Essays on Hardy

BOOK REVIEWS Essays on Hardy Phillip Mallett, ed. The Achievement of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. xvii + 192 pp. $55.00 THE MAJOR PART of this anthology consists of essays that were originally prepared for the Thirteenth International Conference, organized by the Thomas Hardy Society and held in Dorchester in the summer of 1998. Not all the lectures given on that occasion are printed here. Two essays prepared for other contexts, as well as an essay written on request , have replaced three lectures that were not available for publication . The conference, which takes place every two years (on the current schedule), began some two decades ago, in Weymouth, as a way to bring together people interested in discussing aspects of Hardy's life and art. Today the Hardy Society flourishes with several hundred paid-up members and an impressive number of non-members who drop in for one or more days of the conference. Its multiple activities—a publishing program (with more on its plate than the well-respected Thomas Hardy Journal), walks to and around sites associated with Hardy and his fictions , alliances with similar clubs or groups in other cities of the U.K., full or partial sponsorship of musical events and dramatic performances mostly intended for the conference—are designed to satisfy the appetites of even the most dedicated Hardy fan. There is a Hardy Society in the U.S., though its programs are considerably less ambitious with far fewer fans than those in England, and the Thomas Hardy Society of Japan is that country's oldest literary association. "Fan" may be the operative word. Hardy's interests were so wideranging and provocatively set forth that the major part of his audience has always been common readers. The term, given wide currency in Dr. Johnson's time and elegantly praised in Virginia Woolf's criticism, may have fallen into disuse since World War II; but it is a fact that many in attendance at the Hardy conferences—possibly the majority—are nonacademic , and enjoy reading for reasons unconnected with the professional interests of people who teach literature and write about it. Moreover, they regard with suspicion those who use jargon or subscribe to the transient methodologies and theories that they believe tend to push Hardy's works into dark and gloomy corners. As a consequence, there has always been a great divide between members of the professoriat and the housewives, engineers, lawyers, and ar87 ELT 45 : 1 2002 chitects who—sometimes proudly, sometimes in a quiet murmur—like to think of themselves as Hardy's "real audience." The worst-received papers read at these gatherings are those which patronizingly insist on explaining what does not need to be explained or urge the listeners to think well of "Mr. Hardy" (as if anyone present did not already think well of him); and, at the other extreme, attempt to impress fellow dons by operating on the assumption that the speaker's one-key-fits-all is a definitive explanation of Hardy's technique or world-view. Misjudging the nature and interests of a conference audience is, admittedly, a continuing problem, and perhaps too much should not be made of it. The sin, when scrutinized closely, is venial. Nevertheless, since several collections of papers written on widely diverse topics for various Hardy conferences have already been published, the commercially oriented judgment of a publisher—in essence, that such anthologies have a ready-made audience and justify a modest pressrun—should not obscure a reader's awareness that we do not hold in our hands a book with a unifying theme so much as a series of texts prepared on the basis of individual concerns. Phillip Mallett, in his preface , is becomingly diffident when he remarks that the essays he has edited concentrate on the relationship between Hardy the novelist and Hardy the poet: "Novelist and poet, Victorian and modern, an inheritor of the high Romantic tradition who insisted on the modesty of his aims—these are some of the paradoxes which meet Hardy's readers, and which are addressed in varying ways by the essays and lectures collected here." He does not pretend...