CHEERFUL PESSIMIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 12

CHEERFUL PESSIMIST

THOMAS HARDY: A Critical Biography, by Evelyn Hardy; the Hogarth Press, English price 25/.-,

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

ARDY is a Late Victorian novelist and an Edwardian poet; neither period is especially popular today, but Hardy’s work in both fields remains a living and growing force in English literature. Why has he worn so much better than most of his contemporaries? He was an_ indifferent artist, in prose and verse; his explicit philosophy was gloomy enough, and he seldom missed a chance to rub it in. Yet the total effect of his work is positive rather than negative, and he has created a world of the imagination as real if not as wide as Shakespeare’s. Miss Evelyn Hardy’s modest and coscientious study gives us for the first time, at reasonable length, a convincing and balanced account of Hardy’s development as a _ writer. The close student will still have to go elsewhere for detailed analysis and appreciation: but this book is a better introduction to Hardy than Edmund Blunden’s because it is based upon more thorough and -patient research, Some new material is added, notably upon Hardy’s

early years and the tragic issue of his first marriage; and Miss Hardy does belated justice to the literary as well as the personal devotion of his second wife. Her last two chapters, on Hardy’s poetry, are concise but stimulating; and she throws fresh light on the composition of The Dynasts. The portrait presented in this life is that of a man of deep sensibility whose roots were firmly in the countryside he loved, but whose natural temperament was perhaps, predisposed to chills from the 19th Century post-Dar-winian draught. Certainly there seems something odd about the boy who stood close to the gallows when a woman was hanged, and later watched an execution through a telescope: it is hard to believe that "a full look at the worst" so early in life cannot have left an indelible impression. But. Hardy never lost that capacity for joy which he inherited from music-loving forbears, and the pervading irony of almost everything he wrote is bearable because it is matched by an equally pervading compassion. One of the most revealing glimpses we have of him comes from a late letter of his wife’s: "T.H. . . is now, this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit: always a sign of well-being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem."