His temperament is
cast in that brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less
readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever
slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indicates. Like
the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brooding, adumbrative, rather
than incisive or brilliant, and it often limps among the facts of
his story like a man in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist,
except when his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder
passages that we remember him. Yet the most important fact about
Hardy is not that he is pessimistic.
His manner of telling a story, however, helps to confirm the
popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series of accidents, by
which the doom of some lovely or aspiring spirit comes upon it by
the slow drift of misfortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude--it is
clear enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make them
liable. But the master prepares for them trivial error, unhappy
coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, until it is not surprising if
the analytic mind insists that he is laboring some thesis of
pessimism to be worked out by concrete example.
Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is annoying
that the dean of letters in our tongue should be subjected to a
sophomoric formula in which the emphasis is wrongly placed.
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