the Obscure" were over-strong meat for many late Victorians, but it has grown steadily, and is now higher than ever.