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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 247
the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the
whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came
into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year
in which she was born.’
This could be straight Camus, and in fact it really is for, as Cecil
suggests, Hardy’s mnemonic side had to concede what the Greeks
called a human nature. We can, after all, talk about persistence beyond
death; rabbits and rats cannot. ‘Despairing literature’, as Camus once
put it, ‘is a contradiction in terms’.
So society executes Tess, as it did Camus’s Meursault, and for not
entirely dissimilar reasons. In neither case is the murder the guilt; the
revolt against convention is the real guilt. Meursault is decapitated ‘in
the name of the French people’. Tess is hanged in the name of male
society. And yet her touching, tentative revolt against inhuman laws
affirms something irreducibly human, and makes us all her murderers,
as well as her fellow-condemned.
Of course, the great difference, aesthetically, between Hardy’s
brand of existentialism and Camus’s is that the latter writer could
already locate his in a social situation where the values of solitude,
alienation, revolt (during German occupation) were normatively
heroic. As a matter of fact, there may even have been an artistic
penalty for this; however sympathetic Camus’s fiction was, he was
again giving testimony, acknowledging public truths, rather than (or
just as much as) writing out of private discovery, apart. We feel he is
as honest as Hardy all the way, but does he maintain the same creative
energy over long stretches (his best work is short)? As Irving Howe
once put it, ‘Camus has not yet given himself irrevocably to the powers
of art, he has not yet taken the final step that would bring him from
the realm of reflection to the realm of imagination.’ 29 Yet Camus’s
tragic optimism replies to, rounds out, Hardy’s ironic pessimism.
Surely he would have agreed with Camus that ‘a human nature does
exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent
in oneself worth preserving?’ 30
So Tess, this ‘mere child of the soil’, is also a child of our time,
a truly delicate organization of appetencies. No wonder Tolstoy
approved her (at least in serial shape). She is ‘Alive enough to have
strength to die’, all right, and cannot imagine no further life for the