The Novelist (1870-1898)
"Though a course of adventures which are only connected with each other by having happened to the same individual is what most frequently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality."—Sir Walter Scott.
It would naturally be the greatest possible fallacy to assume that Hardy's sympathy with the ideals of the historical romancers went very far. There is indeed a vast gulf between Quentin Durward and The Trumpet-Major. The idea of "poetic justice" and the inevitable happy ending was claimed by Hardy to be absolutely inconsistent with honesty to the facts or to the significance of life. One of his earliest bits of literary criticism was a palpable sneer at "the indiscriminate righting of everything at the end of an old play," although in the novel in which it occurs, everything turns out fairly well in the end. Realism, even though it involves the acceptance of a rather distasteful pessimism, is defended by the tranter, Reuben Dewy, who, in the discussion of Michael Mail's sometimes rather unsavory stories, remarks:
". . . That sort o' coarse touch that's so upsetting to Ann's feelings is to my mind a recommendation; for it do always prove a story to be true. And for the same rayson, I like a story with a had moral. My sonnies, all true stories have a coarseness or a bad moral, depend upon't. If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd ha' troubled to invent parables?" . . .
In the search after truth, Hardy maintained that no previous general conceptions of "what ought to be"
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