(Having been a fan of Thomas Hardy's novels during and after college, I was doubly delighted when I read this particular chapter, sometime during the 1980s, of Powys' wonderful book Enjoyment of Literature.)
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| John Cowper Powys |
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| Thomas Hardy in his garden |
"...in the midst of those who aim at creating a glow of sensuous well-being in their readers and of those who aim at distrubring their readers with frightfulness and disgust, the figure of Thomas Hardy stands out clear and distinct as one whose purpose was to capture the simple truth; and to present it, whatever the effect on his readers might be, with the patient taciturnity of the monotones of nature as they refuse to change one note of their grey neutrality under the prayers and imprecations of our troubled race."
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| Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) |
"A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything; ...Hardy's good men are...a mixture of simplicity and sagacity, and they seldom, if ever, surprise us by explosions of morbid nerves or of imaginative weakness. ....Loyalty, fidelity, simplicity, sagacity, disinterestedness, are the marks of a "good" Hardy character. And it is the same with Hardy's good women. Tess is certainly "a good woman," if ever there was one; and what a comfort to feel how the moral sense of the age has advanced since such a "wounded name" as Tess's needed the bosom of a great and daring genius to house it!" "What makes Hardy--with Shakespeare--the greatest of our pessimists is that his pessimism isn't a matter of personal nerves or personal misfortune but a matter of indignant sympathy with a suffering world..., the kind of suffering on which he concentrates, is not, though the physical enters also, the misery of hardship and destitution, so much as the emotional tragedies of the heart."
views of Thomas Hardy country in England
[Text from above excerpted from Powys, John Cowper. Enjoyment of Literature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938, pp. 435-450.]
