The Education of Henry Adams, written in a severely ironic third person, is an attempt to explain the author to himself and his time to the author. Adams was greatly influenced by late- nineteenth-century physics. He felt that civilizations, like matter, were subject to inexorable laws of change and degradation. In the thirteenth century (see his beautiful book of medieval studies, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres) he believed Western civilization to have achieved a state of coherence and unity, symbolized by the figure of the Virgin. Our time, symbolized by the Dynamo, he saw as one moving further and further away from unity toward multiplicity. The rate of disintegration was rapidly increasing; mankind had little to look forward to beyond a series of graver and graver catastrophes. The Education is remarkable for wit, elegance, wonderful on-the- scene reporting; but what gives it its sharp edge of emotion is Adams's constant cold prescience of tragedy. It makes the Education a work of poetry as well as truth.
The critic Paul Elmer More has decried its "sentimental nihilism," and it is true that AdamsJs special brand of pes- simism sometimes strikes tediously on the ear. Yet, when one looks about at the world today, it is hard to find many writers who foresaw as clearly as Adams did the shape of the future. We have experienced several of the catastrophes he foretold; and it is clear that we are to experience others. Disintegration rather than coherence seems more and more to mark our era. It required a considerable depth of imagination to say in 1862, as Adams did, "Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race may commit suicide by blowing up the world."
Henry Adams was by nature a rather unhappy man, and his beloved wife's suicide in 1885 further predisposed him to pes- simism. He was snobbish, intellectually cocky, vulgarly racist, and his self-depreciation is often spurious. Yet from these weaknesses as well as from his strengths he drew the materiais that make the Education a great book. Being an Adams, he could not write a Confessions. His aim is not the revelation of a human heart but the unflinching consideration of a historical character, who happens to be the writer himself. As an intel- lectual analysis of a labyrinthine mind and of the changing and, as he thought, disintegrating society he knew intimately, the Education remains unrivaled.
C.F.
94
THOMAS HARDY
1840-1928
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy came of Dorset stock and lived the larger part of his life just outside Dorchester. The beautiful, history- freighted, and rather desolate countryside around Dorchester (Hardy calls it Wessex) is in a way the main character in his novйis. His formal education—he was the son of a builder— lasted only from his eighth to his sixteenth year. He was then apprenticed to a Dorchester, and later to a London, architect. At twenty-seven he started what turned out to be a quarter- century of increasingly successful novel writing. The indigna- tion aroused by supposedly shocking situations and passages in Jude the Obscure (1895) made the sensitive Hardy turn back to his first love, poetry. At his death he had written over a thousand poems, not including his gigantic cosmic panorama of the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts. Many rate his verse above his novйis. Certainly he is one of the two dozen or so English poets you may wish to read most closely.
It may be some time before the cycle of taste returns Hardy to favor, just as it has brought back Dante [30], Conrad [100], Stendhal [67], Melville [83], and Henry James [96]. This Plan, however, is not designed to take more than casual account of fashion. It deals mainly with writers of generally acknowledged
long-term influence and interest. Among these Hardy will doubtless occupy a secondary rank. But not a minor one.
He died at eighty-eight. Just as his life linked two centuries, so his work acts as a kind of bridge between Victorian and modern fiction. Bravely (for their time) his novйis defied many of the sexual, religious, and philosophical taboos to which even so independent a mind as George Eliofs on occasion suc- cumbed [84]. Hardy, influenced by Darwin [73] and by a gen- erally mechanical-determinist nineteenth-century view of the universe, dared to show man as the sport of Nature. His view is sometimes bleak, sometimes merely sorrowful; and it proceeds not only from theory, but from the bias of his own brooding temperament. His humor and his remarkable sensitivity to the magic of landscape and weather prevent his novйis from being merely depressing. But if you find modern fiction on the whole uncheerful, that is partly because Hardy pioneered the cam- paign against the unrealistic optimism of some of his contem- poraries.
The Hardy novйis most generally admired are The Return of the Native, Tess of the VUrbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and the one suggested here. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, I find in balance the most striking constituents of Hardy's art: A com- plex plot, which despite some concessions to melodrama, such as the secret document, is powerfully constructed; that sense of place and of the past that gives his work such deep-rooted solidity; the sympathetic portrayal of rustic character, often compared to Shakespeare's [39]; the ability to work out with relentless elaboration a succession of tragic fates; and finally his special atmosphere of ruminative compassion.
The opening scenes, in which a man auctions off his wife, are extraordinary in their capacity to catch our interest. That interest is sustained, page after deliberate page, as we watch Michael Henchard, "the self-alienated man," devising his own self-destruction and expiating his guilt.
The English critic Desmond MacCarthy, speaking of Hardy, says that "it is the function of tragic literature to dignify
sorrow and disaster." By this criterion the creator of The Mayor of Casterbridge, for ali his faults of style and taste, is a true master of tragedy.
C.F.
95
WILLIAM JAMES
1842-1910
The Principies of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The psychologist-philosopher William James was the slightly elder brother of the novelist Henry [96]. A warm affection linked these two very different beings. Henry's nature was fas- tidious; it concerned itself with the relations existing among other rarefied temperaments; and though reflective, it was not speculative or able to handle high-order abstractions. William was, like Emerson [69], a natural democrat, hearty, humorous, with a deep interest in problems of science, religion, and morality. Henry was the pure artist, affecting the world by his books alone. William was a vital teacher whose personality still exerts great influence. Henry opted for upper-class and intellectual English society. William delighted in the vigorous, growing America of his time and entered into its public life in a way that would have been difficult for his more detached brother. The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called William "an adorable genius." The noun would also apply to Henry; the adjective (though he did have a fussy charm) hardly.