' that after having said this, we may also say with him,
'Lord, lift thou the light of thy countenance upon us.
'Lord, lift thou the light of thy countenance upon us.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
Parents are
always stingy towards their poor children: my mother intended
to have given me five hundred louis d'ors, but she had kept back
fifty- as well for some little repairs in the abbey as to pay for
praying for me! Brinon had the charge of the other fifty, with
strict injunctions not to speak of them unless upon some urgent
necessity. And this, you see, soon happened.
"Thus you have a brief account of my first adventure. Play
has hitherto favored me; for since my arrival I have had at one
time, after paying all my expenses, fifteen hundred louis d'ors.
Fortune is now again become unfavorable: we must mend her.
Our cash runs low; we must therefore endeavor to recruit. "
"Nothing is more easy," said Matta; "it is only to find out
such another dupe as the horse-dealer at Lyons; but now I think
on it, has not the faithful Brinon some reserve for the last ex-
tremity? Faith, the time is now come, and we cannot do better
than to make use of it. "
"Your raillery would be very seasonable," said the chevalier,
"if you knew how to extricate us out of this difficulty. You
must certainly have an overflow of wit, to be throwing it away
upon every occasion as at present. What the devil! will you
always be bantering, without considering what a serious situation.
we are reduced to? Mind what I say: I will go to-morrow to
the headquarters, I will dine with the Count de Cameran, and I
will invite him to supper. "
"Where? " said Matta.
"Here," said the chevalier.
"You are mad, my poor friend," replied Matta. "This is
some such project as you formed at Lyons: you know we have
## p. 6922 (#306) ###########################################
6922
ANTHONY HAMILTON
neither money nor credit; and to re-establish our circumstances
you intend to give a supper. "
«< Stupid fellow! " said the chevalier: "is it possible that, so
long as we have been acquainted, you should have learned no
more invention? The Count de Cameran plays at quinze, and
so do I: we want money; he has more than he knows what to do
with: I will bespeak a splendid supper; he shall pay for it. Send
your maître-d'hôtel to me, and trouble yourself no farther, except
in some precautions which it is necessary to take on such an
occasion. "
"What are they? " said Matta.
"I will tell you," said the chevalier; "for I find one must
explain to you things that are as clear as noonday. You com-
mand the guards that are here, don't you? As soon as night
comes on, you shall order fifteen or twenty men under the com-
mand of your serjeant La Place to be under arms, and to lay
themselves flat on the ground between this place and the head-
quarters. "
"What the devil! " cried Matta; "an ambuscade? God forgive
me, I believe you intend to rob the poor Savoyard. If that be
your intention, I declare I will have nothing to do with it. "
"Poor devil! " said the chevalier: "the matter is this: it is
very likely that we shall win his money. The Piedmontese,
though otherwise good fellows, are apt to be suspicious and dis-
trustful. He commands the horse; you know you cannot hold
your tongue, and are very likely to let slip some jest or other
that may vex him. Should he take it into his head that he is
cheated, and resent it, who knows what the consequences might
be? for he is commonly attended by eight or ten horsemen.
Therefore, however he may be provoked at his loss, it is proper
to be in such a situation as not to dread his resentment. "
"Embrace me, my dear chevalier," said Matta, holding his
sides and laughing; "embrace me, for thou art not to be matched.
What a fool was I to think, when you talked to me of taking
precautions, that nothing more was necessary than to prepare a
table and cards, or perhaps to provide some false dice! I should
never have thought of supporting a man who plays at quinze by
a detachment of foot; I must indeed confess that you are already
a great soldier. »
The next day everything happened as the Chevalier Gramont
had planned it; the unfortunate Cameran fell into the snare.
They supped in the most agreeable manner possible; Matta drank
## p. 6923 (#307) ###########################################
ANTHONY HAMILTON
6923
five or six bumpers to drown a few scruples which made him.
somewhat uneasy.
The Chevalier de Gramont shone as usual,
and almost made his guest die with laughing, whom he was soon
after to make very serious; and the good-natured Cameran ate
like a
man whose affections were divided between good cheer
and a love of play; - that is to say, he hurried down his victuals,
that he might not lose any of the precious time which he had
devoted to quinze.
Supper being done, the serjeant La Place posted his ambus-
cade and the Chevalier de Gramont engaged his man.
The per-
fidy of Cerise and the high-crowned hat were still fresh in
remembrance, and enabled him to get the better of a few grains
of remorse and conquer some scruples which arose in his mind.
Matta, unwilling to be a spectator of violated hospitality, sat
down in an easy-chair in order to fall asleep, while the chevalier
was stripping the poor count of his money.
They only staked three or four pistoles at first, just for amuse-
ment; but Cameran having lost three or four times, he staked
high, and the game became serious. He still lost, and became
outrageous; the cards flew about the room, and the exclamations
awoke Matta. As his head was heavy with sleep and hot with
wine, he began to laugh at the passion of the Piedmontese instead
of consoling him. "Faith, my poor count," said he, "if I was in
your place, I would play no more. "
"Why so? " said the other.
"I don't know," said he; "but my heart tells me that your
ill luck will continue. "
"I will try that," said Cameran, calling for fresh cards.
"Do so," said Matta, and fell asleep again: it was but for a
short time. All cards were equally unfortunate for the loser.
He held none but tens or court cards; and if by chance he had
quinze, he was sure to be the younger hand, and therefore lost
it. Again he stormed.
"Did not I tell you so? " said Matta, starting out of his sleep:
"all your storming is in vain; as long as you play you will lose.
Believe me, the shortest follies are the best. Leave off, for the
Devil take me if it is possible for you to win. "
«< Why? " said Cameran, who began to be impatient.
"Do you wish to know? " said Matta: "why, faith, it is
because we are cheating you. "
The Chevalier de Gramont, provoked at so ill-timed a jest,
more especially as it carried along with it some appearance of
## p. 6924 (#308) ###########################################
6924
ANTHONY HAMILTON
truth: "M. Matta," said he, "do you think it can be very agree-
able for a man who plays with such ill luck as the count to be
pestered with your insipid jests? For my part, I am so weary
of the game that I would desist immediately, if he was not so
great a loser. " Nothing is more dreaded by a losing gamester
than such a threat; and the count in a softened tone told the
chevalier that M. Matta might say what he pleased, if he did
not offend him; that as to himself, it did not give him the
smallest uneasiness.
The Chevalier de Gramont gave the count far better treat-
ment than he himself had experienced from the Swiss at Lyons,
for he played upon credit as long as he pleased; which Cameran
took so kindly that he lost fifteen hundred pistoles, and paid
them the next morning. As for Matta, he was severely repri
manded for the intemperance of his tongue. All the reason he
gave for his conduct was, that he made it a point of conscience
not to suffer the poor Savoyard to be cheated without informing
him of it. "Besides," said he, "it would have given me pleasure
to have seen my infantry engaged with his horse, if he had been.
inclined to mischief. "
This adventure having recruited their finances, fortune favored
them the remainder of the campaign; and the Chevalier de Gra-
mont, to prove that he had only seized upon the count's effects
by way of reprisal, and to indemnify himself for the losses he
had sustained at Lyons, began from this time to make the same
use of his money that he has been known to do since upon all
occasions. He found out the distressed, in order to relieve them:
officers who had lost their equipage in the war, or their money.
at play; soldiers who were disabled in the trenches; in short,
every one felt the influence of his benevolence, but his manner
of conferring a favor exceeded even the favor itself.
Every man possessed of such amiable qualities must meet
with success in all his undertakings. The soldiers knew his per-
son, and adored him. The generals were sure to meet him in
every scene of action, and sought his company at other times.
As soon as fortune declared for him, his first care was to make
restitution, by desiring Cameran to go his halves in all parties.
where the odds were in his favor.
## p. 6925 (#309) ###########################################
6925
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
(1847-)
SPECIAL taste for the abstract in mathematics, along with a
practical interest in the military profession, do not generally
enter into the stuff out of which romance-writers and poets
are made.
Mr. Hardy, however, is an interesting example of the
temperament that takes hold of both the real and the ideal. Suc-
cessively a hard-working professor of civil engineering and applied
mathematical science in two or three institutions, he has built up a
reputation in belles-lettres by working in them with an industry that
has given him a distinctive place in what
he once reckoned only an avocation.
Mr. Hardy was born in 1847 at Andover,
Massachusetts. By school life at Neuchâtel,
Switzerland, he was early put into touch
with French letters and French life. After
a single year at Amherst College he entered
the West Point Military Academy, graduat-
ing in 1869. He became a second lieuten-
ant in the Third Artillery Regiment, saw
some soldier life during 1869 and 1870, and
then resigned from the service to become a
professor of civil engineering at Iowa Col-
lege for a brief time. In 1874 he went
abroad, to take a course in scientific bridge-
building and road-constructing in Paris, returning to take a professor-
ship in that line of instruction at the Chandler Scientific School,
connected with Dartmouth College. He assumed a similar professor-
ship in Dartmouth College in 1878. This position (in connection with
which he published at least one established text-book, 'Elements of
Quaternions, followed by his translation of 'Argand's Imaginary
Quantities,' by his own 'Analytical Geometry,' and by other practical
works in applied mathematics) he held until recently, when he be-
came undividedly a man of letters and an editor of a well-known
magazine.
>
Mr. Hardy in literature is a novelist and a poet. His stories are
three in number. The first one, 'But Yet a Woman' (1883), is of
peculiar grace, united with firmness of construction; with a decided
ARTHUR S. HARDY
## p. 6926 (#310) ###########################################
6926
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
French touch in the style (especially as to its epigrammatic flash);
and with types of careful if delicate definiteness prominent in it, par-
ticularly in the delineation of Father Le Blanc, the philosophic and
kindly curé. A story of more subtle psychologic quality, 'The Wind
of Destiny,' came a little later, its scenery and characters partly
French and partly American, and its little drama a tragic one.
'Passe Rose,' a quasi-historic novel, dealing with the days and court
of Charlemagne,-the heroine of it a dancing-girl, with a princess as
her rival in love,- appeared first as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly
in 1888, to be published as a book in 1889. It is a romance of that
human quality which meets with a response in every novel-reader's
heart. Mr. Hardy's heroines are all charming; but he has presented
us to no more winning type than this flower of a mediæval day, with
"the hues of the Southern sea in her eyes and under the rose-brown
flush of her skin, the sound of its waves in the ripple of her
laughter. "
FATHER LE BLANC MAKES A CALL; AND PREACHES A
SERMON
From But Yet a Woman. ' Copyright 1883 by Arthur S. Hardy, and reprinted
by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
F
ATHER LE BLANC had a profound belief in human agencies.
He loved to play the ministering angel, for his heart was a
well of sympathy.
There was even a latent chiding of
Providence at the bottom of this well sometimes, when the sight
of the poor and the suffering stirred its depths with pity for
those lonely wayfarers who, neglected by this world, seem for-
gotten also of God. This was but one of those many themes
which this mind, at once simple, honest, and profound, turned
over and over reflectively, never seeing its one aspect except as
on the way to the other. "The difficulty does not lie in believ-
ing the truths of the Church," he once said, "but in those other
things which we must believe also. " Or again, "Belief is an edi-
fice never completed, because we do not yet comprehend its plan,
and every day some workman brings a new stone from the
quarry. " So that while Father Le Blanc was very devout, he was
not a devotee. He flavored his religious belief with the salt of a
good sense against which he endeavored to be on his guard, as
he was even against his charity and compassion. The vision of
Milton's fallen Spirit, beating its wings vainly in a non-resisting
air, drew from his heart a profound sigh.
## p. 6927 (#311) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6927
His thoughts turned very naturally to Stéphanie and her
journey that day, for he was on the way to secure the nineteenth
volume of the 'Viaje de España' of Pontz, for which he had been
long on the search, and which awaited him at last on the Quai
Voltaire. Those old books which filled the shelves of his room
in the Rue Tiquetonne had left his purse a light one. "But,"
said Father Le Blanc, "I am not poor, since I have what I
want. "
After possessing himself of his coveted book, he took up his
way along the quai, with his treasure under his arm. "I have a
mind to call on her," he said, still thinking of Stéphanie. "The
art of knowing when one is needed is more difficult than that of
helping;" and he paused on the curbstone to watch a company
of the line coming from the caserne of the Cité. A carriage,
arrested a moment by the passage of the troops, approached the
spot where he was standing, and he recognized M. De Marzac.
The priest was evidently sauntering, and M. De Marzac called to
his driver to stop.
"I see you are out for a promenade," he said. "Accept this
seat beside me, and take a turn with me in the Bois. "
Father Le Blanc was not in his second childhood, for he had
not yet outgrown his first; consequently the temptation was a
strong one. But M. De Marzac was no favorite of his, and not
even the fine day nor this opportunity to enjoy it could counter-
balance M. De Marzac's company. Dislike at first sight is more
common than love, as discord is more common than harmony.
So he excused himself as about to make a visit. "Well, then,
that decides it," he said to himself, as he trudged down the quai
with the gait of a man with an object in view. "Now I must
go. "
At the door of the hôtel in the Boulevard St. Germain he
stopped a moment before entering, and took a deep inspiration.
To tell the truth, the day was so fine he regretted going in-doors.
"I feel that I have a pair of lungs," he said, as he rang the
porter's bell.
Stéphanie was not expecting a visit from Father Le Blanc, yet
was glad to see him. She was in that period which lies after
decision and before action, when, having made all her prepara-
tions for an early start in the express of the next morning, there
was nothing to be done but sit down and wait for the hour of
departure.
## p. 6928 (#312) ###########################################
6928
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
"The air is so pure that I feared to find you were out. And
you go to-morrow! "
"Yes," Stéphanie said, "Si Dios quiere, as the Spaniards say. "
"But I shall be there before you. I leave this evening. "
"This evening! "
"And without fatigue," said the priest mysteriously, drawing
his volume from under his arm. "It is my nineteenth journey. "
"You have been to Spain? " said Stéphanie, taking the book,
but still perplexed.
"Oh, never! except in those leaves which you are turning; and
for two reasons," he added laughingly: "the guide-books tell us
that there are in Spain priests by the thousand, but not a single
cook! Still, you perceive that I am about to follow you, and —
who knows! -shall perhaps lodge at the same inn. That is a
country in which nothing becomes obsolete, and I have no doubt
but that if you inquire for it, they will show you in Toboso the
very fonda at which Don Quixote dismounted. "
Stéphanie thought she heard in this pleasantry something
more than was said. Certainly Father Le Blanc had not even
whispered, "Though you are going away, my child, I shall follow
you in my thoughts and in my prayers;" and yet that is what
she heard. Some of his most commonplace sentences were SO
many half-hidden channels, such as the brooks make under the
grass of the meadows, into which overflowed the currents of his
sympathy and kindliness. In spite of a strong natural reserve,
an invincible trust in this homely face crowned with white hairs
mastered her.
"You are very good to think of me, father," she said, in a
voice so full that it brought straight from his heart the message
he had come to deliver.
"All who suffer are my children; and you suffer-and that
grieves me. The Master who took upon himself the sorrows of
the world, bade his followers imitate him. Why will you not
lean a little upon me, daughter? I am an old man who has rav-
eled the path before you. "
She turned her eyes upon him, and they said, "I do not speak;
but read, and comfort me. "
"Sorrow is a very real thing," he continued in a voice full of
sweetness and authority. "It is neither a morbid nor an un-
healthy state. When it seems deepest, when after the world
has failed us, self also proves insufficient,-it may even be a
## p. 6929 (#313) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6929
blessed one. I do not chide, I even agree with you. But I wish
you also to agree with me. Be our life wide or narrow, whether
we live humbly or sit on a throne, whether we dwell in our own
thoughts, in the midst of action or in the search of pleasure, we
come to the verdict of the Hebrew king,- that verdict which I
read in your face and which broods over your life. All is empti-
ness and vanity! It is not the range but the depth of our experi-
ence which convinces us, and from the first we apprehend this
truth dimly. We own this sad statue of Sorrow in the block from
the outset, before experience chisels it out for us; and in our first
search for happiness, when we look on the splendors of the young
world for what they do not contain, it is this intimation of what
they cannot yield, and the capacity of our own natures, which
both allure and deceive us. "
She seemed to be listening to the story of her own life.
“And as we live on, this conviction deepens. The voices with-
out echo and reinforce those within. We are ever looking to some-
thing better than we have or are, and whether we attain it or lose
it, there is no rest for our feet. It is the man who is fooled and
deluded that is to be pitied. He who finds life and self sufficient
is either a monster or a caricature. Do you not see that I do not
argue with your tears? But do not think to dry them in Spain,
my child.
Sorrow is the handmaid of God, not of Satan. She
would lead us, as she did the Psalmist, to say, 'Who will show us
any good?
' that after having said this, we may also say with him,
'Lord, lift thou the light of thy countenance upon us.
> >>
"All else is a broken cistern," said Father Le Blanc, taking
up his thoughts after a pause. "See how time deceives us! He
covers the sore, he even heals the wound, but he gives no
immunity from a fresh one. " Stéphanie's eyes fell. "God only
renders us superior to calamity. Honestly," said he, lifting his
hands as if he appealed to his own conscience, "priest of God
though I am, in understanding I am as a child. I cannot explain
-I testify. I witness to you this mystery, that out of the very
hurt which brings me low, the spiritual life is developed. And,"
he added, as he would the benediction to a discourse at St.
Eustache, "blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they which
mourn, blessed are they which hunger and thirst, for these are
they which shall be filled; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. "
How much soever of gratefulness she felt for these words,
she could not answer them. Had he held her hand, her answer
XII-434
## p. 6930 (#314) ###########################################
6930
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
would have been a pressure. But Father Le Blanc was not hurt
by her silence. Though words bubbled easily over his lips, none
better knew the difficulty of sometimes saying, "Thank you. ”
He sat quietly, smoothing the wrinkles of his soutane over his
broad knee, with his eyes on the floor.
"When you return," he said at last, looking up, "I shall ask
you all the questions which are not answered in my nineteen
volumes. Think of it, at my age! never to have seen the sea.
Yet I have lain stretched out on its yellow sands in the sun,
listening to the music of its blue waves-in the Rue Tiquetonne!
And when I go to my window at night, it is to stand on the
summit of some high cliff, and the roar of the city is that of the
sea at its base. Chained as we are to our little patrimony in the
Rue Tiquetonne, the imagination is a free rover in space and
time. I wager you are surprised to hear an old man talk of
imagination," he said, taking her share of the conversation, and
putting in her mouth the replies which he wished to answer,—
"imagination, which is supposed to belong only to youth. I say,
rather, youth belongs to imagination, which is then a wild Bar-
bary colt, and carries one wherever it wills; but at my age it
has become domesticated, and it is on its back that I have ridden,
as did Sancho on that of his patient donkey, over all the byways
of Spain. And when you see some worthy colleague of mine on
his ass, plodding before you with a shovel hat on his head a
metre in length, you will say to yourself, There is my friend
ahead of me. '"
Her hands crossed on her knees, plunged in a delicious revery
which this voice penetrated without disturbing, Stéphanie raised
her eyes to his face and smiled.
He took his book from the table where she had laid it, and
put it under his arm again. He had dropped his few seeds of
comfort, and was ready to permit God to water them. So he
sought an excuse to go.
"I am like a schoolboy," he said, tapping the volume, "with
a new copy-book, who cannot rest till he has written something
on the first page. What a good friend this book will be! I count
upon him in advance;" and his eyes spoke to hers; "he will not
speak unless I question him; we shall perchance differ pro-
foundly, but he will not reproach me; I shall rifle his pockets.
and put him aside at my pleasure, yet he will not feel neglected.
I shall invite him to-night to a tête-à-tête before my fire, and
## p. 6931 (#315) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6931
fall asleep while he is doing his best to entertain me; but when
I awake, his countenance will be unruffled. Doubtless because
all the while he is aware that I still prize him.
What strange
things we do to those whom we love! Absolutely, madame,"
said Father Le Blanc, rising, and with a self-accusing gesture,
"I am an inveterate sermonizer, and I have not given you even
the opportunity to interrupt me. "
Stéphanie followed him to the door of the room, and at the
threshold put her hand softly upon his arm.
"Thanks, father, for this visit," she said. Her voice was low;
it was all she said, but her look and that gesture were more
eloquent than words.
"I say to you as they will say to you in Spain," replied
Father Le Blanc, "go your way with God, my daughter. "
When he had gone she went to the window and watched him
as he crossed the court-yard, following him out through the gates,
where he stopped to say something to the porter, who touched
his hat to him. She seated herself there in the wide-open win-
dow which projected over the area, as did its counterpart at the
other end of the room over the garden in the rear. Flanked
by two long and narrow projections, this court-yard with its large
paving-blocks of stone was not very inviting in its aspect. It
was in the other window, overhanging the garden, whose case-
ment the trees brushed, over which the vines swayed with the
wind, that she loved to sit. But her thoughts were far away.
It was still early in the afternoon, but the sun went slowly
down behind the tall roofs of the neighboring houses before she
rose to do what greatly surprised Lizette, who thought madame
altogether too much of a saint for a woman who neglected mass
and confession. When madame was dressed, and Lizette had
taken her place beside her in the carriage, she wondered at the
route taken by the coachman, whose instructions she had not
overheard. She supposed they were going to the Bois or the
Parc Monceau. And still greater was her surprise when she
found herself a little later in St. Eustache, placing a chair for
madame at the vesper service.
It was nearly over. Father Le Blanc himself in the pulpit
was finishing his exhortation.
The words of the preacher
gathered force from the immense space in which they were
uttered; from those dim, aspiring vaults into which they were
gathered, and where they died away without a confusing murmur.
## p. 6932 (#316) ###########################################
6932
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
Break your theological rocks, O ritual-hating brother, on the
King's highway, and worship him after your own fashion. For
every wayfaring heart overfed upon these symbols, you shall
show us one starved on your formulæ. Not only for thy weaker
brother, to whom God has not given the brains of the doctors in
the Temple, shall these vaults of stone be the very arches of
heaven; not only for thy frailer sister, in the keeping of whose
warm heart God has placed the sacred things of this life, shall
the incense of this swinging censer be the very fragrance of
celestial fields; but unto many of thine own dignity also shall
this star above the altar be the very star of Bethlehem.
"My children," Father Le Blanc was saying, "you put all
your treasures into earthen vessels. Your aspirations, so noble,
soar upward like the branches of the tree, but your roots are in
the earth, that you must certainly leave. All your faith which
will not take denial; all your hopes which will not be gainsaid;
all your wide-embracing affections, you place in humanity,- in a
few frail hearts which cannot meet the infinity of your need and
of your desire. And all these things which must fail you and
pass away, which you have perchance already gauged and found.
wanting,- why will you put them in the place of heaven, to
which you go to live forever; in the place of God, whose love.
knows no variableness nor shadow of turning? It is not I who un-
dervalue them; it is you who overestimate them. Measure them
rightly, and I shall no longer be to you a prophet of woe or a
sorrowful comforter. Love them without sacrificing yourself to
them. Make them the rivers that water your life, and also the
rivers that bear you to the infinite sea into which they shall be
merged. Then shall this life cease to be for you a vale of tears
walled about with tombs, and become the pathway to your abid-
ing country. Its beauties shall not satiate, if you see behind
them the world of spiritual beauty.
What will it matter to you
that its fetters chafe, that the soul discovers it is imprisoned,
when that end, in which every beauty of flesh and color is en-
gulfed, is not an end but a beginning? 'Verily, verily, I say unto
you, whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it! >»
"For My sake," thought Stéphanie.
And Father Le Blanc, who had not seen this listener,— who,
having sown the seed, had left it humbly to God,-was thus
himself permitted to water it.
## p. 6932 (#317) ###########################################
## p. 6932 (#318) ###########################################
ABHO
THOMAS HARDY.
## p. 6932 (#319) ###########################################
74. 5
10
. ”
03
LA
THOMAS HARLY
BY ANNA
Hapesis of that rare fellow Lip of novel wr ters who
mated in their portra è of Fe by a spit as disip-
afested qnd as scerning, y pasympathetic as t. spirit of
rate
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## p. 6932 (#320) ###########################################
THUMAS HARDY.
1
## p. 6933 (#321) ###########################################
6933
THOMAS HARDY
(1840-)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
HOMAS HARDY is of that rare fellowship of novel-writers who
are actuated in their portrayal of life by a spirit as disin-
terested and as seemingly unsympathetic as the spirit of
nature itself. His realism is indeed less the realism of art than of
the raw material of every-day existence. His straightforward account
of the changes and chances of this mortal state is unsoftened by
optimistic prejudice. But precisely how far his creations are true to
the facts of human experience, is a matter of individual rather than
of general judgment. An analysis of his most characteristic novels
may show that their realism is after all one-sided, and that they are
closer exponents of a Hardy theory regarding life, than of life itself.
What is this theory? and how is it embodied in Hardy's novels?
Stating it briefly, it is that the law which governs human events is
rendered just beyond calculation by an admixture of luck. There is
just enough of chance in the moral order to warrant the implication
of jugglery in the Ten Commandments. Acknowledging no creed,
this most modern of modern novelists is eminently Calvinistic in his
portrayal of men and women as predestined to misfortune or failure;
as pulled about or tossed about at the impish pleasure of the god
Circumstance. The keynote of his work indeed is the effect of cir-
cumstance- of luck upon man's war with the lower elements in
his nature. Some foreordained event for which he is in no wise
responsible turns the tide of the battle against him; yet he is held
accountable for his defeat. He reaps where he has not sown. He is
overwhelmed with punishments for sins committed by others. He
is literally badgered through life by the modern devil of ill luck.
In 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' the heroine Elfride is victimized by circum-
stances. The adverse star is already risen above her brow when the
book opens. She goes artlessly as a child into the hopeless labyrinth
of mischance from which death alone can release her. Tess is an
innocent sinner, browbeaten by bad luck into a guilty one.
So per-
sistent is this evil fortune, this malign spell which might be broken
by a word more or less, that Tess becomes well-nigh an irresponsible
being, a mere bruised flower floating on an irresistible current of
doom.
## p. 6934 (#322) ###########################################
6934
THOMAS HARDY
Between these two heroines, the one of Hardy's earliest, the other
of his latest day, is a long sequence of men and women, all more
or less handicapped by fortune. Their humanity is traceable with
greater distinctness in their failures than in their successes. Hardy
is perhaps the first novelist except George Eliot who has had the
courage to portray failure. What he himself calls "the optimistic
grin which ends a story happily" is never present in his work. His
stories end much as the little dramas of real life end: in compromise,
in the tacit acknowledgment that it is better to make the best of a
bad bargain and so to live on in a semblance of security, than to die
for the impossible.
Hardy himself began to undergo life in 1840. At the age of six-
teen he entered upon the study of architecture. For several years he
vacillated between literary pursuits and his chosen profession. His
first novel, 'Desperate Remedies,' published in 1870, showed at least
that he was a good story-teller. Characteristically, the persons of
the book are all engaged more or less in a tussle with adverse cir
cumstances; but the melodramatic elements in the intricate plot
remove it from the sphere of great art. 'Under the Greenwood
Tree' followed fast upon 'Desperate Remedies. ' In this woodland
story, Hardy first exhibits the fairest qualities of his genius. It is
free from the taint of the battledore-and-shuttlecock conception of
man and the almighty Something in the clutch of which he wrig-
gles. It is an idyl of the fields. That wonderful grasp of rural life
which marks Hardy out from his contemporaries and links him at
times with Shakespeare, is here shown in its fullness; the smell of
the primeval earth is here; between Hardy and the rustic there is a
living bond. Few authors have been able to do as he has done, to
depict Hodge in his native fields in such a manner that the humor-
ous aspect of the picture will be most apparent.
Hardy's peasantry say nothing which is consciously witty. His art
has discovered the unconscious humor of their homely talk. The
serenade of the church choir in 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' the
gossip of the rustics opening a vault in 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' are
rich in this elemental humor. So talk the clowns of Shakespeare;
Grandfer Cantle is linked with Dogberry. Yet the clowns of Hardy
have a worldly wisdom of their own. In 'The Return of the Native'
the question of the advisability of church-going is discussed by the
natives of Egdon Heath. "I ha'n't been these three years," said
Humphrey; "for I'm so mortal sleepy of a Sunday, and 'tis so mortal
far to get there, and when you do get there 'tis such a mortal poor
chance that you'll be chose for up above, when so many bain't, that
I bide at home and don't go at all. " Here are a few observations on
dancing:-
-
## p. 6935 (#323) ###########################################
THOMAS HARDY
6935
"You be bound to dance at Christmas, because 'tis the time of the year:
you must dance at weddings, because it is the time of life. At christenings
folks will even smuggle in a reel or two, if 'tis no further on than the first or
second chiel. And this is not naming the songs you've got to sing. For my
part, I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything. You've as splendid
victuals and drink as at other parties, and even better, and it don't wear
your legs to stumps in talking over a poor feller's ways as it do to stand
up in hornpipes. »
In A Pair of Blue Eyes,' Hardy's third novel, he passes under
the domination of the one aspect of life which has impressed him
most forcibly. Little Elfride, the blue-eyed heroine, the dainty child
of the hills, formed by nature for tenderness and joy, is unlucky
enough to have been beloved, before the story opens, by a village
youth in her father's parish. She was not altogether unconscious of
his far-off worship. She led him on a little. Through that slight
girlish concession to a passing coquetry she blights her life. Her
punishment is out of all proportion to her offense. The youth pines
away and dies. His mother becomes the active enemy of Elfride.
She blackens a thoughtless adventure of the girl's with a subsequent
lover into a sin, and by means of this scandal alienates forever the
one man above all others whom Elfride really loves. She in her turn
tightens the miserable tangle of affairs by an over-exaggeration of
her imprudence. She makes the mistakes of a schoolgirl, and is
punished for the sins of a woman.
In The Return of the Native' it is the hero who plays this
uneven game with chance; and chance, as so often happens in
Hardy's novels, takes the form of a woman. It is Eustacia Vye,
"with pagan eyes full of nocturnal mysteries," who leads Clym Yeo-
bright into the wilderness of love, stripped of his ambitions. "Throw
a woman into this bargaining matter of life, and its intricacies are
increased tenfold," might be Hardy's motto in the treatment of his
"dainty heroines. ” And here a word may be said concerning these
heroines. Hardy's women are even more real than his men. He
understands woman nature, or rather the nature of the eternal woman
as opposed to the woman who is an artificial product of a period or
of a system. Sue in Jude the Obscure' is the one striking excep-
tion to this rule. She is the type of the over-civilized, neurotic
female who has unholy shivers over nature's pure ordinance of mar-
riage. Happily she has no predecessors. She has little in common
with the warm, bright Bathsheba, with the tender, fair Lady Con-
stantine, with demure little Anne, with the quaint and gentle Eliza-
beth Jane, with Elfride, or with the frankly human 'Group of
Noble Dames. ' Hardy's women are always lovable; and because
they are so they make men more or less irresponsible, and thus add
## p. 6936 (#324) ###########################################
6936
THOMAS HARDY
to the confusion, the moral disorder, of which Hardy sees SO
much in the working out of character. In Two on a Tower' Lady
Constantine draws the eyes of the boy astronomer from the stars to
gaze into her own. She enters his life only to render his primitive
austere devotion to science forever impossible. Eustacia Vye leads
Clym Yeobright a devious dance in the direction of nowhere. Jude
is purloined from a possible Oxford career, first by Arabella, then by
Sue. But women are not altogether to blame for the mischief which
is always brewing in Hardy's novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge'
is the story of a man hampered by himself. In a fit of drunkenness,
he sells his wife and child to the highest bidder. For his hour of
dissipation he pays a lifetime of struggle and remorse.
The irony of circumstance is ever present in Hardy's portrayal of
the ambitions and good intentions of men and women. Their "hopes
and fears, so blind and yet so sweet,” have always death about them
to Hardy: the trickery of death, its hideous surprises, its untimely
interventions. In 'Life's Little Ironies,' a middle-aged man, laboring
under the delusion that marriage can patch up a wrong done to a
woman, heroically resolves to take this step after many years of
cowardice. His melodramatic self-sacrifice to the woman once sacri-
ficed to him is turned by the irony of circumstance into mere clumsi-
ness, since his appearance in the neglected little family ruins the
chances of his daughter to make a match of smug respectability.
In Fellow-Townsmen,' one of the 'Wessex Tales,' Lucy Saville, a
middle-aged widow, says no to the man who has loved her and waited
for her through many years, because she does not think it good form
to say yes at once. She sends a note after him, however, asking him
to call again; but he has taken her at her word, and has left the
town forever. Such an incident has a marked resemblance to certain
incidents of real life. Hardy has the courage always to tell a thing
as it really happened, not as weak-hearted humanity would like it to
happen.
In 'Tess' Hardy has written the modern classic of misfortune;
in Tess the finest and most characteristic qualities of his art are
focused. In the portrayal of this primitive tragedy, this spirit-rending
story of a girl's struggle with destiny, Hardy has put forth his con-
summate effort. In 'Tess' the Calvinistic idea of fate, predestination,
the treacherous power outside of ourselves which makes for confus-
ion, as opposed to the rational Greek idea of pursuing punishment
for sins committed,- in Tess' this Calvinistic idea receives its fin-
ished embodiment. The subtle poison of the book lies in the false
theory which actuated its production, not in the working out of the
theory. Tess is a pure woman; the defiant sub-title is unnecessary.
Only the inexperienced would wag their heads dubiously over it as
## p. 6937 (#325) ###########################################
THOMAS HARDY
6937
they read the tale in sheltered and respectable parlors.
always stingy towards their poor children: my mother intended
to have given me five hundred louis d'ors, but she had kept back
fifty- as well for some little repairs in the abbey as to pay for
praying for me! Brinon had the charge of the other fifty, with
strict injunctions not to speak of them unless upon some urgent
necessity. And this, you see, soon happened.
"Thus you have a brief account of my first adventure. Play
has hitherto favored me; for since my arrival I have had at one
time, after paying all my expenses, fifteen hundred louis d'ors.
Fortune is now again become unfavorable: we must mend her.
Our cash runs low; we must therefore endeavor to recruit. "
"Nothing is more easy," said Matta; "it is only to find out
such another dupe as the horse-dealer at Lyons; but now I think
on it, has not the faithful Brinon some reserve for the last ex-
tremity? Faith, the time is now come, and we cannot do better
than to make use of it. "
"Your raillery would be very seasonable," said the chevalier,
"if you knew how to extricate us out of this difficulty. You
must certainly have an overflow of wit, to be throwing it away
upon every occasion as at present. What the devil! will you
always be bantering, without considering what a serious situation.
we are reduced to? Mind what I say: I will go to-morrow to
the headquarters, I will dine with the Count de Cameran, and I
will invite him to supper. "
"Where? " said Matta.
"Here," said the chevalier.
"You are mad, my poor friend," replied Matta. "This is
some such project as you formed at Lyons: you know we have
## p. 6922 (#306) ###########################################
6922
ANTHONY HAMILTON
neither money nor credit; and to re-establish our circumstances
you intend to give a supper. "
«< Stupid fellow! " said the chevalier: "is it possible that, so
long as we have been acquainted, you should have learned no
more invention? The Count de Cameran plays at quinze, and
so do I: we want money; he has more than he knows what to do
with: I will bespeak a splendid supper; he shall pay for it. Send
your maître-d'hôtel to me, and trouble yourself no farther, except
in some precautions which it is necessary to take on such an
occasion. "
"What are they? " said Matta.
"I will tell you," said the chevalier; "for I find one must
explain to you things that are as clear as noonday. You com-
mand the guards that are here, don't you? As soon as night
comes on, you shall order fifteen or twenty men under the com-
mand of your serjeant La Place to be under arms, and to lay
themselves flat on the ground between this place and the head-
quarters. "
"What the devil! " cried Matta; "an ambuscade? God forgive
me, I believe you intend to rob the poor Savoyard. If that be
your intention, I declare I will have nothing to do with it. "
"Poor devil! " said the chevalier: "the matter is this: it is
very likely that we shall win his money. The Piedmontese,
though otherwise good fellows, are apt to be suspicious and dis-
trustful. He commands the horse; you know you cannot hold
your tongue, and are very likely to let slip some jest or other
that may vex him. Should he take it into his head that he is
cheated, and resent it, who knows what the consequences might
be? for he is commonly attended by eight or ten horsemen.
Therefore, however he may be provoked at his loss, it is proper
to be in such a situation as not to dread his resentment. "
"Embrace me, my dear chevalier," said Matta, holding his
sides and laughing; "embrace me, for thou art not to be matched.
What a fool was I to think, when you talked to me of taking
precautions, that nothing more was necessary than to prepare a
table and cards, or perhaps to provide some false dice! I should
never have thought of supporting a man who plays at quinze by
a detachment of foot; I must indeed confess that you are already
a great soldier. »
The next day everything happened as the Chevalier Gramont
had planned it; the unfortunate Cameran fell into the snare.
They supped in the most agreeable manner possible; Matta drank
## p. 6923 (#307) ###########################################
ANTHONY HAMILTON
6923
five or six bumpers to drown a few scruples which made him.
somewhat uneasy.
The Chevalier de Gramont shone as usual,
and almost made his guest die with laughing, whom he was soon
after to make very serious; and the good-natured Cameran ate
like a
man whose affections were divided between good cheer
and a love of play; - that is to say, he hurried down his victuals,
that he might not lose any of the precious time which he had
devoted to quinze.
Supper being done, the serjeant La Place posted his ambus-
cade and the Chevalier de Gramont engaged his man.
The per-
fidy of Cerise and the high-crowned hat were still fresh in
remembrance, and enabled him to get the better of a few grains
of remorse and conquer some scruples which arose in his mind.
Matta, unwilling to be a spectator of violated hospitality, sat
down in an easy-chair in order to fall asleep, while the chevalier
was stripping the poor count of his money.
They only staked three or four pistoles at first, just for amuse-
ment; but Cameran having lost three or four times, he staked
high, and the game became serious. He still lost, and became
outrageous; the cards flew about the room, and the exclamations
awoke Matta. As his head was heavy with sleep and hot with
wine, he began to laugh at the passion of the Piedmontese instead
of consoling him. "Faith, my poor count," said he, "if I was in
your place, I would play no more. "
"Why so? " said the other.
"I don't know," said he; "but my heart tells me that your
ill luck will continue. "
"I will try that," said Cameran, calling for fresh cards.
"Do so," said Matta, and fell asleep again: it was but for a
short time. All cards were equally unfortunate for the loser.
He held none but tens or court cards; and if by chance he had
quinze, he was sure to be the younger hand, and therefore lost
it. Again he stormed.
"Did not I tell you so? " said Matta, starting out of his sleep:
"all your storming is in vain; as long as you play you will lose.
Believe me, the shortest follies are the best. Leave off, for the
Devil take me if it is possible for you to win. "
«< Why? " said Cameran, who began to be impatient.
"Do you wish to know? " said Matta: "why, faith, it is
because we are cheating you. "
The Chevalier de Gramont, provoked at so ill-timed a jest,
more especially as it carried along with it some appearance of
## p. 6924 (#308) ###########################################
6924
ANTHONY HAMILTON
truth: "M. Matta," said he, "do you think it can be very agree-
able for a man who plays with such ill luck as the count to be
pestered with your insipid jests? For my part, I am so weary
of the game that I would desist immediately, if he was not so
great a loser. " Nothing is more dreaded by a losing gamester
than such a threat; and the count in a softened tone told the
chevalier that M. Matta might say what he pleased, if he did
not offend him; that as to himself, it did not give him the
smallest uneasiness.
The Chevalier de Gramont gave the count far better treat-
ment than he himself had experienced from the Swiss at Lyons,
for he played upon credit as long as he pleased; which Cameran
took so kindly that he lost fifteen hundred pistoles, and paid
them the next morning. As for Matta, he was severely repri
manded for the intemperance of his tongue. All the reason he
gave for his conduct was, that he made it a point of conscience
not to suffer the poor Savoyard to be cheated without informing
him of it. "Besides," said he, "it would have given me pleasure
to have seen my infantry engaged with his horse, if he had been.
inclined to mischief. "
This adventure having recruited their finances, fortune favored
them the remainder of the campaign; and the Chevalier de Gra-
mont, to prove that he had only seized upon the count's effects
by way of reprisal, and to indemnify himself for the losses he
had sustained at Lyons, began from this time to make the same
use of his money that he has been known to do since upon all
occasions. He found out the distressed, in order to relieve them:
officers who had lost their equipage in the war, or their money.
at play; soldiers who were disabled in the trenches; in short,
every one felt the influence of his benevolence, but his manner
of conferring a favor exceeded even the favor itself.
Every man possessed of such amiable qualities must meet
with success in all his undertakings. The soldiers knew his per-
son, and adored him. The generals were sure to meet him in
every scene of action, and sought his company at other times.
As soon as fortune declared for him, his first care was to make
restitution, by desiring Cameran to go his halves in all parties.
where the odds were in his favor.
## p. 6925 (#309) ###########################################
6925
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
(1847-)
SPECIAL taste for the abstract in mathematics, along with a
practical interest in the military profession, do not generally
enter into the stuff out of which romance-writers and poets
are made.
Mr. Hardy, however, is an interesting example of the
temperament that takes hold of both the real and the ideal. Suc-
cessively a hard-working professor of civil engineering and applied
mathematical science in two or three institutions, he has built up a
reputation in belles-lettres by working in them with an industry that
has given him a distinctive place in what
he once reckoned only an avocation.
Mr. Hardy was born in 1847 at Andover,
Massachusetts. By school life at Neuchâtel,
Switzerland, he was early put into touch
with French letters and French life. After
a single year at Amherst College he entered
the West Point Military Academy, graduat-
ing in 1869. He became a second lieuten-
ant in the Third Artillery Regiment, saw
some soldier life during 1869 and 1870, and
then resigned from the service to become a
professor of civil engineering at Iowa Col-
lege for a brief time. In 1874 he went
abroad, to take a course in scientific bridge-
building and road-constructing in Paris, returning to take a professor-
ship in that line of instruction at the Chandler Scientific School,
connected with Dartmouth College. He assumed a similar professor-
ship in Dartmouth College in 1878. This position (in connection with
which he published at least one established text-book, 'Elements of
Quaternions, followed by his translation of 'Argand's Imaginary
Quantities,' by his own 'Analytical Geometry,' and by other practical
works in applied mathematics) he held until recently, when he be-
came undividedly a man of letters and an editor of a well-known
magazine.
>
Mr. Hardy in literature is a novelist and a poet. His stories are
three in number. The first one, 'But Yet a Woman' (1883), is of
peculiar grace, united with firmness of construction; with a decided
ARTHUR S. HARDY
## p. 6926 (#310) ###########################################
6926
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
French touch in the style (especially as to its epigrammatic flash);
and with types of careful if delicate definiteness prominent in it, par-
ticularly in the delineation of Father Le Blanc, the philosophic and
kindly curé. A story of more subtle psychologic quality, 'The Wind
of Destiny,' came a little later, its scenery and characters partly
French and partly American, and its little drama a tragic one.
'Passe Rose,' a quasi-historic novel, dealing with the days and court
of Charlemagne,-the heroine of it a dancing-girl, with a princess as
her rival in love,- appeared first as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly
in 1888, to be published as a book in 1889. It is a romance of that
human quality which meets with a response in every novel-reader's
heart. Mr. Hardy's heroines are all charming; but he has presented
us to no more winning type than this flower of a mediæval day, with
"the hues of the Southern sea in her eyes and under the rose-brown
flush of her skin, the sound of its waves in the ripple of her
laughter. "
FATHER LE BLANC MAKES A CALL; AND PREACHES A
SERMON
From But Yet a Woman. ' Copyright 1883 by Arthur S. Hardy, and reprinted
by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston
F
ATHER LE BLANC had a profound belief in human agencies.
He loved to play the ministering angel, for his heart was a
well of sympathy.
There was even a latent chiding of
Providence at the bottom of this well sometimes, when the sight
of the poor and the suffering stirred its depths with pity for
those lonely wayfarers who, neglected by this world, seem for-
gotten also of God. This was but one of those many themes
which this mind, at once simple, honest, and profound, turned
over and over reflectively, never seeing its one aspect except as
on the way to the other. "The difficulty does not lie in believ-
ing the truths of the Church," he once said, "but in those other
things which we must believe also. " Or again, "Belief is an edi-
fice never completed, because we do not yet comprehend its plan,
and every day some workman brings a new stone from the
quarry. " So that while Father Le Blanc was very devout, he was
not a devotee. He flavored his religious belief with the salt of a
good sense against which he endeavored to be on his guard, as
he was even against his charity and compassion. The vision of
Milton's fallen Spirit, beating its wings vainly in a non-resisting
air, drew from his heart a profound sigh.
## p. 6927 (#311) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6927
His thoughts turned very naturally to Stéphanie and her
journey that day, for he was on the way to secure the nineteenth
volume of the 'Viaje de España' of Pontz, for which he had been
long on the search, and which awaited him at last on the Quai
Voltaire. Those old books which filled the shelves of his room
in the Rue Tiquetonne had left his purse a light one. "But,"
said Father Le Blanc, "I am not poor, since I have what I
want. "
After possessing himself of his coveted book, he took up his
way along the quai, with his treasure under his arm. "I have a
mind to call on her," he said, still thinking of Stéphanie. "The
art of knowing when one is needed is more difficult than that of
helping;" and he paused on the curbstone to watch a company
of the line coming from the caserne of the Cité. A carriage,
arrested a moment by the passage of the troops, approached the
spot where he was standing, and he recognized M. De Marzac.
The priest was evidently sauntering, and M. De Marzac called to
his driver to stop.
"I see you are out for a promenade," he said. "Accept this
seat beside me, and take a turn with me in the Bois. "
Father Le Blanc was not in his second childhood, for he had
not yet outgrown his first; consequently the temptation was a
strong one. But M. De Marzac was no favorite of his, and not
even the fine day nor this opportunity to enjoy it could counter-
balance M. De Marzac's company. Dislike at first sight is more
common than love, as discord is more common than harmony.
So he excused himself as about to make a visit. "Well, then,
that decides it," he said to himself, as he trudged down the quai
with the gait of a man with an object in view. "Now I must
go. "
At the door of the hôtel in the Boulevard St. Germain he
stopped a moment before entering, and took a deep inspiration.
To tell the truth, the day was so fine he regretted going in-doors.
"I feel that I have a pair of lungs," he said, as he rang the
porter's bell.
Stéphanie was not expecting a visit from Father Le Blanc, yet
was glad to see him. She was in that period which lies after
decision and before action, when, having made all her prepara-
tions for an early start in the express of the next morning, there
was nothing to be done but sit down and wait for the hour of
departure.
## p. 6928 (#312) ###########################################
6928
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
"The air is so pure that I feared to find you were out. And
you go to-morrow! "
"Yes," Stéphanie said, "Si Dios quiere, as the Spaniards say. "
"But I shall be there before you. I leave this evening. "
"This evening! "
"And without fatigue," said the priest mysteriously, drawing
his volume from under his arm. "It is my nineteenth journey. "
"You have been to Spain? " said Stéphanie, taking the book,
but still perplexed.
"Oh, never! except in those leaves which you are turning; and
for two reasons," he added laughingly: "the guide-books tell us
that there are in Spain priests by the thousand, but not a single
cook! Still, you perceive that I am about to follow you, and —
who knows! -shall perhaps lodge at the same inn. That is a
country in which nothing becomes obsolete, and I have no doubt
but that if you inquire for it, they will show you in Toboso the
very fonda at which Don Quixote dismounted. "
Stéphanie thought she heard in this pleasantry something
more than was said. Certainly Father Le Blanc had not even
whispered, "Though you are going away, my child, I shall follow
you in my thoughts and in my prayers;" and yet that is what
she heard. Some of his most commonplace sentences were SO
many half-hidden channels, such as the brooks make under the
grass of the meadows, into which overflowed the currents of his
sympathy and kindliness. In spite of a strong natural reserve,
an invincible trust in this homely face crowned with white hairs
mastered her.
"You are very good to think of me, father," she said, in a
voice so full that it brought straight from his heart the message
he had come to deliver.
"All who suffer are my children; and you suffer-and that
grieves me. The Master who took upon himself the sorrows of
the world, bade his followers imitate him. Why will you not
lean a little upon me, daughter? I am an old man who has rav-
eled the path before you. "
She turned her eyes upon him, and they said, "I do not speak;
but read, and comfort me. "
"Sorrow is a very real thing," he continued in a voice full of
sweetness and authority. "It is neither a morbid nor an un-
healthy state. When it seems deepest, when after the world
has failed us, self also proves insufficient,-it may even be a
## p. 6929 (#313) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6929
blessed one. I do not chide, I even agree with you. But I wish
you also to agree with me. Be our life wide or narrow, whether
we live humbly or sit on a throne, whether we dwell in our own
thoughts, in the midst of action or in the search of pleasure, we
come to the verdict of the Hebrew king,- that verdict which I
read in your face and which broods over your life. All is empti-
ness and vanity! It is not the range but the depth of our experi-
ence which convinces us, and from the first we apprehend this
truth dimly. We own this sad statue of Sorrow in the block from
the outset, before experience chisels it out for us; and in our first
search for happiness, when we look on the splendors of the young
world for what they do not contain, it is this intimation of what
they cannot yield, and the capacity of our own natures, which
both allure and deceive us. "
She seemed to be listening to the story of her own life.
“And as we live on, this conviction deepens. The voices with-
out echo and reinforce those within. We are ever looking to some-
thing better than we have or are, and whether we attain it or lose
it, there is no rest for our feet. It is the man who is fooled and
deluded that is to be pitied. He who finds life and self sufficient
is either a monster or a caricature. Do you not see that I do not
argue with your tears? But do not think to dry them in Spain,
my child.
Sorrow is the handmaid of God, not of Satan. She
would lead us, as she did the Psalmist, to say, 'Who will show us
any good?
' that after having said this, we may also say with him,
'Lord, lift thou the light of thy countenance upon us.
> >>
"All else is a broken cistern," said Father Le Blanc, taking
up his thoughts after a pause. "See how time deceives us! He
covers the sore, he even heals the wound, but he gives no
immunity from a fresh one. " Stéphanie's eyes fell. "God only
renders us superior to calamity. Honestly," said he, lifting his
hands as if he appealed to his own conscience, "priest of God
though I am, in understanding I am as a child. I cannot explain
-I testify. I witness to you this mystery, that out of the very
hurt which brings me low, the spiritual life is developed. And,"
he added, as he would the benediction to a discourse at St.
Eustache, "blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they which
mourn, blessed are they which hunger and thirst, for these are
they which shall be filled; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. "
How much soever of gratefulness she felt for these words,
she could not answer them. Had he held her hand, her answer
XII-434
## p. 6930 (#314) ###########################################
6930
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
would have been a pressure. But Father Le Blanc was not hurt
by her silence. Though words bubbled easily over his lips, none
better knew the difficulty of sometimes saying, "Thank you. ”
He sat quietly, smoothing the wrinkles of his soutane over his
broad knee, with his eyes on the floor.
"When you return," he said at last, looking up, "I shall ask
you all the questions which are not answered in my nineteen
volumes. Think of it, at my age! never to have seen the sea.
Yet I have lain stretched out on its yellow sands in the sun,
listening to the music of its blue waves-in the Rue Tiquetonne!
And when I go to my window at night, it is to stand on the
summit of some high cliff, and the roar of the city is that of the
sea at its base. Chained as we are to our little patrimony in the
Rue Tiquetonne, the imagination is a free rover in space and
time. I wager you are surprised to hear an old man talk of
imagination," he said, taking her share of the conversation, and
putting in her mouth the replies which he wished to answer,—
"imagination, which is supposed to belong only to youth. I say,
rather, youth belongs to imagination, which is then a wild Bar-
bary colt, and carries one wherever it wills; but at my age it
has become domesticated, and it is on its back that I have ridden,
as did Sancho on that of his patient donkey, over all the byways
of Spain. And when you see some worthy colleague of mine on
his ass, plodding before you with a shovel hat on his head a
metre in length, you will say to yourself, There is my friend
ahead of me. '"
Her hands crossed on her knees, plunged in a delicious revery
which this voice penetrated without disturbing, Stéphanie raised
her eyes to his face and smiled.
He took his book from the table where she had laid it, and
put it under his arm again. He had dropped his few seeds of
comfort, and was ready to permit God to water them. So he
sought an excuse to go.
"I am like a schoolboy," he said, tapping the volume, "with
a new copy-book, who cannot rest till he has written something
on the first page. What a good friend this book will be! I count
upon him in advance;" and his eyes spoke to hers; "he will not
speak unless I question him; we shall perchance differ pro-
foundly, but he will not reproach me; I shall rifle his pockets.
and put him aside at my pleasure, yet he will not feel neglected.
I shall invite him to-night to a tête-à-tête before my fire, and
## p. 6931 (#315) ###########################################
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
6931
fall asleep while he is doing his best to entertain me; but when
I awake, his countenance will be unruffled. Doubtless because
all the while he is aware that I still prize him.
What strange
things we do to those whom we love! Absolutely, madame,"
said Father Le Blanc, rising, and with a self-accusing gesture,
"I am an inveterate sermonizer, and I have not given you even
the opportunity to interrupt me. "
Stéphanie followed him to the door of the room, and at the
threshold put her hand softly upon his arm.
"Thanks, father, for this visit," she said. Her voice was low;
it was all she said, but her look and that gesture were more
eloquent than words.
"I say to you as they will say to you in Spain," replied
Father Le Blanc, "go your way with God, my daughter. "
When he had gone she went to the window and watched him
as he crossed the court-yard, following him out through the gates,
where he stopped to say something to the porter, who touched
his hat to him. She seated herself there in the wide-open win-
dow which projected over the area, as did its counterpart at the
other end of the room over the garden in the rear. Flanked
by two long and narrow projections, this court-yard with its large
paving-blocks of stone was not very inviting in its aspect. It
was in the other window, overhanging the garden, whose case-
ment the trees brushed, over which the vines swayed with the
wind, that she loved to sit. But her thoughts were far away.
It was still early in the afternoon, but the sun went slowly
down behind the tall roofs of the neighboring houses before she
rose to do what greatly surprised Lizette, who thought madame
altogether too much of a saint for a woman who neglected mass
and confession. When madame was dressed, and Lizette had
taken her place beside her in the carriage, she wondered at the
route taken by the coachman, whose instructions she had not
overheard. She supposed they were going to the Bois or the
Parc Monceau. And still greater was her surprise when she
found herself a little later in St. Eustache, placing a chair for
madame at the vesper service.
It was nearly over. Father Le Blanc himself in the pulpit
was finishing his exhortation.
The words of the preacher
gathered force from the immense space in which they were
uttered; from those dim, aspiring vaults into which they were
gathered, and where they died away without a confusing murmur.
## p. 6932 (#316) ###########################################
6932
ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY
Break your theological rocks, O ritual-hating brother, on the
King's highway, and worship him after your own fashion. For
every wayfaring heart overfed upon these symbols, you shall
show us one starved on your formulæ. Not only for thy weaker
brother, to whom God has not given the brains of the doctors in
the Temple, shall these vaults of stone be the very arches of
heaven; not only for thy frailer sister, in the keeping of whose
warm heart God has placed the sacred things of this life, shall
the incense of this swinging censer be the very fragrance of
celestial fields; but unto many of thine own dignity also shall
this star above the altar be the very star of Bethlehem.
"My children," Father Le Blanc was saying, "you put all
your treasures into earthen vessels. Your aspirations, so noble,
soar upward like the branches of the tree, but your roots are in
the earth, that you must certainly leave. All your faith which
will not take denial; all your hopes which will not be gainsaid;
all your wide-embracing affections, you place in humanity,- in a
few frail hearts which cannot meet the infinity of your need and
of your desire. And all these things which must fail you and
pass away, which you have perchance already gauged and found.
wanting,- why will you put them in the place of heaven, to
which you go to live forever; in the place of God, whose love.
knows no variableness nor shadow of turning? It is not I who un-
dervalue them; it is you who overestimate them. Measure them
rightly, and I shall no longer be to you a prophet of woe or a
sorrowful comforter. Love them without sacrificing yourself to
them. Make them the rivers that water your life, and also the
rivers that bear you to the infinite sea into which they shall be
merged. Then shall this life cease to be for you a vale of tears
walled about with tombs, and become the pathway to your abid-
ing country. Its beauties shall not satiate, if you see behind
them the world of spiritual beauty.
What will it matter to you
that its fetters chafe, that the soul discovers it is imprisoned,
when that end, in which every beauty of flesh and color is en-
gulfed, is not an end but a beginning? 'Verily, verily, I say unto
you, whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it! >»
"For My sake," thought Stéphanie.
And Father Le Blanc, who had not seen this listener,— who,
having sown the seed, had left it humbly to God,-was thus
himself permitted to water it.
## p. 6932 (#317) ###########################################
## p. 6932 (#318) ###########################################
ABHO
THOMAS HARDY.
## p. 6932 (#319) ###########################################
74. 5
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## p. 6932 (#320) ###########################################
THUMAS HARDY.
1
## p. 6933 (#321) ###########################################
6933
THOMAS HARDY
(1840-)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
HOMAS HARDY is of that rare fellowship of novel-writers who
are actuated in their portrayal of life by a spirit as disin-
terested and as seemingly unsympathetic as the spirit of
nature itself. His realism is indeed less the realism of art than of
the raw material of every-day existence. His straightforward account
of the changes and chances of this mortal state is unsoftened by
optimistic prejudice. But precisely how far his creations are true to
the facts of human experience, is a matter of individual rather than
of general judgment. An analysis of his most characteristic novels
may show that their realism is after all one-sided, and that they are
closer exponents of a Hardy theory regarding life, than of life itself.
What is this theory? and how is it embodied in Hardy's novels?
Stating it briefly, it is that the law which governs human events is
rendered just beyond calculation by an admixture of luck. There is
just enough of chance in the moral order to warrant the implication
of jugglery in the Ten Commandments. Acknowledging no creed,
this most modern of modern novelists is eminently Calvinistic in his
portrayal of men and women as predestined to misfortune or failure;
as pulled about or tossed about at the impish pleasure of the god
Circumstance. The keynote of his work indeed is the effect of cir-
cumstance- of luck upon man's war with the lower elements in
his nature. Some foreordained event for which he is in no wise
responsible turns the tide of the battle against him; yet he is held
accountable for his defeat. He reaps where he has not sown. He is
overwhelmed with punishments for sins committed by others. He
is literally badgered through life by the modern devil of ill luck.
In 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' the heroine Elfride is victimized by circum-
stances. The adverse star is already risen above her brow when the
book opens. She goes artlessly as a child into the hopeless labyrinth
of mischance from which death alone can release her. Tess is an
innocent sinner, browbeaten by bad luck into a guilty one.
So per-
sistent is this evil fortune, this malign spell which might be broken
by a word more or less, that Tess becomes well-nigh an irresponsible
being, a mere bruised flower floating on an irresistible current of
doom.
## p. 6934 (#322) ###########################################
6934
THOMAS HARDY
Between these two heroines, the one of Hardy's earliest, the other
of his latest day, is a long sequence of men and women, all more
or less handicapped by fortune. Their humanity is traceable with
greater distinctness in their failures than in their successes. Hardy
is perhaps the first novelist except George Eliot who has had the
courage to portray failure. What he himself calls "the optimistic
grin which ends a story happily" is never present in his work. His
stories end much as the little dramas of real life end: in compromise,
in the tacit acknowledgment that it is better to make the best of a
bad bargain and so to live on in a semblance of security, than to die
for the impossible.
Hardy himself began to undergo life in 1840. At the age of six-
teen he entered upon the study of architecture. For several years he
vacillated between literary pursuits and his chosen profession. His
first novel, 'Desperate Remedies,' published in 1870, showed at least
that he was a good story-teller. Characteristically, the persons of
the book are all engaged more or less in a tussle with adverse cir
cumstances; but the melodramatic elements in the intricate plot
remove it from the sphere of great art. 'Under the Greenwood
Tree' followed fast upon 'Desperate Remedies. ' In this woodland
story, Hardy first exhibits the fairest qualities of his genius. It is
free from the taint of the battledore-and-shuttlecock conception of
man and the almighty Something in the clutch of which he wrig-
gles. It is an idyl of the fields. That wonderful grasp of rural life
which marks Hardy out from his contemporaries and links him at
times with Shakespeare, is here shown in its fullness; the smell of
the primeval earth is here; between Hardy and the rustic there is a
living bond. Few authors have been able to do as he has done, to
depict Hodge in his native fields in such a manner that the humor-
ous aspect of the picture will be most apparent.
Hardy's peasantry say nothing which is consciously witty. His art
has discovered the unconscious humor of their homely talk. The
serenade of the church choir in 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' the
gossip of the rustics opening a vault in 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' are
rich in this elemental humor. So talk the clowns of Shakespeare;
Grandfer Cantle is linked with Dogberry. Yet the clowns of Hardy
have a worldly wisdom of their own. In 'The Return of the Native'
the question of the advisability of church-going is discussed by the
natives of Egdon Heath. "I ha'n't been these three years," said
Humphrey; "for I'm so mortal sleepy of a Sunday, and 'tis so mortal
far to get there, and when you do get there 'tis such a mortal poor
chance that you'll be chose for up above, when so many bain't, that
I bide at home and don't go at all. " Here are a few observations on
dancing:-
-
## p. 6935 (#323) ###########################################
THOMAS HARDY
6935
"You be bound to dance at Christmas, because 'tis the time of the year:
you must dance at weddings, because it is the time of life. At christenings
folks will even smuggle in a reel or two, if 'tis no further on than the first or
second chiel. And this is not naming the songs you've got to sing. For my
part, I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything. You've as splendid
victuals and drink as at other parties, and even better, and it don't wear
your legs to stumps in talking over a poor feller's ways as it do to stand
up in hornpipes. »
In A Pair of Blue Eyes,' Hardy's third novel, he passes under
the domination of the one aspect of life which has impressed him
most forcibly. Little Elfride, the blue-eyed heroine, the dainty child
of the hills, formed by nature for tenderness and joy, is unlucky
enough to have been beloved, before the story opens, by a village
youth in her father's parish. She was not altogether unconscious of
his far-off worship. She led him on a little. Through that slight
girlish concession to a passing coquetry she blights her life. Her
punishment is out of all proportion to her offense. The youth pines
away and dies. His mother becomes the active enemy of Elfride.
She blackens a thoughtless adventure of the girl's with a subsequent
lover into a sin, and by means of this scandal alienates forever the
one man above all others whom Elfride really loves. She in her turn
tightens the miserable tangle of affairs by an over-exaggeration of
her imprudence. She makes the mistakes of a schoolgirl, and is
punished for the sins of a woman.
In The Return of the Native' it is the hero who plays this
uneven game with chance; and chance, as so often happens in
Hardy's novels, takes the form of a woman. It is Eustacia Vye,
"with pagan eyes full of nocturnal mysteries," who leads Clym Yeo-
bright into the wilderness of love, stripped of his ambitions. "Throw
a woman into this bargaining matter of life, and its intricacies are
increased tenfold," might be Hardy's motto in the treatment of his
"dainty heroines. ” And here a word may be said concerning these
heroines. Hardy's women are even more real than his men. He
understands woman nature, or rather the nature of the eternal woman
as opposed to the woman who is an artificial product of a period or
of a system. Sue in Jude the Obscure' is the one striking excep-
tion to this rule. She is the type of the over-civilized, neurotic
female who has unholy shivers over nature's pure ordinance of mar-
riage. Happily she has no predecessors. She has little in common
with the warm, bright Bathsheba, with the tender, fair Lady Con-
stantine, with demure little Anne, with the quaint and gentle Eliza-
beth Jane, with Elfride, or with the frankly human 'Group of
Noble Dames. ' Hardy's women are always lovable; and because
they are so they make men more or less irresponsible, and thus add
## p. 6936 (#324) ###########################################
6936
THOMAS HARDY
to the confusion, the moral disorder, of which Hardy sees SO
much in the working out of character. In Two on a Tower' Lady
Constantine draws the eyes of the boy astronomer from the stars to
gaze into her own. She enters his life only to render his primitive
austere devotion to science forever impossible. Eustacia Vye leads
Clym Yeobright a devious dance in the direction of nowhere. Jude
is purloined from a possible Oxford career, first by Arabella, then by
Sue. But women are not altogether to blame for the mischief which
is always brewing in Hardy's novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge'
is the story of a man hampered by himself. In a fit of drunkenness,
he sells his wife and child to the highest bidder. For his hour of
dissipation he pays a lifetime of struggle and remorse.
The irony of circumstance is ever present in Hardy's portrayal of
the ambitions and good intentions of men and women. Their "hopes
and fears, so blind and yet so sweet,” have always death about them
to Hardy: the trickery of death, its hideous surprises, its untimely
interventions. In 'Life's Little Ironies,' a middle-aged man, laboring
under the delusion that marriage can patch up a wrong done to a
woman, heroically resolves to take this step after many years of
cowardice. His melodramatic self-sacrifice to the woman once sacri-
ficed to him is turned by the irony of circumstance into mere clumsi-
ness, since his appearance in the neglected little family ruins the
chances of his daughter to make a match of smug respectability.
In Fellow-Townsmen,' one of the 'Wessex Tales,' Lucy Saville, a
middle-aged widow, says no to the man who has loved her and waited
for her through many years, because she does not think it good form
to say yes at once. She sends a note after him, however, asking him
to call again; but he has taken her at her word, and has left the
town forever. Such an incident has a marked resemblance to certain
incidents of real life. Hardy has the courage always to tell a thing
as it really happened, not as weak-hearted humanity would like it to
happen.
In 'Tess' Hardy has written the modern classic of misfortune;
in Tess the finest and most characteristic qualities of his art are
focused. In the portrayal of this primitive tragedy, this spirit-rending
story of a girl's struggle with destiny, Hardy has put forth his con-
summate effort. In 'Tess' the Calvinistic idea of fate, predestination,
the treacherous power outside of ourselves which makes for confus-
ion, as opposed to the rational Greek idea of pursuing punishment
for sins committed,- in Tess' this Calvinistic idea receives its fin-
ished embodiment. The subtle poison of the book lies in the false
theory which actuated its production, not in the working out of the
theory. Tess is a pure woman; the defiant sub-title is unnecessary.
Only the inexperienced would wag their heads dubiously over it as
## p. 6937 (#325) ###########################################
THOMAS HARDY
6937
they read the tale in sheltered and respectable parlors.
