Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/223



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:

In the search after truth, Hardy maintained that no previous general conceptions of "what ought to be"