Thomas Hardy in Our Time

186 Pages·1994·11.271 MB·English

by  Robert Langbaum

THOMAS HARDY IN OUR TIME
Also by Robert Langbaum
THE POETRY OF EXPERIENCE:
The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition
ISAK DINESEN'S ART: The Gayety of Vision
THE MODERN SPIRIT: Essays on the Continuity of
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature
THE MYSTERIES OF IDENTITY:
A Theme in Modern Literature
THE WORD FROM BELOW:
Essays on Modern Literature and Culture
SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST (editor)
THE VICTORIAN AGE:
Essays in History and in Social
and Literary Criticism (editor)
Thomas Hardy
in Our Time
Robert Langbaum
M
St. Martin's Press
© Robert Langbaum 1995
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ISBN 0-312-12200-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Langbaum, Robert Woodrow, 1924-
Thomas Hardy in our time / Robert Langbaum.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-12200-4
1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PR4754.L36 1995
823' .8—dc20 94-14199
CIP
Contents
Preface vii
1 Hardy and Lawrence 1
2 The Issue of Hardy's Poetry 27
3 Versions of Pastoral 64
4 Diversions from Pastoral 95
5 The Minimisation of Sexuality 127
Notes 156
Index 167
V
To the memory of Cecil Day Lewis
editor and friend
who adored Hardy
Preface
There is a boom just now in the production of interesting new
books on Hardy. Since Hardy wrote so much and with great
understanding about women, he is making a special appeal to
feminist critics. And since he criticised his own society and was
especially revolutionary in his criticism of marriage and the con
ventional ethics of sexuality, he is appealing to politically radical
critics. Far from apologising for adding still another book to the
stream, I am delighted to contribute to so lively a discourse a book
which I hope will prove relevant and will succeed in projecting
Hardy as a still commanding figure for our time. Every genuine
critical act, I believe, is a new start, a fresh encounter between
critic and author distinguished from all previous encounters, just as
every genuine poem and novel is a fresh encounter between author
and life - life as mediated by the literary tradition.
For this reason Hardy in Our Time is organised, not as a chro
nological survey of all Hardy's work (such surveys have been well
done), but according to my perception of the different current
issues relating to Hardy that need arguing. The major works are
treated in varying degrees of detail; the rest are at least alluded to
- the proportions are determined by the requirements of the argu
ment. My method is to describe the works discussed at sufficient
length so that people who have not read them or not read them
recently can follow my argument. I have also tried in my critical
commentary to convey the sense of what it is like to read the work,
both for the first time and after many informed readings.
Chapter 1, 'Hardy and Lawrence', reflects the evolution of my
interest in Hardy from my work on Lawrence about whom I have
written extensively in The Mysteries of Identity. When I came to
realise that Hardy was the principal influence on Lawrence, that
in commenting on Hardy's novels in his Study of Thomas Hardy
Lawrence was rewriting Hardy as a way of arriving at his own
novels, I felt the urge to write about Hardy. Although Hardy's
novels may seem Victorian largely because of their well-made plots,
the plots contain exaggerations verging on fantasy that suggest
VII
Vlll Preface
twentieth-century symbolisations of the unconscious. Hardy's
psychological insights into the unconscious and sexuality seem
contemporary with Lawrence's. There are, as we shall see, passages
in both novelists that might have been written by either. The
comparison of Hardy and Lawrence involves a discussion of sev
eral Hardy novels, especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the
Obscure.
In Chapter 2, 'The Issue of Hardy's Poetry', the first issue is
the question whether the recently increased estimation of Hardy's
poetry expresses a reaction, mainly in Britain, against the classic
modernist poets - Yeats, Pound and Eliot. The next issue is the
question whether in comparison to these modernists Hardy emerges
as a first-rate minor poet whose influence gave rise in Britain to a
generation of poets who in reaction against Yeats, Pound and Eliot
aimed at the small, precise perfections of minor poetry - a generation
best represented by Hardy's self-declared disciple Philip Larkin.
My attempt to formulate a theory of the differences between major
and minor poetry leads me through a discussion of Hardy's poems
to argue that Hardy wrote so many major poems as to be considered
a major poet who, after his successful career as a novelist, gave
himself the luxury of writing mostly minor poems in order to enjoy
the craft of poetry in all its variety. Since Hardy modernised and
transmitted to the twentieth century what was usable in nineteenth-
century poetry, I discuss at length the influence on him of nine
teenth-century poets to show him as thoroughly absorbed in the
nineteenth-century tradition though critical of it.
There follows still another issue (a favourite argument among
Hardy's admirers): which is greater - Hardy's poems or his novels?
My major-minor distinction helps to answer this question, for it
helps to develop a standard for evaluating Hardy against the clas
sic modernists by showing that he is mainly successful on another
scale. The distinction helps to develop a criterion for distinguishing
between Hardy's major and minor poems and for distinguishing
between his poems and major novels. Thus, I argue here and in
the succeeding chapters that Hardy's poetry on the largest scale,
requiring the largest extension of imagination, is to be found, albeit
in prose, in the major novels.
To pursue this argument, I devote the next two chapters to the
pastoral novels - Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding
Crowd, The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders. Chapter 3 be
gins, 'The Return of the Native is Hardy's greatest nature poem.' I
Preface IX
also trace the development away from the pure pastoral of Under
the Greenwood Tree through the nearly tragic Far from the Madding
Crowd to the tragic The Return of the Native to the dark comedy
and antipastoralism of The Woodlanders. In defining the genre of
The Woodlanders, I try to indicate how that neglected novel should
be read, its sustained ironies appreciated, if it is to rank among the
major novels, if we are to understand why Hardy 'in after
years often said that in some respects The Woodlanders was his
best novel'.1
I trace a continuing critique of idealism which is first manifested
in the social idealism of Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native.
The critique continues with the epistemological idealism of Fitzpiers
and the pastoral idealism of Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders,
the Shelleyan idealism of Angel Clare in Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
the Utopianism of Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley in Jude the
Obscure and the Platonic idealism of Jocelyn Pierston in Hardy's
last novel The Well-Beloved.
Finally in Chapter 5 I discern a change of direction in Hardy. Up
to this point I have discussed, with an approach owing a good deal
to Freud, Hardy's interest in sexuality and also the rich eroticism of
his novels. But Chapter 5 is called The Minimisation of Sexuality'
and deals with The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Well-Beloved. Why
this minimisation? In Mayor sexuality is minimised most notably
in Henchard, but in most of the other characters as well, perhaps
because Hardy wanted to throw the emphasis on moral choice and
the novel's tragic structure. In The Well-Beloved Jocelyn cares more
for his feminine ideal, his Well-Beloved, than for the numerous real
women who temporarily embody her, because this ideal is the sub
ject of his sculpture. Hardy may be demonstrating in this novel the
price paid in sexual over-idealisation or sublimation for the artistic
temperament, hence the novel's subtitle A Sketch of a Temperament.
Hardy also rounds out his study of sexuality by reversing his usual
emphasis on it.
A theme throughout is Hardy's connection with George Eliot.
The anonymous serialisation of Far from the Madding Crowd was
attributed by one reviewer to George Eliot, and Hardy's novels
were often compared by reviewers to George Eliot's. A generation
ago F. R. Leavis conceived the fruitful idea of a Great Tradition
running through the English novel from Jane Austen to George
Eliot, through Conrad and James, to D. H. Lawrence.2 Since Leavis
had little respect for Hardy's novels, he omits him from the Great