The
critics, in general, have defined this pessimism, stopped there,
and said, this is Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism
reads Hardy avidly. More light is needed.
Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and melancholy
pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is the first quality one
feels in him, but at eighty he still waxed his mustache tips, and
his eyes lit eagerly. I remember how earnestly he denied knowledge
of science, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had declared
that his art consisted of applying the results of scientific
inquiry to the study of simple human nature. If his treatment of
nature was scientific, as I affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did
not deny, then, he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not
by theory. The war was still on when I talked with him. It had
lifted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no longer interested
him vitally. "It is too mechanical," he said. His novels, where
fate seems to operate mechanically sometimes, he was willing that
day to set aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper
form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too wasteful of
time and space in its attempt to come at real issues.
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