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are now understood; that is why it might, like medicine itself, be called
indifferently a science or an art. It is indeed like medicine, only it is
the art or science of revivifying not the body, but the soul.

To this science or art, if one day it is wholly purified, as it surely will
be, from the accretions of superstition and false philosophy, the separate
arts and sciences will be completely relevant. The arts would be its
sacraments, and the sciences its knowledge. In such a synthesis the
artist would have his social function once again. This does not mean
that it is easy to foresee a condition of society which should be based
upon such a synthesis; nor is it necessary (or even desirable) that
anyone should possess this prophetic power. It is enough to foresee
the possibility of synthesis, and to be convinced that it will not be
established within from the outside, but grow outwards from within.
The social organism is, after all, an organism and not a construction.
It will not be renewed by a reshuffling of its parts, but by the creation
within it of a nucleus of new individuals. Those who can achieve for
themselves some semblance of a synthesis will by this individual action
alone become the instruments of a more comprehensive and visible
synthesis in years to come. The only way to make the arts truly rele-
vant to some future condition of society is to make them truly relevant
to ourselves. If they are merely decorative accidents to us individually,
they will never be more to society; if they have a profound meaning
for us, and if we set ourselves to reconcile that significance with the
other significant elements of our experience, then we may be pretty
confident that sooner or later—and time in these matters should
probably be reckoned in centuries—a congruous society will arise, in
which the arts will have for the many the significance that they now
possess for the few.

J. M. MURRY.

The New Adelphi (ed. John Middleton Murry)

December-February 1928-1929

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

FAR from the Madding Crowd is the first of Thomas Hardy's "Wessex" novels, the first in which he adopted the name of an old Anglo-Saxon kingdom for the region of Dorsetshire and its surrounding counties seen by the novelist himself in a semblance half-fabulous and half-real, but now boldly identified by the tourist as the "Hardy" country, even to its minutest details. In his preface written for the "Wessex" edition of this novel, Hardy is constrained to point out how much of building, character and local custom has vanished since the days which he chose to describe, and he gives in a few words the fundamental reason for the passing away of picturesque local features:

> The change at the root of this has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by generation after generation.

One of the disabilities under which the minds of men labour to-day is that, in order to keep intellectually abreast of their time, they must obtain so much knowledge at second hand in proportion to that which they gain from direct observation. It is direct observation that enables us to mark accurately the changes wrought by passing time, as Hardy's own work consummately proves. His warning just quoted would be unnecessary for anybody who had known an English village intimately for a stretch of years, but it is salutary enough for those—and they are not a few—whose ideas of life are mainly nourished on novels. Hardy a feature of the indigenous rural life depicted in Hardy's novels exists to-day, though the underlying rhythm is still to be heard; and yet these works of art are exceedingly alive. Time's way of eluding all but the vigilant eye is illustrated by the difficulty we have in realizing that *Far from the Madding Crowd* was published in 1874, more than fifty years ago. The "Wessex" novels—a wonderful whole born of a single creative impulse—fresh in their beauty and their humour, impressive in their tragic force, vigorous in their work upon the mind, seem to bear the stamp of a more modern generation. Though this is but another common illusion with which the aspect of an older art, when it is great, affects us, it is not without an effort that we measure the difference of mental and moral outlook, even the diversity of experience, between our generation and that to whose attention the story was first directed.

However, if its place in the time-series is a good reason for dwelling with appreciation on this novel, which bears the authentic stamp of

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Hardy's maturity in imaginative prose, there are other reasons too. If it is not the greatest of Hardy's novels, it is certainly one of the most perfect. No doubt, in estimating Hardy's greatness as a novelist, a preponderant regard must be paid to his handling of the tragic element. Tess, Jude and the Mayor of Casterbridge rise and forbid us to ignore them. On the other hand, while Hardy's power of presenting a critical dramatic situation so as to waste no drop of its essential tragedy is one of his most striking qualities, he sometimes weakens and lames his tragic conception by an ill-digested, or imperfectly considered, philosophy upon which, with a persistence that surprises, he will at times unfortunately harp. We accept these undigested passages that occur with increasing frequency in the later novels, but we judge them as imperfections. The very names of Jude and Angel Clare call up memories of them. Moreover, while the ironic comparison of man's hot desire and avid ambition with the indifference of cosmic process is a legitimate theme of modern tragedy, it is occasionally forced by Hardy to the point where what should have appeared inevitable seems arbitrary, even perverse.

*Far from the Madding Crowd* is marred by nothing undigested or arbitrary; it is carried along with an athletic rhythm, too lively for tragedy to play in it more than an inner part, and too steady to be checked by a sudden access of brooding. It contains implicitly everything in the way of artistic performance and individual quality with which Hardy is identified—the revelation of rugged, staunch and deeply passionate natures in the central characters, a web of human relations strangely diversified in the weft of the incalculable and the ironic, an accompaniment of rustic humour and commentary exquisitely contrived, a use of natural scenery to heighten the emotional stresses which, being a poet's, never fails, and a rich, musical prose, only rarely marred by the squeak of a pedantry, always adequate and, at its great moments, rising to an austere majesty which enchants the sense and transports the mind.

Whatever we may think of the theme, it is questionable whether any of Hardy's characters are finer creations than Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, the latter as solid as his patronymic with a touch of practical genius to justify his Christian name, and she "of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made . . . indispensable to high generation, hated at tea-parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises." The strange and sensual Sergeant Troy, the pathetic wraith of Fanny Robins and Farmer Boldwood, the cold man suddenly inflamed to madness, come not far behind them in effectiveness; while the rich, digressive dialogue of the ancient maltster and the other hinds of Weatherbury Farm supplies a chorus which Hardy never surpassed. The ironies, though not over-laboured, do their work here convincingly. Gabriel Oak, like to become a prosperous sheep-farmer, woos Bathsheba, a penniless girl, and enchants her, though she refuses him, with

3

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the material prospects of marriage; yet in a few months she is the
assured owner of a large farm and he, now the penniless one, sues her
for a shepherd's place: Fanny mistook the church in which she was to
be married, and the Sergeant would not wait again, yet for so slight an
error she paid with her life: and Bathsheba, when she gave orders for
Fanny's funeral, did not know that in the coffin she would find her
husband's mistress and his child. As for Nature, there is no Egdon
Heath here, it is true, but the passage of the seasons that accompanies
the story is a pageant as magnificent as any devised by this sombre
artist, beginning as it does with that description of a December night
upon Norcombe Hill in which Hardy touches heights that, in prose,
are rarely reached. It continues through the rural calendar of works
and days with a graphic appropriateness and profundity of understand-
ing only gained by long and loving observation.

Indeed, this work illustrates as well as any other of Hardy's his
peculiar gift of using every aspect and movement of a familiar country-
side as a counterpoint to human themes or processes. It is not merely
an aesthetic ecstasy that moves him, nor a draughtsman's technique
that guides his strokes, nor merely a long and intimate knowledge of
agriculture that makes his pictures of sheep-dipping, harvesting, shearing
and the like so impressive; it is rather that he seems to have lived with
his ear pressed to the heart of his native countryside and to record, in
sympathetic memory, its remotest vibrations. I find it difficult,
without excessive quotation, to convey this sense of Hardy's privileged
intimacy with the face and features of the earth, with her stony silences
and her sudden expansions, with her exigences and her indulgences,
her threats and her rewards; but, perhaps, a near comparison might
be suggested between this relation and that of Joseph Conrad to the
sea. Hardy makes the earth, as Joseph Conrad the sea, not just a
background for human action but a framework, itself incessantly
changing in accordance with laws not human, which enriches the
experience, points out the duty, inspires the actions, and mysteriously
influences the souls of the human characters working within it. Far
from the Madding Crowd, comedy though we must call it, throbs with
this deep intimacy, which is never sentimentalized or exaggerated into
an act of idolatry, as it sometimes was by George Meredith, who knew
nature much less profoundly; and by it this admirable novel is knitted
into a well-proportioned whole, just as, in a different way, George
Eliot's response to nature knits together Adam Bede.

The title of this story tells us nothing, but only reminds us that its
author chose to look for human nature in a lovely backwater where no
continual ebb and flow of herd-like humanity had chafed away the
quaint angles of personality. Two main themes run through it, merging
finally in a peaceful, happy close. One theme is that of a man's stolid
but inexhaustible courage and loyalty; Gabriel Oak is slow of impulse,
but magnificent in action and unswerving in devotion to a somewhat

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exasperating mistress. The other is that of Bathsheba, a great and
deep female nature, not yet firmly rooted and, therefore, at the mercy
of youthful impulses, swayed by vanity, sheer playfulness, momentary
passion and jealousy, yet never quite overbalanced and at the supreme
moment of trial revealing itself a fit complement to that of Gabriel.
Her quality is first shown in that delightful early scene where she runs
breathlessly after her wooer to tell him that her aunt had spoken
untruly in attributing to her many sweethearts, because she hated to
be thought "men's property" in that way: and she then rebuffs the
simple swain when he concludes that she is going to accept him. When
Oak promises to love and keep wanting her till he dies, she counters
with the words: "It wouldn't do, Mr. Oak. I want somebody to tame
me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know."
This prelude sums up the whole of the coming action. Oak, in cir-
cumstances of which he does not then dream, is true to his promise,
and Bathsheba is tamed by passions, regrets, lessons of experience and,
finally, by the very staunchness of Oak, yet in a way that increases
her stature and enhances her dignity.

The main story begins when Oak, ruined by the destruction of his
flock, owning nothing but his clothes, his flute, and his shepherd's
skill, has wandered in search of hire to Weatherbury Farm, saved the
ricks from burning, and entered the service of the girl who would not
marry him. It is a slender, though not at all a flimsy, thread holding
together a chaplet of episodes. Bathsheba, in a moment of sportive-
ness, has sent an anonymous valentine to Farmer Boldwood, who is
reputed never to have looked favourably at a woman. The effect of
this coquetry is unexpected, and Bathsheba is smitten with self-
reproach at finding herself responsible for attracting the passionate
love of a man whom she does not want. Then she herself is caught in
the toils of the cavalry sergeant Troy, a man who lived for the moment
and instinctively responded to a woman's half-innocent coquetry by
a gallantry that was far from innocent. That Boldwood's shy nature
should have suddenly blazed up so fiercely and that Troy's rather
mechanical flatteries should so rapidly have subjugated a woman of
Bathsheba's strong character are propositions that we have to accept
from the author, even if we silently protest. Troy, especially, with his
peculiar, stilted manner of diction and his bravura of swordplay round
Bathsheba in the hollow—in a scene which has a rather false glamour—
is a difficult morsel to swallow whole. However, in judging his
peculiarities, one has to take into account that this character—a
mixture of headstrong wilfulness and cold insouciance, at once heartless
and passionate, reckless and calculating—has relationships in other
novels of Hardy's. He has an affinity with the Mayor of Casterbridge,
with the Trumpet-major's brother, and even with Alec D'Urberville.
They all bear witness to the presence in Hardy's imagination of some
strange type of human character that is incalculable and often destruc-

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tive, like the wind: it is a type to which, perhaps, he never succeeded in giving a wholly convincing artistic form. In any case, Bathsheba's explanation of her sudden marriage to Troy is convincing enough. She had rushed through the night to find him at Bath in genuine fear lest he should return to encounter Boldwood's jealous violence, and she married him then and there, partly out of helplessness, partly out of jealousy. She finds him out fast enough, but she is lucky to get rid of him so soon. The tense scene where he finds his wife in the presence of his dead, forsaken mistress and her dead child, his sudden passion of tenderness for his lost love, and his fierce revulsion from Bathsheba bring what might be called the third act to an extremely moving curtain. The remainder of the story never quite recovers its gait after this tremendous climax. In spite of the masterly description of the sheep-fair on the downs, Troy's disappearance, his reappearance, and the final tragedy that removes both him and Boldwood are things related a little too much with the desultory air of an epilogue, as if the events had passed outside of the author's imaginative structure and its severe inner necessity, and had to be finished off with an effort. The last ten chapters proceed spasmodically, now fast, now slow, as if Hardy had been unable to determine exactly at what pace he should approach the foreseen happy ending of Gabriel Oak rewarded for his long devotion and of Bathsheba leaning at last, though shorn of no greatness, upon an arm that will never fail her.

Compared with some other of the "Wessex" novels, this is not a very desperate coil, but the charm and excellence of the story lie less in the coil than in what it binds together—the pastoral scenes which run through a year of nature. *Far from the Madding Crowd* is a book which, at every return, one will open at the familiar places. Oak tending his sheep on the windy hill at midnight in December, the burning rick at Weatherbury, and the subsequent gathering round the old maltster's fire, the frosty morning at the malthouse when Oak brings in his lambs and shows his fist, the sheep-dipping, Bathsheba asking Oak's opinion of her conduct as she helps him sharpen the shears, the epic disaster of the sick ewes, the chase of Oak and Coggan through the night, Oak's reading of nature's omens before the storm, his thatching of the ricks while the lightning flashes round him, and the progress of Fanny's coffin through the first mist of autumn—these are the passages that arrest the reader's eye and compel it to travel slowly over the words so that no delight be lost. And this delight is due not only to the eloquence of the descriptions, but to the skill with which, at each of these moments, Hardy had blended the pastoral event, the humours and comments of his village worthies and the motions of his leading characters into a dramatic whole, which lifts the action appreciably forward, as by the thrust of a powerful wave. And Hardy's waves have a motion that is all their own, now tense and stiff like the waves that precede a storm, now bland and broad like the roll of a calm

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138

ocean: the march of his vision and his thought, even where the thing represented can be paralleled from many another writer, remains and shows itself in such passages as these a unique and remarkable function of the imagination.

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dream-wrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in Nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak's flute.

Hardy sounds this deep note of his, which has a not unpleasing harshness in some of its overtones, thus from the beginning. Yet he allows human things, here symbolized by Oak's flute, to break in upon the diapason of the universe, as the piercing cry of the oboe, at the beginning of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, rises above the storm of the strings. Thus, again, at a later stage of the story, Bathsheba's troubled spirit blinds her eyes to the splendour of the sunset:

> Above the dark margin of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud, bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and palpitating stars. She gazed upon their silent throes amid the shades of space, but realized none at all. Her troubled spirit was far away with Troy.

This rhythmic solemnity which haunts the cadences of Hardy's prose is one of its most typical elements. We find it giving a peculiar tinge even to the less portentous periods. Thus, when Bathsheba takes the handle of the grindstone to give herself a countenance before asking Gabriel an awkward question, Hardy interrupts the dialogue with a paragraph beginning: "The peculiar motion involved in turning a wheel has a wonderful tendency to benumb the mind." Something of Hardy's unique quality is isolated when one observes, first, how he uses this solemn rhythm to preface a lively scene of comedy and petulence, and, secondly, with what exquisite skill he makes the actions of grinding—Bathsheba changing places with Gabriel, his long clasp of her wrists to show her the manner of holding the shears, and the effect of turning the stone upon Gabriel's tactless utterances—blend with the human emotions and reactions.

For those who enjoy tracking such a style down to its elements, there is another interesting light to be gained from the beginning of Chapter IX, which describes the aspect of Weatherbury Farm, if this

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passage be contrasted with Chapter IX of *Adam Bede*, where the reader is introduced to the Hall Farm. Both farms were manor-houses in decline, their fronts asleep and their focus of life at the back. George Eliot's description is charming, absolutely her own and a woman's. "Evidently the gate never opened," it begins. She describes the stone lionesses on the pillars, the heavy gate once opened by footmen, the half-weaned calves, the spinning-wheel and other encumbrances of the deserted drawing-room, the bustle of the yard behind, and the brightness and polish of Mrs. Poyser's kitchen. She goes on:

> The history of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and warehouses busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed its focus, and no longer radiates from the parlour, but from the kitchen and the farmyard.

How does Hardy say almost exactly the same thing?

Soft brown mosses, like faded velveteen, formed cushions upon the stone tiling, and tufts of the houseleek or sengreen sprouted from the eaves of the low surrounding buildings. A gravel walk leading from the door to the road in front was encrusted at the sides with more moss—here it was a silver-green variety, the nut-brown of the gravel being visible to the width of only a foot or two in the centre. This circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect, together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse façade, suggested to the imagination that on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes the vital principle of the house had turned round inside its body to face the other way. Reversals of this kind, strange deformities, tremendous paralyses, are often seen to be inflicted by trade upon edifices—either individual or in the aggregate as streets and towns—which were originally planned for pleasure alone.

It would be superfluous to point out here the words and turns of phrase in which especially dwell the spirit of Hardy. The last sentence is inimitably his own, no less than one which occurs a little later in the same description:

> Every window replied by a ling to the opening and shutting of every door, a tremble followed every bustling movement, and a creak accompanied a walker about the house, like a spirit, wherever he went.

The two splendid chapters which set in the midst of the sheep-shearing and the shearing supper Bathsheba's all-but surrender to Boldwood's importunity, and emphasize Oak's helpless inferiority in the lists of love, are also plainly marked with Hardy's individuality. The preceding chapter, quite unsurpassed in any of his novels as a piece of vigorous and dramatic narrative, has told how Gabriel, having been dismissed in pique by Bathsheba, has to be fetched to save from death the ewes all swollen with clover. He has brought his proud mistress to her knees, come valiantly to the rescue with his skill, and promised to stay in her employ. Yet the next chapter typically begins:

> Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable. Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration

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by misfortune, had been independent in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent. . . . But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.

And then, after a few beautiful lines describing the landscape in early June and before his picture of Gabriel's humiliation at the shearing and Boldwood's apparent triumph that culminates at the pastoral supper, Hardy lifts up his voice in a grave, impassioned celebration of the old barn where the shearing took place.

Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout—a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up. The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers. For once mediaevalism and modernism had a common standpoint. The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten arch-stones and chamfers, the orientation of the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed. The defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion, and a desire.

This sudden combativeness in the argument and the sharp precision of the architectural terms, blending in a presentation of complete pictorial beauty, are characteristic of contending processes in the author's mind, no less than the rather painful intrusions of Greek and Latin words into the harmonious English beauty of other scenes in this novel. The charming scene of Bathsheba paying her hands their wages is jarred at its ending by the words: "Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table," and the suspension of Bathsheba's faculties by the dramatic irruption of the supposedly dead Troy into Boldwood's festivity is not well put in the phrase: "she was in a state of mental gutta serena." These are outcrops of a certain hard, rocky intellectualism which Hardy never quite succeeds in enveloping with the rich growths of his artistic imagination, but which gives a very distinct feature to his poetic landscape, both in his prose and in his verse.

Yet there are whole tracks in his work from which the presence of this granitic element would never be suspected. Such is the sheer sensuous loveliness of the shearing supper in this novel where, after the humour of the rustic ballad-singing, Bathsheba, presiding with patriarchal simplicity over the company of her workers, seems almost to be transfigured and to become the evocation of a remote golden age.

> It was still the beaming time of the evening, though night was stealthily making itself visible low down upon the ground, the western lines of light raking the earth without alighting upon it to any extent, or illuminating the dead levels at all. The sun had crept round the tree as a last effort before death, and then began to sink, the shearers' lower parts becoming steeped in embrowning twilight, whilst their heads and shoulders were still enjoying day, touched with a yellow of self-sustained brilliancy that seemed inherent rather than acquired.

> The sun went down in an ochreous mist; but they sat, and talked on, and grew as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven. Bathsheba still remained enthroned inside the window, and occupied herself in knitting, from which she

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sometimes looked up to view the fading scene outside. The slow twilight
expanded and enveloped them completely before the signs of moving were
shown.

Liddy the maid brings candles to the back part of the room where
her mistress is sitting at the window overlooking the supper-table on
the lawn; her form is thrown into distinctness between this light and
the eyes of her guests; she is asked to sing, and beckoning to Gabriel
to stand and flute at her side, she stands up in the open window and
sings "The Banks of Allan Water," while "the shearers reclined
against each other as at suppers in the earlier ages of the world."

Hardy's power of expressing the full plastic beauty of such a scene
—the soft scent and hush of a long June dusk in southern England, the
marvellous grouping of the figures—without any strained luxuriousness
of diction is extraordinary, and bears witness to the intensity of his
imaginative vision. Indeed, the combination of this wonderfully limpid
and expressive draughtsmanship with a sombre, and rather troubled
yet proud reflectiveness is, perhaps, the most striking feature of Hardy's
prose in general. Of these two qualities, his vein of reflectiveness,
shot with irony and agnosticism—his whole line of argument, in fact
—is, no doubt, the one more easily characterized. The philosophy
which tinges the presentation of human developments and mischances
is something unique in our imaginative literature: we notice it here
in the fate of poor Fanny, in Bathsheba's opening of Fanny's coffin,
and in the virile words that Hardy puts into her mouth when, as Troy's
wife, she determines to return and stand her ground:

Liddy, if ever you marry—God forbid that you ever should !—you'll find
yourself in a fearful situation; but mind this, don't you flinch. Stand your
ground, and be cut to pieces. That's what I'm going to do.

We find it, too, in Bathsheba's courageous fulfilment of the last
offices to her murdered husband, and in her last words before she falls
into a swoon: "the heart of a wife merely." It is the inspiration,
throughout his work, of his faith in the power of worthy natures to rise
to the height of great moral necessities without any supernatural
assistance but by their own innate, human fineness. Yet, if these
things are more easily marked off as symptomatic, they are only com-
plete when seen in relation to the workings of his wonderful plastic
power. Our conception of Tess is conditioned not only by her most
tragic passages, but also by such a scene as that where Angel Clare
surprises her at Talbothays one summer afternoon, in all the soft,
surrendering beauty of drowsiness, just as our conception of Bathsheba
is compounded of the womanly and the heroic, combining the image of
her singing to the shearers in the dusk or passionately clinging to Troy
beside the open coffin with that other image of her holding out the reeds
to Oak as he thatches without flinching from the lightning. Hardy's
mastery of pictorial beauty is, indeed, a dominant characteristic. His
sense of composition, his magnificent grouping of the great scenes,
his use of atmosphere and light and shade, and his adaptation of nature's

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moods as backgrounds to human junctures and crises do not fall short
of genius. If George Eliot could rightly compare the scenes that
delighted her mind's eye to the serene and homely canvases of the
Dutch painters, Hardy's compositions recall at times those vast and
arresting paintings of Tintoretto which, by the mysterious alchemy of
great art, transform the impressions of a delighted eye into an inter-
pretation of drama that satisfies and subjugates the perceiving mind.

There is, however, one other element in Hardy's novels common,
not to Tintoretto, but certainly to George Eliot. It is his humorous use
of rustic character and quaintness of speech. Having dwelt among
his originals from early youth and observed them with affection, he
has attained an absolute truth and naturalness in his delineation of
them. In none of his novels is this element more admirably used than
in *Far from the Madding Crowd*, in none is there a greater variety of
sharply contrasted comic types, and in none does the utterance of the
countryfolk more rise above the merely decorative and amusing to
become, as it often becomes in Shakespeare's plays, an utterance
impressive in itself—a disinterested commentary upon all life so finely
phrased as to transcend laughter and take on the authority of true
poetry. The hinds of Weatherbury Farm, whom Gabriel first comes to
know in Warren's malthouse the night of the rick-fire—Mark Clark,
the merry companion, Jan Coggan, "a crimson man, with a spacious
countenance," the bitter and sententious "Henery" Fray, the blushful
Joseph Poorgrass, the much-married Laban Tall, and the gnarled old
maltster himself—generate among themselves a shrewd, racy and
digressive dialogue which forms a perfect preamble, settling Gabriel
Oak comfortably in the circumstances and surroundings that are to
control his future. We see them again gathered round Bathsheba's
pay-table and again at the malthouse in the red and orange light of
a frosty dawn, when Henery Fray's comic spite against his mistress is
subdued by the energetic display of Gabriel's beefy fist. At the
foundering of the ewes these retainers form an amusingly distracted
chorus, whose helplessness accentuates the shepherd's position among
them as a "clever man in talents," and throws Bathsheba, to her
annoyance, into a humble posture before him. After the comic ballads
of the shearing and the restful beauty of the shearing supper, this
rustic chorus is kept tactfully in the background while the gallantry
of Troy and the coquetry of Bathsheba breed mutual inflammation,
and only Jan Coggan appears to accompany Gabriel in that duet of
splendid energy when, galloping bareback, they track through the night
the hoof-marks of Dainty, the mare. But Bathsheba's marriage to
Troy is admirably made a point of rest that finds the whole company
in the hayfield, and brings to them Cainy Ball, the boy, comically to
choke out the news of what he saw in Bath upon his holiday. In the
muddled question and comment of this truly comic scene, the talk of
the rustics begins to take on the true Dogberry quality, an expression

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THE NEW ADELPHI

of the portentous seriousness of the rustic mind formed only by inter-
course with countryfolk and nature, by the words of the Bible and by
long rumination over rhythmical labour in the field. This expression
Hardy here brings to its climax in the magnificent chapter in which
Joseph Poorgrass, driving Fanny's flower-strewn coffin home in the
waggon, is overtaken by the first mist of autumn and cajoled into
prolonging his halt at the Buck's Head by Jan Coggan and Mark Clark.
At the outset Hardy marks the silent pathos of the event in brief and
powerful strokes—the coffin passing out of the upper door of the work-
house, the legend scrawled upon it in chalk, the blue spring waggon
creeping down the hill, and Poorgrass walking pensive by its side.
Then, as the mist rolls up from the sea, the rhythm of his prose grows
solemn and muffled like a funeral march:

The air was as an eye suddenly struck blind. The waggon and its load rolled no longer on the horizontal division between clearness and opacity. They were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches and firs composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely, that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were distinctly individualized. . . . The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were hung with similar drops, like diamonds on auburn hair.

But when the depressed waggoner descends for comfort at the decayed coaching inn, Hardy works up that tremendous colloquy between Jan Coggan, Mark Clark and Poorgrass which seems to epitomize the reflection that neither the mist of autumn nor the thought of decay can damp the desires nor extinguish the cheerfulness of simple, living humanity which, in the persons of these three, rises upon fumes of cider to a philosophy of life and death. The coffin waiting outside in the wet dwindles from a portentous fact into an argument for taking comfort where it is offered, and for enjoying life while it is in the body. Jan Coggan is the chief orator, and it was a triumph of invention on the author's part to steer the talk of these worthies up to Coggan's tribute to church as against chapel:

"Chapel folk be more hand-in-glove with them above than we," said Joseph, thoughtfully.

"Yes," said Coggan. "We know very well that if anybody do go to heaven, they will. They've worked hard for it, and they deserve to have it, such as 'tis. I baint such a fool as to pretend that we who stick to the Church have the same chance as they, because we know we have not. But I hate the feller who'll change his old ancient doctrines for the sake of getting to heaven. I'd as soon turn King's-evidence for the few pounds you get. Why, neighbours, when every one of my taties were frosted, our Pa'son Thirdly were the man who gave me a sack for seed, though he hardly had one for his own use, and no

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

189

money to buy 'em. If it hadn't been for him, I shouldn't hae had a tatie to put in my garden. D'ye think I'd turn after that? No, I'll stick to my side; and if we be in the wrong, so be it; I'll fall with the fallen!"

The downrightness of this speech is Shakespearian, and the suggestion that an honest man, out of moral gratitude, should stick to a creed which, while it countenances cheerfulness, is inferior as a way of salvation, goes to the roots of English character. Jan Coggan follows it up with an eloquent defence of toping, even with a coffin waiting.

"If she'd been alive I would have been the first to help her. If she now wanted victuals or drink, I'd pay for it, money down. But she's dead, and no speed of ours will bring her to life. The woman's past us—time spent upon her is throwed away: why should we hurry to do what's not required? Drink, shepherd, and be friends, for to-morrow we may be like her."

And a last comic touch is given by the collapse of Joseph Poorgrass in maudlin dignity under the scolding of Gabriel.

"Have I ever allowed the toe of pride to be lifted against my hinder parts without groaning manfully that I question the right to do so? I enquire that query boldly."

"We can't say that you have, Hero Poorgrass," admitted Jan.

"Never have I allowed such treatment to pass unquestioned! Yet the shepherd says in the face of that rich testimony that I be not a man of spirit! Well, let it pass by, and death is a real release!"

Here, at the word "death" uttered in self-pity by a drunken man, we leave the revellers and follow the dead woman whom they have ceased to pity back to Weatherbury with Gabriel. This philosophic pause, devised by a poet who can fashion comedy to be a true counterpart to tragedy, refreshes and prepares us for Bathsheba's discovery and the passionate rupture that follows it. Rustic wit, the poor man's wisdom, has had its great scene, and in it Hardy, without seeking falsely to ennoble what is ignoble, has used for an effective contrast with death in misery the sensual stoicism of the country that is rooted in life, the dynamic principle of an agricultural community. By these uses of his humorous observation Hardy seems to achieve far more than certain more drably realistic novelists of the countryside, who love to harp upon dungheaps and depravity, dowering nature with all nobility and man with none. In this, contrasted with Hardy, they prove themselves but poor little poets beside a great one who, though he may sometimes err in his estimates of immaterial or intellectual things, never speaks falsely of those that can be touched and heard and seen: but, judging rightly the mixture in all that is earthly, irradiates the lower with humour and lifts up the higher as an encouragement to the lonely souls of men.

ORLO WILLIAMS.

THE MILL

THE cobbled yard; the horn blaring; the last of the stream
of shawled workers hurrying in through the slowly-closing
gates. Dust, heat, a dry smell of tow in your nostrils. The
mill wall rises sheer, a cliff of red brick pierced by rows of
windows—dingy greenish panes of ribbed glass behind which obscure
wheels whirr and great masses of machinery hum incessantly. Standing
at the base of the huge chimney you bend back your head till you feel
ready to topple, and gaze vertically up the diminishing brick-and-mortar
perspective of the shaft. At a terrifying height black smoke goes
billowing away across the blue.

The door of the weaving shed opens, emitting a deafening roar. You enter and find yourself peering through a dense iron jungle—rows and rows of iron columns—gleaming steel rods, shafts and crank-wheels revolving, tappets oscillating, innumerable belts flapping, flapping, round and round interminably. Spirits of steam everywhere hiss into an atmosphere in which already the wet-bulb thermometer registers 72° of humid heat. You fight against impending faintness. You are confused and deafened.

For though you expected noise, you had not imagined such noise.
It is almost palpable; it is tyrannical, inescapable. Your brain pulses
and aches as if being split asunder. Yet the puzzling thing is that the
women bending over the thousand shuttles which crash to and fro,
each with the loudness of a pistol shot, seem not even aware of this
appalling noise. How is it, you wonder, that they are not all stone-
deaf?

On the contrary. The two women at your side converse without
difficulty while you, strain how you can, hear not a word. It is weird
and a little alarming to watch the intelligent exchanges of their eyes
and the play of their facial muscles while the lips move in rapid articu-
lation which you cannot hear—as in a cinema. Or are they adepts at
lip-reading? You shout a question at your guide, rasping your throat
hoarse in desperate combat with the overwhelming din; he smiles
and nods and seems to be explaining something. You cannot hear;
he begins to gesticulate, but as you are no wiser he leans close and
discharges into your ear the tiny explosions of each shouted syllable.

You leave the sheds and enter a corridor, and for a moment enjoy
the oasis of quiet. But again the noise, and in addition, overpowering
heat and a sickening stench. "This is the dressing shop," you are told.
You watch the beams of yarn being unwound and drawn through
troughs of boiling size and tallow. The air itself seems to boil. You
become conscious in millions of pores. It amazes and faintly irritates
you to see some workmen talking and smiling while the sweat glistens
and trickles down their half-naked pelts. But this is their everyday
life, from boyhood to old age. Incredible! Distressing! But they
go on laughing and talking.

THE LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY

THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY (1840-1891). By Florence Emily Hardy. (Macmillan.) 18s. net.

Mrs. Hardy by her biography of Thomas Hardy has added another to
his works, so scrupulous has been the care with which she has recorded his
own words. What we have is virtually as much of an autobiography as
Hardy could ever have been prevailed upon to write. It seems best,
therefore, to interpose a minimum of comment between the reader and
the book; and simply to quote from it a selection of the passages which
seem to us most significant. First, a fundamental judgment upon himself
in retrospect:

> His immaturity . . . was greater than is common for his years, and it
> may be mentioned here that a clue to much of his character and action
> throughout his life is afforded by his lateness of development in virility, while
> mentally precocious. He himself said humorously in later times that he was a
> child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was five-and-twenty, and a young man
> till he was nearly fifty. Whether this was intrinsic, or owed anything to his
> having lived in a remote spot in early life, is an open question.

It is not easy to be quite sure of the meaning of this; perhaps the next
volume will make it plainer. For it is to be noted that this one ends
precisely at the fiftieth year, that is, immediately before the outcry over
*Tess* and *Jude* which was so crucial in his career. "You have no more
consciousness in these things than a child," Leslie Stephen said to him
concerning a passage in *Far from the Madding Crowd* which had offended
subscribers to *The Cornhill*. It may be that Hardy regarded the awareness
of "these things" that was so violently forced upon him in the early
'nineties as his full awakening into manhood.

> The truth is (he wrote to Leslie Stephen at about the same time) that I
> am willing, and indeed anxious, to give up any point which may be desirable
> in a story when read as a whole, for the sake of others which shall please those
> who read it in numbers. Perhaps I may have higher aims some day, and be a
> great stickler for the proper artistic balance of the completed work, but for the
> present, circumstances lead me to wish merely to be considered a good hand
> at a serial.

This indifference is ascribed to a feeling of carelessness about his reputation
as novelist, owing to his being prevented from being a poet. Perhaps it
was also due to an enforced but good humoured acceptance of prevailing
conditions.

It is clear that he thought often and earnestly concerning the art of
fiction. Thus in June, 1877, he wrote:

> The world often feels certain works of genius to be great without knowing
> why: hence it may be that particular poets and novelists may have had the
> wrong quality in them noticed and applauded as that which makes them great.

And in the same month:

> If Nature's defects must be looked in the face and transcribed, whence
> arises the art in poetry and novel-writing? which must certainly show art,
> or it becomes merely mechanical reporting. I think the art lies in making
> these defects the basis of a hitherto unperceived beauty by irradiating them
> with "the light that never was" on their surface, but is seen to be latent
> in them by the spiritual eye.

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THE NEW ADELPHI

This in 1880:

Arnold is wrong about provincialism, if he means anything more than a provincialism of style and manner in exposition. A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is of the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought no great deeds done.

A month or two later (January, 1881):

Style—consider the Wordsworthian dictum (the more perfectly the natural object is reproduced, the more truly poetic the picture.) This reproduction is achieved by seeing into the *heart of a thing* (as rain, wind, for instance), and is realism, in fact, though through being pursued by the means of the imagination it is confounded with invention. It is, in short, reached by what M. Arnold calls “the imaginative reason.”

In June, 1882:

As in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature; yet the result is no photograph, but purely a product of the writer's own mind.

Five years later (January, 1887):

After looking at the landscape ascribed to Bonington in our drawing-room I feel that Nature is played out as a Beauty, but not as a Mystery. I don't want to see landscapes, i.e., scenic paintings of them, because I don't want to see the original realities—as optical effects, that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.

The "simply natural" is interesting no longer. The much-decried, mad, late-Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art—it is a student's style—the style of a period when the mind is serene and unawakened to the tragical mysteries of life; when it does not bring anything to the object that coalesces with and translates the qualities that are already there—half hidden, it may be—and the two united are depicted as the All.

A year later (October, 1888):

If you look beneath the surface of any farce you see a tragedy; and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce.

January 29 [1889]. I have been looking for God 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him. As an external personality, of course—the only true meaning of the word.

And these two thoughts:

July 14 [1887]. It is the on-going—i.e., the "becoming"—of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment there would be no sadness in it. The sun and the moon standing still on Ajalon was not a catastrophe for Israel, but a type of Paradise.

June, 1888. I have attempted many modes [of finding the value of life]. For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as part is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment: only fit to behold and say, as another spectre said: "Peace be unto you!"

More adequate quotation is impossible in these pages. We hope to have given enough to show how necessary Mrs. Hardy's "Life" is to any complete understanding of Hardy's work.

J. M. M.