pdf download - Westerly Magazine

Josephine GibbonTHOMAS HARDYThomas Hardy's Personal Writings, Edited byHarold Orel, Macmillan, London, 1967, $5.30.This collection includes the prefaces toHardy's novels and poetry, and what is perhapsmore useful because not so easily available,his prefaces to works of other authors,and other occasional writing by Hardy.Frequently Hardy's prefaces were writtenyears after the completion of the work theyprefaced, and they show us Hardy as his owncritic. He finds in different novels differentfaults; including immaturity, the flippant treatmentof a subject he views seriously, and anunjustifiable use of suspense "for exciting interest".However he refrained from revisingany of these works, feeling that they wouldlose their freshness and spontaneity. This attitudetowards revision was probably maintainedin his writing of poetry.As well as his own criticisms, we findHardy's reactions to the criticisms of the press.He wrote more than one defence against thecharge of pessimism. But it was his treatmentof relations between the sexes which arousedthe loudest attacks upon him; though it ishard now to see Tess of the D'Urbervilles asan inflammatory novel. Hardy answered theseattacks upon his book, but three years laterhe commented that he would not write in thatway now. Some of his critics were dead andhe was reminded of "the infinite unimportanceof both their say and mine".Hardy, however, had not lost his sensitivityto critical attack, and he claimed that thereception of Jude the Obscure cured him foreverof his desire to write novels. He complainedthat his reviewers had missed one ofthe important themes of the novel, "Thetragedy of unfulfilled aims", in their attemptto defend the marriage laws which they felthe was undermining. One bishop actually burnta copy of the book, as Hardy wryly commented,"probably in his despair at not beingable to burn me".And yet it seems unlikely that it was simplyhurt feelings resulting from this outcry whichprompted Hardy to stop writing novels. Inanother very important essay, 'Candour inEnglish Fiction', he gives us a clear insightinto the peculiar difficulties facing novelistsof this period. Popular novels were introducedto the public by magazines and circulatinglibraries whose aim was to produce "householdreading". The novel was not addressed tosingle adult readers but to whole familygroups, the adults of which were anxious toprotect their children from anything "unsuitable".In effect the discussion of sexual relationswas banned. In 'Candour in EnglishFiction' Hardy poses the problem confrontinga writer who has had the beginning of a novelprinted in a magazine before the novel is completed.To continue the story he must eithercompromise his artistic conscience and makehis characters "produce the spurious effect oftheir being in harmony with social forms andordinances" or "he must bring down the thundersof respectability upon his head, not to sayruin his editor, his publisher, and himself".One is led to wonder how far Hardy himselffelt that he had maimed his work by suchcompromises. One remembers Henry James'scharge that "the pretence of sexuality was onlyequalled by the absence of it" in Tess of theD'Urbervilles. Certainly Hardy claimed thatthe price a writer paid for writing in Englishwas "the complete extinction in the mind ofevery mature and penetrating reader, of sympatheticbelief in his personages".So Hardy can be seen as an author whoattempted to win the freedom of expression forwriters which today is taken for granted. InWESTERLY, No. 1, MARCH, 1 968 59