Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/58

 as low as old Durbeyfield, the town drunkard. Nor can he in any way be related to the plebeian father of Stephen Smith of A Pair of Blue Eyes, a character actually suggested to Hardy by a workman in his father's employ. Tragic feeling may run through the family, but it cannot be the instinctive fatalism of the peasant. Hardy's so-called "pessimism" is emphatically of the intellectual and heroic type, born of physical comfort and reflective thought. His immediate relatives, it is true, had to work in order to exist; sometimes even the women. His sister at one time taught school in Dorchester. Yet there is no reason to suppose that, as a group, these Hardys longed for past ease and a vast share of fleshpots and affluence, consoling themselves finally with an acquiescent and renunciative determinism.

The poet's father was a master-builder by trade, employing about ten men on an average, and lived in circumstances that may fairly be called prosperous. He was able, at any rate, to afford special efforts for the early education of his son. A Joseph Poorgrass knows nothing of French governesses. That, in point of culture, the builder belonged to the extremely modest class of which the band of church-musicians in Under the Greenwood Tree is representative, is an indefensible thesis. Hardy has found occasion to resent with some bitterness this erroneous assumption, prevalent sometimes even among his intimates. The Norman blood of Clement the elder has been stirred to a cruel ebullience under certain circumstances.