The New Lifetime Reading Plan

From one standpoint (and it was also his own) he was a fail- ure. From another, he was a success, though largely a posthu- mous one. His failure lay in disappointed ambitions, in his inability to live up to the family tradition. He felt—this is a major motif in the Education—that his eighteenth-century upbringing, with its emphasis on humane letters and strict moral accountability, had ill-equipped him for the twentieth century, with its emphasis on energy, science, and industry. His success lay in the fact that this very dissatisfaction with himself (a dissatisfaction out of which he made a virtual career) led him to probe deeply the age for which he was tempera- mentally unsuited. His books, particularly the Education, are pearls produced by irritation.

The Education of Henry Adams, written in a severely ironic third person, is an attempt to explain the author to himself and his time to the author. Adams was greatly influenced by late- nineteenth-century physics. He felt that civilizations, like mat­ter, were subject to inexorable laws of change and degradation. In the thirteenth century (see his beautiful book of medieval studies, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres) he believed Western civilization to have achieved a state of coherence and unity, symbolized by the figure of the Virgin. Our time, symbolized by the Dynamo, he saw as one moving further and further away from unity toward multiplicity. The rate of disintegration was rapidly increasing; mankind had little to look forward to beyond a series of graver and graver catastrophes. The Education is remarkable for wit, elegance, wonderful on-the- scene reporting; but what gives it its sharp edge of emotion is Adams's constant cold prescience of tragedy. It makes the Education a work of poetry as well as truth.

The critic Paul Elmer More has decried its "sentimental nihilism," and it is true that Adams^Js special brand of pes- simism sometimes strikes tediously on the ear. Yet, when one looks about at the world today, it is hard to find many writers who foresaw as clearly as Adams did the shape of the future. We have experienced several of the catastrophes he foretold; and it is clear that we are to experience others. Disintegration rather than coherence seems more and more to mark our era. It required a considerable depth of imagination to say in 1862, as Adams did, "Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race may commit suicide by blowing up the world."

Henry Adams was by nature a rather unhappy man, and his beloved wife's suicide in 1885 further predisposed him to pes- simism. He was snobbish, intellectually cocky, vulgarly racist, and his self-depreciation is often spurious. Yet from these weaknesses as well as from his strengths he drew the materiais that make the Education a great book. Being an Adams, he could not write a Confessions. His aim is not the revelation of a human heart but the unflinching consideration of a historical character, who happens to be the writer himself. As an intel- lectual analysis of a labyrinthine mind and of the changing and, as he thought, disintegrating society he knew intimately, the Education remains unrivaled.

C.F.

94

THOMAS HARDY

1840-1928

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy came of Dorset stock and lived the larger part of his life just outside Dorchester. The beautiful, history- freighted, and rather desolate countryside around Dorchester (Hardy calls it Wessex) is in a way the main character in his novйis. His formal education—he was the son of a builder— lasted only from his eighth to his sixteenth year. He was then apprenticed to a Dorchester, and later to a London, architect. At twenty-seven he started what turned out to be a quarter- century of increasingly successful novel writing. The indigna- tion aroused by supposedly shocking situations and passages in Jude the Obscure (1895) made the sensitive Hardy turn back to his first love, poetry. At his death he had written over a thou­sand poems, not including his gigantic cosmic panorama of the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts. Many rate his verse above his novйis. Certainly he is one of the two dozen or so English poets you may wish to read most closely.

It may be some time before the cycle of taste returns Hardy to favor, just as it has brought back Dante [30], Conrad [100], Stendhal [67], Melville [83], and Henry James [96]. This Plan, however, is not designed to take more than casual account of fashion. It deals mainly with writers of generally acknowledged

long-term influence and interest. Among these Hardy will doubtless occupy a secondary rank. But not a minor one.