The Achievement of Thomas Hardy Also by Phillip Mallett KIPLING CONSIDERED (editor) RUDYARD KIPLING: LIMITS AND RENEWALS (editor) A SPACIOUS VISION: Essays on Thomas Hardy (editor) SATIRE (editor) THOMAS HARDY: THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (editor) The Achievement of Thomas Hardy Edited by Phillip Mallett Palgrave macmillan Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 10 © Phillip Mallett 2000 Chapters 1-9, 11 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-73702-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. * No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PAlGRAVE MACMILlAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILlAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press. LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark In the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. Outside North America ISBN 978-1-349-65273-0 ISBN 978-1-349-65271-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-65271-6 In North America ISBN 978-0-312-23536-9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-036900 Dedicated to the memory of Desmond Hawkins This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface by Phillip Mallett viii Notes on the Contributors xvi 1 Merely a Good Hand at a Serial? from A Pair of Blue Eyes to Far from the Madding Crowd 1 Charles P. C. Pettit 2 Geology, Genealogy and Church Restoration in Hardy's Writing 22 Sophie Gilmartin 3 'Gifted, even in November': the Meanings of The Well-Beloved 41 Michael Irwin 4 A Feast of Language: Hardy's Allusions 58 Mary Rimmer 5 'As near to poetry as the conditions would allow': the Presence of the Poet in Hardy's Novels 72 William Morgan 6 Hardy's Architecture: a General Perspective and a Personal View 95 Timothy Hands 7 Wessex Poems, 1898 lOS James Gibson 8 The Figure of the Singer in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy 117 Danny Karlin 9 Thomas Hardy's Narrative Art: the Poems and Short Stories 137 Douglas Dunn 10 Noticing Things: Hardy and the Nature of 'Nature' 155 Phillip Mallett 11 Rediscovering Thomas Hardy's 'Facts' Notebook 171 William Greenslade Index 187 vii Preface The essays and lectures collected in this volume are concerned with both Hardy the novelist and Hardy the poet, and with the relation between his two careers as a writer. Unlike Rudyard Kipling and D. H. Lawrence, the two writers who most obviously compare with him in producing major work in both poetry and prose fiction, Hardy had been known as a novelist for twenty-five years before he made his first public appearance as a poet. The shift from prose to verse signalled by the pub­ lication in 1897 of his last novel, The Well-Beloved, and in the follow­ ing year of his first collection of poems, Wessex Poems, means that readers new to Hardy's work now find themselves making two different discoveries. Hardy the novelist is usually encountered as the slightly younger contemporary of Trollope, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot. Trollope's Barchester novels, beginning with The Warden (1855), may have influenced Hardy's plan to write a series of novels set in Wessex; Desperate Remedies, Hardy's first published novel, has numerous simi­ larities with Collins's most successful work, The Woman in White (1860); Richard Hutton, reviewing Far from the Madding Crowd in the Spectator, was not the only critic to invoke George Eliot's name, and to suggest that if this was not another of her novels, then it was the work of her equal. Hardy the poet, on the other hand, is the older contemporary of the T. S. Eliot of Prufrock and The Waste Land, if not of Four Quartets. Christo­ pher Ricks has shown the similarities between Hardy's poem 'A Spellbound Palace' and Eliot's 'Sweeney Erect', and argues, convincingly but unexpectedly, that if there is a question of influence, 'Eliot is not the borrower but the lender'. 1 Famously, Philip Larkin, until his death the unofficial laureate of post-1945 England, was enabled to shed the influence of Yeats when he fell under the spell of Hardy. In short, few other writers sit so firmly in two ages as Hardy does in the 'Victorian' and the 'Modern'. Wordsworth and Yeats, perhaps: but we remember Wordsworth as a great young poet, and Yeats as a great old one. Hardy became a major novelist in his thirties, and remained a major poet into his eighties. There is a deeper puzzle to be resolved before we can come to terms with Hardy's achievement in either form. In the 'Apology' which pre­ faced Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) Hardy looked for an alliance between viii Preface ix religion, 'in its essential and undogmatic sense', which had somehow to be preserved, and 'complete rationality', which would come whether it was desired or not, by means of 'the interfusing effect of poetry' - though, characteristically, he noted that this might be only a forlorn hope.2 The 'Apology' thus takes its place in the line which runs from Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, through Arnold's Essays in Criticism, on into the launch of Scrutiny in 1932, and beyond. But beside this exalted notion of the power of literature, and poetry in particular, to act as a bulwark for the essential values of a civilised society, Hardy's claims for his own work are curiously modest. He wanted, he told Leslie Stephen in 1874, to be 'a good hand at a serial' (though he admitted that later he might have higher aims), and he said of his poems that he hoped to write at least some good enough for an anthology like the Golden Treasury. From the first, Hardy has exasperated his critics by seeming not to have the kind of ambition they demanded of him. Far from the Madding Crowd, grumbled Henry James - four years Hardy's junior, but contriving to sound a good deal older - was 'singularly inartistic', 'a really curious imitation of something better'.3 Almost a century later, Donald Davie complained that Hardy's poems, 'instead of transforming ... the reality of commonsense, are on the contrary just so many glosses on that reality'. Like James, Davie feels that Hardy is somehow less than he ought to be: in Davie's words, he 'sold the voca­ tion short'. And yet Davie is in no doubt that Hardy's is a 'poetic imagi­ nation of the first magnitude', and that his influence, even more than that of Pound and Eliot, has been the most far-reaching in British poetry in the twentieth century.4 Novelist and poet, Victorian and modern, an inheritor of the high Romantic tradition who insisted on the modesty of his aims - these are some of the paradoxes which meet Hardy's readers, and which are addressed in varying ways by the essays and lectures collected here. Charles Pettit concentrates on A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy's third pub­ lished novel, and compares it with Far from the Madding Crowd, which followed a year later. These were apprentice novels, and it is clear that Hardy took his apprenticeship seriously. From the first he set himself to explore different narrative strategies, especially in the handling of point of view. For George Eliot this was primarily a moral issue: her famous question - 'but why always Dorothea?'5 - leads to her insistence that narrator and reader should allow every character a fair hearing, recog­ nising that each has his or her own 'centre of self'; it is because she learns to act in this spirit in the course of the novel that Dorothea becomes its heroine and exemplar. Hardy's concern with point of view x Preface is at once more literal and more unsettling. As Pettit shows, one of the lessons Hardy learned from A Pair of Blue Eyes was the effect of pre­ senting a scene from the limited perspective of a single observer or par­ ticipant, fusing dramatic action and psychological interest: Elfride as her actions were seen at that moment by Knight, or by Stephen, Sergeant Troy as he is first glimpsed by Bathsheba, and so on. Technically, this may owe something to Hardy's reading of Browning's dramatic mono­ logues, or even to his studies in the National Gallery. What makes it unsettling is that it allows Hardy to resist what George Eliot so often seeks to create: the supposition that there is some way for characters, readers and narrators to come together in a shared sense of reality. When Hardy insisted that his work dealt with 'unadjusted impressions', he meant to cast doubt on whether consensus, or final adjustment, was ever possible.