Hardy Thomas - Thomas Hardy : the critical heritage

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer's death.

Edited by

R.G.COX

First published in 1979

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Compilation, introduction, notes and index 1979 R.G.Cox

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-19895-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19898-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-13466-8 (Print Edition)

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and nearcontemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer's historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative qualityperhaps even registering incomprehension!

For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer's lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author's reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

B.C.S.

Anyone investigating the reception of Hardy's work must be conscious of how much has been done for him by earlier scholars. I am aware of a particular indebtedness to Dr. W.R.Rutland's Thomas Hardy, a Study of his Writings and their Background (Oxford, 1938) and to Professor Edmund Blunden's English Men of Letters volume, Thomas Hardy (Macmillan, 1942), both of which give very full accounts of contemporary criticism. References to the indispensable biography by Florence Emily Hardy are to the one-volume edition of 1962. I should like to thank the editors of the Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement for information about the authorship of reviews in their columns, and the editor of the New Statesman for similar information concerning the Athenaeum. I have been indebted throughout to my colleagues Professor J.D.Jump and Mr. F.N.Lees of the University of Manchester for general advice and suggestions of items I might otherwise have missed.

I should also like to thank the following for permission to quote from previously published material:

The Society of Authors, literary representative of the authors, for Havelock Ellis's reviews in the Westminster Review, and the Savoy Magazine, for Sir William Watson's review in the Academy, and Laurence Binyon's review in The Bookman: the Trustees of Max Beerbohm's estate for his article in the Saturday Review: Peter Newbolt for Sir Henry Newbolt's article in the Quarterly Review: Eleanor Manning and W.O.Manning for Frederic Manning's review in the Spectator: the Trustees of the Hardy Estate and Macmillan and Co. for the extract from Harold Orel's Hardy's Personal Writings: Oxford University Press for the extract from Letters from G.M.Hopkins to Robert Bridges: Tweedsmuir Trustees for John Buchan's review in the Spectator: Jennifer Gosse for E.Gosse's reviews in the Speaker, Cosmopolis and Edinburgh Review: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd. for Charles Whibley's article in Blackwood's Magazine: Mrs. A.S. Strachey, Chatto and Windus Ltd. and Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. for the extract from Lytton Strachey's Characters and Commentaries, copyright, 1933, 1961, by James Strachey: John Farquharson Ltd. for the extract from The Letters of Henry James, Vol. I.

Most of the extracts given here are reprinted from the original periodicals. Nos. 9, 30, 50, 72 and 76 are taken from the reprints in volume form. All omissions are clearly indicated: these consist mostly of lengthy quotations and passages merely summarizing the narrative. Obvious misprints in the text have been corrected. xii

From the point of view of publication and chronology Hardy may be said to have had two careers, each lasting about a generation. He appears as a late Victorian novelist and an early twentieth-century poet. Of course, this simple division will not do either for criticism or biography: we know that much of the verse which was published from 1898 onwards had actually been written earlier. But as far as the reception and influence of his poetry is concerned it is simple fact that two volumes appeared later than The Waste Land and that we have to deal with it as an Edwardian and Georgian phenomenon. All this raises special problems for any attempt to trace the growth of Hardy's reputation, or, as in this volume, to give a representative selection of the main documents illustrating the impact of his work upon contemporaries. In particular it makes especially difficult the choice of a terminal point. After a good deal of hesitation I have taken 1914 as a convenient landmark which allows the inclusion of some of the general surveys of the novels made at the time of the first collected editions, and which takes in reviews of the poems up to and including