Hardy and Time

Abstract

In 1876 Hardy copied two sentences from an address by John Morley into his Literary Notebooks:

Life. ‘The stuff of which life is made is Time.’

The unknown Great ‘You never know what child in rags that meets you in the street may have in him the germ of gifts that might add new treasures to the storehouse of beautiful things or noble acts’¹

One wonders why Hardy troubled to copy the first sentence, since Time, with or without the initial capital, is the subject of so much of his work. Few writers can have had less need to remind themselves of how much human life is shaped by the sense either of time past, of memories pushing into or pulling against the present, or more often of time as passing, the present undermined even as it is experienced by the anticipation of its loss. The second is more teasing. Was it taken down as the starting point for a story about wasted potential and the careless cruelty of social judgements, or perhaps for a poem about the gradual disclosure of the beauty hidden in the commonplace and everyday? Either of these might be a ‘typical’ Hardy subject. The sense of ambiguity in the sentence, and the idea of the ‘germ’, are among the topics I want to explore further in the course of this paper.