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262 REVIEW Hardy's Historical Perspective R. J. White, Thomas Hardy and History (Lond: Macmillant NY: Barnes & Noble, 1974). $17.50. A pity: the high price set by the American importer of this volume, published by The Macmillan Press Ltd. in England, will keep many Hardy admirers from purchasing it. For the writings of R. J. White, that distinguished historian, political scientist, and critic of Downing College, Cambridge, had led many to hope for a definitive treatment of Hardy's attitudes toward the past in this long-awaited book, and even if death prevented completion of the manuscript, the text is in reasonably good shape. The final tidying was done t'y James Gibson, who is completing a variorum edition of Hardy's verse. Although some of the seams still show, and the final chapter, "The Future," remains singularly unsatisfactory because of its narrow focus on two novels,the book offers a great many well-formulated observations . The style is both provocative and attractive. Almost any page offers at least one sentence like the following: "Slowly, like crystals forming upon a thread in a rich solution, the elements of this unique temperament coalesce into the pattern of the mature man and artist, and it is complete before he leaves his native heath for London and the world" (p. 31)« "It is only in the twentieth century that the ignorant have come to believe that to be a poet one must be a drunkard and a lecher" (p. 52)ι or "of all the characters in the drama the only one who could have read, and appreciated, The Dvnasts is Napoleon, though he would undoubtedly have complained of the way he is treated therein" (p. 99). The book rapidly surveys Hardy's life, and has useful notes to contribute to the long overdue updated version of Carl Weber's biography that somebody else will doubtless write before the end of the decade. The Wessex novelist and poet, for example, held a "certain regret for the fading of past glories" in his own ancestry, but he knew that the world of his childhood - Dorset in the 1840's - had irrecoverably disappeared, that much of it was ugly, and that fiction which pretended otherwise only sentimentalized the past. "He was equally opposed to democratic and to aristocratic privilege," White tells us while defining the term "Intrinsicalist," a term used by Hardy to define his own brand of political awareness, "and while he believed in equality of opportunity for all, he disliked the worse than aristicratic arrogance of those who think that hand-labour is the only labour, and he was against the taxing of those who help themselves in order to help those 'who will not help themselves when they might'" (p. 27), In assessing the importance of contributions made by Herdy's parents to his childhood, White distinguishes with considerable skill "the gifts of the father" from those of his mother. He reminds us that Thomas Hardy senior - "His son was to liken him to Hamlet's Horatio, and one would suppose him to have been a rather more talkative version of Giles Winterbourne 263 with perhaps a touch of Gabriel Oak about him" - was a good deal more influential than most writers on Hardy, grateful to Jemima Hardy for her emphasis on letters and literature, have appreciated. It is salutary to recall the long period when Hardy lived as a Bohemian (to do so, we combine the years of "Hardy the young man with his living to make in Victorian London" with the five years that followed his marriage to Emma Lavinia)ι it is easy, but misleading, to think of Hardy as writing his novels in the study of one fixed location, when in fact he came late to the authorship of fiction, was something of a gay blade in London society before marriage, and a restless traveler until, at the age of thirty-nine, he settled at Upper Tooting. Speculations on the significance of Rebecca West's epigram - "One of Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow" run bracingly counter to current critical doctrine: Hardy, White says emphatically, believed that "a story must be striking enough to be worth telling...

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