Thomas Hardy's Philosophy on Life

"Happiness is an occasional episode in a general drama of pain"-this is the conclusion drawn by one of Hardy's chief women characters, Elizabeth-Jane in his tragic novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. This is also the concluding sentence of the novel. We can imagine how much emphasis is put upon this observation made by a character who has throughout her life remained a passive sufferer, and therefore an observer, of human life, of human misery. This sad realization is not something that we find in this novel only; all of Hardy's so-called novels of character and environment reflect human tragedy after the grave and sombre manner of ancient tragedies. All the novels depict the despair and agony of man in eternal conflict with external as well as internal forces. His protagonists fight not only with circumstances but also with their own impulses, their own strong passions.

The Return of the Native is one of Hardy's representative novels based on his sombre recognition of life as a series of ironic situations which play with mankind, allure them to his doom, and he dies -either spiritually or physically or both-with the kind of bitterness in his heart which may be found in a Macbeth or an Oedipus. The critic John Paterson is not ready to place RN in the same category with The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urburvilles, and Jude the Obscure. He calls it "too studied and self-conscious an imitation of classical tragedy." The novel is, according to him, merely `an attempt at great tragedy'. He reminds us of Hardy's original plan to divide it into five books or `acts' of traditional tragedy: "The Return of the Native was meant to recall the immensities of Sophocles and Shakespeare. But the facts of its fiction simply do not just...

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....signifying nothing"(Dobree).In the Return the final effect is one of irony and pathos. As Deen points out, "The episode tends to absolve both Eustacia and Clym of responsibility, and to make both appear to be the innocent victims of a malignant fate."

But the march of mankind does not stop, even though it is `a slow, silent walk' and the road inimical. Hardy's `man' is walking against all odds, both internal and external, that make the journey more enervating, but he goes on. This is the true picture of the Hardiean protagonist, a lonely figure set against the vastness of the universe. And we can say with Bonamy Dobree that "the movement within the landscape is not without its dignity."

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