Two Critics of Hardy

476 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ~he modern sense of the term the more likely he is to understand what he is doing. Manuscripts and antecedents are of little help to the real understanding of literature; and the substitution of palaeography for: philosophy among theologians simply ruins the subject." On the other.hand, I am dismayed by what he says concerning J. E. B. Mayor, whose stupendous kn.owledge of Latin was in his·day (perhaps in any) unrivalled, not indeed quite superciliously , but with tolerant amusement. The simple fact is that Mayor was a gigantic and uncompromising exemplar of. "pure" scholarship, a ruthless champion of reading, and reading till death, if not beyond; v;:ho complained that some undergradua.tes owned less than two thousand volumes. For Glover to object to this was as if the Rhine complained of the Alps. His own books, to a careless or pedantic reader, may look like journalism. Because . they are easy to read, they are supposed easy to write; but those who have attempted such work know better. And how they glow with humanity, with immense knowledge lit up by a keen soul from an original point of view! I recall taking his little book on Horace " to read on the boat," well assured that the familiar Atlantic coma would not be disturbed by anything new onHorace, of all ancients. What I found was a jewel of literary skill, charm-and novelty.·or read his chapter· in The Challenge of the Greek on that repellentsounding theme, Greek trade. T~e whole ancient world is'lit up .for you by a thousand facts that a vivid soul has transmuted into personal experience. TWO CRITICS OF HARDY* J. F. MACDONALD Hardy of Wessex and Hardy the Nooelist are as representative as two books could very well be of the strength and weakness of· American and British scholarship. Har4y of Wessex is crammed with information and Hard) the Novelist assumes enough infor_ rnation already in the reader's mind to let him follow a detailed criticism of Hardy's novels. The admirer or student of Hardy's fiction could.not do better than read Mr Weber's book; and then, *Hardy of Wessex: His Lijland Literary Caru r, by CARL J, WEBER. New York, Columbia University Press, 1940, 302 pp., $3.00. Hardy tlu lfoollisl: dn Essay in Criticism, by DAVID CecJL. T he Clark Lectures given at Cambridge in 1942. London, Constable and Co. [Toronto, ~acmillan], 1943, 157 pp., $2.50. REVIEWS 477 with the solid basis of fact it supplies, go on to weigh and consider the very provocative criticism of Lord David Cecil in Hardy the Novelist. The two books provid~, between them, nearly all that one needs to form an intelligent judgment on Hardy's place as a novelist. Mr Weber has what the· Scots call a good conceit of himself. He states in the Preface that Hardy of Wessex "has been written wi.th the conviction that no account o( Hardy's career has yet been published which adequately recognizes the specific problem confronting the biographer of a man of letters." H e goes on to explain: "In dealing with an author emphasis must be placed upon those facts which determine his emotional personality, for from them emerge.his writings. Above all, the biographer must remain keenly alert to detect those radical discords which result in literary activity. His task is to unravel the psychological complexity and unrest that find release in a work of art." He elucidates further by telling us: "One must penetrate into the inner life of the man, learn what he read and what he thought, inspect his secret desires and ambitions, and st\)dy his rebuffs and .disappointments. .The literary biographer's task is not so much to appraise the pearl as to explain why the oyster grew it." Mr Weber makes one further claim: "Until recently it has been impossible to penetrate far into the inner life of Thomas Hardy, but the time has now come when the attempt can be made. Access to hundreds of his unpublished letters has facilitated the present study and has often permitted the turning of surmise into dogmatic...