Hardy, Kipling, and Haggard

232 HARDY, KIPLING, AND HAGGARD By Harold Orel (University of Kansas) Literary influence is a devilishly hard thing to prove. Despite the popularity of such studies, the linkage between the act of reading a book and the subsequent act of writing a book under the direct influence of that first book is seldom direct or clear. Many writers do not like to admit that their handiwork traces back to another writer's earlier inspiration. They argue, with some justification, that the number of themes and situations available to creative writers is limited, and that all writers borrow from one another; "analogues " is a more useful word than "sources"; a book may resemble another book, but its existence does not depend on the prior existence of any single work of the creative imagination; and so forth. There is no obligation that a novel be the descendant of an earlier novel; it may be based on newspaper accounts of a murder trial, as in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy ; or on personal experience in migrant-laborer camps, as in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; or on experiences in a medical school, as in Somerset Maugham's p_f Human Bondage ; or on the memories of a tormented and unhappy childhood , as in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The memory of a writer, moreover, may be unreliable. He may deny that the influence exists, as T. S. Eliot did when critics pointed to Browningesque elements in his poetry, or as D. H. Lawrence did when readers reacted uneasily to the Freudian elements in the plotting of Sons and Lovers. In other words, an author may not be the best judge of how his memories of a reading experience have moved the direction of his pen; he may not recall the way in which the supposed influence operated, or whether any specific influence operated more powerfully than all the other possibilities. Ihab H. Hassan, discussing the problem of influence in literary history in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1955). argues that influencing forces may include (in addition to a specific author or a specific work) "climate, mores or locale of a people"; historical events such as the Armada and the American Civil War; "some particular style or literary convention"; "a particular theory or idea"; a specific thinker; and a literary movement. Hassan continues: the influence may be exerted upon such broad entities as the age at large, the cultural tradition, or a literary movement. "Literary influence" may very well become, in these terms, too broad and generalized to be useful to literary scholars. But let us suppose that the writer is honest about his borrowings, and even, as Hardy did, maintains a meticulous record of his readings , underlines notable passages in the book he is perusing, goes to the bother of transcribing passages (some quite lengthy) for the sake of later quotation, and takes pride in the variety and quality of his sources. Is the task made any easier? Are we, in fact, able to assert with greater positiveness that we understand the workings of the creative mind? The answer, regrettably, must be no, for this kind of evidence is almost entirely quantitative. Many scholars interested in Hardy have 233 had occasion to consult the table of Hardy's quotations from English literature, compiled by Carl Weber, printed in his biography of 1940, and only slightly revised in the later edition of I962. "This is not a list of Hardy's readings," Weber wrote, "but merely a tabulation of those English authors whom he alludes to or quotes. They are arranged , approximately, in chronological order." Bede is the first author, Edmund Gosse, the last. I counted sixty-seven authors in all, but since the list includes only those authors whom Hardy explicitly named, it is incomplete; the number of borrowings from Wordsworth is not an accurate reflection of the extent of Hardy's indebtedness. But Weber's list barely scratches the surface. It does not do justice to Hardy's deep, intimate knowledge of the Bible; it implies that Hardy found little or nothing in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature to his taste, and...