The Facts of Fiction (25 page)

Within his mind Hardy was philosophic with a painful tenderness that is remote from the grey half-hatred of the pessimist. It was in the world outside that he saw those things that saddened and sickened him. If he had stayed within the four walls of his study he would have remained all his life the shy architect contentedly drawing. “So far as my experience goes,” he once wrote, “conclusions about the universe do not affect the spirits, which are a result of temperament. What does depress me is the sight of so much pain in the world, constant pain; and it did just as much when I was an orthodox churchman as now; for no future happiness can remove from the past sufferings that have been endured.”

Both
Tess
and
Jude
were written as though cruelty to others were a raging tooth set in the writer's head. They were written when despair at the world's pain had mounted within Hardy's mind to a desperate defiance; at a moment when he had the invalid's instinctive hatred of the robust.

In calling Tess “a pure woman ” Hardy displayed a rather aggressive broad-mindedness. Nowadays, when the word “pure ” is almost an archaism, we should suffer no special incredulity in hearing Hardy call her such a thing. But those who objected at the time really had a quite good case. Her mind may have been white as freshly driven snow—such was obviously Hardy's view—but it was one of the innocent minds that led its owner on a devil's dance through life. A bastard and a murder are awkward entries to appear on the credit side of purity. And it did not help either Hardy or Tess that Hardy
should have adopted the attitude: “Don't blame me, or Tess. If you must blame anyone, for this ghastly mess, blame God. He arranged it—I didn't.” That sentence at the end of
Tess
in which “the President of the Immortals ” “ended his sport with Tess,” put Hardy definitely on the other side of conventional morality. And his ingenuous defence of the sentence by citing Shakespeare's words in Gloster's mouth in
Lear,
” As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,” does suggest that perhaps Hardy was a little deaf in the orthodox ear, that he did not realise that it was the startling and stimulating blasphemy of the sentiments that had attracted orthodox Christians so irresistibly.

Actually the blame on God in
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
was more than a little unfair. The truth is that Hardy had got into the habit of hurting Tess, and apparently could not get out of it. It was Hardy, who wanted to sear our hearts by showing us a woman hanged, who made Tess stick the knife into D'Urberville. God would probably have been content with something less sensational than that ironic bright blob of blood that leaked through the floor, and printed itself like a gigantic ace of hearts on the landlady's ceiling beneath.

The drip, drip, drip which the landlady heard when she applied her ear to the keyhole of the room in which Tess had been so demonstrably asserting her purity is an historic sound, like the report with which Ibsen's Nora slammed the front-door on the home behind her, and made the whole world her prison.

Both were a part of the work of the New Spirit in Woman; the work of wives who had thrown-over, or overthrown, their husbands. Tess paid the penalty on the gallows for being a New Woman without the New Education. She was, indeed, about midway between the New
Woman and the Noble Savage. It was Jude's cousin Sue, the girl who could say “Don't you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don't you think it is destructive to the profession whose essence is its gratuitousness,” who was the complete New Woman with the New Education, even though she had been unable to throw off all the instinct of the older Eve.

Strangely enough, to mention the legal obligation in marriage is one of the easiest ways of annoying the very people who see salvation for the world through the sacrament of marriage and the office of the law. And annoy them Hardy did. His obstinate way of showing marriage both in
Tess
and
Jude
as hallowed, but unholy, and illicit love as holy but unhallowed, naturally enraged the orthodox.

A Scottish reviewer wrote that “Swinburne planteth, Hardy watereth and Satan giveth increase,” a reader in the Antipodes posted Hardy a packet purporting to contain the ashes of
Jude the Obscure,
and an American reviewer intending to admonish Hardy, unintentionally insulted three other writers of genius:

When I finished the story I opened the windows and let in the fresh air, and I turned to my bookshelves and said: “Thank God for Kipling and Stevenson, Barrie and Mrs. Humphry Ward.”

It was in a sudden anger against criticism of that sort that Hardy exclaimed:

If this sort of thing continues no more novel writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.

And in his Diary Hardy describes how he and Swinburne condoled with each other on having been the two most abused of living writers, Swinburne for
Poems and Ballads
and Hardy for
Jude the Obscure.

The last years of the last century will be regarded by future historians as one of the Ages of Abuse. Huge issues have always meant high voices; and when Hardy raised great questions, voices on both sides were raised as well. By the time he had published
Jude,
Hardy had managed to direct half the stream of abusive public criticism from Ibsen to himself. Without searching for resemblances like a forewarned passport officer, and certainly without indulging in the popular and pernicious habit of rechristening, by giving Hardy some such title as the Dorchester Ibsen, it remains for us to comment on some notable and obvious common aims and methods and qualities and deficiencies common to Hardy and Ibsen.

Both preached a new morality; a morality founded not only on having seen the orthodox God, but on having seen through him. Both wrapped up their gospel of “facing life unflinchingly ” in a covering about as comfortable to the average touch as a porcupine's. Both regarded the denial of love as the ultimate crime of Life. Both saw Society built on Deceit as Venice is built on piles, ready to collapse at a shake. Both saw Religion as a deceit; a promise of dividends without reasonable security. And both saw that man willingly and wilfully deceives himself long after the first innocent deceit of ignorance is past. Both, therefore, set upon the demolition of the soul of society with the energy of housebreakers, just as Lassalle and Karl Marx had already started to demolish its body. In their method of work Hardy and Ibsen were both bold with the broad bravery of the man
to whom boldness is not itself an end, but a means of arriving. Both achieved a mastery of form that only the remarkable nature of the material itself concealed. And both—but here it is necessary to invoke the aid of Genius as an explanation—managed to invest mean individual occurrences with a noble universal significance; to promote the small hardships of men into the whole tragedy of Man. Thus when Tess stabbed D'Urberville it was not merely a sordid George Gissing kind of lodging-house affair in which the first-floor front happens to be a bad lot. It was a huge event in which all Womankind rose against its male oppressor, and did mad deeds for love. It was not
News of the World
but news of the World. Jude is not the prematurely wrinkled President of the Union of a correspondence college, but is the divine spirit weighed down by the whole human weight of the flesh. Like Ibsen's Nora and Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, Jude and Tess are creatures not so slavish as to be patently symbolic, yet who cast a shadow of symbolic size.

Hardy was a “regional ” novelist who kept to his boundaries with the scrupulousness of an ordnance survey map. Yet confining the implications of Hardy's novels to Wessex, by saying that at this point and at that the map ends, would be as futile as the erection of the wall with which the Wise Men sought to imprison the cuckoo and preserve eternal Spring. Egdon Heath somehow spreads out until it is hard to say where the Great World begins and where the Heath stops; the woods of
The Woodlanders
stretch across half England, appearing in odd, idyllic hollows in strange places many miles from Wessex; and though Hardy's characters talk with a local burr they speak with the large voice of mankind.

The scenery in Hardy's novels is one of the strangest things in fiction; it is well painted but not apparently
well beloved. Often it seems as though Hardy were unhappy in it; certainly less happy than Meredith among the shrubs of Surrey. There is something in Hardy of the man who is irresistibly attracted yet more than a little miserable in his attraction; like a man who goes to the Lakes each year grumbling about the rain.

So much for the qualities in common between Ibsen and Hardy. If there are defects in Ibsen and Hardy to be looked for, they will be found I think in the tags of contemporary philosophy and thought they carry with them; such as a rather pathetic confidence in heredity. Indeed there would at least be a precedent for an idiotic line of inquiry into Darwin's authorship of Hardy.

Again in a labouring of points such as “the coming universal wish not to live,” as the “outcome of new views of life,” which is how the doctor explained the baby butchery in which Jude's son indulged when he murdered his brother and sister, the philosophy bears its date brightly upon it. Little Jude is a victim of just that same death which carried off little Bertha in the attic menagerie where the wild duck lodged: both were helpless children with a load of more than adult cares. And both Ibsen and Hardy were writers of an immortal genius that was the immediate and inevitable product of nineteenth century Protestantism. They were children who happened to dislike their parent, but who nevertheless bore a strong family resemblance to him. They were black sheep in a white flock; but undeniably and recognisably sheep all the same.

Hardy remained artistically agnostic to the end. He died to a verse from ‘ Omar Khayyam read to him before an open window listening to bells his ears were too drowsed to catch:

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And ev'n in Paradise devise the Snake;

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Men

Is blackened—Man's forgiveness give—and take!

Thus did Thomas Hardy salute the President of the Immortals—impolitely.

Within the last generation the novel has tended to change from being a record of events into being a record of the causes of events. The name psychological has been applied to it, and it has become conscious, even self-conscious, of its new duties and responsibilities. For the new duties of the novel have demanded a new form, and when novelists spend their time talking about a New Form, as Conrad did, it is a miracle when they produce anything finer than a freak.

Certainly the old novel was about as well adapted to its new duties as a cart-horse for steeplechasing, and the work of a notably important section of writers during these years was that of breeding a new and volatile creature which could clear the ditches and hedges that divide the physical world from the mental.

No author better illustrates what the psychological novelists were trying to do than Henry James. Joseph Conrad might seem an equally good example. But in his case the mind of the critic cannot help straying into wondering how it was that Joseph Conrad Kurzeniowski, the Pole, wrote such nearly perfect French novels in English. And it is Henry James, the naturalised American who ends by becoming more nearly the typical new English novelist.

Henry James, at first, inevitably puts one in mind of those parties of American tourists, with pale, flat, childlike faces, who stand in groups about the Temple during the summer months pondering profoundly on Art, Architecture and Antiquity. But he is like the one member of
the party who not only knows where Elia was born, but even knows Elia, having read him in some far Western university. And possibly—quite probably, in fact—has published an immense volume of detailed and minute Elian criticism.

Henry James came to Europe from the wrong side of the Atlantic, and spent thirty-seven close, painful years in showing those born on the right side how crude, barbaric and colonial they were. He was driven out of the United States, as remorselessly as if he had been deported, by the sheer material pressure of ambitious, immature life. And he was as miserable in consequence as a gigolo in a farmyard. His mind moved always as though it were in the thinnest of dancing-shoes. It drew back appalled when it found that a single step would carry it clean off the narrow pavement of culture. There was something rather ridiculous in his having been born in an unfinished country. And he realised it. It was as artistically absurd as the thought of Fenimore Cooper in a
salon.

Europe glittered on the horizon of his imagination, stately with age, strangely alluring with the euphonious names of the south, and with plenty of pavement everywhere. Henry James visited it with that sleep-defying thoroughness of intention that is the unconcealed secret of his work. In paradoxical inversion of the natural law, Henry James came to Europe as the emigrant from America because Europe seemed the more promising land. And in becoming the perfect European he showed himself the born American; the man who is at home anywhere outside his own house, the true pioneering Colonial.

That the United States should have produced so physically useless a creature as Henry James is due to the fact that strange lands have always meant strange religions,
and that strange religions have always occupied men's minds to exclusion. Henry James the elder was a Swedenborgian whose mind walked naturally with ease amid the abstract and mysterious. His son, William James, was the founder of the philosophy of Pragmatism, that theory of life which in its combination of psychological and physical elements satisfies no one completely, and reminds the European mind of philosophy at play.

It has often been remarked that William and Henry seemed to share a common genius for the subtle and the psychological; that they wrote their books—William his
Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking,
Henry his
Wings of the Dove
—as two brothers who do their school homework together, without any clean dividing line between the results.