Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/305

 the bright Wessex sunshine flooding the landscape—alone, indubitably alone."

Hardy's well-known impatience with besiegers of this sort, although too often and too grossly exaggerated, as above, has served to propagate the impression that he is an incurable recluse who has foresworn the society of his fellow-beings.

This is far from being true, however. He receives casual visitors. He is not shy. The one common ground upon which the personality and the works of the man meet is that of a universal sympathy for the sufferings of humanity, which may even, on suitable occasions, include the sufferings of journalists. This is the one dominant Hardy-theme, and to it he long ago dedicated both himself and his artistic work. His life and works are one great protest against man-made and god-made misery—against man's inhumanity to man, to woman, and even to the lower animals.

Just as the figure of Thomas Hardy should be recognized as possessing the two distinct and sometimes quite contradictory aspects of the personality and the writer, so Hardy the writer in himself sometimes has presented to the careful reader two quite distinct faces. The realistic and the naïve writer will frequently have to be sharply differentiated from the philosophic and symbolic writer. The fundamental and unconscious dilemmas and contradictions underlying his later philosophy can usually be traced back to this instinctive ability of his to divide him-