February 12, 2002

The works of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) can best be understood as an indivisible expression of the poet-novelist. Just as his lyrical poetry reverberates with the rhythms of country dances, rural tunes and folk songs, so are his novels based on ballads of love, passion and betrayal. The setting and substance of his novels and poems is traditional Dorsetshire but his frame of mind and his outlook on life exhibit an essentially modern kind of sensibility. Emotionally he was steeped in tradition but intellectually he was thoroughly modern. This tension gives his poems and novels a haunting depth and power.

Hardy was profoundly disturbed by the disruptive social changes brought about by the industrial revolution that dominated the nineteenth century. He was not so much concerned about the blackening of English countryside by “dark, satanic mills” as William Blake was. What troubled him was the breakdown of rural life, with its human and spiritual values, its constant touch with the rhythms of nature, and its relationships of trust and integrity. He reacted to the contemporary social upheaval with mixed feelings of anger, bitterness and nostalgia.

Intellectually Hardy was an advanced man of his time. He was fully conscious of the currents and crosscurrents of nineteenth century thought and philosophy. It was a time when the impact of science was corroding the traditional view of man, morality and universe held by Europeans for centuries.

The theories of Charles Darwin and James Frazer undercut the fundamental assumptions of Christian theology. The theory of evolution traced the ancestry of man to reptiles — a bizarre contrast to the inflated view of man widely held since the Renaissance. The universe, believed to embody a divine purpose, was found to be controlled by impersonal forces. Morality, held to be universally true, was dubbed as relative. Nineteenth century man lived in a vacuum of values. The scepticism and uncertainty created by scientific researches underlies much of the melancholy meditation characteristic of Hardy.

Hardy was acutely conscious of the transience and triviality of human life relative to the vast expanse of the physical universe. Underlying his poems is a deep sense of tragedy that is inherent to man. “HAP”, a very moving poem, shows the anguish of a single person whose hope is frustrated and whose joy lies in dust. Human destiny lies in the hands of a blind power which cannot distinguish between joy and pain, hope and fear:

These purblind doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Hardy poses the same question in his poem, “Nature questioning”:

Has some vast imbecility

Mighty to build and blend

But impotent to tend

Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardy?

Or come we of an automaton

Unconscious of our pains?

The dynasts, his poetic drama on Napoleonic wars, is full of what Hardy called obstinate questionings in the exploration of reality. Destiny is compared to a drowsed knitter whose fingers play in skilled unmindfullness:

It works unconsciously, as heretofore.

Eternal artistries in circumstance.

His pessimism is not crabbed. There does appear a ray of hope in his dark, bleak world. Man might at some stage free himself from the domination of destiny:

... a stirring fills the air

Like to sounds of joyance there.

That the rages of the ages

Shall be cancelled...

The dynasts ends on a note of guarded hope. Hardy has rightly been called an ameliorist.

In his early novels, Hardy depicts the disappearance of the rural way of life, its joys and sorrows, its charms and humours. These are beautiful tales of love, sorrow and indulgence. The characters move on the rural landscape, unaware of the catastrophe that lies ahead. The rural way of life is still intact, untouched by the intrusion of social forces unleashed by industrialization. From The return of the native onwards, Hardy brings out the tragedy involved in disruptive social change.

The philosophical note gets deeper as Hardy is moved by the sight of vanishing rural society to the contemplation of human destiny itself. He shows human happiness and fulfilment thwarted by stupidity and selfishness, conventionality and ignorance. He does not, however, preclude the possibility of human amelioration but is agonizingly aware of the forces, within man and outside, that militate against it. Hardy shows his characters struggling against the unchanging background of nature which is cynically indifferent to human concerns.

The return of the native is a tragic love story extremely simple in plot. It forms the key to his mind and art. Clym Yeobright who has been a diamond merchant in Paris comes back home to serve his fellow men as a teacher and preacher. Clym is an idealist conscious of the ache of modernism. He marries Eustacia, who has been magnified into a splendid romantic figure but is not a fit wife for the idealistic Clym. She marries Clym in the hope of making him return to Paris. When his eyesight fails as a result of his studies and he takes to hair-cutting, she deserts him and resumes her affair with Wildeve.

Egdon Heath, which symbolizes the indifferent world of nature and the long sweep of time, sets the tone of this story. This is the tragedy of trapped passions. The ephemeral nature of man is brought out with reference to the brooding permanence of the heath. “The real stuff of tragedy,” observes D.H. Lawrence, “is the heath — the unfathomed nature which subsumes human morality.”

In The return of the native the dichotomy between sentient man and insentient nature is acute. In The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the obscure the characters take nature into themselves. This gives depth to the tragic vision that Hardy unfolds in these novels. In The Mayor of Casterbridge the story of Michael Henchard is presented as a symbolic statement of the human condition. Nature, civilization and human character interact. Henchard is a powerful hero swept by emotions and instincts but lacking in objective understanding of the world.

Impatient with domestic restraints, he sells his wife. Having exchanged his humanity for worldly power and prestige, he comes through suffering to a realization of the implications of his act. Forsaken by Farfrae, deprived of the love of Lucetta, disgraced by the disclosures of the furmity woman, ruined in the trade war with his Scottish antagonist, rejected by his daughter and reduced to the starkest of deaths, Henchard rediscovers like Oedipus and Lear the actuality of moral power he had so recklessly flouted. The dignity with which he faces his self-destruction lends him tragic stature. Jude the obscure is an extraordinary book. Jude the country boy with academic ambition escapes from his native village to Christminster but he never gets entry into the university and remains torn between passion and intellect until his death. He marries a sensual girl. Arabella who corresponds to his own sensuality. The account of a starry-eyed idealist distracted by his own physical nature is one of the most powerful things in Hardy. Jude meets at Oxford his emancipated intellectual cousin Sue Bridehead.

Hardy shows psychological insight in probing the most puzzling paradoxes of love, sex and character as he portrays their enigmatic relationship, Sue Bridehead is a curiously frigid person. Jude, torn between his own sensual nature and intellectual aspiration, is trapped between Arabella and Sue neither of whom is capable of satisfying him fully. The tragedy of Jude is not of missed chances but of missed fulfilment, the tragedy of thwarted aspiration.

Hardy’s early books portray with relish and gusto various aspects of rural society. Tess of Durberville and The Mayor of Casterbridge highlight the tragic aspects of the dissolution of a way of life Hardy cherished so deeply. In Jude the obscure the rural protagonist is uprooted from his context and moves into a milieu of intellect, urbanity and introspection. His novels show the various stages of the social revolution that dominated the nineteenth century.

Hardy was a great novelist in many ways. His novels taken as a single document form a remarkable statement on the contemporary social scene. But he does not restrict himself to that and is moved to brood over human destiny itself. He is the only English novelist who vies with Sophocles and Shakespeare in the intensity of his tragic vision. His characters, set against the unchanging background of nature and infinite stretches of time, assume the vagueness and largeness of myth.

Hardy gave a new dimension to the realism of the Victorian novel. In Hardy the development of the novel is towards an inward analysis of a situation and a poetic rendering of experience. In that he represents the continuity of the English novel from the Victorian to the modern tradition and points to the works of novelists like D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.

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