Hardy's Wordsworth: A Record and a Commentary

210 HARDY'S WORDSWORTH: A RECORD AND A COMMENTARY By Peter J. Casagrande (University of Kansas) It bridges over the years to think that Grav might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle, and Wordsworth might have seen me in mine. (Thomas Hardy in I918) "The writer of this century, whom Mr. Hardy brings most often before my mind, is Wordsworth: that austere poet." So wrote Lionel Johnson in 1894. So write critics of Hardy of the present day. Michael Squires (The Pastoral Novel; Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence | 1974 |) views The Woodlanders as a Wordsworthian document which portravs Giles Winterborne and Martv South as intimates with Nature. In Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (1974), Paul Zietlow describes a reversal of the Wordsworthian ideal of Nature in "The Ruined Maid," and finds in "My Cicely" an echo of the language of Wordsworth. Donald Davie (Thomas Hardy and British Poetry [I972]) argues that in the 1922 "Apology" to Late Lyrics and Earlier, "Hardy's strategy was ... to buttress his case for scientific humanism as the onlv respectable working ethic for the poet, bv enlisting as a scientific humanist avant la lettre an authority £Wordsworth's] more compelling than his own could be, bedevilled as his was (so he believed) by willful misrepresentations of his own position as perverselv 'unorthodox.'" Squires in the fiction, Zietlow in the poetry, Davie in the criticism , find what many critics since Johnson have found in Hardy's writings, a Wordsworthian element which Walter Wright describes as pervasive: "The influence of Wordsworth permeated Hardy's work .... Hardv and Wordsworth were again and again trving to express similar feelings and . . . the memorv of Wordsworth was always present for Hardv to draw upon."l I have begun with an account of some critics' views of Hardv and Wordsworth to establish one thing - that we habitually use Wordsworth in our efforts to understand Hardy - and to point out another: that we have done so to date without reference to anything approaching the full range of the Wordsworthian element in Hardv. This oversight is the result of the steady influence of two books, W. R. Rutland's Thomas Hardy : A Study of His Writings and Their Background (1938). and Carl J. Weber's Hardv of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career (1940; rvd ed,1962). Rutland restricts Wordsworth's influence on Hardy to his earlv vears. Weber insists, with more than a grain of truth, that Hardy was attracted to the style but distrusted the philosophv of Wordsworth. And both urge that the influence of Wordsworth is negligible beside that of Sheliev, Swinburne, and especially Browning.2 The chief purpose of this study is to provide, with brief commentary , as complete a record of Hardv's debt to Wordsworth as. I have been able to compile from both published and unpublished sources. To date the record has been allowed to remain a scattered one.3 When consolidated, augmented by a number of previously unnoted allusions in the writings, as well as by evidence (in the Hardy Memorial Library) of Hardv's keen interest in 211 contemporary criticism of Wordsworth, Hardv's debt to Wordsworth is confirmed and several things about it present themselves. First, Hardy relied upon Wordsworth throughout his career, not just in his early years. In particular, Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," generally thought of as an isolated target of Hardv's satire in Tess (I891), was for Hardv, as for many other Victorians,^ a life-long touchstone - in personal affairs as well as in his poetrv, fiction, and criticism. Finally 1 it is clear that Hardy developed his own poetic, especially in the 1890's, with conscious reference to the author of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Hardy's debt to Wordsworth was, to quote F. R. Leavis in a different context, "largely a matter of its being brought home to him how different he [was] - in what ways he [was] different, and so having his sense of his own essential idiosyncracv, his own expressive need, sharpened." As Harold Bloom has put it·. "Poetic Influence is the sense - amazing, agonizing, delighting of other poets, as felt in the depths of...