Tag Archives: Thomas Hardy

‘More tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear’-Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

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She [Bathsheba] had walked nearly two miles of her journey, watching how the day was retreating, and thinking how the time of deeds was quietly melting into the time of thought, to give place in its turn to the time of prayer and sleep, when she beheld advancing over Yalbury hill the very man she sought so anxiously to elude. Boldwood was stepping on, not with that quiet tread of reserved strength which was his customary gait, in which he always seemed to be balancing two thoughts. His manner was stunned and sluggish now.

Boldwood had for the first time been awakened to woman’s privileges in tergiversation even when it involves another person’s possible blight. That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for consistency’s sake, and accept him, though her fancy might not flood him with the iridescent hues of uncritical love. But the argument now came back as sorry gleams from a broken mirror. The discovery was no less a scourge than a surprise.

He came on looking upon the ground, and did not see Bathsheba till they were less than a stone’s throw apart.  He looked up at the sound of her pit-pat, and his changed appearance sufficiently denoted to her the depth and strength of the feelings paralyzed by her letter.

“Oh; is it you, Mr. Boldwood?” she faltered, a guilty warmth pulsing in her face.  Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. Boldwood’s look was unanswerable.

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter  XXXI

The chapter goes on for about a dozen pages of sharp and agonizing dialogue between Bathsheba and Boldwood, but, really, just from the descriptions of the posture and stance of our two conversationalists in this excerpt we could tell exactly what’s going to happen.

Bathsheba is walking past Yarbury to visit her maid Liddy’s sister, partly in order to escape her own premises as Boldwood will be heading there to remonstrate after receiving Bathsheba’s letter stating that she cannot accept his offer of marriage. They are therefore meeting without prior arrangement on neutral ground.

What rings true to me here is how Boldwood is not saddened, or enraged, or plunged into despair by Bathsheba’s refusal of his pledge. His feelings are ‘paralyzed.’ For the rest of the book, Boldwood will be a kind of emotional paraplegic, stuck in the tragic condition of loving Bathsheba unrequitedly. Bathsheba’s mood, as illustrated by her musings over the progression of time, is reflective and centered. As our blog-enabled contemporaries put it, Bathsheba is processing.

Boldwood’s emotions, meanwhile, are beautifully limned by Hardy with a set of exquisitely mismatched metaphors: ‘the very lung of his hope,’ ‘a straight course,’ ‘the iridescent hues of uncritical love,’ and ‘sorry gleams from a broken mirror.’ His feelings are as jumbled and as out-of-cadence as his figures of speech.

‘Not mannish, but so almighty womanish that ‘tis getting on that way.’ -Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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‘And, dear miss, you won’t harry me and storm at me, will you? because you seem to swell so tall as a lion then, and it frightens me! Do you know, I fancy you would be a match for any man when you are in one o’ your takings.’

‘Never! do you?’ said Bathsheba, slightly laughing, though somewhat seriously alarmed by this Amazonian picture of herself. ‘I hope I am not a bold sort of maid—mannish?’ she continued with some anxiety. ‘Oh no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that ‘tis getting on that way sometimes. Ah! miss,’ she said, after having drawn her breath very sadly in and sent it very sadly out, ‘I wish I had half your failing that way. ‘Tis a great protection to a poor maid in these illegit’mate days!’

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter XXX

This excerpt is just right for one of those middle-school language-arts exercises, where you put all the adjectives that mean the same as “mannish” in one column, and all the synonyms for “womanish” in another column, and all the words that the students might venture to use to describe Bathsheba in a third, and pretty soon the bell rings, and the class is left with a bunch of new words to describe what they already know.

In a private chat with Liddy, her maid, Bathsheba is furiously squashing gossip about her and Sergeant Troy, about whom her other servant, Maryann, has earlier declaimed, “He is a wild scamp now, and you are right to hate him.”

Part of the joy of reading Far from the Madding Crowd is admiring how Bathsheba, though in the strictest sense she’s alone in the world, creates a family of sorts around her, despite the varying motives of her entourage. Hardy’s chapter-after-chapter focus on the natural world and the folkways of Wessex makes it apparent that his characters belong in Wessex, their native habitat. And like all such creatures of their context, his characters can express a wider bloom of variation in their comportment and conduct because they have a place to belong. Bathsheba’s “almighty womanishness” fits right in to the landscape, traditional roles be thrown aside.

We city-dwellers, in contrast, are the ones who are obliged to conform because we belong nowhere in particular.

 

‘This unwonted abstraction by love of all dignity from a man’-Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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At this time of departure, when nothing more was visible of the inside of the parlour than a thin and still chink of light between the shutters, a passionate scene was in course of enactment there.

 Miss Everdene and Boldwood were alone. Her cheeks had lost a great deal of their healthful fire from the very seriousness of her position; but her eye was bright with the excitement of a triumph—though it was a triumph which had rather been contemplated than desired.

 She was standing behind a low arm-chair, from which she had just risen, and he was kneeling in it—inclining himself over its back towards her, and holding her hand in both his own. His body moved restlessly, and it was with what Keats daintily calls a too happy happiness. This unwonted abstraction by love of all dignity from a man of whom it had ever seemed the chief component, was, in its distressing incongruity, a pain to her which quenched much of the pleasure she derived from the proof that she was idolized.

 ‘I will try to love you,’ she was saying, in a trembling voice quite unlike her usual self-confidence.…

 
—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter XXIII
 
Again, it’s like going to writing school to read these passages. Hardy first uses the two lovers’ physical position like a film director, blocking them out on the set, around the armchair, in order to demonstrate their complete mismatch, then tops it with a metaphor in verse to seal their fate.
 
Just before the quoted section, Boldwood and Oak were singing duets to entertain Bathsheba Everdene and her farm workers. As everyone gets up to leave, Bathsheba and Boldwood retire to the parlor to discuss their possible engagement. As you see, the director doesn’t take us there immediately; he pauses for the workers to finish up a minor plot twist, then just as the camera would, establishes the shot outside the parlor first, then takes us inside where the action is going on.
 
He doesn’t begin with the two-shot, with Bathsheba standing and Boldwood kneeling on the chair, but instead with the close-up of her face, where we read her emotions. Only then does Hardy pull out to the two-shot.
 
Then, of course, Hardy does what film cannot: he alludes to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and for a brief moment, only enough to establish the scene, sets up the dour Boldwood as the chirping nightingale and Bathsheba as the careworn poet. From later on in the poem:

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.

This romance is never going to work, as Boldwood sheds his dignity, hops onto the chair like a 19th century Tom Cruise, and natters away to his darling, oblivious to how he has failed himself.

‘The impetuosity of passion unrequited is bearable, even if it stings’ -Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to her, and with a rudeness which is not offensive. Bathsheba [Everdene] would have submitted to an indignant chastisement for her levity had Gabriel protested that he was loving her at the same time; the impetuosity of passion unrequited is bearable, even if it stings and anathematizes there is a triumph in the humiliation, and a tenderness in the strife. This was what she had been expecting, and what she had not got. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating. He had not finished, either. He continued in a more agitated voice:—

‘My opinion is (since you ask it) that you are greatly to blame for playing pranks upon a man like Mr. Boldwood, merely as a pastime. Leading on a man you don’t care for is not a praiseworthy action. And even, Miss Everdene, if you seriously inclined towards him, you might have let him find it out in some way of true loving-kindness…’

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter XX

I treasure this kind of insight, which I guess you could call epigrammatic romance. Hardy is a master at teasing out the strands of common feeling that connect us with his characters, using his command of the English language as his comb. His axioms aren’t based on psychology, but on the author’s skill at putting feelings, moods and emotional states into words. I especially admire the prescriptive nature of his observations, which manage to sound both completely fresh and exactly on target. As a comparison, just leaf through the shelf of self-help books at your local library to see just how hackneyed and misguided this kind of assertive statement can get.

Bathsheba is trying to get Gabriel’s advice on how she should proceed with Boldwood after sending him a over-flirtatious valentine. She blames Gabriel’s disapproval of her conduct (reprised in the second quoted paragraph) on his failed suit to marry her, but she is overcome when he denies categorically that he is still carrying a torch for her.

Hardy’s observation about ‘the impetuosity of passion unrequited,’ which follows from Bathsheba’s assuming that Gabriel still has feelings for her, is dead on. How many times in our own lives have we taken the petits châtiments of our partners in flirting and joshing as secret compliments, secure in knowing that the deepest layer of sentiment laid down in our correspondents’ hearts is one of deep and abiding love toward us? Some people make this assumption the guiding principle of their lives: all disparaging comments they receive are absorbed and made to disappear in this notional layer of good feeling. Imagine their surprise (and concomitant exasperation) when they are addressed in ‘the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion.’

Bathsheba, unlike some of our friends and acquaintances, can take it; she is an independent businesswoman. Her response to Gabriel’s frankness is to fire him from his job.

 

‘They presented alternations of roan and bay, in shapes like a Moorish arch’ -Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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via flickr.com

His [Boldwood’s] house stood recessed from the road, and the stables, which are to a farm what a fireplace is to a room, were behind, their lower portions being lost amid bushes of laurel. Inside the blue door, open half-way down, were to be seen at this time the backs and tails of half-a-dozen warm and contented horses standing in their stalls; and as thus viewed, they presented alternations of roan and bay, in shapes like a Moorish arch, the tail being a streak down the midst of each. Over these, and lost to the eye gazing in from the outer light, the mouths of the same animals could be heard busily sustaining the above-named warmth and plumpness by quantities of oats and hay. The restless and shadowy figure of a colt wandered about a loose-box at the end, whilst the steady grind of all the eaters was occasionally diversified by the rattle of a rope or the stamp of a foot.

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter XVIII

I adore the earthiness of this particular quote, the crafty way that Hardy leavens his use of the English language’s more rarefied words of French or Latin origin with good-sized helpings of our Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. ‘Portions’ is followed by ‘lost amid bushes of laurel.’ ‘Presented alterations’ gives rise to ‘roan and bay,’ and then ‘Moorish arch’ leads to ‘the tail being a streak down the midst of each.’ ‘Quantities’ is balanced with ‘oats and hay.’

Then, at the end of the group, another twin hit of Latin words: ‘occasionally diversified,’ which Hardy then contrasts immediately with a doubled adverbial phrase, all in Anglo-Saxon: ‘the rattle of a rope or the stamp of a foot.’ It’s not perfect, and the author probably didn’t even realize it, but it makes a difference in the rhythm of the reading to keep switching back and forth between the more florid words and their punchy and direct counterparts.

‘The filling of the pools, a rising of fogs, the embrowning by frost…the collapse of the fungi’ -Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river, behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land, partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating upland.

The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are not so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering the general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to the country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might have been successively observed the retreat of the snakes, the transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools, a rising of fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the fungi, and an obliteration by snow.

This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more character than that of being the limit of something else—the lowest layer of a firmament of snow. From this chaotic skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked thereby. The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor; for the instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and that encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without any intervening stratum of air at all.

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter XI

This is another beautiful description of the natural world, tied into a chapter that in its plot contours aptly reflects the desolation and featurelessness brought to life in these lines. ‘The embrowning by frost’ indeed! Hardy creates a profound and thoughtful metaphor by likening the signs of the advent of winter to the signs of other seasons, then describes them for the reader’s benefit. The metaphor goes both ways: we city dwellers now know that the seasons—winter surely, and summer and spring too—advance in well-marked stages. I don’t know what embrowning is per se but I can understand pretty easily that it has to do with winter being on the march.

It’s so weird to read this passage this first week of March, as it appears I’ve come back to the archipelago in the anteroom of spring. We skipped and frolicked this warm weekend in anticipation of the crocuses and new growth, and you could take note of the live worms shifting underneath the chilled and barren ground. Down at the secret city, the winter, with its rains, was the life-giving season and the summer was ready to scorch everything living back down to the roots again. Spring and fall were notional. The idea, therefore, of such a steady progression through the seasons as Hardy describes, instead of the pesky fight for survival recapitulated in each patch of quickly growing grass that I saw at the secret city, is bizarrely thrilling and exotic.

‘Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.’ Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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‘Did anybody ever want to marry you, miss?’ Liddy ventured to ask when they were again alone. ‘Lots of ‘em, I daresay.’

 Bathsheba paused, as if about to refuse a reply but the temptation to say yes, since it was irresistible by aspiring virginity, in spite of her spleen at having been published as old.

 ‘A man wanted to once,’ she said, in a highly experienced tone and the image of Gabriel Oak, as the farmer, rose before her.

 ‘How nice it must seem!’ said Liddy, with the fixed features of mental realization. ‘And you wouldn’t have him?’

 ‘He wasn’t quite good enough for me.’

 ‘How sweet to be able to do disdain, when most of us are glad to say, “Thank you!” I seem I hear it. “No sir—I’m your better” or, “Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.” And did you love him, miss?’

 ‘Oh no. But I rather liked him.’

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter IX
 
Hot on the arrival and departure of Farmer Boldwood, Bathsheba’s maid
Liddy interrogates her mistress on her romantic past.
 
Kiss my foot, indeed! That’s the tag line for today’s installment, but
the previous sentence, “How sweet to be able to do disdain, when most
of us are glad to say, ‘Thank you!’ ” has its own charms as well.
Being able to reject a suitor is one of the perquisites of the gentry,
apparently.

‘there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in’ – Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours is apt to idealize the removed object with others—notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone—that was all.

 
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter V
 
Start with the pith of the aphorism, and then flip it around so that
it actually becomes a keen insight into human nature, and then (as if
those two achievements weren’t enough, in a single paragraph, no
less!) in the fourth sentence apply it all to one of your immortal
characters so exactly that you create an immediate secret fusion of
your reader in the character of Gabriel Oak. How breathtakingly easy
Hardy makes it look, but consider just how many lesser novels must you
trawl through for an insight into humanity—or love—that shines as
brightly as this one would even after years of refraction through your
memory’s multiple lenses.

‘He would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net’ -Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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‘Yes, I suppose I should,’ said Oak, absently. He was endeavoring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her, his head upon her dress, before the event passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter III
 
Gabriel Oak has just been saved from carbon-monoxide poisoning in his
shepherd’s hut by Bathsheba Everdene. I love the simple metaphor of
“carrying an odour in a net.” It shows a deep appreciation for the
role of language and figure. It is such a simple metaphor, but it is
obliged to be, because it is standing for this simple feeling that he
cannot adequately describe in words. And odors, well, just reading the
book brings all kinds of wonderful country scents to mind.
 
In another touch of genius, Hardy plots to combine a near-death
experience, which naturally inspires a certain amount of reflection in
the participant, with the overwhelming time-stood-still sensation of
love at first sight. Gabriel hesitates with his head on Bathsheba’s
lap not only for the intimacy it portends, but for the catastrophe he
has narrowly averted.

 

‘The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes’- Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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Norcombe Hill—not far from lonely Toller Down—was one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil—an ordinary specimen of those smoothly outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.

 

The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapter II

Hardy is a wonderful nature writer. It might sound like
damning-with-faint-praise to dismiss a novelist with the sobriquet of
“nature writer,” especially for a novel that is as full of social
dynamism and new ideas as Far from the Madding Crowd. Its
heroine, the wonderfully named Bathsheba Everdene, inherits a farm and
chooses to defy convention by managing it herself. But his able
descriptions of the world around his characters don’t insulate them
from the social pressures of the 19th century; rather, they energize
them by linking his characters’ contemporary dreams and aspirations
with the enduring land.

Certainly, as someone who has put his own two cents into describing the Boreal breeze, I can’t help but
admire how Hardy’s description comes out of direct observation. By
comparing a ditch full of dry leaves to the immanence of a cookpot he
illustrates the power of the north wind through difference: we know
the static nature of a pile of leaves in a ditch, and we know what a
stew looks like cooking away on the stove. The north wind, Hardy says,
is the difference between those two: a figurative comparison that
exercises the humanity of our observation and our essential unity with
the world around us, just as Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak are
one with their Wessex habitat.