A New Biography of Hardy

BOOK REVIEHS 1. A NEW BIOGRAPHY OF HARDY Michael Millgate. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982. $25.00 The task of the biographer of Thomas Hardy poses special problems. Faced with all the information available about such a well-known and popular figure how is he to choose between the relevant and the trivial? Which aspects, in other words, of Hardy's life is the biographer obliged to register? Should he concern himself more with the public or with the private life? Should he emphasize Hardy the simple countryman turned author or should he write about the progress of the great man of letters? How does he strike a balance between the practical affairs of his life and the development of his subject's intellectual life? To what extent can he afford to speculate about Hardy's psychology or about his possible emotional relationships with others? In the case of Thomas Hardy these difficulties are compounded by the existence of an extremely full and recently published biography which covers similar ground. Robert Gittings' two-volume work—Young Thomas Hardy and The Older Hardy—appeared only four years ago and yet here is another study of over six hundred pages. So do we really need another full-length biography and so soon? The questions about the nature of biography are thrown into sharp relief by these parallel volumes. In general outline they resemble each other exactly since many of the details of Hardy's personal and literary career have been known for many years. Yet they both bring to light new and interesting material and their differences lie in the bias that each writer brings to the teatment of that new material. Broadly speaking Millgate is more accurate and is the more painstaking and .sober of the two. His conscientiousness with detail and his scrupulous identification of all his sourcees comes as a relief after Gittings' more cavalier and sometimes deeply irritating use of primary material. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that Gittings' work is the more lyrical of the two. His prose is easier on the eye and the ear. He writes about Hardy the poet and he is more willing to speculate when circumstantial evidence fails. Often that speculation is infuriating —as for example on Hardy's relationship with his cousin and the possibility of a child by her—but he always supplies the reader with an engaging and readable narrative. The two texts provide a salutory warning about the infallibility of the art of biography. Without the corrective evidence of the other we might have been tempted to say that we now had a definitive picture of the man and his life. The discrepencies between the two accounts, however, serve to remind us that what we are reading is one man's impression of another and maybe it is here that Professor Millgate has missed a rare opportunity. The desire for comprehensiveness on the 133 part of both biographers inevitably leads to an Impression which is episodic and fragmentary, and Millgate might have done better to have stressed those aspects of Hardy's life to which Gittings has not done justice—to have strengthened his own bias and ignored aspects of Hardy's development with which Gittings deals more fully. For example, Professor Millgate initiates an interesting discussion about the influence of Arnold on Hardy and he touches on Hardy's reading in the 1880s (p. 246); he mentions Hardy's familiarity with the fine arts and Hardy's friendship with Hamo Thornycroft, Alma Tadema and W. P. Frith (p. 239); he often mentions the influence of Horace Moule over the young author but in each case the exigencies of the form prevent the development of the ideas and each one remains an aperçu. No sooner does he initiate a discussion of some philosophical or literary idea than he has to hurry his subject off to London once again to involve him in a discussion with a publisher, the details of which are readily available elsewhere. No biography will ever "fix" the life forever and perhaps the best test of a literary biography Is the degree to which the practical aspects of the...