Hardy denied that he was a pessimist, calling himself a 'meliorist'?that is, one who believes that the world can be made better by human effort. But there is little sign of meliorism in either his most important novels or his lyric poetry. A number of his poems, such as the one he wrote about the Titanic disaster, 'The Convergence of the Twain,' illustrate the perversity of fate, the disastrous or ironic coincidence. Other poems go beyond this mood to present with quiet gravity and a carefully controlled elegiac feeling some aspect of human sorrow or loss or frustration or regret,
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185 2 / THOMAS HARDY
always grounded in a particular, fully realized situation. 'Hap' shows Hardy in the characteristic mood of complaining about the irony of human destiny in a universe ruled by chance, but a poem such as 'The Walk' (one of a group of poems written after the death of his first wife in 1912) gives, with remarkable power, concrete embodiment to a sense of loss.
Hardy's poetry, like his prose, often has a self-taught air about it; both can seem, on first reading, roughly hewn. He said he wanted to avoid 'the jewelled line,' and like many modern and contemporary poets, he sought instead what he called 'dissonances, and other irregularities' in his art, because these convey more authenticity and spontaneity. 'Art is a disproportioning .. . of realities,' he declared. Though he adheres to the metered line, Hardy roughens prosody and contorts syntax, and he creates irregular and complex stanza forms. His diction includes archaisms and deliberately awkward coinages (e.g., 'Powerfuller' and 'unblooms' in 'Hap'). He distorts many conventions of traditional genres such as the sonnet, the love poem, the war poem, and the elegy. Though rooted in the Victorian period, Hardy thus looks ahead to the dislocations of poetic form carried out by subsequent poets of the twentieth century.
The sadness in Hardy?his inability to believe in the government of the world by a benevolent God, his sense of the waste and frustration involved in human life, his insistent irony when faced with moral or metaphysical questions?is part of the late- Victorian mood, found also, say, in A. E. Housman's poetry and, earlier, in Edward FitzGerald's Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, published when Hardy was nineteen. What has been termed 'the disappearance of God' affected him more deeply than it did many of his contemporaries, because until he was twenty-five he seriously considered becoming an Anglican priest. Yet his characteristic themes and attitudes cannot be related simply to the reaction to new scientific and philosophical ideas (Darwin's theory of evolution, for example) that we see in many forms in late-nineteenth-century literature. The favorite poetic mood of both Tennyson and Arnold was also an elegiac one (e.g., in Tennyson's 'Break, Break, Break' and Arnold's 'Dover Beach'), but the mood of Hardy's poetry differs from Victorian sorrow; it is sterner, more skeptical, as though braced by a long look at the worst. It is this sternness, this ruggedness of his poetry, together with its verbal and emotional integrity, its formal variety and tonal complexity, its quietly searching individual accent, that helped bring about the steady rise in Hardy's reputation as a poet. Ezra Pound remarked in a 1934 letter: 'Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died.' W. H. Auden begins an essay with this testament to the effect of Hardy's verse: 'I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him.' And Hardy appears as the major figure?with more poems than either Yeats or Eliot?in Philip Larkin's influential Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973).
On the Western Circuit1
I
The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet feminine lives hereunder depicted?no great man, in any sense, by the way?first had knowledge of them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been standing in the Close,2 vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a
1. When first published in magazine form in (1894), he restored it to its original form. The England and America in 1891, 'On the Western Western Circuit was the subdivision of England's
Circuit' was altered to minimize its illicit sexuality. High Court of Justice with jurisdiction over the
References to Anna's seduction and pregnancy southwestern counties. In Hardy's literary land-
were eliminated, and Mrs. Harnham was made a scape Melchester is Salisbury, which has a partic
widow rather than a wife. When Hardy published ularly beautiful cathedral.
the story in his collection Life's Little Ironies 2. Closed yard surrounding a church.
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ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1853
glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediaeval architecture in England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward' in front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him.
He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of steam barrel- organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells, the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men. A lurid light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and into the square.
He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings, ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps affixed to booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the spacious market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human figures, more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up, down, and around, like gnats against a sunset.
Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws, flying- leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts4 which occupied the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of steam-organs came.
Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than architecture in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe, and putting his hat on one side and one hand in his pocket, to throw himself into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest and most patronized of the steam circuses, as the roundabouts were called by their owners. This was one of brilliant finish, and it was now in full revolution. The musical instrument around which and to whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet- mouths of brass upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes.
