Poet in Self Defense

THOMAS HARDY (286 pp.)--Edmund Blunden--Macmillan ($3).

HARDY AND THE LADY FROM MADISON SQUARE (264 pp.)--Carl J. Weber--Colby ($5).

In the 18903 Thomas Hardy was at the summit of his novelist's career. Such dark-grained, tragic stories as The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles had won him a place second only to George Meredith among the late Victorians. They had also won him a handsome income; Hardy, the son of a poor stonemason, earned enough to build a comfortable home in his native Dorset, where he suffered the tongue of his shrewish wife, walked the countryside, and gloomed over the fate of man in an inhospitable universe.

But with each of his gnarled books, public and critical uneasiness grew. Why did he have to be so depressing, so frank about sex? Answered Hardy: "The crash of broken commandments is as necessary ... to the catastrophe of tragedy as the noise of drums and cymbals to a triumphal march." Not all his readers saw it so; when Tess came out as a serial, many of them wrote Hardy begging for a happy ending. He could not satisfy them, for life, as he felt it, has no happy endings.

When Jude the Obscure appeared, the Victorian public howled with stuck prudishness. "Jude the Obscene," cried one reviewer. The Bishop of Wakefield publicly burned his copy--only, snapped Hardy, because he could not burn the author. But Hardy was hurt more than he admitted. Even before Jude, he had written in his journal: "If this sort of thing continues, no more novel-writing for me."

Lady from New York. After Jude, he wrote no more novels. In his late 505 Hardy began an entirely new career. As a young man, he had written poetry, and now he went back to it in earnest. In po-:try, he reasoned, he could say almost anything without attracting much public attention, and his novels would bring in money enough to live on.

Hardy's reputation as a novelist has never shrunk: he has been spared the indignity of being forgotten and "revived." And in recent years there has been a steady growth of interest in his poems. In an affectionate biography written ten years ago and now republished, Edmund Blunden, himself a minor Georgian poet, rates Poet Hardy almost as high as Novelist Hardy. With Blunden's book comes another book, a work of scholarly piety by Colby Professor Carl Weber, possib'y today's foremost Hardy scholar. In Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square, Weber unearths the story of Rebekah Owen, a New York woman who was smitten by Hardy's books, visited England, where she was apparently smitten by Hardy himself. After some mild tea-drinking and book-autographing plus years of letter-writing, she was finally brushed off by the aging and impatient author. Though the book is for dyed-in-the-wool Hardy fans only, it is another example of the interest the man continues to hold while the George Merediths fade away.

Tackling the Stony Hill. Hardy's masterpiece in verse is The Dynasts, a vast dramatic epic of the Napoleonic wars and a development of his notion that the

Prime Mover of the universe is a force indifferent to man. Despite its amateur philosophizing, The Dynasts is powerful poetic drama full of grandeur and passion, but Hardy's short dramatic pieces are easier to enjoy.

On the face of it, Hardy was poorly endowed for poetry. He has none of Tennyson's elegance, little of Browning's knack for the whiplash phrase. His music creaks, his language limps. One critic compared his rhythms to the rattling of a milk cart, and Author Blunden, with more justice, writes that Hardy the poet "is ever on the road . . . tackling the stony hill rises."

What overcame Hardy's faults was his deep knowledge of human weakness, his brooding kinship with suffering. Some of his poems are short stories in rhyme, gravely undulating narratives about the dangers of irresponsible passion and the ironies that level men to despair. A good many turn on the theme of unhappy marriage, a subject on which he could speak with authority.

Hoping in the Gloom. Hardy's poems are limited in emotion; says Critic Blunden: his muse "lives too much in the frown." But the range of Hardy's subject matter is as wide as the range of his sympathies. In Reminiscences of a Dancing Man, a gay country dance turns into the dance of death; in The Respectable Burgher, an English gentleman who has been reading "higher criticism" of the Bible decides to turn to "that moderate man Voltaire"; in A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, the heroine teases her "fancy-man" into committing a pointless murder; and in Channel Firing, the dead, stirred by great noises, rise from their graves only to be reassured by. God: "It's gunnery practise out at sea / Just as before you went below; / The world is as it used to be."

Some of Hardy's ideas, shaped and misshaped by igth century science, now seem dated and more than dubious; but his struggle with faith--his inability to believe in Christianity and his lingering wish to return to it--is all too contemporary. One of his finest poems, The Oxen, recalls the legend that on Christmas Eve the oxen, too, kneel before God. Writes Hardy:

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve ''Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used, to know," I should go with him in the gloom Hoping it might be so.

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