HARDY, THOMAS (184o-1928), English novelist and poet, was born in Dorsetshire on June 2, 1840. His family was one of the branches of the Dorset Hardys, formerly of influence in and near the valley of the Frome, claiming descent from JOHN LE HARDY of Jersey (son of Clement Le Hardy, l:eutenant-gover nor of that island in 1488), who settled in the west of England. His maternal ancestors were the Swetman, Childs or Child, and kindred families, who before and after 1635 were small landed proprietors in Melbury Osmond, Dorset, and adjoining parishes.
Early Life.—He was educated at local schools, 1848-54, and afterwards privately, and in 1856 was articled to John Hicks, an ecclesiastical architect of Dorchester. In 1859 he began writing verse and essays, but in 1861 was compelled to apply himself more strictly to architecture, sketching and measuring many old Dorset churches with a view to their restoration. In 1862 he went to London (which he had first visited at the age of nine) and became assistant to the late Sir Arthur Blomfield, R.A. In 1863 he won the medal of the Royal Institute of British Archi tects for an essay on Coloured Brick and Terra-cotta Architec ture, and in the same year won the prize of the Architectural Association for design. In March 1865 his first short story was published in Chambers's Journal, and during the next two or three years he wrote a good deal of verse, being somewhat uncertain whether to take to architecture or to literature as a profession.
In 1867 he left London for Weymouth, and during that and the following year wrote a "purpose" story, which in 1869 was accepted by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. The manuscript had been read by George Meredith, who asked the writer to call on him, and advised him not to print it, but to try another, with more plot. The manuscript was withdrawn and rewritten, but never published.
The order of merit was conferred upon Hardy in July 1910, and in his later years he received increasing recognition, not only as a great novelist but also as a poet, until by common consent he was admitted the undisputed sovereign of English letters. His great epic-drama The Dynasts (1904-08), a chronicle play of England's struggle against Napoleon, with an accompaniment of philosophic comment chanted by a chorus of "phantom intelli gences," was in part produced at the Kingsway theatre, London, in the early months of the World War, and again at Oxford in 1920. Several volumes of lyrical poetry followed (Selected Poems in 1916; Collected Poems in 1919—but now incomplete). His first wife died in 1912, and in 1914 he married Florence Emily, daughter of Edward Dugdale, herself a writer of children's books and articles in periodicals. Both on his loth and his 8oth birth day he received, in his house near Dorchester (from which, lat terly, he seldom moved), tributes of respect and admiration representing the English-speaking world.
Three Periods.—Thomas Hardy's career naturally divides it self into three periods. The first of these contains his work as a novelist, and ends with Jude the Obscure in 1896 (The Well beloved, published in book form in 1897, appeared serially in 1892). Throughout the series of the novels these gradually become more and more insistent—first as an element of irony, but later as the tragic essence of the narrative—a characteristic metaphysic, in which the strivings and passions of individuals are in fruitless conflict with the inexorable process of the world. Jude the Obscure, despite its splendid qualities, made it clear that such a theme could not be adequately developed in the form of the novel ; a form was required in which the author could speak out his own convictions without violating aesthetic propriety.
Accordingly, the second period consists of The Dynasts, the three parts of which were issued separately in 1904, 1906, 1908 ; no doubt the greatest single achievement of his career. It may be said that this great poem was written in order to give full utter ance, in artistic form, to his peculiar metaphysic. That, however, was not its originating intention, which was simply to celebrate as a chronicle play England's part in the Napoleonic wars. But as the conception grew and deepened, and as to the human action the superhuman comment of "phantom intelligences" was added, the poem became the summation of Hardy's vision of life; and thereby achieved a unity which, in its intrinsic grandeur, and in its perfect command over immense wealth of matter, can only be compared with such monuments of man's destiny as Faust and Paradise Lost. In diction, however, The Dynasts will not bear any such comparison.
The third period may be said to begin with Time's Laughing stocks in 1909, and is wholly devoted to lyrical poetry. It is not often that an artist's life can be divided so definitely into separate stages, each stage characterized by the use of a different form ; and, next to its length and plenty, and consistently noble idiosyncrasy, this tripartite division is, perhaps, the most remark able feature of Hardy's career as a whole. The lyrical period, however, does not give us an entirely new development of his genius. While he was writing novels, he had occasionally experi mented with poetry, and some of the results were published in Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and the Present (19o1), between Jude the Obscure and The Dynasts. The volumes published since The Dynasts also contain a good many more of these earlier poems. But from 1909 onwards Hardy wrote nothing but lyrical poetry, and this may therefore be truly called his lyrical period. (A Changed Man, in 1913, merely rescued from the periodicals of former years several stray pieces of minor fiction.) It represents a new concentration of his power, but certainly no diminution of it. Devotion to lyrical expression has produced a mastery almost as signal in its kind as his com mand of the art of fiction; and his loth year saw him beginning, with Time's Laughing-stocks, the series of volumes—Satires of Circumstance (1914) , Moments of Vision (1917) , Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925), and the posthumous volume Winter Words (1928), which has shown him to be the most original, the most poignant, and also the most copious of contemporary lyrical poets.
Poetry.—The originality of the technique in these volumes does not by any means consist in a mere breach with the accepted conventions, but rather in its highly individual—to some, per haps, rather disconcerting—compound of the conventional and the unconventional. Most of these lyrics maintain an exact and even rigid formality of stanza, in which a scheme of rhymes is imposed, as it seems, arbitrarily and at all costs. The effect is sometimes justified by its music ; but more often by the compact force its pressure gives to language almost conversational in its idiom and choice of words. Yet the diction which defies poetic tradition and seems to despise the magic of elaborated verbal suggestion, is oddly blended with stiff literary phrases and even with words one might expect only lexicographers to think of. The truth seems to be that, in lyrical technique, Hardy had no prejudices either for or against the conventions. He is simply concerned with the matter which intense feeling and profound understanding have enabled him to imagine in a way peculiarly his own, and to express this faithfully he has forged a technique peculiarly his own, out of whatever the language of literature or of speech could offer him. Readers who are willing to allow him this liberty can hardly fail to be impressed, as perhaps nowhere else in recent poetry, by the subtlety, depth and variety of his versions of the experiences common to humanity; the commonplace becomes in his hands something rich and strange. Naturally, the habits of thought and outlook on the world, which we find progressively insistent in the series of the Wessex novels, and which inspire the turbulent matter and monumental struc ture of The Dynasts, are very evident also in the lyrics; which, indeed, are often in the nature of marginal comments on themes previously used.
But something like the quintessence of his tragic power may be found in such ballads as "A Trampwoman's Tragedy," or such keen discrimination of pathos as "Near Lanivet," and something too like the quintessence of his irony to be altogether comfortable in Satires of Circumstance or "Ah, are you Digging on My Grave?" Nor is the rustic humour of his beloved Dorset villagers wanting, nor the vivid delight in nature, in the extraordinary range of his lyrical art. It is, in fact, the same Hardy in the lyrics as in the novels and The Dynasts; but a Hardy who, if his lyrics were all we had of him, would surely, by virtue of them alone, hold a secure, indeed a unique, position in modern English literature.
Thomas Hardy died on Jan. i t, 1928, and while, in deference to the feeling of the whole English-speaking world, his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, in consideration of his deep affection for his native Wessex and the peculiar inspiration it gave him, his heart was buried in his parish churchyard.
The position which he occupied in English literature on account both of his literary merits and of his great age, was an unique one. Known generally as "the last of the great Victoriarts," his death seemed to snap the last link connecting with the famous nine teenth century litterateurs.