Celebrating Thomas Hardy: Insights and Appreciations

215 Pages·1996·20.48 MB·English

by  Charles P. C. Pettit (eds.)

CELEBRATING THOMAS HARDY
Also edited by Charles P. C. Pettit and from the same publishers
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THOMAS HARDY
THE THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY
(President: The Earl of Stockton)
The Society welcomes anyone interested
in Hardy's writings, his life and his
times, and it takes pride in the
way in which at its meetings
people come together in a
harmony which would have
delighted Hardy himself.
Among its members are
many distinguished literary
and academic figures, and
many more who love and
enjoy Hardy's work sufficiently
to wish to meet fellow enthusiasts
and develop their appreciation of it.
Members receive copies of The Thomas Hardy Journal which is
published three times a year and is regarded as the leading
source of Hardy studies. Lectures, guided tours and walks in
Hardy's Wessex, and other events take place throughout the
year, and there is a biennial conference in Dorchester which
brings together students from all over the world.
For information about the Society please write to:
The Thomas Hardy Society
p. O. Box 1438
Dorchester
Dorset DTt 1Y H
Celebrating
Tholllas Hardy
Insights and Appreciations
Edited by
Charles P. C. Pettit
First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-14015-2 ISBN 978-1-349-14013-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14013-8
First published in the United States of America 1996 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-15974-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Celebrating Thomas Hardy: insights and appreciations / edited by
Charles P. C. Pettit.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-15974-0
I. Thomas Hardy, 1840-1 928-Criticism and interpretation.
2. Pastoral literature, English-History and criticism. 3. Wessex
(England)-·In literature. 4. Country life in literature.
I. Pettit, Charles P. C.
PR4754.C33 1996
823' .8-dc20 96-3598
CIP
Editorial matter and selection © Charles P. C. Pettit 1996
Foreword © Furse Swann 1996; Chapter I © James Gibson 1996; Chapter 2 ©
Laurence Lerner 1996; Chapter 3 © Lance St John Butler 1996; Chapter 4 ©
Ronald Blythe 1996; Chapter 5 © Peter Levi 1996; Chapter 6 © Gillian Beer 1996;
Chapter 7 © Simon Curtis 1996; Chapter 8 © Michael Millgate 1996; Chapter 9 ©
Rosemarie Morgan 1996; Chapter 10 © Peter Rothermel 1996; Chapter II ©
Edward Blishen 1996.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996
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 permissi,)ll 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 WI P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
10 9 8 7 6 54321
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96
Contents
Foreword by Furse Swann vii
Preface by Charles P. C. Pettit xi
Notes on the Contributors xiii
1 Thomas Hardy's Poetry: Poetic Apprehension
and Poetic Method 1
James Gibson
2 Moments of Vision - and After 22
Laurence Lerner
3 Stability and Subversion: Thomas Hardy's Voices 39
Lance St John Butler
4 Thomas Hardy and John Clare: A Soil Observed,
a Soil Ploughed 54
Ronald Blythe
5 Hardy's Friend William Barnes 68
Peter Levi
6 Hardy and Decadence 90
Gillian Beer
7 Hardy, George Moore and the 'Doll' of
English Fiction 103
Simon Curtis
8 'Wives All': Emma and Florence Hardy 115
Michael Millgate
9 Bodily Transactions: Toni Morrison and Thomas
Hardy in Literary Discourse 136
Rosemarie Morgan
v
vi Contents
10 The Far and the Near: On Reading Thomas
Hardy Today 159
Peter Rothennel
11 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, and Some
Persisting English Discomforts 177
Edward Blishen
Index 196
Foreword
Language makes it possible to define and share experience. Each
one of us uses language in his or her own way but each language,
from whatever part of the globe, is what holds us together as people.
Language is what both unites and divides. Each voice too, is unique.
Yet we all know, like Stephano's 'most delicate monster' - part
Trinculo, part Caliban - that we have more than one voice; indeed,
we are a veritable orchestra of potentially harmonious or conflicting
voices. Hardy recognised this very clearly. In his poem 'So Various'
he enumerates a succession of conflicting thumb-nail sketches of
individuals totally contradictory in their apparent natures, yet all
Were one man. Yea,
I was all they.
This recognition of the immense, often contradictory, variety of
voices which we all possess seems a useful starting point for intro
ducing a volume of essays such as this.
For in Hardy's writings we find the voices of both realist and
dreamer, conservative and radical, the nostalgic and the avant-garde,
the comfortable and comforting and the uncomfortable and discom
forting. It is not surprising, therefore, that he constantly disclaimed
having any single philosophy which might be abstracted or deduced
from his writings. Rather they were to be viewed as a series of
'seemings', 'impressions', ascertained through a life-time of enquiry,
reading, observation, experience and conscious artistry.
Thus, when some 250 people gathered together in Dorchester from
all over the world in the last week of July 1994 for the 11th Inter
national Thomas Hardy Conference, there was assembled a multi
tude of voices, each in its own way unique, yet all had come together
because they recognised something of their own voice or voices
in the voice or voices of Hardy. It was my intention, through the
variety of lectures, seminars, poetry readings, recitals, concerts, music
workshops, services, plays, exhibitions and dances which made
up the eight-day conference, to mirror something of this multiplicity
of voices.
This volume records the key lectures, ranging, as always, over
vii
viii Foreword
wide aspects of Hardy's life and work, and of his relationship to
other writers and to his readers today in far-flung areas of the world.
It was important to me that, taking Hardy as the centre, we should
cast our minds both back and forward from his time, to seek out his
roots and inspiration, his links with writers such as John Clare and
William Barnes, as well as his relationship to our own time. Parallels
were drawn, between the Dorset agricultural worker in Hardy's day
and now; between his social background and concerns and those of
the recent Nobel Prizewinner for Literature Toni Morrison; between
the class-conscious upwardly mobile young man of the 1870s and
of the 1950s; between the experience of Tess at Flintcomb-Ash and
the personal experience of a Chinese academic sent out to work in
the rotten potato fields on the edge of the Gobi Desert during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. Throughout, the lecturers were invok
ing Hardy's voices and comparing them with their own in their own
situation today.
And Hardy's voices are legion. Not only is he able, with Keats's
'camelion Poet', to enter into the lives and thoughts of other people
- real or imagined - but he also enters into the imagined thoughts
and 'voices' of such improbable 'Bodies' as sundials, tables, old news
papers, innumerable species of birds and trees, individual musical
instruments, winds, skies, rabbits, dogs, old psalm tunes, the Elgin
Marbles, the family face, ghosts galore, sun, moon and star - and,
not infrequently, the Prime Mover himself. This Keatsian and Shake
spearian capacity whereby the poet is 'continually in [forming] and
filling some other Body' is also quintessentially Hardyan.
As Gillian Beer pointed out in her masterly lecture, such voices
are not isolated for Hardy. In that great little poem 'In a Museum',
which she quoted and discussed in her lecture, Hardy records the
momentary but momentous illumination that the 'coo' of the now
fossilised prehistoric 'musical bird' he sees in a glass case 'is blent, or
will be blending' with the 'contralto voice I heard last night' in -
and I believe it is one of the great lines of Hardy's poetry -
In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.
No voice is lost ultimately. All voices play their part in the totality
of 'the full-fugued song of the universe'. The image of the fugue is
important: the repetition of a theme by different voices, different
instruments, at different pitches, in often subtly different variations
Foreword ix
- this is at the heart of the West Gallery music which Hardy loved
as well as that of the great classical Western tradition.
It is a theme which Hardy returns to on a number of occasions.
In 'To Meet, or Otherwise' we find it. Here Hardy contemplates the
importance of meeting - ultimately it will make no difference:
... Yet this same sun will slant its beams
At no far day
On our two mounds
But no, they should 'make the most ... of what remains':
By briefest meeting something sure is won
Each moment adds something to the great saga of history. And
this, in its way, was as true of that week in Dorchester as of the
projected meeting of Hardy and Florence Dugdale:
So, to the one long-sweeping symphony
From times remote
Till now, of hu!nan tenderness, shall we
Supply one note,
Small and untraced, yet that will ever be
Somewhere afloat
Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life's antidote.
As T. E. Lawrence said in a letter to Robert Graves, after visiting
Hardy at Max Gate, in September 1923: 'They used to call this
man a pessimist. While really he is full of fancy expectations.' This
volume, I hope, bears witness to the vitality and optimism and
'fancy expectations' which Hardy, three-quarters of a century on, is
still able to inspire.
Furse Swann
Director, 11th International Thomas Hardy Conference