" It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy
which wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but pity
worked them out.
The characters that Hardy loved--Grace, Marty South, Jude, Tess--
are life, brooding, intense, potential, and lovely, struggling
against a fate which they help to draw upon themselves, but which
is, nevertheless, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this
fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not told to
describe it. It is his creatures that get the color, the interest;
they are valuable to us, and would be to him, whatever the truth
of his philosophy. But because he loves life, the living thing,
even the lizard in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations.
Pessimistic Hardy is, as any gentle heart would be who chose to
study misfortune; yet pessimist is not the right term for him.
Realist he is clearly, in the philosophic sense of one who is
willing to view things as they are without prejudice. I seek a
term for a mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more
intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when most
ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. Pity for the individual,
not despair of the race, is his motive.
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