China and the West

Xu, Zhimo. Tang mai shi Hadai [ID D27729].
Er schreibt : "With his four novels (Jude the obscure, Tess oft he D'Urbervilles, The return oft he native, Far from the madding world) alone, Hardy has secured a lofty status in the literary world comparable to Shakespeare and Balzac. In the history of English literature, Hamlet and Jude the obscure stand out like two fiery trees shining on each other. A large amount of good writings has indeed been produced in the three centuries in between, yet none of them measures up to these two poles which will give off their sacred sheen forever in the realm of literature and art."
"Hardy is not an arbitrary pessimist though he could not check his anger and melancholy sometimes. He never gave up his resolve to seek a way out for his personal ideal and the prospects of humanity as well, even during the darkest and most tiresome hours of his life. His realism and his pessimism reflect exactly his mental faithfulness and bravery."
"The act of imagination is the starting-point for the creation of a universe. But only a select few, possessed of 'complete imagination' or 'absolute imagination', have the capacity to create a complete universe : Shakespeare, for example, or Goethe or Dante. Hardy's universe also is a whole. If some should suggest that in that universe the climatic variation was altogether too monotonous, the aspect always that of autumnal or wintry gloom, that no gay blaze of the sun ever came bursting through the clouds and mists, then Hardy's answer would be that the age he represented was not, unfortunately, that of Elizabeth I, but that era of the fullest development of self-consciousness which began with the closing years of the nineteenth century : a most stern season in the history of man...
Even in the moments of the greatest distress, the blackest darkness, Hardy never abandoned his determination to find a way out for his thinking, to find a way out for the future of mankind. His realism, his so-called pessimism, are names for nothing but the honesty and courage of his thought."
"No one else could gauge as closely as Hardy the pulse-beat of his age ; under his fingers the slightest movement was made to divulge its inner secret.
The death of Thomas Hardy properly concludes an important historical era. The era opens with the thinking and the character of Rousseau, in whose words and deeds there was realized the formal birth of the 'liberation of the self' and the 'consciousness of the self' of the modern age. From the Confessions to the French Revolution, from the French Revolution to the Romantic movement, from the Romantic movement to Nietzsche (and Dostojevsky), from Nietzsche to Hardy – through this hundred-and-seventy-year span we watch the struggles of human feeling as it emerges from the grip of Reason, bursting forth like flame, and in the bright blaze shooting out its various movements and doctrines, meanwhile in the embers nourishing the 'modern consciousness', pathological, self-analytical, questioning, weary ; and even as the flying sparks diminish, so does the heap of ashes beneath broaden out until a sense of disillusionment tones down all the throbbings of energy, crushes feeling, paralyzes intellect, and mankind suddenly discovers that its footsteps have strayed to the brink of despair, that if it does not hold back then the future offers only death and silence. When Hardy began the writing of his novels the days of Victoria were at their most flourishing, the indications of evolutionary theory and the achievements of the doctrine of laissez-faire had thrown up a high tide of optimism which within a short time blotted out all inequalities and mysteries. By the time he ceased writing fiction a fin-de-siècle melancholy had replaced the hollow hopes of the early years. When Hardy first published a volume of his verse the forces of destruction, gathering for a century past, had formed a hidden current which might at any moment burst its banks. As he was publishing his later volumes this current broke out in the Great War and the Russian Revolution."