Thomas Hardy's "Idiosyncratic Mode of Regard"

Abstract

Thomas Hardy's readers have often remarked on the personal, idiosyncratic quality of his work, the strong sense of a distinctive behind the fictional world. This presence is there in the prose, so that we feel a direct impress in every sentence which we can only describe . . . as personal.'1 It is there in the shorter poems. For is . . . a personal poet; an understanding and appreciation of his poetic persona is the most satisfactory approach to the poetry.2 It is there even in the seemingly impersonal epic-drama, Dynasts, for in it the very syllables are totally expressive of a and an acquired sensibility and philosophy of life.3 And it is the same who is present in most of the works, for The novelist and poet are unmistakably the same man, and We feel that almost any poem or story of his is itself only a particular instance of a constant and individual way of regarding life.4 This is not to say that the implied author is always the same, for his presence may be modified because of the demands of editors and the reading public, so that his full presence is not felt in the minor fiction. And even in the major fiction, his nature is not entirely constant, for in his role as omniscient narrator he develops from the somewhat George Eliot-like figure of Far from the Madding Crowd to the unique of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. That change, however, seems less a matter of growth than of emergence; that is, Thomas Hardy the man only gradually finds ways to bring the of the poems of the 1860's into the fiction: The deeper configurations of Hardy's work remain the same from the beginning to the end, so that The evolution in his work is a gradual clarification or bringing to the surface of these structures and their meanings rather than a change in the structures themselves.5 This personal element is, then, a constant and dominant factor in Hardy's work. How one responds to it will determine one's response to the work. Thus T. S. Eliot based his attack on Hardy on just this point: He seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of