Hardy, THOMAS, one of the foremost of modern English novelists, a writer of singular power and of marked individuality, was born at Upper Bockhampton, in Dorsetshire, on 2d June 1840. He was trained as an ecclesiastical architect at Dorchester, but spent a great part of his pupilage in reading Latin and Greek with a fellow-student. In London in 1863 he gained the prize and medal of the Institute of British Architects and Sir W. Tite's prize for architectural design; here too he found time to study, at King's College and otherwise, modern languages, literature, and theology. He also began to write: an article, 'How I built myself a House,' appeared in Chambers's Journal in 1865, and ranks as his first published production. The experiment of a not unsuccessful novel, Desperate Remedies (1871; new ed. 1896), shaped his destiny; and about 1873 he definitely forsook the profession of architecture for that of literature. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) remains one of his most charming stories; and this and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) prepared the way for his first great work, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which, first issued in Cornhill as a serial, has remained on the whole his most popular book. It was followed by The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-major (1880), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge as a serial, The Woodlanders (1887), Wessex Tales (collected 1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Life's Little Ironies and A Few Crusted Characters (collected 1894), Jude the Obscure (1895), and The Well-beloved (1897). Much of Mr Hardy's earlier work was in poetry, but most of his verses he destroyed; and it was not till 1898 that a volume of Wessex Poems appeared. Mr Hardy has contributed largely to periodical literature, and two of his stories have been dramatised. Of his novels, some critics have preferred The Return of the Native, others The Trumpet-major; but Tess of the D'Urbervilles is for most people his most characteristic and, on the whole, his greatest work. It was not for nothing that in youth Mr Hardy, as architect's apprentice in church restoration, visited innumerable villages throughout Wessex; not for nothing did he elect to remain a Wessex man. If there be any tales that are racy of the soil, it is Mr Hardy's stories of Wessex life and manners. Quite exceptional is his command of rustic humour, of the Wessex dialect, and of pithy dialogue. But his chiefest characteristic is perhaps his determination at all risks to present in all its width and depth the tragedy of human life, perhaps to err on the side of regarding life as too terribly and inevitably sad and sombre. Our social system is very imperfect, even rotten; conventions and proprieties are hollow; cant and shams abound; our social code is cruel and cruelly unequal. Passion and the passions are the key of life and of literature, and freedom of speech must be maintained and exercised. Sincerity in art forbids the artist to call a spade anything but a spade, or to invent happy endings for too true stories. Even friendly critics reproach Mr Hardy with pessimism, some- times to the verge of morbidness. But it may safely be said that if he is pessimist he is not cynical; enough there certainly is of satire and irony. In all his stories unity of plan is consistently kept in view, and incidents all work towards the inevitable conclusion. The nervous English style—appropriate rather than brilliant, natural rather than exquisite—is in just keeping with the austerity of the issues handled and the architectonic completeness of the presentment.
There are monographs on Mr Hardy and his art by Miss Macdonell (1894) and Mr Lionel Johnson (1894)—the latter with a full bibliography of Mr Hardy's publications.