Ernest Brennecke, Jr.

“ Above you, then, is Mai Dun, popularly called "Maiden Castle," the prehistoric British fortress, unique in that Hardy has treated it objectively, but has never introduced it into his transfigured Wessex. It needs no transfiguration. The ceremonial of deification would be wasted on a divinity.
You are tired after you have scaled the three separate earthwork rings at the summit. An eager, biting wind lashes you persistently. You feel the icy polar breaths that once stung the hapless Tess on the uplands over there. You brace yourself against them ”

“ Like the Athenian dramatists who found in their tiny Mediterranean peninsula a cosmic mirror wherein the whole panorama of what is richest, direst, best, worst, deepest, most colorful in the minds and actions of humanity might be discovered and artistically presented, Hardy has found in the southwestern corner of his Island all the ingredients for a complete literary picture of his time—and, in many senses, of all times. ”

“ At the time of Monmouth's Rebellion, one Christopher Swetman lived there, as head of the family. A man of some spirit, he was secretly in sympathy with the cause of the Duke. The night following Monmouth's defeat, a cloaked and spurred gentleman, a mud-spattered cavalier, knocked at Christopher's door. He declined to disclose his identity, but Christopher respected his incognito and gave him shelter, even as the fleeing Henry of Richmond had been sheltered by Clement Le Hardy. But the unfortunate Duke found it impossible to resist the charms of the pretty Swetman daughters. ”

“ Very meagre information, regarding even that little, is possessed even by Hardy’s intimates. Hardy is at this moment still alive; to tell too much, even if one could, would be indelicate, impertinent. ”

“ What is remarkable is that Hardy, while making his discovery, has in his creative work achieved such an epic sweep, has so masterfully welded together observation, passion and form, that he has become perhaps the outstanding literary figure of his time. ”

“ And yet—one must remember what curious pranks, to our thinking, our ancients in their eighties can sometimes play. They live in a world apart; their standards are often more flexible, more ethically "enlightened" and "progressive" than those of the most ardent youthful anarchs and iconoclasts.
If his grandmother thus provided the raw materials for his cold X-ray studies of character under the bombardment of environment and circumstance, it was Hardy’s mother who stimulated his earliest impulses to translate them into artistic entities. ”

“ Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy appears as a dramatis persona. Sir Thomas was a Dorset man; he was a Napoleonic hero: these things in themselves would be sufficient to endear him to the Wessex poet. But above all, he was a relative, a Hardy. As such, he was rated glorification, almost deification. The death of Nelson and the attendance of Sir Thomas is in The Dynasts portrayed in a series of scenes which stand out as unforgettably thrilling, superlatively pathetic and beautiful even in a framework which is itself full of incomparable thrill, beauty and pathos. ”

“ IT is difficult to think of Thomas Hardy without thinking of a definitely circumscribed portion of the English countryside. And yet, when reading his novels, lyrics and dramas, one cannot help noting how universally they apply to all that is most intense in human life, how vividly they image the tragedy of human existence everywhere on our little grey planet. ”

“ You hurry to your room. You have ordered a fire to be lighted, and find your quarters swimming in smoke. You open the window. Both smoke and heat fly out. But that doesn't matter. You descend, dine, and join the crowd heading for the Corn Exchange. Hardy's "first real play" goes on the boards tonight. He has entrusted his Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall to the Hardy Players, humble Dorset mummers. ”

“ Hardy's father, for instance, had decidedly not fallen as low as old Durbeyfield, the town drunkard. Nor can he in any way be related to the plebeian father of Stephen Smith of A Pair of Blue Eyes, a character actually suggested to Hardy by a workman in his father's employ. Tragic feeling may run through the family, but it cannot be the instinctive fatalism of the peasant. Hardy's so-called "pessimism" is emphatically of the intellectual and heroic type, born of physical comfort and reflective thought. ”

“ But in Hardy's case such a procedure has a certain importance. He has frequently been called a "man of the people," and his sympathetic penetration into the delicious workings of the peasant's mind has often been attributed to the fact that his ancestry ramified endlessly through simple illiterate "Hodges." This is untrue. The Hardys have always been, and still are, a class apart from what W. S. Gilbert called "the common country folk" of an "insipid neighborhood." The complete genealogy of the main limbs of the family can be set down only by means of an elaborate and imposing table ”

“ Inside the old Exchange is the audience, simple country people for the most part, seated under the oak ceiling, flanked by green-painted Gothic arches—the very scene of the Casterbridge Mayor's spectacular downfall. ”

“ Even if she had been such a grim-hearted grandmother as deliberately to sow the seeds of distrust and misogynism in the trusting, ingenuous mind of a child, one may imagine, it may still seem impossible that the deeply rooted cynicism of the young writer—a cynicism which almost invariably made feminae mutahiles of his early heroines—could have begun to germinate at such a tender age. ”

“ They are, for the most part, captioned and sold as illustrations to the Hardy novels and poems. Few sets for Dorchester, but many sets for The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. The aura is not merely "literary." Not even the natives consider their own countryside as something real. Their familiar places have little to do with ponderable matter; the “real” people who now go to and fro in them are only phantoms. These places are real only in so far as they are the places where Clym Yeobright and Tess Durbeyfield rejoiced a little and suffered much. ”

“ To return to Jersey. Of the two immigrant Le Hardys, only one managed to make his mark in the world—if having one's name preserved in historical records can properly be called making one's mark. This was Clement Le Hardy. He had married a sister of one Sir William Lalague, or Lulazin, who brought him a dowry of "a corn rent of one quarter." He retained his ancestral Norman coat of arms, and founded the central line of Jersey Hardys, which still flourishes today. He was made a magistrate, a Jurat, of the island, in 1381. ”

“ Well—the critics who immediately disappear Londonwards, back to the fashionable oriental glitter of Flecker's Hassan (only the faithful Clement Shorter remains for a second performance) , will not be slow to point out, rightly, that here was given no great sweep of emotion such as a reading of The Dynasts gives, no thrill like the melodramatic thrill of The Return of the Native, or of Tess, or of Jude.
Superficial explanations of this are of course not lacking. You have learned to expect the superhuman from Hardy. ”

“ The combination of these two inherited planes, each with its own particular breadth as well as restriction, enabling the poet to view and to criticise his world objectively while experiencing it to the full subjectively, has had a mighty share in making Hardy the full-dimensioned genius he is. ”

“ Hardy thinks so. He wants to know why they don't teach the writing of verse. It's the best method of learning how to handle words and sentences, he says, even if one's final object is the writing of clear and vivid prose.
"I never wanted to write prose novels at all. I was forced to manufacture my novels; circumstances compelled me to turn them out. All the time I composed verse. I wrote verse for years, long before I thought of writing prose. Lyrical activity was essential for my existence—and The Dynasts was crying for materialization, crying to be born, for many years. ”

“ That she had chosen for her afternoon walk the road along which she had returned to Casterbridge three hours earlier in a carriage was curious—if anything should be called curious in concatenations of phenomena wherein each is known to have its accounting cause.
Darkness has fallen by the time you emerge into the cold air. ”

“ Her people were the Swetmans and the Childses, two groups which have often intermarried, and have for centuries lived only in the neighborhood of Melbury Osmond, the "King's Hintock" of Hardy's "Wessex," a picturesque old village on the plateau which spans the Frome Valley and the Vale of Blackmoor. Here the proliferation of life streams upwards from the rich soil with unquenchable vigor.
While the Hardys adhered to their ruffle-sleeved King during the Civil Wars, the Swetman and Childs families were stanch Parliamentarians and Roundheads. ”

“ The lovely dignity of the countryside leaves its photograph on the people, you know. I've become convinced that climate really makes character. I'm sure your terrible, harsh West Virginia mountain country is really responsible for the overwhelming multiplied tragedy which you call your 'poor white' population. America is a tragic country; its tragedy is reflected in the countenances and manners of even the visitors who pass through England. ”

“ The poet's father was a master-builder by trade, employing about ten men on an average, and lived in circumstances that may fairly be called prosperous. He was able, at any rate, to afford special efforts for the early education of his son. A Joseph Poorgrass knows nothing of French governesses. That, in point of culture, the builder belonged to the extremely modest class of which the band of church-musicians in Under the Greenwood Tree is representative, is an indefensible thesis. ”

“ They are anxious, terror-stricken. Knight is hanging, clinging to the sheer face of the ghastly towering Cliff Without A Name. Wind and rain lash him grimly, bent on destroying him. He can hold out but a little longer. ”

“ It can account for the ambitious writer, determined to make his mark in the London reviews, but never for the cosmic poet. It can account for many of his affections, perhaps, but not for his detached realization of all-too-human motives. The responsibility for these latter endowments rests largely with the French nobility transmitted through Hardy the master-builder. ”

“ Slightly inconsecutive is the Hardy discourse, but quietly dynamic. Sometimes the gears of memory actually slip for a moment. Minor characters in certain of the Wessex novels, for instance, have become quite submerged. ”

“ Tilley himself, still wearing Merlin's cloak, has come up the stairs, followed by nearly all the other players. The place is soon teeming with munching mummers, a jolly, hungry company. Tilley tells you of the past achievements of the Hardy Players. He is their General Manager. Every year they present dialect scenes out of the Wessex novels. ”

“ Meanwhile the Jersey family carried on the traditions of the great Clement. As adventurous islanders these Le Hardys continued to distinguish themselves, particularly in foreign military service, down to the present day. Their arms were in the last century borne by Lt. Col. Charles Francis Le Hardy of His Majesty's Indian Army. They are ”

“ The fashionable young gentleman cannot win the fashionable young lady's love. He appeals to Jan, the old rustic, for advice. Jan, in each succeeding stanza, advises his "measter" to offer higher inducements: a "fine silken gown," the wealth of London City, the keys of Canterbury, and finally the keys to his heart, whereupon he is accepted by the haughty fair. ”

“ He loves his Wessex and his verse. Or more exactly, he is frankly interested in them both.
But he is not ardent—about anything. Why should he be? The Immanent Will Itself is unmindful, unconscious. Hardy has said it himself, many times: "Nothing that men do . ”