Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

246
Thomas Hardy
translation of two words in line 169 of Prometheus Bound, but in the
given context it has a sneering, sarcastic ring that is curiously insecure
. . . ‘strange terms for an atheist’, as Lord David well puts it.
Precisely. With one side of himself (the rational) Hardy tried to
adumbrate a universe of sheer fatality, chance, ‘hap’. As the fields are
cut in Tess rabbits and rats, friend and foe alike, cluster together in
panic and misery, then run for their lives. Like humans, it is a matter
of luck which of them is killed, and which escapes. We are all, that
is, in the words of one of Hardy’s best poems (‘Neutral Tones’), ‘Alive
enough to have strength to die.’
There is a whole philosophy in that line, which seems to be Hardy’s
inheritance from those urns of Zeus of which the weary Achilles talks
to Priam at the end of the Iliad. 28 Angel once confesses to his father
‘that it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been
the source of the religion of modern civilization’. And again, after
the chance but most important meeting with the stranger in Brazil,
a cosmopolite who thought Tess’s slip ‘of no importance beside what
she would be’, Angel reflects that he had himself ‘persistently elevated
Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity, yet in that civilization
an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem’.
This is all very well, but Hardy proceeds to people his fiction
with omens, and his poetry with ghosts. Intuitions, hauntings, spectral
voices usually have a habit, with Hardy, of coming true. Cecil
pinpoints the difficulty:
‘You simply do not get a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist
writer employing omens to increase his effect in a serious
work. As a matter of fact, Hardy was not altogether consistent.
Though his intellect accepted rationalism and materialism, his
imagination never did. . . . Intellectual inconsistency, however, is
often aesthetic gain.’
Tess may be part of nature, but she has to be part of society. ‘Thus
Tess walks on, a figure which is part of the landscape. . . . ’ This is the
existentialist Hardy who could write, with some fervour in his prose:
‘Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss;
but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself
who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as