THOMAS HARDY
BOOKS BY IRVING HOWE A Margin 01 Hope: An lntellectual Autobiography Celebrations and Attacks: Literary Essays Leon Trotsky World 01 Our Fathers The Critical Point: Literary Essays Decline 01 the New: Cultural and Literary Essays Steady Work: Political Essays Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study The American Communist Party: A Critical History (with Lewis Coser) Politics and the Novel William Faulkner: A Critical Study Sherwood Anderson: A Critical Biography The UAW and Walter Reuther (with B. J. Widick)
IRVINGHOWE THOMAS HARDY M MACMlLLAN
Copyright 1985, 1966 Irving Howe Copyright 1967 by Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1985 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition 1967 Reprinted with a new preface 1985 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world The author wishes to make grateful acknowledgement to the following for permission to reprint material first published by them: The Hudson Review, for "A Note on Hardy's Stories," Vol. XIX, No. 2. Summer, 1966; The Southern Review, for "The Short Poems of Thomas Hardy," Vol. 11, No. 4 (new series) Autumn, 1966; and to Fawcett Publications, Inc., for portions from the author's Introduction to The Selected Works of Thomas Hardy. Acknowledgement is also made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material: to St. Martin's Press, Inc., The Macmillan Press Ltd., for permission to quote from The Life of Thomas Hardy by Florence Emily Hardy; to Macmillan London Ltd., and the Trustees of the Hardy Estate for permission to quote from The Dynasts by Thomas Hardy and to Macmillan Publishing Company, for permission to quote from The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Howe, Irving Thomas Hardy.-(Masters of world literature series) 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928-Criticism and interpretation I. Title 11. Series 823'.8 PR4754 ISBN 978-0-333-39503-5 ISBN 978-1-349-18007-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18007-3
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Contents Prelace to the I985 Edition Prelace IX Xltl I. Background and Profile I II. Entertainments and Digressions 32 III. The World 01 Wessex 45 IV. Comic Fiction, Middle Age, Short Stories 67 V. The Struggles 01 Men 84 VI. Let The Day Perish VII. An Iliad 01 Europe I08 In VIII. The Lyric Poems I60 IX. The Last Years I87
VIII CONTENTS A Listing of the Works of Thomas Hardy Suggestions for Further Reading Index I93 I95 I97
Preface to the 1985 Edition FEW PLEASURES CAN BE KEENER for a writer than to see a longunavailable book returned to print. It gives one all sorts of happy illusions about a second life. The first edition of my book appeared sixteen years ago, and rereading it now 1 find myself somewhat bemused about the man who wrote it-someone, evidently, who is both 1 and not 1. The primary analyses and judgments in this book 1 still hold to. The affection for Hardy as novelist and poet 1 feel, if anything, still more strongly. But if 1 were to write this book now 1 would do it somewhat differently. About "critical methodology," too often a substitute for critical perception, 1 remain quite as skeptical as in 1966.1 would, however, try for a somewhat more just distribution of space and a more austere style. 1 would want to write in greater detail about Hardy's poetry, and 1 would try for a somewhat less epigrammatic or "lapidary" style, convinced as 1 am that in criticism lucidity is all. Were 1 able to confront the autllor of this book face-to-face, 1 would say in all friendliness: You have probably overestimated the critical value to be extracted from a nicely turned subordinate dause. When I wrote this book, the inftuence of the New Criticism ix
:Je PREFACE TO THE 1985 EDITION was still strong and the force of T. S. Eliot's depreciation of Hardy still feit by serious literary people. That may explain why at a few points this book has a somewhat combative edge and in one or two footnotes becomes downright pugnacious. Eliot's attack had already been parried, quite brilliantly, by Katherine Anne Porter, and Hardy's poetry had been praised by W. H. Auden in an inßuential essay. Still, one must remember how enormous-and I think, merited-was Eliot's authority in our literary life a few decades ago. For him to attack Hardy as he did was an act of some cultural importance, and anyone proposing to assess Hardy's work had to confront it-which, directly and indirectly, I tried to do. Today that would no longer be quite so necessary. The kind of criticism that faulted Hardy's novels for their structural and tonal irregularities-a criticism that in a less sophisticated version faulted Hardy for not adhering to the disciplines of the Flaubertian "art novel"-has receded in inßuence. Critics do not seem so concerned with "unity" in a work of fiction as they were during the high point of the New Criticism, and they certainly have a greater awareness of, and tolerance for, kinds of "unity" that don't necessarily manifest themselves as structural compactness and economy. The more open, mixed and experimental forms of fiction that have recently ßourished give us a better appreciation for the heterodox ways in wh ich Hardy put together his novels. We have learned to see what experienced nineteenth century readers must have grasped intuitively: that episodic fictions can be held together through a unity of voice and that novels can be marked by values at least as significant and attractive as the kind o( struetural unity so greatly prized a (ew deeades ago. As (or Hardy's poetry, that now seems more seeure in its literary position than it was two or three decades ago. Not many o( us are worried-some never were-about Hardy's alleged heresies as a lapsed Christian. We know, as both Ms. Porter and other erities be(ore her have pointed out, that in Hardy's lovin~-kindness o( voice, his compassion (or all living ereatures, he embodied the Christian virtues far better than a good many later writers eonspicuously striving (or orthodoxy. We are now also likely to have a greater responsiveness to Hardy's gnarled romanticism; to his unorthodox opinions, dra:wn (rom both a "churchy" youth and
PREFACE TO THE 1985 EDITION xi mature experiences; and to the verse techniques with which he kept experimenting. Some of his ideas may seem a little da ted, the remains of late nineteenth century skeptidsm and "scientism"; but his underlying sense of things, the profound gravity and doubts of a man unsure of his place in the world, is closer to us than the more strident assertions of many later poets. There has never been another voice in English poetry like Hardy's and there probably never will be. Hardy, I believe, is one of the few "classical" English poets who retain a strong following among nonacademic and nonprofessional readers, those who turn to poetry for pleasure and feel toward hirn a deep sense of friendship. Still another reason for the recent growth of interest in Hardy's work ought to be noticed here, and that is the rise of feminist approach es in literary criticism. The new sensibility to which these approach es have contributed teaches us that in both literature and critidsm there is often an unexamined sexual bias: sometimes asserted with a conscious will to domination, more often emerging unwittingly as part of that structure of values by which we order our lives. Whether developed with measure or excess, feminist criticism has forced us to look at our intellectual premises and moral prejudices, questioning the previously unquestioned. That such a criticism should take a keen interest in Hardy's fiction is understandable, since there is hardly another English novelist in the nineteenth century who has drawn such striking yet radically different figures as Bathsheba, Tess and Sue. My book was written before the recent upsurge of feminist opinion, but parts of it, such as the opening to Chapter VI, touch upon the kinds of problems with which feminist opinion concerns itself. In the years since this book first appeared there has been a good deal published about Hardy. Let me mention just a few of the books that see m essential for bringing up to date the"suggestions for Further Reading" on p. 195. There is, first of all, a new Complete Poems edited by James Gibson and the first volume of a Collected Poems edited by Samuel Hynes. Several volumes of Hardy's letters have also appeared. Perhaps the foremost addition to the Hardy literature i6 Michael Millgate's Thomas Hardy, a careful and thorough piece
xii PREFACE TO THE 1985 EDITION of work that may now be regarded as the definitive biography. It is one of those "old-fashioned" biographies that allow narrative to unfold at a steady, leisurely pace. A critical work I have found especially interesting is Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and English Poetry, 1972, which contains acute criticism of Hardy's poetry and argues that it is he, rather than Yeats or Eliot, who has been the central inhuence on twentieth century English poetry. Davie sees Hardy as a "liberal" poet, by which he has in mind not so much a political opinion as a style of response, a humane and tolerant way of dealing with our experience. Perhaps a bit excessive at some points, Davie's book has a virtue not always present in critical studies: it is completely interesting. A critical work I have found stimulating is Joseph Hillis Miller's Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, 1970. Among the feminist studies of Hardy, two are especially notable: Mary Jacobus, "Sue the Obscure," Essays in Criticism, #25, 1975, and Elaine Showalter, "The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge," in Dale Kramer, Critical Approaches to the Fiction 01 Thomas Hardy, 1979. Ms. Showalter's essay includes a disagreement with portions of my book, and while apprecia.ting her concern I must report that it has not shaken my belief in the 'book you are now about to read. -IRVING HOWE, 1984