Chapter 11 On Thomas Hardy's Novels

The death of Thomas Hardy has deprived the English fiction of a leader, and by that we mean that no other author's supremacy is universally accepted, no one seems so naturally fitted to be worshipped.Of course, no one pursues it less than he does.Had the unearthly, simple old man heard the flowery language we employ on such occasions, he would have been poignantly bewildered and embarrassed.Nevertheless, it is still true that while he lived there was at least one novelist who could make the art of the novel seem an honorable enterprise; Excuses could be used to despise the art he practiced.It wasn't just a consequence of his particular genius, either.Some of his admiration was for his humility and integrity, for his simple life in Dorset that was free from self-seeking or self-promotion.For two reasons, for his genius, and for the seriousness with which he used it, it is impossible not to admire him as an artist, and to respect and admire him as a person.But it is his work that we must speak of, the novels he wrote long ago, which seem as remote from contemporary fiction as Hardy himself was from the turmoil and petty banality of contemporary life.

If we are going to trace the work of the novelist Hardy, we have to go back an era.In 1871, at the age of thirty-one, he had already written a novel called "Extreme Means," but at that time he was by no means a sure craftsman.According to himself, he was "groping his way, looking for a method of creation"; he seemed to be aware that he had various talents, but he did not understand their nature, or how to use them to their advantage.To read this first novel is to share in its author's sense of embarrassment.The author's imagination is strong and ironic; he has a sort of self-taught book knowledge; he can create characters but not control them; he is clearly hampered by his technical difficulties; and, more curiously, He is driven by a feeling that human beings are the playthings of forces other than themselves, which leads him to extreme, even exaggerated use of plots of chance and coincidence.He had acquired a definite conviction that the novel was neither a toy nor an argument, but a vehicle for furnishing real or harsh, violent impressions of the lives of men and women.But perhaps the most noteworthy quality of the book is the roar and echo of a waterfall that travels through the pages.This is the first concrete expression of that force which occupies such a large proportion in later works.He had proved that he was a meticulous and consummate observer of nature; he could tell the difference between raindrops falling on tree roots or plowed fields;However, he understood nature in a broad sense as a force; he felt that there was a god in it, which could either sympathize with the fate of mankind, or laugh at it, or stand by with indifference.He had felt it already when he wrote the novel; and the crude tale of Adclive and Miss Cecilia is memorable because it is under the watchful eye of the gods, created in front of nature.

It should be said that he is a poet, which is obvious; that he is a novelist, it may not be conclusive.However, by the time "Under the Green Shade" came out the following year, it was clear that much of that painstaking "finding the way" was a thing of the past.Some of the dogged originality of the preceding book has gone.Compared with the first work, the second work is more accomplished, charming and moving, with an idyllic flavor.It seems probable that the author would develop into an English landscape painter, whose pictures are full of huts and gardens and old peasant women wandering about to collect and preserve ancient ways and words that are rapidly becoming obsolete.Yet what a lover of ancient customs and customs he was, what a careful naturalist with a microscope in his pocket, what a scholar who was obsessed with the changing forms of language, and with what passion he Listen to the whine of a bird in the nearby woods as it is killed by an owl!The whine "spreads into that silence, but does not interweave with it."Again we heard in the distance a strange and ominous echo, like the sound of a gun on the sea on a sunny summer morning.When we read these early works, there is a sense of desolation and loneliness.We have a feeling that Hardy's genius was tenacious and self-willed; at first one talent dominated him at will, then another dominated.They refuse to go hand in hand in everyday activities.This indeed may well be the fate of a writer who is both poet and realist; a faithful son of fields and dawns, yet tormented by doubts and depressions bred by book knowledge; The way of life and the simple peasantry, yet he was doomed to see the beliefs and desires of his forebears evaporate before his very eyes.

Nature has added another factor to this pair of contradictions, which may well disturb a well-proportioned development.Some writers are born aware of everything; others are unconscious of many things.Some writers, like Henry James and Flaubert, are able not only to take full advantage of their genius but to control it in their creative activity; they are aware of all the possibilities of the situation and never No unexpected surprises.Unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens or Scott, seem to be carried aloft and rolled forward by the tide of emotion without their own consent.When the tide was flat, they could not tell what had happened, or why.We must put Hardy among them--this is the source of his strength and his weakness.In his own words, a "moment of vision," which precisely describes those moments of astonishing beauty and power that can be found in every book he has written.With a sudden and intensified force that we cannot foresee and that he does not seem to control, one episode breaks off from the others.As if it existed alone and eternally, we see the cart carrying Fanny's body drive along the road under the dripping shade; See Tera brandishing her saber around the transfixed Miss Bathsheba, shaving off a lock of her hair and raining caterpillars onto her breast.These scenes are vividly presented to our eyes, and we do not only see them, because while reading, every sense is engaged in activities, such scenes come to us gradually, their splendor Live forever in our memory.However, this force came suddenly and left suddenly.After the fleeting vision lies the long, ordinary day, and we cannot believe in any craft or artifice to catch this wayward force and make better use of it.Those novels, therefore, are full of disproportion, they are dull, dull and emotionless, but they are never dull; The unexpressed outline often gives the deepest satisfaction.It seems that Hardy himself did not realize what he was doing, that his consciousness contained more than he could create, and he left it to his readers to find out for themselves the full meaning of his work, and according to supplemented by their own experience.

For these reasons the development of Hardy's genius was uncertain, and its attainment uneven; yet, when the time came, its achievement was brilliant.In the novel Far from the Madding Crowd, that moment comes in all its fullness.The subject is right; the method is right; the poet and fellow countryman, the sensitive man, the melancholy reflective man, the learned scholar, they all have been called upon to produce this novel , however capricious literary fashions may be, it must secure its place among the great English novels.First, Hardy, more than any novelist, brings before us that sense of the material world: the sense of the small prospects of human existence surrounded by a natural landscape that exists independently, yet which gives Hardy The drama of life has a deep and solemn beauty.The black lowlands, dotted with burial mounds and shepherds' huts, are against the sky, smooth as the ripples of the sea, but solid and eternal, stretching as far as the eye can see, in its folds There are quiet cottages hidden among them, their smoke curling up by day, and their lights shining in the vast darkness of night.Gabriel Oak grazed his flock on the back of the earth, the Eternal Shepherd; the stars were the ancient bonfires; and through the ages he has kept watch by his flock.

But in the valley below, the earth was full of warmth and life; the farms were busy with work, the barns were filled with grain, and the fields were full of cows lowing and bleating.Nature is fertile, majestic, and sensual; yet she is harmless, and is still the great mother of the laborer.Now for the first time Hardy had his sense of humor fully developed, and it was at its liveliest and richest in the redneck's mouth.When Jane Cogan, Henry Frye, and Joseph Polglass gathered in the malthouse after a day's work to drink ale and give vent to their biting, poetic sense of humor, it had long been Brewing in their heads, ever since the pilgrims set foot on the pilgrimage, it has found concrete expression in wine; Shakespeare, Scott, and George Eliot loved to hear now and then It was the kind of redneck humor, but no one loved it more or understood it better than Hardy.In the Wessex novels, however, the peasants do not feature prominently as individual characters.They constitute a pool of wisdom and humor of the masses, a reservoir of eternal life.They comment on the actions of heroes and heroines, however, when Terra, Oak, Fanny, or Bathsheba enters the novel or leaves, disappears, Jane Cogan, Henry Frye, and Joseph Bolgera S still exists.They drink at night and plow the fields during the day.They are eternal.We meet them again and again in Hardy's novels, and there is always something typical about them, which is closer to the character that marks a nation than to the visage that belongs to an individual.The peasant is the great temple of uprightness; the countryside is the last bastion of a happy life.Once they disappear, the entire nation loses hope.

Oak, Terra, Bathsheba and Fanny Ropin accompany us to the perfect images of men and women in Hardy's novels.In every novel there are always three or four dominant characters who stand tall and attract the forces of the storm like the conductors of the lightning.They were Oak, Terra, and Bathsheba; Eustacia, Veddy, and Vane; Henchard, Lucetta, and Favre; Jude, Sue Bradher, and Philoson.There is even a certain similarity between these different groups of characters.They exist as individuals, and as individuals they are different; but they also exist as types, and as types they are alike.Bathsheba was Bathsheba, but she was a woman, a sister to Eustacia and Lucetta and Sue; Gabriel Oak was Gabriel Oak, But he was a man, and to Henchard and Van and Jude he was a brother.However charming Bathsheba may be, she is weak; however stubborn and misguided Henchard is, he is still strong.This is an essential part of Hardy's perception; it is the main quality of many of his novels.A woman is weak and sensual, she clings to the strong and blurs his vision.Nevertheless, in his greater works, how freely life breaks out of this fixed frame!When Bussheba sits in her carriage in her nursery, smiling at her own charming figure in the little mirror, we know—and we know, a testament to Hardy’s ability— How much she will suffer before the end of the story, and will cause pain to others.However, this moment glows with all the youth and beauty of life.Scenes like this appear again and again in his novels.His characters, both male and female, are to him infinitely attractive creatures.With women he showed a tenderer concern than with men, and perhaps a more intense interest in them.Void though their beauty may be, and fearful as their fate may be, yet, when the spark of life shines through them, their steps are light, their laughter sweet, there is a strength that enables them to plunge into The embrace of nature turns into a part of her solemnity, or makes them stand up, as calm and demure as rolling clouds, as wild and unruly as a forest full of mountain flowers.Those men—who suffer not, as women do, from dependence on others, but from conflict with fate—evoke our harsher and harsher sympathies.With such a man as Gabriel, we need no moment of suspense.We must respect him, though we cannot love him so generously.He's firmly on his feet, ready to hit back hard -- at least with a male -- any blow he might take.He had a foreknowledge of probable events which came from his nature rather than his education.His temperament is strong and stable, his love is unwavering, and he can bear blows with his eyes open without flinching.But he's not a puppet either.Under normal circumstances, he is a genial and ordinary character.He could walk down the street without people turning to stare at him.In short, no one can deny that Hardy has the ability--the ability of a true novelist--to convince us that his characters are fellow-citizens motivated by their own passions and idiosyncrasies, while at the same time they have--the poet's Talent—something symbolic that we all share.

When we consider Hardy's ability to portray both male and female characters, we become clear about the profound differences that set him apart from his contemporaries.We look back at a series of Hardy characters and ask ourselves what qualities we remember about them.We are reminded of their passion.We are reminded of how deeply they loved each other, and how often its ending was tragic.We think of Oak's faithful love for Bath Sheba, and the tumultuous and short-lived passions of men like Wade, Terra, and Fitzbiars; we think of Clem's filial affection for his mother, and Henchard For Elizabeth Jean's kind of jealous parental love.However, we won't be reminded of how they were once in love.We don't recall how they talked, changed, got to know each other, and moved from stage to stage beautifully, gradually, step by step.The relationship between them is not formed by those seemingly slight but actually very deep intellectual understandings or subtle intuitions.In all those novels, love is one of the great concrete facts that shape human life.Yet it was a catastrophe; it happened so suddenly and so overwhelmingly that there was little to say about it.The conversation between lovers, when it is not passionate, is practical or philosophical, and it seems that in fulfilling their daily obligations, they are more eager to explore life and its purpose than to examine each other's emotion.Even if they are capable of analyzing their feelings, life is too turbulent to give them time for such analysis.They need to concentrate all their energies against the direct blows of fate, the elusive schemes, the growing viciousness.They no longer have spare energy to spend on the delicate subtleties of human comedy.

In due time, therefore, we can say with certainty that we will not find in Hardy's novels certain qualities which give us the greatest pleasure in the novels of other writers.He doesn't have the perfection of Jane Austen, the wit of Meredith, the range of Thackeray, or the prodigious intellect of Tolstoy.In the works of the great classic writers there is a decisive effect which detaches some of their situations from the story, beyond the bounds of variation.We do not ask what they mean for the narrative of the story, nor do we use them to interfere with questions that lie at the periphery of the situation.A smile, a blush, a few words in conversation, and that's enough; our pleasure comes and goes.Hardy's work, however, lacks this concentration and completeness.His light does not directly shine on the heart of the character.It goes beyond the mind, projecting outward onto dark moors and trees shaken by storms.When our eyes returned to the room, the group of figures by the fire had long since dispersed.Every man or woman struggles alone against the storm; and the more he withdraws from the observation of others, the more fully does he reveal his own character.We don't know them the way we know Pierre, Natasha, or Becky Sharp.We do not know all about them, inside and out, as they are exposed to casual visitors, government officials, noble ladies, and generals in battle.We do not understand how intricate, all-encompassing, and tumultuous their minds were.Geographically, they were also fixed in a corner of the English countryside.Hardy seldom departed from the yeoman or poor peasant to describe higher social classes, and the consequences of that description were often unpleasant.In drawing-rooms, clubs, and ballrooms, where leisured and educated men meet, where comedy is bred and characters are revealed, he feels at a loss and awkward.But the reverse is also true.If we do not understand the relationship of his male and female characters to each other, we understand their relationship to time, death and fate.If we don't see them against the city lights and crowds in our swift excitement, we see them against the land, the storms, and the seasons.We learn about their attitudes to some of the most astonishingly significant issues humanity can face.They present a tall image beyond ordinary people in our memory.What we see is not their minutiae, but the enlarged and solemn image.We see Tess "with an almost divine dignity" as she christens her baby in her pajamas.We see Mattie Soth laying flowers on Winterbourne's grave "like a character who indifferently denies sexuality in favor of a higher, abstract humanitarian quality."There was a biblical majesty and poetry in their speech.There is an undeniable power in them, a power of love or hatred, which in men leads them to rebel against the oppression of life, in women it suggests infinite possibilities of suffering; Strength dominates the characters and makes it unnecessary for us to discover the better traits that are hidden.This is the force of tragedy, and, if we are going to place Hardy among his peers, we should call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists.

However, as we approach the danger zone of Hardy's philosophy, let us be vigilant.In reading the novels of an imaginative writer, nothing is more important than keeping a proper distance from his books.Especially for a writer of marked idiosyncrasy, there is nothing easier than to connect opinions by force, to assert that he has certain beliefs, and to confine him to some consistent point of view.Hardy was no exception to the rule that the mind most receptive to impressions is often the worst at drawing conclusions.Let the reader, immersed in the impression, draw the conclusions.It is the reader's responsibility to know when to set aside the author's conscious intentions in favor of some deeper intention which he may not be aware of.Hardy himself recognized this.He has long warned us that a novel "is an impression, not an argument," and, as he points out:

Unsorted impressions have their value, and the way to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in the humbly recording of the various interpretations of the phenomena of life which chance and change impose upon us. Of course it must be true to say that in his greatest works he impresses us; in his weakest he argues.In "Woodland Residents", "Far from the Madding Crowd", especially in "The Mayor of Casterbridge", we see Hardy's impression of life, which has not been processed by his consciousness.As soon as he begins to falsify his immediate intuitive impressions, his power is gone. "Didn't you say the stars were worlds too, Tess?" asked little Abraham, as they drove their hives to market.Tess replied that they were like "the apples on my stump, and most of them were pretty and unblemished--a few were moth-eaten and shriveled". "Which one do we live on—a beautiful apple? Or a shriveled one?" Reply.The words came out cold and hard, like springs from a machine, and not so long ago we saw only flesh and blood, not a machine.Our empathy took a brutal blow, and after a while, the little car was overturned, and we saw a concrete example of the ironic ways that rule our planet, and our empathy was refueled. But born. It is for this reason that we say that "Jude the Obscure" is the most painful of all Hardy's novels, and it is only with this that we can justly charge it with pessimism.In Jude the Obscure, argument is allowed to override impressions, with the result that while the book is utterly tragic, it is not tragic.As disaster after disaster occurs, we feel that the case against society as a whole has not been fairly discussed, or that the facts have not been understood at the time of the debate.There is not here the breadth, force, and knowledge of human beings with which Tolstoy makes his charges powerful when he criticizes society.Here before us is the petty cruelty of man, not the great injustice of the gods.Just compare "Jude the Obscure" with "The Mayor of Casterbridge" to see where Hardy's real power lies.Jude has been wretchedly pitted against the deans of the college and all manner of hypocritical social conventions.Henchard was battered, not because he was against other men, but against something outside himself, a force against a man of ambition and force like himself.No one has any ill will towards him.Even Farfrey, Newson and Elizabeth Jean, who had been wronged by him, came to sympathize with him, and even admired the strength of his personality.Standing up to his fate, and standing up for the aging mayor, whose ruin is largely through his own fault, Hardy makes us feel that we are standing up for humanity in an uneven confrontation.There is no pessimism here.Throughout the book we remain conscious of the sublime sublime of this question, yet it is presented to us in its most concrete form.From the opening scene where Henchard sells his wife to the sailor Newson in the market place until his death on the Aydon Moor at the end of the novel, the grandeur of the whole story is unmatched, its humor rich and poignant, and its variety of activities wide open. And free.The carriage with the simulated figures paraded through the streets, the struggle between Farfrey and Henchard in the attic, Mrs. As background, or as nature mysteriously dominates the foreground, is one of the brightest chapters of English fiction.Slightly, perhaps, as measured by the happiness that each man can attain, but so long as, like Henchard, he struggles against the judgments of fate and not against the laws of the world, so long as the struggle is wrought in the open air, and requires more There was vigor, pride, and happiness in this struggle, and the ruined corn-merchant died in his hut on the Moor of Aydon to be compared with the death of Ejak, chief of the Salamis.We experience that real feeling of tragedy. In the face of such a force we feel the utter futility of our ordinary examinations of fiction.Do we insist that a great novelist should be a master of tonal prose?Hardy was by no means a man of this class.With his wit and uncompromising sincerity, he gropes for the words he needs, often with a haunting poignancy.If no such words could be found, he would resort to any common, clumsy, or old-fashioned language, sometimes extremely crude, sometimes with a bookish scrutiny.No literary style is so difficult to analyse, save Scott's; so clumsy in its appearance, and yet it achieves its object with alacrity.One might equally illustrate the charm of a muddy country road or a winter field strewn with plant stumps.Thus, like Dorset itself, his prose forged from these dead, blunt elements a majesty, a Latin sonority, as solid, Very well-proportioned form.Besides, don't we demand that the novelist should be mindful of possibilities and try to be true to reality?To find anything in English literature that comes close to Hardy's dramatic twists and turns, you have to go back to Elizabethan plays.Nevertheless, when we read his work, we fully accept it.More than that, his violent melodramas, when they were not born of a curious, peasant taste for the perversely terrible in themselves, were evidently part of that savage poetic spirit with a strong The irony and harshness of the discovery: that no account of life can be more peculiar than life itself; no capricious, irrational symbol of our astonishing circumstances can appear too far. But when we think of the great structure of those Wessex novels, it seems inappropriate to focus on the minutiae--individual characters, scenes, and fragments of profound poetic beauty. .What Hardy has bequeathed to us is something broader.The Wessex novel is not one book but many books.They cover a wide range; they are inevitably full of flaws—some are failures, and some show only the wrong side of the writer's genius.There can be no doubt, however, that when we accept them fully and willingly, when we judge our impressions as a whole, the effect is majestic and satisfying.We are freed from the fetters and smallness that life imposes on us.Our imaginations are stretched and heightened; our sense of humor is let loose in laughter; we suck in the beauty of the earth.At the same time, we are brought into the shadow of a sad, brooding elf who, even in his saddest moods, torments himself with a sublime sense of justice, and even in his most agitated rage, does not would lose a deep love for men and women and all living beings who are suffering.Therefore, what Hardy gives us is not a portrayal of life in a certain time and place.This is the vision of the world and of the destiny of man unfolded before a powerful imagination, a profound poetic genius, and a tender, life-like heart.