‘graver things...braver things’ (the evidence of his intentness is everywhere), he was also concerned to intervene.
Hisnovels all possess a polemical element, whether directed against the divorce laws,
class privilege, tourist complacencies, intellectuality, masculine self-importance, or
the sexual double standard, and (in retrospect at least) he saw his novel-writing
career as an attempt to reform the novel. He wrote in 1891, soon after the
triumphant success ofTess:
Ever since I began to write—certainly ever since I wrote ‘Two on a Tower’ in 1881—I have
felt that the doll of English fiction must be demolished, if England is to have a school of
fiction at all...the development of a more virile type of novel is not incompatible with
sound morality.^15
The sense of being dedicated to a manly task supported Hardy as he followed a
career his family disliked and his Dorset compatriots thought either disreputable
or trivial. Keeping in mind a sense of mission also defended him against the
rudderless melancholy from which Brandon and Moule had suffered so badly. He
learnt the attitude in part from Leslie Stephen, whom he befriended soon after
Moule’s traumatizing death, and may have been drawn to Stephen by the firmness
he appeared at least to embody.
War for Hardy possessed, then, a fatal glamour that revealed a psychological
need. Having that need revealed could be destructive, sometimes fatally so, but the
need for heroism could not be denied. Hardy’s response was to establish routines
and principles, strict habits of both activity and engagement, even though his
world-view told him that human action achieved nothing and even though he
saw himself as, by temperament, passively inclined. He went out to battle in his
novels, taking on, through them, the forces of the English Establishment, and he
didsomethingsimilarinhiswarpoetry.
When the Boer War broke out in October 1899, English public opinion was
carried along on a wave of patriotic feeling partly generated by the poets, Swinburne
included:
scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life. Strike, England, and strike home.^16This is from Swinburne’s ‘The Transvaal’, published right at the beginning of the
war; in ‘Reverse’, which appeared four weeks later, the abuse of the enemy is more
violent still.
But loathing more intense than speaks disgust
Heaves England’s heart, when scorn is bound to greet
Hunters and hounds whose tongues would lick their feet.^17(^15) HardytoH.W.Massingham,31Dec.1891,inTheCollectedLettersofThomasHardy,i:1840–1892,
ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 250.
(^16) A. C. Swinburne, ‘The Transvaal’,The Times, 11 Oct. 1899, 7; repr. inSwinburne’s Collected
Poetical Works 17 , ii (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 1223.
Swinburne, ‘Reverse’, inSwinburne’s Collected Poetical Works, ii. 1224.