Thomas Hardy, an illustration of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, by Helen Garwood / Garwood, Helen, 1876-

Author: Garwood, Helen, 1876-
Title: Thomas Hardy, an illustration of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, by Helen Garwood
Publisher: Philadelphia, John C. Winston, 1911
Tag(s): schopenhauer, arthur, 1788-1860; hardy, thomas, 1840-1928; hardy; schopenhauer; tess; tragedy; thomas hardy; philosophy
Contributor(s): Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
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Rights: GNU General Public License
Size: 35,202 words  Grade range: 11-13  Readability (Flesch) score: 58
Identifier: thomashardyillus00garwrich

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V 



THOMAS HARDY 

An Illustration of the 

PHILOSOPHY OF SCHOPENHAUER 



THESIS 



PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA IN PARTIAL 

FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE 

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

JUNE, 1909 



BY 

HELEN GARWOOD 



PHILADELPHIA 
THE JOHN C. WINSTON CO. 
i9ii\ 






• • • « 



••••••• t* • • * 



CONTENTS, 



PAGE. 

I. Use of Philosophy in Literature 5 

i. The General Use of Philosophy in Literature. 
2. The Hardy Use of Philosophy in Literature. 

II. Establishment of Purposelessness 16 

i. General Establishment of Purposelessness. 

2. Schopenhauer's Establishment of Purposelessness. 

3. Hardy's Establishment of Purposelessness. 

4. Similarity of the Views of Schopenhauer and Hardy. 

III. Effect of Purposelessness : Tragedy 41 

1. Some General Views of Tragedy. 

2. Schopenhauer's Idea of Tragedy. 

3. Hardy's Use of Tragedy. 

4. Similarity of the Views of Schopenhauer and Hardy. 

IV. Outcome of Purposelessness 69 

1. General Outcome. 

2. The Outcome of Schopenhauer. 

3. The Outcome of Hardy. 

4. Lack of Similarity of the Views of Schopenhauer and Hardy. 

V. Artistic Value of Purposelessness 83 



228301 



CHAPTER I. 
Use of Philosophy in Literature. 

Much has been written of Thomas Hardy, much more 
will be said. Great men are not disposed of in a few volumes. 
To couple his name witr/ that of Schopenhauer even is no 
longer a new matter. The present study pretends to give no 
final word of criticism and no comprehensive appreciation. It 
aims to be one-sided and intensive. It is a search into the 
reason why The Return of the Native or Tests or The Mayor 
of Casterbridge should come to the lips as an illustration of 
the philosophy of The World as Will and Idea. How much 
of a philosopher Hardy, the writer, is, how nearly his philos- 
ophy resembles that of Schopenhauer, how it has affected his 
work, and to what conclusions it has brought him are the 
questions it will consider. 

To-day scholars are contributing articles to the Modern 
Language Association publications to show first, that the Peart 
is a real lament of a real father over a lost daughter, second, 
that the poem is a theological dissertation woven about a straw 
child. Will the Modern Language Association writers of some 
distant future expend their strength to prove that Thomas 
Hardy wrote novels, poems, and one stupendous drama to set 
forth a scheme of philosophy he had ; or, on the contrary, that 
he wrote because an artist must write, and that the philosophy 
leaked in as the theology leaked into the Pearl, because the air 
was supersaturated with it. One is tempted to press the 
analogy to its limits, to foreshadow the arguments pro and con, 
and to suggest that the decision may long be a matter of 
individual preference. Without going so far, however, the 
inference seems clear that even as the Middle Ages produced 
their theological literature, their Body and Soul debates, their 
Piers Plowman and Pearl, and even as they had their burning 
questions of predestination and free-will, and whether men are 
saved by grace of God or by their own merits ; so to-day we 
have our philosophical literature, and our burning questions of 

(5) 



optimism and pessimism, of whether we shall extol life or 
endure it. 

After all, what could be more natural? Literature must 
reflect the interests of its time or lose its vitality. There are 
certainly eternal laws of beauty which cannot be evaded, there 
are just as certainly eternal laws of life which cannot be 
neglected, and the ever-insistent problem of art is to keep these 
two harnessed together, a task as difficult as that of driving 
the famous chariot of Plato. 

Some politics, some economics, some religious unrest, 
some philosophy must be reflected in the literature of to-day. 
If the abstruse and difficult philosophical systems of a Kant, 
a Fichte, and a Hegel could profoundly affect a Coleridge and 
an Emerson, how much more will the works of a Schopenhauer, 
a Nietzsche, a Von Hartmann affect the writing, and even the 
reading public! For the one person who can enjoy Kant's 
subtleties, there are twenty who can grasp Nietzsche's vagaries. 
Perhaps we have grown wiser, perhaps the philosophers speak 
more clearly, perhaps the great spirits are no longer with us. 
At any rate, we have learned to regard Mill and Huxley and 
Spencer and the three Germans and others of the hour as part 
of our necessary stock-in-trade for culture and for conversa- 
tion. A few years ago one chatted over a cup of tea about 
William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and Will 
to Believe with the same people with whom one had exchanged 
pleasantries about Hugh Wynne, or Mrs. Humphry Ward's 
latest intricate piece of womankind. Now we give one breath 
to The Stooping Lady, another to wireless telegraphy, and 
turn to meet Pragmatism at the corner; yes, even in popular 
University Extension lectures. Macaulay's history lay on my 
fine lady's dressing-table, Pope's "Essay on Man" was the talk 
of the fashionable world, William James is charged with 
writing novels and dubbing them Philosophies. When philos- 
ophy grows as interesting as a novel, how can the novel, which 
is true to life, help reflecting philosophy? An utterly un- 
philosophical literature to-day would be as much of an anomaly 
as an untheological Milton. 

Mr. Henry Newbolt, in a review of The Dynasts, in the 
Quarterly Review for January, 1909, recognizes this new 



tendency. "There can be no doubt," he says, "of the develop- 
ment wrought by modern science and philosophy in human 
feeling, or rather in that combination of thought and feeling 
which determines each man's view of the world." He enforces 
his observation by giving the following quotations from Milton 
and from Laurence Binyon to show, not, as he says, the merit 
of either, but "the simple truth that philosophy has given to 
Mr. Binyon an opportunity which the theology of the seven- 
teenth century could not offer to Milton." 

Paradise Lost, Book VIII, lines 261-271. 

"About me round I saw 
Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, 
*— And liquid lapse of murmuring streams ; by these, 
Creatures that lived and moved, and walked, or flew ; 
Birds on the branches warbling; all things smiled; 
With fragrance and with joy my heart o'erflowed. 
Myself I then perused, and limb by limb 
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran 
With supple joints, as lively vigour led ; 
But who I was, or where, or from what cause, 
Knew not." 

Laurence Binyon, "Death of Adam." 
"On my opening eyes 
The splendour of the world shone slowly In, 
Mingling its radiant colours in my soul. 
Yea, in my soul and only in my soul 
I deemed them to abide ; sky, water, trees, 
The moving shadow and the tender light, 
This solid earth, this wide and teeming earth, 
Which we have trodden, weary, step by step, 
Nor found beginning of an end of it, 
I deemed it all abounding in my brain ; 
The murmur of the waters and the winds 
Seemed but a music sighing from my joy, 
Then I arose, and ventured forth afoot ; 
And soon, how soon, was dispossessed of all ! 
By every step I traveled into truth 



i 



8 

That stripped me of my proud dreams, one by one, 

Till all were taken. On such faltering feet 

By gradual but most certain steps I came 

Into my real and perfect solitude, 

Alone amid the world that knew not me." 

It is not surprising, then, to find Nietzsche put into drama 
by Bernard Shaw, to hear of him in John Davidson, to find 
traces of him in Ibsen, Hauptmann, Sudermann, to come across 
echoes of the Neo-Platonists in Maeterlinck's Treasures of the 
Humble, to see Spinoza in Bourget's Le Disciple, one phase 
of Schopenhauer in Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee and Intelli- 
gence of the Flowers, another in Guy de Maupassant's "La 
Ficelle", to have Browning's "Instans Tyrannus" given as an 
illustration of a point in Hegel, or Kant's great apostrophe to 
Duty compared to Wordsworth's ode, to find Zola's U Assom- 
moir and La Terre mentioned as exemplifying the Schopen- 
hauerian pessimism and Sturge Moore's poem, "In Centaur's 
Booty" as "subtly presenting all that is poetically valuable in 
the idea of the Superman as now current among us." One 
stumbles upon so many allusions to philosophy in literature 
that one begins to feel that time alone is needed to enable one 
to form a goodly list of works that reflect, whether con- 
sciously or unconsciously matters not, some phase of some 
philosopher. 

Nor is it a strange development. They "be of one blood", 
and Philosophy can always say to Literature, as Gray Brother 
said to Mowgli : "Thy trail is my trail, thy lair is my lair, 
thy kill is my kill, and thy death-fight is my death-fight." 
Have they not been suckled by the same mother, the great 
mother, Truth; and, though one may go upon four legs, one 
upon two, are not the traces of the mother in both? Those 
same trifling adverbs, "whence" and "how" ; that little "what", 
which formed the riddle of the universe for Thales, still com- 
pose the riddle for Schopenhauer; the relation of man to the 
gods, the form the "how" took in Aeschylus, is still the theme 
of Hardy. And just as I hope to show that Schopenhauer 
and Hardy delineate the same country, the one by a relief 
map, the other by a model of villages and fields, animals and 



people, which serve but to accentuate the hills and valleys of 
the severer map; so all the philosophers, all the great writers, 
save the absolute realists, have ever striven to mirror the great 
country that lies beyond. Life is greater, stronger, infinitely 
more interesting than books, be they of philosophy, or be they 
of poetry ; and as long as we have men of the Lafcadio Hearn 
type, which will be as long as we have men at all, profoundly 
interested in the "Universal Riddle", in "the Whence, the 
Whither, the Why", thes6 will be the real topics of philosophy 
and of literature. The genuine kinship has always been there, 
and always will be there ; it merely happens that in our day we 
are privileged to see the joining of hands. 

Philosophy, politics, finance, science, almost any subject 
man can think, may enter literature, as long as it enters by 
way of man's feelings; but let it once attempt to get in by the 
door of his intellect, and all is lost. Didacticism is the one 
enemy of literature, purpose the one dragon that rouses the 
St. George in her. As soon as Purpose with a capital P 
begins to strut, art dwindles to a little a, and that is a 
synonym of mediocrity. /~*S 

In Paul Bourget's Le Disciple, we have an openly 
philosophical story. The hero, a philosopher, has been deeply 
influenced by the thought of an older philosopher, whose 
fundamental principle is that the world is a-moral, because 
man must follow out a given nature, and is therefore irrespon- 
sible for his acts, which can not be judged as good or bad. 
The hero regards himself as a psychological problem, and jots 
down in a note-book his various emotions as he tries to seduce 
a young and noble girl, grows to love her,- does seduce her, 
breaks the suicide pact he had formed with her, and, when 
she takes her own life, is arrested for her murder. From 
beginning to end the story holds your attention, but it holds 
you as the story of the three Leonies who inhabited one body, 
or any other tale of the Society for Psychical Research holds 
you, through your curiosity and not through your artistic sense. 

There could be no better example of what Hardy has not 
done. You will not find in him any such open, direct, frank 
statement of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, as Bourget has 
given of Spinoza. Hardy is not deliberately setting forth any 



( 



10 

philosophical system, neither that of any pronounced philos- 
opher, nor even his own, unless it be in The Dynasts. He is 
too true to nature for that. ( He knows that men do not live 
by consistent systems of conduct and thought; that there are 
all the impulses and instincts to be reckoned with ; that even 
Schopenhauer, who thought he had found an unfailing solu- 
tion, did not himself follow the path of his denial of the 
"will to live." 

Philosophy is a part of life because it stands for man's 
groping after the unknown, his attempt to comprehend what 
is given, but it must always follow after and never precede. 
Man acts, then he reflects, or in the phrase of a Von Hartmann, 
the Unconscious comes before the Conscious. All of which 
Hardy realizes. One suspects that he has been a great reader 
J? of philosophy, partly because he mentions the names of so 
many philosophers in his books, partly because it seems natural . 
and consistent for a man who is so oppressed and depressed 
by the lack of system in the world, to seek for a clue among 
the people who have gone at the problem instead of around \C 
But whatever raw material he has gained in his search he has 
refrained from inflicting on his reader. He has the power of 
assimilation, of stamping his thought with his own individual- 
ity; so that the philosophy which we find in his books is his 
own, a true native product, no matter whence the seeds were 
imported. 

Why, then, is he selected as an illustration of the philos- 
ophy of Schopenhauer? Simply because any one who is 
familiar with the main points of the Schopenhauerian philos- 
ophy, and reads Hardy feels that here is a curious sympathy 
of outlook upon life. Here are two men who view life through 
the same glasses, dark glasses if you will, lenses that distort 
if you will, but lenses that are similar, surely. How far 
Schopenhauer is responsible for this attitude of Hardy seems, 
at present, a question which can be limited, but not answered. 
One must await a fuller biography or an autobiographical 
statement. The mention of Schopenhauer in Tess, and in a 
letter in the Academy concerning Maeterlinck's "Apology for 
Nature" justify the assumption that he is at least familiar with 
the work of that philosopher. In a letter, however, which he 



II 

very courteously sent me in answer to an inquiry, Mr. Hardy 
speaks of his philosophy being a development from Schopen- N 
hauer through later philosophers. So we can only proscribe 
limits to the question. On the one hand, he has not delib- 
erately and consciously set out to give artistic expression to 
the Schopenhauerian philosophy; on the other he constantly 
suggests it. Influence is too strong and definite a word for 
the result attained, sympathy comes nearer to it. There is a 
noteworthy and observable sympathy between the philosophy 
of Thomas Hardy and that of Schopenhauer. 

Those words, the philosophy of Hardy, lead one back for 
a moment to the inartistic novel of Bourget. Is Hardy 
artistic or does he, as Lionel Johnson suggests in speaking of 
Tess, need to be separated from his own philosophy before he ? 
can be enjoyed ? Certainly most people separate them. They , 
like him because he brings all Wessex to them, because he - 
takes them out-of-doors, because he pleases their delicate sense 
of humor, but always in spite of his philosophy. All of which 
is justifiable. There is no law, artistic or moral, commanding 
people to look into the depths of life, and the depths of Hardy 
are stern and lead only to a negative courage. Nevertheless, 
such a separation proves only the reader's inherent need of 
brightness, not Hardy's need of revision. The question is the 
old one of whether a man must keep his own personality out 
of his books entirely, or whether he may occasionally play 
the part of the Greek chorus and take the reader aside for a 
moment. Some of us consider that trait Thackeray's great 
weakness, others of us are very grateful to him for being weak. 

It is a matter of interest that both Hardy and Bourget 
have spoken in the same magazine, the Eclectic for June, 1891, 
in favor of subjectivism in art. Bourget thinks that events 
are interesting because of their interest to the narrator, and 
that whatever is interesting to the narrator is a subject for 
art ; provided only, that it be artistically presented. "In every 
novel," he says, "the primary condition is, that it must be an 
imaginative fragment of human life." By this formula, "the 
novel is distinguished from psychology pure and simple. La 
Bruyere in his Caracteres, La Rochefoucauld in his Maximes, 
differ from the novelist merely by lacking this color of life. 



12 

They have observation, profound or comic touches, every- 
thing, indeed, except the power of painting human beings as 
they act or feel." 

Hardy, in like manner, thinks that art lies in the way in 
which a matter is presented. "The most devoted apostle of 
realism, the sheerest naturalist, cannot escape, any more than 
the withered old gossip over her fire, the exercise of Art in 
his labor or pleasure of telling a tale." He continues, "With 
our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces, and 
man's position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, 
must adjust itself to the new alignment, as would also artistic 
works in form and color, if further spectacles in their sphere 
could be presented. v Nothing but the illusion of truth can 
permanently please, and when the old illusions begin to be 
penetrated, a more natural magic has to be supplied." % 

With the same theory, then, that anything may be a sub- 
ject of fiction, provided it is presented in a manner true to life, 
and that the narrator has the right to play the part of colorist, 
as he does in every day life, Hardy has succeeded, where in 
this one novel, Le Disciple, Bourget has failed. The success 
of the former is due to his skill in welding together two inter- 
ests not always congenial, the pure and simple story, his 
interpretation of the story. Perhaps there was never a time 
when people could so well appreciate the compelling need of 
the author to introduce such an interpretation, and the diffi- 
culty of doing it well. To-day we are all familiar with our 
two selves : the one which acts, and the other which sits back 
and watches the acting. Selma Lagerlof describes this second 
self as a creature with "eyes of ice" and "long, bent fingers," 
who sits in the soul's darkest corner and picks to pieces our 
being. She turns from the joyous description of olden times 
when the people did not think as we think, to tell of this spirit 
of introspection which makes every person a spectator of the 
drama of his own life. But just as the figure with "the staring, 
icy eyes" and "busy, picking fingers" killed all emotion in the 
beautiful Marianne, so it can kill all spontaneity in literature, 
if it is allowed to creep out too far from its corner. It is 
questionable whether, in The Dynasts, Hardy has not allowed 
the second self to creep out too far from its corner ; although 



13 

if Mr. Henry Newbolt has the true insight, that is the very 
value oiThe Dynasts, a value we shall appreciate as we develop""*" 
our own second selves more and more. Aside from The 
Dynasts, there is at least one reader of Hardy who does not 
feel that his two selves are inartistically blended, who does not 
need to separate him from his philosophy, indeed who could 
as little imagine the Hardy stories without the gloomy Hardy 
background, as those of Hawthorne without the pensive, ante- 
Puritan melancholy. In botli the mood is the man. 

What is this mood in Hardy that so permeates all his "] 
stories? Briefly, that there is very much that is wrong ia_ 
the world, and that no one cares. God has forgotten the Earth. 
All creation groaneth and travaileth — and for no reason. This / 
is the theme that recurs again and again like the motif of ar 
Wagner opera, that grows loud in the poems and the later 
novels, and reaches a finale in The Dynasts. This, too, is the 
theme of Schopenhauer; the purposelessness of life, the lack I 
of reason, the eternal revolution of the wheel, and the failure 
of events to lead to any goal. 

Why these two men should hold this view of life, a view 
which we have seen to be repugnant to the general mass of 
mankind, is, though an interesting question in itself, one that 
does not concern this study; which aims merely to establish 
the facts of the sympathy between them, and to show some 
kindred results to which such a philosophy led them. I have 
chosen the facts of the case rather than the theories, in spite 
of the interesting suggestions of causes that have occurred to 
me, or have been mentioned to me, such as the hint of insanity 
in the Schopenhauer family, and the pronounced bitterness of 
his character; and with Hardy, the love of mediaevalism and of 
an age of faith, the sense perhaps, that William Morris had, 
that "he is born out of his due time," his childlessness, his 
residence in a country that is decaying and rapidly becoming 
depopulated by the drift to towns. There is just one of these 
suppositious causes that needs to be examined, because it shows 
that wheresoever the seeds came, there was in Hardy the very 
soil to bring them to maturity. 

A careful reading of the poems of William Barnes, true 
and faithful delineator of the country he loved so well, shows 



14 

how much Hardy owed to Wessex. We find not only the 
fascinating dialect words, "so's," "randy," "arm-in-crook," 
"hag-rid," and the descriptions of tranters, club walkings, and 
homely feasts, but the same fidelity to life, best appreciated by 
those who have gone to country junketings, in describing the 
rough and boisterous dances and pastimes, which makes the 
party at Tranter Dewy's, where the poor man felt the heat too 
much, and that of Giles Winterborne with its makeshift house- 
keeping, such delightful reading. This is the realism of Fal- 
staff and his merry comrades. But of the sense of the grandeur 
and the sublime forlornness of nature, as on an Egdon Heath, 
Barnes has no trace; as he has none of the feeling of the 
antiquity of Wessex. He is comparable to Burns. It is the 
homely, heart-touching side of Wessex he brings to us; the 
moving days, the courtships, the happy firesides, the Sundays 
when the farmer walks about his farm to enjoy it. And with 
it all no hint nor trace of purposelessness. Barnes' "God is in 
His heaven, and all's right with the world." 

"If winter vrost do chill the ground, 
'Tis but to bring the zummer round, 
All's well a-lost where He's a-vound 
Vor if 'tis right, vor Christes seake 
He'll gie us more than he do teake, — 
His goodness don't gi'e out, John." 

But even in a Wessex tavern, or among the humblest 
cottage folk, Hardy's God is not surely in His heaven. Like 
Dame Quickly in Henry V, "So a' cried out 'God, God, God' 
three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should 
not think of God ; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself 
with any such thoughts yet," they accept him conventionally 
and doubt him intrinsically. "I ha'n't been (to church) these 
three years," said Humphrey, "for I'm so mortal sleepy of a 
Sunday, and 'tis so mortal far to get there, and when you do 
get there, 'tis such a mortal poor chance that you'll be chose 
for up above, when so many bain't that I bide at home and 
don't go at all." 

"Yes, not but I was a Methodist once — ay, for a length 
of time. 'Twas owing to my taking, a house next door to a 



15 

chapel; so that what with hearing the organ bizz like a bee 
through the wall, and what with finding it saved umbrellas on 
wet Zundays, I went over to that faith for two years — though 
I believe I dropped money by it — I wouldn't be the man to say 
so if I hadn't." 

In like manner, Barnes says, 

"An' if there be mouths to be ved, 

He that sent em £an send me their bread, 

An' will smile on the chile 

That's a-new on the knee." 

Hardy retorts when some one has said, "God A'mighty 
always sends bread as well as children," "But 'tis the bread to « 
one house and the children to another." Barnes sees the 
soldiers going away and sings them a song of God-speed; 
Hardy sees them going, thinks that so went Vespasian's legions 
and Cerdic, the Saxon's hosts and that the world has learned 
no better way. Fancy for instance what Hardy would have 
told about the man who cut J. L. and T. D. in the tree, and 
cut the L lightly because it was soon to turn into a D. He 
would not have returned to fulfill his mission. All of which 
goes to show that Empedocles' theory of perception had a 
symbolic truth in it, like does perceive like. There is some- * 
thing in Hardy that perceives the melancholy, the fatalism of * 
the rustic character, and the tragedy of an event. Some strain 
of deepest melancholy must be innate in a man whose thought 
when he sees a comet is that when it returns again all the 
people now witnessing it will be gone. 

Just as one is repelled by Schopenhauer's egoism and his 
rancour, so one is attracted by Hardy^s honesty and sincerity. • 
When he longs to believe, and regrets his utter inability to 
have such faith as others have, then one feels that whatever 
may be the causes of environment or heredity that turn Hardy 
into a pessimist, the cause of causes lies in himself. Such is 
his nature. Born like Schopenhauer to see the world as an 
evil thing, because a purposeless thing. 



CHAPTER II. 

Establishment of Purposelessness. 

An unconscious optimist who was about to read her first 
Hardy novel and had been told she would find it pessimistic, 
remarked, "Pessimism, that's when you look for the dark side, 
isn't it? And optimism you look for the bright. I always 
get those two mixed up." It is doubtful whether, when the 
last word on these subjects has been said by the philosophers 
and thinkers, it will amount to more than that, a looking for 
the dark side and a looking for the bright ; with, perhaps, the 
corollary which the writer of "De Profundis" and "The Im- 
percipient" would surely add that the pessimist is under the 
necessity of looking for the dark, the optimist for the bright. 
Like all words which connote whole developing move- 
ments, such as romanticism and classicism; rationalism and 
empiricism ; these, opposing terms are incapable of definition. 
We may strike out clever analogies, telling words, illuminating 
phrases like Pater's "desire of beauty" in romanticism, or even 
witticisms like the optimist seeing the doughnut, the pessimist 
the hole; but a succinct definition is, from the nature of the 
problem, one of the things we must leave for some super- 
sensible existence. The irony of such words is that the very 
people who most realize their incapability of definition short 
of a treatise are the ones who are immediately forced to an 
attempt to define, or to explain their own meanings. However, 
for the purposes of this inquiry, the only limitation that is 
needed is the generally conceded, because inherent, one of 
opposition. A man cannot at the same time be both pessimist 
and optimist. If the sum of his pessimistic moments exceeds 
, his optimistic then he is a pessimist, and vice versa. It is a 
, plain question of sums because the absolutely consistent pessi- 
, mist and the absolutely consistent optimist are, happily, mere 
' ideals. 

But in this array of the foemen, there is one kind of so- 
called optimism which ought to be rigorously excluded. I 

(16) 



17 

mean, the optimism of all unthinking and of all superficially 
thinking people, the optimism that rather prides itself on 
shutting its eyes. In the Return of the Native, Hardy, speak- 
ing of Gym Yeobright's features, says that a physically beau- 
tiful man has become an anachronism. The "spirit of 
sufferance" which has replaced the "zest for existence" must 
ultimately enter into the countenances of men. Perhaps it is 
some such feeling of the age of the race which makes even the 
rawest pessimism seem more honest and dignified than this 
crude optimism. "What the Greeks only suspected we know 
well; what their Aeschylus imagined our nursery children 
feel." There is surely something in the race to-day which makes 
despair, rebellion, and the melancholy minor key, though not 
good in themselves, more consistent with our time than flat 
complacency. 

These complacent optimists who are afraid to read, afraid 
to think, lest they light on something- to disturb their equanim- 
ity, are usually irritated by pessimists. They would like to 
convert them and have the whole round world a happy, optimis- 
tic country waving palms and singing songs. Pessimists, on 
the contrary, are rather envious of these opponents, for pessi- 
mists are always full of self-pity because they have gone beyond 
the Golden Age. The real opponents of pessimism are those 
optimists who have so retained their touch of the Golden Age 
that they are able by its help to see a future Age of Gold. 
These oppose to the stoicism which is the outcome of pessimism, 
the "train for ill and not for good" attitude, not the mawkish- 
ness nor sentimentality of the easy-going optimism, but a noble 
faith which, recognizing the dark side and often recognizing 
its inability to dispel this gloom, still believes in the bright 
side, because it must. 

Reading, thought, and observation convince one that life, 
both in general and in the individual, has two sides, and that 
according as the emphasis is shifted we have optimism or 
pessimism. This shifting of the emphasis depends so largely 
on the nature of the individual that one is tempted to wonder 
whether these terms are not purely subjective, and whether 
there exists any one large-minded enough and sane-minded 
enough to determine whether life is good or bad. 



i8 

All thinking persons come to a Tantalus-like picture in 
the course of their thinking. It is that man has certain 
instincts, deep-ingrained, and that these are never satisfied. 
The general desire for happiness, which is always in excess 
of its gratification; the desire for life which once drove men 
to seek fountains of perpetual youth, and now drives them to 
seek cures for malignant diseases and the nevertheless "quick- 
coming death" ; the desire to do certain acts without the accom- 
panying power which Browning has happily expressed in "The 
Last Ride," "What hand and brain went ever paired" ; are all 
forms of this enigma. But more subtle and more conflicting 
are some of the answers that philosophy gives us. Every 
people and every nation has a desire for morality, a desire 
sufficient to make them evolve some system of morals. Every 
one hopes and expects to find, in answer to this longing, some 

s basis on which to build a universal morality, and no one finds 
it. Locke in his discussion of innate qualities and Hume in a 
truly delightful Gulliverian dialogue have shown that what is 
revered in one country is abhorred in another. Nor has Kant 
with his famous categorical imperative done any more than 
assume such a basis. In the same way we have a passionate 

\ longing for certainty, for finding some one thing that is sure 
and stable and to which we can cling, something that is abso- 
lute and immutable; and all we get from philosophy is an 
overwhelming sense of the relative nature of all knowledge, 

Iand of the impossibility of finding the absolute. It was this 
desire that led Newman to seek refuge in the Catholic Church. 
If he could not reach the absolute through reason, he could 
cling to it through tradition. Again, man has in him the sense 
V- of law, so vitally within him, that, as Kant has proved, the law 
we find in nature we ourselves put there. One would naturally 
expect to find, somewhere, an answering law; but it is just 
this lack of law without that troubles Hardy. "Why it was 
that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, 
and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been 
traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive ; why 
so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, many thousand 
years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our 
sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a 



19 

retribution lurking in the catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess 
D'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray 
had dealt the same wrong even more ruthlessly upon peasant 
girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers 
upon the children may be a morality good enough for divini- 
ties, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore 
does not mend the matter." 

So that one can turn in many ways and find always some- 
thing that baffles. It is all desires and longings, unfulfillment, 
silence. Here is the dividing of the ways. According to the 
answer a man gives to this question is he pessimist or optimist ; 
the former, when he finds this baffling process utterly purpose- 
less, and the latter when he sees in it something purposive. One 
may, for instance, be a Kant with an overwhelming love of 
system and because one has seen man's necessity to put law in 
nature feel the need of formulating postulates that bring law 
outside of nature. Put as much purpose as you can in nature, 
says Kant, and your life will have unity. Or one may take the 
attitude of Lafcadio Hearn which is, in part, the attitude of 
Maeterlinck, that this longing will grow so imperious, so 
merciless that it must evolve within men new powers which 
will enable them to achieve the impossible, to perceive the 
invisible. Or one may take the Pragmatic attitude, what is 
useful is believable; or the simple Christian attitude of those 
who having not seen, still believe. All these varying solu- 
tions will help men to infer a purpose where no purpose is to 
be seen. 

But there are others who find no comfort in these answers, 
because they can never forget the injustice of the question. 
Such a one is Mr. Hardy when he replies to some one who has 
vindicated M. Maeterlinck's "Apology for Nature," that 
though she is not just from our point of view, she may practice 
a scheme of morality unknown to us. "Far be it from my wish 
to disturb any comforting fantasy, if it be barely tenable. But, 
alas, no profound reflection can be needed to detect the sophis- 
try of M. Maeterlinck's arguments, and to see that the original 
difficulty recognized by thinkers like Schopenhauer, Hartmann, 
Haeckel, etc., and by most of the persons called pessimists, 
remains unsurmounted. Pain has been and pain is; no new 



\ 



20 

set of morals in Nature can remove pain from the past and 
make it pleasure for those who are its infallible estimators, 
the bearers thereof. And no injustice, however slight, can be 
atoned for by her future generosity, however ample, so long 
as we consider Nature to be, or to stand for, unlimited power. 
The exoneration of an omnipotent Mother by her retrospective' 
justice becomes an absurdity when we ask, what made the 
foregone injustice necessary to Her Omnipotence?" He then 
suggests that Nature is either blind or an automaton, which 
simply throws the responsibility a stage further back. 

Schopenhauer, as Hardy suggests, recognizes a difficulty. 
He accepts all Kant's subjectivism and believes that the world 
is his idea, but he does not accept Kant's sense of purposive- 
ness. He finds instead, back of the worlds a blind and purpose- 
. less^"witeQ^velLj^lnch Is" ever^vajrmg_uj>on itself, ever 
"consuming itself because that isut£ nature^ In a sense, Schopen- 
hauer is the exceptional, Kant the normal man. All of us 
would gladly add to the mechanical purposiveness, which even 
pessimists unhesitatingly accept, a teleological purposiveness. 
Most of us can do so; there are those here and there who 
cannot. As Mr. Housman says, on them is the burden. "Them 
it was their poison hurt." 

We sometimes speak as if pessimism were a new growth, 
a thing of our own time, and forget that the Job-like type of 
man has always been with us. The prosperity of the sinner 
is the theme of the three books of wisdom literature : "Eccle- 
siastes," "Ecclesiasticus' v and "Wisdom of Solomon"; while 
the corresponding punishment of the righteous is portrayed in 
"Job." Old Omar Khayyam felt the impotence of the world. 

"And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky, 
Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die ; 
Lift not thy hands to It for help — for It 
Rolls impotently on as Thou and I." 

Lucretius felt the power of the "will to live," in all its 
force. "Moreover, we are ever engaged, ever involved in the 
same pursuits, and no new pleasure is struck out by living on ; 
but whilst what we crave is wanting, it seems to transcend all 
the rest; then, when it has been gotten, we crave something 



21 

else, and ever does the same thirst of life possess us, as we 
gape for it open-mouthed." In somewhat the same vein, 
Pascal felt the restlessness of the human spirit, "On cherche 
le repos en combattant quelques obstacles; et si on les a 
surmontes, le repos devient insupportable." Lionel Johnson 
has given quotations from Pascal and from Newman showing 
that they arraigned the world as severely as Hardy. They see 
only the bitterness and misery of man, and no reflection of the 
world's creator. But, as' he shows, they both find something 
within them which prevents their reaching the conclusion that 
actual experience would force upon them. 

It is just in this respect that both Hardy and Schopenhauer 
often seem more oriental than occidental. As long as men 
retain a belief in a future life where all debts may be paid, and 
injustice compensated with hundred-fold justice, they will find 
excuses for the criss-cross management of this world. But 
when that is gone, as it is with Hardy and was with Schopen- 
hauer, the full weight of purposelessness breaks upon them. 
Moreover, if they are keenly alive to human suffering, their 
woe is increased. That Schopenhauer, in spite of his contempt 
for the average man, was very sensitive to human misery, we 
know from accounts of his boyhood. Hardy's humanitarianism 
shows in the boy Jude, who will not step on earth-worms ; in 
Gabriel Oak who when he sees the dead sheep, thinks first of 
their misery, then of his loss in money ; and in Tess who was 
most tender to all life. 

The Schopenhauerian philosophy which is spread through 
so many volumes is, thanks to his habits of reiteration, capable 
of a brief statement. With the more genuinely philosophical 
parts, the criticism of K^ant and the welding together of some 
of the Kantian doctrines, we have nothing to do. Schopen- 
hauer believed that he had made a great discovery, that he was 
unique among philosophers and would ever occupy the highest 
niche of philosophical fame. Time has shown how he over- 
estimated his powers, but it has also popularized his thought 
and some of his expressions. His system has two main ideas 
which give the title to his chief work, Die Welt als Wille und 
Vorstelhing. The first consideration in this volume, that the 
world is Idea, is akin to the subjective idealism of the earlier 



22 

German school. Schopenhauer has given the term Idea to this 
theory that the world of phenomena is an appearance dependent 
upon the nature of the observer, and he is fond of alluding to 
the eastern religions, which habitually show that the world is 
illusion, the "veil of Maya." Such a belief breathed in for 
centuries as in Japan and India, would doubtless color life and 
eventually literature, but in the less mystic occidental countries, 
it has not yet permeated fiction, and one feels that as far as 
life and books are concerned a man may regard the world as 
something subjective or something objective and his neighbors 
will perceive no difference in his daily conduct and his artistic 
productions. There are passages in Hardy's novels which just 
suggest this subjective idealism, as when he speaks of Tess 
fancying the natural processes were part of her own story, and 
adds "for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and 
what they seemed they were"; but though such views may 
belong to his speculative hours, they are not vital enough to his 
whole work to need consideration ; and therefore we can dismiss 
this side of Schopenhauer. 

With this philosopher, however, the world is not only 
Idea, but Will, and to make clear the nature of this Will is his 
whole end and aim. His full discovery is not the mere recog- 
nition of the "will to live," which Aristotle for one had men- 
tioned, but the nature and overwhelming importance of this 
desire, and its far-reaching effects. Not only is the second 
book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung an exposition of 
this thesis, but all the work of Schopenhauer, save in those 
places where he vents his ire and spleen and venom on Fichte, 
Hegel and Schelling, is an exploitation of the importance of 
the "will-to-live." 

The World as Will is the basis, the "Grund" of the World 
as Idea. All the phenomenal world, all this veil of illusion, is 
the direct result of the "will to live." The Will in its struggle 
for existence takes the form, for instance, of rock crystals, of 
bees, of flowers, of man ; yet the will does not divide itself up 
and apportion such an amount for minerals, such for vege- 
tables, such for animals. It is one and the same Will for all, 
although in the crystal it is too vague to be formulated, in the 
bee it may take the form of a will of the species, as Maeter- 



23 

linck has adequately shown in the Life of the Bee, in man, of 
the individual will. Just here enters the tragedy of the Will. 
It cannot take all these forms without having the forms come I 
into conflict. It is as if there were one small basin of soap- 
suds and twenty children who wanted to blow bubbles. Some 
will be pushed aside, some will secure only a dip of the pipe, 
and none will have as much of the bubble material as they 
want. "Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and 
alternation of victory, and*' in it we shall come to recognize 
more distinctly that variancejwith itself which is essential to - 
the will. Every grade of the object ification of will fights for 
the matter, the space and the time of the others. The perma- 
nent matter must constantly change its form; for under the 
guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical and 
organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrest the 
matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own Idea. _, 
This strife may be followed through the whole of nature, 
indeed nature exists only through it." Kant showed in the 
course of his discussion of the purpose in nature, that the 
vegetable kingdom seems to exist for the herbivorous animals, 
the herbivorous for the carnivorous, and these in turn for the 
use of man ; but looked at in another way, which he attributed 
to Linnaeus, man thins out the carnivorous animals, who in 
turn thin out the herbivorous, who perform the necessary 
thinning out of the crowded vegetable kingdom. Therefore 
one could never conclude, thinks Kant, which was the purpose 
of nature, man or the vegetable kingdom ; and he proceeds to 
attack the problem in another way. With Schopenhauer the 
conclusion matters less than the nature of the problem. Since 
you have the same will in animals, minerals, vegetables, you 
have a will^at war with itself; and it is this sense that the will 
feeds on itself which makes him call it blind and purposeless. 
The two characteristics of the will, then, are desire to 
exist and strife for existence. This makes the wheel of life, t 
The will cannot stop willing since that is its very nature, is 
all that it is, and as long as it wills, it must of necessity will 
conflict. "The inner being of unconscious nature is a constant 
striving without end and without rest." But in man this will 
reaches its greatest tragedy because man alone grows con- 



24 

scious of the will's irresponsible and capricious character. 
Therefore man when he becomes sufficiently introspective is 
sick at heart and despairing, and longs to escape from a world 
which is such a pitiable farce. Moreover, man has an added 
drop of bitterness, because while in the lower forms of life, 
species contends with species or individual with individual, in 
man the individual is himself a battle ground. There are 
moods when no book of the Bible satisfies us as does "Eccle- 
siastes." They are the moments when it comes home to us 
that love, ambition, pleasure must all end in satiety. Schopen- 
hauer gives us an intensified Ecclesiastes. /For not only is the 
result of every desire "vanity and vexation of spirit," but the 
real irony lies in the necessity of desiring. No sooner have we 
become bored with one thing, than we long for another; we 
obtain that, only to fail to find satisfaction in it, and to grasp 
at something else. We continue this senseless revolution, even 
after we realize that it can never bring us anywhere, just 
because of the strength of the will that is in us. 

The man of Ecclesiastes had the relief of a wholesome 
fear of God ; the Schopenhauerian man has no God to fear, nor 
would he be worth fearing if he had one. Where, then, is 
there any relief ? Schopenhauer points out two, one temporary, 
the other permanent. The first is the enjoyment of the beau- 
tiful, the second is the famous denial of the "will to live." In 
the third book of Die Welt ah"W\lle imi Vorstetlimgi^m which 
Schopenhauer treats of the beautiful, he is very close to Plato's 
"Doctrine of the Ideas." Beauty is something objective, some- 
thing which the artist or the appreciator of art sees outside 
himself, and endeavors to express or to understand. It is 
said of Michael- Angelo that he saw the statue in the marble 
and freed it. In the process of freeing, our philosopher would 
say, the artist loses himself, and forgets the misery of exist- 
ence; in the process of- contemplating what is freed, the 
observer passes out of himself for the moment. They substi- 
tute for their sense of what is individual, the sense of what is 
universal, what is an archetype ; but in time this larger outlook 
becomes unsatisfactory also, because it, too, is seen to be only 
another form of the vision of unrest. So this release is but 
transitory. The ultimate deliverance lies in the denial of the 



25 

will, and the path of denial is the path of asceticism. By 
stifling every desire, curtailing every longing, ceasing to will, 
one annihilates the will itself, and has the reward of pure 
nothingness. 

Schopenhauer, then, answers the "Universal Riddle" by 
concluding it is not worth answering. By an examination of 
what makes up the riddle we find that pain is within man and 
the world, is their very nature, and that therefore they cannot 
hope to escape from it. It serves no end, leads to no outcome, 
is decreed for no reason, so we have the Schopenhauerian pur- 
poselessness. Nature is law-abiding, man is law-abiding, but 
for what reason, since there is no final law? As Hoffding 
says, he has broken with "the fundamental presupposition of a 
harmony of existence on which western theology and philos- 
ophy had more or less decidedly always been based." 

To darken the picture more, Schopenhauer allows man 
little freedom except the freedom of the denial of the "will-to- 
live." Otherwise man has the position of a victim. He is the 
prey of his own characteristics which are largely determined 
for him, and he is the prey of the chances of nature. "Brute 
chance" Professor Royce calls it, recognizing with Schopen- 
hauer its utterly irresponsible character. Sometimes it is so 
insidious as to seem designedly malignant, always it is capri- 
cious. In one of his minor essays, "The Art of Controversy," 
Schopenhauer thus expresses the complete irrationality of this 
force. "Consider that chance, which with error, its brother, 
and folly, its aunt, and malice, its grandmother, rules in this 
world; which every year and every day, by blows great and 
small, embitters the life of every son of earth, and yours too ; 
consider, I say, that it is to this wicked power you owe your 
prosperity and independence; for it gave you what it refused 
to many thousands, just to be able to give it to individuals like 
you. m Remembering all this, you will not behave as though 
you ha/l a right to the possession of its gifts ; but you will 
pefceiv* what a capricious mistress it is that gives you her 
favours; and therefore when she takes it into her head to 
deprive you of some or all of them, you will not make a great 
fuss about her injustice; but you will recognize that what 
chance gave, chance has taken away." 



26 

The Schopenhauerian quarrel with existence, then, is a 
quarrel with its irrational and inharmonious character. We 
find a world where individuals exist by devouring other indi- 
viduals, types by crowding out types; we find also a world 
where chance reigns, heaping up benefits and taking away 
necessities, irrespective of actual wants and deserts; some- 
times refusing its aid at the psychological moment; again 
thrusting it in when the need is not there. The real pain of 
life is thus the pain of life as a whole. We feel this when we 
look beyond our own unhappy selves or beyond any tragic 
event; and see that all are but parts of this total undirected 
blindness. If we think of some Cause for this blindness, we 
can only scorn it; because such a Cause must be omnipotent.; 
and being omnipotent, could have made something better a 
possibility. 

Thomas Hardy's quarrel with existence is a quarrel with 
all that does exist and with what makes it exist. He quarrels 
with society because its code is unfair and takes no account of 
motives; he quarrels with nature, because her laws are cruel; 
he quarrels with the Force back of nature because It has 
permitted such a state of things to be, when, being all-powerful, 
it could have decreed otherwise. In The Dynasts he presents 
this view in the picture of "A knitter drowsed, whose fingers 
play in skilled unmind fulness." Man must take what is knitted 
off for him, by a knitter who does not once glance at his 
needs. Herein lies the pain. Who would not suffer for a 
good cause? But suffering for a knitter who is drowsed, suf- 
fering which may be absolutely unnecessary drives any one to 
melancholy and despair. 

Emerson in his "Threnody" has voiced just the sense of 
personal unfairness that comes to all men, face to face with 
their first great sorrow : 

"I had the right, few days ago, 

Thy steps to watch, thy place to know ; 

How have I forfeited the right?" 

Some men who question thus, go on until, like the poet, 
they find some solution in a purpose served by their woe, others 
forget their questions only in the press of daily life. It might 



27 

be said of Thomas Hardy that he is always facing such a 
question, and has neither of the accustomed modes of relief. 
He finds no acceptable evidence of any purpose that is sub- 
served by the individual suffering; and because he is sensitive 
beyond most men, the press of life does not destroy the sharp 
pangs of the unreasonableness of such suffering. 

A rather detailed study of the novels and poems of Hardy 
shows how profound and far-reaching is his conviction that 
the world we live in is an ui/reasonable and inharmonious one. 
Every person who loves the outdoors world at all must love 
the outdoors world of Hardy. Lionel Johnson says that he 
has what Hawthorne had, "a gift of sight into the spirit of a 
place; a most rare gift." Nowhere is this "gift of sight" more 
happily evident than in the opening chapter of The Return of 

hero of the book. As such if is a typical Hardy hero. "GayJ&^k, 



>& 



prospects wed happily with gay times," says Hardy, "but alas!^ * i 
if times be not gay !" "Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler "^ « 4 
and scarcer instinct; to a more recently learned emotion, than <r 
that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming." i^W^ 
"The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the fa* 
mournful sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain, will be Ly. ^ff 
all of nature that is absolutely consonant with the moods of the ^ 
more thinking among mankind. And ultimately to the com- 
monest tourist spots like Iceland may become what the vine- 
yards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now." 

This "gift of sight" into the gloomy spirit of nature is • 
well brought out in a passage in The Mayor of Casterbridge - $& / 
in which Hardy has been describing a peaceful scene as a ^V/ 
contrast to the turmoil of man. One might "abjure man as f^i^ ' 
the blot on an otherwise kindly universe ; till it was remembered ^V 
that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent ; and that man- 
kind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet 
objects were raging loud." 

In Two on a Tower our ordinary feeling that the sky is a f^r^ 
thing of beauty, worthy of rapt contemplation, is rudely shaken. 
"The actual sky is a horror." It contains "things much more 
terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magni- 
tude without human shape." The sky goes beyond the size at 




28 

which grandeur begins, beyond that of solemnity, even beyond 
that of awfulness, the stellar universe has the she at which 
ghastliness begins. The sky shows the sense of inevitable 
decay, too. It has its burnt out places. If you want to remain 
cheerful, avoid the study of astronomy. On the other hand, 
if you are depressed, it will help you, but in a rather negative 
way, by showing you that nothing is important. 

Sometimes the Hardy nature dreads life just as the Hardy 
characters do. Marty South speaks of the newly planted trees 
sighing as if they dreaded to begin to live. Sometimes wild 
creatures seem to feel the tragedy of existence, as in Tess when 
the birds which come from the north and have seen "cataclys- 
mal horrors" have tragic eyes. Sometimes subjectivism is 
more simply expressed, as in the poems, "The Seasons of the 
Year" and "The King's Experiment," where nature is grave 
or gay according to the mood of the observer. However, this 
open personification is less subtly convincing than the more 
indirect finding of the saddened latter-day mood of man in 
nature. 

A simple feeling of gloom in nature analogous to the 
gloom of man is, after all, of trivial importance beside the 
sense of a lack of order in the outside world. This feeling is 
especially strong in Jude and Tess, and in the poems. Jude, 
after he has been whipped for allowing the birds to eat the 
grain, instead of scaring them away from it, perceives "the 
flaw in the terrestrial scheme by which what was good for 
God's birds was bad for God's gardener." "That mercy to- 
wards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sick- 
ened his sense of harmony." Again nature's law is said to be 
"mutual butchery," and "cruelty is the law pervading all nature 
and society; and we can't get out of it if we would !" In Tess, 
the Durbeyfield children are spoken of as a "half-dozen little 
captives under hatches" compelled to sail in the Durbeyfield 
ship; then the writer says, "Some people would like to know 
whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as 
profound and trustworthy as his song is sweet and pure, gets 
his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan.' ' Tess 
and her little brother have been speaking of the stars being 
worlds, and Tess says, "They sometimes seem to be like the 



2 9 

apples on our stubbard tree, Most of them splendid and sound 
— a few blighted." "Which do we live on," asks the boy, "a 
splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one." "Tis 
very unlucky we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there were 
so many more of 'em!" 

In a poem called "Nature's Questioning" the various prod- 
ucts of nature, pool, field and so forth are represented as having 
lost their first joy in being created, and as inquiring the reason 
for their existence. The burden of their complaint is that they 
are left to hazard and not to law. In "The Mother Mourns," 
the Earth laments that man has found her out, she had never 
intended that he should advance to that point of keenness which 
would enable him to discover her flaws. In other poems she is 
represented as blind or asleep or utterly neglectful of her chil- 
dren. Perhaps the best summary of what Hardy means by the 
lack of order in nature and what Schopenhauer meant by the 
struggle of the will to obtain objectification is this passage in 
The Woodlanders: "Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled In- 
tention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could f 
be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was^.-" 
deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; 
the lichen ate the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled 
to death the promising sapling." &/> € f e //0 W$ rlQ*V\6 fi£l 

Another unfairness in Nature is that she seems always to 
throw the weight of her approval on the side of man's baser £.*JLy- 
instincts, rather than on that of his nobler. In reading Schop- 
enhauer, one has often a vague feeling that though the whole 
"state of nature" may not triumph over the "state of grace," 
in any individual it is likely to prove the stronger. In Hardy 
this vague suggestion becomes concrete statement. In Tzt'o on 
a Tower, in The Return of the Native, in Jude, we have three 
examples of young men of the highest promise and loftiest 
aims who are sWayed from their careers and crippled, the first 
temporarily, the two last for life, by the sudden cropping out 
of natural instincts which they are powerless to subordinate. *^< 
"In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary 
muscular power seized hold of him — something which had 
nothing in common with the spirits and influences which had 
moved him hitherto. This seemed to care little for his reason 



30 

and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and 
moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a school-boy he 
has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended toward 
the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and 
whose life had nothing in common with his own except lo- 
cality." 

Women are more pitiably the victims of Nature's lack of 
sympathy with a "state of grace" than men. Who does not 
pity the three milkmaids with their hopeless, generous love for 
Angel Clare as we see them in the sleeping chamber whose air 
"seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls. 
They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emo- 
tion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law — an emotion which 
they had neither expected nor denied." Who can help feeling 
with Hardy that there is a flaw in Tess's guardian angel, that 
he ought to have told her Angel Clare was the man to make 
her happy, when she first saw him dancing on the green; and 
to have warned her that Alec D'Urberville would surely make 
her miserable. But Tess's narrator assures us that "the call 
seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides 
with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See !' to 
a poor creature, when seeing can lead to happy doing ; or reply 
'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has 
become an irksome, outworn game." 

An unordered world of nature suggests its counterpart, 
an unordered world of man. This is the Hardy attitude toward 
history. It leads nowhere, is a mere monotonous recurrence 
of the same motives, the same causes, in varying times and 
places. Thus Tess does not care to learn what will only show 
her that she is one of a long row, that others have had her 
nature and done her deeds, and will do so again. She wouldn't 
mind learning why the sun shines on the just and the unjust 
alike ; but that is what no books will tell her. Ethelberta, on 
the other hand, finds fortification in the past, but it is the 
same ironical aid to courage that Swithin St. Cleeve found in 
the study of astronomy, the individual insignificance is lost in 
the general insignificance. 

In The Dynasts we find Hardy's reason why history pre- 
sents this unsatisfactory character. History seems to be in the 



* 



hands of men, but in reality it is not, because the men therja* — ^ 
selves are in the hands of an "Immanent Will." The over- 
throw of dynasties, the clash of armies, the rise and fall of 
nations are but the struggles of the Will to find expression. 
And since the Will works unconsciously and even automat- 
ically, we have the same continuous results "click-clacked off;" 
but no hint of any one result to which these shall lead. Von 
Hartmann has this same yiew of a force back of the will of 
man which is really responsible. He calls it the "Unconscious 
Will," and one recognizes in it the "will-to-live" of Schopen- 
hauer. The masses are moved by instinctive impulses, but 
it is seen later that they have been working out ideas of this 
unconscious will, though the motives they have presented to 
themselves are not these ideas at all. He sees in history a 
development and an evolution, which, like everything else in 
Von Hartmann, is the evolution from the unconscious to the 
conscious; but since the only result that he can predict when 
this total consciousness is attained, is that it will will annihila- 
tion, most of us will be inclined to agree with Tess that we 
do not need to intensify the picture of gloom by the study of 
history. 

The feeling that the world of man is also unordered is 
shown in the lack p£ a vital belieTm God. This is especially 
noticeable among the rustic characters of the Hardy novels, 
and it gives to their speech a subtly humorous flavor that will 
bear much repetition. " 'They say every man for himself ; but, 
thank God, I'm not so mean as to lessen old fokes' chances by 
being earnest at my time o' life, and they so much nearer the 
need o't' " " 'Well, sir, 'tis much as before wi' me. One hour 
a week wi' God A'mighty and the rest with the devil, as a chap 
may say.' " " 'But for a drunk of really a noble class that 
brought you no nearer to the dark man than you were afore 
you begun, there was none like those in Farmer Everdene's 
kitchen. Not a single damn allowed ; no, not a bare poor one, 
even at the most cheerful moment when all were blindest, . 
though the good old word of sin thrown in here and there at 
such times is a great relief to a merry soul. . . . Ay, poor 
Charlotte, I wonder if she had the good fortune to get into 
Heaven when 'a died ! But 'a was never much in luck's way, 
and perhaps 'a went downwards after all, poor soul.' " 



32 

Sometimes the lack of a vital belief becomes an open 
doubt, " ' Well, well,' said Mrs. Leat, giving way, 'Whatever 
may be the truth on't, I trust Providence will settle it all for 
the best, as he always do.' " " 'Ay, ay, Elizabeth/ rejoined 
Mrs. Crickett with a satirical sigh, 'good people like you may 
say so, but I have always found Providence a different sort 
o£ feller.' " In Desperate Remedies again, Manston and the 
letter carrier hold a conversation about religion. Manston tells 
the carrier that the higher class of mind does not need to be 
religious, and that believing is all a mistake. " 'Well to be 
sure!' says the carrier. 'However believing in God is a mis- 
take made by very few people after all !' " " 'Not one Chris- 
tian in our parish would walk half a mile in a rain like this 
to know whether the Scripture had concluded him under sin or 
grace/ " " 'Ah, you may depend upon it they'll do away wi' 
Goddymity altogether, afore long, although we've had him 
over us so many years.' " 

More commonly Providence is regarded as a thing to be 
taken into account, but not a thing to. interfere with the more 
serious pursuits of life. There is a scene in Far from the 
Madding Crowd where the man who is driving the wagon con- 
taining poor Fanny Robin's body, goes into an ale-house and 
joins two companions. After they have decided that they 
ought to drink because all men haven't the gift of enjoying a 
soak, this deserting driver says, " *,Well, I hope Providence 
won't be in a way with me for my doings. I've been troubled 
with weak moments lately, 'tis true. I've been drinky once 
this month already, and I did not go to church A-Sunday, and 
I dropped a curse or two yesterday ; so I don't want to go too 
far for my safety. Your next world is your next world, and 
not to be squandered offhand.' " 

In The Hand of Ethelberta the clerk won't allow bad 
words to be said in the church. "As far as my personal self 
goes, I should have no objection to your cussing as much as 
• you like, but as an official of the church my conscience won't 
allow it to be done." In Jude we have Arabella taking to 
chapel-going after her husband's death "as 'twas righter than 
gin ;" and in several places we find reference to a special Sun- 
day form of truth. Some one may say, "All this is true to 



33 

life." As a matter of fact we are prone to separate our Sun- 
day morals from our week day ones, though we are not all so 
frank about acknowledging the division. But the fact that 
this frailty of human nature is true to life is rather a point in 
favor of its significance in a general purposeless view of life. 
Faith is lukewarm because there is nothing to make it hot. 

From a merely formal belief in God to a sense that life is 
not worth living and will not bear examination is but a step. 
We sometimes wonder if there is a single Hardy character 
who, if he or she were challenged with the question, "Is life 
worth while?" would answer, "Yes." They are all like Eus- 
tacia Vye, they know too much unless they could know all. 
This is a characteristic of the earliest Hardy. Farmer Sprin- 
grove in Desperate Remedies is described as feeling with Walt 
Whitman, "I foresee too much, it means more than I thought." 
One of the things that he foresees is that his son Edward may 
never get on in the world, "all through his seeing too far into 
things — being discontented with makeshifts — thinking o' per- 
fection in things, and then sickened that there's no such thing 
as perfection." Cytherea, the heroine, feels "almost ashamed 
to be seen walking such a world," and Manston, the villain, 
feels that it is necessary to be honest because nothing can be 
achieved by stratagem in a world whose materials are such as 
he sees. 

Even in his professedly lighter novels the futility of life 
intrudes upon Hardy. Ethelberta wishes she were in a quiet 
grave, and well out of this world; and laments that God Al- 
mighty did not kill off three-fourths of the Chickerel family. 
Ten children is a hopeless number. Joey remarks with the 
proud cynicism of extreme youth, "The world's a holler mock- 
ery — that's what I say." Picotee, who knows, retorts, "Yes, 
so it is, to some, but not to you." So, too, Christopher has to 
the full that attitude of resignation which is the outcome of 
gray views of life. 

In the four books where the tragedy is most intense, The 
Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess and 
Jude, this feeling of the barrenness of life, and of the evil 
plight of man in being alive attains its culmination. We might 
expect a man of violent extremes like the Mayor of Caster- 



34 

bridge to have black moods in which he would, like Job, curse 
the day wherein he was born; but we would scarcely antici- 
pate that the gentle Elizabeth should appraise life at a mod- 
erate value. Yet she is first attracted to Farfrae because he 
feels as she does about life, that "though one could be gay on 
occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of 
the actual drama." : When she is watching her mother through 
the nights of illness the "subtle-souled girl" is "asking herself 
why she was born, why sitting in a room and blinking at the 
candle ; why things around her had taken the shape they wore 
in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared 
at her so helplessly as if waiting for the touch of some wand 
that should release them from terrestrial constraint ; what that 
chaos called consciousness, which spun in her at this moment 
like a top, tended to, and began in." Even after her "bark has 
come into smooth water, she is not exuberantly happy, for she 
seems to feel still that happiness is "but the occasional episode 
in a general drama of pain." 

Both Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright have reached 
this point before their marriage. Eustacia idealizes Wildeve 
because she has arrived "at that stage of enlightenment which 
feels that nothing is worth while," and must fill up her spare 
hours. She tells Clym that she joins the mummers to get 
excitement because life depresses her. He, in his turn, has 
reached "the stage in a young man's life where the grimness 
of the general human situation first becomes clear, and the 
realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile." 

Tess is wholly convinced that it would have been better 
never to have been born. "Sheer experience had already 
taught her that, in some circumstances, there was one thing 
better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from 
leading any life whatever." "To her and her like, birth itself j 
was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratu- j 
itousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best 
could only palliate." One relief Tess has, the same that Schop- 
enhauer saw in a contemplation of the beautiful, and the sub- 
lime in nature. She can for the moment, pass out of herself. 
"She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment, of eve- 
ning when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced 



35 

that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize 
each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the 
plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible 
dimension." Relief comes in forgetting existence; when you 
remember it, when you see how "brute chance" rules the world, 
and the desired always comes after its value has departed, then 
you stand like Angel Clare and Tess, face to face after all their 
misfortunes and mistakes, but with the spectre of Alec between 
them, and implore something to shelter you from reality. 

But it is in J tide that the desire not to live reaches the 
awful. Little Time, a cousin of that symbolic child Pearl, in 
The Scarlet Letter, never enjoys anything. " 'I am very, very- 
sorry, father and mother. But please don't mind ! I can't help 
it. I should like the flowers very, very much if I didn't keep 
on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days !' " When 
his father and mother have had trouble to get a lodging, he 
says, "It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, 
wouldn't it?" and again, "If children make so much trouble, 
why do people have 'em ?" Finally when the poor little fellow 
has put an end to his questionings, Jude says of him, "It was 
in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys 
springing up amongst us in the last generation, — the outcome 
of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before 
they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. 
He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not 
to live." 

r~The sense of satiety that was so strong in Schopenhauer 
is equally pronounced in Hardy. His characters are often con- 
scious of their own perversity in despising what they have and 
wanting what they have not. Some of them even guard against 
this frailty by resorting to self-trickery. Eustacia Vye, cast 
by a capricious fate upon a heath where her charms are lost, 
is too conscious of the double tragedy in man, that he ever 
longs for what is beyond his reach, and quickly learns to scorn 
what he possesses. When Wildeve shows the independence of 
loving another, she does all in her power to win him back, 
summing up her feelings in this wise : "Indeed, I think I like 
you to desert me a little once now and then. Love is the dis- 
malest thing, where the lover is quite honest. Oh, it is a shame 



u 



36 

to say so, but it is true I" When on the other hand she realizes 
that Wildeve can belong to her, that the other woman no longer 
wants him, her passion for him is gone. "The sentiment which 
lurks more or less in all inanimate nature — that of not desiring 
the undesired of others — was lively as a passion in the super- 

I subtle, epicurean heart of Eustacia." 

Eustacia is not alone in her preference for the unattain- 
able. Ethelberta knows well how to apply this psychological 
fact to the practical art of keeping a man a lover. It is an in- 
stinct which she shares with many a woman in real life who 
has learned how to turn the human fickleness to her own ad- 
vantage. But the arts of all women in hoodwinking the god 
of fickleness are put to shame by the ingenuous device of the 
husband in Far from the Madding Crowd, who, finding that 
he was tiring of his wife, took off her ring and called her by 
her maiden name, and "as soon as he could thoroughly fancy 
he was doing wrong and committing the seventh, 'a got to like 
her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect picture of mutual 
love."* 

The idea of the decay of love is a favorite theme with 
Hardy. The Wessex Poems have many hints of it, the novels 
have many frank statements of this change tucked away in 
them. The Well-Beloved is an idealization of fickleness, and 
Jude is so clear and open a statement as to seem brutal. Many 
men beside Thomas Hardy have realized that absolute con- 
stancy in deed, in thought and in spirit between man and 
woman, or even between friends of the same sex, is a sheer 
impossibility. Ibsen showed us one solution in Love's Comedy, 
Hardy gives us another in Jude. And both of them bear the 
onus of having ruthlessly dragged to light a lurking problem 
we would fain forget. 

The nature in man decrees that he shall lightly value what 
he has and desire what he does not own. The "brute chance" 
outside of him adds this bitter drop that so long as he desires 
he seldom attains, but when he has ceased from wishing, the 
once coveted is often given to him. So Christopher tells Ethel- 
berta, who has remarked that at the bottom of her heart she 
doesn't care whether she succeeds or not, "For that very reason 
you are likely to do it. My idea is, make ambition your busi- 



37 

ness and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but 
make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, 
and you will succeed. So impish are the ways of the gods." 
To realize how deep-imbedded is this instinct, we have only 
to reflect how often we shrink from revealing our real desires 
or how we pretend that we have others, just because we are 
afraid that the very whisper of them will attract ill-luck to 
them. "A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood," 
says Hardy in A Pair of 6lue Eyes, "is that inexorable circum- 
stance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts. Re- 
nounce a desire for a long-contested position, and go on an- 
other tack, and after awhile the prize is thrown at you, seem- 
ingly in disappointment that no more tantalizing is possible. " 

This is akin to the philosophy of renunciation taught Eliz- 
abeth Jane by a checkered life. For she is of the stern stuff 
that will not speak in favor of compensation. She can resign 
herself, she can bow to the inevitable, but she will never admit 
that what has been given her is better than what she sought. 
"Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure dis- 
appointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it 
had happened that what she had desired had not been granted 
her, and what had been granted her she had not desired. So 
she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled 
days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and won- 
dered what unwished for thing Heaven might send her in 
place of him. ,, 

The reason that a man like Hardy can not be lightly set 
aside, as those who wish to preserve the illusion that the world 
is wholly fair, would counsel, is that his most gloomy utter- 
ances find an echo in our daily experiences. Very probably 
we consider it wise to ignore these facts, or to give them a 
different explanation, but we must admit they are there, and 
are no figments of a pessimistic imagination. Ethelberta's 
butler father read human nature truly. "People always want 
what's kept from them, and don't value what's given." Tess 
is true to the general attitude of regarding evil as the natural 
lot of mankind, and expecting bad luck even in trivial affairs, 
when she says, "All this good fortune may be scourged out o' 
me afterwards by a lot of ill. That's how God mostly does," 



I 



38 

The hero of the Laodicean, too, trembles at one time because 
the course of his love seems to run too smoothly. But it is in 
The Hand of Ethelberta that this feeling finds true ironical 
expression: "At the most propitious moment the distance to 
the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man's spirits must 
not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to 
his insight." 

Maeterlinck in recognizing this freak of destiny suggests 
three ways of accepting it. The Roman, Paulus iEmilius, who 
has lost his sons at the moment of a great victory is glad that 
the arrows of fate are directed against him rather than against 
the state, for some one must bear the brunt of an inconstant 
fortune. Job would have said, "The Lord gave and the Lord 
hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Marcus 
Aurelius would perhaps have argued that as he was no longer 
allowed to love those whom he wished to love, he must learn 
to love those whom he did not love as yet. It is needless to 
say that none of these solutions would satisfy Hardy. Why 
should fortune be inconstant? Why should the Lord take 
away what he gives? Why is there not some other way to 
teach me to love all men? This is just another aspect of the 
caprice that rules the world. The butler philosopher Chickerel 
sums up all we know : "I never believe in anything that comes 
in the shape of a wonderful luck. As it comes, so it goes." 

yxhe idea that chance rules, that caprice is everywhere, 
that the "inherent will to enjoy" and the "circumstantial will 
against enjoyment" are ever in conflict lies at the bottom of 
Hardy's philosophy. One would expect, therefore, to find 
many direct and definite statements of purposelessness. It is 
neither possible nor necessary to quote all the passages which 
are deeply tinged with Hardy's view that the world is governed 
by a blind force. There are two in The Return of the Native 
which are sufficiently characteristic to stand as delegates for 
the others. "Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. 
On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. 
She had the passions and instincts which make a faultless god- 
dess, that is, those which make not quite a faultless woman. 
Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely 
in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spin- 



39 

die, and the shears at her own free-will, few in the world would 
have noticed the change of government. There would have 
been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors 
here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, 
the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious interchange of 
caresses and blows, as those we endure now." "He did some- 
times think he had been ill used by fortune so far as to say that 
to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aim- 
ing to advance with glory, they should calculate how to retreat 
without shame. But that he and his had been sarcastically and 
pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls 
he did not. maintain long. It is usually so, except with the 
sternest of men. The placable human race, in its generous en- 
deavor to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a first 
cause, has always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of 
lower moral quality than its own ; and, even while it sits down 
and weeps by the waters of Babylon, invents excuses for the 
oppressor which prompts its tears." 

Mr. Archer in hi&Real Conversations quotes a saying of 
Hardy : "What are my books but one plea against 'man's in- 
humanity to man' — to woman-^-and to the lower animals?" 
He goes on to take the position that Maeterlinck takes in Lc 
Temple Enseveli that it is time enough to talk of inherent in- 
justice, when we have done away with the injustice of men. 
Nevertheless one feels inclined to answer Hardy's question and 
say that his books are also a statement of God's inhumanity to 
man. It is true that we feel to our innermost depths the ar- 
raignment of man-made conventions in Tess and Jude, and in 
lesser fashion in many of the other novels and poems. Con- 
ventions and general opinions seem always to take the obvious, 
and to leave not even a corner for the more subtle truths. 
Therefore these neglected verities become the discovery of 
artist after artist, and slowly, oh how slowly, are forced upon 
public opinion. Thus we see Hardy recognizing in Tess a 
truth that Hawthorne formulated in The Marble Faun, that 
spiritual and mental growth can come through sin as well as 
through innocence,* that all that is necessary is that the spirit 
be startled into life, and that it matters not what startles it. 
He sees, too, another oft-neglected truth, that blackness of sin 
depends upon the motive, not upon the result. \ In "The Dance 



40 

at the Phoenix' ' he turns the light upon another spectre which 
ought to teach us charity but is too seldom owned by society, 
that we do not know what is latent in us. 

If this were all of Hardy's message, there would be noth- 
ing to separate him from Ibsen, from Pinero, Jones, and Shaw 
and a host of others who lay bare social inconsistencies; and 
certainly nothing to connect his name with that of Schopen- 
hauer. It has been said that from his earliest book Desperate 
Remedies published in 1870 to his most recent The Dynasts 
there runs an "ever increasing passion in the doubt or denial 
of the goodness of God." At the bottom of the gloominess 
Hardy so often finds in nature, of the cruelty of her laws, of 
her sympathy with man's more ignoble aims, at the bottom 
of man's restlessness, of his wish he had never been born, of 
his indifference to a history that tells only of pain and unful- 
filled intentions, of his indifference to religion; at ; the bottom 
of his expectation of ill, and his general sense of the unex- 
plained and undemanded existence of evil, there is always the 
thought of uselessness. If we knew any one profited, even if 
we knew that some vengeful god were full of mirth at our 
misery, we could grimly endure; but all that we can discover 
from the facts of the case is that some power which is either 
blind, or automatic, or both, has set in motion a world whose 
basic note is pain. No one can question the omnipotence of 
such a power, but of its benevolence what can be said? 

Schopenhauer says it is not benevolent. There is no har- 
mony in existence. It is the frank statement of this lack of 
harmony that makes him a new note in occidental philosophy. 
Hardy is equally outspoken through the medium of novel, 
poem and play. There is no reason why. Things are simply 
unarranged and unreasonable. The two men are not entirely 
alike in the details of their problem, not at all alike in their 
solution, they are alike in starting from the same basis, the 
basis of utter purposelessness. It might be possible to parallel 
many a passage in Schopenhauer, with a like one in Hardy. 
Such a process is neither entertaining nor entirely trustworthy. 
It savors too much of seeing what we want to see. But with- 
out unduly stretching the material to fit the theory, it is possi- 
ble to say that they are alike in the spirit which drives them to 
utterance, ? ! 



CHAPTER III. 
Effect of Purposelessness : Tragedy. 

If Schopenhauer and Hardy have departed from the gen- 
eral run of men in regarding the whole of life as purposeless, 
what effect will this have upon their view of life as we see 
it in events and actions? Obviously there will be a change 
of values. What seems important to men who see each deed 
and each occurrence as parts of a purposive whole, may seem 
worthless to them. Nowhere will this shifting of values be so 
evident as in a consideration of what they regard as tragic. So 
the three questions of what is the more usual view of tragedy, 
what constitutes a tragedy for Schopenhauer, what is used as 
a tragedy by Hardy become all-important. 

The essence of tragedy is conflict The old definition that 
tragedy represents the triumph of the universal over the par- 
ticular still suffices, although we have many times changed the 
meaning of universal. If we give to it the meaning we have 
found in Schopenhauer and Hardy, then the universal is a 
blind irrationality for which no laws can be given, no predic- 
tions made.) It will strike where it will strike, here with dire 
results, there with good, (it is of course the dire results which 
concern us. Obviously the particular who encounters this 
universal will be an object of pity, not one of blame. Indeed 
there is no tragedy in what our writers would call the deeper 
sense of the word, as long as the individual is able to help him- 
self. Tragedy enters only when the individual has reached the 
limit of his power of resistance to evil, and is blameless. Thus, 
in this tragedy the universal takes things into its own hands, 
whereas in the other the individual took the initiative. , Pity of 
a certain sort one always had for the individual, but it was the 
pity for those who make mistakes, the pity for the sinner ; now 
it is the pity for those who are sinned against. Like our pity, 
our terror has changed its nature. Formerly it was definite, we 
feared the rewards and punishments which would surely fol- 
low ; now we scarcely know what we fear, we call it the lack of 

(41) 



42 

justice. Like the new pity this terror has the tinge of ironic 
bitterness. As we can no longer blame the individual, and as 
we must have one side right or wrong to produce a conflict, 
we transfer our protest to the universal. And it is in the sense 
that we know nothing of the morality of this universal, and 
from what we see can only conclude it is less high than our 
own, that the full poignancy of this tragedy is felt. 

With the Greeks, the more usual form of tragedy pre- 
vailed. Man was in conflict with Fate, but it was an optimis- 
tic conflict, because Fate was law-abiding. Among themselves 
the gods had laws, it was when man came into opposition with 
these that he fell into tragedy. Men recognized that they were 
victims of Chance, but they did not think of her as powerless 
and blind. W. L. Courtney in some essays on The Idea of 
Tragedy says that originally the Greeks, like the Hebrews, 
thought of their gods as jealous of human happiness, and 
of fate as something inexorable and rigid, which made men 
its sport ; but that yEschylus, realizing that these views would 
interfere with the dramatic interest, modified them. His fate 
is not the implacable thing, Adrasteia, but Nemesis, the 
apportioner, the power which allots to every man according 
to his deserts. Man excites the ire of the gods, not their 
jealousy. We know, too, that Aristotle did not recognize as 
a true tragic hero the good man who came from prosperity 
into adversity. His true hero must contain within him a mix- 
ture of good and bad. 

In the great era of Elizabethan tragedy God takes the 
place of Fate. His decrees or the general moral sense of men 
forms the universal, the individual Lear or Tamburlaine who 
puts himself into antagonism with these decrees must bear the 
penalty. Fate, however, is enthroned within man rather than 
on some high point without. Both the particular will which is 
rebelling, and the universal moral laws which must triumph 
are within the same man. He helps form the universal, he 
does not find it ready formed as in the old Grecian days. Ham- 
let's tragedy takes place within his own soul. 

In our own day tragedy like everything else, seems com- 
plex and many-sided. With the growing belief that all cri- 
teria of right and wrong are within man and not in some god 



y 

43 

without, there has been an intensification of the struggle 
within the individual. Two opposing forces meet in the same 
person, one may be the conventional sense of right, one a 
more fundamental instinct, as in Ibsen's The Doll's House: 
or one may be the narrow selfish side of a man, the other his 
wider, freer self, as in The Master Builder. This has drawn 
tragedy to realism, because it is in everyday humdrum life that 
we find these struggles the fiercest. There is also a tragedy 
that has taken the form 6f symbolism as in Maeterlinck's The 
Blind, Joyzelle, and The Seven Princesses. And there is an- 
other view of tragedy which is not distinct from the tragedy / 
of realism or that of symbolism, but is distinct from the Gre-/ 
cian idea of Nemesis and the Elizabethan idea of the surety' 
of the moral triumph. This view is that in the majority of 
cases the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, but that 
there are exceptions where the just man suffers and the wicked 
man goes scot free, and that these exceptions form a special and 
particular kind of tragedy. Aristotle's true tragic hero is no 
longer the only hero, he has had to admit into the arena the 
Job-like man who has fallen from prosperity into adversity. 

All three of these elements of tragedy enter into Hardy. 
He is the realist who finds his tragedies in his own Wessex 
and among the problems that press upon us to-day. He may 
often wish that he had lived in the Middle Ages when belief 
was everywhere prevalent and doubts had not arisen, but he \ - 
cannot humor himself with the relief of living imaginatively 
in such a time. He is no shirker, and he must face the un- 
pleasant to-day with only a lingering wish that he could have 
had his lot cast in a happier and less strenuous time. ' Symbol- 
ism on the whole finds little place in his work. He is usually 
matter-of-fact and direct in telling what he means; but, aside 
from the symbolic use which he often makes of nature, there 
is in The Dynasts the double set of antagonists, the aggressing 
Napoleon and the righteous defenders of the peace of Europe, 
and back of them the impotence of man and the compelling 
force of the Immanent Will. As to dealing with the exceptional 
man who receives more than he merits, it is true that Hardy 
does that, but the vital point is whether he would admit that 
they were very exceptional ; or granted that they are, whether 



r 



44 

one exception would not prove the point against purposive- 
ness as well as a majority of cases. 

People to-day do not doubt that we can undeservedly suf- 
fer. Maeterlinck, who is the best and deepest kind of an 
optimist, says, "I do not pretend that destiny is just, that it re- 
wards the good and punishes the wicked," and in Le Temple 
Enseveli, he shows that there is grossest injustice in visiting 
the sins of the fathers upon the children, since no account is 
taken of the motive that caused the sin, and a disease con- 
tracted in an act of heroism may be transmitted as quickly as 
one caught in a selfish career of vice. But most people are not 
willing to go as far as Schopenhauer and say that life in itself 
is the worst form of undeserved suffering. In a sense the 
world's greatest tragedies, though not always its greatest 
dramas, are those in which the victim is clearly in the right, or 
those in which both sides think they are right. The great 
dramas of Christ and of Prometheus are of the first order; 
all religious persecutions, all civil wars like our own great 
Rebellion and the Revolution of 1789 in France are of the 
second. In both these cases, you have men who are willing to 
die for the right they see, who triumph even in their defeat, 
because they represent the universal. But the Schopenhauerian 
hero does not die because he finds something worth dying 
for, but because he finds "nothing worth living for." What 
life would teach all men if they had ears to hear, the victim 
of tragedy is forced to learn. More quickly than his brethren 
he comes to the realization that all is futile in a world con- 
structed like this one. 

Tragedy, says Schopenhauer, is to be regarded as the 
summit of poetical art. It is significant that this highest poeti- 
cal achievement represents the terrible side of life. "The 
unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, 
the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of 
the just and innocent" are all the subject matter of tragedy. 
At last the noblest men, purified by suffering, renounce the 
ends they have striven for, and renounce the pleasures of life. 
They have learned their lesson of the nature of the world, and 
the futility of striving against it. "The demand for so-called 
poetical justice," continues Schopenhauer, "rests on entire 



45 

misconception of the nature of tragedy, and, indeed, of the 
nature of the world itself." He asks in what Ophelia, Desde- 
mona and Cordelia have offended. "The true sense of tragedy 
is the deeper insight that it is not his own individual sins that 
the hero atones for, but original sin, that is, the crime of exist- 
ence itself; 'for the greatest crime of man is that he was 
born' ; as Calderon expresses it." 

Schopenhauer distinguishes three kinds of tragedy. 
Those that deal with a character of extraordinary wickedness, 
such as Iago, or Richard III ; those which portray blind fate, 
chance, and error, as the GEdipus Rex" of Sophocles, and last 
and nearest to us, those that are brought about by simple 
juxtaposition of ordinary characters. No one is specially to 
blame; trifling accidents, innocent acts bring about great en- 
tanglements. In The Woodlanders Giles Winterborne refuses 
to turn his heavily loaded team out of the road for the pas- 
sage of the haughty Felice Charmond. This sows in her mind 
the prejudice that makes her refuse to allow Giles to renew his 
right to the houses, a right lost by the merest chance. This 
refusal causes him to lose Grace, and in the end causes Felice 
to lose Dr. Fitzpiers, because he has married Grace. Such a": 
chain of incidents conveys the force of Schopenhauer's remark 
that this kind of tragedy is so near and horrible and sinister as 
to make us feel ourselves already in the midst of hell. J 

Schopenhauer, then, would not for a moment admit that 
the man who failed to be rewarded or punished according to 
his deserts was exceptional. A lack of poetic justice is a 
necessary correlative of a world composed of irrational will 
and its manifestations ; but the truly tragic lies in the general * 
recognition of the lack of justice in life as a whole, and not in 
any given case. This idea that it is only the pain of all life and 
not any individual pain which is tragic, is a favorite one with 
Schopenhauer, and is repeated in many of his minor essays. 
The given case is important only because it shows the nature 
of every case. The entire trend of life is tragic. We see 
merely in the glare of the search-light what we could see any- 
where. 

Our first cursory thought about Thomas Hardy is that 
he has gone back to the Greek idea of tragedy. Man and 



S 



T 



46 

Fate, seem pitted against each other, and Fate is the stronger. 
There is the closing sentence in Tess to confirm this idea. 
"7 ustic e' .was done, and the President of the Immortals (in 
^Eschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess." But as 
we have seen in "Hap" man is not even so dignified as to be 
the sport of the gods, he is an utterly useless factor in a blind 
scheme. So a second thought tells us that nothing ever recurs 
in exactly the same form. Life is like the river of Heraclitus, 
and we cannot step twice into the same stream. If Hardy 
and other writers of our time center their dramas about des- 
tiny we may be very sure it will not be the same Destiny who 
dwelt with the Greeks. 

Maeterlinck in discussing the fact that the drama of to- 
day has turned to the regions of psychology and of moral prob- 
lems, says, "There is no longer a God to widen, or master, the 
action; nor is there an inexorable fate to form a mysterious, 
solemn and tragical background for the slightest gesture of 
man." "There still abides with us, it is true, a terrible un- 
known." This unknown he finds within man and Hardy 
without man. That seems to be in reality, the sole kinship 
between the latter's idea of destiny and that of the Greeks, that 
the two opposing forces are man and a power outside him. 
This fact that Hardy is an innovator, that he has reversed the 
traditions of tragedy both in our drama and in our novel is, 
perhaps, best understood by a comparison of three dramatic 
productions which have the same theme, the suffering of the 
innocent. 

In Antigone, the Duchess of Malfi, and Tess, we have 
three women who did not merit the accumulation of horrors 
that came to them. Fortune was most unjust to each of the 
three, with that worst kind of injustice which takes no account 
of the spirit and motives of the victims. For these women 
were all innocent with the deepest innocence, the pureness of 
heart that not only shall see God, but does see Him. They are 
among those who most wring our hearts, the unfortunate, the 
ill-fated ones who draw misfortune to them as the magnet 
draws the iron. But in the nature of the fate that overtook 
them, there is the most essential, the most vital distinction. 

Their doom was unwarranted by their deeds, it was 



47 

lacking in all higher justice; yet Antigone and the Duchess 
had a hand in their fate. They chose their course, pitted them- 
selves against destiny, went into the conflict with their eyes 
open; whereas Tess was an unsuspicious victim, seized in her 
innocence by malicious circumstances. Never did she dare **** 
fate, never did she have the satisfaction of fighting, even in a 
losing cause. Antigone knew when she chose to bury her 
brother, that she chose her own doom. She knew she trans- 
gressed the law of the ruler of the state; she preferred to be 
true to the law of the goas. Perhaps she expected a miracle, 
that Creon would relent, or the gods she served would inter- 
vene; but she knew what could happen, and what would most 
probably come to pass, and she advanced open-eyed and cour- 
ageous to her doom. The Duchess, too, chose openly. She 
knew when she made offers of marriage to Antonio that she 
invoked the sure enmity of her brothers, and took not only her 
own life, but that of her lover in her hands. Tess is the vic- 
tim of a shiftless family, who prey upon her sensibilities, and 
drive her forth to the house of her rich relations where her fate 
lies in wait for her. Of course she could have resisted her 
fate. Tess has her weaknesses. Her power of resistance is 
not adamantine. If it were not for this weak side in her, she 
would deserve the criticism Lionel Johnson makes of her, that 
she is so blameless as to be uninteresting. It is the feeling 
that though ninety-nine girls with Tess's heredity, her en- 
vironment, and her temptations would have yielded as she 
yielded, there might have been one who would have seen the 
way of avoidance of all these difficulties, which makes her lot 
so tragic. Tess's exceptionalness consists not in wise fore- 
sight, but in another virtue; she can pass through sin and^/" 
degradation and come out undefiled. 

It may be said that Tess transgressed a law of society, 
as the Duchess a conventional law and Antigone one of the 
state, and that each simply met with the penalty of her trans- 
gression; but it was never given to Tess to choose whether 
she would transgress or not. She did not risk defiance of a * 
social code for the sake of something dearer in the shape of 
pleasure or duty, as these two did, or as Monna Vanna did. 
Her tragedy fell upon her with no invitation from herself, 



48 

and brought no compensation. So our pity for Antigone and 
for the Duchess is tempered with a kind of glory in their dar- 
ing, our pity for Tess has no alleviation. They are conquerors, 
they are subdued, but triumphant; Tess is a victim, she is 
crushed. 

Antigone, indeed, is among our grandly heroic figures. 
Maeterlinck classes her among the sages, and calls her drama 
the drama of wisdom, of which there are few examples in the 
world. For Antigone defied bad fortune for the sake of a 
duty, she was the sacrifice to all she held to be holy and in- 
violable in a sister's relation to a brother. Where the Duchess 
ventured all for the sake of her own love and happiness, Anti- 
gone yielded even her love and happiness to the call of the 
highest in her. "Thy choice was to live; mine to die," says 
she to her sister. "One world approved thy wisdom ; another, 
mine." There is all that is glorious, and nothing that is hope- 
less in the fate of Antigone, for it was given to her to find 
something that was worth dying for. The Duchess, too, 
though the path of noble self-sacrifice is not her lot, dies like 
a Duchess, full of pride, dignity and a willingness to pay for 
the happiness she has bought. But Tess dies an ignoble 
death after a few paltry days of happiness with Angel Clare, 
days for which she has paid again and again in former 
agonies of sorrow. She dies gladly because it is better to go 
before she awakes from her dream, before Angel learns to 
despise her. Never has death seemed repulsive, but life has 
always sung in her ears the refrain, "It would be better not 
to be born." How truly might it be said of her that she found 
"nothing worth living for!" 

It is in them all to question the decrees of the gods. 
They know that their fate is undeserved, and being one and 
all women of spirit, they must ask why it should come to 
them. Antigone and Tess have a right to a' more subtle form 
of questioning than the Duchess, who has only her own misery 
to account for, whose woes start with herself. The others 
may indeed ask why they should be involved in the deeds of 
their forefathers? Why the descendants of (Edipus should 
perish for his unwitting sins, and why this daughter of the 
house of D'Urberville should be cursed with their weak- 



49 

nesses are questions for the high gods of justice. Antigone 
questions like a Greek. We cannot avoid the decrees of 
fate, we cannot explain them, we must simply submit to them. 
Inexorable and inscrutable are the ways of the gods. "And 
what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why, hapless one, 
should I look to the gods any more, — what ally should I in- 
voke, — when by piety I have earned the name of impious? 
Nay, then, if these things are pleasing to the gods, when I 
have suffered my doom, ]7shall come to know my sin; but if 
the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller meas- 
ure of evil than they, on their part, mete wrongfully to me." 
The Duchess of Malfi is even more submissive : 

"Must I, like to a slave-born Russian, 
Account it praise to suffer tyranny? 
And yet, O heaven, thy heavy hand is in't ! 
I have seen my little boy oft scourge his top 
And compared myself to't : naught made me e'er 
Go right but heaven's scourge-stick. " 

And though she learns to curse the stars, and the world to 
its first chaos, she never rebels against the general injustice 
that could allow such a life as hers to be so maimed. Tess, 
however, does see her tragedy as part of a whole world of 
suffering, and not as an isolated case. She has compassion 
on the wounded birds after her sorrowful night in the wood, 
because they are in worse plight than herself, since she is 
whole. She feels her general insignificance, that she is of no 
more consequence than a fly; she sees the unfairness of her 
situation, that it has not been in her power — "nor is it in 
anybody's power — to feel the whole truth of golden opin- 
ions when it is possible to profit by them" ; and she realizes 
that she has not merited her judgment. "Never in her life 
— she could swear it from the bottom of her soul — had she 
intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. 
Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of 
inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so 
persistently?" She has ^earned that there is an element in the 
world with which we can not reckon, because it is not law- 
abiding, as we are law-abiding. "Brute chance" met her, and 
"brute chance" won. 



I / 



50 

W. L. Cross, in his Development of the English Novel, 
has this to say of Thomas Hardy: "Tess of the D'Urber- 
villes, his mightiest production, is a tragedy that at no period 
in our history other than these fin de siecle days could have 
been written; or, if written, could have been understood." 
The reason for such a statement is that in this novel, as in 
so many of his others, we get the conflicts that are not "sig- 
nificant," and perhaps never before in the western world, were 
we so bold in challenging their insignificance. Professor 
Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, has pointed out 
the distinction between tragedies that are significant and those 
that are not, and has admirably summed up just the side of 
life the Hardy novels show. "The worst tragedy of the world 
is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything 
spiritual seems to be subject among us — the tragedy of the 
diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of what- 
/'' ever is significant. An open enemy you can face. The 
temptation to do evil is indeed a necessity for spirituality. 
But one's own foolishness, one's ignorance, the cruel accidents 
of disease, the fatal misunderstandings that part friends and 
lovers, the chance mistakes that wreckf nations: — these things 
we lament most bitterly, not because they are painful, but 
because they are farcical^ distracting— not foemen worthy of c 
the sword of the spirit, nor yet mere pangs of our finitude \ 
that we can easily learn to face courageously, as one can be I 
indifferent to physical pain. No, these things do not make * 
life merely painful to us ; they make it hideously petty. They 
are like the "mean knights" that beat down Launcelot during 
his hopeless wandering in search of the Grail." 

These insignificant conflicts, then, these intrusions of 
the mechanical world into the world of spirit, these blind 
irrationalities, are "the door to which Thomas Hardy finds no 
key." With this admission, there throng about us a whole host 
of unanswered questions. Does he mean that this is a general 
condition of life or an occasional one? Does he consistently 
present this view? Does he do it from artistic motives or 
from those of belief? Is he true to life in so emphasizing 
one side of it ? Is there some obvious solution to such seeming 
ironies, which he fails to perceive? 



5i 

Mr. Hardy so definitely says, in the Real Conversations, 
reported by Mr. William Archer, that it is better not to be 
born, and that life is incomplete and grotesque, "bounded, 
circumscribed, cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd," that it is evident 
he regards all life as a tragedy. If life in itself is tragic, then 
the particular tragedy is not different in substance from the 
others, it only happens to be more dramatic. There is just 
a hint of humanitarian feeling here. We no longer look upon 
our lives as exceptional m individual things, but as parts of 
a great whole. More and more to-day are we coming to say 
and to think, even if we do not live up to it, that all men are 
brothers. Schopenhauer's system included the whole world 
under the self. If all mankind are linked together by suffering, 
then my suffering is typical, but not peculiar. Elizabeth Jane, 
when she had reached a position where lighter-natured girls 
would have been happy, remains merely tranquil. "But her 
strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved 
less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there 
were others receiving less who had deserved much more. 
And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she 
did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, 
when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been 
accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed 
to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a 
general drama of pain." 

But even if the one case were peculiar and unusual, the 
charge of irrationality is still maintained. If the one per- 
fectly innocent and righteous person can meet with the calami- 
ties that overtook Tess, or the petty hardships that came to 
Elizabeth Jane, then the law of justice needs revision. A hun- 
dred cases will not make the need more apparent, because we 
can see no reason why this law, which has the possibility of 
perfection should err. Omnipotence and Benevolence surely 
have the ability to create a world without error and unfair- 
ness, yet every day shows us error and unfairness. Herein lies 
our tragedy. Maeterlinck takes as the theme of one of his 
essays that moment when the civilized world watches the issue 
between Edward VII of England and the destiny that 
threatens to rob him of life at the very moment when he has 



52 

attained, presumably, his heart's desire. He calls it, "the 
essential tragedy of man, of the universal and perpetual drama 
enacted between his feeble will and the enormous unknown 
force that encompasses him." This particular instance is 
typical of the drama which has unfolded itself every day since 
life first began, and it gives us a chance to compare our dif- 
ferent ways of viewing it. Some saw in it an incensed Provi- 
dence chastising the pride of man. "But," says Maeterlinck, 
in words which Hardy might have used, "why does this God, 
more perfect than men, ask of us what a perfect man would 
not ask ?" Others saw in it the wretchedness and insignificance 
of man. He himself saw the victory of science, one more cer- 
tainty was added to the sum of certainties in the world, 
one more point was wrested from the unknown. The imper- 
fect world and the perfect God, there is the irreconcilable par- 
adox. And it makes no difference whether an incident like 
that of Edward VII is unique and exceptional, or whether 
they have been of daily occurrence since the world first came 
into existence; the paradox is apparent in either case. 

So it is the ironic side of life that Hardy deals with. Evo- 
lution has been no easy doctrine for any one. Nature's gran- 
diose methods, her prodigality, her absolute carelessness of 
the individual depress the individual, man. Man's indifference 
to other men, his lack of charity to his kind, add to that im- 
pression. We look beyond man and nature for some guardian 
angel who shall recompense us with some strength or some 
faith, and there is nothing that can satisfy our reason. All 
the proofs point to a power which takes no account of us. 
This is so hard and bitter a truth; it is so incomprehensible 
that a God-loving man should not find a man-loving God, 
that men have not faced it. Here is a man who does face it, 
who devotes all his art to showing this most seamy side of 
life. The "joy of life" which intoxicated the world of Eliza- 
beth is a thing unknown to the world of Thomas Hardy. At 
the most you will have pleasurable episodes, moderate tran- 
quillity, an occasional giddy ■ hour of forgetfulness. The 
things that come to us when our first fresh desire for them has 
become stale, the things that we must renounce, the things we 
should have and do not get, the things we do get and should 



53 

not have, these will be the themes of our writer. A typical 
illustration is the collection of short stories called "Life's Little 
Ironies." There is not one person in the series of tales that 
gets what he wants, yet not one who wants anything that is 
unreasonable, and not one who misses his happiness by any 
plotted wickedness or villainy. A few mistakes, a blunder or 
two, and lives are spoiled. If happiness were far off, if these 
characters never glimpsed it, there would be no ground of 
complaint ; but they one' and all see it ; one and all miss it. 
The merest trifling change and all would be so different, and 
therein lies the irony. 

There are two ways of realizing that Hardy gives us the 
character of defeat* rather than the character of victory; the 
man who endures, rather than the man who triumphs, either 
with an inner or an outer triumph. If we look through the 
titles of his novels for those that are satisfactory in the sense 
in which a Dickens novel is satisfactory, where the neglected 
and deserving ones are rewarded and the bad ones are dis- 
covered and punished, and the world is ruled as we like to 
see it ruled, only three can by any possibility occur to us, 
Under the Greenwood Tree, The Trumpet Major, and A 
Laodicean. Of these three The Trumpet Major gives only 
momentary gratification. To be sure one does lay it down 
with that feeling of being soothed and refreshed which is 
altogether pleasing in these days of the problem play and the 
problem novel, but that is because of its idyllic charm, a charm 
unbroken by any digression into the fields of gloomy specula- 
tion. A moment's reflection, however, shows us the grim 
spectre of irony in the background. It is summed up in the 
words of Anne. "No one loves me so well as you, John; 
nobody in the world is so worthy to be loved ; and yet I cannot 
anyhow love you rightly." Bob is not worthy of Anne, John 
is too worthy ; yet it is the fickle Bob who wins her, the faith- 
ful John who wins death. 

Under the Greenwood Tree just faintly suggests an ironic 
condition. Dick wonders at the prosaicness of his father and 
mother, and reflects that all the fathers and mothers he knows 
have the same unromantic kind of love; yet in marrying 
Fancy, who has more than the usual girlish taste for "fixings" 



54 

and the little refinements of life, and who has once been faith- 
less to him because of this liking, he runs a risk of as great 
a prosaicness and perhaps a less contented one, as any father 
and mother in Mellstock. Paula, the Laodicean, learns to 
separate the gold from the tinsel, and truly respects and honors 
Somerset, yet she can wish he were a De Stancy with all the 
romantic interest that attaches to that old family, which she 
sees decaying and passing away as all things must pass away. 

The other novels do not leave us with any sense of a 
world ruled as we would like to have it ruled. Tess and Jude 
are among the hardest books to read, and to reread them calls 
for a genuine act of courage. They create in us the feeling 
which life often gives us, that we must interfere to set things 
right ; that surely we would not muddle them, as they are now 
muddled. The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native 
are those worst of tragedies, the tragedies of mistakes, of little 
deficiencies of firmness or of foresight that bring such dis- 
proportionate effects. Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue 
Eyes are of the same nature, but less convincingly effective. 
The Hand of Ethelberta and The Well Beloved, which are 
designedly lighter in tone, leave their tang of bitterness. Cir- 
cumstances far too often force the Ethelbertas to desert their 
better selves, and the vagueness and whimsicality of their 
deires far too often keep the Pierstons from genuine happi- 
ness. Far from the Madding Crowd vibrates between the 
idyllic charms of sheep shearing and agricultural suppers, and 
the irony of hopeless passions like that of Boldwood and the 
quiet sufferings of Gabriel Oak. 

There is another phase of the general irony of life which 
interests Hardy. It is the rather dark psychological problems 
which often fascinated Hawthorne. Among the Wessex 
Poems, there is one called "The Dance at the Phoenix," in 
which an old woman, who has long been a virtuous wife, is 
so mastered by an irresistible impulse that she slips away from 
her sleeping husband and returns to the giddy habits of her 
youth. There is a story in A Group of Noble Dames which 
also illustrates the fact that we none of us know what is in 
us. Like Barbara of the House of Grebe, we believe that our 
love is divine, and that no physical misfortune, no moral delin- 



55 

quency could make us cease from loving those we now hold 
dear. Yet it takes only a moment's thought about our instinc- 
tive repugnance to all that is abnormal and deformed, to con- 
vince us that, confronted with such a mutilation, we, like Bar- 
bara, might find our boasted love was only human, and could 
but shudder and turn away. "Squire Patrick's Lady" and 
"An Imaginative Woman" show curious psychological prob- 
lems, but, though the latter well reveals the tragedy of that 
utter loneliness and lack 01 sympathy which can drive to death 
two sensitive people, who, if they could have known each 
other, would have found companionship and comfort, they do 
not add any new shade to the sombre picture we have watched 
Hardy paint. fc-** AA4*tef*4*n*> <*■£ **k* "&*** 

If we leave a general consideration of the novels and turn 
to particular events and scenes, the irony of life is clearly 
evident. There is a short story called "The Waiting Sup- 
per" which is a typical illustration. The heroine who origin- 
ally married the wrong man is on the eve of marriage with 
the right one, when her former husband who has not been 
seen for some years, and is supposed to be dead, returns to 
her. He merely greets her and promises to return in an hour. 
She waits not only the hour and the night, but days and years ; 
afraid to marry her lover, lest this unwelcome husband come 
again. When they have both grown so old and staid that it no 
longer seems worth while to change their state of courtship 
for the state of marriage, his skeleton is found at the foot 
of a dam, where it has lain ever since the night he interrupted 
their union. One of the Wessex Tales, "Fellow Townsmen," 
has to quote its author, "that curious refinement of cruelty in 
the arrangement of events which often proceeds from the 
bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind 
Circumstance." The hero hears of the death of an unloved 
and unsympathetic wife, just one half hour after the mar- 
riage of a girl he has long loved. It is said of this man that 
his eyes had a curious look, best described by the word 
"bruised," "the sorrow that looked from them being largely 
mixed with the surprise of a man taken unawares." 

There is a certain amount of significance in the kind of 
characters Hardy chooses. He is not fond of the deliberately 



56 

wicked man, who plans to do evil. Manston in Desperate 
Remedies and Dare in A Laodicean are the only ones of this 
nature. He is apt to introduce the voluptuous, selfish type 
of man, or even woman, who is driven by his instincts rather 
than by his reason; and invariably creates misery without 
specially desiring or planning to do so. Such are Wildeve in 
The Return of the Native, Sergeant Troy in Far from the 
Madding Crowd, and to some extent Alec D'Urberville in 
Tess. Neither does he seem fond of depicting the man who 
is struggling with himself. In a measure we feel Jude's ef- 
forts to get the better of his many vices, and in the tale of 
"The Distracted Preacher," the conflict between the man's 
loyalty to his religion and his love for the fair smuggler is 

I rather lightly touched, as is Knight's conflict in A Pair of 
Blue Eyes; but in general man is not struggling with him- 
self, but with a malignly indifferent power outside him. We 
have no Markheims, no Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes. The 
typical Hardy hero is a passive man, more inclined to contem- 
plation than to action, to endurance than to defiance. The 
Mayor of Casterbridge is his one strenuous character in our 
American sense of the word. There is an expression in com- 
mon speech very applicable to the Mayor. "He brought it 
on himself." \ Indeed the Mayor cannot shirk the responsi- 
bility of his pride and stubbornness, can not place the blame 
on a cruel providence. But there is an irony in the Mayor's 
life, an irony with a truth in it that strikes home, as do all 
the Hardy ironies. When the Mayor does learn humility, 
when he does see his folly, his energy is gone, has been eaten 
up by these very mistakes. He knows how to begin a new 
life, but he has neither the desire nor the will. The "wisdom 
to do" comes with "departure of the zest for doing." 

The "insignificant" tragedies are, then, without doubt, 
an integral part of the work of Hardy. The question arises 

) whether he has so emphasized this side of existence because 
he is always seeing it, or because he needs to see it in the 
interests of artistic productions. He has himself said that 
"the crash of broken commandments is as necessary an ac- 
companiment to the catastrophe of a tragedy as the noise of 
drum and cymbals to a triumphal march," and Maeterlinck 



57 

has assured us that the * 'Angel of Sorrow can speak every 
language — there is not a word but she knows; but the lips 
of the Angel of Happiness are sealed, save when she tells of 
the savage's joys." Furthermore, Hardy tells us, when he 
writes on "Candour in English Fiction" in the Eclectic Mag- 
azine for March, 1890, that there is a revival of interest in 
great dramatic movements, in the collision between the indi- 
vidual and the general, once worked out by the dramatists of 
the Age of Pericles and those of the Age of Elizabeth. But, 
though things move in cycles, they are not true cycles, but 
what Comte happily characterized as "a looped orbit." We 
do not have revolution, but evolution, and the collision of 
to-day between the general and the individual demands new 
and original treatment. The original treatment which he 
mentions is a disclosure of those laws which are merely 
social expedients and have no basis in the heart of things ; and 
the showing of the triumph of the commonplace majority 
over the exceptional few. Such a statement of present-day 
needs in art may easily be stretched so as to cover all that is 
sombre in his own work, but it by no means proves that there 
is any divorce between his artistic instincts and his philoso- 
phy of life. Rather it shows that he mentions as artistic sub- 
jects, the very problems of the day which he considers most 
pressing. As for the feeling of the futility of all things, which 
he does not mention as an artistic possibilty, that is too much 
a part of the poems, of the novels, and of the chorus of The 
Dynasts, and is too frankly stated in various magazine articles 
to be merely an artistic atmosphere. It must be part of the 
man's philosophy of life. 

Closely connected with this question of how much gloom 
is to be regarded as an artistic scheme, is the kindred one of 
how far these little accidents, like the losing of letters and the 
delay of news, are to be regarded as true ironies of fate, how 
far as necessary devices of the drama or novel. There are 
dramas into which the element of extraneous chance does not 
enter, where naked soul is brought into contact with naked 
soul, openly and directly, and the conflict lies in the clash of 
forces bared. Such is Antigone, such is Monna Vanna. But 
if you imagine yourself constructing a drama or a dramatic 



I 



58 

novel, how could you do it unless you made some use of such 
devices as the dropping of letters, overhearing of conver- 
sations, and chance encounters? Situations must be made 
dramatic, they must convey to the spectator or reader the 
conditions that are in the minds or natures of the actors, and 
as they are sufficiently true to the experience of every one, 
the extraneous chances are legitimate. To be sure there is 
the finest art in selecting those circumstances which carry 
conviction. When as in Eden Phillpott's Secret Woman, the 
dashing rain interrupts a tense and powerful scene and drowns 
the one sentence which would have saved the whole tragedy, 
the mind of the reader revolts. The circumstance is too ab- 
normal. There are deaths also that are too opportune. We 
feel that the hero dies because he troubles his creator. 

If, then, some extraneous chances are, though not abso- 
lutely necessary, a highly valuable part of dramatic construc- 
tion, what ones and how many should be so considered ? The 
answer seems to be, all those that are inevitable, all those that 
are of the nature that if this hadn't happened, something 
else would, to bring about the result or the catastrophe. As 
we shall see, this will by no means cover the ironical chances 
of the Hardy stories. The "brute chances" which are in- 
evitable are those which come because the characters have put 
themselves in a position where something must happen. 
Othello often seems a drama of pure accidents that are brought 
about by the wicked scheming of Iago ; and Desdemona seems 
a mere victim caught in his evil machinations. But Desdemona 
has put herself in a position where there is every possibility that 
something will befall her. She has married a man of different 
race, age, religion, and traditions; married him because of a 
romantic attachment. There is always the bare possibility 
that she might find life a smooth sailing, but the chances are, 
as we say, that she will not, and that Iago but brought to a 
i focus what sooner or later must have come. So in The Re- 
J turn of the Native, Mrs. Yeobright is turned away from the 
door of her son, because Eustacia, his wife, thinks he hears 
her knocking, and he does not. It is the discovery later, that 
she has been there, and has not succeeded in gaining admit- 
tance, which brings about the rupture between Clym and Eus- 



59 

tacia, a rupture that from the first was inevitable, when one 
thinks of the difference between them, that what was valuable 
to her in the shape of gayety and social position and adven- 
ture, was as dust and ashes to him, with his desires of im- 
provement for his fellowmen. It is too old and common a 
situation to leave us in any doubt of the issue. Eustacia car- 
ried within her the seeds of discord, and had it not come 
through the turning away of Mrs. Yeobright, it would have 
come in some other fashion. 

So much for what is inevitable. In this book the inevit- 
able and the utterly extraneous stand side by side. On the 
night when Eustacia has decided to flee with Wildeve, Gym's 
letter ought to have been brought to her ; but first it is forgotten 
by the bearer, then, when it is delivered, her grandfather 
thinks she is asleep and does not give it to her. Had she re- 
ceived it, she might have gone back to Clym, and perhaps they 
would have wrought out a mutual forbearance. Such are the 
"brute chances" that are not inevitable. They are our con- 
stant regrets. They are the little, trifling things that, had 
they been different, might have changed the whole course of 
jour lives.- 

In Two on a Tower, again, some accident must come. A 
young idealist of twenty-two who knows nothing of the world 
is bound to tire of a woman twelve years his senior. But the 
accident that does come is not inevitable. They are married, 
and then they find that through a technical flaw, their mar- 
riage is illegal. In a generous impulse, the woman refuses to 
remarry, and sends her lover away to study, not even allow- 
ing herself to have the address, lest she be tempted to write 
to him and thus interfere with his career. And all her later 
troubles and her tragedy come upon her because she has not 
this address. In Tess, this species of accident is not at all 
inevitable. We feel them as part of the forces that are ar- 
rayed against her, and give her no chance; and perhaps the 
most agonizing point in the book is when Tess, who is resist- 
ing Alec D'Urberville with all her strength, doubting her 
own powers of endurance, writes that letter of heart-broken 
appeal to Angel Clare, and we know that it is lying in his 
father's parsonage, as the net closes round her. 



6o 

The ironic circumstance which is simply ironic and not in- 
evitably connected with the situation is very common in the 
Hardy novels. The case of houses which are held on lives, 
and have the possibility of renewal, which is discovered too 
late, is a favorite one. It forms part of the plot of Desperate 
Remedies, and in The Woodlanders, Giles discovers just 
twenty-four hours after the death of the last holder that he 
could have added more lives and renewed his holding. The 
result turns him from a rich man to a poor one and causes 
him to lose Grace. In a short story, "Netty Sargent's Copy- 
hold," in Life's Little Ironies, the heroine who has lost her 
property by an hour, gets the better of chance, by cleverly 
bolstering her uncle in a chair, and making the dead fingers 
sign the name, while the witness who is looking in at the 
window, never dreams of the forgery. 

Of all the stories that show this irony of the "brute 
chance," none so well and pithily expresses it as that one in 
Life's Little Ironies, called "The Winters and the Palmleys." 
A man enters a house at night to find his own love letters, 
which he does not want his scornful mistress, who has cast 
him off, to show to her new lover. The box he seizes hap- 
pens to contain money as well as the letters ; he is arrested for 
stealing, tried and hanged. This is only exceeded by Guy 
de Maupassant's "La Ficelle," in which the mere stooping to 
pick up a piece of string in obedience to a thrifty habit he had, 
involves a man in an arrest for a lost purse; and then, later, 
when the neighbors will not believe his protestations of inno- 
cence, even after the purse has been found, his trouble drives 
him to illness and- death. One may say that these accidents 
were greatly helped by people; that in the first case the boy's 
death was due to the unkindness of his former sweetheart in 
not telling that he came merely for the letters, and in the 
second, the man's tragedy was caused by the lack of charity 
of the neighbors, too prone to believe the worst. All this is 
true, but it does not alter the primal fact that the men suf- 
fered for what they in no wise merited, and that a trivial 
accident called down upon them as heavy a curse as the 
wicked acts themselves could have done. 

In Hardy, then, "brute chance" runs riot. If we took 



6i 

from him the undelivered letters, the marriage licenses that 
have a mistake in date or place, the leases where chance of 
renewal is discovered after the time has expired, the mar- 
riages that come too early or too late, we should spoil the 
whole fair fabric of his tales. There is a reason why we have 
no right to take these accidents away. They are sufficiently 
true to life to be legitimate. For we are all familiar with 
these accidents. We receive every trivial letter that is ever 
sent to us, one day we fail^o get an important one and an ir- 
revocable misunderstanding is the result. There are two peo- 
ple whom we have sedulously kept apart for years; on the 
day that one calls, the other is sure to drop in for dinner. In 
more trivial affairs we recognize the impishness that lurks in 
inanimate things. It is when we are hurrying to catch a train 
that our shoe lacer breaks or the laundry fails to bring back 
our clean collars, when we can least spare our watch that the 
main spring snaps. We realize, too, how often we say "JusV 
my luck," when we have hastened to see a man and find he left 
an hour earlier that day, or are impelled to take a train which 
is then delayed. These are the kinds of circumstances which 
Hardy intensifies and emphasizes. 

What we are apt to forget in a persistent reading of his 
work is that "brute chance" is not always adverse, though 
perhaps it needs some other descriptive adjective when it is 
favorable. We just as frequently realize that things happened 
in the nick of time, that there was good fortune in the taking 
of a certain train, that some kind power warned us to make a 
visit or write a letter which later events proved to be a happy 
inspiration, as we call attention to our ill-luck. /The fortu- 
nate chances, the saving encounters are never the theme of 
Hardy. This sense of unfairness is what makes the optimis- 
tic people whom he troubles, eager to have his admirers admit 
that he is one-sided. And they must admit it squarely, though 
over-emphatic is a better word than one-sided since no one 
is called upon to give us all sides of life. But it is a genuine 
and grave fault to over-represent one side of life, because that . 
is to make it untrue to life as a whole. In admitting this 
fault, however, his admirers do not forget the virtue that 
causes the fault, that he has had the supreme courage to 



62 

grapple with this "brute chance" of which we are all more 
or less afraid, and to lay bare its bruteness. For what rea- 
son, say the easy-going optimists, life is sad enough in itself, 
when we read books, let us have something to make us hap- 
pier and to help us. And they do not realize that they have 
delivered themselves bound to the enemy, that they have ad- 
mitted that life is as intrinsically sad as the pessimist finds 
it, and the only difference is that he cares to look at what they 
would cover. Still there remains the plea for reading only 
what will help us and give us courage to go on. But there are 
helps to be found in the world's dark places, as well as in its 
bright ones. Moreover, if it come to a question between 
truth and the most helpful illusion ; let us, the pessimist would 
contend, take the truth though it be of ink-deep blackness, 
and the illusion be bursting and shining with light. 

There remains one question. Is there never any explana- 
tion of these occurrences which seem whims of destiny? 
Maeterlinck in his book Wisdom and Destiny has made a dis- 
tinction between inner and outer destiny which is a vital one. 
It is a point unrecognized or unemphasized by both Schopen- 
hauer and Hardy. If our aim in life is happiness, and if by 
happiness we mean the avoidance of pain, then we are not likely 
to attain it, and will surely find the world a place of misery and 
suffering. But how if our aim is not happiness but growth, how 
if we are courageous enough to say that we do not care what 
comes to us or to our friends, for that is the harder, what pain, 
what tragedy, so long as we may be sure that we are all advanc- 
ing and expanding? This it is which makes Maeterlinck say 
that it matters not at all what comes to you, but it matters su- 
premely how you take it. There are over-conscientious people 
who take life as a discipline and study every event to see why it 
was sent to them and what lesson they must learn from it. To 
these, the remark of Bernard Shaw is applicable, that the 
world is no one person's moral gymnasium. Better than this 
self-centered reasoning is the attitude of the Mayor of Caster- 
bridge, "I am to suffer, I perceive! So much scourging as 
this, then, is it for me?" But there is more than a shade of 
difference between these extremes and the attitude of Maeter- 
linck, since, then, this has come, I will bear it like a man and 
I can get something out of it. 



63 

In general, Hardy recognizes this truth that it is better 
to deal with true things than with illusions, even if the latter 
are happier, and he apparently feels that he is dealing with the 
true side. In one particular case, that of Tess, he does recog- 
nize the value of inner experience. She, he confesses, had 
a mental harvest. There are three possibilities in the life of 
Tess — to have married an Angel Clare, before she met Alec, 
when her splendid possibilities might have borne glorious fruit, 
and we could have had n6 story, because it would have been 
one of Maeterlinck's "fireside dramas," for which there are 
no adequate words; to have had the life she did have and 
reaped some sort of a mental harvest; or to have married, as 
would naturally happen, some stolid countryman and reaped 
no harvest. The first would undoubtedly have been the best, 
but surely the last is the worst, even though it involves no 
sin against society, and no actual pain. But Hardy does not 
seem to feel that intensity of feeling, richness of experience 
balance the extremities of pain by which that experience is 
won. Or perhaps he thinks the intensity and richness could 
come as well in happy fashion. There is no reason why they 
could not, they simply do not. Most of us have to be jogged 
into our depths. 

When Maeterlinck says that dramas between sages are 
unheard of, and those that center about the sage are rare, and 
result always in victory for the sage, he means not that trag- 
edies do not come to the sage, but that in his wisdom he draws 
the sting from the tragedy. It is like Browning's poem, 
"Instans Tyrannus" ; you can have no tyrant, unless you have 
the slave who acknowledges oppression. Did not Clym Yeo- 
bright win something precious out of his mistakes and suffer- 
ings ? Was not the Bathsheba Troy whom Gabriel Oak won a 
richer woman that the Bathsheba Everdene he wanted? Did 
Giles Winterborne die quite in vain when he could inspire the 
love of a Marty South? Was not her life ever the richer 
though she had never a word of encouragement? Think of 
the depth of the love that could say, "But I — whenever I get 
up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee. 
Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can 
plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and when- 



64 

«ver I turn the cider-wring, I'll say none could do it like you. 
If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and heaven! 
But no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a 
good man, and did good things." There is a terrible double 
irony in this when we think that this girl who could be so 
faithful, never had one word or smile of love from Giles, and 
that the woman for whom he gave his life in love, had left 
Marty alone to mourn him. But is there not also a rich recom- 
pense in the possession of a love that can be faithful unto death, 
or that can lay down its life for the loved one ? Let us acquire 
our depths of experience quietly and easily if we can, but 
let us acquire them at any price. 

Does this cover the whole situation? No, for there are 
the Eustacia Vyes, the Farmer Boldwoods, the Mayors of 
Casterbridge, who win no wisdom from their experience. They 
have the elements of tragedy in them. Just as there are some 
situations in which we feel tragedy to be inevitable, so there 
are some characters that have the seeds of an evil fate in 
them. As Maeterlinck has well said, "If Judas go forth to- 
night, it is towards Judas his step will tend, nor will chance 
of betrayal be lacking ; but let Socrates open his door, he shall 
find Socrates asleep on the threshold before him, and there 
will be occasion for Wisdom." That is his reason for saying 
ithat a character like Louis XVI of France is not the mere 
puppet of an evil destiny, but a man who attracts a bad destiny 
to him. And even Emily Bronte, whom he has greatly praised 
because she so ennobled a meagre destiny by the richness she 
put into it, is responsible for that meagreness since she lacked 
the daring that would have brought her a more varied exist- 
ence. So we feel that in no world, no matter how purposive, 
no matter how kind the circumstances, how happy their lot 
in life, could Eustacia and the Mayor have been true children 
•of wisdom. Eustacia was born a rebel and died a rebel ; the 
Mayor rose and fell with a stubborn, bitter pride. There are 
people for whom we can not honestly predict anything but 
sorrow and turmoil; and for whom we cannot see any rest 
except in death. They seem born to a doom, but they are 
iborn to it because they will not understand what is understand- 
ble. Here it is not the universal which is blind and purpose- 
less, it is the individual who is blind. 



65 

There are cases, however, to which Maeterlinck's explan- 
ation will not apply. In The Return of the Native, Far from 
the Madding Crowd, Trumpet Major and the W oodlanders 
we have four stories of patient men who gave all possible 
tenderness and constancy to a woman and were long unre- 
warded. There is a measure of irony in the fact that not 
one of them won the girl he wanted in her freshness and 
bloom, but aside from this one point in common, the destinies 
meted out to them were very different. Both Giles Winter- 
borne of The W oodlanders, and John, the Trumpet Major, 
failed utterly to win the women they desired, but to each 
was given a heroic part. Giles could die for Grace's good 
name, John could sacrifice himself to his brother. Both had 
their inner reward, for to love deeply and truly and to the 
point to which they loved is as rich and varied an experience 
as to be loved, and to live in plain, material happiness. Gab- 
riel Oak, as we have seen, secured perhaps a better Bathsheba, 
so his fate can be justified ; but what can be said of Tamosin 
and Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native? They 
marry and are apparently happy ever after, but why did they 
need to wait so long ? Tamosin Wildeve is no better a woman 
than Tamosin Yeobright, only a sadder one. Perhaps no 
blame attaches to fate, but rather to Mrs. Yeobright and to 
Tamosin's submissiveness, but this is just one of those things 
that are hardest to bear. Tragedy is not irretrievably bound 
up in Tamosin's character as it was in Eustacia's. It was not 
inevitable that she should suffer ; it was a mere blunder. Surely 
our blunders do not need to be scourged so heavily as our 
faults. It seems that after we have allowed for all the ad- 
vantages of wisdom and increased experience, there remains a 
residue of cases for which we can find no justification. 

One of the things in daily life that has always seemed to 
me tragic in the deepest sense of the word, that is in the 
Schopenhauerian sense of being non-understandable, baffling, 
is that to the individual comes always the temptation he is 
least able to resist. If your will is weak, if decisions are hard 
for you, be sure that nothing but decisions will come your 
way. No explanation of an inner destiny or an inner tri- 
umph satisfies us here. This is among the residue of things 



66 

unexplained that the optimist must leave. It may be that we 
must regard our moral body as we do our physical one, and 
constantly practise exercises to strengthen our weakest part, 
but then the exercises should be graded, whereas now the 
heaviest weight seems often presented first. Of course it may 
be true, as Maeterlinck suggests, that we have more control 
over outside forces than is now apparent, and secretly attract 
events to us, but then why should we not secretly attract some 
guardian angel that will help us to win our way ? Why should 
we attract only what makes us sink lower? This is what is 
really terrible about a book like Tess. She was responsible 
for her own downfall, she had that "slight incautiousness of 
character," inherited from her race, and that too great sub- 
missiveness which kept her from pleading her own cause, and 
winning Angel Clare back, after her disclosure had driven 
him from her. It is pitiful to think that these traits should 
wreck her. There are such splendid possibilities in Tess. 
What could she not have been under a happier fate, when she is 
so fine, and wins so much under the hard one meted out to 
her? "Thou hast rushed forward to the utmost verge of 

/daring, and against that throne where Justice sits on high 
thou hast fallen, my daughter, with a grievous fall," says the 
Chorus to Antigone. Schopenhauer and Hardy have gone to 
the utmost verge of daring and have brought back the message 
. that Justice, is blind, or far removed from her blind servants. 
We hope and believe that this is not the final answer, we must 
admit they have a right to it. 

This brings us to the point of vicarious pain. William 
Watson has said of Tess, that it is a direct arraignment of 
the morality of vicarious pain. Vicarious suffering is so es- 
sential a part of life that no intelligent person will question it. 
What men like Schopenhauer and Hardy do resent is not 
u- suffering for the sake of another, but suffering for the sake 
of suffering. There have been times when men saw much 
virtue in suffering, when they felt themselves purified and 
bettered by it; and there are still people who welcome it in 
this spirit. As we have seen, there is just an atom of justi- 
fication for their view, because we are more often stirred to 
our depths by sorrow than by joy. But the atom of truth will 



6/ 

not save the day, for the very greatest joys can go so much 
deeper than the greatest sorrows, that pain is not absolutely 
necessary for depth. Suffering as such, then, has no value, 
and it is the sense of suffering, when no one profits that so 
wrings the heart of Hardy. 

Another problem from the residue of the unexplained is 
the fact that inner growth is often so lop-sided. Here in 
America we are very familiar with a struggle that has become 
one of our national ideals, /'that of the self-made man, of the 
lesser Abraham Lincolns and James A. Garfields. There is 
always much to be respected and admired in these displays of 
pluck and bravery and courage, but there is usually something 
to be deplored, a something which the man who has won often 
recognizes himself, that he has not been able both to be and 
to become. People can not seem to win two things in life. 
The ripeness that comes from leisure, and the energy that 
comes from resistance to heavy odds appear to be always op- 
posed. If the day ever comes when wealth is more evenly dis- 
tributed, perhaps these tragedies will lessen, for they seem not 
absolutely unavoidable. In the meantime, one wonders why so 
simple a desire as that for moral and inner growth is not more 
easily gratified, why the people who have "souls to •invite," so 
seldom have time to invite them. This, three times intensified, is 
the tragedy of Jude. Everything is against him, nothing en- 
courages him in his struggle to carry out his noble intentions 
and aspirations. About Clym Yeobright, who has the same 
noble ideals of helping the less fortunately endowed, we feel 
that though he is maimed and crippled by his experiences, 
though he will never reach what he should have reached, yet 
he has some compensation. The portion of Jude is utter de- 
feat, "I felt I could do one thing if I had the opportunity, I 
could accumulate ideas and impart them to others." And the 
opportunity was denied him. 

The result of the usual view of tragedy > which takes as 
its basis that the world is purposive, is triumph. However 
many may be the deaths and agonies we are called on to en- 
dure, however our feelings of sympathy and pity and horror 
may be wrought up and stirred, we close the book with the 
sense that there is a right, and that the right triumphs. Some- 
where a flag is waving. 



68 

In the Schopenhauerian view of tragedy and in the 
Hardy exemplification of it, no flags wave. We may feel in- 
deed that there is a right, but it does not always triumph. We 
have often the irony of a right that is defeated. With 
Schopenhauer this tragicness in life results in renunciation. 
Accept the inevitable; that nothing is worth living for; that 
all is not only vanity, but can be nothing else. Then give up 
this illusion of happiness, renounce the world and its ways, 
and so find peace. In Hardy we have not renunciation, but 
resignation. Accept the inevitable, what is to be, will be, and 
as they say in Under the Greenwood Tree, " 'Tis to be and 
here goes will carry a body through it all from wedding to 
churching, if you only let it out with spirit enough." Life is 
so made, and must be so endured. If you realize this, if you 
expect nothing better, if like Elizabeth Jane you know its in- 
trinsic nature is tragedy and not comedy, then your expecta- 
tions will be less and your disillusion easier. 

Few more words are needed to show that both Schopen- 
hauer and Hardy are alike in regarding the manifestation of 
a purposeless world as tragedy of an insignificant, petty and 
hopeless nature. From the idea that will is the ground of 
everything, and that will in itself lacks harmony, life is seen 
to be inharmonious and therefore tragic. A dramatic por- 
trayal of this lack of harmony will teach the actors that there 
is no prize in life worth the pain of existence, and that renun- 
ciation of life is best. This is the Schopenhauerian statement of 
tragedy. Hardy gives us stories that are illustrations of this 
view. People are not happy, but we do not feel that there is 
any satisfactory reason why they should not be happy. Life 
is simply against happiness. A little mistake, like the joke of 
sending a valentine to a man, may bring down as heavy a 
doom as a premeditated murder. Error and chance rule the 
world, not justice. So we get characters who are not aggres- 
sive nor strenuous, who seldom take the initiative, who do 
not demand much, who do not challenge life, who scarcely 
aim at all, much less at the stars ; but who are quiet, restful, 
kindly, humorous, and above all capable of endurance. 
Placed, against their will, in a world not to their liking, they 
are resigned to it and will make the best of it. 



CHAPTER IV. 
Outcome of Purposelessness. 

The man on the street who consents to talk to you about 
a purposeless world has always one retort, "What's the use of 
trying, then ?" "If I am not to be rewarded for my good deeds, 
nor punished for my bad ones, either here or hereafter, why 
should I care what I do, why not yield to every impulse, good 
or bad?" If he is of a more thoughtful turn of mind he will 
tell you not to talk about such an idea. "We must believe that 
in some fashion things are good or the world would not go 
on; there would be no ambition, no enjoyment. We would 
all lie down and die, the quicker the better.' ' To some of them 
the notion is so repugnant that they declare no one could hon- 
estly hold it. Those who do must believe in something good, 
even when they say they do not; they must believe even 
though their belief is unknown to themselves. 

What men believe unknown to themselves we must omit 
from our consideration, and we must, in common respect, 
grant that our pessimists are not telling us of idle theories 
but of deepest convictions. In truth, the view of the man on 
the street is shallow and neglects two important considera- 
tions. The first is that life is largely a matter of habit. By 
the time the pessimist comes to his opinion about the futility 
of life, he is usually so involved in these futilities of duties, 
affections, and pleasures that he cannot break away from 
them, even when he sees their vanity. He does not necessar- 
ily become the man with the long face and gloomy sentence. 
Indeed, there are many optimists who show more gloom over 
their individual woes than the pessimist does over the entire 
gloom of the world. For the pessimist the sun still shines, 
trees are still green, friends are still worthy of cultivation, 
and mankind an object to arouse compassion and service. 

This brings us to the second point about the pessimist 
which the man of the street forgets- — his great courage. All 
pessimists must have courage; for, to look upon this dark 

(69) 



70 

side of life is as deep and heartrending an experience as one 
can imagine. "Pessimism" says Royce, borrowing a word of 
Hegel's, "isn't the doctrine of the merely peevish man, but of 
the man who has once feared not for this moment or for that 
in his life, but who has feared with all his riature; so that he 
has trembled through and through, and all that was most 
fixed in him has become shaken." A man of no courage will 
either refuse to fear in this fashion, or the fear will drive him 
to voluntary death. But the man of courage will look and 
turn away to lead the most brave and upright life. Sometimes 
it seems as if the courage of a pessimist were the only cour- 
age deserving the name. It is easy enough to be brave when 
you think things are good on the whole, and your suffering 
is but for a day; but to be brave when you have no hope of 
anything better takes a strong soul. The philosopher, Scipio, 
in Owen Wister's Virginian says that the courage of your 
convictions isn't half enough courage. "There's times in life 
when a man has got to have courage without convictions — 
without them — or he is no good." 

This courage without convictions is the practical out- 
come of purposelessness, and it lends to the work i of the pes- 
simist when he chances to be a writer, a tonic quality. ! Can 
any one read that little book of pessimistic verses, A Shrop- 
shire Lad, without feeling braver ? Isn't it one cry of cour- 
age all the way through? Its verses are sad and gloomy 
enough, they hold out no hope except the rest of death, they 
breathe the unquiet life of man, and the injustice of the things 
he encounters as strongly as do the W ess ex Poems or the 
Poems of Past and Present, but they ring with a call to 
arms. 

"Therefore, though the best is bad 
Stand and do the best my lad." 

and never shame the Shropshire land that gave you birth. It 
is this same quality of courage, of a humanity that refuses to 
be dwarfed into sluggishness by destiny, which makes one 
critic call Hardy a "heroic optimist," and class him with Ibsen, 
Zola, Tolstoi; and which makes another biographer say of 
him that his satire and bitter irony are not dispiriting in the 



7i 

sense in which cynicism is dispiriting, for, as he depicts it, 
"life is not little, nor cheap, nor easily found out." 

The theoretical outcome of purposelessness fs also a mat- 
ter of courage, the courage involved in facing truth. There 
is a passage in William James' Will to Believe in which he 
says that the questions, "What do you think of yourself ?" 
"What do you think of the world?" are questions that all 
must deal with as seems good to them. If we decide to leave 
the riddle unanswered, it js a choice; if we waver in our an- 
swer, that is a choice and whatever we do we take a leap in 
the dark. The pessimist is the one who cannot leave the 
question unanswered, cannot waver, but must take the leap in 
the dark. Two characteristics mark the pessimist. One, the 
fact that extreme sensitiveness can often drive a man to cyn- 
icism or pessimism is best expressed by a poetical phrase of . 
Nietzsche, "I love the great despisers because they are the 
great adorers, they are arrows of longing for the other 
shore." The other is best formulated by Professor Royce, 
"It is the way of men who demand ultimate answers, and JL- 
who, if they can't get them, prefer doubt, even if doubt means 
despair." An arrow of longing for an ultimate answer! ■ 
What can such a man bring for an answer to the riddle ? 

The final outcome of a purposeless view of life is no 
more than the final outcome of a purposive one, a single theory 
which all pessimists can accept, but an unevasive statement 
of the truth as they see it, and a tentative solution. Naturally 
these solutions will differ. Indeed we have seen Royce stat- 
ing the problem of evil as clearly as ever Schopenhauer gave 
it, yet arriving at an optimistic conclusion. It behooves us 
now to see what tentative conclusions Schopenhauer and 
Hardy reached, and whether these are similar. 

I do not know that the solution of Schopenhauer can 
be called a tentative one; at least it is not tentatively offered, 
if it must be so accepted. He regarded the path of asceticism 
as the only absolutely final outcome of a purposeless view of 
the world. The idea of renunciation is no new one either in 
eastern or western religion, but I think it usually has more of 
the purpose of purification in it, of a freeing of some power 
which is impeded by the grossness of matter, than of the 



\ 



72 

purpose of release from the capricious nature of pain. Schop- 
enhauer of course could not counsel the freeing of anything, 
since he saw nothing to free. This restless, capricious longing 
is the heart of all willing, and when the individual, has freed 
himself from this unrest, nothing is left. As he says at the 
close of the fourth book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstel- 
lung, if you still have the nature of will, you will consider this 
final annulment of the will, nothing; but if you have learned 
to penetrate this nature of the will, and have once seen to the 
full its wholly irrational character, then you will regard 
this world and all the worlds of your desires as nothing. 

Professor Royce has an illuminating suggestion about 
Schopenhauer. He says that the path from mediaeval mysti- 
cism to a system of pessimism is a very short one. Both lay 
infinite emphasis on the vanity and unsatisfactoriness of the 
world, both advise the forsaking of such illusory delights; 
but where the one finds recompense in a contemplation of the 
divine perfection, the other finds no compensation and at the 
most can only hope for release. The contemplation of the 
mystic is vague and ecstatic and dream-like, he is bound to 
have waking moments when the vision is faint. It is these 
waking moments which the pessimist seizes and emphasizes. 
Mr. Royce quotes Bunyan's saying at the end of his Pilgrim's 
Progress — "I saw in my dream that there was a way to the 
bottomless pit from the very gate of Heaven, as well as from 
the City of Destruction" and adds, "Now, Schopenhauer's 
mission it was to explore this highly interesting way with con- 
siderable speculative skill." So our Thomas a Kempis whom 
we unhesitatingly accept in the most orthodox circles, and 
our Schopenhauer whom we cast out as a heretic, ought to be 
of the same value in showing us this true picture of life, that 
it is essentially restless, craving, finitely tragic, and that it 
never can be anything else. And the criticism one could bring 
against such a mysticism as that of Thomas a Kempis is the 
same that one could bring against the pessimism of Schopen- 
hauer that in their asceticism both provide us with a somewhat 
colorless, bloodless substitute for living. They give us no 
fighting formulas, and yet the world presents itself to us as 
a place of battle. 



73 

This is the plain man's revolt from the Schopenhauerian 
outcome of purposelessness. The philosopher's dissatisfac- 
tion is of another nature. To him the really interesting ques- 
tion is whether purposiveness is a matter of choice or a matter 
•of discovery; whether the nature of our consciousness de- 
mands that we put purpose in the world, as Kant has shown 
it to demand that we put law there ; or whether we know it to 
be there or not to be there from the facts of our experience. 
Schopenhauer's value l&s rather in his insight into a real 
problem of life, than in anything he has contributed to this 
genuine philosophical side of the problem. This kind of a dis- 
cussion of purposelessness need not concern us here, and is 
only mentioned because of its prophetic interest. If that phil- 
osopher should ever arise who could show in satisfactory man- 
ner what many have dimly felt, that purposiveness is a part of 
the nature of our consciousness, then some synthesis of pessi- 
mism and optimism would seem not impossible, till then we 
are like to have both. 

The ultimate value of Schopenhauer for the general 
reader, then, will lie in no solution he has offered but in the 
Jboldness and frankness of his statement of what every one 
must realize, either dimly or clearly, as a real side of life. 
We do not either as philosopher or plain individual need 
to accept his doctrine that the "will to live" is everything. We. 
are not obliged to say that the only road to happiness, if happi- 
ness it can be called, lies through the path of annihilation. But\ if 
in these days of evolutionary doctrine and science, we cannot 
deny the seeming cruelty of the struggle for existence; 
these days of introspection we cannot deny the incessant alter- 
nation of restlessness and insipidity. The day has gone by 
when we could simply assert there was purposiveness, or lose 
ourselves in a mystic admiration of it. We must have what 
might be called a "working" purpose; that is one that will 
take into account just this tragically capricious element of 
purposelessness in life. The value of a pessimism such as that 
of Schopenhauer, then, is to drive those who cannot accept it 
to a higher optimism. 

Schopenhauer gave a very complete picture of the ideal 
and practice of renunciation. It was to be a giving up of 



I 



74 

everything on the part of the individual and must, logically, 
result in race suicide. It was, however, the release of the in- 
dividual that interested him. Eduard Von Hartmann fol- 
lowed the idea of renunciation further, and since Hardy is 
quoted in the Real Conversations of William Archer as say- 
ing that The Philosophy of the Unconscious suggested to 
him what seemed almost like a workable theory of the great 
problem of the origin of evil, it is not out of place to consider 
him here. We saw in reviewing Schopenhauer that the will 
which exists in men as the individual will, may exist in ani- 
mals, in the bees for instance, as a will of the species, and in 
plant or lower forms of life in a still more vague, general and 
indefinable way. And we saw that man becomes conscious 
of this will and its nature, and that there are degrees of con- 
sciousness even among men. Von Hartmann starts at this 
point. l The fact that we become conscious leads him to be- 
lieve that there are two "Grunds" instead of one as Schopen- 
hauer thought> These he calls, will and idea, or the uncon- 
scious and the conscious. We can not will without willing 
something, he says, and this something is the idea. The ideas 
are always present, but they are in the process of changing 
their nature ; first they belong to the realm of the unconscious, 
then to that of the conscious. A large part of his work is 
devoted to a proof that these two, the conscious and the un- 
conscious, exist side by side. Our reflex actions of which we 
are unaware, the traits of character that suddenly come to the 
surface to our very great surprise, the aim of nature for the 
propagation of the species disguised under the name of love, 
are a few of the many examples of the unconscious which he 
presents. The line of division is an unstable one. At present 
the unconscious is the stronger factor, but it is daily losing 
ground. In a sense the unconscious is the higher element, for 
it is always quicker, surer, and more far-seeing than the con- 
j scious. 

One is reminded here of Maeterlinck, of his feeling that 
the future is within us, that we ought to be able to penetrate 
the veil of the unconscious, and some day shall be able. Both 
of them agree that the conscious is our goaT, that it is the 
higher in the sense of being that toward which everything is 



t 



75 

tending. The control of the unconscious by the conscious 
seems to be the final aim. To Maeterlinck this idea is fraught 
with hope, to Von Hartmann it brings only despair. Here 
he is very like Schopenhauer in recognizing the unsatisfac- 
tory nature of the will, and in realizing that as we grow more 
conscious, we shall only be more aware of this unsatisfactori- 
ness. He considers the possibility of happiness in this world, 
in some dreamed of hereafter, and in a world made better by 
the evolution of some better species. In the first case he finds, 
like Schopenhauer, that there is more pain than pleasure in the 
world, and that pain is active, while pleasure is only the nega- 
tive result of the cessation of pain. The second is an im- 
possible ideal. We can only think of two possible hereafters 
for individuals, one where there shall be no pain and no 
striving, the other a repetition of this present life. Of these 
the first is too suggestive of tediousness and insipidity, the 
second would have the same pains that afflict us now. The 
third theory of a possible better finite world is also dismissed, 
because nothing could change the nature of the will, and that 
nature means suffering. So he, too, arrives at the solution of 
renunciation. His emphasis, however, is not on the enlight- 
ened individual man who decides not to live and stifles the 
will, but on some future time when the race, having attained 
full consciousness, shall, as a race, decree annihilation. The 
race is to struggle to acquire consciousness that it may work 
out its own redemption, that is, its cessation from pain, by 
decreeing its own annihilation. 

The part of Von Hartmann that interests Hardy is not 
this final speculation, but the thought of the unconscious be- 
coming conscious. The theory that The Philosophy of the 
Unconscious suggested to him (he says it is not Von Hart- 
mann's own theory) he thus expresses, "There may be a con- 
sciousness, infinitely far off, at the other end of the chain of 
phenomena, always striving: to express itself, and always 
baffled and blundering, just as the spirits seem to be." Mr. 
William Archer asks "Is not that simply the good old Man- 
ichaean heresy, with Matter playing the part of the evil prin- 
ciple — Satan, Ahriman, whatever you choose to call it ?" And 
Mr. Hardy responds : "John Stuart Mill somewhere expresses 



i 



7 6 

surprise that Manichaeanism was not more widely accepted. 
But is not all popular religion in essence Manichaean? Does 
not it always postulate a struggle between a principle of good 
and an independent, if not equally powerful principle of 
evil?" 

This, then, is a suggestion of one outcome of Hardy's 
philosophy, that he is inclined to think of the evil and good in 
the world as two opposed principles, rather than as one sub- 
\^ ordinated under the other. There are said to be three prin- 
cipal ways of accounting for the origin of evil. One is the 
Manichaean idea of dualism, two definite powers, one good, the 
other evil : another is that of Plato and Aristotle, the form or 
spirit, which is good, is resisted by an a-moral matter: the 
third, which St. Augustine used in controverting the Mani- 
chaean heresy, that the good estranges a part of itself as evil, 
in order that it may show the distinction between good and evil, 
and that by contending and conquering the good turns the 
evil into a higher good. Hardy's suggestion seems to in- 
clude the two first. His remark that the consciousness which 
tries to express itself is baffled and blundering, leads us to 
think of the resisting matter, the reference to John Stuart Mill 
X shows how much dualism he sees in the world about him. 

In a chronological reading of the work of Thomas 
Hardy one often feels that it is not his purpose to suggest a 
solution, that he is, like Ibsen, concerned in stating the prob- 
lem, in showing the bones which Life has bared to him, and 
that he awaits some solver of the riddle. At first we expect 
that solver to be an enlightened and improved man, and we 
go looking for some hint of Nietzsche's "Superman." Nietz- 
sche finds the same trouble with the First Cause that Hardy 
does. "A God who is omniscient and omnipotent, and who 
does not even provide that His intentions be understood by 
His creatures — could that be a God of Goodness?" "Would 
He not be a cruel God, if He had the truth and yet could 
quietly look down upon mankind, miserably worrying itself 
for the sake of truth ?" "God does not hear — and even if He 
did, He would not know how to help. The worst is that He 
seems incapable of communicating himself clearly." Nietz- 
sche then turns utterly away from God and finds his solution 



77 

in man, not man of to-day who is a creature of false ideals and 
degradation, but man who is to come — "beyond-man," he 
calls him. The will is to be its own liberator, but it is the 
"Will-to-Power," and not the old restless "will-to-live" of 
Schopenhauer. This will has an aim, the aim of the per- 
fected man. There is not in Hardy, so far as I have been 
able to discover, one passage that can be interpreted as hint- 
ing at a solution that is to come through man, either in the 
Nietzsche sense of an evolved "Superman" or the Maeter- 
linck sense of the man who shall have more knowledge of the 
secret laws of nature and of all the realm of the unknown. 
All that there is in him of this nature is the insistence that it 
is better to know the worst. "Who holds that if way to the 
Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst." The 
change that he is going to find satisfactory must be more fun- 
damental and far-reaching than a change in man, it must be 
a change in the First Cause Itself. And this brings us to The 
Dynasts. 

The Dynasts is a summing up of all the Hardy philos- 
ophy. In the work of Hardy in general, and in the poems in 
particular, there is the constant recurrence of the idea that 
Nature and her Creator are blind. Poems like "By the Earth's 
Corpse," "The Bedridden Peasant," "God-Forgotten" all 
have the cry that God does not know what men are suffering. 
"The Sleep-worker," "The Lacking Sense," "The Mother 
Mourns" all tell of the awakening of the earth. Thjsjin- 
consciousness of the primal force is the theme of The Dynasts. 
The opening speeches give us the clue. The Shade of Earth 
asks, "What of the Immanent Will and Its Designs?" And 
the Spirit of the Years responds, 

"It works unconsciously, as heretofore, 

Eternal artistries in Circumstance, 
Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote, 
Seem in themselves Its single listless aim, 

And not their consequence." 

The Spirit of the Years is then asked why It behaves in this 
way, and suggests two theories; that the Immanent Will is 



7& 

tired of this world and has betaken itself to others, and that 
this planet lost Its care by the acts of bad men early in its 
history. It is suggested that some shock may wake this sleep- 
ing Will ; but the Spirit of the Years finds nothing in the past 
on which to build such a hope. 

Once the Spirit of the Years is asked why this world 
should exist and it replies that it is as good as any, and when 
the second question is naturally put, "Why any?" it cannot 
answer. Only the Immanent Will can answer that, the Spirit 
has merely been rendered conscious by chance and must wit- 
ness Its working. Once the Chorus tries to find some aim 
of the Will, but it only finds words Schopenhauer might have 
used, "to alter evermore things from what they were before." 
• Thus there is a double unconsciousness. The Will is un- 
conscious of Its workings, men know Its workings, but are 
unconscious of Its aims. In these conditions, men, who are the 
puppets of the Will, can adore It or defy It. The Pities are the 
ones who adore. In the After Scene of the third volume of 
The Dynasts which takes place in the Overworld, the Semi- 
chorus of the Pities give their hymn of adoration. They praise 
the power and the might of the Thee to whom they sing. It 
must be good, it must have some reason for sending suffering. 
Anyway they will hope so, and will continue to sing. 

"Exultant adoration give 
The Alone, through Whom all living live, 
The Alone, in Whom all dying die, 
Whose means the End shall justify !" 

The Spirit of the Years is almost charmed out of its long phil- 
osophy into the past when it too could give thanks and let 
raptures rule. But the Semichorus of the Years continues 
the aerial singing and gives the opposite picture to that of the 
Pities, the old unanswered question of why there should be 
lack of reason, why there should be lack of aim. If there is 
to be no answer, if Its blindness is never to be cured, then let 
those whom It has quickened into life, find a swift and sure 
extinction. Then the Chorus speaks the final word : 



79 

"But — a stirring thrills the air 
Like to sounds of joyance there 
That the rages 
Of the ages 
Should be cancelled, and deliverance offered from 

the darts that were 
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all 
things fair!" 

The time when the First Cause shall become conscious which, 
of course, may include a development of the consciousness of 
man, is what Hardy awaits. 

The frequent use of the words conscious and unconscious 
throughout The Dynasts causes one to think of Von Hartmann. 
Both have the idea of development from an unconscious to a 
conscious state, but in the philosopher this consciousness is 
to be consummated in the race, in the author we get the im- 
pression it is to occur outside the race and come to men as an 
effect of change, rather than as a process of change. There 
is also something more hopeful about the latter, some feeling 
that the world's woe will lessen if these halcyon days should 
ever come. Though he intimates that men are no longer over- 
powered by the idea that the race shall cease to be, in such a 
poem as "I Said to Love," there is nothing in Hardy's work 
to indicate the solution of annihilation. The suffering and ' 
the turmoil of the present world, the aimless recurrence of ( 
the same events and deeds, the futility of all action, which 
The Dynasts of course emphasizes just as much as his other 
work, is no more an illustration of Von Hartmann than of 
Schopenhauer. Both philosophers have made much of the 
capricious element in life. 

The other likeness to Von Hartmann in this drama, that 
the Unconscious is really the cause of great historical move- 
ments, and the men who carry them out and seem to plan 
them are but Its puppets, brings us to a troublesome question 
which has been showing its head in all the novels, and can 
no longer be shirked. It is a clear statement of determinism, ^^ 
and as such removes all direct responsibility from mankind. 
Yet we all feel that without freedom not only is no morality 



8o 

possible, but no interest in men. Who cares to watch the 
most clever marionettes dance? Or is interested in the strug- 
gles of poor creatures who absolutely can not break a single 
one of the ropes that bind them ? The answer to this difficult 
question seems to me to lie in no examination of the amount 
of responsibility that his characters feel for what ills befall 
them, nor even in the degree of repentance and remorse they 
show, nor yet in their own proneness to fatalistic conclu- 
sions, but in the more practical test of whether they seem 
like real people. Here Hardy has inadvertently given us a 
genuine answer. The people we read of in the novels and 
poems are the people we might meet to-morrow. They have 
just as much freedom to do anything as we have, are just as 
subject to mechanical accidents and chance rebuffs as we are. 
If we always see them exposed to such chances, there is noth- 
ing in the occurrences which could not happen to us or to the 
people we see about us. But in The Dynasts we have a set 
y £>f puppets who are wound up, and who are so little like real 
people that they excite in us no interest. We are listless 
and lackadaisical before them. Napoleon as the pure man of 
lestiny has been robbed of the trait which makes the Napo- 
leon of history attractive. "If we be doomed to marry, we 
marry," they say in Under the Greenwood Tree. "That's not 
the case with some folk. There's that wife of mine. It was 
her doom not to be nobody's wife at all in the wide universe. 
But she made up her mind that she would and did it twice 
over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside an elderly woman — 
quite a chiel in her hands." We want the Napoleon who can 
see and seize the chances destiny offers, who has the power to 
make doom "a chiel." Determinism as we meet it in every 
day life is a deeply fascinating problem, determinism worked 
out into a system like that of The Dynasts has gone beyond 
the point of vital interest. 

The final outcome of renunciation in Schopenhauer was 
unsatisfactory; so too is the outcome of a consciousness that 
is to be of Hardy. The first, however, repels all our instincts, 
the second has the failing of the mystics, that of being vague 
and remote and only valuable as a vision or dream. But 
the real dissatisfaction with a Hardy interpretation of life as 



8i 

an ultimate interpretation is that it is man-centered. If one 
regards man as the pivot of the universe, then it is evident 
that the world is very little to his wants and needs. But 
there is no reason why he should be so regarded, nor why the 
earth should be treated as the only world. Both may be 
parts of some system, some whole. Evolution impresses on 
all of us the idea of development, and after a time we ask for 
what we are developing, since development in itself is no goal. 
We cannot answer that /question. If we could, we might 
answer Hardy's other question of why we develop in this way 
of pain and suffering. To say that no future justification can 
recompense us for the pain we are now enduring, seems to 
make man unduly important. The First Cause may seem 
blind to us ; it might not be so if we had the vision of all that 
It is doing. Here Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann are 
more consistent ; they see that, in the nature of the will, which 
would make any superman, any glorified world, unhappy. 

This deficiency applies to the strictly philosophical Hardy, 
and not to the author ; and it is as the author that he is valu- 
able to the general public; because it is as the author that he 
has given us this picture of the irrational and capricious side 
of life. Whatever may be the final reason why any world 
should exist, or why this world should; we are interested in 
it as it does exist, and in the impression it makes on man. 
Like Schopenhauer, his real value lies in the clear presenta- 
tion of a side of life that is true. We are not all like the man 
in The Dynasts who had to believe the world was round 
because the singers up in the gallery said with such gusto 
every Sunday, "the round world and they that dwell therein." 
All the gusto in the world cannot take away the truth which 
these men have presented, that there is an inharmonious ele- 
ment in the life we are forced to live. 

A friend who talked with me about the existence of this 
inharmonious element which Hardy had made her recognize, 
admitted that it was intellectually convincing, and wondered 
what would be left in life if you took it too much to heart. 
A few weeks later she sent me the following recently pub- 
lished poem as a very direct answer to her question of what 
the author's philosophy left in the way of desire to live. It 
is called "Let Me Enjoy." Song : minor key. 



f 



82 



"Let me enjoy the Earth no less 
Because the all-enacting Might 
That fashioned forth its loveliness 
Had other aims than my delight. 

II. 

"About my path there flits a Fair 

Who throws me not a word or sign; 
I will find charm in her loth air, 

And laud those lips not meant for mine. 

III. 
"From manuscripts of tender song 

Inspired by scenes and souls unknown, 
I'll pour out raptures that belong 
To others, as they were my own. 

IV. 

"And some day hence, toward Paradise 
And all its blest — if such should be — 

I will cast glad, afar-off eyes, 

Though it contain no place for me." 

Enjoyment and courage then, Hardy leaves, and the 
feeling of a very sweet spirit which recognizes that we are all 
seekers. 

In our attempt to find out in what purposelessness con- 
sisted, and to show the effect of a purposeless view in the 
shape of tragedy, we found Hardy an excellent illustration of 
Schopenhauer. Both found the world a purposeless place, 
because an irrational place, where no aim was discernible. 
Both found the tragedy of life to consist in this conflict of 
man with a capricious unknown. In our attempt to find out 
the final outcome of such a purposeless view of life, we find 
Hardy no longer illustrating Schopenhauer. He is no fol- 
lower of the path of renunciation. But we find, too, that 
what is valuable in both is not their solutions, but their pre- 
sentations of the problem. No one has better recognized this 
element of caprice in life than Schopenhauer, no one has 
better illustrated it than Hardy. 



CHAPTER V. 
Artistic Value of Purposelessness. 

There remains one more outcome of purposelessness to 
be considered, and that is the outcome of purposelessness in 
art. In presenting a purposeless view of life is the author 
attacking the very bones and sinews, not only of the faith and 
traditions in which the western world has been reared, but of 
its ideals of art? The value of Schopenhauer lay, as we have 
seen, in his giving us a true and graphic picture of a very real 
side of life, in making us feel that the world is a place of stern 
conflicts, and often of losing ones. We have tried to show 
that the work of Thomas Hardy is an admirable illustration 
of just this truth which Schopenhauer shows, that there is 
from man's point of view a large degree of chance and caprice 
in life, that we do meet with incompleteness, lack of fulfil- 
ment, thwarted ambitions, inharmonious circumstances. If 
all this is so, if Schopenhauer had insight into a truth which 
we can transcend but not refute, if Hardy had the same 
insight, if Schopenhauer expressed it in a popular philosoph- 
ical system, and Hardy in a series of successful novels, why 
penetrate any deeper? Why ask whether the portrayal of a 
purposeless view is as successful as that of a purposive one ? 

For the reason that the art which presents a purposeless I )^ 
view of life is to the English mind not usual and seems 
deficient. Its very likeness to life is a point against it, its 
inactive characters are another detriment, its absence of poetic 
justice completes the ban. The opposites of these qualities 
are, it is true, what we have learned to expect in our art, they 
are not necessarily the things we must find there. To fully L 
enjoy a man like Thomas Hardy or Eden Phillpotts or Guy 
de Maupassant requires a new point of view on the part of 
the reader, just as much as Romanticism once did, but it 
does not require a violation of one's artistic sense. 

There is a sound saying, that books should be truer than 
life itself, which I have always taken to mean that some ideal- 

(83) 



8 4 

ization is necessary on the part of the writer. He should give 
. I us what life ought to be rather than what it is. Daily life 
has not an eye for the dramatic, it is often trivial, discursive, 
it hides its hero under a mass of meaningless commonplaces. 
It is the business of the author to free the hero, to brush 
away the debris so that he stands out clear and commanding. 
In life we meet a man twelve times, and three out of the 
twelve may reveal to us significant traits about him; but 
occasionally it happens that we meet a person at a great crisis, 
and the flood gates are opened, and we know in a night what 
ordinarily it would take us years to learn. The writer must 
always take men at their revealing crises, even if the crisis 
is a prosaic every-day affair; he must make us know in one 
book, what we would be years in learning by observation. 
Out of the mass of raw material which life thrusts upon him, 
he must select what is vital to the hero, and to that act in the 
hero's life about which he centers his story. He must do 
more than take a photograph which is true to life, he must 
\ paint the portrait which gives hidden possibilities. He must 
do more than show us the mere individual, he must give us 
a hint of the Platonic archetype. And it is just here that one 
questions the purposeless view of life as a subject for art. 
Does it deal too much with what life is, and too little with 
what it ought to be? Should some truths be excluded, and 
are these among them? 

There is a remark of Tranter Dewy in Under the 
Greenwood Tree which is pertinent. "My sonnies, all true 
^ stories have a coarseness or a bad moral, depend upon't. If 
the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from 
true stories, who'd ha' troubled to invent parables ?" All great 
art deals with truth, and it would seem at first that every 
art might deal with every truth ; but a moment's thought con- 
vinces us of the soundness of the Tranter's statement. We 
must turn to the parables for all that side of life which 
^ expresses our aspirations, our longings, our dreams, our vi- 
sions of perfection. Poetry and music which are much helped 
by sound, painting and sculpture and architecture, which have 
the aid of color and form, can express those things at which 
the novel can only hint, or at the most suggest by giving the 



85 

negative or reverse side. The realm of the novel is those 
truths which have life in them, and will arouse our interest ; 
one might say all those which have earth in them. Not 
all truths will bear transplanting. If we want to visit the 
New Jerusalem or the home of Ulalume, it is better to ascend 
with St. John or go down with Poe, but if we want to visit 
Vanity Fair, let us join Thackeray. If we want the strength 
of wise thoughts, let us go to Marcus Aurelius, but if we 
want to see a man struggling and falling in the effort to find 
wisdom, let us go to Lear. 

Now it is just this large mixture of earth in a purposeless 
view of life which makes it a fit subject for a novelist, and OfM(k 
even in his best poetry Hardy is still the novelist. The depths 
of life are for the novel, the heights are not; it can go to 
the bottomless pit, it can not ascend to the Celestial City. s 
Doubtless Hardy could have pointed the way to the heights 
as well as to the depths of life. His temperament, his insight 
into the dark side has made him emphasize that. In doing HT 
this he has transgressed accepted traditions of art, he has 
violated no fundamental principles. 

That a character should be interesting and lifelike is an 
essential of art. In Thomas Hardy where the real protagon- 
ist is always the unknown, men and women lack initiative. 
One of his triumphs is to have created characters who are 
neither active nor aggressive and yet are not meekly submis- 
sive. They endure all things, are tinged with fatalism, re- 
signed to the worst, but they will never cringe before their 
destiny. They have the strong characteristic of fortitude. 
Elizabeth Jane, who will not yield to the blandishments of 
prosperity, Tess, who will not overrate her fault, are splendid 
examples of this type of bravery. In the hands of a great ar- 
tist then, neither the insistence on the dark problems of life, 
nor the prevalence of passive characters is truly detrimental. 
There remains the one question of fitting rewards and pun- 
ishments. 

Whatever may be the spirit of our day, bravado, courage, 
the desire to "see things as they are," or merely Nietzsche's 
"transmutation of all values," it is certain that we dare to 
question the truth and the value of poetic justice. This is the 



86 

more daring because it is an ideal of such ancient and respect- 
able lineage. Hebrew precept, Greek tradition and a pro- 
nounced instinct of man all speak in favor of an allotment of 
rewards and punishments according to deserts. This is a de- 
mand for moral cause and effect. It presupposes that there 
shall inevitably be a chain of causes as definite as those of 
the mechanical world. It forgets that in the moral world 
there is always the factor of freedom. To-day we remember 
this. We no longer slur the last clause in the Century Dic- 
tionary, "not usually found in life." And we ask why that 
which is not usually found in life should usually be found in 
books about life. 

There are two distinct types of poetic justice, both of 
which are found in literature. In Raphael's Cartoon the by- 
standers look with horror on the fallen Ananias who has paid 
the penalty of his perfidy. His justice comes from without 
in striking and fitting fashion. The spectator of the play of 
Othello is denied any such gratification when Iago, a man 
of greater perfidy, is not thwarted by Providence. Poetic 
justice here must depend on some recognition that there is a 
blackness of sin and a whiteness of purity, that virtue is its 
own reward and vice its own punishment are more than copy- 
book maxims. The Ananias type of judgment seems to-day 
crude and naive. It does not fit in with our ideas of the im- 
portance of experience and of the psychological effect of sin 
upon the sinner, and of a God within man. Just as tragedy has 
gone from the extensive type of the Greeks to the intensive 
kind of Shakespeare and Browning, so poetic justice has 
passed to the working out within man rather than on a plane 
without. The effect on the witness is something like that pro- 
duced by a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral respectively. 
The death of an Ananias asks of the spectator only the defin- 
ite emotions of pity and horror. The case of a Desdemona or 
a Duchess of Malfi calls for more. The witness of the trag- 
edy must create his own justice. His own experience, and his 
own observation of life must suggest to him the inference to 
be made. 

With a man like Thomas Hardy we come to the cases 
not where we are forced to create our own justice, but where 



87 

we can create none, if we would. He is a man of his time, a 
time which does not demand of its writers that like Milton 
they "justify the ways of God to men," but that they shall re- 
veal them. Yet in revealing some of the ways of God to men, 
he is often said to have removed a bulwark of tragedy. 

Tragedy involves four elements. The first and the only i 
one absolutely essential is conflict. But as a conflict can only 1 
arise when some one starts it, the aggressive spirit becomes •* 
a part of tragedy. In all ^reat tragedy, there is a feeling that 
one party to the conflict is something greater than the indi-*" 
vidual man. It may be collective men in the shape of con- 
vention or morality, or it may be the gods, or mysterious 
supernatural forces, but it is never man and man. Because it 
does touch on this deeper issue of man's relation to what is 
about him, some sort of a reconciliation is felt to be necessary. 
The spectator feels the need of squaring himself with these 
forces greater than he is. He must find his own feet before he 
can take up the burden of life again. Poetic justice is one way 
of effecting this reconciliation; it is not necessarily the only 
way. 

In every day speech we use the word tragic with no hint 
of poetic justice. A Messina earthquake or a terrible railroad 
accident is tragic. The tragedy lies in the fact that it was un- ' ; 
deserved by the victims and cannot be explained. It reminds 
us of man's situation in the world, that he is always virtually 
in conflict with forces greater than himself and can at any 
moment be worsted. Hardy's stories emphasize this sense of 
the ready-at-any-moment tragicness of life. Like the tragic 
episode they give the feeling of a conflict in which man is ever 
contending with all that is unknown about him, and this un- 
known is of course greater and more powerful than man. This 
is the tragicness of great forests, and of the open sea, and of 
terrible storms, and of primitive man in the midst of wild 
beasts and primeval nature — the insignificance of man and 
an unknown that can be terrible. This tragedy would lose 
its value, if man were always conquered. But he often wins. 
Every medical discovery, every mechanical invention, every 
new use of electricity is a point in his favor. He is a con- 
queror too in Pascal's sense of being a reed, the most feeble in 
nature, but a reed which thinks. 



88 

The courage of man in daring to contend with what is 
so powerful or even to live in the face of his own insignificance 
is what furnishes the needed reconciliation. The witness of 
it finds himself possessed of increased respect for humanity 
and belief in man. The admiration the world has always 
given to great explorers and discoverers becomes the due of 
every man, since all are voyagers on unknown seas. They 
are hero voyagers, too, for in the face of their own insignifi- 
cance before great unknown forces, they live according to the 
best within them. They have thus accomplished their des- 
tiny whether they meet with success or failure. If it is failure 
and catastrophe, then the spectator is purged not of pity and 
terror, but of cowardice and all meanness of spirit. 

The creation of this type of tragedy based on a lack of 
justice tends to broaden the tragic conception by taking away 
what is cut and dried about it. As long as poetic justice must 
be exemplified we know what is going to happen, we are only 
excited about how it shall come to pass. We have read the 
last chapter before we begin the book. But once the possi- 
bility of a lack of poetic justice is admitted, the written trag- 
edy has all the excitement of life. We can not know the 
end till we come to it. To produce this uncertainty justice 
itself must be presented as an uncertain element: There can 
be all the characteristics Schopenhauer allowed the will, ir- 
rationality, blindness, capriciousness, but there can not be 
malignancy. If the unknown forces are bad then a cut and 
dried tragedy is established of a nature which hopeful man 
will not tolerate. We must feel that destiny is careless and un- 
certain, not that it is deliberately unjust. 

That sense of mystery which always comes when we think 
at all about the destiny of man forms the attractiveness of 
this idea of tragedy. One type is excluded, that of Othello 
and Lear, where the catastrophe is brought about by the 
machinations of a thoroughly evil man. As long as man's pre- 
meditated wickedness alone is the cause of the suffering there 
is no illustration of a lack of justice. Othello and Lear are 
pessimistic tragedies, but their deepest pessimism to a genera- 
tion brought up on the brotherhood of man is in their presen- 
tation of men who want to be wicked and work hard to accom- 
plish it. They strike at the root of our pride in man which 



89 

forms the reconciliation element in a tragedy exemplifying a 
lack of justice. A genuine field for this form of tragedy is 
where the catastrophe is brought about by some weakness in 
the victim. Such a one is Tess. First the sensuality of Alec 
D'Urberville, later the priggishness of Angel Clare cause the 
sorrows of Tessi yet they are not responsible in the sense in 
which Iago and Edmund are responsible, for they do not con- 
sciously choose to do wrong. The blame is shifted from them 
to something outside of tnem.* The more of this feeling of 
outside responsibility there is, the better an example of a lack 
of poetic justice we have.) So that a purely objective story 
like Guy de Maupassant's "La Ficelle" is an almost perfect 
example of this type of tragedy. 

To get used to this new conception whose tragicness con-" 
sists in the uncertainty of life, of tone's happiness, and even of 
one's moral character will not be accomplished in a day or an 
hour, perhaps not in a generation. We are fed too full of the 
daring hero who challenges the world. That the world should 
challenge a man is a harder thing to realize. We thrill with 
the youth who would paint the sun if he had to draw the sun 
down to dip his brush in it. It is the call of manhood, of all 
that is strong and virile in the races of the west. The other 
tragedy is perhaps only to be appreciated by an adult people. 
One hopes some children will always linger, that we shall 
never lose the youths who want to paint the sun, and the dramas 
about them. But growing up is inevitable and to the man 
who has truly grown up the feeling must come that life with 
all its compensation, its brilliance, its worth-whileness lies close 
to the tragic chaos of what is uncertain and unknown. Profes- 
sor Royce says, "To see where the worst problems of life lie 
is a very black experience. And yet, so much does human rea- 
son love insight, that I have never met a man who was alive 
to these deepest problems, and who still repented him of his 
insight." 

For those of us who do not repent us of our insight the 
day is not far distant when we may expect what a recent writer 
in the Atlantic Monthly describes as "another sort of tragedy 
founded upon the very inscrutability of the plotting of our 
lives." Indeed it is already upon us — for have we not 
Thomas Hardy? 






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