You read the title of this piece and immediately, a well-educated person will list half a dozen names.
Not many, I would warrant, are going to put Tom Hardy at the top of their list.
Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was a man whom I had the misfortune to have to study in my English Literature at 'A' level.
Adulterer and moralist both - (?) his works across the two genres have occasional solid moments but far too many which echo a particularly cheesy and cloying episode of Eastenders.
Emma Hardy.
The mourning poems for his wife Emma, whom he had treated so very shamefully and shabbily for the bulk of their marriage, speak considerably less of repentance than of a wallowing in unadulterated self-indulgence. For Hardy, whose hatred of God was legendary in any case - repentance was an impossibility.
You must almost think of his most infamous tearjerker, Tess of The D'Urbevilles as being from the same mould as one of the rather more honeyed and cloying films of Doris Day and Cary Grant back in the fifties. It had promise and potential but was ruined by the never-ending efforts to work the readers' feelings into a maelstrom of naked sentimentality.
Is it not ironic that Hardy was perceived as someone who 'worked for the emancipation of women'?
Worst still was his final novel, Jude the Obscure, which has the kind of ending almost calculatedly designed to turn the stomach in just the same way as a fourth rate slasher movie might attempt today. Such was the adverse reaction of his readers upon its printing - he was never again to write another novel.
At times, in Far From The Madding Crowd - as one example - we get to see the kind of great novelist he might have become.
But witness the first sixty or seventy pages of Return of The Native and the victim-reader is subjected to a description of the local heath! Certainly, in my library edition it was a full seventy pages of the aforementioned self-indulgence. Unbelievable - although I once mentioned this to an English teacher who claimed to have enjoyed this abuse of her time and intelligence. (There is no accounting for what a degree in English can do to the brain.)
In The Mayor of Casterbridge - the idea of a man auctioning off his wife is certainly engaging and his use of time-out-of mind traditions, local folklore and capturing a snapshot of an era in Hardy's Wessex so soon to be consigned to history with the onset of World War One. These all deserve a certain degree of praise. He has to be allowed some leeway.
Throughout the poetry, his debilitating nihilism, insistent atheism and rampant narcissism tended to ruin whatever had any degree of potential. The liberals of his day welcomed his work with open-armed joy as they deemed it to be a kind of iconoclasticism which they were so desperately anxious to embrace.
I will allow him some praise. The Man He Killed, a poem from 1902 - and surely his best - filled the soul with true emotion rather than the customary, tedious emotionalism.
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