A New Approach to Hardy
WOLFE, ANN F.
A New Approach to Hardy Thomas Hardy. By Evelyn Hardy. St. Martin's. 342 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" IT WAS G. K. Chesterton,...
...Her portrait of that mind has taken on new lineaments, less from the fresh material, valuable as it is, than from her authoritative scholarship and her perceptive reading of the writer's work...
...His first wife supplied that need with a subtlety that Miss Hardy is too gallant to elaborate...
...Miss Hardy brings out his joy in music, his countryman's ear for the nuances of sound, his Franciscan sympathy with the small wild creatures of wood and meadow...
...Even courageous Leslie Stephen, who had published the unorthodox storyteller's work in the Cornhill Magazine, feared to shock Victorian sensibilities with that shadowy prose poem, The Return of the Native...
...He warmed to the Dutch and Flemish painters, whose homely rural backgrounds echoed his own...
...Certainly the tormented marriages in Hardy's stories were considerably influenced by disillusionment with his own...
...The pioneering Hardy, who did not think of himself primarily as a novelist, was the first of our modern poets...
...Yet, Evelyn Hardy, a compatriot but no relation, has come up with a lively and original approach to the paradoxical mind of the Dorset pagan...
...Here she has brought to bear the insights that sharpened her studies of Donne and Swift...
...Not that Hardy's life was unrelieved gloom and inner conflict...
...But she takes into account a psychological factor that even his understanding second wife seems to have overlooked: Hardy's masochism, his "need to suffer and to enjoy suffering...
...This stricture does not appear in the latest biography of the creator of Tess and Jude, but it keynotes the outrage of his contemporaries...
...So many good books have been written on Hardy that it would seem supererogation for a critic to attempt another interpretation of his Aeschylean genius...
...And, in the course of her re-examinations, she has turned up an unexpected spiritual kinship between Donne and Hardy...
...His sense of delight was vivid...
...It is in her treatment of this Napoleonic epic drama that Miss Hardy makes possibly her most distinctive contribution to Hardyana...
...A reader mailed Hardy the ashes of a copy of Jude the Obscure, burned out of Grundian wrath or moral indignation...
...In the fertile seedbed of his mind, "The Dynasts" lay germinating for half a century...
...Let me enjoy the earth" is his opening of a poem...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" IT WAS G. K. Chesterton, I believe, who characterized Thomas Hardy's novels as "the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot...
...delight in the taste of sweet cider, in the bells of the carter's horse and the figures of a rustic dance...
...She here rounds out a complex portrait that raises her to the top rank of Hardy scholars...
...In his days as apprentice architect, he played pranks and had fun singing and dancing...
...His poetry may indeed outlive his fiction...
...Miss Hardy traces the development of her namesake's "twilight view of life," agreeing with earlier critics that the so-called pessimism was partly rooted in his love of Greek drama, his enthusiasm for John Stuart Mill and Swinburne, and his loss of formal faith...
...Spiritually he was a solitary, but he took pleasure in friendships and the society of his fellow man...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 43
