Cassandra in Wessex

HARDY THE NOVELIST--Lord David Cecil--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

"Have you ever noticed, when looking at a photographic group taken 20 years ago," asks Lord David Cecil, "that it is impossible to judge which women are well dressed, for all the clothes look equally grotesque; whereas in a group taken 40 years ago some were clearly charming? The same phenomenon is true of literature. . . . A certain time must elapse before we can easily separate what is permanent in an artist's work from what is temporary."

Lord David feels that for Thomas Hardy this time has now safely elapsed--"the world he lived in is as much a part of vanished history as the world of Queen Elizabeth." Hardy the Novelist is the first important study in its field since Edmund Blunden's Thomas Hardy. Composed of a series of lectures delivered at Oxford (Lord David, 44, youngest son of the Marquess of Salisbury, is a Fellow of New College), it lacks the polished style and brilliance that made Author Cecil's The Young Melbourne (TIME, Aug. 28, 1939) one of the finest biographies of the past decade.

Author Cecil considers Hardy "the last English writer to be built on the grand Shakespearean scale." Readers, argues Cecil, may be overcritical of Hardy's often cumbersome, melodramatic writing if they fail to grasp that his work was modeled on the Elizabethan drama--on the wild and stormy tragedy of King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi rather than on he carefully constructed novel form of a Tolstoy or a Jane Austen. They may also become impatient with his pessimism if they do not realize that, unlike his great Elizabethan predecessors, Hardy was a reluctant atheist.

Hardy was still a boy, Author Cecil Doints out, when he became obsessed by the monotonous, changeless elements of village tragedy--"the drama of broken love and wronged girls, the feuds and the hangings . . . the witchcraft and the wax images." The laborers of "Wessex" (Dorsetshire) lived in clay cottages and raised families on seven shillings (less than $2) week. At 15, Hardy was already so appalled by the menaces of adult life that he longed to remain a boy forever. By the time he was 18 he had seen a man and a woman publicly hanged. Soon after, when he first set pen to paper, his lifelong theme was already in evidence--"mankind's predicament in the universe."

A Place Too Smiling. The struggling peasants of Hardy's youth had at least the support and consolation of the village church. But as the 19th Century unfolded its industrial and scientific secrets, Hardy became convinced that the Christian God would slowly recede into the limbo of forgotten mythologies. As an atheist, he accepted such a development as inevitable; as an artist and a tenderhearted human being, he was horrified.

Soon, he believed, a new type of man would dwell in Wessex--a man so naturally wounded and disillusioned that from the day of his birth his face would reflect not the zest for life of previous centuries, but only a morose determination somehow to survive. Beauty would become an unbearable irony. "Men," said Hardy shrewdly, "have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged."

The new man's esthetic sense would be stirred only by the impressive but melancholy sight of bleak moorlands, seascapes and gaunt mountains. He would take for granted that the universe was "a huge, impersonal mechanism . . . utterly indifferent to the feelings of mortals."

From this gloomy pedestal, Hardy surveyed the world. Like the nostalgic chronicler of a dying era, he lyrically portrayed its doomed beauties, its bucolic humor. But, like a prophet of catastrophe, he decorated it mostly with symbols of mortal helplessness and black irony. He seemed, says Author Cecil, to take "a sinister pleasure in presenting Destiny as a sort of superhuman perpetrator of jokes in poor taste."

Love, Beautiful & Baleful. Love, for Hardy, was the most impressive aspect of human struggle ("all Hardy's novels are love stories"). It was natural for Hardy to understand that in the black world of his conception, man's desire for happiness should express itself principally in pursuit of love. But "beautiful and baleful" love, Hardy felt, was in reality ruthless fate's chief agent. Other ironies of mechanical destiny--freaks of bad weather, coincidences, misunderstandings--led men into the toils of everyday unhappiness. But love was the "blind, irresistible power" that led them to murder, suicide and the gallows.

It was Hardy's own grim fate, concludes Author Cecil, that he felt "compelled to accept a philosophy of the universe so repugnant to the deepest instincts of his heart. . . . The Christian virtues--fidelity, compassion, humility--were the most beautiful to him. . . . [His] very pessimism is of a kind only possible to one indissolubly wedded to Christian standards. . . ." But Hardy's view of death was as comfortless and unyielding as his view of love. When the flag goes up on the prison tower to announce the hanging of unhappy Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy simply says: "Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals . . . had ended his sport with Tess."

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