Hardy’s despair was not, as one might say, of the sort that is active: he did not think the Devil rules the world, or that God hates man and wants to thwart him. He simply believed that there was nothing there to guide and succor the world, nothing but blind chance. In “Hap” he makes this clear. If there were only a vengeful God who would tell him that His divine happiness depended on suffering man, Hardy says, he could endure it—but there is none such. Instead, “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan … These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.”
“Purblind Doomsters” are at the center of Hardy’s concept of things. There is a power that controls and ordains our fate: This power is absolute, and our fates are unavoidable. But there is no way in which we can understand it. It is totally beyond our ken. If we know anything at all about this power, it is that it seems to joy in strewing pains about our pilgrimage rather than blisses. But even that is not certain and may be illusory.
Because he was without hope does not mean that Hardy was unhappy. That is a curious and wonderful thing about him, and the thing that makes his poetry magicaclass="underline"
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
Is it necessary, after all, for happiness, to believe that we are “taken care of,” mothered, fathered, tended to our dying day? Hardy says no. He is one of the great pagan writers, two thousand years after their time. He has more in common with Lucretius, say, who lived two millennia before him, than with his contemporary, W.B. Yeats. Thus Hardy’s vision of the world—cold, unyielding, beautiful—seems sometimes hard to take. But it is one with which we must learn to deal, because it may be—not necessarily is—true.
Hardy’s Collected Poems is a massive volume, with hundreds and hundreds of poems (most are short, many very short). Here it is difficult and finally unwise to make a selection and say (as we may of Yeats or Robert Frost): Read these first, and then go on to another selection of your own making. Every reader of Hardy has his or her own favorites, and you will have yours when you begin to read him. Start at the beginning of the volume and read through, a few poems at a time, not more than ten pages an evening. Skip as much as you want. Flip the pages and read a poem whose title attracts you. There is a remarkable consistency; not one of this large number is a bad poem, although some are better than others. They were written at all times during Hardy’s life; sometimes he published poems he had written as long as forty or even fifty years earlier, so it does not matter at all which you read first.
I think you will want to keep on reading Hardy, not steadily, not every day forever, but forever nevertheless. He will become a habit.
WILLIAM JAMES
1842–1910
The Principles of Psychology
William and Henry James are certainly the leading brother act in the history of literature. As brothers, they were close; William, especially, adored his younger brother Henry. They did not entirely approve of one another; William, especially again, did not think the way Henry wrote English was as clear as it could be. Henry did not feel that way about William’s prose style, and indeed no one ever wrote English better than William James.
William was born in New York in 1842, some fifteen months before Henry. His education was irregular, partly because of his irregular family life and partly because of the almost continuous ill health that he suffered until the time that he married Alice Gibbons; thereafter his neurasthenia disappeared, and he began to show an energy and an ability to work hitherto unknown. He taught at Harvard for thirty-five years, but his real life unfolded in his study, where he wrote a series of remarkably readable books.
His writing career divides neatly into three periods or phases. The first culminated in the publication of The Principles of Psychology, in two volumes, in 1890. The second, in which his curious mind turned to problems of religion, culminated in the Gifford Lectures of 1902, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. The third, devoted to philosophy, culminated in Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). All three books were accompanied and followed by collections of essays, like “The Will to Believe,” which lays it down as a human necessity that everyone must, sooner or later, go beyond the definite and the certain, and take the “leap of faith”—in short, you have to believe in something for which there is less than enough evidence. I think we know this to be true, from our own life experience.
William James spent nearly twenty years studying the subject of psychology—not the mental philosophy of the “genteel tradition,” as George Santayana called it, but the laboratory science that is psychology today. At the end of the twenty years, however, he seems to have become bored with psychology. Nevertheless, he had written one of the greatest books on the subject, which, although it is dated in some respects, is still more pleasurable to read than almost any other book on the subject.
Actually, James’s Principles of Psychology is no more dated than Galileo’s Two New Sciences, Newton’s Principia, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. All four books make mistakes and reveal ignorance on the part of their authors of some things that we now know. Yet each book not only signaled a new turning in the career of thought, but showed the new way to go.
The pragmatism of William James is the most commonsensible of commonsense philosophies, and his psychology is equally credible and down to earth. His long, fascinating book is full of lore and learning, but in no book is learning presented in such a delightful and easy way. In fact, one of the best things about William James’s Psychology is the great number of long quotations from other psychologists and philosophers. His book is an anthology of the field, and the quotations are so well chosen and so deftly interwoven with his own commentary that one concludes that no other of these somewhat antique experts needs to be read.
Ideally, a book on psychology should be full of wisdom. Most books on psychology are not, but I don’t know of any book that contains more wisdom about the way people are and the way they think and the things they do than James’s Principles of Psychology. Each chapter contains pages of useful advice for readers, young and old, male and female. This, for example, from the chapter “Habit,” which has always seemed to me to be an invaluable observation on the life we live:
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone…. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out … Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.