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NATURE AND THOMAS HARDY

STRATEGEMA NATURÆ

Fall Mr. Hardy's books, The Return of the Native is undoubtedly the one that displays him to the best advantage. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that obsession of hopeless misery, with the grim, sardonic humour licking under its title like a scurrilous tongueTess, which has long disputed a characteristic pre-eminence-suffers incurably, among other drawbacks, from its incongruous clutter of erotico-psychological sentiment. But in The Return of the Native there is nothing to distract from the slow impressive march of tragic circumstance over the sombre rounds and hollows of Egdon Heath; the very nudity of the story only falling in the more harmoniously with the broad and simple outlines of human tragedy. Nor is the reason of this superiority far to seek; for, first of all, before character, before action, Mr. Hardy is the novelist of nature; and gaunt, melancholy, brooding Egdon dominates the novel.

Among the aperçus which Stevenson has left us on the subject of his craft, his biographer reports the following:

I know three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or, lastly, . . . you may take a certain atmosphere and get action and person to express and realise it.

A hundred years ago and this last clause would have been scarcely intelligible to the general public; but who is there to-day so insensible to the influences of time and place, "the dreadful hollow behind the little wood," or the shadow "under that grey convent-wall," as not to wish the scene in its typical aspects provided with some complementary attribute of human experience? Such at all events would seem to be the impulse of all Mr. Hardy's work, of A Laodicean as well as of The Woodlanders -only where he is conspicuously not himself, does it drop into abeyance-the desire to see for once in life man's destiny and circumstances properly suited.

But in this respect, it may be said, he has only continued, like most writers of the nineteenth century, the tradition of Jean Jacques Rousseau. And indeed it is the fashion to talk nowadays as though nature were Rousseau's original discovery and peculiar property; whereas more exactly he was only the first of moderns to see in the spectacle of the outer world a new literary motive and to attempt to raise it, as a literary element, to an equal power with

character and action. The first of moderns I say, because even then he was after all but a reviver of "the vice of the eye," in which the Latin decadents had been long beforehand with him. In the introduction of this new element into literature there is as much to deplore as to rejoice over; for though the hint was taken first by the "romanticists" with their innocent and amusing splashes of "local colour," it afterwards furnished the "naturalists" with the suggestion of "environments" that can by no stretch of language be qualified by either of these epithets. But, such as it is, this tendency to project the human drama, no longer upon the background of the universe, but upon some shallow geographical horizon, has transformed the fortunes of the novel, and too often, alas! by its predilection for strict localisation led to a sacrifice of cosmical perspective for the sake of a very flimsy illusion of reality—a sort of straitened literary parochialism.

Against all this limitation and restriction Mr. Hardy has instituted a salutary reaction, even while appearing, perhaps, to do the contrary— and that without yielding a single genuine advantage of those secured by his predecessors. Though as concerns that narrower conception of nature of which Jean Jacques may be said with approximate accuracy to be the originator, he is necessarily the child of his ancestors, and

more especially of his immediate progenitors, the "realists"; yet he has given to their notions an extension of which neither the lugubrious Senancour nor the methodical Stendhal would ever have dreamed. Himself he has partly restored, partly created, an entire country on the ancient and fabulous territory of Wessex -like Lyonesse, "a land of old upheaven from the abyss," "where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt"-filling it in with wood and water, hill and dale, and populating it with towns and villages of an obsolete and superseded life, all in exactest topography and with a cartographer's minute attention to details. But with him this varied region, flooded with sunlight and rejoiced by labour, or lying mysterious under a solitary moon, is no longer mere scenery, the spectacular decoration of an indifferent comedy, wherein man moves untouched save for some occasional vaporous sentimentality. On the contrary, it has been promoted to a fatal and grandiose complicity in human affairs, of a piece with destiny, overpowering the minds of the actors, tyrannising over their lives and fortunes, and appearing in any one locality as but the particular agency and manifestation of a single consistent, universal power.

Moreover, from this expansion of nature's rôle there has resulted in the spirit of the

author a conception of destiny as an organic whole, whereby humanity is once more factored with the universe, as at once an integral part and a discordant element-an ideal much larger and more satisfactory in itself and one more agreeable with the modern scientific view than is that which has prevailed for the most part in the literature of the century. And here, if it is well considered, in man's aberration and nature's implacable grudge, that motive of which Clem Yeobright is the type, lies the source of all Mr. Hardy's tragedy and the peculiar grimness with which it is invested. For invariably as the catastrophe falls out in consequence of this dissension, as it were between parent and child, so, no matter how pitiful the human plight in its one aspect, it is always in its other informed with just the touch of malice requisite to suggest some trick of circumstance, played not merely upon man's happiness, but upon his dignity as well. With the one face it appeals to our mortal kinship of infirmity and sorrow, with the other to that passionless company of invisible witnesses, who, like Apollo and Athene aperch on the oak tree, find a careless amusement in the hapless spectacle, ἀνδράσι τερπόμενοι. It is this mixture in his plots of pity and malice, resembling, though with a difference, the profound duplicity of the Greek tragic spirit and the moral