Ernest Brennecke, Jr.

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”