Volume 9, Number 8 · November 9, 1967
Hardy Perennial
By Ellen Moers
Thomas Hardy
by Irving Howe
Macmillan (Masters of World Literature Series), 206 pp., $4.95
'A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill…' 'The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom…' A solitary figure—or a van, a gig, a spring-cart, a wagon—appears upon the deserted highway, or 'the pale thoroughfare,' or 'the long laborious road, dry, empty and white.' We are in Wessex again, on the eternal vale, barrow, down, verge, upland, fallow, or 'featureless convexity of chalk and soil.' 'It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where…dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real.' Or, 'one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible.' Or, 'It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.'
Review, 2157 words
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