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Content THOMAS HARDY'S THEORY OF LOVE PI.S' £ y f A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy hy Isabella Corbett McKinney Zimmerman August 1934 UMI Number: DP22979 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22979 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 This thesis, w ritte n under the direction of the candidate’s F aculty Com m ittee and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and ac cepted by the C ouncil on Graduate Study and Research in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of the require ments fo r the degree of .Do o t P.rQfpjx j , iQjsjaphy. Dean Faculty Committee .Er.ofjass.or— Gaw...................... Chairman Professo.r...Qc»oket .... .?.?P.?©s.sor .Greasier.............. Professor H arley Professor M a rtin TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION............................... 1 II* MATERNAL L O V E ............................. 17 v III. PATERNAL L O V E ............................. 49 IV. BROTHER AND SISTER LOVE . . . . ............ 80 V. FRIENDSHIP ......... 92 VI. LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES............. 113 VII. CONCLUSION................................ 250 APPENDICES ...... ............................ 276 APPENDIX I Synopses of the novels ........ ...... 277 APPENDIX II Bibliographies .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION It is over sixty years since Thomas Hardy published his first book, and the distance between then and now seems more than two generations. The great transformation of time has wrought colossal change. But his own literary life, happily, crested the change: a novelist of one epoch, he found himself a poet of easily recognized affinities with the other. A map of the mental change would show the cancelled shapes of vanished beliefs, conventions, social classes. Yet even in the midst of these Victorian creeds, now out-dated, Hardy was a rebel, and beneath his hand Victorian sentimentalism crumbled under the weight of ter rible truths. He saw that the tragedy of this epoch would be that its certitude would have more and more to encounter shocks of the uncertain, and he was always, even in his earliest days, ready to perceive and grasp the uncertain; he was hostile to all forms of compromise with the attend ant inaccessible ideals. In "Candour in English Fiction” he struck tellingly at the malady of the nineteenth century: "It is in the self-consciousness engendered by interference with spontaneity, and in aiming at a compromise to square with circumstance, that the real secret lies of the 2 charlatanry pervading so much of English fiction.Con sequently, he permits no evading of things as they are: his aim is to portray the truth of what life and character are without reference to what man would like them to he. And life to him is, undeniably, a mixture. He shows evidence of a disillusioned and pungent use of reason that ignores the conciliatory philosophies that use the reason in another way. He consistently shows an unusual closeness to human problems in life. It is true that he is primarily a tragic artist, but his own explanation is sufficient to excuse his somber outlook: Differing natures find their tongue in the presence of differing spectacles. Some natures become vocal at tragedy, some are made vocal by comedy, and it seems to me that to whichever of these aspects of life a writer*s instinct of expression responds, to that he should allow it to respond.2 Though the tragic sense became the complexion of his art, it did not exclude comedy, for he enjoyed the happy aspects of life, and had, as McDowall phrases it, "the secret eom- edy of thought which makes him so often a tragic ironist."3 And be it remembered, greatest art is neither optimistic ^ Hardy, Life and Art. 80. 2 Ibid.. 86. 3 Arthur S. McDowall, Thomas Hardy. 23. 3 nor pessimistic, since no one who realizes the worlcl in its infinite variety can be either pessimist or optimist. Shakespeare no more becomes a pessimist by virtue of King Lear than an optimist by virtue of A Midsummer Night*s Dream. It is another matter to insist upon the essential duality of life, the tragedy and the comedy of the whole, and this is what Hardy does; he sees life as a tragi-comedy, a mixture of anguish and Joy, a sequence of logic and wild absurdity. This tragi-comedy of life, this "strange orchestra of victim-shriek and song,"4 most often has its poignant edge K in human love, the "strongest passion known to humanity.n % / For this passion, according to the poet’s admission, not withstanding the uneasy slavery and mortification attendant upon it, none the less remains the great motive force of existence: But— after love what comes? A scene that lours, A few sad vacant hours, _ And then the curtain.6 To understand Hardy’s conception of the passion in 4 Hardy, "The Sleep Maker," in Collected Poems, 110. 5 Hardy, Jude the Obscure. iv. 6 Hardy, "He Abjures Love," in Collected Poems. 231. 4 all its manifestations, a knowledge of his idea of the fate, or destiny, with which humanity is constantly warring is necessary. Two forces contend in manfs bosom: one, his intellect which fosters his desire to reach his individual aspiration, to effect his own furtherance in the general onward motion of life; the other, his instinct, the ?/ill- to-Live, which is in accord with the Prime Impulse existing as the race urge, necessitating that man shall not exist individually, but as one of the numberless, a bit of the continuity of the Primal Force pervading all things earthly. The Spirit of the Years suggests this: Yet but one flimsy riband of Its web Have we watched in weaving— web Enorm Whose furthest hem and selvage may extend To where the roar and plashings of the flames Of earth-invisible suns swell noisily, And onwards into ghastly gulfs of sky, Where hideous presences churn through the dark— Monsters of magnitude without a shape, _ Hanging amid deep walls of nothingness. Man battles to exist outside the natural scope of his being, to attain to something higher than what the Life tJrge sets as limitation; and in this futile warring, tragedy results. He is at once witness and actor in a harrowing affray which forces him as a conscious being to come to grip with the world of phenomena. He learns the meaning of 7 Hardy, The Dynasts. 468. 5 defeat; his woeful condition is revealed to him; he appre hends the futility of his striving; a will to non-existence results* Too sincere to accept illusory panaceas, Hardy can but depict and testify to this unending conflict which opposes human desire and will to an unseen, unfeeling power, a mechanism that can pound the rebel to atoms without ever revealing the secret of its gear. When cognizant of the workings of the Will which fulfills or ruins aimlessly that which he imagines to be his own purposing, man questions as did Napoleon: Why hold me my own master, when I be a Ruled by the pitiless Planet of Destiny? Above man’s fruitless warring, impalpable powers rear them selves. M. de Vigny’s lines suggest themselves, these lines that antedated Hardy’s: Vivez, froide nature, et revivez sans cesse Sous nos pieds, sous nos fronts, puisque c’est votre loi. Vivez et dedaignez, si vous &tes d^esse,A L’homme, humble passager, qui crut vous etre roi. Hardy thus lays the responsibility for ills and sufferings on this despot, unconscious and unwearying, the monstrous automaton constituting the Imminent Will which appears in the over-world of The Dynasts: o Loo, oit. Q La Maison du Berger. 6 The Will lias woven with an absent heed , Since life first was; and ever will so weave.10 Points of similarity can be noted clearly between this concept of Will and that of Schopenhauer in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Whether he was greatly in fluenced by Schopenhauer or not, surely he felt some af finity as he admitted to Brennecke.11 But he had no need to borrow this philosophical attitude; it, his vade me cum, was already apparent in "Hap,” written in his twenty-sixth year, before his knowledge of the German philosopher: If but some vengeful God would call to me Prom up the sky, and laugh: *Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love*s loss is my hatefs profiting!* Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it ^oy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? — Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.12 And it must be noted that Hardy was but within the rhythm of his age. Darwin*s Origin of Species carried, in its 10 Hardy, The Dynasts. 2. 11 Ernest Brennecke, Thomas Hardy*s Universe. 14. 12 Hardy, Collected Poems. 7. 7 stern theories of the survival of the fittest, a direct pro test against optimism. In Germany, von Hartmann, Haeckel, and Schopenhauer attested their doctrine of the Will and the Unconscious. Taubert and Frauenstaedt followed the tracks of the masters; each gave expression to the idea of a world whose causes are unintelligible. In England, Bed- does, Arnold, James Thompson, Arthur Hugh Glough, Edward Fitzgerald formed a Pleiade of poets of doubt and suffering, a culmination of the terrible dismay sweeping Europe. Humanity1s tragedy, then, is a resultant of man’s struggling subservience to this life force, which, in so far as human intelligence can understand it, is neither good nor evil, but blindly indifferent to the feelings of the earth lings. This concept is suggested in The Sleep Worker: When wilt thou wake, 0 Mother, wake and see— As one who, held in trance, has laboured long By vacant rote and prepossession strong— The coils that thou has wrought unwittingly; Wherein have place, unrealized by thee, Fair growths, foul cankers, right enmeshed with wrong, Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and song, And curious blends of ache and ecstasy?13 Life thus becomes in Duffin’s phrase, "a lost, inglorious, and bloody battle.”1^ 13 Ibid.. 208. 14 Henry Charles Duffin, Thomas Hardy. 298. 8 And in this atmosphere of struggle love is horn and runs its course. Plato once compared human love to that of a wolf for the lamb that it devours, and Hardy concurs in this view. But, as always, his balance is safeguarded; he examines the permanent, immovable, eternal aspects of the passion of love, not merely its tempestuous and often tragic moments. One finds recounted in his works every phase of the emotion. It is true, when one reads Hardy*s novels and poems one is inclined to believe that many times the author puts into play an apparatus of extraordinarily hostile events to bring about what is ordinarily a tragic solution. And he has been criticized greatly for what has been termed his over-use of coincidence. However, it seems the succession of calculated events eould but serve his vision of things. And it must be borne in mind that Hardy was always the conscious artist, too self-conscious to have worked in this way without realizing it. He placed as a motto under the title of Desperate Remedies these lines from Sir Walter Scott: "Though an unconnected course is what most fre quently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romantic writer being artificial, there is more required from him than the mere compliance with the simplicity of reality.” Thus, invention allows Hardy to design more nearly in har mony with his purpose— generally a tragic one. With justice 9 it has been declared that the novelist picked up his num erous incidents of intrigue in some old shop of long dis used theatrical and melodramatic accessories— a clandestine marriage, the non-arrival of a letter, a woman’s secret* the return of someone thought dead; but .when a thorough study of the novels is made, it seems that the more deeply the author sinks into the mire of difficulties, the nearer he approaches his psychological goal. And indeed, at the moment when ridicule seems to threaten, he surpasses himself just by virtue of the paradoxical and exaggerated character of the situation he creates. Thus does the oscillation of the mighty pendulum of destiny bear Jude in turn into the 1 * 5 arms of Arabella and Sue, Tess into the arms of Alec and Angelthus does the "flux and reflux, the rhythm of change alternate and persist in everything under the sky”; and thus can the sorrowful history of a "pure woman” be concluded with the ironically tragic utterance: "Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”^7 Everywhere one finds the same coalition of evil forces envenoming the con- Jude the Obscure. ^ Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 17 Ibid.. 457. 10 flict. The stage upon which the earthlings carry on their human drama is controlled hy an ungentle hand that does not hesitate to intervene after the fashion of a deux ex machina as it points the way for Sustacia, Tess, and Jude* Thus, to understand the oft criticized use of coin cidence in Hardy, one must remember the force operating be hind all life, the power whose hurling and unheeding force gives rise to those disastrous accidents, a power that forms the basis of the author1s philosophy of life and being. He depicts the fatal arm of destiny at work in the life of the individual fated to catastrophe or, as is rarely the case, to happiness. In reality, Mischance is King; it is the law of contingency and probability; the Hardian accent is the essence of the world, a world without finality. As D’Exi- deuil has suggested: Qu’on ne reproche done pas trop k Hardy les grandes libert^s qu’il a prises pour la conduite des ^ve/ ne- ments. Sans ces dkfauts qui ajoutent k sa puissance, son oeuvre ne serait pas ce qu’elle est et ces d^fauts ontcontribu^ k la doter de son intensite d*expression. La vraisemblanee pure n*est pour Hardy un critkre de veritk. Elle n*est pas une marque d*authenticity. Dans certaines successions d’evenements il y a au con- traire quelque chose de surnaturel. Pour comprendre une rare collaboration de circonstances, il faut per- cevoir le travail artistique et sadique d*une puis sance, dont la propulsion engendre ces repetitions de coincidences, Hardy dkcouvre derrikre tout ce qui la dissimule l^oeuvre de cette Volonty Immanente ob- stinke a crekr des p^ripkties orientyes dans un cer tain sens. . . . Ce qui sauve Hardy dans les exeks de ses intrigues est ce q^ti garde aux tragiques grecs 1*integrity de leur maitrise, I’exactitude, la verite 11 plus qu’humaine des caracteres, la fid&Lite de leur psychologie a un prototype rigoureux. Les tenements apparaiss^nt a peine eroyables, mais les personnages restent petris d’humanite concrete, a la fois elargie ©t stylisd'e toujours beitis a notre echelle, ils n’en demeurentv pas moins des etres fraternels b. notre eoeur et a notre pitie.18 And Laseelles Abercrombie rightly senses the fact that the real tragedy in the Hardian world is much less the conspiracy of circumstance than man’s resistance to this great current of necessity against which he strives to swim when the struggle from the outset is an unequal one.-^ In reality, the idea of liberty itself perishes under the presence of this external force, which makes every individ ual the instrument of its tenacious and tormenting will. Indeed, in place of a series of hackneyed intrigues and threadbare adventures, ample silhouettes are limned directly from life presenting the passionate and sorrowful image of a humanity enslaved to its destiny, but ever thwarted of its purpose. Since love is the basis of the race urge, nature’s means of prolonging the species, and since it is in this passion that humanity hopes to achieve some happiness, "an occasional episode in the general drama of pain," it is in ■ * - 8 Pierre d’Exideuil, Le Couple Humain dans 1’Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy, 161. Laseelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 18. 12 its working in the lives of men that individual tragedy most often results; its passionate force brings out most clearly the conflict between reason and intuition* The Intellect, as exemplified in such characters as Jude,2® Knight,21 and Clare,22 which realizes the uselessness of life, is en croaching upon the domain of the Heart, which contains the instinct of reproduction. Woman is the unknowing instrument of the Will-to-Live; her business is to reproduce life; existence is for the sake of existence. It is from this conflict between nature and instinct through the passion of love that tragedy in individual life arises. The ignorant live as beasts without questioning existence; they pass the weight of life from generation to generation, unhesitatingly and unthinkingly. The superior intellects, disillusioned as to the intrinsic importance of the human race in the universe, exert their intelligence against the force which serves them unheeding their suffer ings. Consequently, they reach the point where they hesi tate to confer upon succeeding generations the unhappy gift of existence. But, nevertheless, they continue to possess the Obscure. 21 A Pair of Blue Eyes. 22 Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 13 desires and passions which, exist in spite of them as a part of the workings of nature. Love is the great trap wherein they are caught; and of the various artifices of Nature, woman is the blind accomplice. She ensnares man with her charm and with her beauty. Nature bates her trap for man with the pleasures of the senses. Thus woman, the instru ment of the conservation of the species, remains close to nature; she is less intellectually developed than is man. And the terrible utterance of one of the Phantom Intelli gences in The Dynasts who cries out at the spectacle of the suffering imposed upon poor mortals, A juster wisdom his who should have ruled They had not been, is combined in the mind with Schopenhauer »s phrase, "If a God exists, I would not be in his place. The spectacle of the world’s misery would break my heart." Though it is in the love between the sexes that the most fundamental analysis of human passion as a motivating force for tragedy in human life is portrayed, nevertheless in the minor relationships, such as in maternal and pater nal devotion, in love between brother and sister, and in friendship, elements of tragedy and unhappiness are also everywhere prevalent. In these relationships, however, the unhappiness is not the result of the war with existence, but arises from something innate in the emotion itself, as 14 is found in the selfish jealousy of Mrs. Yeobright’s devo tion to Clym,23 the blind ambition that rules Melbury’s love for Grace,24 or from outward events ©hanging and re-shaping the passion, as is instanced in the friendship between Henchard and Farfrae,23 and between Knight and Smith,23 It matters not what may be the manifestation of the passion, the result is tragedy. Happiness is sought, but Hardy would say with Flaubert: "Happiness is a monstrosity; punished are those who seek for it.” Nature and humanity carry on the duel, the weakest goes down, and from the aom* bat the victor himself emerged wounded: Heart-halt and spirit-lame City opprest, Unto this wood I came As to a nest; Dreaming that sylvan peace Offered the harrowed ease— Nature a soft release From man’s unrest. But, having entered in, Great growths and small Show them to men akin— Combatants all! 23 Return of the Nat ive. 24 The Woodlanders. 25 The Mayor of Casterbridge. 26 A Pair of Blue Eyes. 15 Sycamore shoulders oak, Bines the slim sapling yoke,. Ivy-spun halters choke Elms stout and tall7 Hedgcook finds this unequal duel instinct in the Hardian world: Une seule qualite caraeterise la Volonte Immanente: l*activit^, I’g'ffort pour lfEffort, l’eternel devenir sans but apparent. Cette activity se trahit dans les changements des ph^nom'enes: la mati&re des grandes montagnes s’effrite; la vapeur se condense en eau; les fleuves couleijt vers la mer; sous 1* act ion du sole11 I’oc^an s’evapore et se change en nuages. Les plantes poussent, portent leurs fruits, laissent tom- ber leur semence, dechoient et meurent; d’autres pren- nent leur place, et la ronde perp^tuelle recommence. Les animaux, y compris les hommes, n’agissent pas autrement. La force qui est leur essence se reproduit dans d*autre^ forms vivantes; eomme deeharges infini- t^simales s’epuisant dans l’arc ^lectrique qui reste toujours incandescent, les individus sfen vont et l’espfece reste.28 Thus the lines of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat present the key note to this Hardian world: Life is but a monotonous game, in which one is certain to win two prizes: suffering and death. Happy the child who dies on the day which it is born! Happier still he who never enters the world!29 P7 Hardy, "In a Wood," in Collected Poems. 56. 28 F. A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy. 383. Translated from the Persian by Franz Toussaint, Edition Piazza, 32. 16 For love that should offer happiness for humanity ... is a sowre delight, and sugred griefe, A living death, an ever dying life. CHAPTER II MATERNAL LOVE The depth of the insight that marks Hardy’s analyses of the passion of love in its various manifestations en ables him to portray the emotion of maternal affeetion with a candor and verity generally lacking in its literary pre sentation. This love has been the subject of idealization since the beginning of time, and the selflessness, purity, and beauty attributed to it have been immortalized in the story and song of all literature. This very idealism has prevented its truthful depiction: other instances of human love might be treated with real candor and discussed un reservedly, but the maternal passion has inspired an awe and reverence that have prevented its searching and true delineation. Few authors have looked deeply into it; they have accepted the romantic sentiment that began to color it with the story of the first Biblical mothers, and that received greatest inspiration from the glorified legend of the Mother of Christ, and the subsequent body of mother literature termed Mariolatry. True, though the drama at Athens gave Medeas and Clymnestras to the literature of the world, and great periods of dramatic literature since that age have "held 18 the mirror up to nature” in this as in other themes, on the whole this passion has been less divorced from the senti mentality of treatment which prohibits truthful delineation than have any of the other human passions. But since Hardy’s avowed purpose in his works is to reflect, to re veal, and to criticize life,*1 - the reader is certain to find that this aim for truth extends to the portrayal of this emotion. His revolt from compromise, his realistic in sistence on seeing things as they are exacted, in his own words, to take "a good look at the worst,” prevented any glorification through sentimentality of a passion which, though moving, strong, and capable of beautiful sacrifice, nevertheless carries within itself potentialities for the destruction of tile very being it holds most dear. In this regard, I find Lina Wright Berle laboring under complete misapprehension in her judgment of this aspect of the novelist’s work. In Hardy she finds "the sentiment of parenthood shown with especial charm.Her contention, "To Hardy, for whom so few of the human rela tions deserve reference, this [love of parent for child\ receives uniformly sympathetic and deferential treatment; 1 Hardy, Life and Art. 77. 2 In her George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. 132. 19 of his studies of character none are more convincing than those in which the unselfish devotion of father for daughter or mother for son, is shown,” besides suggesting her habit for sweeping generalizations of a derogatory kind, manifests the result of a laek of critical weighing of the problems suggested and the conclusions reached by the novelist. Her final summation betrays a lack of understanding of the novelist’s depiction of the emotion in the novels and poems: It is a happiness that old age presents itself in these colors and under this guise .... The euphem istic instinct which seeks to present the fairest aspect of the latter stages of life is a sound and healthy one, and one which modern literature has too often failed to respect. However warped and destruc tive may be his view of the waxing generation, Hardy loyally preserves the more gracious phases of the old. To that extent he is ’Victorian* as was George Eliot.3 True, Hardy does present some examples of a rare and beautiful devotion that forgets self and merely gives, but in the majority of cases he depicts this passion as a selfish possessiveness that bears within it seeds of the greatest unhappiness and tragedy. Though one finds present here as elsewhere a sense of the ideal, there are no ide alized creations; one finds instead the swift-awareness of conditions within life and within character that transform 3 Ibid.. 152. 20 purposes, whether evil or good. To Hardy, the eradieator of illusions, life is a mixture; and he paints it as such. As McDowall phrases it, there is "a logic of candour in him, a disillusioned and pungent use of reason that ignores the conciliatory philosophies"4 of a world that sentimen talizes, glorifies, and raises to the ideal an emotion es sentially duo-fold, an emotion compound of good and bad, selflessness and selfishness, loyalty and treachery. Though he is ever conscious of the potential best in a passion, he is aware also that but rarely is the best at tained. It is the mixture of the lower with the higher that makes his characters universal; his novels Eire as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself struggling in the grip of circumstance, his best colored with the baser things, his worst elevated by a divine spark. Because of this gift of double vision, Hardy is able to portray forcibly the best and the worst possibilities in this passion, whether in separate characters, as in Sue 5 and Arabella, or combined in one personality as in Mrs. Yeobright, Hardy never sentimentalizes maternal devotion; 4 Arthur S. McDowall, Thomas Hardy. 18. 5 Jude the Obscure. 6 Beturn of the Native. 21 he sees its beauty, but he is aware also of its divine in sanity. He is conscious of the self-sacrifice, the loyalty, and the depth of devotion found in a mother*s love for her child; but he is cognizant also of the selfishness and the unreasoning Jealousy so often a part of the emotion. As a consequence of his broad insight he has developed three major types of mother: those who stand as examples of steadfast devotion and unselfishness; those who are utterly selfish and use the love tendered them to further their own desires; and those who represent the more general type of motherhood— the mother whose love is very real, but who, through non-understanding and unreasoning possessiveness, causes the greatest sorrow to the one she loves deeply. In proof of his ability to see the best as well as the worst in any human passion, Hardy has painted some clear out and very human pictures of the high devotion and beauty of some mothers* love. These examples are based on the fundamental and exclusive loyalty found in this affec tion, and the fact that no outside influence, however strong, can change its essential nature. The lover in "The Widow Betrothed” is conscious of the intensity and exclusiveness of the mother*s devotion when she pleads: Tomorrow— could you— would you call? Abridge your present stay? 22 My child is ill— my one, my all! And can’t he left today. He realizes the difference that divides the maid whom he lost to another and the woman of the present: Yet in my haste I overlooked When secondly I sued That then, as not at first, she had learnt The call of motherhood . • . Her word is steadfast, and I know How firmly pledged are we: But a new love-elaim shares her since She smiled as maid on me!7 A similar intensity and singleness of devotion is depicted in A Sunday Morning Tragedy. Here the mother, in order to save her daughter from disgrace, procures the herh "that balks ill-motherings": That night I watched the poppling brew With bended back and hand on knee: I stirred it till the dawnlight grew, And the wind whiffed wailfully. TThis scandal shall be slain,* I said, That lours upon her innocency: 1*11 give all whispering tongues the lie!*— But worse than whispers was to be. The daughter sickens and dies, and the mother’s tragic despair is pictured: There she lay— silent, breathless, dead, Stone dead she lay— wronged, sinless she!— Ghost-white the cheeks once rosy-red: Death had took her. Death took not me. 7 Hardy, Collected Poems. 129 23 I kissed her eolding faee and hair, I kissed her corpse— the bride to bej— My punishment I cannot bear, But pray God not to pity me.8 q "To Please His Wife" depicts an analogous story of misguided love on the part of a mother for her two sons. Here the mother’s driving ambition for her children and her jealousy of a more fortunate friend’s ability to give her sons great advantages sends her husband and their two sons to the sea in order to gain riches that will assure them position in the future. When fear comes to her that she has driven them to death through her misdirected ambition for worldly goods, her sorrow is unbounded: Nothing will repay me for the grief of their absence ....... I made them go .... I could not bear that we should be only muddling on, and you {to the frien<Jl rich and thriving. 10 And finally when after years of waiting she must acknowl edge their death, her mind unbalanced, she starts up at any noise, imagining she hears her loved ones: The mist blowing up the street from the q.uay, hin dered her from_seeing the shop, although it was so near; but she had crossed to it in a moment. How was it? Nobody stood there. The wretched woman walked 8 Ibid., 188. 9 Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies. 107^129. 10 Ibid., 125. 24 wildly up and down with her bare feet— there was not a soul. She returned and knocked with all her might at the door which might have been her own— they might have been admitted for the night, unwilling to dis-> turb her till morning. It was not till several min utes had elapsed that the young man who kept the shop looked out of an upper story window, and saw the skeleton of something human standing below half dressed. fHas anyone come?’ asked the form. ’Oh, Mrs. Jolliffe, I didn’t know it was you,* said the young man kindly, for he was aware how her baseless expectations moved her. ’No, nobody has come. * 11 Another aspect of selfless emotion is portrayed in ’ ’ The Son’s Veto.”12 The mother sacrifices herself and any chance for happiness she may have because her son demands it of her in furtherance of his own ambitions: Sophy’s son, now an undergraduate, was down from Oxford one Easter, when she again opened the subject [of marriage] • As soon as he was ordained, she argued, he would have a home of his own, wherein she, with her bad grammar and her ignorance, would be an encumbrance to him .... He showed a more manly anger now, but would not agree .... His education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him quite firm; though his mother might have led an idyllic life with her faithful fruiterer and green grocer, and nobody have been anything the worse in the world.13 The conclusion is one of pungent and devastating irony: 11 Ibid., 128. 12 Ibid., 3-22. 13 Ibid., 20. 25 Some four years after this date a middle-aged man was standing at the door of the largest fruiterer’s shop in Aldbrickham. He was the proprietor, but to-day, instead of his usual business attire, he wore a neat suit of black; and his window was partly shuttered* From the railway station a funeral procession was seen approaching: it passed his door and went out of town towards the village of Gaymead. The man, whose eyes were wet, held his hat in his hand as the vehicles moved by; while from the mourning coach a young smooth- shaven priest in a high waistcoat looked black as a cloud at the shop keeper standing there.14= This story bears a certain analogy to "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions,n^-5 where, in somewhat similar circumstances, the young priest remarks to his brother: "Ah, we read our Hebrews to little account, Joei To have endured the cross, despising the shame— there lay greatnessj"I& Tess as a mother finds place in the first group. Though her feeling for little Sorrow presents at first a curious mixture of primitive love and savage eontempt, she later rises to high devotion and self-abnegation. The scene in the fields is one not easily forgotten. Tess on the hay-stack with the child "one moment dawdled it with gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden fell to violently kissing it dozens of times, as if 14 Ibid., 21. 15 Ibid., 44-76. 16 Ibid., 75. 26 she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangly combined passionateness and con tempt.’ ^ 7 The philosophic comment of the rustic on-lookers, ’ ’ Shef 11 soon leave off saying she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard. Lord, *tis wonderful what a body can get used to o’ that sort in timej**^® accurately forecasts the sorrow of the future when she does get used to it and must suffer the tragedy of its loss. When the child’s life is in danger, her love rises to the height of self-forgetfulness, and ’ ’the baby’s offense against society in coming into the world was forgotten by the girl mother; her soul’s desire was to continue that offense by preserv ing the life of the child.”- i -9 Her fear that her baby will have to pay the full penalty of the sin of its birth re ceives anguished utterance in the self-renunciation of her prayer: ”0, merciful God, have pity, have pity on my poor baby. Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and wel come; but pity the child.”20 And finally in a frenzy of fear for its ultimate salvation, she gathers her little 17 Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 99. 18 Ibid.. 100. 19 Ibid., 103. 20 Loc. cit. 27 brothers and sisters around her, and "looking singularly tall and imposing," baptizes the child: "Sorrow, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."21 An ironic counterpart of this love of Tess for her Sorrow is found in "The Dark-Eyed Gentleman.” The last stanza is adequate for illustration: Yet now I’ve beside me a fine lissom lad, And my slip’s nigh forgot, and my days not sad; My own dearest joy is he, comrade and friend, He it is who safe-guards me, on him I depend; No sorrow brings he, And thankful I be That his daddy once tied up my garter for me.22 Thus, in spite of all the psychological reactions which confer a more complex character upon the making of these varied situations, it is the mighty voice of the race that resounds through the many sorrowful echoes, and though the result may be disastrous to the individual, when con sidered from the universal standpoint the episodes may con tain certain elements of justification and even of happi ness. In numerous instances Hardy uses the passion of love as a means for contrasting characters. Certainly this is 21 Loc . . 32 Hardy, Collected Poems. 227. 28 true in Jude the Obscure, not only in the episodes of the love between man and woman, but equally in the contrast pictured between the maternal devotion found in the two mothers, Sue and Arabella, in their respective attitudes towards their children. These two women embody in separate characters the best and the worst to be found in the emo tion. Arabella’s love for her child is at best a negative thing, based on his ability to be of help to her: I would have him here with me in a moment, but he is not old enough to be of any use in the bar, nor will he be for years .... I must ask you to take him when he arrives, for I don’t know what to do with him.23 Though the news of his parenthood is an unexpected shock both to Jude and to Sue, the latter's unselfishness is por trayed in clear contrast to the attitude displayed by the child’s own mother when she unhesitatingly and with love accepts the other woman’s child: The poor ehild seems to be wanted by nobody .... We’ll have him here. And if he isn’t yours it makes it all the better . . . . If he isn’t, I should like so much for us to have him as an adopted ehild. . . . . I’ll do the best I can to be a mother to him, and we can afford him somehow. I’ll work harder.24 Never does Arabella’s feeling approach the unselfish 23 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 323. i I 24 Ibid., 328. 29 devotion that can constitute true mother's love, and after the dreadful murder of Jude's and Sue's children "by her child, Little Father Time, and his own suicide, Hardy with scathing denunciation analyzes her feelings: Arabella .... went on with placid bluntness about 'her boy,* for whom, though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience,25 This "ceremonial mournfulness" is contrasted with the tragic intensity of Sue's frenzy of grief at the grave: 'He's filling them in, and he shan't till I've seen my little ones again!* she cried wildly to Jude. *1 want to see them once more. Oh Jude— please, Jude— Let me see them! I didn't know you would let them be taken away while I was asleep! You said perhaps I should see them once more before they were screwed down, and then you didn't, you took them away. Oh, Jude, you are cruel to me too! .... Can't I see them once more— just once! Can't I? Only just one little minute, Jude! It would not take long! And I should be so glad, Jude! I will be so good, and not disobey you ever any more, Jude, if you will let me? I would go home quietly afterwards, and not want to see them anymore. Can't I? Why can't I?26- The depth of the tragedy is reached when under the appal ling crash of this catastrophy her brain collapses and, accepting the murder of her children by Arabella's son as a judgment on her for what she now considers her sinful 25 Ibid., 328. 26 Ibid.. 405. 30 life, she condemns both herself and Jude to life-long sorrow and unhappiness: ’We must conform! All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and we must submit. There is no choice. We must. It is no use fighting against God! .... I have thought that we have been selfish, careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a vain at tempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh— the terrible flesh— the curse of Adam.......... I am a wretch— broken by my distractions! My babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella’s child killing mine was a judgment— the right slaying the wrong.**” She returns to Phillotson, her legal husband, the man she loathes, and leaves Jude to the voluptuous Arabella. To her husband she makes her "creed-drunk” explanation: ’My children are dead— and it is right that they should be; I am glad— almost. They were sin-begotten. They were sacrificed to teach me how to live!— their death was the first stage of my purification. That’s why they have not died in vain! .... You will take me back?’2® With Arabella may be cited two examples of mother love as a selfish and destructive force bringing unhappiness and tragedy into the lives of those involved. Arabella’s mother and the mother of Tess are representative of the lowest type of motherhood. Essentially natural products of the soil and class to which they belong, they have in 27 Ibid., 407. 28 Ibid., 433. common a system of comfortable ethics that enables them to be indifferent to results* When Arabella voices her plan for entrapping Jude, I want the house to myself to-night. He’s shy and I can’t get ’im to come in when you are here. I shall let him slip through my fingers if I don’t mind, much as I care for ’n, the pander-mother with full understanding replies, "It is fine; we med as well go since you wish.”29 This plot for Jude’s downfall is in full accord with the novelist’s expressed belief that "innocent youths such as Jude should also receive instruction in the natural processes; for it has never struck me that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably female. The element of understanding differentiates Ara bella’s mother from Mrs. Durbyfield. The latter never fully comprehends the fine nature of Tess. Her lack of insight is made poignantly clear in the scene where Tess returns home and confesses her disgrace. No pity, no love is expressed; her whole condemnation is based upon her daughter’s failure to provide creature comforts for her family, whether by sin or by marriage: ’And yet th’st not got him to marry ’eel Any 29 Ibid., 58 32 woman would have done it but you. After all the talk about you and him that has reached us here, who would have expected it to come'to this! Why didn’t ye think of doing some good to your family instead o* thinking only of yourself .... See how I’ve got to teave and slave, and your poor father with his heart clogged like a dripping pan! I did hope something to come out o’ this! You ought to have been more care ful if you didn’t mean to get him to make you his wife.* But at Tess’s anguished remonstrance, *0h mother, my mother! .... How could I be ex pected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folks? Why didn’t you warn me??3l her mother’s essentially natural philosophy reasserts it self: »I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead to, you would be hontish wi’ him and lose your chance.......... Well we must make the best of it, I suppose. *Tis nater, after all, and what do please God.*32 Her statement suggests Ghamfort’s thought: "By separating us from our reason, Nature increases the strength of her own empire over us.” And the final tragedy of Tess’s life, her return to Alec, is caused by the insistence of her family that she furnish them support and care not for the means involved. Thus a major portion of the misery she experiences may be Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 89. 32 Ibid., 90. 33 laid at her parents’ door through their selfish use of the love she tendered them. The third class of mothers in Hardy’s works consists of the more general type, neither the worst nor the best, which fill the world. Their love,is combined with with the lack of understanding and the blind jealousy so often a part of the passion. Mrs. Newsome33 and Mrs. D’Urberville^ pale, shadowy, and indistinct, as well as the masterful mother-type represented by Mrs. Yeobright,35 are figures in this group. Mrs. Newsome and the mother of Alec D’Urberville are both vague figures dominated by characters stronger than themselves, and serve but as blind instruments for circum stances within the plot. Mrs. Newsome forms a pallid second to the characters about her: she is first primitive ly owned and sold by Henchard to Newsome for money for drink; she believes in the validity of the sale and becomes a meek wife to the sailor; finally, understanding he is dead, and with certain vague doubts as to the binding qualities of the union, she finds Henchard and a second *zrz Mayor of Casterbridge. 34 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 35 Return of the Native. 34 time takes shape merely as she is reflected in the light of his power* As a mother she is entirely negative* Elizabeth Jane is the dominant factor, and it is her determination that brings about the mother’s remarriage with the Mayor* The only independent act that can be credited to her is the weak attempt she makes at bringing Farfrae and Elizabeth Jane together in response to her unexpressed desire for their marriage; and, ironically, it is her one determined effort at holding to a principle of truth, her letter to Henchard confessing that the Ghild is not his, that causes the initial misery in the relationship between Henchard and Elizabeth Jane as father and daughter. Mrs. D’Urberville is another indistinct figure on a background of grand passions. The blind woman surrounded by the birds she loves, and with no point of contact with the son she would love, is a pitiable figure; but, in the author’s words, ”she was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring scornfully, and to aversely yearn. She merely forms a querulous excuse for Tess’s presence and further acquaintance with Alec. In this last capacity, an unconscious reason or ex cuse for certain actions and results within the plot, Mrs. 36 Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 64. 35 D’Urberville is akin to Mrs. Chickerel, the mother of Ethel- berta,37 and to that half-insane being, Mrs. Jethway.33 Mrs. Chiekerel, a semi-invalid, reclines in an armchair, and serves as an excuse for her daughter’s determination to reach a social and, incidentally, a monetary position wherein all chance of want will be removed from the paren tal door. Mrs. Jethway is a much more strongly limned figure than any of these characters just cited. She may be likened to a sinister Fury, an evil nemesis, half-crazed with love and grief for a dead son, and obsessed with the idea that the flighty Elfride by refusing his love was the cause of his death. It is she who even in death is the means of ruining Elfride’s chance for happiness with Knight; her letter denouncing the irresponsible but essentially innocent girl comes to Knight after the mother’s tragic death: Sir:— a woman who has not much in the world to lose by any censure this act may bring upon her, wishes to give you some hints concerning the lady you love. You are deceived. Gan such a woman as this be worthy? i One who encouraged an honest youth to love her, then slighted him, so that he died. 37 The Hand of Ethelberta. ^ A Pair of Blue Eyes. 36 One who next took a man of no birth as a lover, who was forbidden the house by her father. One who secretly left her home to be married to that man, met him, and went with him to London. One who, for some reason or other, returned again unmarried. One who, in her after-correspondence with him, went so far as to address him as her husband. One who wrote the enclosed letter to ask me, who better than anybody else knows the story, to keep the scandal a secret. I hope soon to be beyond the reach of either blames or praise. But before removing me God has put it in my power to avenge the death of my son.39 There can be but one result of such disclosures, no matter how over-magnified, on such a nature as Knight’s. Her son’s death is avenged; Elfride*s happiness is the forfeit. A slight but very definite characterization is given to Jude’s crusty maiden aunt, Drusilla Pawley, the only mother influence the boy had known. She fails con sistently to understand his striving for learning and sees in him "but another comer to this stony shore" when "it would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took him wi’ his father and mother, poor useless boy."4^ It is not reading too much into this character to state that had she 39 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 393. 40 Hardy, Jude the Obscure. 7, 37 looked on M m as other than ”a poor useless boy," and tried to understand this striving after knowledge, the keynote to his nature, certain major circumstances in his life would have been altered. But inability to understand on the mother’s part is a major premise in Hardy’s analyses of maternal devotion, and is based upon his belief in the blindness of the adora tion, the jealousy, and the lack of logical reasoning found in the average mother’s devotion to her child, Mrs, Clare4^ is representative of this non-under standing type. She is a picture of the mid-Victorian wife and mother; a staid, gray little woman who gives the black pudding to the family of the man suffering with delirium tremens, and who puts the mead in the medicine chest "be cause it is so extremely alcoholic,” Her questions regard ing Tess as a desirable daughter-in-law are typical of the middle-class, mid-Victorian, theological sense of values: is her family a good one, and does she attend church as she should? These answered in the affirmative, all is well. Since she can understand no one who fails to think accord ing to rule, she never understands Angel, and it is in her constant striving to see into his heart and to help him 41 Tess of the D’TJrbervilles. 38 that she wounds him most and adds greatly to the tragedy of his disillusionment. After Angel, hitter and disillusioned, has left Tess, gone home, and acquainted his family with his deci sion to emigrate to Brazil, the ironically tragic scene wherein the mother probes the wound with her questions as to the appearance of her daughter-in-law, her virtue, her ability, takes place, ending with her words after the family prayers: *1 could not help thinking how very aptly that chap ter your dear father read QProverbs xxxjj applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you have chosen. The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler, but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others. "Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but she excelled them all." Well, I wish I could have seen her, Angel. Since she is pure and chaste, she would have been refined enough for me ... . After all there are few sweeter things in nature than an unsullied country maid.t4^ But Angel "could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good-night to these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts; only as something vague and external to themselves."43 It was, indeed, this 42 - Ibid.. 301. 43 Ibid., 302. 39 "terrible sarcasm of a blind malignity" which brought home to him more fully that he had wrecked his career by mar riage— a perception which had not taken place among his early thoughts after Tess’s disclosure— and which did much to determine him in the step he had but tentatively chosen before. Stephen Smith*s mother is another, but harmless, example of blind maternal pride and illogical thought pro cesses. She demonstrates forcibly that trait common to most mothers, and the cause of such tragedy in The Return of the Native— the feeling that no prospective wife, how ever good and however high her position, is worthy of the son*s devotion. Her inability to reason logically is best displayed in the scene where she discovers Stephen’s love for Elfride. When the son, who recognizes the difference in the social positions involved, declares his unworthiness, she immediately protests: *1 knew she was after *ee, Stephen— I knew it ... . You ought not to be in such a hurry, and wait a few years. You might go higher than a bankrupt pa*son’s girl then .... Five years hence you’ll be plenty young enough to think of such things. And really she can very well afford to wait, and will, too, take my word. Living down in an out-step place like this, I am sure she ought to be very thankful that you took notice of her. She’d most likely have died an old maid if you hadn’t turned up.’44 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 105. 40 It is, however, in the delineation of Mrs. Yeobright*s character that Hardy presents his most complete and detailed analysis of mother love as a driving force for tragedy. The author has depicted fully in this character that divinely insane feeling which many mothers harbor for their sons. He leaves the reader in no doubt about the depth of her love for Glym; but he shows clearly, that blindness of the emotion prevents any real understanding between the two and works for tragedy in their lives. Clyn^s mother with her reticent strength and set maternity disappoints because her mind is far less generous than her emotion. Completely non-sympa- thetiG, she fails consistently to comprehend the largeness of her son's aims and to understand the breadth of vision he sees in his future occupation. Her son pleads for under standing in the new profession he feels he must choose and for sympathy for it: *1 hate that business of mine, and I want to do some worthy thing before I die. As a schoolmaster I think to do it— a schoolmaster to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will.......... I hate the flashy business \manager of a diamond establishment^ . Talk about men who deserve the name, can a man de serving the name waste his time in that effeminate way, when he sees half the world going to ruin for want of somebody to buckle to and teach them how to breast the misery they are born to? I get up every morning and see the whole creation groaning and tra vailing in pain. .... and yet there am I, traf ficking in glittering splendours with wealthy women and titled libertines, and pandering to the meanest vanities. .... I have been troubled in my mind about it all year, and the end is that I cannot do 41 It any more.’45 But the mother replies: *After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and when there is nothing to do but to keep straight on towards affluence, you say you will be a poor man’s school-master. Your fancies will be your ruin, Clym.........I hadn’t the least idea that you meant to go backward in the world by your own free choice. Of course, I have always supposed you were going to push straight on, as other men do— all who deserve the name.’ And later when she learns of Glym’s infatuation for Eus- tacia, she makes this unjust accusation: ’You are wasting your life here; and solely on account of her. If it had not been for that woman you would never have entertained this teaching scheme at all. I know you had decided to attempt it before you saw her; but that would have ended in intentions. It was very well to talk of, but ridiculous to put into prac tice.’^ Thus to the maternal instinctive expectation of obedience is added the inevitable jealousy of the woman whom the son loves. This opposition to Eustacia is, of course, per fectly natural, but foolish in the extreme to which it is carried: ’You are blind, Clym. It was a bad day for you when you first set eyes upon her. And your scheme is merely a castle in the air built on purpose to justify this folly which has seized you, and to salve your conscience on the irrational situation you are in. 45 Hardy, Return of the Native, 215. 4 6 Ibid., 237. 42 .... But it is all through that woman— a hussy This depiction of the feeling as a deep love com bined with an equally deep and unreasoning possessive jealousy forms a powerful and accurate study. Through this maternal attitude Clym's situation is made practically impossible: Three antagonistic growths had to be kept alive: his mother*s trust in him; his plan for becoming a teacher; and Eustacia*s happiness.48 Fate vetoes the second for a time; and the other two nec essarily break down from difficulties inherent in the nature of the subjects. The mother, her blind anger driv ing her, at last brings about the definite estrangement: ’If you wished to connect yourself with an unworthy person, why did you come here to do it? Why didn’t you do it in Paris?— it is more the fashion there. You have come home only to distress me, a lonely woman, and to shorten my days! I wish that you would bestow your presence where you bestow your l o v e .*49 This only can be the end, when two markedly different and powerful natures comprehend some mutually vital fact from diametrically opposed standpoints. Clym leaves in utter misery, and the mother, refusing to unbend a fraction, cries: 47 Ibid.. 215 48 Ibid., 247 49 Ibid., 252 43 'And this is maternity— to give one's years and the best of love to insure the fate of being despised.t&0 Later, the "Rencounter at the Pool" presents a start- lingly real picture of the nature of the man's mother and of his wife. Mrs. Yeobright, trying in her austere way to reach Eustacia and, through her, her son, finally pleads; "I am only a poor old woman who has lost a son." And Eus tacia, furious at the accusations which have been made by her mother-in-law, retorts with prophetic truth: 'If you had treated me honourably you would have had him still. You have brought yourself to folly; you have caused a division which can never be healed. *5- * - The two are fighting for the man whom they both love, and they are equally, unjustly 'vindictive, tigerish, and al most insane in their jealous anger. But a more lovable side of the mother's nature is presented when after the months of separation Venn reports Clym's affliction. Hardy pictures her love touched through the son's distress, and willing to overcome past unhappi ness in an effort to help him: 'This marriage is unalterable; my life may be cut short, and I would wish to die in peace. He is my only son; and since sons are made of such stuff, I am not sorry I have no other.........I forgive 50 Ibid.. 264 51 Ibid., 302 44 M m now. 1*11 go.’52 It is noteworthy that even in this effort to over come pride, she yet fails to understand, or really to try to comprehend, the son’s viewpoint; he is still the mis taken one to her. But tragic results follow her decision. Of all the scenes in the hook none is more vivid or com pletely presented than the crucial episode of the "Closed Door” that.sets the tragedy moving to its inevitable denoue ment: the hot little garden outside Clym’s cottage, with his mother waiting; Eustacia looking from the window, hating her, and fearing her jealous reaction to Wildeve’s presence; Clym in his furzecutter’s clothes asleep in the parlor; and Mrs. Yeobright turning back on her death journey across the heath. Eustacia’s refusal to open the door, which dooms the older woman and, ultimately, herself, is half an acci dent, but is at all points consistent with her nature. And it is part of the irony which invests the order of the Hardian world that the impression left in Clym’s mind should be of his mother’s bitterness and resentfulness of his sup posed indifference. The last words spoken in grief and anguish to the little boy who saw her conscious on the heath were not true indices of her belief in her son and love for 52 Ibid., 338. 45 him: fIf they had only shown signs of meeting my advances half-way how well it might have been doneI But there is no chance. Shut out I She must have set him against me. Gan there be beautiful bodies without hearts in side? I think so.* And her reply to the boy’s question, "What shall I tell my mother?” are the words that come to Clym, ”Tell her you have tyA seen a broken-hearted woman cast off by her son," ^ It is inevitable that these words should be interpreted by Clym, in his complete ignorance both of her motive and of her desire, as proof of her bitterness and resentfulness toward him. And when he learns the truth later, it can but lead to complete rupture between him and Eustacia— his nature and the unbreakable tie with his mother explain this com plete revulsion. Clym, nearly insane with remorse and grief, drives Eustacia from him, and she, realizing the wreck of her hopes, and later, ironically unconscious of her husband’s relenting, finally goes to meet Wildeve on that night "when the heath had unleashed all its furies of darkness and storm.” The final catastrophe, the death of Eustacia and Wildeve, closes this cycle of the tragedy of non-understanding and possessive love. 53 Ibid., 356. 54 Ibid.'* 357. 46 Mother love to Hardy, then, is not the ideal thing pictured by the romanticists; it is a very real emotion, sometimes approaching a certain divinity but more often containing the same elements of jealousy and selfishness found in other passions. In its highest form it is the exemplification of the most selfless love known to man; but in its lowest aspects it is as deep in the mire of life as are the other human feelings in their realistic portrayals. Because of the essential possessiveness and exclu siveness of the passion, jealousy and pain can but result with the entrance of another, of whatever nature. It is because of this aspect of the emotion that Hardy*s mother warnings are so numerous in the poems as well as in the novels. "The Hetties" is a poetic analogy of Mrs. Yeo- br i ght * s lament: This, then, is the grave of my son Whose heart she won! And nettles grow Upon his mound; and she lives just below. How he upbraided me, and left And our lives were cleft, because I said She was hard, unfeeling, caring but to wed. Well, to see this sight I fared these miles, And her firelight smiles from her window there, Whom he left his mother to cherish with tender care I It is enough. 1*11 turn and go; Yes, nettles grow where lone lies he, 47 Who spurned me for seeing what he could not see.55 And "Rose-Ann" is justification for the universal maternal question voiced by Mrs, Yeobright, "0, why is it that a mother can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”56 Mother said: ’She’s a sport-making maiden, my son*; And a pretty sharp quarrel had we; 0 why do you prove by this wrong you have done That I saw not what mother could see?57 This poem in combination with "The Sweet Hussy" is further exemplification of the Hardian theory that often the in nocent youth needs warning against the spider-female: In his early days he was quite surprised When she told him she was compromised By meetings and lingerings at his whim, And thinking not of herself but him; While she lifted orbs aggrieved and round That scandal should so soon abound, (As she had raised them to nine or ten Of antecedent nice young men): And in remorse he thought with a sigh, How good.she is, and how bad am I— It was years before he understood That she was the wicked one— he the good. ° Hardy, Collected Poems« 486. 56 Hardy, Return of the Native. 264. 57 Hardy, Collected Poems, 253. go Ibid., 368. 48 Hardy thus pictures the shadow of doom that limits all love. And Hardy’s art, so far as it is a scrutiny of personal relations, centers in the varying issues of the strongest human passions. Mother love he presents broadly and accurately without idealization or without undue re proach. His method is a realist’s; his offerings are un varnished in their truth; his severe logic will allow no puerile invention and romancing to please those who shy at reality. This love of mother for child, presenting pos sibly the fullest opportunity for the development of a selfless devotion, suffers from the introduction of those earthly elements which reduce it to a selfish, jealous possessiveness, lacking entirely the high devotion and self-abnegation attributed to it by romanticists, and caus ing ultimate misery to the very ones to whom it should render happiness. CHAPTER III PATERNAL LOVE Paternal love rarely has been the great force either for good or for evil that maternal love has been; conse quently, in literature its place has been restricted. It is not reading too much into Hardy*s analysis of this emo tion to see in it a medium for his depiction of the essen tial masculine nature. Nowhere is the depth of love and self-abnegation found in Tess,^ Sue,^ and Mrs. Yeobright3 to be discovered in Hardy*s fathers. But though their love lacks the blind devotion of the maternal passion, it is grounded in those same qualities of non-understanding and prideful determination to rule that caused unhappiness in the instances cited of mother affection. Hardy has developed three major types of fathers: first, the parasitic type that constantly demands and ac cepts sacrifices from the child; second, the sensualist whose thought is merely for personal gratification, and who 1 Tess of the D^rbervilles. o Jude the Obscure. 3 Return of the Native. 50 assumes no responsibility for consequence; and third, the more universal type of parent who, though he loves and de sires the happiness of his child, fails to understand him, and in prideful determination and ambition brings sorrow to the one he professes to love. Tess’s father, John Durbeyfield, is representative of the lowest type of paternalism— the parasite. Through his ridiculous pride in his ancient lineage, he presents the prime cause for tragedy in his daughter’s life. Refusing in his false vanity and general inertia to contribute to the support of the family by his own labor, and caring nothing for the results to his daughter, he insists with the rest that Tess shall bear the burden of the newly discovered gentility and make it count through her own efforts for some financial benefit. This description is suggestive of the man: Her father’s ill-health was of the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright. He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was. ’I’m thinking of sending round to all the old anti- queeruns in this part of England .... asking them to subscribe to a fund to maintain me. I’m sure they’d see it as a romantieal, artistical, and proper thing to do. They spend lots o* money in keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o’ things, and such like; and living remains must be more interesting to ’em still, if they only knowed o* me. Would that somebody would go round and tell ’em what there is living among ’em, and they thinking nothing of him. If pa’- 51 son Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd haf done it, I'm sure**4 He passively but obstinately resists all efforts to arouse pride in him and all efforts to bring to him a sense of responsibility toward his family. And, ironically, at the point when Tess, with Alec importuning her to come to him again since she is deserted by Angel and sees her brothers and sisters in want, gains strength to reply to Alec's statement that the father will not help, "He can with my assistance; he must!" the father only a "little bit ill" dies. Then indeed, The Durbeyfields, once D'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now.5 For John Durbeyfield's life had a value apart from his poor personal achievements; his was the last of the three lives for whose duration the house and premises were held under lease. And with eviction facing them, with her mother ill, her brothers and sisters in want, and her father, whose poor life alone had kept a roof over their heads, incon veniently dead, Tess can but return to Alec, and the sonata 4 Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 397. 5 403. 52 of her pain moves forward to its desperate conclusion. The same parasitic attitude is presented in the poem "The Orphaned Old Maid," Here the father uses the love his daughter bears him to keep her with him until he dies, and gives no thought to her future: I wanted to marry, but father said, ♦No— ♦ Tis weakness in woman to give themselves so; If you care for your freedom youf11 listen to me, Make a spouse in your pocket, and let the men be.* I spake on* again and again: father cried, ♦Why— if you go husbanding, where shall I bide? For never a home♦s for me elsewhere than here I♦ And I yielded; for father has ever been dear. But now father1s gone, and I feel growing old, And I*m lonely and poor in this house in the wold, And my sweetheart that was found a partner else where , And nobody flings me a thought or a care.6 Another example of the low type of parent is pre sented in Arabella's father, old Do mi.7 Just as the mother helped her to entrap Jude into the first marriage, in like manner does her father help her later in the plan for her remarriage. To this end they decide to get Jude drunk. Arabella voices her scheme; ♦Now we must keep plenty of good liquor going in the house these next few days, I know his nature, and if he once gets into that fearfully low state that 6 Hardy, Collected Poems, 228. 7 Cf. ante., 32. 53 he does get into sometimes, he’ll never do the honor able thing by me in the world, and I shall be left in the lurch. He must be kept cheerful. He has a little money in the savings bank, and he has given me his purse to pay for anything necessary. Well, that will be the license; for I must have that ready at hand, to catch him the moment he’s in the humor. You must pay for the liquor. A few friends and a quiet, con vivial party would be the thing if we could get it up. It would advertise the shop, and keep me too.’ And the father acquiesces: ’That can be got up easy enough by anybody wha’ll afford victuals and drink. .... Well, yes— it would advertise the shop— that’s true.*® Subsequently, they get Jude married by the simple expedient of making him more drunk. When the man would resist, the father turns to him with the one argument that can touch him; ’Now, Mr. Fawley, be honorable • . . . You and my daughter have been living together these three or four days. Quite on the understanding that you were going to marry her. Of course, I shouldn’t have had such goings-on in my house if I hadn’t understood that. As a point of honor you must do it now.* At this Jude capitulates: ’If I am bound in honor to marry her— though how I came to be here with her I know no more than a dead man— marry her I will, so help me GodI I have never behaved dishonorably to a woman or to any living thing.*9 The second group of fathers, unwilling ones, presents 8 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 452 seq. 9 Ibid.. 455. 54 a wide field for analysis. This group divides itself into those men who loved and "then would not turn their heads to look at the girls by the next harvest-time11;1^ those en lightened few who reason logically that two lives should not pay the penalty for "one midnight passion"; and lastly, those who after gratification try to make reparation in the conventional manner. It is through a comparison of the men of this group with the women who were their victims that the basic depth, almost a physiological thing, that differ entiates maternal from paternal love becomes apparent; no one of them approaches the devotion and loyalty found in Tess and Sue as mothers; and opposed to them is placed but one woman in whom a feeling of parenthood similarly is totally lacking— Arabella. The sensualists of the first classification are un- 11 12 redeemed. These undisciplined spirits, Troy, x Fitzpiers, and "The Dark-Eyed Gentleman,"13 given up to an utter and unmitigated egotism and enslaved to the forces of desire, 10 Ibid., 9. ^ Far from the Madding Crowd. 12 m a The Woodlanders. 13 1 Collected Poems. 227. ,55 represent nothing more than animal desire in man; to them the event is hut an episode to he placed in memory beside others of its kind— interesting hut not unusual. Hedg- cock has stated: Assez differents par le cachet que la vie a imprime^ sur eux, ils sont freres en eeci: qu*ils n’ont jamais permis a leur metier d * inf luer sur leur temperament, dans lequel lfinstinct s*est toujours tenu a lTecart de 1*intellect .... Ils oiit appris s a . se conformer en apparenee aux exigences de la civilisation; mais ils restent primitifs, impuissan^s envers leur nature essentielle; incapahles mimes d*eviter les occasions qui l'excitent . . • .14 An excess of emotion allied to an impatience of thought is their distinguishing mark. Their nerves are de veloped at the expense of their intellect, with the result that they are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others. Abandoned to their own pleasure, they fail to comprehend suffering in their victims; egoists, they are facile liars and hypocrites in their relations with the women they wish to exploit; sensualists, they are change able. Their appetites once satiated, they await new stimulus, yet are free to retake the old should they find there an air of added novelty. Their glutted desire trans forms itself into ennui and their lives form one series of fruitless efforts wherein they spend themselves without 14 Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy, 314. 56 arriving at stability. The instinct to live and to enjoy is incarnate; the blind force that no reason can check. And their personality being unique and not enfeebled by the revolt of the intellect, they recognize neither the power ful hesitations nor the reproaches of conscience. They stride directly toward the attainment of their object either by force or by guile. They carry no ball and chain of altruism; they are animated but by their power of will and the passion of their desire. These men with their sharp intellects, inflammable faithless passions, and shallow good nature, are typical of the sudden, brutal, and impulsive attraction found in the passion. They represent to the fullest the "unvoiced call" of the flesh felt by Tolstoi when he wrote his theory in the Kreutzer Sonata: "The noblest and the most poetic form of love, as we term it, depends not upon moral qual ities, but upon physical intimacy .... to be more exaet, ’physical pre-intimacy.*" And born of purely physical proximities, the lot of love must necessarily be hazardous. For with Alec,1® Troy,16 Fitzpiers,17 sensuality is domin 15 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. ^ Fa** from the Madding Crowd. 17 The Woodlanders 57 ant; the intellect is stifled; desire puts an end to con scious decision. At the first onset of the emotion, the intelligence becomes the natural enemy and passion holds the field. And amid this inner conflict, face to face with fleshly desire, the man no longer contemplates the end towards which he advances as an individual. He becomes one with the male species which opposes him to the female. He cares not for the disastrous results of his passion to the woman when society judges her. The ascendency which the male exercises at first sight over the female soon to become subject to the law of his desire is stressed throughout the novels. A few nota tions will be adequate for illustration: He seemed to be her ruler rather than her equal.1® *He was like a magician to me. I think he was one. .... He could move me as a loadstone moves a speck of steel.T19 Marjery always declared that there seemed some power in the stranger that was more than human, something magical and compulsory, when he seized her . . . The next evidences of his influence upon her were 16 Ibid., 148. 19 "Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid,” in Changed Man and Other Stories, 321. 20 Ibid.. 321. 58 singular enough and it would require a neurologist to fully explain them «... Without a moment’s warning .... she would start from her seat in the chimney corner, as if she had received a galvanic shock, and spring convulsively towards the ceiling.21 At hearing him speak all the delicate activities in the young lady’s person stood still: she stopped like a clock. When she could again fence with the per~ ception which had caused all this, she breathed.22 This acceptance, even eager acknowledgment, of masculine domination on the part of his heroines explains the "intoxi cation” of the charm of Fitzpiers, the seductive libertine, for the exquisite Grace Melbury;25 it explains the surrender of the essentially fine-natured Tess to the gross sensualist A l e c ; 2 4 it explains the seductive power which a good-for- nothing Troy can exercise over servant and mistress alike.25 The second type of father, found in "The Christen ing”26 and "Rake-Hell Muses,"27 presents a combination of 21 "The Fiddler of the Reels," in Life’s Little Ironies. 156. 88 The Hand of Ethelberta. 125. 23 The Woodlanders. 24 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. ^ ffar from the Madding Crowd. 86 Collected Poems, 224. 87 I^id.. 653. 59 what may be termed animalism plus a certain humane logic. In both of these poems, preachments against marriage, is found the old situation of woman betrayed and man refusing conventional reparation. Stupid chance has decreed that two ill-assorted creatures shall be united by ties of flesh. Though Nature has taken part in the conspiracy, instinct alone is satisfied, contentment is not assured. Thus, the refusal of conventional reparation is not the essentially heartless and selfish denial of Alec2® and Troy;29 it is based upon a thoughtful conclusion that "one midnight passion” is not a rock upon which to build enduring love. For, in the author's words, "The man to love rarely coin cides with the hour of loving.”30 Nature provides the man or the woman with a partner unfitted, to be a companion with whom life-long harmony may be achieved. Lending criminal aid, Nature unites two utterly unlike beings in a moment of madness. The author sees the hopelessness and tragedy in the invincible "tentatively” of the relations which may occur between a man and a woman in this framework of real ity and imagination when "Rake-Hell Muses": 2® Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Fa** from the Madding Crowd. 30 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 44. Chained to me year by year. My moody madness Would make her golden gladness An intermell. Our unborn, first her moan Will grow her guerdon, Until from blot and burden A joyanoe swell. Of the disgrace, maybe ’He shunned to share it, Being false,* they*ll say. 1*11 bear Time will dispel . The calumny, and prove This much about me, That she lives best without me Who would live well. That, this once, not self-love But good intention Pleads that against convention We two rebel For, is one moonlight dance, One midnight passion A rock whereon to fashion Life’s citadel? Prove they their power to prance Life’s miles together From upper slope to nether Who trip an ell? . . . .This great good will grace Our lives* division, She’s saved from more misprision Though I plumb hell. Si- Hardy, Collected Poems, 653 seq 61 Herein, in addition to suggesting ridicule for a passing attraction considered permanent, the man touches the almost universal idea expressed in ”The Dark-Eyed Gentleman” that the present individual misery with the passage of years becomes both individual and universal good, for Hardy stres ses the abolition of human categories in the Interest of a general good, a theme expanded ironically in ”The Husband*s View,” In this poem, the indiscreet wife bewails the day when her husband must know of her pre-marital sin. But the broad-minded spouse, the expectant father, knows of and accepts the situation philosophically: Yes, , • , . sweet Nan; I have known it all the time. I am not a particular man; Misfortunes are no crime. And what with our serious need Of sons for soldiering, That accident, indeed, To maids is a useful thing!32 ”The Christening” is a poetic statement of Jude’s 33 and Suefs convictions that the "formal matrimonial common place is love’s sepulchre.” The mother explains that the baby’s father is In the woods afar. otp Ibid., 232. 33 Jude the Obscure. 62 He says there is none he’d rather Meet under moon or star Than me, of all that are. To clasp me in lovelike weather, Wish fixing when, He says: To he together At will, Just now and then, Makes him the blest of men; But chained and doomed for life To slovening As vulgar man and wife He says, is another thing: Yea: sweet Love’s sepulchring!3^ Somewhere between this group and the next, those fathers who return to make conventional reparation, is ’ ’ Panthera"33 with its answer to Joseph’s33 questioning: I have endured too much misery because of this child bearing. How can I refute their hateful words, or find an answer for my enemies? It is known far and wide that from the glorious temple of the Lord I willingly received a maiden free from sin, and now all is changed by I know not what. Based on one of the old traditions clustered around the birth of Christ, the poem unfolds the simple story of the Roman soldier’s illicit love for the innocent Mary, his leave, his return after thirty years to find That he— the man whose ardent blood was mine— 34 Hardy, Collected Poems. 244 sea. 35 Ifrid., 262—268. Cynewulf, Christ, translated by C, H. Whitman, 8. 63 Had waked sedition among the Jews, And hurled insulting parlance at their God, Whose temple hulked upon the adjoining hill, Yowing that he would raze it, that himself Was great as he whom they adored, And by descent, moreover, was their king.3” The father’s final, and not un-Shakespearian words, are full of unknowing irony: Fors FortunaI He who goes fathering Gives frightful hostages to hazardryJ3° Just as "Panthera" discovers that A son may be a comfort or a curse, A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea worse— A criminal . . . .3» Captain William de Stancey^0 finds his child an evil neme- sis--Bare, the proud captain*s illegitimate and criminal son, comes to blackmail him after the mother’s death. The boy is a thief and a deceiver, a bold and unscrupulous criminal. His desire is fixed; his father must marry the wealthy Paula Power. She wishes to unite with aristocracy, and Dare wishes his father to marry her money. It is he who arranges the Captain’s meeting with the heiress; it is 37 Hardy, Collected Poems. 266 sep. hoc. cit. 39 Ibid., 263. 40 Hardy, A Laodicean. 64: he who discredits his father*s rival, Somerset, in Paula*s eyes; and, finally, it is through Dare*s over-reaching him self in his hold plans that the girl discovers the trick that has been played on Somerset, and at her demand that Dare be arrested, de Stancey, on their wedding day has to confess his paternity. This forced confession wrecks Dare*s plans for money and the father’s plan for happiness. This story of the relationship of Dare and de Stancey is the only instance in Hardy of an illegitimate child’s serving, it may be considered, as an instrument, though unconscious, of a deceived mother’s revenge. Yet, even in this type of man a certain late conven tionality or conscience sometimes asserts itself. The de ferred desire for reparation is the theme of ’ ’ For Conscience Sake."4' 1 After twenty years, "a mood of seriousness and a sense of principle, approximating often to a religious sentiment, which had been evolving itself in his breast for years”42 made itself uncomfortably prominent in Dr. Mill- borne, with the result that he decided that the one course he could pursue as a man of honor was to return and marry the woman he had disgraced. The irony of the situation 41 Hardy, Life * s Little Ironies. 22-44. 42 Ibid., 27, 65 arises when it transpires that she is far from disgraced; in faet, she and the daughter are so very prosperous and happy that abject pleading is necessary to bring about the desired marriage. And it is only after this conventional reparation that the secret, so carefully guarded, comes to light when the daughters very proper lover notes the striking resemblance between his fiancey e and her supposed stepfather. Then, for the good of them all, it is decided that the father must leave. This he does, quite firmly convinced that "whatever the remedy may be in such cases, it is not marriage.”4® A similarly unhappy result of bowing to convention in such instances is depicted in "On the Y/estern Circuit.”44 In this story, after the man has married the woman, the mother of his child, he discovers that the delightful let ters, prime cause of his reawakened interest in her, were written, not by her but by her mistress, in an attempt to bring about the legal union. The unhappy future for mother, father, and child is forecast-: ’What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said, timidly, from the other window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god. 43 Ibid., 4S. 44 Ibid.. 76-107. 66 ‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed ”Anna,n* he replied with dreary resignation*4® The third group, composed of the more universal type of parent, offers wider scope for analysis. It includes not only the self-effacing Loveday46 and Chickerel,47 the genial Captain Vye,4® but the dominant Swanseourt4' 9 and the volcanic Henchard.51 The first two, Loveday and Chickerel, serve more as background than as definite forces for good or evil in the novels in which they are respectively found. Neither possesses such dominant characteristics as result in great sorrow or great happiness for those around them; they seem very normal, kind, loving, and generous. And old Captain Yye, Eustacia*s grandfather, the only paternal influence she ever knew, exerts no positive influence on the tempes 45 Ibid.. 107. 46 The Trumpet Major. 47 Tbe Hand of Ethelberta. 48 Return of the Native. 4^ A °f Blue Eyes. 50 The Woodlanders. 51 Mayor of Casterbridge. 67 tuous course of her life. The only time his prevailing in difference to her movements is disturbed occurs when he learns of her part in the Christmas mumming and dressed in men's clothes; and then it is not the active self but her attire which he criticizes: •'Dammy, how 'twould have pleased me forty years ago— But r<e member,' he cautioned, 'no more of it, my girl, Tou may walk the heath night or day, as you please, so that you don't bother me; but no figuring in breeches again,'52 The other father in this same novel, old Grandfer' Cantle, is of interest because of his individuality. In his relationship with Ghristian, his half-witted son, the usual order is reversed: the son in this case feels it is his mission to "stay at home to keep down father's spirits to the decent pitch that becomes an old man." An example of paternal love almost incapable of classification is that feeling Michael Henchard bears for Elizabeth-Jane,55 This uneven affection, his early love, later aversion, and final deep devotion,is in keeping with the elemental character of this "swift moving giant of im pulse," Immoderate in everything, this man of varied passions first loves her strongly as a daughter, and later, Hardy, Return of the Native. 181. 53 Mayor of Oasterbridge. 68 when he learns she is not his own, hates her with equal in tensity. Indeed, this man, considered the most original as well as the most forcible character Hardy ever drew, is most truthfully seen in all his contrarieties. The master- less vein in his masterful nature crops out incessantly in all of his associations; nothing is certain except that he will do the worst for himself. He wins sympathy by the vigorous life in him, and pity by his likeness to a "netted lion." After Mrs. Henchard’s death he finds himself ter ribly alone: his wife dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper, Farfrae, estranged; Elizabeth-Jane ig norant of what he assumes his true relation to her. He would recall the girl whom he believed to be his own: ’Elizabeth, it is I who am your father, and not Rich ard Newsome. Shame alone prevented your wretched parents from owning this to you while both of ’em were alive.......... I’d rather have your scorn, your fear, anything than your ignorance; *tis that I hate! .... I am your father; why should you cry? • • • • Don’t turn against me— though I was a drinking man once, and used your mother roughly— I’ll be kinder to you than he wasI I’ll do anything, if you will only look upon me as your father!’54 And, ironically, it is while he is looking for the documents to prove his contention that he comes on the letter his wife 54 Ibid., 146. 69 has left, "Not to be opened till Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding- day*” But with usual impetuosity, he reads the note and discovers within it the devastating news that the girl is not his child; his own child had died three months after the ”sale” of his wife, and Elizabeth-Jane is in reality Newsome’s daughter. Then his love turns to dislike, for in the ’ ’statuesque repose of the young girl’s countenance Richard Newsome’s was unmistakably reflected; he could not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.”55 Misery had taught him nothing more than defiant en durance of it. His wife was dead, and the first im pulse for revenge died with the thought that she was beyond him. He looked out at the night as at a fiend. Henohard like all of his kind was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him. .... If he had not revealed his.past history to Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for the papers .... The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught the girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship with him. The ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from a fellow creature.55 But when adversity overcomes him, and she alone stays with him, the race urge, the desire for love, reasserts it self, and-his devotion for her becomes the strongest factor in his life. It is when Newsome, her true father, returns 55 ifria*, iso 56 Ibid., 151 70 to claim her that Henchard realizes the depth of his awak ened feeling, and to keep her he lies determinedly. In his love for the girl he is changed: he has hazarded everything on a lie to keep Elizabeth-Jane, but at the very end his affection for this girl who is not his becomes selfless. He becomes a "netted lion" purged of his former despotism, and schooled to accept her merest whim as his law. ?/hen he finds he must lose her, he, an old hand at bearing anguish in silence, sternly subdues his grief and leaves, only to be drawn irresistibly to her, to receive her reproaches, and to make his final plea and promise: ’Gall me worthless old Henchard— anything— but donft *ee be so cold as this! Oh, my maid— I see you have another— a real father in my place. Then you know all; but don't give all your thought to him! Do save a little room for me! .... Don't distress your self on my account. .... I would not wish it. .... I have done wrong in coming to 'ee— I see my error. But it is only for once, so forgive it. I'll never trouble *ee again, Elizabeth-Jane— no, not to my dying day!'57 The little starved goldfinch, the wedding gift he had brought to her, but which, since "it was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his worst ac cusers," he did not present in the face of her reproaches, causes the girl to repent'and to try to find him and help 57 Ibid., 396 71 him. But the decision is made too late, and his will in the simplicity of its desolation is his epitaph; Michael Henchard*s Will That Elizabeth Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. & that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground, & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell, & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remmember me. To this I put my name. 58 Michael Henchard. As McDowall has noted, few tragedies in fiction have ended on so consummate a note;5^ it takes us into the same region as the final simplicity of King Lear. Henchard*s character is his fate. But, be it noted, this love of Henchard for Elizabeth-Jane, though tragic in its final solution, pre sents one of the few instances in the novels where the emo tion is a definitely ennobling influence in the life of man, A more usual relationship is portrayed in the feel ing that the minister Glare holds for his son Angel. The father is the typical mid-Victorian theologian, 58 » 404 seg. 59 Arthur S. McDowall, Thomas Hardy« 74, 78 a spiritual descendant in. the direct line from Wy- cliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, . . . . a man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in his youth made up his mind once for all on the deeper questions of exist ence , and admitted no further reasoning on them thenceforward.........To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Tar Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in high degree had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it.6$ It is, then, quite impossible for him to understand his son, a product of the new school of individual thinking. He never argues with the boy, because his pre-determinism on all subjects admits no questioning; he preaches at him austerely for hours on any occasion when they differ. With such a father, kind and loving though he may be, it is but a natural consequence that Angel is increasingly conscious of a widening divergence between the life at the vicarage and his own, between his father's views and hopes for him and his own desires for his future. Hardy portrays one other theologian as father: Dr. Swanscourt, father of Elfride, a worldly theologian "slipped accidentally into a black coat and carrying it with more grace than gravity, and more gravity than godli ness. "63- The lack of understanding suggested in Clare*s An Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 177. Henry Charles Duff in, Thomas Hardy. 185. 73 father attains tragic significance in A Pair of Blue Eyes. Here, Dr. Swanscourt in his domineering impatience of opposition and blindness to his daughter*s welfare is the motivating force for the tragedy of her life. He dismisses Smith, her first lover, and when she goes to Knight to try to affect a reconciliation after their misunderstanding, the father finds her and demands that she return with him. and bring no further disgrace upon his name and family "by acts that would be a scandal to a washerwoman*s daughter. *^2 And Elfride, carrying out her decision "to do anything for the benefit of her family, and turn her useless life to some account,"63 marries Lord Luxellian, her father*s choice, and dies without regaining any of her former happi ness. Dr. Swanscourt forms an anticipatory study for Mel- bury in The Woodlanders. These two fathers are illustra tive of the idea entertained by many parents that the child always retains its youthful inability to form sound de cisions regarding his own individual welfare, Mrs. Yeo- bright voiced this belief when, after Clym has been driven from her by her jealousy, she cries: "0 Thomasin, he was 62 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 405. 63 Ibid.. 451. 74 so good as a little boy— so tender and kind”; Swanscourt felt it when he brusquely dismissed Smith and later Knight; Melbury shows it when he blindly dictates to Grace where she shall bestow her love. When Grace sees Suke Samson leaving Fitzpiers* home early in the morning, and, con scious of the significance of the scene, decides she can not marry him, the father declares: ’There*s a time for a woman to alter her mind; and there’s a time when she can no longer alter it, if she has any right eye to her parents* honor and the seemliness of things. That time has come. I won’t say to ye, you shall marry him. But I will say that if you refuse, I shall forever be ashamed and aweary of you as a daughter, and shall look upon you as the hope of my life no more.*64 Consequently, she does marry Fitzpiers, and he, true to his type, leaves her and elopes with Mrs. Charmond. However, even after this disgrace, at the first suggestion of the man’s desire to return, the father resumes his rule of dic tator and demands that Grace take her husband again: ’Now .... we must make the best of what has been a very bad matter. The man is repenting; the partner of his shame, I hear, is gone away from him to Switzer land, so that chapter of his life is probably over. If he choses to make a home for ye, I think you should not say him nay, Grace. Certainly he cannot very well live at Hintock without a blow to his pride; but if he can bear that, and likes Hintock best, why there’s the empty wing of the house as it was before.’65 Hardy, The Woodlanders. 167 65 Ibid., S93. 75 Grace protests, but the father is adamant: ♦Why not?* said he, a little of his former doggedness returning.........* Surely it is the most respect able thing to do? .... I don*t like this state that you are in— neither married nor single. It hurts me, and it hurts you, and it will always be remembered against us at Hintock. There has never been any scandal like it in the family before.*66 At this she rebels, but with the tragic consequence of her former lover Giles*s death. Finally, however, and this time not because of her father’s intervention, she does re turn to Fitzpiers after his second determined wooing. It is then that Melbury with unconscious irony remarks: "You are your own mistress.”67 Thus Melbury*s affection for his daughter, as strong a passion as any portrayed in the book, centered as it is in social ambition, brings unhappiness to those most di rectly concerned: to Giles, the son of his old friend; to Grace, his daughter, married to a libertine; and, finally, to Marty South, the girl who loves Giles with all the depth of her quiet nature. "The Grave by the Handpost**6® presents yet another aspect of the tragedy of paternal intervention in the life 66 ifcia* * 294. 67 T . . Loc. cit. 68 Hardy, Changed Man and Other Stories. 127-143. 76 of the child* The father here insists upon the son’s en tering the army, though Luke was a "home-keeping, peace- loving youth." Later, the son writes bitter letters, re proaching his father for advising him to embark on a career for which he finds himself unsuited. Suffering fatigues and illnesses without gaining glory, and engaged in a cause which he does not understand or appreciate, he bitterly condemns his father for his interference in the course of his life plan. The father, broken by the son’s recrimina tions, first takes to drink and finally commits suicide. Jude as a father is almost outside possible classi fication; real in all of his other relationships, as a father he presents a strangly unreal picture. Though his earthly love for Arabella, the flesh, is natural, and his deep devotion for Sue, the spiritual, is the truest thing in his life, his feeling for his children is a product of theory rather than of fact. When his and Arabella’s son, Father Time, is to come to him and Sue, he remarks: ’What a view of life he must have, mine or not mine I .... I must say that if I were better off, I should not stop a moment to think whose he might be. I would take him and bring him up. The beggarly question of parentage— what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. The excessive regard of parents for their own chil dren, and their dislike of other people’s is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, 77 and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at the hot- torn.* $9 And even after the catastrophe when his child, Father Time, has murdered his and Suets children, and then committed suicide himself, he can hut theorize coldly and academi cally ahout the event: ♦The doctor says there are such hoys springing up amongst us— hoys of a sort unknown in the last genera tion— the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power enough to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. And later; ♦Some say that the elders should rejoice when their children die in infancy.......... Nothing can he done .... Things are as they are, and will he brought to their destined issue. *72 . It is apparent, then, that paternal love generally tip n rz is a means of individual tragedy. Chickerel,Loveday, ^ and Captain Vye74 can hardly he considered true represen Hardy, Jude the Obscure. 384. 70 Ibid., 400. 71 Ibid., 408. ^ fhe Hand of Ethelherta. 73 The Trumpet Major. 74 Return of the Native. 78 tatives of Hardy’s fathers. They are too much essentially independent personalities to take shape as parents; they affect in no way positively, either for good or for evil, those with whom they are associated. Jude75 stands without classification, though it is true that through his general trend of life, his defiance of conventions, his refusal to conform, he was primarily instrumental through his child in bringing catastrophe to all involved. In contrast to these parents is the other body of individualists as 7 fi 77 fathers, the sensualists, such as D’Urberville w and Troy, who, although they assume no direct paternal responsibility, bring through their association tragic unhappiness to others. But by far the most general type of fatherhood in found in those men whose lives are very definitely a part of the life trend of those associated with them: John Durbeyfield, the father in "The Orphaned Old Maid,”78 and the more universal type presented in Clare,7® Swans- 75 Jude the Obscure. 76 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 77 Far from the Madding Crowd. 78 Hardy, Collected Poems. 228. 79 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 79 AO AT court, and Melbury. These men, neither passively nega tive like Chickerel and Loveday in their influence, nor tragically negative as are D’Urberville and Troy, exert for good or evil a very full influence upon the lives of their children. It is old Durbeyfield’s parasitic devotion to Tess that is the first cause of her sorrow; and the non understanding selfishness and ambition of the convention- bound Swanscourt and Melbury, demanding obedience to paternal rulings at the sacrifice of individual happiness, work for ultimate and complete tragedy in lives to which they should bring a depth of true vision and understanding love. 80 A Pair of Blue Eyes* 81 The Woodlanders. CHAPTER IY BROTHER AND SISTER LOYE Love between children of the same parents, a minor theme in literature, presents necessarily smaller field for analysis in Hardy than is accorded the more fundamental passions. Since in its very nature it must lack that basic depth found in the love of parent for child, it partakes more of the aspect of a social relationship and becomes, consequently, a weaker emotion. The affection between brothers and sisters pictured in The Hand of Ethelberta presents a rather uncommon and at times highly amusing analysis of love within the family. Ethelberta insists upon helping the somewhat unwilling members of her family to high place through her plan for marriage with wealth and position. They, not caring great ly to be elevated within the social scale and quite satis fied with their lot in life, tolerantly aid her in the achievement of her aims. When she finally attains her goal, their happiness is greatest, not because of the ban ishment of all their financial stress, but because each member of the family is at last free to follow his own pur suits unmolested by the aggressive Ethelberta, who can visit them but "four or five times a year, because she can- 81 not come so often as she would because of her lofty posi tion, which has its juties.**^ Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean, two early ex amples of the over-use of mystery and coincidence in the novels, anticipate later studies of the tragedy through self-sacrifice that often becomes a part of this relation ship, In both of these novels the love between brother and sister is unequal; the sister*s feeling partakes of a maternalism of devotion that expresses itself in self- sacrifice. This aspect of the devotion is indicated in the decision Cytherea makes to marry Manston in order that her brother may benefit: TWhy do I marry him?* she said to herself. *Because Owen, dear Owen, my brother wishes me to marry him. Because Mr. Manston is, and has been, uniformly kind to Owen, and to me. wAct in obedience to the dictates of common-sense," Owen said, **and dread the sting of poverty.” .... Scheme to marry? I*d rather scheme to die I .... I know I am not pleasing my heart; I know that if I were only concerned, I should like risking a single future. But why should I please my useless self over-much, when by doing otherwise I please those who are more valuable than I?*2 And the tragedy that shadows her life, the discovery of Manston*s bigamy, and the terrible events that follow this discovery, Manston*s murder of his first wife and his own Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta. 477. 2 Hardy, A Laodicean. 278. 82 suicide, result direetly from this desire on her part to model her life according to the dictates imposed by her own desire to aid her brother# The love between Charlotte de Stancey and her brother, Sir William de Stancey, is another example of unequal love. Charlotte is drawn unhappily between love for her brother and loyalty to Paula, her friend. She cannot but believe that Paula would be happier with Somerset, and this in spite of the fact that she, herself, loves the latter. However, she finds herself unable to desert her brother, and though continuing "neutral," as she describes her position, she is made his ally nevertheless and is happy when she discovers the reciprocal affection between the brother she loves and the friend she adores. Captain de Stancey does not take her into his confidence fully, however, and her distress of mind and agony of spirit are great when she discovers that it is through her loyalty to her friend in acquainting her with the lies Dare, her brother’s illegitimate son, has told against Somerset that her brother’s marriage with Paula is prevented. And at last, having given of herself and, as she believes, failed, the only recourse she finds is to enter a convent and there hope to discover a peace the world has denied her. The tragedy resulting from the transformation of a minor emotion into something deeper and more basic than it 83 is intrinsically is portrayed in "Alicia's Diary."3 Alicia, the elder sister, loves the younger Caroline with a love approximating a high and self-abnegating maternal devotion in its willingness to sacrifice unquestioningly. Unhappi ness, however, results from the love that develops between Charles, Caroline's lover, and Alicia. He had met and oared for the younger sister, but after meeting Alicia he recognizes that the feeling he holds for the younger sister is but a "protective, tutelary affection" such as she in spires in everyone. Caroline senses this change in his love, and after his departure sickens and nearly dies. In a frenzy of remorse Alicia sends for the man and implores that he carry out a mock marriage with the younger girl in order to bring her some happiness before her death. But as a result of the subterfuge Caroline, radiantly happy, recovers. The real sacrifice comes when, after the sister has discovered the deception, Alicia insists that Charles renounce all thought of their promised happiness together and legalize the mock marriage. Charles protests: 'But, Alicia, let us understand each other. Do you mean to.tell me, once for all, that if your sister is still willing to become my wife you absolutely make way for her and will not entertain any thought of our love and happiness?* 3 Hardy, Changed Man and Other Stories, 85-127. 84 But Alicia is adamant: ’I do tell you so— you belong to her, .... How can I do otherwise?*4 The sacrifice is made, but the tragedy of the selfishness of such love comes with the suicide of Charles. Alicia writes: ^Caroline lives on meekly in her grief, and will probably out-live it; while I--but never mind me.1,5 Another example of the lasting devotion, almost maternal, is that expressed by Tess Durbeyfield for her little brothers and sisters. It is their want that drives her to Alec after Angel has deserted her and when no work can be had. Alee tempts her in their name, knowing her passionate devotion to them. And when Angel does return she states simply: * It is too late.......... I waited and waited for you. .... He was very kind to me, and to mother, and to all of us after Father*s death.*6 After Tess has killed Alec, fled with Clare, and enjoyed four days of the happiness that she knows cannot last, her thoughts turn to the sister she loves so well: fAngel, if anything happens to me, will you watch 4 Ibid., 131. 5 Ibid., 125. 6 Hardy, Tess of the D«Urbervilles. 434. 85 over ’Liza-Lu for my sake? .... 0 Angel— I wish you would marry her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. 0 if you would! • . . . 0, I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits .... She has all the best of me without the bad of me, and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us.*7 An affection difficult to classify is that presented in "The Tragedy of Two Ambitions.”® In this tale the brothers are banded together by ambition rather than by love, and see in their drunkard father an obstacle to their success and the hopes of social advancement they hold for their only sister. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that the goal they have set for themselves is the attainment of a high place in the church, and yet they will exercise none of the tolerance and forbearance they preach to this father who needs it so badly, and, in reality, become his murderers when, after he has denounced them as hypocrites and declared his intention of exposing them, they stand immobile while he drowns in the weir. ’He has fallen in!* said Cornelius, starting for ward to run for the place at which his father had vanished. Joshua rushed to the otherTs side before he had taken ten steps. ’Stop, stop, what are you thinking of?* he whispered, hoarsely, grasping Cornelius’s arm. 7 Ibid., 452. 8 Hardy, Life*s Little Ironies. 44-77. 86 1 Pulling him out!* ’Yes, yes— so am I. But— wait a moment .... Her life and happiness, you know— Cornelius— and your reputation and mine~and our chance of rising to gether, all three— f He clutched his brother’s arm to the bone; and as they stood breathless the splashing and floundering in the weir continued. .... The floundering and splashing grew weaker, and they could hear gurgling words: ?Help— I*m drowned!* .... Cornelius started forward at last, and Joshua al most simultaneously. Two or three minutes brought them to the brink of the stream .... *He has drifted into the culvert . . . . *9 Years later, after life has accorded them so-called success, the enormity of their crime and its incompatibility with their life’s work becomes apparent to them: *1 see him every night_, * murmured Cornelius . . . .! *Ah, we read our Hebrews to little account, Jos! .... To have endured the cross, despising the shame— there lay greatness.*1° A tragic example of misdirected brotherly devotion is presented in "Master John Horseleigh, Knight,"-*-1 The brother, who has been away for years and has cared little for his sister or her affairs, suddenly returns and is led to believe that the sister’s second husband has deceived 9 Itoid.. 68. 10 Ibid., 75. Hardy, Changed Man and Other Stories, 231-249. 87 her and is not married.to her. Immediately, he assumes an aggressive part, and since he is "a man with considerable reserve of strong passion," he does not wait to Question but denounces the husband precipitately: •!Edy, ye fond one, he’s not your husband! Th’rt not his wife; and the child is a bastard.*I2 He will listen to no protests; later, when the husband comes he repeats the accusation, and in the ensuing fight kills him, Developments prove, however, that the sister was lawfully married, and the brother, through his stubborn anger having ruined his sister’s life, leaves England to be seen no more. The most natural and most extended example of broth erly devotion found in Hardy’s works is that which forms a major theme in The Trumpet Major, in Chew’s phrase "the sweetest and serenest of the novels.The devotion pic tured between John and Bob Loveday more nearly approximates a natural affection existing under normal conditions than do many of the other examples cited, notably those found in "The Tragedy of Two .Ambitions" and Desperate Remedies. These two brothers remind one of the "faithful friends" or the "two noble kinsmen" of earlier literature. Although 12 Ibid.. 243. 13 Samuel Claggett Chew, Thomas Hardy, 22. 88 it is true that John’s devotion is essentially deeper and stronger than Bob’s, the reader never feels that the latter is merely a passive recipient of this love and sacrifice. Indeed, he rises to quite noble heights within the novel. The theme is the old one of two fair-minded and devoted brothers in love with the same woman. Though it is true that the one, John, is representative of the Aristotelian "mean” in Hardy’s men, one who is able to subdue personal aspiration and regard self-gratification as of secondary importance to the task of service to those he loves, Bob, the younger brother, is never a villain; he is always charm ing if incontinent. The story of this devotion is, however, illustrative of the Hardian idea that no affectionate re lationship is quite free from pain and sacrifice, and with in the story John makes the sacrifice. The first renunciation of personal desire comes with John’s discovery of his brother’s interest in Anne Garland, and his consequent decision to relinquish all hope for her love. Accordingly, when Bob accuses him of loving the girl, he replies: *0 Bob, you are mistaken! .... When I first saw her I admired her, and I admire her now, and like her. I like her so well that I shall be glad to see you marry her. .... I am in love, Bob; but— not with Anne.......... She is a very lovely woman, you know. But we won’t say anything about it— it dashes a man 89 go,t14 However, Bob later discovers the heroic lie his brother has told, and in turn determines to sacrifice his true feelings that John may benefit: ♦Jack, now I see it all .... Youfve been pretending that you care for this woman that I mightn’t blame myself for heaving you out from the other— which is what I’ve done without knowing it.......... I’ve been making you unhappy all these weeks and weeks through my thoughtlessness. They seemed to think at home, you know, John, that you had grown not to care for her; or I wouldn’t have done it for all the world.’15 It is this feeling that causes Bob to decide to leave his home and return to his life as a sailor. His parting words to John serve as excellent character analysis for both brothers: ’Now, Jack, these be my last words to you: I give her up. I go away on purpose, and I shall be away a long time. If in that time she should list over towards ye ever so little, mind you take her. You have more right to her than I. You chose her when my mind was elsewhere, and you best deserve her; for I have never known you to forget one woman, while I’ve forgotten a dozen. Take her then, if she will come, and God bless both of ye.’16 And later, when word is brought of Bob’s character istic unfaithfulness, Anna does begin to realize the worth 14 Hardy, The Trumpet Major, 266 15 Ibid., 301. 16 Loc. eit. 90 of the steadfast John. However, the elder "brother, still loyal to Bob, feels that his brother’s decision was made hastily and writes to ascertain his true feelings. Then word comes from the fickle Bob that his heart is returning ”to the old anchorage again, after all,” and he pleads that John "keep a brotherly eye upon Anne, and guide her mind 17 back to me.” But even after this declaration he fails to return, and, in his prolonged absence, Anne practically de clares her love for the elder brother. At this point John is so much a type of self-sacrificing brotherhood, and so little a man, that the character almost forfeits convic tion. His letter to Bob is indicative: ’I write these few lines to let you know that if you want Anne Garland you must come at once— you must come instantly, and post-haste— or she will be gone I Somebody else wants her, and she wants him! Tt is your last chance.’18 At this the repentant Bob returns, and after a coaxing "that would have been enough to win three ordinary English women, five French, and ten Mulatters”!9 wins Anne again. John, self-sacrificing to the last, leaves his love to his vacil lating brother, and with a disguise of brave gaiety, leaves 17 Ibid., 340 18 Ibid., 360 19 Ibid., 385 91 with ringing step "to blow his trumpet, till silenced for ever upon one of the bloody battlefields of Spain*"20 Clearly, then, love between brother and sister leads to little complete happiness. In the relationship, one generally holds a stronger, more basic feeling, and is a sacrifice to the other’s selfishness, Nature^s law worhs that way. It is when this feeling attaches to itself this deeper significance, this paternalism of attitude suggested often in the relationship between elder brother and younger, or elder brother and younger sister, that unhappiness re sults. The tragedy often a part of the emotion comes, then, from the attempt to convert what is essentially a minor emotion into a deep and fundamental passion. It is the fate of the one whose love is made strong and deep to suffer the unhappiness attendant on the necessarily thwarted de sires and the sacrifices made, even though willingly, for the one loved. The real tragedy arises from this addition by one of a depth of devotion not a part of the feeling it self, and not experienced by the other. This it is that causes the unhappiness in the relationships pictured in Desperate Remedies, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, "Alicia’s Diary," and The Trumpet Ma.jor. Loc. cit. CHAPTER V FRIENDSHIP Love of man for man existing independent of bond has been a major theme in world literature. In this relation ship, the result of choice and existing independently of convention’s law, man has seen opportunity for humanity’s unselfish development. The traditional friendships of Damon and Pythias, of David and Jonathan, and the universal friendship pictured in the New Testament have presented field for broad analysis and much glorification. The maxim, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend," has been the keynote for this body of literature. Hardy was not willing merely to glorify; his belief that no previous general conception of what ought to be should be permitted to influence recognition of the facts themselves as such-1 - has permitted him to offer a wide canvas upon which are limned all kinds of friendship where in truth is the standard. As is to be expected in melodrama, Desperate Remedies presents a strange and uncommon picture of the friendship between two women. The feeling portrayed as existing be- Ernest Brennecke, Life of Thomas Hardy, 168 93 tween Miss Aldclyffe and Gytherea partakes of that "strange fascination" reminiscent of the Gothic novel. Miss Ald clyffe, when she learns that her maid is the daughter of her former lover, first flies into a passion of anger and then as suddenly repents and goes to the girl, abjectly praying her love. Later, finding that the girl has a lover, her curiously possessive, almost Freudian, emotion is sug gested: ’I thought I had at last found an artless woman who had not been sullied by man*s lips, and who had not practiced or been practiced upon by the arts which ruin all the truth and sweetness and goodness in us. Find a girl if you can, whose mouth and ears have not been made a regular highway of some man or another. .... You are as bad as I— we are all alike; and I — an old fool— have been sipping at your mouth as if it were honey, because I fancied no wasting lover knew the spot. But a minute ago, you seemed to me like a fresh spring meadow— now you seem a dusty high way. But later she repents her disavowal and pleads: *And now think how much I like you .... I shall never forget you for anybody else, as men do— never. .... Now will you promise to live with me always, and always be taken care of, and never deserted?*^ The strange quality of this feeling is maintained throughout the book. It serves as a motive for much that happens, but it also adds to the bewilderment of the reader © Hardy, Desperate Remedies. 97 3 Ibid.. 100. 94 when later Miss Aldelyffe favors Manston*s suit, and insists by every means in her power on his marriage with Gytherea. This policy is directly at variance with her avowed jealousy of any love save her own in the girl’s life. But the dis covery that Manston is the woman’s illegitimate son clari fies the situation. However, this unusual friendship works for evil throughout the novel, because the desire of the older woman that the two whom she loves marry brings about the ultimate catastrophe^— Gytherea’s unhappiness, Manston*s murder of his first wife, and his own suicide. The friend ship, however, is saved from becoming a mere prostitution of love on the older woman’s part because of her real devo tion to the girl, and her belief that her plan will ulti mately bring happiness to all; ’By such toilsome labor .... I got him here as my steward. And I wanted to see him your husband, GythereaI— the husband of my true lover’s child. It was a sweet dream to me . . . . Pity me— 0, pity me! To die unloved is more than I can bear! I loved your father, and I love him now.*4 But instead of happiness resulting, this selfish use of such a relationship in furtherance of personal desire brings sorrow and tragedy to all concerned* Another example of unhappiness in friendship aris ing from causes inherent in the emotion itself is found in 4 > 462 • 95 the devotion pictured between Elizabeth-Jane Henchard and K Lucetta Templeman. This feeling is comprised of hero-wor ship for an unworthy person on Elizabeth-Jane*s part, and of desire to use the trusting affection offered to gain selfish ends on Lueetta's. The difference between the at titudes of the two women is clearly indicated. With Elizabeth-Jane, the impression that this woman of comparatively practised manner had made upon the studious girl's mind was so deep that she enjoyed standing under an opposite archway merely to think that the charm ing lady was inside the confronting walls, and to wonder what she was doing,® And Lucetta in her letter to Henchard states frankly her reason for befriending the girl: 'You are probably aware of my arrangement with your daughter, and have doubtless laughed at the— what shall I call it?— practical joke . . . . of my getting her to live with me.......... Do you see, Michael, partly why I have done it?— why, to give you an ex cuse for coming here as if to visit her, and thus to form my acquaintance naturally.'7 The hero-worship, so integral a part of Elizabeth-Jane*s affection for Lucetta, continues even after her own un declared lover becomes Lucetta's suitor. With the humility 5 Mayor of Casterbridge. 6 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge. 167, 7 Ibid., 178. 96 and resignation characteristic of her, she argues that the change was hut natural: What was she beside Lucetta?— as one of the ’meaner beauties of the night,* when the moon had risen in the skies. She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If her earthly career had taught her few philosophies it had at least well practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and won dered what unwished for thing Heaven might send her in place of him,8 Later, even her discovery of Lucetta’s marriage with Far- frae, and the secret of her past with Henchard, fails to change her real affection for her friend. And it is she alone who is present with Lucetta on the tragic night of the "skimmity-ride” and is her sole comforter in death. In contrast to these examples of elements within the devotion itself causing unhappiness, Hardy has portrayed a group of such relationships affected and reshaped by out ward circumstances of ambition and love. A complicated analysis of a friendship starting in one generation and causing tragedy in the second is found in The Woodlanders. The central character, Melbury, is the 8 Ibid., 214 friend first of the elder Winterborne and later of Giles, Winterborne's son. The history of the first relationship is illustrative of the maxim: "Friendship is eonstant in all things save in the office and affairs of love." Mel bury *s first wife and the mother of his daughter, Grace, was first the sweetheart of his friend, Winterborne, who loved her tenderly, until she was won from him to Melbury by a trick. Winterborne*s happiness was ruined, and Mel bury himself afterwards felt adject misery at what he had done. However, as time went on, and his daughter, Grace, and Winterborne*s son, Giles, grew up, they seemed attached to each other. Melbury then determined that he would do all within his power to right the wrong he had done the father by having Grace marry his old friend’s son; not only that, but he would give her the best education he could afford in order to make the gift as valuable as it lay in his power to bestow. This is the situation at the beginning of the novel, and true to his vow Melbury does favor his daughter’s union with Giles. However, when he perceives the great trans formation her education has wrought, he regrets spending so much money on her if it is only to be that she sink to her former social level through her marriage with the wood- lander. In this state of indecision, it is an easy matter for Edgar Fitzpiers, the contemptible young doctor, last 98 representative of an old house, to fascinate the farmer, even though it is against his will and sense of justice, into a preference for him above Winterborne as a future husband for the daughter. The unhappy results arising from the pursuance of this course, compounded of non-understand ing, possessive love, and over-weening ambition on Melbury*s part, constitute the ma^or portion of the novel, and end with the death of Giles, the son# of the old friend to whom he had vowed reparation for the wrong done the father. The friendship depleted between the two men in "Fel low Townsmen"9 and between Smith and Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is again illustrative of the idea that this af fection between men cannot last when both love the same woman. In the former story the friendship is broken and is never revived. The first lover leaves the woman to his rival and returns only after the husband*s death. His suit for the widow’s love unsuccessful, he disappears, and she is left in loneliness. It is, however, in A Pair of Blue Eyes that this theme is most fully developed. Here the story of the friendship of Stephen Smith and Henry Knight is an example of the havoc woman* s love can bring into the lives of two 9 Hardy, Wessex Tales, 105-173. 99 men. Hero-worship, many times an inciting force in such relationship, is paramount in Smith’s feeling for Knight: ’He is the best and noblest man in England, .... You see, it was in this way— he came originally from the same place as I, and taught me things; but I am not intimate with him. Shan’t I be glad when I get richer and better known, and hob and nob with him! .... He deserves even more affection from me than I give .... He is. so brilliant .... so thought ful .... that it charms you to talk to him. He’s a most desirable friend, and that isn’t half I could say!»10 Indeed, this affection for Knight is so strong and so col- / ours his life that Elfride, his fiancee, is resentful: ’You think always of him, and like him better than you do me! .... I don’t care how good he is; I don’t want to know him, because he comes between you and me. You think of him night and day, ever so much more than of anybody else; and when you are thinking of him, I am shut out of your mind.’H However, when Stephen returns from India and learns of the love now existing between his friend, Knight, and Elfride, even the realization that his friend is ignorant of his own former relationship with the girl cannot prevent the severing of the affectionate bond. Knight feels the cold ness in Stephen’s attitude, and since they do not meet for years the estrangement is complete. But after Knight’s tragic disillusionment and break with Elfride, the erstr - 5 - 0 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 72. 11 Ibid., 73. while friends encounter each other again. It is then that Stephen’s story of his innocent love affair with the girl is told, and Knight sees the wrong he has done her. The misunderstanding cleared, each of the lovers with renewed hope sees a chance for his suit to prosper, and determines to go to Elfride and plead his cause. Tragic coincidence sends the two friends to Endelstow in the same train that hears the body of their former love. The height of irony is reached when, after they have learned the identity of the deceased, each man, declaring she died true to him, visits the vault where she is laid, only to find there the kneeling figure of Lord Luxellian, her husband. They then retire, no longer rivals, and with hope of friendship re stored. In contrast to this example of man’s friendship ruined by the entrance of woman, in A Laodicean Hardy has presented a picture of one woman’s steadfast devotion to another despite all obstacles, Charlotte de Stancey’s af fection for Paula Power contains the same element of self- abnegation as that exemplified in Elizabeth-Jane *s self less feeling for Lucetta, but the difference between these two relationships lies in the fact that in the former case both women love equally and loyally; theirs is a nearly perfect friendship. A scene comparable to the one wherein • Henehard tries to demonstrate to Elizabeth-Jane the advan- 101 tage to herself of his marriage to Lucetta, is in this novel pictured as occurring between de Stancey, Charlotte’s broth er, and her, when he tries to win her for an ally in his courtship of Paula: ’We are both in the same ship, I love Paula, you love Mr. Somerset; it behooves both of us to see that this flirtation of their ends in nothing.*!2 But Charlotte is true to what she considers her friend’s best interests: *1 don’t like you to put it like that— that I love him— it frightens me .... I don’t want to divide him from Paula; I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do anything to separate them. Believe me, Will, I could not I I am sorry you love there also, though I should be glad if it happened in the natural order of events that she should come round to you. But I cannot do anything to part them and make them suffer. It would be too wrong and blameable.’I3 Later, when she learns of the trickery through which her brother has won Paula from Somerset, the unselfishness and loyalty of her devotion is demonstrated in her immediate decision to warn her friend of the deception that has been practised. And in spite of all obstacles of love and family, the friendship never changes. Charlotte is ever fair, even though this honesty brings about her own unhappiness 12 Hardy, A Laodicean. 208. 13 Ibid.. 209. log through her unrequited love for Somerset. Her love for her friend and Clym Yeobright's love for Eustacia14 are the two instances in Hardy of a human passion sublimated: Glym becomes a preacher to heath-folk; and Charlotte gives up the world and exiles herself to a convent. From this re treat she writes to Paula: fBut, my own very best friend, and more than sister, don't think I mean to leave my love and friendship for you behind me. No, Paula, you will always be with me, and I believe that if an increase in what I already feel for you is possible, it will be fur thered by the retirement and meditation I shall enjoy in my secluded home. .... God bless you and your husband • * - 1 - 5 This constancy to friend even in face of personal loss is repeated in the pathetic scene where Angel Glare, after having left Tess, meets Izz Huett and suggests that she accompany him to Brazil. Izz, although she loves him with all her heart, must confess to his questioning that Tess loves him more than she does: 'She would have laid down her life for *ee. I could do no more.*16 It is this "act of justice to an absent one" that causes Clare to see his error, and withdraw his suggestion, Izz 14 Beturn of the Native. 15 Hardy, A Laodicean. 495. 16 Hardy, Tess of the D'tTrbervilles. 308. 103 would willingly have sacrificed herself to him, but she could not but do Tess, her friend, the justice of the truth. The greatest and fullest example of the tragedy wrought by friendship in the life of a man is that presented by Michael Henchard. A passionate friendship, which in its suddenness and intensity is almost volcanic, is the feeling he has for the Scotchman, Farfrae. He grasps young Farfrae into his deep friendship on sudden strong impulse: "he takes possession of him as friend took possession of friend in the early ages of the world, in places beyond the reign of caution and convention. He takes him to his bosom, and 1 * 7 loads him with favors, and sets him in high place,"-1 -' The suddenness and strength of the feeling is inexplicable: 'You can see that it isn't all selfishness that makes me press 'ee; for my business is not quite so scien tific as to require an intellect entirely out of common. Others would do for the place without a doubt. Some selfishness perhaps there is, but there is more; it isn't for me to repeat what. Gome bide with me— and name your own terms. I’ll agree to 'em willingly and 'ithout a word of gainsaying; for, hang it, Farfrae, I like thee well,' Finally Farfrae accepts, and "the faee of Michael Henchard beamed forth a satisfaction that was almost fierce in its strength. "*;Now you are my friend?' he exclaimed. 'Come back to my house; let's clinch it at once by clear terms, 45, 17 Joseph Warren Beach, Technique of Thomas Hardy, 104 3 8 so as to be comfortable in our minds.*" The end of the day finds Henchard thoroughly devoted to Farfrae, and tell ing him the strange story of his life. But the manager is one of those people to whom it is fatal to allocate too much authority. And immoderate in everything, Henchard*s almost tigerish affection continues until the day comes when he is brought to fear the Scotch man* s growing popularity, and he hears that the people "wish that Farfrae were master instead of Henchard."'^ The final severing of the tie results from Henchard*s overwhelm ing pride and vanity, for when Farfrae*s entertainment is a success and his own is ignored by the people, his jeal ousy flames, and he dismisses his manager without reason, to regret the act only too late: The young man who could now read the lines and folds of Henchard*s strongly lined face as if they were clear verbal inscriptions quietly assented; and when people deplored the fact and asked why it was, he simply replied that Mr. Henchard no longer required his help. Henchard went home apparently satisfied. But in the morning when his jealous temper had passed away his heart sank within him at what he had said and done.20 Thus, through his unreasoning pride he thrusts away in his 1A Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge. 76. 19 Ibid.. 120. 20 Ifcid*. 120. 105 perversity the man he had so passionately befriended and forces him into the position of a foe. Though grimly gen erous, impartial fairness of thought is entirely foreign to his nature, and in his eyes Farfrae remains the ungrate ful recipient of his generosity, with no right to the position he attains. His hatred for the Scotchman is as strong as his love has been; "under his stern self-control the unruly volcanic of his nature constantly heaves and surges, and he loves and hates with buffalo wrong-headedness."21 And to this jealous hatred of Farfrae*s financial success is added his jealous hatred of him as a successful rival in love. He fails to realize that his former mistress has trans ferred her love to his rival until it is too late. The small episode which means so much is admirably described by Hardy: A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled the room for a few instants. It was produced by the passing of a load of newly trussed hay from the country, in a wagon marked with Farfrae*s name. Beside it rode Farfrae on horseback. LucettaVs face became— as a woman's face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an apparition. But Henchard notices nothing. He has eyes, but he never sees the way clearly; he has ears, but they do not inter 21 Ibid., 129. 106 pret rightly the sounds that smite upon them. A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the win dow, and the secret of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not note the warm consciousness upon Lueetta's face.22 Yet, however strong his hate, it is never strong enough to cause him to bring absolute ruin on the ones against whom it is directed. He takes grim pleasure in reading to Farfrae the letters Lueetta had written to him when she was his mistress, and he joys in hearing the con demnation voiced by the husband. He had quite intended to effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama by reading out her name. But "sitting here in cold blood he could not do it. Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his enmity."23 The same last minute reaction is responsible for the saving of Farfraefs life in the barn. His enemyfa life is in his hands, but when Farfrae bids him, "Take it, take it, ye've wished it long enough," he cannot, and his fury turns to repentance: 22 Ibid.* 212 23 Ibid. , 29.7 107 ’0 Farfrae!— that’s not true!— God is my witness that no man ever loved another as I did thee at one time. .... And now— though I came here to kill ’ee, I cannot hurt thee! Go and give me in charge— do what you will— I care nothing for what comes to mei’S4 And Farfrae gone, Henchard took his full measure of shame and self-re proach. The scenes of his first acquaintance with Farfrae rushed back upon him— that time when the cur ious mixture of romance and thrift in the young man’s composition so commanded his heart that Farfrae could play upon him as on an instrument. .... At length he arose, shook the dust from his clothes wearily, felt his way to the hatch, and gropingly descended the steps till he stood in the yard. .... He became possessed by an overpowering wish to see Farfrae again that night, and by some desperate pleading to attempt the well-nigh impossible task of winning pardon for his late attack.25 This story of Henchard’s decline illustrates the tragic result of a too strong and impetuous friendship in the life of man; for it is the sudden and passionate af fection for Farfrae that is the most direct and persistent cause of this downfall. From the moment of the Scotchman’s advent, Henchard*s fortunes were doomed. Strangely, though, this rise of the Northerner arouses no such sympathy in the reader as does the gradual ruin of the Southerner. Though there is no blameworthy act on Farfrae’s part in spite of Henchard’s reiterance of his treachery, and though 24 Ibid., 331. 25 Ibid.. 332. 108 the Scotchman's behavior throughout is marked by charitable ness and humility, one feels no enthusiasm at a success which means Henchard*s failure. He may be too perfect, or it may be the counter-effect of the affection and sympathy felt for Henchard, an untamed creature astray in a world that he could not control or understand, who has been called nthe most magnificent among the men of Hardy."2® In contrast to individual friendship, Hardy has drawn some very human pictures of comforting and lasting group affection. The Mallstock Choir in Under the Greenwood Tree presents possibly the best example of such a plural friend ship. They play together, and together they assemble at the parsonage to voice their grievance at the usurpation of their several places by the single, isolated organist. Hardy analyzes the body in his introduction: The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a toilsome week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay at a dis tance from their homes. They usually received so little in payment for their performance that their efforts were really a labour of love.27 A picture of the bond still holding the group together after death is presented in nThe Dead Quire,"2® on that 26 Charles Henry Duffin, Thomas Hardy. 38. 27 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree. vi. 2® Hardy, Collected Poems. 240-243. 109 night when ................ the hamleteers Made merry with ancient Mellstock zest, But the Mellstock quire of former years Had entered into rest. When the "loud, lively, reckless" joy had reached its height, .... without, as in old days, The ancient quire of voice and string Seemed singing words of prayer and praise As they had used to sing. And then, The sons defined their fathers* tones, The widow his whom she had wed, And others in the minor moans The viols of the dead. Hardy*s peasant groupings, with their simple joy and affection, their zest in living, their mummings and Birth- tide Eve celebrations, present fine examples of peasant England’s union and hospitality. "The House of Hospitali ties" is a poetic version of the open-door friendship found with Gantle, Christian, Fairway, and Humphrey in The Return of the Native, with Dewy, Reuben, Michael, and the others ~0hder the Greenwood Tree« and with that great body of English peasantry distributed throughout the novels and poems: Here we broached the Christmas barrel, Pushed up the charred log-ends; Here we sang the Christmas carol, And called in friends. 110 Time has tired me since we met here When the folk now dead were young, Since the viands were outset here And quaint songs sung. And the worm has bored the viol That used to lead the tune, Bust eaten out the dial That struck night’s noon. Now no Christmas brings in neighbors, And the New Year comes unlit; Where we sang the mole now labours, And spiders knit. Yet at midnight if here walking, When the moon sheets wall and tree, I see forms of old time talking, Who smile on me.29 The idea suggested in the last stanza, the soul’s immortality through friendship, is voiced elsewhere in the poems. The theme of "His Immortality"30 is the belief that a dead man's "finer part" shines in the faithful hearts of those who love him: I saw a dead man’s finer part Shining within each faithful heart Of those bereft. Then said I: ’This must be His immortality.’ I looked there as the seasons wore, And still his soul continuously bore A life in theirs. But less its shine excelled Than when I first beheld. His fellow-yearmen passed, and then In later hearts I looked for him again; 29 Ibid., 192 30 130 Ill And found him— shrunk, alas! into a thin And spectral mannikin. Lastly I ask— now old and chill— If aught of him remain unperished still; And find in me alone, a feeble spark, Dying amid the dark. In "Her Immortality"3- * - the shade tells the lover who in his grief would commit suicide: A shade but in its mindful ones Has immortality; By living, me you keep alive, By dying you slay me. In you reside my single power Of sweet continuance here; On your fidelity I count Through many a coming year. Similarly, in "The To-Be-Forgotten"32 the friend questions the dead: Wherefore, old friends .... are you distrest, Now screened from life's unrest? And the answer comes: -0 not at being here; But that our future second death is near; When, with the living, memory of us numbs, And blank oblivion comes. We here, as yet, each day Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say We hold in some soul loved continuance Of shape and voice and glance. 31 IMd.. 45-50. 38 Ibid.. 131-132. 1X2 But what has "been will he— First memory, then oblivion*s swallowing sea; Like men foregone, shall we merge into those Whose story no one knows. From this study, it is clear that Hardy in the vari ous examples of friendship he has depicted in the novels and in the poems has been able to see not only the strength and happiness but the weakness and the pain found in the emotion. He has pictured the beauty and steadfastness of an unselfish devotion such as Charlotte de Stancey felt for Paula Power, and Elizabeth-Jane Henchard felt for Lueetta Templeman; but he has also presented the tragedy and sorrow resultant from ambition and selfishness changing the very nature of the original feeling, as was instanced in the cases of old Melbury and Giles Winterborne, Henry Knight and Stephen Smith, and Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae. He visions the ideal to which the passion may attain; but he sees that in the average relationship one of those in volved must suffer, either as a result of causes inherent in the emotion itself, as in the case of Elizabeth-Jane and Lueetta, or because of outward influences affecting and re shaping it, as instanced in the friendships between Paula Power and Charlotte de Stancey, old Molbury and Giles Win terborne, Henry Knight and Stephen Smith, and Michael Hen chard and Donald Farfrae. As in the other passions, he sees in this relationship a possible strength in an actual weakness. CHAPTER VI LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES In Hardy’s view "nothing in man is significant ex cept race, sex, and the great servitude to time and nature."1 Since race is resultant from the sex instinct which reaches to the core of human nature, the problem of this instinct necessarily becomes a major theme. The various collections of stories and the fourteen novels that appeared between 1871 and 1895, throwing upon the affairs of the heart some times a harsh, often a savage light, put us in possession of Hardy’s ideas regarding the human pair. And the volumes of verse that followed, offering in epitome swift-moving scenes and more tersely expressed thoughts, in no way in validate the message of the prose writer. The totality gives the impression of an effort directed towards an end. Hardy, who sees in love at once the creative and the motor force, accords it first place among human preoccupations;^ all Hardy’s art, so far as it is a scrutiny of personal rela- ^ Hardy, Life and Art, 66. o ”. . . .a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age, which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity.” Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Preface. 114 tions, centres in the varying issues of the strongest human passion. Within his work are revealed, immovable and tena cious amid their variety, the permanent laws of the mind and of the feelings. Fundamental to an adequate understanding of Hardy’s theory of love is the knowledge of his conception of the men and women, the protagonists in his vast epic of the flesh. The distinctive attribute of these members of the Hardian world is their universality. These are characters in each of whom the observer sees something of himself; "each comprehends within himself the whole of human nature.” "Of this primitive clay and breath of God out of which old Adam was fashioned,”3 Hardy has moulded Tess Durbeyfield,4 Bathsheba Everdene,5 Glym Yeobright,8 Giles Winterborne,7 Michael Henchard,8 and Sue Bridehead.9 Though Angel Clare10 3 Charles Henry Buff in, Thomas Hardy. £0. ^ of the DtUrbervilles. K Far from the Madding Crowd. 6 Return of the Hafcive. 7 Woodlanders. 8 Mayor of Casterbridge. ^ the Obscure. 10 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 115 and Jocelyn Pierston11 must be considered as typical rather than universal, and very rarely typical, such natures are decidedly in the minority when placed in the balance against the universals. It has been said that "the touchstone of a novelist*s power, and the rock upon which he most frequently splits, is his handling of women.w12 But in Hardy, profound insight into the female personality is ever-present. He studies tellingly the workings of fate or law in the chief vivify ing and disturbing influences in life— women. Real pictures of all types of womankind are presented, from the gross animalism of Arabella-*-3 in the lowest order to the white spirituality of Sue14 in the highest. Breaking away from the accepted idealization of women by the imaginative writers, he sees a cruel gulf between the glory of what woman was meant to be, her possible best, and her own piti ful earthly attempts to reach the goal. Hardy seems clear on this law of weakness. And yet women sway the novels, and on the first leaf of Jude the 11 Well-Beloved. 1 ? Charles Henry Buffin, op, cit.» 130. 13 Jude the Obscure. 14 Ibid. 116 Obscure he put the prophet’s saying: ”How can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?* The truth is that they are both weak and strong; we see them always in terms of helpless power, but under a quivering balance rather than a law. Elfride3- 5 of the blue eyes, the first of these heroines who fills a novel, is pure plasticity with a childlike impulse and indiscretion at the start; she loves Knight with a woman’s consciousness but still with the faith of a child, and the mixture of guilt and innocence is so delicate that it condones her treachery to Stephen Smith. Bathsheba Everdene has a strong mind and self-reli ance, but she scarcely knows herself or the world. A whole psychology is phrased in Liddy the maid’s verdict on her as nnot mannish, but so almighty womanish that *tis getting on that way sometimes.”16 Bathsheba held a man’s position as an independent farmer, and could display a cool and cal culating faculty in business; but with her caprice and her surrenders, and her strength at a crisis, she is a most engaging blend of strength and weakness. Gytherea Ald- clyffe17 veers stormily between the opposites; Mrs. Yeo- A of Blue Eyes. * | A Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. 233. 17 Desperate Remedies. 117 1 A bright, ° one of the few women with marked maturity, has reached an obstinate firmness. And the novelist’s olarity of insight enables him to draw woman as he does: a creature of emotion, fickle, vain, conscienceless, and seductive, Season plays a purely sub altern role in her conduct. Like Schopenhauer, he sees her as a tool of the Will-to-Live. ??oman’s spontaneity, her impulsiveness, are, in fact, the expressions and the condi tions of that Will-to-Live which determines her destiny. In one of his earliest novels Hardy discovers this corner stone for the structure of his heroine’s psychology, Ethel- berta states it: ”A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts, and thinks several times."19 Innate urge causes the instinctive assertion of the femi nine charm against which the intelligence of men such as Knight20 and Jude21 revolts, and which instinct overcomes. For consciously or unconsciously the goal of the woman is the subjugation of the man, Everything is strained to attain this goal. Woman makes the first step in the 18 Return of the Native. 19 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 62. 20 A Pair of Blue Eyes. Jude the Obscure. 118 approach: Eustacia stands masked in Clym*s road;22 Arabella throws the lamp of pig*s offal at Jude;23 Phyllis is the instigator of the acquaintance with the Hussar when she goes to the same place at the same time the next day after their first meeting;2^ and what could be a more wanton piece of mischief, feminine and intuitive, than Bathsheba*s sending a valentine to Boldwood, the majestic unknown?2^ Thus, throughout his delineation of women, men, and love, Hardy is in accord with Schopenhauer * s disillusioned view of the Dominant Will. The lack of volition in women, their capriciousness, their instinctive obedience to emo tional impulse with no control by intelligence, are but re sults of the subservience to the All-Moving Will. They are creatures of the moment; an instant*s gratification blinds them to a disastrous morrow; their emotions consis tently lack control. Again and again the novelist stresses the impulsiveness of woman, for in it is revealed the sor row-laden power of the original life force. A proper 22 Return of the Native. 23 Jude the Obscure. 24 Hardy, "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion," in Life*s Little Ironies. 25 Far from the Madding Crowd. 119 course, an ideal for the development of self, is unknown to her. This impulsive and unthinking abdication before sud den feeling for the man is fundamental in this novelist’s analysis of these "passion-driven” women; they are bound to the men they love suddenly and by every fibre of their be ings. As Mr. Hedgcock very justly observed in his exhaus tive work devoted to Hardy, for the frank and naive ardour of their passion, for their delicate freshness and glow, the women in Hardy’s gallery are comparable only to Shake speare’s women, among them the charming Miranda, Juliet with her pure and unblemished sensuousness, and the fatal, sickly, and luxurious Cleopatra,^6 All these women closely resemble their sisters in the Wessex Novels, for their love is often a love that knows no limits and is almost always born at first sight. One might imagine one’s self to be listening to a Hardy heroine when Miranda cries out in the presence of Ferdinand: I might call him a thing divine, For nothing natural I ever saw so noble. In the overweening desire for admiration, Nature herself acquaints them with the destined role of their charm and with the power which it wields, at the same time 26 F. A, Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy, 313. ISO instructing them in its necessity. "Ihre Schonheit ist ihre Waffe,w says Salberg; a weapon in the duel into which love always resolves itself. For the abdication is not acknowl edged by the woman immediately; indeed, she strives for mastery. Bathsheba considers herself a queen among the farmers at the grain market and it is Boldwood's indiffer ence that arouses in her the desire for dominion over him. pn The ill-fated idea of sending him the Valentine results. Ethelberta's anger at the absence of her friend disappears when one who means nothing to her makes a declaration of love.2® And even though Festus is obnoxious to little Anne Garland, Hshe is struck, now as at their previous meeting, with the power she possesses of working him up either to irritation or to complacency at will, and this conscious ness of being able to play upon him as upon an instrument disposed her to a humorous consideration and made her tolerate even while she rebuffed him."2^ The weapons employed by woman are lying, coquetry, and seduction. The final stakes are the continuance of the race and the egotistic satisfaction of the individual, 27 Far from the Madding Crowd. 2® The Hand of Ethelberta. 29 Hardy, Trumpet Major, 67. 121 two really irreconcilable antinomies. Everywhere the pair shows the same obstinate will to live individually and the same determined need for superiority over the other person. Their recourse is the wonderful strategy suggested by the instincts. In a passage in La Gaya Scienzia. Nietzsche wrote that woman wishes to be taken and accepted as a form of property, that she desires a man who seizes without abandoning himself, one who can enrich his ego by means of an increment of force and pleasure. Hardy concurs in this view, because to him in the final analysis there is no real equality of the sexes. Woman struggles to preserve the individual ego, but always when she is confronted by a master and a slave, she finally chooses the master: the timidity of a Stephen Smith is spurned for the instructed mastery of a Henry Knight;30 the steadfast and non-demand ing devotion of a Giles Winterborne is cast aside for the subtly hard domination of the sensualist Fitzpiers.31 Tess is analysed in her reaction to Clare: Tess .... the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun .... was such a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by his touch, her blood driven to her finger ends, *30 A Fair of Blue Eyes. 31 The Woodlanders. 132 and the cool arms flushed hot.'5*5 Hardy depicts the over-mastering passion in its hold upon the sophisticated Mrs. Charmond: As soon as he was out of the room, she went to a cor ner and there sat and writhed under an emotion in which hurt pride and vexation mixed with her better sentiments. Mrs. Charmond’s mobile spirit was sub ject to these fierce periods of high tide and storm. She had never so clearly perceived till now that her soulr. was being slowly invaded by a delirium which had brought all this; that she was losing judgment and dignity under it, becoming an animated impulse only, a passion incarnate. A fascination had led her on; it was as if she had been seized by a hand of velvet, and this was where she found herself— over shadowed with sudden night, as if a toronado had passed.33 And one recalls that glimpse of the sleeping girls in the dormitory-room at Talbothays: The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law— an emotion which they had neither expected nor denied.......... The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but por tion of one organism called sex. Every face bore the legend ’The Weaker’ upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were moulded, which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and abilities could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what they are.34 32 Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 199. Hardy, The Woodlanders, 231. 34 Ibid., 165. 183 Thus, the essential serf in woman responds to the dominating male. And this inferiority entails upon woman many deceptions; in Hardy's view it bears down any possi bility of her becoming a clear-sighted creature capable of choosing a companion worthy of her. Instinct is ruler; in telligence is subdued. And, inevitably, as D, ? Exideuil notes: "Malgre ses faiblesses et ses contradictions, la femme est la grande vaincue de 1*amour, et Hardy, tou^ours dans son oeuvre, se_penche avee sollicitude sur son sort d’eternelle vietime.”35 For study these women may be grouped into classes: Arabella Bonn36 and certain figures in the poems, notably the symbolic "Ivy-Wife,1,3,7 are representative of the basest in love, pure animal desire for man; Thomasin Yeobright 0 N and Marty South39 exemplify those women whose life and philosophy are almost a part of nature itself; Elizabeth- Pierre d*Exideuil, Le Couple I-Iumain dans 1»Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy. 122. 36 Jude the Obscure. 37 Hardy, Collected Poems. 50. 38 The Return of the Native. 39 The Woodlanders. 124 Jane Henchard4^ and Ethelberta Chickerel4- * - represent the modern growth of self-regardfulness and intellectuality as opposed to the old complacent obedience to instinct; Mrs. Charmond,42 Lucetta Templeman,43 and Grace Melbury44 sug gest the more educated woman's revolt against environment and circumstance, a theme to be fully developed in the character of Eustacia Yye,43 who seeks to compel circum stance to accord with her dream world, and Bathsheba Ever- dene,4® who gains a certain judiciousness and self-control in her futile effort to manage her life and possessions independently. Tess Durbeyfield,47 as a character, stands alone as a picture of a "pure woman" whose mind was at variance with her flesh, and who fights against too great odds; but Tess in modification is sister to Julie-Jane,48 ^ Mayor of Casterbridge. 41 The Hand of Ethelberta. 42 The Woodlanders. 43 Mayor of Casterbridge. 44 The Woodlanders. 45 Return of the Native. 43 Far from the Madding Crowd. 47 Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 48 Hardy, Collected Poems. 329. 125 AQ the joy girl, and to Fanny Robin.* And lastly, in Sue Bridehead, that example of a woman’s fleshless love, Hardy reveals how well he knows all that a woman oan be, but realizing that this is but her possible best he sees that she cannot remain true to ideals, for although clear and strong in reason, her fatal woman’s emotion overshadows her mind’s beliefs, and in the final analysis, though possibly the greatest, she is also one of the weakest of Hardy’s heroines. Though these women may be differentiated, in the great majority instinct rules all, and desire to love speaks with imperious command, Arabella Donn5^ is the incarnation of the will to live; but in Eustacia Vye, Yiviette Con- KA KK stantine, Lucetta Templeman, Felice Gharmond, though the intellect is more developed through education, sensation AQ Far from the Madding Crowd. 50 Jude the Obscure. 51 Ibid. 52 Return of the Nat ive. 53 Two on a Tower. 54 Mayor of Casterbridge. 55 The Woodlanders. 126 still counts for more than thought; for them life without love would have no value. Hedgcock comments on this group: Tot ou tard, elles eedent a 1*impulsion de leur nature, elles se laissent entrainer par le courant de la passion. Elles luttent de fagons diverses et d'apres leur temperament personnel: Ylviette s*accroche a la religion, Felice pense a sa reputation compromise, Eustacia esp'fere que son mari l*arretera a temps; mais toutes, elles savent qu*il n*y a rien au dedans^d*elles qui puisse faire obstacle & la force qui les maitrise, Elles veulent se d^penser, se donner, jouir; comme Arabella, elles comteront les consequences plus tard.56 Even Sue is placed high among the few who do not bow im mediately and unreasoningly to instinct more because of what she wishes to do than what she really accomplishes; she aspires to regulate her instincts, her sensations, her desires by her intellect, but the end of the unequal strug gle is the complete rout of her intelligence. Among all the women Hardy has drawn, Elizabeth-Jane57 and Ethelberta58 are the two who are granted some degree of intellectual mastery in the conditions of love. Elizabeth- t Jane, the most thoughtful among the quieter heroines and the most hardly schooled, is something of a stoic, but a knowing one. She achieves a workable life philosophy. 56 F. A. Hedgcoek, Thomas Hardy, 294. 57 The Mayor of Casterbridge. 58 The Hand of Ethelberta. 127 Neither unhappiness nor great joy can move her greatly; she is enough of an individualist to allow no others to dictate her conduct; she is sensible enough not to put her inter ests above those of the race, not to demand a universe fashioned to her taste. Her cool reason proves adequate to estimating simple and moderate satisfactions at their / true value, Hedgcock calls her "la femme achevee." Ethel berta is more positive and more ambitious than is Elizabeth- Jane. The former, perceiving the fact that the possession of a heart and emotions is a serious obstacle for a woman who wishes to make her own way in life, sets herself reso lutely to overcome them. But, like Sue, she never had the intention of renouncing the advantages of her sex; men are enemies, and against them she has the right to employ all feminine wiles. With her, intelligence is vietor over the joy of living and the instinct to love, and though the victory is not without some sadness, her intelligent desire is accomplished. But as Hedgcock has stated: La plupart des h^ro'ines de M, Hardy ^e sont ni aussi interessdes qu*Ethelberta ni aussi eprouvees quf Elizabeth-Jane; elles n*ont pas les pretentions in- tellectuelles et avanc^es de Sue; en meme^emps, leur naissance et leur Education ont discipline la partie primitive de leur nature, Ce sont des quantites in- connues pour elles-mekes comme pour les autres, Elles viennent de s’^veiller a la vie et regardent autour d*elles avec des yeux dmerveill^s. Ce sont des Miranda qui ne savent guere ce que e*est qufun homme; 128 mais, grace a leur instinct de femme, elles n’ignorent pas^ce que c’est que l'amour, et tout en ^tant at- tirees par son charme, sont effraye'es par son mystere. 9 And though accidents of "birth, of circumstance, of education may differentiate them in part, the essential of the feminine nature is the same: the country-women, Tess,66 Bathsheba Everdene,61 Anne Garland,62 and Thomasin Yeo- bright, without the accomplishments of education and travel found in Paula Power,64 Elfride Swanscourt,65 and Gytherea Graye,66 are nevertheless, in spite of divergen cies of intellect and experience in the social sense, greatly alike. They represent essential oneness in diver sity. They venture into life curious to know what it holds for them, but are withheld by restriction of convention, by respect for conscience, and by a thousand fears implanted kq F,. A. Hedgcock, op. cit.. 297. 60 Tess of the BfUrbervilles. Cl Far from the Madding Crowd. f t P The Trumpet Major. 63 Return of the Native. 64 A Laodicean. A Pa4** of Blue Eyes. Desperate Remedies. in them by education. But they are always entrapped by love. Disturbed by the conflict between their desires and their principles, they advance, they recoil, they turn in a maze. They make promises at length, and then act blind ly. They follow those who are unfaithful to them, and abandon those who love them. They are weak and hesitant, and then strongly obstinate; they are submissive and tyran nical, playful and severe, passionate and eold, all simul taneously, in a manner which at the same time distracts and captivates those who love them. Hardy seems to agree with Proudhon that woman is a being morally inferior to man and with a weaker conscience; and with Georges Sand in her statement that woman is na ture’s fool. However, these, creatures owe their captivat ing seductiveness to the decrees of the caprice that governs their actions. And these decrees are predetermined they express the will to live and to love; they are issued subject to a law of necessity which, with Hardy, links the action with the intimate structure of the character. But the thing that must always be borne in mind is that though these women may be grouped, though they re semble each other, they are clearly defined in character. A comparison of Bathsheba and Eustacia will verify this fact; yet the folly of a glorious woman is characteristic of both. And it is a singular clarity of vision that 130 enables the novelist to discern them as "creatures nobly- planned and bright with angelic radiance," and yet only in rare cases free from the earth-drag, undimmed and ideal. Though they are in many aspects fundamentally simi lar, one major fact differentiates Hardy1s men from his women characters: in general, the men within the novels are more modern than the women, who retain the incalculable impulses of a more elemental nature, and in the battles these men undergo to establish their final being, to retain their control over the essential self, there is present a more definite self-control, and at least an occasional triumph of reason over instinct. Wildeve^7 the engineer, Fitzpiers6® the doctor, Manston69 the architect, D’Urberville70 the country-squire, and Troy71 the soldier, though separated by profession and by circumstances arising from life’s conditions, neverthe less are brothers in temperament; their life conditions 67 Return of the Native. 68 The Woodlanders. 69 Desperate Remedies. 70 Tess of the D’tTrbervilles. 71 Far from the Madding Crowd. 131 have never left an appreciable stamp of differentiation upon their characters. With them, intellect is always superseded by the instinct to live and to love, to enjoy and to gratify, and they are too abandoned to their own desire to comprehend suffering in their victims. They are undisciplined spirits given up to an utter and unmitigated egoism, enslaved to the forces of their desire. These men are of the lowest order, the sensualists: Alec D^Urber- ville, representative of unredeemed animalism in man, counterpart of Arabella;72 Fitzpiers,73 the intellectual sensualist; and Wildeve,74 Festus,75 and Troy,76 "one and all following their own wills and ways, not just with pride, but with a jaunty petulance, and a swagger of body or a swagger of soul."77 A second group is composed of those men in whom the sexual instinct is of less importance; it is merely of 72 Jufl® the Obscure. 73 The Woodlanders. 74 Return of the Native. 7 5 The Trumpet Major. Far from the Madding Crowd. 77 Lionel P. Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy. 190. 132 secondary import to the work at hand* Henchard,78 Farfrae,79 Helmsdale,80 and Boldwood8^ are typical of this group. These are men to whom love has meant little; its passion surprises them in the midst of other occupations. Boldwood and Helmsdale, men of habit, the former thinking but of his harvest and of his cattle, the latter of his advancement in the.church, and both without experience in love, find them^- selves suddenly swept by its violent force completely out side the circle of their ordinary and accustomed being, hurled headlong into violence and tragedy* Henchard and Farfrae, the former having once come to tragedy through love in his youth, the latter untried, both bend the great est part of their energies to the pursuit of place in the community, and to the accumulation of the world*s goods. But Henchard, though touched in his pride by Lucetta*s de ception, never fully yields himself to love. As Hedgcock phrases it; "Du veritable amour il n*a nullement besoin; sa force est trop grand pour etre prise dans les filets de 78 Mayor of Casterbridge, 79 Ibid. 80 Two on a Tower. 81 Far from the Madding Crowd, 133 Dalila."8^ And in this ability to stand against woman and her temptation for man he is a striking exception among Hardyfs men. Farfrae is more susceptible because he is younger. He is masculine enough to be seduced by the beauty and the sensuousness of Lueetta; but one feels even here that he does not yield himself entirely; and his es sentially cold and reasoning nature reasserts itself fully after Lucettafs tragic death and his marriage with the rather stoical Elizabeth-Jane. Thus, though instinct com plicated the lives of these two men, and one may say with justice that love exercises a deplorable influence in all their affairs and interrupts violently their most serious occupations, nevertheless, both of them have handled the passion in such a way as to demonstrate the fact that love can be but an incident in a life whose true end is more solid and stable. The intellectualists, the direct antitheses of the first group, are represented in the figures of the essen tially spiritual Angel Clare83 and the over-intellectualized Henry Knight.8^ Yet it is a curious touch of irony that OO F, A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy, 320. 83 Tess of the DtUrbervilles. i 84 A Pair of Blue Eyes. 134 makes of these two men, advanced thinkers, modern savants, possibly the narrowest and the most prejudiced of all Hardy's heroes. It is the restriction of their view, their in ability to see advancement in the world of men and women rather than in the world of books and science, their "cru elty of foiled honesty," that leads to their tragic mis understanding of the essential nature of the women they love, and that must necessarily lead to final catastrophe through their lack of comprehension. Self-control they have; intellect triumphs over instinct; but the final re sult is unhappiness. Somewhere between the two extremes, the sensual and the intellectual, comes the Aristotelian mean: those men who subordinate desire to the demands of life; who regard personal gratification as of secondary importance to their serviee to those they love, Gabriel Oak,®5 Diggary Venn,86 Giles Winterborne,8? John Loveday,88 Dick Dewey8^ exemplify 85 Far from the Madding Crowd. 86 Return of the Hat ive. 87 The Woodlanders. 88 The Trumpet Major. 89 Under the Greenwood Tree. 135 these enduring heroes. Through service they pay homage. Love is a perfectly natural thing to them. They have no fear of it; and in addition they have not exalted desire and satisfaction to the point where the woman is of no im portance. With them there is a fine equilibrium between the two elements of character: the brutal part of their na ture is not exalted; the intellect is not developed to the morbid point of believing that there is danger in the things which conform to nature, such as love and marriage. Having passed their lives in the open and having dealt with natural things, they are habituated to see function in the animal kingdom the mechanism by which nature prolongs the species. They are equally removed from prudery and from sensuality. They look upon woman neither as a being to be conquered nor as a creature whose function is merely to appease their appetites; they see her as a comrade and as a weaker creature whom,they should protect. These are the enduring men, the steadfast lovers, so faithful that per sonal disappointment is of no account when matched with the welfare of the beloved. They are natural results of "plain heroic magnitude of mind," of lives whose whole conduct is simple unquestioning patience, of tolerant fortitude deeply rooted in the earth and directly nourished by the unseen vigours of impersonal nature. The passion of these long- 136 suffering lovers is rarely reciprocated. Their qualities are not such as will fascinate the women they love: endur ance, loyalty, reserve, modesty, make poor showing against the hrillance and the seductiveness of a Troy99 or of a Wildeve•91 There are, finally, the younger lovers, not a group of romanticists, but rather a group of thinkers who can ask themselves . . . .Shall we run with Artemis Or yield the breast to Aphrodite? In general they are intelligent; they have achieved a cer tain amount of eulture through their own efforts; and when love comes they question the advantages or the disadvantages it may bring. Swithin Saint-Cleeve well represents this group: "A student of the greatest forces in nature, he had, like many others of his sort, no personal force to speak of in a social point of view.”" It may be said that they arrive at a truer knowledge of themselves through love, and that in general they strive to strike a mean. Love means a slight detour on the straight path to their hopes. Momen 90 Far from the Madding Crowd. 91 The Return of the Native. 92 Hardy, Two on a Tower, 176. 137 tary unhappiness comes to Clym Yeobright,93 Edward Spring- grove,9^ Stephen Smith,98 Christopher Julien,96 George Somerset,97 Swithin Saint-Cleeve,98 but through this un happiness they are made men. Clym fails to make Eustacia k&PPy; Saint-Cleeve is cause of Viviette's death; Smith un knowingly brings tragedy to Elfride; but one feels the men themselves go on with their predetermined plans, and, no doubt, achieve happiness of a kind for themselves. One finds them achieving a philosophy gained through education and experience; though the essential nature is not greatly changed, this philosophy enables them to count adequately their resources and to draw therefrom the best possibili ties. The philosophy so achieved counsels patience and self-forgetfulness in the case of Smith;99 suggests the turning of desire towards goals accessible in that of Heturn of the Native. 94 Desperate Remedies. 95 A Hair of Blue Eyes. 96 The Hand of Ethelberta. 97 . t A Laodicean. 98 Two in a Tower. QQ A Hair of Blue Eyes. 138 Julian;100 counsels the discarding of all things that will distract thought and turn self from the ultimate aim in the case of Saint-Cleeveand proves to Clym102 that only- through suffering and asceticism can his high aspiration he reached, Jude Fawley10* 5 does not lend himself easily to clas sification; yet he is to my mind Hardy’s conception of a complete man, half-earthly and half-spiritual. He typifies those who "decide not to live but to know," and yet his in stinct will not let him rise to the ideal. The device which the power of the world uses to ambush and capture the assaults on circumstance of Jude?s aspirations is the ter ribly obvious one, the flesh. As Abercrombie104 states it: The world need put no subtle stratagems in train against such an attack as Jude’s: it has but to re main unperturbed, and Jude will work out his own damnation. For this aspiring nature of his is lodged in worldly substance, and thus, for all his desperate efforts to belong wholly to his own desires, secretly and profoundly he belongs to the world. 100 The Hand of Ethelberta. 101 _ . Two in a Tower. 103 The Return of the Native. 103 Jude the'Obscure. 104 Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy. 118. 139 He is a spiritual animal compounded of the best and possibly the worst in human nature. From his union with Arabella it is obvious that the animal side of his nature is well developed; the spiritual side appears as soon as he comes in contact with Sue. But his instincts, animal and human, are gross. His own confession is that his two besetting sins are love of women and love of drink; they constitute the earth-drag in him. Soul has too little ascendency; reason and flesh have too much. Thus, it may be seen that it is more difficult to establish a general type of man in Hardy than it was to achieve a composite portrait of woman. Woman is unequivo cally the tool of the Will-to-Live• Child-bearing is her chief province; her business is to reproduce life. In her relationships with the opposite sex, her function is to seduce man for the profit of the race. But with man, a great part of his will, his desire, is turned towards an other object— the conservation of the individual ego. Thus his personality becomes more complicated: his intellect is strengthened at the expense of his instincts; he is less the facile dupe of nature; he sees in existence other in terests than that of passion and finds more reasons to hesitate before abdicating to love than does woman.105 And 105 Cf. Shaw's Man and Superman. 140 this very hesitation before the acceptance of love is char acteristic of Hardy1s men of intelligence; it accounts for the weakness of a Stephen in his relations with Elfride,1^ of Julian with Ethelberta,^7 of George with Paula.In fact, this hesitation born of egoism, this unwillingness to lose the essential self in any relationship combined with the cruelty of jealousy, so often a part of masculine pas sion, are the two forces that often complement one another and crown misfortune. And Hardy has insisted with special stress upon the harmful effects of this masculine egotism. Sacred and worthy it may be when considered from the indi vidual standpoint, and when it concerns only one; but a fatal egotism it becomes when it involves another. With the intellectuals this force is a particularly dangerous weapon. The cult of ego with them has already developed a propensity to sacrifice everything to the personality. And when thorough-going and cold intellectualism is added, one can but agree with Grimeditch:^-0^ "Nothing can be con- 106 A °£ Blue Eyes. The Hand of Ethelberta. 108 A Laodicean. 109 H, B. Grimeditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. 115. 141 ceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysi cian. n A Knight-1 - - 1 - 0 and a Clare-1 - - 1 - - 1 , can never understand the women who love them. And, too, it is the egoism of thorough-going sensu alism that is manifest in D'Urberville,-1 - - 1 - 2 Wildeve,-1 - - 1 -® and Troy;*1 - - 1 -^ the desire stifles the intelligence, but the will to take all and to give nothing, to remain savagely inde pendent, is still innate. Instinct and intellect are at war; intelligence is stifled for the moment; but finally the ego conquers, for passion was but an intruder for the moment in the general course of egoistie development. D^Exideuil has summarized this aspect of the male character: Quand lfhomme poursuit avec aprete la possession, ce besoin l*envahit tout entier; il oblitere la con-* science. Chez de nombreux heros, l*amour fera en quelque sorts irruption comme un intrus. L*intelli gence deviendra d*emblee 1’adversaire naturel. H6an- moins, selon l|i loi de la nature, c*est la passion qui restera maitresse. Dans sa lutte interieure, en presence de la chair, l'homme ne voit plus sa fin comme individu, il se eonfond avec ltesp'eee male, qui 1*oppose a la femme, dont 1*instinct premier est un 110 A Pair of Blue Eyes. 111 Tess of the D^rbervilles. 112 I M £ * 113 Return of the Native. 114 Far from the Madding Crowd. 142 vouloir vivre surgi des fonctions hereditaires. Le conflit interne chez l’homiije provient de; ce qu’en raison de son individualite plus forte, il est a la fois membre d’une esp'fece et espbce & lui tout seul. On retrouve done en lui ee conflit d^erit chez Schopenhauer entre 1*intelligence et la volonte. Cette opposition results de la presence de ces deux tendances, qui expriraent peut-etre deux stades dTune seule et m§me chose, Pareille lutte results du dualisme du connaitre et du faire. L’intelligence est sans doute elle aussi sortie du vouloir vivre; elle en represente probablement une consequence plus achev^e et realise 1*aspiration plus haute et plus objective de la volonte pour fa^onner le monde a une image v o u l u e . H 5 5 However, though these characters, both men and women, in the work of Hardy lend themselves in part to classification, they remain essentially individual; though Hardy never wastes his art on such minute differentiation as is found in Dickens, each man and each woman stands apart even within classification. They are but levelled into a common humanity in one great respect: they are moved by the elemental urge, and they suffer therein the uni versal tragedy of conflict between the reason given them and the Will, the race-urge, moving within them. As Chew116 has pointed out: "Hardy’s clarity of vision prevents any sentimentalizing of love as in Scott; any intellectualizing of it as in Meredith; or any idealiz- 115 pierre D’Exideuil, Le Couple Humain dans 1’Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy. 143 seq. Samuel Claggett Chew, Thomas Hardy, 154. 143 ing of it as in Browning.” He presents it as it is, a physiological force, product of the Will-to-Live, in which the individual is subordinated to the species. Passion, thus, is an objective force rather than a subjective emotion, and has little in common with the romantic or poetic notion of love. Two beings destined to love one another are but part of one and the same thing, two molecules of the same body, and the driving urge, the race urge, has violently and precipitately thrown them into each others* arms. As Joyce has said in Ulysses: nThey clasped and sundered, did the Coupler’s Will." In the depiction of man’s futile struggle between his instinct and the Immanent Will, Hardy’s philosophy is directly at variance with that of George Eliot, to whom he has been compared. She sees man’s struggle, too, but it is within, a moral one, a struggle between desire and con science, and there is a chance of man's ultimate victory. She declares for action and resistance; her philosophy ad mits it. Hardy, on the other hand, declares for submission and quietism as the only course possible. The tragedy of life is that the unequal struggle does go on; man is the tool of the Will, and from his futile warring with the greater force his individual tragedy is born. Humanity is a restless thing; personal desires, including the wish to love and to be loved, assert themselves against the vast 144 unconcerned current of existence; tragedy results from man’s refusal to be held in the process of the general being, the World-Purpose, and his inability to make his refusal pre vail. This fatal antinomy between man’s nature, his desire, and the divine impulse of the world shadows his ill-omened existence. Love, therefore, does not remain a mere latent force hidden away; it is a will that desires to express itself and must project itself against a suitable being. And this will, unchanging, manifests itself in that invin cible need for love inherent in all living things. Thus, in love, the Immanent Will, the World-Purpose, wields greater power than do the spiritual forces. And this de sire, projecting itself- on the object within its reach, is aided by man’s instinctive attribution to the loved one of qualities she does not possess, a part of the love and the romance of youth. This conception causes the poet, though he opens "youth’s sweet-scented manuscript” and sees romantic love seeking solace .... not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being, Not from noting Life’s conditions, Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam .. _ Whereby gray things golden seem,J"L/ 117 Hardy, ”0n a Fine Morning,” in Collected Poems. 118. 145 to vision "beyond the tragedy of disillusionment awaiting when the .... lessons that love deceives And wrings with wrong......... are learned. He therefore draws the love that all men have for the ideal, whether it be the ideal of a soul, of a nature, or simply of a beautiful body; but he sees its im permanence in the light of the truth and understanding that ultimately comes. The lover's visioning of his mind's ideal in the be loved is but a natural outgrowth of this theme, and it is an ironic Hardian touch that makes the sensualist Fitzpiers voice the essence of idealistic Platonic love. When he sees Grace Melbury, he exclaims: 'The design is for once carried out. Hature has at last recovered her lost union with the Xdeal'11-8 And later he defines love, platonically: 'Human love is a subjective thing— the essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says— ipsa hominis essentia— it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris is projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indif ferently. 119 In harmony with this definition, Jude consoles himself, Hardy, The Woodlanders. 117 119 Ibid., 130. 146 when the "baseness of Arabella's character becomes known to him, by maintaining a .... factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella her self......... l2^ And Julian, when he realizes the hopelessness of his love for Ethelberta, finds that his lost mistress has become a "creature of contemplation" and thus "almost a living soul."-1 *^-1 - This last idealistic aspect, Julian's finding that Ethelberta has become a "creature of contemplation" and "almost a living soul," and from this fact taking comfort, seems to find its basis in Hardy's belief in mind's suprem acy over body. He believes in his earlier poems that the mind can quit the bodily cell, rise above it, plumb the un known depths of the universe: In vision I roamed the flashing Firmament, So fierce in blazon that the Night waxed wan, As though with awe at orbs of such ostent; And as I thought my spirit ranged on and on In footless traverse through ghast heights of sky, To the last chambers of the monstrous Dome, Where stars the brightest here are lost to the eye.122 120 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 117. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 212. ^22 Hardy, "In Vision I Roamed," in Collected Poems, 118. 147 This rising above earthly self brings comfort, for when he re-lives in mind his life, his hopes, his efforts, he can raise his gaze from the human and contemplate the higher that Uncloaked .... from fog-damps afar, . . . showed its beams burning from pole to horizon As bright as a b r a n d ,123 and Regarding the vision on high And thus re-illumed I have no humour letting My pilgrimage fail. Two short stories suggest this belief in mind’s supremacy over body. In "The Withered Arm"-1 - 24 the story is recounted of a woman whose hatred for her successful rival is so strong that in a peculiarly vivid dream she imagines she grasps the arm of the other woman. Later, the prints of her fingers appear on the arm of the actual person, object of her jealousy, and paralysis of the limb results. This same concept underlies the theme of "The Imaginative Woman.”!25 The wife in this tale, unhappily married, broods over a photograph of a poet, her mind's ideal, who 123 Ibid., 505. 124 Hardy, Wessex Tales. 65-106. 125 ^ Ibid.. 1-33. 148 commits suicide before she is able to meet him. After her death, her unimaginative husband discovers that the child bears unmistakable resemblance to the dead poet. In the Preface, Hardy writes the explanation of the phenomenon: It turns upon a physical possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and that is well supported by the experience of medical men and other observers of such manifestations, These stories demonstrate the philosophical idea that mind is the creative impulse underlying physical phenomena. In The Well-Beloved, however, these ideas of mindfs supremacy and the willingness of the lover to vision his ideal in the beloved receive fullest analysis* The amorous sentiment which possesses the central character is an in teresting practical variety of the Platonic theory of love. It falls somewhere between the two extremes of the ideal love as conceived in modern literature. In both* the man is dominated by the desire for transcendental perfection. Of one of these Dante is the highest example. With him, the desire can be aroused only by the vision of one who not only appears to be but actually is, so far as man is con cerned, eternal perfection embodied in physical woman. In the other form, the desire is constantly being aroused, not by the definite image, but by the hope that this image may be perfection. It is not stable; it is not excited once and for all; but it is constantly changing and alight- 149 ing on her who changes near. The lover worships his own desire; his mind controlling him enables him to do this; and each episode ends when he sees the reality of* the woman under the beauty he has imaged in her. Ideal love thus be comes ironic. The second type’ -is that portrayed in the fantasy, The We11-Beloved. The central character is sketched in the Preface: A personage .... a native— whom some may choose to call a fantast .... but whom others may see only as one that gave objective continuity and a name to a delicate dream which in a vaguer form is more or less common to all men, and is by no means new to Platonic philosophers.126 And the peculiar quality of this quest for the Well-Beloved, of an ideal Beauty or Desire flittingly incarnate in this or that woman of earth, is stated at the beginning of the novel: To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defense, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tan gible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a con ception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable.I27 And further: 126 Hardy, The Well-Beloved, iii 127 Ibid., 15. 150 Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified by the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of her ghost liness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next would be, whither she would lead him, having herself access to all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night he dreamed that she was ’the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus* in person, bent on tormenting him for his sins against beauty in his art— the im placable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved the masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never been in one place long,128 This dream, this vision, "had not remained the occupant of the same fleshy tabernacle in her career so far. Whether she would ultimately settle down to one he could not say."-^9 For Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor, veers as a youth of twenty from Avice Caro to the handsome Marcia; then, as "a young man of forty" finds himself in love with a second Avice, daughter of his former fleeting passion; again, as a "young man of sixty" he is under the spell of the third Avice, daughter of his love of twenty years before. Final ly, when the girl has settled her affections upon a more appropriate lover, and his sense of art and beauty have become dulled, he settles down with the Marcia of his youth of forty years before in an elderly marriage. 128 Ibid.. 16, Loc. cit. 151 The ironic result of such a g,uest for th© beloved when she assumes varied and irresistible feminine forms is suggested in the poem "The Chosen." The fickle lover, after he has found the one woman desired, discovers that in her face he sees resemblance to all five of his former loves *A woman for whom great gods might strive!’ I said, and kissed her there: And then I thought of the other five, And of how charms outwear. At length I came to a Christ-cross stone Whieh she had passed without discern; And I knelt upon the leaves there strown, And prayed aloud that she might turn. I rose, and looked; and turn she did; I cried, ’My heart revives!* ’Look more,* she said. I looked as bid; Her face was all the five’s. All the five women, clear come back, I saw in her— with her made one, The while she drooped upon the track, And her frail term seemed well-nigh run. I took the composite form she was, And carried her to an arbour small, Not passion-moved, but even because In one I could atone to all. And there she lies, and there I tend, Till my life’s threads unwind, 130 Hardy, Collected Poems. 640 seq, 152 A various womanhood in blend— Hot one, hut all combined. But, nevertheless, this instinctive attribution of qualities unpossessed to the loved one, a part of the love and the romance of youth, Hardy sees with others as the beginning of all passion. One never sees the reality of the other; the idea projected is the important factor. Man looks at woman and visions in her the qualities he himself desires. In the little poem "The Well-Beloved,” the lover as he goes to meet his bride singing of the "God-created norm of perfect womanhood” meets a wraith: A shape whereon one star-blink gleamed Slid softly by my side, A woman's; and her motion seemed The motion of my bride. He questions her: — *0 maiden lith and lone, what may Thy name and lineage be Who so resemblest by this ray My darling?— Art thou she?' The shade replies: 'Thy bride remains within Her father’s grange and grove. 'But though thy bride remains inside Her father’s walls .... The one most dear is with the:er. here, For thou dost love but me. 'Thou has transferred To her dull form awhile 153 My beauty, fame, and deed, and word, My gestures and my smile. *0 fatuous man, this truth infer, Brides are not what they seem; Thou lovest what thou drearnest her; I am thy very dream!’ He would marry her; but She, proudly, thinning in the gloom: though, since troth-plight began, I have ever stood as bride to groom I wed no mortal man!* And just as this lover finds — When I arrived and met my bride Her look was pinched and thin, As if her soul had shrunk and died, And left a waste within, and in his disillusionment can love no more, so do all lovers find that love has disappeared with the advent of truth: 0 vision appalling When the one believed-in thing Is seen falling, falling, With all to which hope can cling. Perhaps the most savagely condensed example of this theme is found in "The Newcomer’s Wife," when the disillusioned bridegroom threw himself Over the slimy harbour wall; They searched, and at the deepest place 131 Ibid., 121 seq. 132 "At Waking" in Ibid.. 208. 154 Found him with crabs upon his face.-1 - 33 Love does not present itself to Hardy in rosy colors, beautiful and ideal; his view is that of a naturalist who sees love as a sexual attraction, a mighty instinct, against which strong men fight in order to retain their essential identity* This aspect of the passion, a physiological force having little in common with the romantic or poetic pictur ing of the instinct, finds early expression in the little poem, "Amabel": I mused: fWho sings the strain I sang ere warmth did wane? Who thinks its numbers spell His Amabel?T— Knowing that, though love cease, Lovef s race shows no decrease; All ’ or dell Civilized man cannot liberate his appetites; society look ing to its own conservation has established laws and erected barriers for the regulation of the joy of this instinct. But nature rarely allows man to remain within these arti ficial boundaries; she takes no cognizance of man-made laws; she urges her subject through his powerful instinct to break the commandments of conventions; and always from this 133 Ibid., 344. 134 Ibid.. 6, 155 antagonism between passion and social law tragedy and suffer ing are born* For the unhappiness that results, nature is not mindful. Jude describes her workings: "it ^he forcej seemed to care little for his reason and will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a school-boy he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had noth ing in common with his own except locality.”135 novel ist voices the question in the mind of thinking man; Should the blame for intellectual man’s failure be laid to women themselves, or is it the conventions attached to the natural relationship between the sexes that holds back those who aspire to the highest progress? For, surely, thinking man’s struggle between nature and instinctive desire is the cause of his individual tragedy. Henry Knight, the intellectual, expected to find no place in his life, dominated by his ambition, for love’s "charming dalliance," In him the intellect was supreme; it had moulded his life and he thought it would mould his desire. However, the charm of the capricious Elfride cap tures him. But even in his abdication before her, he loves 135 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 45. 156 philosophically, and, rationalizing, he ironically decides that he has "fallen in love with her soul, which had tem porarily assumed its disembodiment to accompany him on his 1 wa.y»n And Elfride has so little soul; she is purely changeable emotion in woman*s form. But for Knight, love for the time is supreme: Once the passion had mastered him, the intellect had gone for naught• Knight as a lover was more single minded and far simpler than his friend Stephen [Elfride*s former lover] , who in other capacities was shallow beside him.J-*7 However, later when he discovers the lack of "soul," when the girl, weak, high-strung, and burdened with the very intensity of her love, proves herself no match for her-lover*s brilliant and unerring reasoning, when she is led to see indiscretion in small incidents, and "the actual innocence which made her think so fearfully of what, as the world goes, was not a great matter, magnified her guilt" in the eyes of Knight, "this man, whose imagination had been fed up to preternatural size by lonely study and silent obser vation of his kind— whose emotions had been drawn out long and delicate by his seclusion, like plants in a cellar-- 136 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 45. 137 Ibid.. 3S9. 157 was absolutely in p a i n * ”^38 But one finds little pity for him in his tragedy of ruined love. Hardy analyzes him well: The moral rightness of this man’s life was worthy of all praise; but in spite of intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an ab straction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it. Having now seen himself mistaken in supposing Elfride to be peerless, nothing on earth could make him beliefe she was not so bad after all.139 His love was too systematic, too coldly mathematical; when on examination it failed to meet his requirements, it was rejected as an unsatisfactory solution to a problem. Swithin St. Gleeve, the youthful astronomer, repre sents a less relentless intellectual, but nevertheless one who protests the inclusion of passion in his life of as piration. He who voices his desire to Lady Gonstantine to gain nothing less than "the dignity and office of Astron omer Royal”- * - 4^ knows nothing of love and sees no place for it in his life. Lady Constantine sees him as he is: There lay, in the shape of an Antinous, no amoroso, no gallant, but a guileless philosopher. His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually 138 Ibid., 369. 139 Ibid., 407. 140 Hardy, Two on a Tower, 9. 158 gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, hut into other worlds* Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of other woman’s looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations,141 And Hardy analyzes the possibilities of the situation; The ennobling influences of scientific pursuits was demonstrated by the speculative purity which expressed itself in his eyes whenever he looked at her [Lady Constantine] in speaking, and in the child-like faults of manner which arose from his obtuseness to the dif ference of sex. He had never, since becoming a man, looked even so low as to the level of a Lady Constan tine. His heaven at present was truly in the skies, and not in the eyes of some daughter of Eve. Would any Circe or Calypso .... ever check this pale haired scientist’s nocturnal sailings into the inter minable spaces overhead, and hurl all his mighty cal culations on cosmic force and stellar fire into Limbo? Oh, the pity of it, if such should be the casejl^S But such is the case. Love in him is slow in awakening, but gradually his feeling of gratefulness for the things done for him by his benefactress changes, in spite of his struggle, from a placid friendship to a deeper passion. Though when he is teased by Yiviette Constantine about mar riage, he can answer, "A beloved science is enough wife for me,’ ’ it is not long before he must write his confession: I can do nothingI I have ceased to study, ceased to observe. .... This affection I have for you ab sorbs my life, and outweighs my intentions. The power to labour in this grandest of fields has left me. I struggle against weakness till I think of the cause, 141 Ibid.. 47. Loc. cit. 159 and then I bless her. But the very desperation of my circumstance has suggested a remedy; and this I would inform you of at once.143 The remedy, marriage, is the result— marriage between this ambitious boy and this unhappy woman of twenty-eight. And again, instinct is the victor; intellect is vanquished. Angel Clare is another man, primarily intellectual, who loves at first unwillingly, but then allows human lit tleness to triumph over love, intellect to get the better of the generous forces of affection and of tenderness. He belongs with Knight in the class of those men who have partly shaken off the tyranny of convention, and yet, while believing themselves free, are bound fast by the very laws they have supposedly resigned. To Angel’s intellect is added a spirituality that eclipses his humanity: Clare .... was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singu larly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot— less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but his love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could Jealously guard the loved one against his very self......... He loved Tess dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thorough ness of her feeling for him.144 His egoism, "his squeamish, fastidious nature, conscious of 143 Ibid.. 114 seq. 1 4.4- Hardy, Tess of the D*Urbervilles, 219. 160 his own perfection and unconscious of his deep insincerity, U C .... pretentiously broad-minded and essentially mean,” can never understand the essential nature of Tess. Though he can tell his father, ’I love the church as one loves a parent. X shall always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for whose history I have deeper ad miration; but I cannot honestly be ordained her minis ter, as my brothers are, while she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry1;146 he cannot redeem his own mind from the narrowness of his conventional views. Yet he cannot but answer the call of the flesh; the passion Tess evokes in him cannot be put down. First to him she "was the merest ideal phenomemon . . . . a rosy, warming apparition, which had hardly ac quired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her, yet would not own his preoccupation to be more than a philosopher’s regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of womankind.”- * - 47 But gradually, this aspect of his feeling changes; the male and the female element be comes uppermost: Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 148. 146 Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1S8. 147 Ibid., 145. 161 .... she impressed him more deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman— a whole sex condensed into one typical form.148 And finally passion masters him; The stimulus that had passed into Clare like an an nunciation from the sky did not die down. Resolu tions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and .... went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and kneeling down beside her clasped her in his arms,149 His striving intelligence, his ambition, are submerged; she is not the r r ladyn he had intended for his wife, and he de votes hours to self-analysis and to justification for his choice of a simple dairymaid for his mate. The effect of her revelation of the episode with Alec D'Urberville upon the cold, spiritual, and idealizing Clare is foreordained. He will admit no alleviating cir cumstance. nThe hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse itn1^8 blocks his understanding of the nature and the purity of his wife. ”111 with thinking, eaten out with thinking, withered with thinking, scourged out of all his former pulsating, flexous domestici- 148 Ibid.. 146 149 Ibid.. 169 150 Ibid., 274 163 ty,"l5l he can see no way out of his dilemma but to crucify the spirit of Tess; he must dismiss her because, as he tells her, "Though there is no anger between us, there is that which I cannot endure at present. I will try to bring my self to endure it. I will let you know where I go as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it— if it is desirable, possible— I will come to you. But until I come to you it will be better that you should not try to come to me,"^ His love had been ethereal, spiritual, to a fault; his mind and spirit had played too great a part in it. When his emotions had finally overcome intellectual prohi bition, he had seemingly loved completely and enduringly. On his wedding day he had reached understanding and had approached the unselfishness and the humility that must be a part of love: f Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irre trievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not, I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am, she is. What I become she must become. What I cannot be she cannot be. And shall I never neglect her, or hurt her, or ever forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime**153 151 Ibid., 376. 152 Ibid., 388. 159 Ibid., 348. 163 But when he discovered that his mind had been deceived by his emotions, with all his attempted independence of judgment, this advanced and well-meaning young man .... was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. Ho prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as de serving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. .... In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defi cient can be more than the entire.1^4 The result can be but tragedy for him and for her. Even fuller analysis of intellectual man's striving in the grip of the physiological force is presented in Jude the Obscure. Jude Eawleyfs strong intellectual aspirations are housed in worldly substance; his hopes, his plans, his expectations give way instantly and completely before the force which works to populate the world. It is not love which draws him to Arabella; she had merely been singled out "for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from head quarters, unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of their lives is to be occupied with the feminine" ;I^5 an(i «the unvoiced call of woman to man, 154 Ibid.. 302. Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 40. 164 which was uttered very distinctly by Arabella's personality, held Jude to the spot against his intention."3-56 Mature is not slow in compelling Jude through instinct to forget his elevated intentions. The one encounter is decisive: "There was a momentary flash of intelligence, a dumb announcement of affinity in posse between herself and him."-1 -^7 And on the next Sunday, a day usually given over to study, he dis covers that "a great hitch had happened in the gliding and noiseless current of life,"158 an<i study is impossible, "The predestinate Jude" goes to Arabella, and he, "the in cipient scholar, prospective D. D«, Professor, Bishop, or what not, felt himself honored and glorified by the con descension of this handsome country wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her Sunday frock and ribbons."-1 -^5 7 He fights the infatuation, and deciding the afternoon walks will not be repeated, finds a sense of relief. But the feeling is only temporary; Arabella soon reasserted her sway in his soul. What were his books to him? What were his intentions 156 Ibid., 41 157 Ibid., 40 158 Ibid.. 44 159 Ibid., 47 165 hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of the time day by day? ’Wasting?* It depended on your point of view to define that: he was just living for the first time; not wasting life. It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson— ay, or a pope! 160 Thus two forces at once friendly and hostile have just recognized one another in a sudden flash of lightning. The gleam has revealed that they must be united; the desires of the flesh have been divined; their precocious affinity is purely instinctive, Arabella is the embodiment of the Schopenhauerean view of woman: she is the Instrument of the Will-to-Live. Her nature "seethes with indiscriminate desire for men of flesh,”161 as Duffin phrases it, and this desire directs itself at Jude: ’I’ve got him to care for me, yet! But I want him to more than care for me; I want him to have me— to marry me! I must have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I shall go mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether.*162 The only thing that concerned her, then, was to get posses sion of, and to be possessed by, man; and when Jude is the man, the result must be that his striving personality and 160 Ihid., 50. 161 Charles Duffin, Thomas Hardy, 5. 162 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 52. 166 high hopes fall helpless before a merciless indulgence of sex. Obviously, in Arabella the feminine instinct is sheer unquestioning destructiveness, a theme poetically stated in "The Ivy-Wife": ^ In new affection next I strove, To coil an ash I saw, And he in trust received my love; Till with my soft green claw I cramped and bound him as I wove . . . Such was my love: ha, haI By this I gained his strength and height Without his rivalry. And............ ............ ................ soon he Being bark-bound, flagged, snapped, and fell outright . . . .163 Yet when he is free of this first entanglement, simple nature still holds Jude; his aspiration cannot tri umph over his instinct. Striving to master his own fate, he is not only immersed in, but is himself an inseparable part of, the great onward motion of existence; and it is the fierce unavailing struggle between his desire and his reason, his passion and his intellect, that makes humanity’s enforced obedience to the basic law an evil force for him. He exemplifies the passion of love bringing out the indi vidual in uncontrolled revolt against the law of race. His instinct prompts him to earn a living, to marry and beget 163 Hardy, Collected Poems, 50. 167 children; hut through his aspiration to live outside the natural scope of his being, these results of natural desire hold him back and become to him fearful evil. It was doomed that the failure of his personal life should come through the love of two women; it was their different rela tionships with the finer faculties of his mind that caused his degradation. And finding himself a second time in love with a woman, Jude recalls his life experience and ques tions it; Strange that his first aspiration— toward academical proficiency— had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration— toward apostleship— had also been cheeked by a woman. *Is it,T he said, ‘that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want progress?1164 The struggle is, then, between instinct and under standing, between the blind force that works for the con-, servation of the species, and the intelligence of the in dividual that wills to fashion its life at its desire. One woman, Arabella, personifies the sensual appetites; another, Sue, represents the highest development of human nature. Between them Jude is held, his heart and his brain alter nately attracted by one and by the other. His eyes turned 164 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 257. 168 toward an ideal aim that he has fixed in his youth, he fol lows a vacillating course that leads him finally to disas ter. Just as thinking man revolts against the unheeding Life-Force intellectually, woman, rarely predominantly in tellectual, revolts instinctively. In woman, the prime impulse is to maintain personal integrity. And it is pro- • foundly right that the more general tragedy, the failure passively to maintain the integrity of personal existence against the main force of the world should he woman’s tragedy; and that the life of a man should figure the special case of this essential catastrophe— the courageous futility not simply of resistance, hut of aspiration, of the desire to make circumstance give way to, as well as to allow, personal heing. And in no matter what diverse stations of life they are discovered, women are linked in this instinctive re volt: the essentially "natural" Tess,16^ the more educated Bathsheha,!66 the spiritualized Sue,I67 are sisters in this desire to hold to personal integrity, to resist the unheed- Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Far from the Madding Crowd. 167 Jude the Obscure. 169 ing force that pushes them on to love that generally results in individual tragedy. The spirited, willful figure of Bathsheba dominates Far from the Madding Crowd; it is her caprice that is responsible for the death of Troy, the insanity of Boldwood, and the near-tragic solution of her life and that of her steadfast lover, Gak. Hers is a figure in which feminine charm and feminine destructiveness are almost equally min gled. An educated, independent woman, she fails to rise above essential nature. She may manage her farm well, she may direct her life intelligently to a certain point, but. she cannot control her impulses. She leads both Oak and Boldwood to love her and then regrets the fact that she can not return their love. She may "resolve never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of a man’s life," but as the novelist says, ” .... a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far ad- vanced as to make avoidance impossible."-*-®® Marriage may be something she desires to fight against, and independence may be something she wishes to cherish, but she cannot overcome her desire for masculine adoration. When Troy fascinates her, her abdication before him is complete and 168 Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 141. 170 sudden, and "her heart erratically flitting hither and thither from perplexed excitement, hot, and almost tearful, she retreated homeward, murmuring, ’Oh, what have I done I What does it mean?*"-*-69 Too late she would resist: "Bath.- sheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best of her advantage."^70 And as a result of this essential womanliness, Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance* ?/hen a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weak ness is doubly weak by being new.171 In the end, though intelligent and capable, she is a creature of instinct. She may protest, but she finds her impulses pleasanter guides than her discretion. She never really attempts to control the feeling that sweeps her by subtle and careful inquiries into the consequences. Her brain is under the control of her emotions. Troy realizes her inadequacies in reasoning; he plays on her jealousy and 169 Ibid.. 207. 170 Log. cit. 171 x Loc. cit. 171 on her vanity. Her own story of her hasty marriage to the soldier is illustrative of the lack of intellectual and the preponderance of instinctive control: * .... I was coming away, when he suddenly said he had that day seen a woman more beautiful than I, and that his constancy could not be counted on unless I at once became his......... And I was grieved and troubled— And then, between Jealousy and distraction, I married him.*!72 Her tragedy is started with this marriage against which she fought but which she could not forego. Finally, when she discovers that she is not all to her husband, that there have been other women in his life, that she cannot hold him completely for herself, her life is misery. After the scene wherein she pleads for the continuance of her romance and has had TroyTs answer, "All romances end at marriage,"i73 Bathsheba ’ . . . . burst into great sobs— dry-eyed sobs, which cut as they came, without any softening by tears. .... She was conquered .... Her pride was indeed brought low by despairing discoveries of her spolia tion by marriage with a less pure nature than her own. She chafed to an fro in rebelliousness, like a caged leopard; her whole soul was in arms, and the blood fired her face. Until she had met Troy, Bathsheba had been proud: of her position as a woman; it has been a glory to know that her lips had been touched by no man's on earth— that her waist had never been encircled 172 Ibid., 296 173 Ibid., 319 17E by a lover’s arms.^ She analyzes her present condition in view of her past and looks back to those earlier days when she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them. She had never taken kindly to the idea of marriage in the abstract as did the majority of women she saw about her. In the tur moil of her anxiety for her lover she had agreed to marry him; but the perception that accompanied her happiest hours on this account was rather that of self- sacrifice than of promotion and honour. .... That she had never, by look, word or sign, encouraged a man to approach her— that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in re nouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to be come the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole— were facts now bitterly remembered. Oh, if she had never stopped to folly of this kind, respectable as it was, and could stand up again .... and dare Troy or any other man to pollute a hair on her head by his interferenceJ175 Thus, though a thinking and intelligent being in matters of business, she cannot conquer instinct and reaps the tragedy of her woman’s instinctive subservience to man and to her own desire. Eustacia Vye, a more impressive, but much less charm ing figure than Bathsheba, is a woman who as McDowall phrases it, "is victimized by loneliness,”^76 a victim of 174 Ibid., 322, 175 Loc. cit. et seq. ■ * " 76 Arthur S. McDowall, Thomas Hardy. 6. 173 the moorland solitude.of which she says ”*tis my cross, my misery, and will toe my death.” She, in her intensely tragic temperament, sees the world as a huge deliberate conspiracy, a force consciously inventing devices for her ruin. Tragedy is the inevitable answer to her personality’s self-asser tion. That she should toe drawn to Clym is inevitable: he was above the general on the heath; he represented the pos sibility of her achieving the dreams of joy and bliss of fered by her impassioned visioning of the beauties of the cities of the world; she questioned herself as a wife, but saw in wifehood an escape to the things she had viewed in her imagination. And finally, though she has forebodings and doubts, she yields to her instinct, though in her case the instinct is more a reasoned one than is the case with Bathsheba. When she says to Clym "I know that we shall not love like this always.......... Nothing can insure the continuance of love; it will evaporate like a spirit, and so I feel full of fears,”- * - 77 she voices the doubt that woman, when she will try to reason in love, knows. And later she warns her lover: ’ ’There, go away I .... I shall ruin you.......... Kiss me, and go away for ever. It is your only chance. Many a man’s love has been a curse to 177 Hardy, Return of the Native. 24=2. 174 1 7 8 him*” But it was inevitable that these two should marry, and just as inevitable that that marriage, product of in stinct rather than reason, should bring tragedy. Clym was right in his analysis: ’ ’ You are just like all women. They are ever content to build their lives on any incidental position that offers itself; whilst men would fain make a globe to suit them,”^® She did try ”by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind,”^-8^ and through these, the dangerous desires for self-importance, she comes to tragic disillusionment. When Clym, the man she had idealized, the one who represented escape and whom she loved instinctively and un- reasoningly had been reduced by ill-health to humble cir cumstance, when life with him no longer holds passion and hope for future joy away from Egdon Heath, that mere void of emptiness and nothing, Eustacia realizes the depth of her individual tragedy; ’Two wasted lives— his and mine! And I am come to this! Will it drive me out of my mind?’ She cast about for any possible course whieh offered the least improvement on the existing state of things, and could find none. She imagined how all those Budmouth 178 Ibid.. 243. 179 253* 180 Ibid.. 254. 175 ones who should learn what had become of her would say, *Look at the girl for whom nobody was good enough!1 To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mcekery of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire of heaven should go much further. To her, in her pride, every adverse turn in her fortune she construed as evidence of an immense malicious fate arrayed against her. But as Hardy notes: "This gloomy corner into which accident as much as indiscretion had brought this woman might have led even a moderate partisan to feel that she had cogent reasons for asking the Supreme Power by what right a being of such exquisite finish had been placed in circumstances calculated to make of her charm a curse rather than a blessing."I82 And her tragic cry uttered when, regretting her hasty marriage, she turns to the other man, Wildeve, the man whom she had thought she loved before she met Clym, again shows her reason fighting against her desire, her rational power at grip with her incarnate destiny: 'Can I go, can I go?* she moaned. *He*s not great enough for me to give myself to— he does not suffice for my desire! .... If he had been a Saul or a Bonaparte— ah! But to break my marriage vow for him— it is too poor a luxury! .... And I have no money to go alone! And if I could, what comfort to me? I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this 181 Itoia., 319 182 Loc. cit. 176 year, and the year after that as before. How I have tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me I .... I do not deserve my loti1 she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. *0, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control. 0, how hard it is of heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all1*133 And it is only after she had deeided to yield to Wildeve, when, with misgiving and doubt, she has gone to him on that terrible night of storm when the Heath unleashed all of its fury, and when both of the lovers have lost their lives in the swollen weir, that peace comes to her. The tragic poetry of her own notional world at last overwhelms her. As Abercrombie has well said: , r In no book of Hardy*s is the ceaseless drifting power of material fate so im pressively or so directly typified— neither malignant nor benevolent, but simply indifferent, unconscious of its freightage of a humanity not so much struggling as vainly desiring against its relentless motion."1®^ Eustacia with her strong pride, her instinct for love and for happiness, pitiably mistakes the indifference of this world motion for actual malignity, and acting as she does unconsciously, brings evil consequences on herself and on others. Her 183 Ibid.. 442. 184 Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 79 177 reasoning power was strong: her logic feared the outcome of instinctive yielding to desire; but her desire was too strong, and tragedy resulted. Tess Durbeyfield’s story is compounded of the con flict of two forces— the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. And this will of TessTs to enjoy is nothing extravagant; she merely hopes humbly for the happiness that her instincts promise her. Her tragedy presents an epic statement of the conflict of the individual with the world force in its simplest and most general mode; she is punished simply for the sin of personal existence as what she is. Tess is Hardy’s almost standard woman— a woman whose possible best is great, but whose flesh prevents her at taining the heights: She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage . . . .; and it was this that caused Alec D’Urber- ville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure.185 Tess, in common with so many of the women of Hardy, surely radiates a ’ ’something” that calls for sympathy from 185 Hardy, Teas of the D’Urbervilles, 43. 178 the very beginning of her tragic course. She seems to be possessed of a prophetic feeling of coming evil, a feeling of helplessness, a feeling that any happiness cannot last, that, finally, "any happiness is but an occasional episode in the general drama of pain.”1®6 Eustacia felt this same certainty of the transiency of human happiness when she said to Clym: ’I dread to think of anything beyond the present. What is, we know. We are together now, and it is un known how long we shall be so; the unknown always fills my mind with terrible possibilities, even when I may reasonably expect it to be cheerful......... I see your face in every scene of my dreams, and hear your voice in every sound. I wish I did not. It is too much— what I feel* They say such love never lasts.*87 Similarly, Tess says to Angel: 'You seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line; the first of them seems the biggest and the clearest; the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and eruel and as if they said, "I’m coming! Beware o* me! Beware o’ me!" . . . .’188 Tess is instinctive woman; close to nature, almost a part of the natural forces around her, intelligence is submerged, underdeveloped, and instinct plays greatest 186 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge. 406. Hardy, Return of the Native; 246. 188 Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 139. 179 part. Her story is the history of a life compelled "by its very nature to utter its desires against the great un perturbed current of general existence— the existence that takes no cognizance of the personalities it sweeps forward. From the beginning the author makes one aware of the inevitably tragic consequences of this epic of the flesh: Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meet ing’s import [with Alec D’UrbervilleJ she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the wrong man and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all respects— as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to him who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind, she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.^8® But, as Hardy sees it .... in the ill-judged execution of the well- judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving. Nature does not often say ’See1 to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ’Here’ to a body’s cry of ’Where’ till the hide and seek has become an irk some, outworn game.3.90 Thus a stupid ehanee decrees that two ill-assorted creatures, Alec and Tess, should be united by ties of the flesh. Nature takes part in this conspiracy to satisfy the instincts, but not to bring contentment to the soul. And 189 Ibid., 44. 190 Loc. cit. 180 the fall of Tess, astray and slumbering in the woods, en tirely at the mercy of Alec*s designs, beoomes a dramatic moment of conspiracy. Sleep, weariness, darkness, and solitude all combine to bring about the destined event. D'Exideuil notes the terrible significance of this conspir acy of nature against the girl: L1instant revet une solennite e/ touffe/ e. II va sTaccomplir un acte ind^l^bile dans ses consequences h . la faveur dfune ambiance fatale. o£i veille a ce moment l'ange gardien de la jeune fille? Ob. erre cette providence en qui elle a foi? Questions derisoires. Cette chair tentatrice et veloutee est offerte, 1*innocence ne lui tient pas de bouclier, comme a Una Ghez le poete Spenser. C*est la gazelle dans les griffes du fauve, la vierge aux bras mon- streux du desir. Dans cette scene poignante qui fait du sombre hasard 1*artisan charge du soin de pourvoir tout &tre d’un compagnon ou dTune compagne, on voit le spectacle de 1* innocence abandonee par les secours d’en-haut, Revocation, ^ternel retourxdes choses drici-bas, de viols semblables pdrpetres sans doute par un ancetre de Tess bruyant et d^bauch^, regagnant son manoir aprbs quelque combat sous la cotte de mailles. Desertion des Dieux? Rangon du passe? Cruels destins de la chair? Tout travaille a^livrer un corps immacui^ aux pollutions du male. Pretant sa criminelle assistance, la nature unit dans moment de folie des etres dissembables; elle se rit d*eux et de leurs esperance, • . . . Et il en est ainsi sans que, apres tant de milliers d'annees, line ex^- pI,ication plausible puisse apparaitre autre que la mechancet^ inherente aux xhoses et a I1univers tout entier.191 Tess never loved the sensualist Alec; she did love Angel with all the strength of her being. And thus Hardy Pierre D*Exideuil, Le Couple Humain dans 1 * Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy. 146 seq. 181 depicts another "misfit” in love, and the worst of it is that he can see no possible chance of anything better for man and woman of the future. What purpose can there be in this ill-assorting of people? At least Hardy can see none; but neither can he see hope for the future betterment of the condition: We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us around and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied or even conceived as possible. And thus the first movement of the sonata of desire and pity named Tess of the DTUrbervilles comes to its finale. The second movement presents her true and everlast ing love for Angel Clare, Though in her past experience she may be considered vacillating, acquiescent, and drift ing, McDowall strikes the true reason for these defects within her when he notes that in this book Hardy has with ironic realism used the past to the fullest extent to supply the main and most dexterous themes: The genuine and debased heredity of the Durbeyfield, the cheapness of the sham D^rberville, and Angel Clare1s pursuit of virgin stock. Tess is slightly, but not greatly, idealized; we are made to feel that, besides her beauty, she is a finer and more thought ful nature than the other girls. Pure at heart, 192 Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 44. 182 generous and devoted, she has still the acquiescent and drifting disposition of her family with an im petuous streak from the D'TJrbervilles of long ago,193 And Salberg summarizes her being: "Reinheit ist das Leit motiv ihres Wesens."^9^ Even to D'Urberville, Tess appears to be unsmirched in spite of the faet that he was her se ducer. When Clare has turned her out, and Alec, after an interlude of open-air preaching, again becomes her pursuer, he tells her: 'By my word and truth, I never despised you .... Why I did not despise you was on account of your in trinsic purity in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one victim in the world for whom I had no con tempt, and you are she. But you may well despise me now. I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still serve in the groves.'l95 But essential Nature snares Tess always. In spite of her shame, in spite of her belief that she can never belong to a good man after the episode with D'Urberville, she is driven irresistibly to Clare "by every heave of her pulse." She fights a desperate battle against her instinct and her love, against her desire to be his, but she cannot 193 Arthur S. McDowall, Thomas Hardy, 80. 194 Gerda Salberg, Thomas Hardy*s Frauen im Lichte seiner Weltanschauung, 27. 195 Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 369. 183 overcome Nature’s commands: *1 shall give -way— I shall say yes--I shall let my self marry him— -I cannot help it I I can’t "bear to let anybody have him but meJ Yet it is wrong . . . 0 my heart— 0— 0— 01*196 And Tess, all her efforts at confession failing, marries him with her secret untold. The effect of her story on the cold, spiritual, and idealizing Glare is foreordained. Despite his own "eight and forty hours of dissipation with a stranger in Lon don, "I97 he finds it impossible to accept the girl. And his desertion of his wife as a result of a false idea of purity is the cruelest act imaginable. Tess had broken no moral law; she had fulfilled a natural and instinctive one. She had fought against this part of life; she had tried to retain conventional purity; nature, her instincts, her environment were against her. Remorse and shame result much more from her situation as a girl who has been seduced than from within her own conscience, She bears no respon sibility for a sin which she has not committed, but of which she is the victim. Hardy sees her as a victim of the Law of Nature, the victim of circumstances and the evil deeds of others, and, so far from placing her outside 196 Ibid.. 202. 197 Ibid.. 256. 184 Nature, he repeatedly affirms that she is in harmony, not at issue, with Her. But the ready and cruel judgment of society implanted in her mind, and acting upon her through other people and finally through her husband, costs her her place in society, gives rise to the notion of an imaginary mea culpa, wastes her youth, her beauty, her love, and drives her to misery, crime, and violent death. Throughout her life Tess had been forced to stand alone and unaided in her struggle against a tragic fate. She had, indeed, a conscience and a will of her own, but thwarting her at every turn were her father, her mother, her lovers, her hereditary tendencies, a conventional society, and a mali cious course of events. She is a "pure woman” set amid circumstances that compel the defilement of her body and the starving of her spirit. She is weak, true, in all but loving and enduring; but her very strength in loving, as Abercrombie notes, is her greatest weakness and the source of her tragedy.-1 - 98 And, as I have said, her "will to en joy” is not extravagant. She modestly hopes and humbly begs for happiness in life which her instincts seem to promise her; and it is for these instincts implanted in her, which she tries to direct but which she cannot govern, that Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 104 X85 she is destroyed by anguish and crime. Sue Bridehead voices most completely woman’s in stinctive and intellectual rebellion against the World Pur pose. She is one of the few women Hardy has drawn whose intellect one feels is a force of strength, a force to be reckoned with, a force that might have a chance against the relentless, uncaring order of things. She is a strong in dividual; she strives to force her place in the general onward movement; she alone of all the women characters seems one who might stand defiant and win. At first she seems to be just the woman who could help Jude Fawley most. She is as clever as he is, clear-sighted, and entirely sympathetic with his unfaltering desire. The nature of their early relationship is accurately judged by her hus band Phi Hot son: ’I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all flavor of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together— to share each other’s emotions, and fancies, and dreams.*199 Jude, after the soul-destroying episode with Arabella, after he has repented of his frenzy, decides to mortify his intellectual desires by dedicating himself to a life of humble Christian effort. He hopes to find in Sue "a corn- 199 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 274. 186 / panion in Anglican worship.” The irony of the situation lies in the fact that this interest in Sue is but a result of the commandment of his concealed nature speaking in the language familiar to his ruling desire— his flesh. When Sue goes to Jude, after having left Phillotson whom she cannot bring herself to love, she visions an ideal love, almost Platonic, free from sex and the earth-drag, and she believes that Jude can be her perfect companion: ’My liking for you is not as some woman’s perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely delicate kind, and I don’t want to go further and risk it by— an attempt to intensify its I quite realized that, as woman with man, it was a risk to come. But, as me with you, I resolved to trust you to set my wishes above your gratification.*200 Criticisms that Sue was insincere in her love or that Hardy drew her imperfectly are not justified. Other authors have developed this same conception of woman’s fleshless love. Shaw in his introduction to Man and Super man suggests that spiritual and physical marriage be dif ferentiated; the partnership of the soul should result from choice, that of flesh should be arranged by the State* It is not necessarily true that body and soul must mate in one individual; physical perfection does not pre-suppose mental and spiritual excellence. This possibility is sug- 200 Ibid,, 285. gested when Jude declares: ♦But you, Sue, are such a phantasmal, bodiless crea ture, one who— if you*11 allow me to say it— has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can't.*201 And Sue replies: ♦Well .... you*ve owned that it would probably end in misery for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantage it gains them sometimes— a dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do without,*202 Browning also is cognizant of this strife between flesh and spirit in HA Womants Last Word”: Teach me, only teach, Love I As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love, Think thy thought— Meet if thou require it, Both demands, Laying flesh and spirit In thy hands. But this idyll, in which the spirit is assigned a greater r&Le than the flesh, none the less confronts us with the problem of the human pair, because the Racial Will-to-Continue is dominant and the ideality aspired to by Sue is dragged down by the essential nature within Jude. 201 Ibid., 307. 188 For though the Intellect that realizes the uselessness of life is encroaching upon the domain of the Heart that con tains the instinct for reproduction in Jude, the rational element is ever and anon dragged down by the body. At one point he rises almost to a complete understanding of Sue*s nature and loves her none the less, when he says: ?Never mind. .... So that I am near you, I am comparatively happy. It is more than this earthly wretch called Me deserves— you spirit, you disem bodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom -^-hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms around you, I almost expeet them to pass through you as through airI Forgive me for being gross as you call it I ’SOS And to him, Shelley’s lines from "Epipsychidion" are Sue: There was a being my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings far aloft A Seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath that radiant form a woman .... But Sue, too, cannot escape her sex. The Christian ideal of purity to be gained by denial of life, disgusts her; but her pagan purity is not such a simple matter as she herself considers it. It is her nature to excite desire in man, but she has the fastidious horror of physical sex so strongly implanted that rather than endure her hus band Phillotson at night she jumps out of the window into 203 Ibid., 290. 189 the street. Her story of her "friendship" with the Christ- minister student is illustrative of the sex feeling of the woman: ♦We used to go about together— on walking tours, read ing tours, and things of that sort— like two men almost. He asked me to live with him, and I agreed by letter. But when I joined him in London, I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. He wanted to be my lover, in fact, but I wasnft in love with him; and on my saying I should go away if he didnft agree to my plan he did so. We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken ill, and had to go abroad. He said I was breaking his heart by holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could never have believed it of a woman. I might play that game once too often he said. He came home merely to die. His death caused a terrible remorse in me for my cruelty— though I hope he died of consumption and not of me entirely,'204 And later when she is glancing over the pages of "The Song of Solomon," her reaction to misinterpretation of the truth suggests another side of her nature: ♦And what a literary enormity this is . . . . The synopsis at the head of each chapter, explaining the real nature of the rhapsody .... ♦People have no right to falsify the Bible. I hate such humbug as could attempt to plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural, human love as lies in that great and pas sionate song,1205 However, though distaste for sex is a prominent part 304 Ibid., 174. 205 Ibid., 178. 190 of lier nature, in reality it seems the form taken in her consciousness by a concealed superstitious fear of the mys terious powers of existence. Abercrombie has analyzed this aspect of her character: So long as her fear remains concealed, she is quite willing to be a rebel, and requires only her own self approval. But even so, she has explained things by a not very comfortable metaphysic; she has imagined Tthat the world resembled a stanza of melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at full waking; the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.*206 Such ideas come very near a fear of existence. And when she must face the realities of life, fear comes out of con cealment . For Jude was soon to long more desperately that the companion of his spirit should become the comrade of his flesh. When Arabella returns and Jude, "an inconvenient sympathy rising in his breast," decides to go to her and help her, Sue, finding that "love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in,"207 protests with very earthly jealousy: ’Oh, but are you going to her? Don’t! Stay at home! Please, please stay at home, Jude, and not go to her now she’s not your wife any more than I.*208 200 Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 125 207 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 315, 208 I MA*. 3 1 2• 191 And Jude to her pleading exhibits a heartless brutality of sentiment paralleled only by Troyes behaviour to Bathsheba over the coffin of Fanny Robin.209 Duffin analyzes the situation: At his comrade, the woman he loves and reverences, he hurls insult after insult of the lowest kind, simul taneously twitching and rending the exposed nerve of jealousy, till she is exhausted and crushed and her soul murdered.21° Jude in his harsh brutality of sentiment relinquishes all claims to idealism in his love, when he says: ’Well, she is my wife, rather more than you, come to that .... D’ve waited with the patience of Job, and I don't see I've got anything for my self-denial .... Perhaps I am coarse .... I have the germs of every human infirmity in me, I verily believe— that was why I saw it was so preposterous of me to think of being a curate. I have cured myself of drunkenness, I think; but I never know in what new form a suppressed vice will break out in me I'211 He recognizes the truth and the nature of his love for Sue, but idealism inspired in him by her is incapable of bear ing the pull and strain of instinct: .'All that’s best and noblest in me loves you, and your freedom from everything that's gross has ele vated me, and enabled me to do what I should never have dreamed myself capable of, or any man a year or two ago. It is all very well to preach about self- 209 Far from the Madding Crowd. Gharles Henry Duffin, Thomas Hardy. 151. Hardy, Jude the Obscure. 312. 192 eontrol, and the wickedness of coercing a woman. But I should just like a few virtuous people who have condemned me in the past, about Arabella and other things, to have been in my. tantalizing position with you through these late weeks!— they'd believe, I think, that I exercised some little restraint in al ways giving in to your wishes— living in one house, and not a soul between us. .... Well, Arabella appeals to me . . . .’212 And Sue at last surrenders, her fear of sex still paramount: ♦I oan't say any morel Oh, if you must, you must . . . . I have nobody but you, Jude, and you are deserting me! I didn't know you were like this— I can't bear it, I oan*t .... if I must, I must. Since you will have it so, I agree! Only I didn't mean to! And I didn't want to marry again, either .... But yes,— I agree, I agree! I ought to have known you would conquer in the long-run, living like this.*213 Thus Sue in spite of intellect, of advanced think ing, is incapable of escaping instinct and jealousy of rivalry. The next morning the truth comes to her and she faces it; "a glow had passed away from her, and depression sat upon her features": 'I feel I was wickedly selfish last night! .... It was sheer unkindness in me or worse— to treat Arabella as I did. I didn't care about her being in trouble, and what she wished to tell you! Perhaps she was justified in telling But she finds herself "returning Jude's kisses in a way she 212 Ibid.. 314. 2^3 Loc. cit. et seq 214 Ibid., 316 193 had never done before. Times had decidedly changed. "’The bird is caught at last It she said, a little sadness showing in her smile.”215 But Sue’s mind never fully accepts the changed posi tion. And with the coming of little Father Time, child of Jude’s union with Arabella, in "whose shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadows which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last,"2^-8 the final catastrophe is set in motion. This strange child is analyzed by Hedgcock: Un gargon de dix ans, avec le caract^re d’un vieil- lard, accable sous le poids des sibeles passes; n^ desillusionnd, grace h 1’experience accumul^e de ses ancestries; epuisd, d^sepere', peu apte aux joies habituelles de I’enfance, sensible a tout le maD^heur et s a toute la gravity de la vie avant d*avoir vecu .... *Le pere Tempe’ repr^sente le temperament pessimiste de la lignee paternelle; il est le produit concentre' de plusieurs generations qui ont a peine su s’adapter aux conditions de l’existence.2!* And Salberg epitomizes his position in the story: Symbolistiseh in der Gestalt von Father Time tritt das Schicksal von aussen an Sue heran, Es ist weit in den Hintergrund gedr&ngt von der inneren Schicksalsmacht, die sich in dem charakter Sue’s offenbart.218 2' L5 Loc. cit. et seq. 216 IMA., 400. F, A. Hedgcock, Thomas Hardy. 259. Gerda Salberg, Thomas Hardy’s Frauen im Liohte seiner Weltanschauung. 39. 194 Of course, the fact that Jude and Sue, terrified at the thought of a second and irrevocable union in view of their unhappy first attempt, are fearful lest the condition of the contract kill their love and hence never marry, adds to the complication. Finally, after the terrible catastro phe of Father Time's murder of Jude's and Sue's children and his own suicide, Sue's nerves give way utterly; her clear reason deserts her. She decides that she deliberately op posed a part of the prescribed order of existence, and she fearfully suffers. Once a free-spirited human being, she is frightened into the dire catastrophe of denial of her own faith. She sees the two things, her opposition and her suffering, as sin and punishment. To Jude she says: 'Our life has been a vain attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher road. We should mortify the flesh— the terrible flesh— the curse of Adam. .... We ought to be continually sacrific ing ourselves on the altar of Duty!— But I have al ways striven to do what pleased me. I well deserved the scourging I have got 1*219 She yields to blind sentiment, and sees in this punishment the hand of a vengeful God. She must repent; indeed, she decides she must add to the punishment meted out to her. In her lust for self-abasement she sees that she must re nounce the man she loves and return to the one who is her 219 Hardy, Jude the Obscure. 410. 195 husband "in the sight of God.” And too late Jude realizes his lack of understanding of her true nature, a lack of understanding that did much to lead to the catastrophe: ?I have seemed to myself lately .... to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous— the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of itj I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrong-doing towards you, whom I love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as I? .... Yes, Sue— that’s what I am. I seduced you......... You were a distinct type— a refined creature intended by Mature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone I .... Perhaps— perhaps I spoiled one of the highest and purest loves that ever existed between man and woman.’220 And Sue, too, sees the fundamental quality of her own yield ing to desire and instinct: ’At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exaetly flirt with you; but that inborn crav ing which undermines some women’s morals almost more than unbridled passion— the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do to the man— was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then— I don’t know how it was— I couldn’t bear to let you go— possibly to Arabella again— and so I got to love you, Jude. But, you see, however it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.221 In this confession, Sue is at one with the general type of 220 Ibid., 408. 221 Ibid.. 420. 196 woman depicted by Hardy: the wish to fascinate, the wish to captivate without thought of the cost, the desire to be desired is their instinctive reaction to man and is the means through which the World Purpose works its designs. And she is adamant. She cannot be turned from the path she sees directed by Duty, even by Jude*s agonized plea: *Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons! You have been my social salvation. Stay with me for humanity*s sake. You know what a weak fellow I am. My two Arch Enemies you know— my weakness for women and my impulse to strong liquor. Don*t abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul.*22S And in spite of her love for Jude, the love she will hold for him always, she returns to Phillotson, and though un able to conquer the repugnance that he inspires in her, she inflicts this last penitence upon herself and in tor tured submission becomes his wife. As for Jude, he slips into the hands of Arabella and dies in shame and misery. Thus this tragedy of the half-and-half closes; the tragedy of people whose individuality, as Child expresses223 it, is too strong to fit into the common scheme and too weak to keep them out of conflict with it. For these two 222 Loc. oit. et seq. 223 Harold H, Child, Thomas Hardy. 90. 197 people so alike, so responsive, so true, it seems there should be some chance for eventual happiness; but the frus tration of hopes, the bitterness of unattained ambitions, and the catastrophe of destroyed ideals are the results. Both Jude and Sue were intellectual; both had high ideals; both strove constantly to advance; and both found themselves tragically defying the bewilderment induced by the conflict between their natural desires and the effort after social and intellectual advancement innate within them. The man strives more aggressively; the woman strives strongly too, but is more easily vanquished. Endowed with fine intellect and aggressively confident of intellectual independence, Sue nevertheless cannot overcome her woman*s desire to be desired, her woman*s essential dependence on and responsiveness to instinct. The one woman in Hardy*s gallery of women who could, it seems, have gone far and risen above instinct is the one whose tragedy in the end is the most intense and the most cruel. Thus human individuality and desire are always in conflict with the indifferent governing power, and since there is nothing that intensifies individuality and exerts desire so much as does love of man for woman, nothing brings individuality so sharply and so tragically into con flict with the World Purpose. But not only in protest by 198 the individual does tragedy result; in the nature of the passion of love itself certain aspects modify and change it and bring ultimate unhappiness to the individual. Hardy sees love as an impermanent passion: it cannot stand the light of truth; the lover’s passion is deadened with the passage of the years; and love is stifled by the obligation that convention and law put upon it, Man is an idealizing creature; he sees in the loved one the beauties of soul, mind, and body that he desires to see. In fact, this idealization is a potent factor im planted in him by the World-Purpose to insure his yielding. He sets certain standards of excellence, believes they are fulfilled, and then, when he discovers truth and loses the illusion, the death of ideals and hopes brings his tragedy, and love is killed. This visioning of impossible perfec tion may be merely that of beauty of body, and when the loveliness of the physical being is gone passion is dead. This aspect is ironically suggested in Hardy’s little poem, "In the Night She Game": I told her when I left one day That whatsoever weight of care Might strain our love, Time’s mere assault Would work no change there. And in the night she came to me, Toothless, and wan, and old, With leaden concaves round her eyes, And wrinkles manifold. I tremblingly exclaimed to her, 199 *0 wherefore do you ghost me thus! I have said that dull defacing Time Will bring no dread to us,' *And is that true of you?1 she cried In voice of troubled tune. I faltered: ’Well....I did not think You would test me quite so soon!*22^ However, though the change in the beauty of face may serve to bring tragedy to two lives, Hardy in his analysis of love as a transient passion concerns himself fundamen tally with the terrible result of love based on a miscon ception of the essential nature of the loved one. This ac counts for the tragedy of Elfride,225 Tess,226 Eustacia,22? Lucetta,228 and the others within the novels. One never feels that Donald Farfrae, the cold and almost passionless young Scotchman in The Mayor of Caster- bridge, is capable of great and consuming passion. His is not the strong nature of his antagonist Henchard. Yet, it is true that much of his love for Lucetta, his first wife, Henchard*s former mistress, is grounded, possibly almost 224 Hardy, Collected Poems. 212. 225 A of Blue Eyes. 286 Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 227 Return of the Native. Mayor of Casterbridge. 200 unconsciously, on his belief in her truth and purity, Lucetta*s intention was never to acquaint Farfrae with her past. She pleads with Henchard, she becomes ill with fear, knowing that should her husband learn of her past miscon duct his love would die, And when she is confronted with the results of the suppression of the secret on the night of the fateful skimmity-ride, she suffers tragically: ,fTis me!* she said with a face pale as death. *A procession— a scandal— an effigy of me and himl .... He will see it, wonrt he? Donald will see it I He is just coming home— and it will break his heart— he will never love me any more— and oh, it will kill me— kill me.* ^29 And after she has confessed her past to Farfrae, after her death on the same night as a result of the miscarriage caused by her tragic fear and despair, Hardy analyzes the essentially cold Farfrae in his attitude to the terrible affair: Time, in his own grey style, taught Farfrae how to estimate his experience of Lucetta— all that it was, and all that it was not. There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause, thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity— even the reverse, indeed; and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete. But Farfrae was not one of those. It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank which his loss threw about him. He could not but per ceive that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged a 229 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 337. 301 looming misery for a simple sorrow. After that rev elation of her history, which must have come sooner or later in any circumstances, it was hard to helieve that life with her would have been productive of further happiness.23® Life with Lucetta would have been impossible after the discovery of the action of her past; his belief in her purity and truth gone, love would have died also. His nature, however, cold and relatively passionless, can make easy adjustment to life; and one adjustment comes with his logically reasoned marriage with Elizabeth-Jane, a woman whom he knows to be true, pure, and a future help-mate to him in his work. The relationship is suggested in the gossip of the town: ’’Tis she that’s stooping to he— that’s my opinion. A widow man whose first wife was no credit to him— what is it for a young persuing woman, that’s her own mistress and well liked? But as a neat patching of things I see much good in it. When a man have put up a tomb of the best marble-stone to the other one, as he’ve done, .... and thought it all over, and said to hisself, "T’other took me in; I knowed this one first; she’s a sensible piece for a partner, and there’s no faithful woman in high life now”;— well, he may do worse than not to take her, if she’s tender-inclined.’23I A more complete tragedy, the result of love’s in ability to stand truth, involving the wrecking of three lives, is presented in A Pair of Blue Eyes. The love of 230 Ibid.. 565. 231 Ibid.. 374. 202 Elfride and Knight gives full expression to the tragedy of disillusionment when the passion is "based upon misunder-? standing of the true attributes of the loved one. The de votion of the intellectual Knight differs markedly from the romantic youthful love of Stephen, who loved the girl "with the very center of his heart," Of course, Elfride*s passion for the older man is suggestive of that dominance of emotion, that impulse to seize the moment and not count the morrow’s cost, so much a part of Hardy’s idea of women, and is demonstrated in the climactic scene on the cliff after she has saved Knight’s life: An overwhelming rush of exultation at having de livered the man she revered from one of the most ter rible forms of death, shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, en circled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete re- sult--a glorious crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the slave of the greater than the queen of the less.23S Obviously, the second love is to be a direct rever sal of the earlier romantic emotion: Knight is to be master and she the willing bond-servant. "A greater than 232 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 260. £03 Stephen had arisen, and she had left all to follow him,”233 Through this devotion to Knight, Elfride*s essential nature is changed. As Duffin phrases it: ”By nature joyous, light-hearted, and affectionate, she was Stephen Smith* s queen and fairy; under the sterner influences of Knight she becomes love*s vassal to a painful degree— her gay spirits are crushed; she is no longer Elfride.”23^ The ultimate tragedy of the devotion results from Knight^s misconception. He is devoted to Elfride because he sees in her his own ideal woman: one possessing major qualities of truthfulness, faithfulness, and above all, ignorance in all matters of love. This egotistic fiance wished to find in her a virgin soul: Inbred in him was an invincible objection to be any but the first comer in a woman*s heart. He had dis covered within himself the condition that if ever he did make up his mind to marry, it must be on the cer tainty that no cropping out of inconvenient old letters, no bow or blush to a mysterious stranger casually met, should be a possible force of discom posure ,235 Elfride*s overwhelming sincerity and Knight?s preju dices become the sorry instruments that defraud them of 233 _ Ibid., 261. 234 Henry Charles Duffin, Thomas Hardy, 115. 235 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 224. 204 their happiness in their love. The coincidence of Knight's request for the pot of myrtle, a gift from a former lover, leads to the betrayal of her essentially innocent past love experience. But since it was his belief in the absolute newness of the emotion to her that had been the basis of his love for the girl, the man is in an agony of jealous and unreasoning rage. And the girl is no match for his un erring and brilliant logic. She is actually innocent; but this very innocence magnifies her apparent guilt in the eyes of the coldly reasoning Knight. D'Exideuil analyzes the sequence of events leading to the final disillusionment and unhappiness: Les 'oui' tombent de sa bouche comme les feuilles se dd'tach.ent d'un arbuste fletri secou^ par le vent. Passive, elle s’abandonne aux aveus qui la livrent au malheur, incapable de detourner la marche de la menace qui s'avance, n'ayant t^ouve jusqu'ici d'autre secours que son silence, immergee dans l'effroi de^ son lime. G'est pour Knight un effondrement nouveau a chacune des paroles d'Elfride. II s'abandonnera bientSt, lui aussi, mais aux suggestions borages de son egoisme masculin. G'en est fait/de ce reve. Deux scenes d’amour se sont superposees au meme lieu, et leurs suites sentimentales se trouveront detruites en quel- que sorte l'une par 1*autre. Deux amis, par une coincidence nouvelle se seront chasses 1'un et 1'autre du coeur de la meme femme, excluant l'un par 1'autre une possibilite de ^onheur...........Q,uelques chapitres conduiront par de^res cet amour 'a son agonie, car le mecanisme a ete declench^ pour produire les conse quences qui rendront la repudiation i n e v i t a b l e .236 236 Pierre D'Exideuil, Le Couple Humain dans 1'Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy, 59 seq. 205 And Knight voices man’s anguish in disillusionment: ’Diogenes Laertius says that philosophers used volun tarily to deprive themselves of sight to be unin terrupted in their meditations. Men, becoming lovers, ought to do the same thing......... Because they would never then be distracted by discovering their idol was second-hand.*237 Hardy would present the philosophical dictum that he who extends the range of his Knowledge also increases his pos sibilities of suffering. Qui auget sclentiam auget dolorem. It is only after the girl’s death that Knight begins to see that he might have been mistaken, or that, at least, there might have been palliating circumstances. To Stephen he says: ’She is beyond our love, and let her be beyond our reproach. Since we don’t know half the reason that made her do as she did, Stephen, how can we say, even now, that she was not pure and true in heart? .... And we call her ambitious? No. Circumstance has, as usual, overpowered her purposes— fragile and deli cate as she— liable to be overthrown in a moment by the coarse elements of accident.*238 Thus, this love based upon misconception and unknow ing idealization, and complicated by man’s essential ego tism and half-development so often blamed by the novelist for the unhappiness of the passion, finds its tragic solu- 237 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. 381. 238 Ibid., 449. 206 tion in the death of the one and the saddened lives of the other two involved. And it is because the love of Dick Dewey for Fancy Day is based in great measure on a similar visioning of qualities unpossessed by her that Hardy suggests future un happiness in their union. Dewey, believing in her truth and constancy, declares: 1Fancy, why we be so happy is because there is such full confidence between us. Ever since that time you confessed to that little flirtation with Shiner by the river .... I have thought how artless and good you must be to tell me o’ such a trifling thing, and to be so frightened about it as you were. It has won me to tell you my every deed and word since then. We?11 have no secrets from each other, darling, will we ever?— no secret at all.’ And Fancy answers: "’None from today,’ and thought of a secret she would never tell."239 Somewhere between the delineation of a love that fails through lack of true vision, found in A Pair of Blue Eyes, and the soul-tragedy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles may be placed the love of Glym and Eustacia found in The Return of the Native. This passion has points of similarity with both of these novels: it is analogous to the love of Knight and Elfride in its basis in misconception and the fact that love cannot stand the light of truth; and it 239 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree. 273 seq. 207 approaches the latter novel in the constant intensity of the tragedy portrayed* Dual incongruity forms the tragedy of Eustaeia*s life: her seclusion upon Egdon, to her a "hell of mere voidness and solitude, oppression and restraint”;240 and her love of and marriage to Clym Yeobright. The very foundation of their love is misunderstanding and wrong evaluation of the real nature of the emotion. To Eustaeia, in her unmistakable sensuousness, love signifies world-* oblivious rapture and passion--”to be loved to madness was her great desire”;241 to Clym, passion, as she knows it, is but an incident, an interlude'— his earth-love is high and "chaste as that of Petrarch for his Laura*”242 Eustaeia sees in Glyrn. a means of introduction to the gaiety and brilliance of Parisian life; he sees in her a splendid help er in his world-work of teaching his fellow man— in prosaic English, as he phrases it, ”she would make a good matron in a boarding school.”243 Thus against the human screen offered them they project the desires they hold within themselves. Essentially different, and with diametrically 24:® Charles Henry Duff in, Thomas Hardy. 108. 241 Hardy, The Return of the Native, 81. 242 Ibid., 247. 243 Ibid.. 237. 208 opposed philosophies, they mate, the race-urge dominant, each believing the other to he the ideal sought: "they were like those double stars which revolve round each other, and from a distance appear to be one,n24^ And Eustaeia lies both to herself and to Clym about the quality of the love she bears him* Salberg has ana lyzed the woman and her passion: Mit der Macht ihrer Leidenschaft und Schonheit berauscht sie ihn, und der Mann, den Hardy mit Johannes dem Taufer vergleicht, der die Weltstadt mit ihren Glanz verachtet, der in die einsame Hide zuruckgekehrt ist, urn als Lehrer der Landleute fur ihre ethische Entwicklung zu arbeiten— verfallt dem Zauber der lebensdurstigen Eustaeia. Verstandnislos steht er ihrem Wesen gegenuber; doch nur zu gern lasst er sich in seiner Leidenschaft uber die Kluft, die zwischen ihm und ihr besteht, hinweg tauschen. Er halt um sie an gegen den Willen seiner Mutter-- gegen seine bessere Einsicht.— Kurz nach der Ver- lobung steigen Zweifel auf: ’You are ambitious, Eustaeia— no, not exactly ambitious, luxurious. I ought to be of the same vein to make you happy, I suppose. And yet, far from that, I could live and die in a hermitage here, with proper work to do.T Aber Eustaeia beruhigt ihn: f* . . . though I should like Paris, I love you for yourself alone* To be your wife and live in Paris would be heaven to me; but I would rather live with you in a hermit age here than not to be yours at all. It is gain to me either way, and very great gain.t245 And further: Doch trotzdem Eustaeia das Gefuhl hat, sie konnte 244 Ibid., 55. 245 Gerda Salberg, Thomas Hardy♦s Frauen im Lichte seiner Weltanschauung, 55. 309 Clym dazu bringen, wieder nach Paris zu gehen und seine Sehulplane aufzugeben— trotzdem sie ihn leidenschaftlioh liebt als den Retter aus der Einsamkeit, der sie in glanzvolles Leben zu fuhren vermag, liegt immer Schwermut liber ihr, Sie glaubt nicht an die Dauer der Liebe— sie Puhlt den Druek des Schicksals und kommendes Leid, Angstvoll warnt sie Clym vor sich, und schreekt vor der Ehe zurlick, denn: Ehe vernichtet Gluck(und Liebe; ihr ahnt. dass das Zusammenleben unglucklich enden wird.246 It does not take long for the truth to become ap parent, however. Clym, the furze-cutter now, holds little romantic charm for the luxurious Eustaeia. She had loved him to madness, but it was because she saw him as he was not. When ill-health has reduced him to humble circum stances, he questions her: "Has your love for me died, then, because my appearance is no longer that of a fine gentleman?"247 And she finally voices the justification for his fears: fYes, I fear we are cooling— I see it as well as you. .... And how madly we loved two months ago! You were never tired of contemplating me, nor I of con templating you. Who could have thought then that by this time my eyes would not seem so bright to yours, nor your lips so very sweet to mine? Two months— is it possible? Yes, ftis too true!*248 But, in addition to the basic difference in their 346 Ibid,, 35. 247 Hardy, The Return of the Native, 313 248 Ibid., 315. 210 love, other elements, such as the blind devotion of Mrs. Yeobright to her son, her intense jealousy of Eustaeia, the peculiar relationship existing between Eustaeia and Wildeve and between Wildeve and Thomasin, contribute to the steady progress of the tragedy. In the final analysis, then, though "peers in grandeur and personality, Yeobright and Eustaeia were not more alike than marble and molten gold, and their attempt at union was necessarily fraught with the tragedy of divergent aims."249 This same unsuspecting idealization of unpossessed qualities found in The Return of the Native and A Pair of Blue Eyes forms the very centre of the love of Angel Clare for Tess, Both Knight and Angel demanded essential purity; the difference, greater and more tragic, between Knight’s relationship with Elfride and Angel*s with Tess lies in the real seriousness of the act in Tess*s past; in the fact that Tess disillusions Angel herself, instead of leaving the truth to be discovered through the chances of coinci dence and the revelations of some Mrs. Jethway;250 and the heavy payment that is exacted of her. Finer characteriza tion and more certain shadings of personality are here 249 Charles Henry Duffin, Thomas Hardy. 109. 250 Cf. above, page 35, 211 embodied. Glare is essentially a more definite personality and stands out more clearly than does the dryly real Knight, And there is little comparison between the weak, capricious heroine of A Pair of Blue Byes and Tess. 0f course, it was but natural that such an imagina tive and ethereal nature as Clare*s should seek an ideal for its love, and to him Tess seemed perfection. To her beauty he added purity and truth, and knew her as "the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived,"2§1 And, as is often the case within the novels, Hature plays its part in the development of the love of the man and the woman. The landscape at every turn parallels the story told. The lush fullness of the farm at Talbothways parallels the development of the love of Angel for the dairymaid. There is an interfusion of body and mind and environing nature that creates beauty: The season developed and matured. Another year’s in stalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and other creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their places, and they were nothing more than germs and in organic particles. Rays straight from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and brought out scents in invisible jets and breathings. .... Thus passed the leafy time, when arborescence seems to be the one thing aimed at out 251 Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy, 148. 212 of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of passion yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were none the less converging, under the force of irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.252 The natural scene is humanized and gives a fuller reality to the human lives within it: The spectral, half compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim, inceptive stage of the day, Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness, both of dis position and physique, an almost regnant power . . . . The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection hour, He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade, his companions face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghost ly, as if she were merely a soul at large .... It was then .... that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a vision ary essence of woman— a whole sex condensed into one typical form,253 And the natural environment produces conclusive results: Amid the oozing fatness and ferments of Froom Yale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was imr- possible that the most fanciful of love should not grow passionate. .The ready hearts existing there were impregnated by their surroundings,254 252 Hardy, Tess of the D^rbervilles. 144. 253 1 4 6 • 254 , 166. 213 But such a man as Clare could never forgive Tess the "sin" of the past. He will admit no alleviating circum stances when she makes her confession; that he has sinned and she has forgiven bears no weight with him. She does not live up to the ideal he has imaged in her; she is a different woman. ♦In the name of our love, forgive me I1 she whis pered with a dry mouth. fI have forgiven you for the same......... Forgive me as you are forgiven.1 •I have no such hope,* said he. ♦I forgive you. Angel.’ ♦You— yes, you do.f ?But you do not forgive me?’ VO Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another. My God— how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque prestidigi tation as that!*255 In this instance the passion of love clearly defines character: the essential narrowness and meanness of Clare is opposed to the nobility and high devotion of Tess. His own egotism, his own restricted and essentially conven tional attitude, blocks his understanding of the essential nature of his wife: ♦I thought, Angel, that you loved me— me, my very self! If it is I you love, 0, how can it be that Ibid., 259. 214 you look and speak so? It frightens me I Having begun to love »ee, I love 'ee forever— in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no.more. Then how can you, 0 my husband, stop loving me?* And Clare coldly and callously replies: "I repeat the woman I have been loving is not you.” And to her anguished, "But who?” he replies, "Another woman in your shape*”256 And Tess, as Hardy notes, savours deeply the bitter ness of Time*s satiric psalm: Behold when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate; Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; And the veil of thine shall be grief, and thy crown shall be pain,25? Since in his spiritual egotism Angel cannot overcome the loss of his ideal he finally leaves her. Of this action Abercrombie states justly: ”He, and not her se ducer, is the real poison in Tess's life.”255 Certainly it is the casting off by Clare that sets in motion the greatest tragedy. It is her bewilderment at Clare*s at titude, her agony of despair engendered by his repudiation, 356 IMA.. 260. 7 Ibid., 263. 258 Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy. 149. 215 that cause the final catastrophe— the wrecking of her na ture, her fundamental purity, in the lust of DTUrberville. In the spoiling of such a nature, it is had enough to play Alec D’Uberville’s part, hut worse to play that of Angel Glare* Glare is the fullest example of that half-develop- ment to which Hardy ascribes so much of the sorrow and the tragedy of human life. Henry Knight was at least fair; he asked no more of Elfride than he was able to bring her* But Glare was demanding what he could not give; therefore he was unjust and insincere. He had outgrown the narrow orthodoxy of his preacher-father’s household; but he re mained conventional enough to regard Tess as hopelessly soiled and himself still spotless. It is only after Tess has killed DTUrberville, first cause of her loss of Angel, that something approaching real understanding and love are apparent in Glare. Tess comes to him, making no reproaches, merely begging his love: ♦Angel .... I have killed him .... I feared long ago that I might do it some day for the wrong he did to me in my simple youth, and to you through me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more......... I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it, don’t you? You believe it? You didn’t come back to me and I was obliged to go back to him or sell what was not mine to sell, the heir-things of your family. Why did you go away— why did you— when I loved you so? I can’t think why you did it. But I don’t blame you, only, Angel, will you forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along that you would be sure to forgive me now 216 that I have done that. It came to me as a shining light that I could get you back that way. I could not bear the loss of *ee any longer— you don’t know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me. Say you do now, dear, dear husband: say you do, now I have killed him1*259 And when it is too late Glare begins to see: 'I do love you, Tess— 0, I do— it is all come back. .... I will not desert youi I will protect you by every means in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done.’ Surely no last dreadful dialogue between two lovers never to meet again has been more poignantly written than by Hardy: fWhat is it, Angel?* she said, starting up. ’Have they come for me?* *Yes, dearest,’ he said, ’they have come.* ’It is as it should be,’ she murmured. ’Angel, I am almost glad— yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had. enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!* She stood up, shook herself, and went forward . . . . *1 am ready.’ she said quietly.2$1 And soon, ’ ’The President of the Immortals .... had finished his sport with Tess.”262 259 Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 441 seq. 260 * Loc. cit. 261 Ibid.. 454. 262 Ibid., 454. 217 Here, then, idealization of qualities later deemed unpossessed brings ultimate and terrible catastrophe. One feels that the tragedy is primarily Tess's, however, be cause though Angel will suffer for a time, his is a nature that can rise above sorrow and continue on with the regular course of life with little regretful backward glancing. He is too self-sufficient to be permanently dwarfed and de feated by the horror and misery he has brought to the woman he had sworn to love and to protect. The rest of his life will not be shadowed; pangs of doubt and of self-contempt will not torment him. Condensed expression of this same theme— the tragic consequence of the light of truth to idealizing love— is found in Hardy*s poetry. nA Dream-Follower” suggests briefly the fact that when the real is divorced from the ideal, nothing is left for love: A dream of mine flew over the mead To the halls where my old Love reigns; And it drew me on to follow its lead: And I stood at her window-panes; And I saw but a thing of flesh and bone Speeding on to its cleft on the clay; And my. dream was scared, and expired on a moan, And I whitely hastened’ away.26^ 263 Hardy, Collected Poems, 130. 218 But the most savegely condensed expression of this theme is found in "The Newcomer’s Wife": He paused on the sill of a door ajar That screened a lively liq.uor-bar, For the name had reached him through the door Of her he had married the week before. ’We called her the Hack of the Parade; But she was discreet in the games she played; If slightly worn, she’s pretty yet, And the gossips, after all, forget; ’And he knows nothing of her past; I am glad the girl is in luck at last; Such ones, though stale to native eyes, Newcomers snatch at as a prize.* ’Yes, being a stranger he sees her blent Of all that’s fresh and innocent, Not dreams how many a love-eampaign She had enjoyed before his reign!’ That night there was the splash of a fall Over the slimy harbour-wall: They searched, and at the deepest place Found him with crabs about his face,264 The second element that inevitably leads to unhappi ness for the human pair is found in the deadening effect of the years on the passion of the lovers. Beautiful pro testations of undying love, of desire, of hope are told; but the years bring cynical disillusionment and the beauty of the emotion is lost. "The Revisitation" suggests this theme. The lover finds that 264 Ibid.. 344. 219 ............... Time’s transforming chisel Had been tooling night and day for twenty years, and tooled too well, In its rendering of crease where curve was, where was raven, grizzle— Pits, where peonies once did dwell* And the woman, feeling the loss of his love, leaves him# Though he realizes that hers is a nobler soul than his, that he should follow her, in the end he concludes: Did I return, then, ever? Did we meet again?— mend all?— Alas, what grey- head perseveres! — Soon I got the Route elsewhere .— Since that hour I have seen her never: Dove is lame at fifty years#2^5 "The Man Who Forgot" voices the same theme: My right mind woke, and I stood dumb; Forty years* frost and flower Had fleeted since I’d used to come To meet her in that bower*2^6 Everywhere, Hardy sees the essential impermanence of the passion* Ideals vanish, first passion is dimmed, the years bring cynical re-evaluation, and love always suffers. The triolet, "At a Hasty Wedding," prophesies the sure loss of the early fire of passion: If hours be years the twain are blest, For now they solace swift desire By bonds of every bond the best, If hours be years. The twain are blest 265 Ibid., 344. 266 Ibid. . . 180. 230 Do eastern stars slope never west, Not pallid ashes follow fire: If hours be years the twain are blest, For now they solace swift desire.£67 Hardy, ever-eonscious of struggling humanity’s little pitiful efforts at happiness in love, inveighs strongly and bitterly against that other element forced by society upon love— conventional obligation. He sees the few chances human passion may have for surviving generally shattered by the law that one is obliged to possess, to own, the other. And in the novels and poems he exposes mercilessly the heart-rending results of the ill-assorted unions destiny has arranged. As a poet he wrote in The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, Why did Heaven warrent in its whim A twain mismated should bedim, The courts of their encompassment With bleeding loves and discontent, . . . a companion piece to Tess’s lament that the hour for love and the man to love rarely coincide.369 The temporary passion deludes man and woman; they believe the desire is everlasting. And society insists upon putting a convenr Ibid,, 130. p t f r t Hardy, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Corn wall. Act III, p. 35. 269 Cf. above, page 179. 221 tional seal of FOREVER upon what may be merely "one mid night passion." If they protest, if they will hot be bound, they are outcasts. If they do allow the conventional dic tum to be their guide, love is often stifled by the mere fact of the obligation. The satire of "The Conformers" states this contrast. "Stolen trysts" are now replaced by lawful, if monotonous, cohabitation "in a villa chastely grey"; and We shall not go in stealth To rendevous unknown But friends will ask me about your health, And you about my own. When we abide alone, No leaping each to each, But syllables in frigid tone Of household speech. When down to dust we glide Men will not say askance As now: !How all the country side Rings with their mad romance!* But as they graveward glance Remark: *In them we lose A worthy pair, who helped advance Sound parish views.*27® Hardy stresses the fact that what may be good col lective morality for the herd is not necessarily conducive to the highest and most intense happiness for the few who are capable of great emotions. Strong satire against this collective morality is found in "Rake-Hell Muses," wherein <37 0 Hardy, Collected Poems. 213. 222 the seducer decides that it were greater justice that the woman suffer for the present than both suffer throughout all the dull years to come; * . . . this once, not self-love But good intention Pleads that against convention We two rebel For, is one moonlight dance, One midnight passion, A rock whereon to fashion Life's citadel? Prove they their power to prance Life's miles together From upper slope to nether Who trip an ell? .... this great good will grace Our lives' division, She's saved from more misprision Though I plumb Hell.2'1 Of course, the greatest law that society imposes on the love of the pair, the law against which Hardy protests consistently, is the strong convention of marriage. Hardy sees it again as collectively useful; seemingly there must be some law to regulate instinct if man is to live suc cessfully and securely within the social order. But never theless, as now practised and enforced, marriage is to Hardy a snare and a tyranny, and he questions "whether 271 Ibid., 654 seq. 823 civilization can escape the humiliating indictment that, while it has "been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, in literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satis factory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes."272 Fullest analysis of Hardy’s ideas on marriage is found in Jude the Obscure. A study of the love element in the novel naturally merges into a study of the author’s conception of the convention of marriage, for the story of Jude’s relations with his wife, Arabella, and his cousin, Sue Bridehead, develops into a conflict in which marriage minus love is opposed to what theologians call "unhallowed union” plus love, and this is mixed with a satirical dis cussion of the notion that an external ceremony can ratify passion. Throughout its course the novel presents a study in contrasts: first the beauty of Jude’s aspirations and the ugliness of the actual circumstances of his life are pre sented; and next, the difference between the idealism and beauty of Sue’s vision of marriage and its tragic and sordid reality is depicted. Possibly nowhere in English fiction, and certainly nowhere in the work of this author 272 Hardy, "On the Tree of Knowledge,” in Life and Art, 119. 284 replete as it is with this theme, has the subject of sex been treated in a manner so little colored by romantic con vention, The woman who first ensnares the hopeful Jude is the coarse daughter of a pig-breeder; she attracts his at tention by throwing at him a lump of offal from her butch-r er*s meat. The whole setting of the affair, her home, her wooing, is sordid, typical of the purely animal love por trayed, She is "a complete substantial female human--no more, no less,"273 She sets out deliberately to catch a man by sexual excitements, and to make him marry her by any means she can devise. The incident is not related in a tone of comedy as are certain similar episodes in the ad ventures of Tom Jones, nor is the manner like Richardsons. Jude is not very different from the ordinary man, except in his aspirations which are higher, and in his sensibilities which are finer--differences that serve but to eause him, after his weakness, greater remorse and self-reproach than is felt by other men. But the marriage between the striv ing Jude and the vulgar Arabella takes place because Jude, Hardy would have us see, is but the subject of the force that works physiologically to populate the world, and, often times, to drag down the souls of men; that force that 275 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 45. 225 "seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him alongj as a violent school-master a school-boy he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own except locality.”27^ This marriage of flesh alone, duly ratified by the approval of the church and of society, is blasting and ruinous to the soul of the man. His next union is the "unhallowed" one with his cousin, Sue Bridehead. Sue, almost entirely devoid of sex, proposes to Jude a fraternal union of minds. In this de mand there lies a paradoxical idea touching one of the gravest problems of married life. To Sue, the most hor rible aspects of marriage is the obligation resting upon the woman to respond at all moments to the manfs desire. This evasion on the part of the woman, who in response to a deeply-seated sensibility refuses to admit certain con tacts, attracted Hardy greatly. He incarnated this rather morbid case in his heroine, who, although of ethereal na ture, was yet true to life. Sue explains her feeling to Jude: 274 - r- , . , Ibxd,, 40• 226 *Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say— that though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don*t . like him— it is torture to me to— live with him as a husband...........I have only been married a month or two .... And it is said that what a woman shrinks from— in the earlier days of her marriage— she shakes down to with comfortable indifference in half a dozen years. But that is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time! .... What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!— the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way, in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!*275 This passage recalls the indictment of marriage brought by the heroine in Yir&in Soil by George Egerton (Mrs. Golding Bright). Florence accuses marriage of being a legal prostitution which allows the husband permanent rights at any and all times from his wife— rights which he would have to plead for or buy from a mistress. Arabella, on the other hand, presents the materialistic view of the union in her advice to Sue, after the latter has voiced her fear of entering into the contract: *Then let him marry you in Heaven*s name. Life with a man is more business like after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out-of-doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you ean*t otherwise, unless he runs you through with a knife or cracks your noodle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you— I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there*s 275 Ibid., 251 227 never any knowing what a man will do— ryou’ll have the sticks o’ furniture, and won’t be looked upon as a thief.......... And, as I say, I’d advise you to get the business legally done as soon as possible. You’11 find it an awful bother later if you don’t.’276 Sue’s reaction is characteristic: ’7/hat Arabella has been saying to me has made me feel more than ever how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is— a sort of trap to catch a man. . . . Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t you think it is de structive to a passion whose essence is its gratui tousness? *277 She fears the "government stamp" of approval on union will automatically cancel true devotion: ’I have just the same dread lest an iron contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for you, as it did between our unfortunate parents. . . . I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under Govern ment stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by you.’^7® And she does not feel that they are in any way different from the usual person in their reaction to the bondage of ceremony: ’ .... It is foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover. There would be a much 'likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not 276 Ibid,, 318. 277 Ibid., 320 seq. 278 Ibid., 305. 228 to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving each other from that day forward, in considera tion of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There’s be little cooling then.*2^ They do finally go to the Registrar’s Office, but the scenes, the people, cause further reluctance in Sue: ’How terrible that scene was to me! The expression on that flabby woman’s face, leading her on to give her self to that jail-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul— to escape a nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her — a man whom to avoid forever was her only chance of salvat ion•’280 In fact, the abortive attempt to legalize their union results in the crystallization of their beliefs in opposi tion to it, Jude feels that "the intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no doubt; but in our own case it may defeat its own ends, because we are the q.ueer sort of people we are— folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness." But, again, Sue feels that there is nothing unusual or exceptional in their case— that all are so: "Everybody is getting to feel as we 279 Ibid., 306. 280 Ibid., 337. 229 <3.0• We are a little beforehand, that’s all, In fifty, aye twenty years, the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we."s81 Hardy, then, accuses the bond of marriage of causing the death of love, of bringing about the loss of ideals, of causing, eventually, final unhappiness. He sees it as a trap and snare for mankind; as it stands today, it is a contract based on material interests leaving little place for expansion of soul. He agrees with Georges Sand in her statement in the short preface to Maurat: "L’ide'al de 1’amour est certainment la fidelite eternelle, Les lois morales et religieuses ont voulu consacrer cet ideal; les faits mate'riels le troublent, les lois civiles sont faites souvent de maniere a la rendre impossible ou illusoire." And, of course, the final triumph of respect for society, the bowing before a conventional law which states that two who are attracted and answer that attraction must get "life-leased," brings about the final tragic result. Nature demands the unleashing of passions; society demands respect for her social law and her conventional demands. A terrible aspect of love is the essential egotism often a part of the passion; as Hardy phrases it, "Selfishness is 281 Loe. eit. 230 frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and some times its only one.”282 This selfishness, this egotism, this desire to be the first and the only one, works hand in hand with conventional demands. Angel Glare was attracted to Tess primarily because he saw in her ”a virginal daughter of nature.”283 Henry Knight284 demanded that he be the first comer in a woman*s heart. Woman must be the un smirched one; no sex must be known to her; marriage, con ventionally demanded by man, is based primarily on purity of woman. Ho natural law must be fulfilled by woman before she is married to the man who has chosen her; no accidents, no alleviating circumstances, will be admitted by him. And if woman should yield herself in a moment of passion, law demands that she be married to the man for all of her life, no matter how unfitted they may be for eaeh other, or be come an outcast from society and mankind. In ”Long Plight ed,” the lover questions: Is it worth while, dear, now, To call for bells, and sally forth arrayed For marriage-rites— discussed, descried, delayed So many years? 282 Hardy, The Woodlanders, 248. 283 Hardy, Tess of the D*Hrbervilles, 139. 283 cf. above, page 203. 231 Is it worth while, dear, since We still can climb old Yell'ham's wooded mounds Together, as each season steals its rounds And disappears? Is it worth while, dear, since As mates in Mellstock churchyard we can lie, Till the last crash of all things low and high Shall end the spheres?285 Such happiness, such lasting love, Hardy ironically sug gests, cannot be admitted according to man-made law; to be sacred such love must be consecrated by vows before judge and priest. And, man-rmade law applied to such a case would but end the dream. It did with Sue;2®9 it did with Bath- sheba;287 it did with Grace Melbury,288 with Eustacia,289 and with Tess.299 Hardy is, thus, ever conscious of the tragedy of the "kindling coupling vow," and particularly does he inveigh against "the necessity for getting life-leased at any cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach,"291 Mar Hardy, Collected Poems, 128. 286 the Obscure. 287 Far from the Madding Crowd. 288 woodlanders. 289 The Return of the Native. 299 Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 291 Hardy, "On the Y/estern Circuit," in Life♦ s Little Ironies. 93. 232 riage, proclaims Hardy uncompromisingly, is a passing in stinct which is sought to be rendered permanent by means of an oath. But as DfExideuil has noted, one does not meet with a systematic criticism of the institution in the Wessex Hovels: L*ecrivain n^attaque pas, mais les decouvertes de son regard sont accablantes. Elies constituent h. la fois une accusation et une preuve. Intangible sans doute au point de vue social, le mariage devient, q.uand il sfappose a lfepanouissement moral de l*in- dividu, un des jougs les plus pesants et cela Hardy l*a constate avec une force et une ironie implaca- bles.292 Hardy is concerned with the merciless exposure of the heart-rending results of the ill-assorted unions destiny has unwittingly arranged. Though a certain romantic atmos phere is sometimes discerned in his works, as in More Love Lyrics, when he really thinks philosophically he lapses into such a mood of disillusioned renunciation as is ex pressed in nl Said to Loven: I said to Love ♦It is not now as in old days When men adored thee and thy ways All else above; Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,’ I said to Love, I said to him, ♦We now know more of thee than then; 292 pj[erre DfExideuil, Le Couple Humain dans !♦Oeuvre de Thomas Hardy, 126. 233 We were but weak in judgment when, With hearts abrim, We clamoured thee that thou wouldTst please Inflict on us thine agonies,* I said to him. I said to Love, ’Thou are not young, thou are not fair, No elfin darts, no cherub air, Nor swan, nor dove Are thine; but features pitiless, And iron daggers of distress,* I said to Love. ’Depart then, Love!. . . — Man’s race shall perish, threatenest thou, Without thy kindling coupling-vow? The age to come the man of now Know nothing of?— T/e fear not such a threat from thee; We are too old in apathy! Mankind shall cease— So let it be,’ I said to Love.293 This suggests one of the remedies, drastic though it may be, that Hardy offers as solution for unhappiness and tragedy found in life-union at present. His indictment of love is in accord with the Schopenhauerean view that lovers are traitors to the race. The passion of the lovers in "On the Western Circuit" starts with "that unmistakable ex pression that means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair."294 293 Hardy, Gollected Poems. 103. 2Q4. Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies, 81. 234 ?Mad Judy,” that little tale of cruelty from a ‘ biting pen, is part of the theme: When the hamlet hailed a birth Judy used to cry: When she heard our christening mirth, She would kneel and sigh. When the daughters and the sons Gathered them to wed, And we like-intended ones Danced till dawn was red, She would rock and mutter, 'more Comers to this stony shore!' When old Headsman Death laid hands On bahe or twain, She would feast, and by her brands Sing her songs again. What she liked we let her do, Judy was insane, we knew,295 One recalls the terrible utterance of one of the Phantom Intelligences in The Dynasts; The Shade of the Earth cries out at the spectacle of mortal suffering: What boots it, Sire, To down this dynasty, set that one up, Goad panting peoples to the throes thereof, Make wither here my fruit, maintain it there, And hold me travailling through fineless years In vain and objectless monotony, When all such tedious conjuring could be shunned By unereation? Howsoever wise The governance of these massed mortalities, A juster wisdom his who should have ruled They had not been,296 Hardy, Collected Poems, 138 296 Hardy, The Dynasts, 15, 235 And Sue, when she hesitates before marriage with Jude, prophesies that in the future all men will see "wel tering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as "Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied!1 1 and will be afraid to produce them."297 Indeed, it is in this novel that fullest statement of the radical philosophy of non existence is made. With the coming of little Father Time, Arabella’s and Jude’s son, Hardy launches into his greatest indictment of present day marriage and its fearful fruits— children. As a consequence of the fact that Jude and Sue, ter rified at the thought of a second irrevocable union, re membering as they do the unhappiness of each in their first attempt and fearful lest the condition kill their love, have never become legally united, they are refused lodging by the respectable people of Christminster. Finally a room is found for Sue and the children, but there is no place for Jude. Father Time questions: "Father went away to give us children room, didn’t he?" This question leads to the more general conclusion: "It would be better to be out o* the world than in it."298 Then to Sue’s statement that 297 Hardy, Jude the Obscure. 339. 298 Ibid.. 395. 236 one cannot regulate one’s having or not having children since it is a law of nature, this preternaturally philo sophical comment is forthcoming: ”1 think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their soul come to ’em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about,,,s" And at Sue’s statement that there is to be another baby, his hysterical feeling reaches its height: ’WhatI .... 0 God, mother, you’ve never a-sent for another; and such trouble with you’ve got now. . . . .Oh, you don’t care, you don’t care......... How ever could you, mother, be so wicked and cruel as this, when you needn’t have done it till we was better off, and father wellI To bring us all into more trouble ! No room for us, and father a-forced to go away, and we turned out tomorrow; and yet you be going to have another of us soonl .... *Tis done o’ purpose— ’tis— ’tis!. . . . Yes, it is— it must be,! For nobody would interfere with us like that, unless you agreed! I won’t forgive you, ever. I’ll never believe you care for me, or father, or any of us any more. And the next day, Sue and Jude find little Time’s terrible solution for the tragic impossibility of life: At the back of the door were fixed two hooks for hang ing garments, and from these the forms of the two youngest children were suspended by a piece of box- cord round their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little Jude was hanging in a similar manner. An over-turned chair was near the elder boy, 299 Ibid., 397, 300 T Loc. .cit. 237 and his glazed eyes were staring into the room; hut those of the girl and the baby boy were closed. . . . i A piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written in the boy's hand, with the bit of lead-pencil that he carried: 'Done because we were too menny.'30- * - For Hardy as for Schopenhauer, to elude the desire to live is to give proof of a deeper knowledge of the real nature of life; in this desire for non-existence may be recognized the ultimate triumph of liberty over the hor rible misery of existence, the victory of intelligence over the Immanent Will. A less drastic remedy for the present scheme of things which finds solution today in the "mire of marriage" is suggested in a more conciliatory doctrine in line with the present scheme for-the conjugation of the sexes. Hardy, disillusioned as he is, yet retains a spirit of pro found sanity. He considers that for woman, celibacy is preferable to an ill-adjusted marriage and that it is a stronger safeguard of her interests, dignity, and freedom; he refuses to admit "that a bad marriage with its aver sions is better than free womanhood."302 Though he sees that marriage brings major unhappiness to the many, he is 301 Ibid., 399. Hardy, "On the Western Circuit,” in Life's Little Ironies, 93. 238 aware that under certain very definite circumstances some contentment may result. Of tragedy there is enough, surely, hut in the majority of instances it results from the eager acceptance as a lasting feeling of what in most cases is hut a momentary impulse. It is only after the storm and stress of youthful passion has spent itself that the calm and satisfying comradeship leading to ultimate enjoyment may come. One of the few couples to find a moment's grace in Hardy's novels is that composed of Donald Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane.20' 3 But their affection has heen of gradual growth; their love did not spring from the revelation of affinities as sudden as they are unenduring. The two feel for each other a sympathy and respect that serves to aid them in triumphing over the conspiracies and events placed hy an unwitting destiny in their paths to thwart their union. Such a victory is not accorded hy life to those who follow impulsively the dictates of instinct. And it cannot he doubted that their union could result only after the tragic events of which they have heen either witnesses or victims. One feels that the marriage uniting the patient 303 Mayor of Casterbridge. 239 Diggory Yenn and Thomasin30^ was but appended to the gen erally tragic novel as a concession to the tradition that demands an ending in marriage to reassure the optimists. Serial publication demanded that the author should not run too much counter to the reader*s habits of mind. Hardy himself has explained the dilemma that often confronted him when he wrote for the magazines: He [the novelist^ must either whip and scourge those characters into doing something contrary to their natures, to produce the spurious effect of their be ing in harmong with social forms and ordinance, or, by leaving them alone to act as they will, he must bring down the thunder of respectability upon his head, not to say ruin his editor, his publishers, and himself. What he often does, indeed can scarcely help doing in such a strait, is belie his literary conscience, do despite to his best imaginative in stincts by arranging a denouement which he knows to be indescribably unreal and meretricious, but dear to the Grundyist and subscriber,305 The theme of true contentment coming after and be cause of trials passed through is presented in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bathsheba, vain and capricious, loves and is loved by two men, Boldwood and Troy. Troy betrays her trust entirely, and after the catastrophe of his murder by Boldwood and the letter’s consequent insanity, Oak, the steadfast man who has loved her unquestioningly for years, 'P*Ie Beturn of the Native. 305 Hardy, "Candour in English Fiction,** in Life and Art,, 80, 240 presents the hope for a future of calm security and under standing comradeship. By the time this climax is reached, Hardy would have us note, Bathsheba and Oak have become tried friends. The lies, deceits, coquetries, and shame that mark the initial conflict of the sexes are no longer necessary nor are they a part of the union. Indeed, the novelist sees in such an affection, based on a profound sentiment which has withstood the shocks of the uncertain and the tragic, and the result of years of mutual under standing, the only foundation for married happiness: Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any.arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship— camaraderie— usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its de velopment, the compounded feeling proved itself to be the only love which is as strong as death— that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.306 Just such a devotion as this, one feels, is that steadfast love that Marty South holds for Giles Winterborne even after his death. The beauty of this feeling brightens her life, and at his grave, in her tribute to him, she 306 Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 469. 241 voices the undying quality of this affection that makes it eternal: 'Now, my own, own love .... you are mine, and on'y mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died. ■ But I-— whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young larches I'11 think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and HeavenI— But no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things!'307 But that other love in the same novel, that of Grace and Fitzpiers, even though the man has passed through a period of probation and self-abasement in redemption of his faults, offers little real chance for ultimate marital contentment. Though Grace receives him after his unfaithfulness with Suke Sampson and with Felicia Gharmond, it is but natural to suppose that their life together will be melancholy. And Grace will never be able to forget the sacrifice made by Winterborne, her steadfast lover, who chose death rather than bring the suggestion of dishonor to her. Thus, Hardy is able to see that in love and in mar riage happiness is possible though unhappiness is prevalent. The full understanding necessary to a lasting affection, the understanding based on mutual concessions, is seldom 307 Hardy, The Woodlanders, 364. 242 gained; passion blinds the lovers to reality; it generally brings disaster. Satisfaction, if they reach it, is a good deal chastened; it comes only after the lesson is learned: AGhe deep; but make no moan; Smile out; but stilly suffer: The paths of love are rougher Than thoroughfares of stone,308 Though translations of Freud appeared in England too late to have exerted any influence upon Hardy’s thought,^09 many of the doctrines of the Austrian psychologist are in no respect at variance with anything in the Wessex cycle* D’Exideuil notes that there is no real opposition between such a passage as the following, which he quotes, and many pages in the work of the novelist and poet which have at tracted our attention: La sexual it s ' * est la seule fonction de l’organisme vivant qui depasse l’individu et assure son rattache- ment v a l’espdee. II est facile de se rendre compte que l’exereice de cette fonction, loin d’etre tou- jours aussi utile a l’individu que 1’exercise des autres fonctions, lui cree, au prix d’un plaisir excessivement intense, des dangers qui menacent sa vie et la suppriment mSme assez souvent. II est en outre probable que c’est V la faveur de processus m^taboliques particuliers, distincts de tous les 308 Hardy, ' ’ The End of the Episode,” in Collected Poems, 211. 30® First English translations of Freud date from 1909. Scientific literature dealing with his work became popular about 1917. Introductory Lectures to Psycho- Analysis appeared in 1920. 243 autres, qu'une partie de la vie individuelle peut §tre transmise " “ a la posterity a titre de disposition. Enfin, l’etre individual qui se eonsidere lui-^neme comme l’essentiel et ne voit dans sa sexualite qu’un moyen de satisfaction parmi tant d?autres, ne forme au point de vue biologique, qu’un Episode dans une serie de generations, qu’une excroissance caduque d’un protoplasma virtuellement immortel, qu’une sorte de possesseur temporarie d’un fideicommis destin^ a lui survivre Because Hardy does see the sexual function as the only func tion which extends beyond the individual and connects with the species, and because he knows that the exercise of this function often brings disaster to the individual, he feels that there must be some means suggested whereby the human pair may meet the demands of the world law and yet achieve some instinctive contentment. He, therefore, advocates the education of the sexes and the education of society in order that normalcy may result. In The New Review. May, 1894, his essay "On the Tree of Knowledge" appeared. It was the novelist’s contribution to a symposium of opinions on the physiological aspects of marriage, questions of sex ual morality, etc. A few quotations will serve to make his stand clear: .... a girl should not be allowed to enter into matrimony without a full knowledge of her probable future in the holy estate, and the possibilities 310 Pierre D’Exideuil, Le Couple Humain dans 1*Oeuvre de Hardy, 207-208. 244 which may lie in the past of the elect man. I have not much faith in an innocent girl’s ’dis covery of the greatest mysteries of life’ by means of the ordinary intercourse of society. Incomplete presentations, vicious presentations, meretricious and seductive presentations, are not unlikely in pursuing such investigations through such a channel. .... a plain handbook on natural processes, specially prepared, should be placed in the daughter’s hands, and, later on, similar information on morbid contingencies. Innocent youths should, I think, also receive the same instructions; for .... it has never struck me that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably female. As your problems are given on the old lines so I take them, without entering into the general question whether marriage, as we at present understand it, is such a desirable goal for all women as it is assumed to be; or whether civilization can escape the humilia ting indictment that, while it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, In literatures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never suc ceeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes. The solution for the present ills of marriage that he most consistently and strongly stresses, however, is the necessity for easier divorce. Marriage as practised today with all its faults should not be considered an indis soluble tie; there should be greater freedom of divorce al lowed. In "The Burghers,” the enlightened husband gives his wife and her lover their freedom, considering himself 311 Hardy, Life and Art, 118 seq. 245 "but the licensed tyrant of this bonded pair": Blanked by sucb love, I stood as in a drowse, And the slow moon edged from the upland nigh, My sad thoughts moving thuswise: *1 may house And I may husband her, yet what am I But licensed tyrant to this bonded pair? Says Charity, Do as ye would be done by. 1*11 take you to the doorway in the wall, And then adieu,’ I told them. ’Friends, with draw. ’ They did so; and she went— beyond recall. And as I paused beneath the arch I saw Their moonlit figures— slow, as in surprise— Descend the slope, and vanish on the haw. ’Fool,’ some will say, I thought— ’But who is wise, Save God alone, to weigh my reasons why?* The companion study, "A Wife and Another," presents the situation of the wife’s discovering the secret of her hus band’s love for another woman and setting a trap to discover them together: And as beside its doorway, Deadly hued, One inside, one withoutside We two stood, He came— my husband— as she knew he would. Ho pleasurable triumph Was that sight I The ghastly disappointment Broke them quite. 312 Hardy, Collected Poems. 20 seq. 246 What love was theirs, to move them with such might I But when the confession is made that the mistress is to bear a child— Then, as it were, within me Something snapped, As if my soul had largened; Conscience-capped, I saw myself the snarer— them the trapped* And, finally, alone, she feels she has acted for the best: As I, my road retracing, Left them free, The night alone embracing Childless me, I held I had not stirred God wrothfully.3^5 Similarly, Phillotson, the conventional schoolmaster, is broad-minded enough to feel that when Sue confesses her aversion to him as a husband he would be an inhuman wretch to hold her. To his friend who warns him against the pos sible consequences of an unconventional act to one in his position, he explains his motives: ♦I shall let her go; with him certainly, if she wishes. I know I may be wrong— I know I ca^t log ically, or religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers, or harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in. Only I know one thing: some thing within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing her. I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets a preposterous request from his own wife, the only course that can possibly be regarded as right and proper and honorable in him is to refuse 313 Ibid., 246 seq. 24 7 it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder her lover perhaps* But is that essentially right and proper and honorable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don't profess to decide, I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible,*314 And he further confesses to loss of faith in the old belief that a few words said over two people insure lasting love and give one the right to possess and to determine the life- course of the other: ’I had not the remotest idea— living apart from woman, as I have done, for so many years— that merely taking a woman to church and putting a ring upon her finger could by any possibility involve one in such a daily, continuous tragedy as that now shared by her and me,'315 In justification of the enlightened attitude shown in these illustrations, Hardy would suggest that in many cases the final triumph of respect for society completes the ruin of happiness already compromised. Nature demands the unchaining of passions; Society demands respect for her law. The two are mutually antagonistic. Surely the case of Sue is poignantly illustrative. She loved Jude, but remorse acting on her through her conscience and implanted in it by conventions of the social order drove her back to 314 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 273 Ibid., 274. 248 Phillotson in tortured submission to his demands. And Angel Clare abandons Tess, the woman who has inspired his respect and love for her essential self, because she is not conventionally pure. Thus though in love and passion, it may be said, man listens to the obscure instincts of the jungle, he then finds himself opposed to the law of conven tion which places its binding restrictions upon his essen tial nature. A passionate and sorrowful image of a humanity enslaved by instinct, but ever thwarted in its purpose by man-made law, thus results. And it is necessary, Hardy feels, that some means for changing this tragedy be developed, either by man’s accepting the radical philosophy of non existence, by a more thorough education of the sexes, or if marriage remains as the only means for the conjunction of the sexes, it must not be indissoluble. His final opinion is well summarized in his essay, "Laws the Cause of Misery”: .... I regard Marriage as a union whose terms should be regulated entirely for the happiness of the community, including, primarily, that of the parties themselves. As the English marriage laws are, to the eyes of anybody who looks around, the gratuitous cause of at least half the misery of the community, that they are allowed to remain in force for a day is, to quote the famous last word of the ceremony itself, an ’ ’amaze ment,’ and can only be accounted for by the assumption that we live in a barbaric age, and are the slaves of gross superstition. As to what should be done, in the unlikely event of any amendment of the law being tolerated by bigots, 249 it is rather a question for experts than me. I can only suppose in a general way, that a marriage should he dissolvable at the wish of either party, if that party prove it to be a cruelty to him or her, provided (probably) that the maintenance of the children, if any, should be borne by the breadwinner.316 With humanity and society constituted as they are there is little chance for anything approaching happiness to result from the union of two who believe they love. In the first place, lovefs blindness leads to tragic disil lusionment. Man visions ideal beauty, ideal truth and purity in a woman, but to discover that he has been wor shiping his ideal rather than the reality of the woman her self. The force that propels him takes no cognizance of his desires, his hopes, or his aspirations; it works blindly for the population of the world, and idealism has little to do with "the kindling coupling vow." Society unfits man for happiness. His strength unfits him to become a part of "the common scheme"; and his weakness makes it impossible for him to keep out of conflict with it. And love, product of instinctive desire for companionship and affection, is remoulded from within by selfishness and egoism, and from without by man-made laws that seek to limit and confine, to change and to modify, something that is innate and in its essence impossible of modification. 316 Hardy, Life and Art, 120. CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION In the works of Thomas Hardy is found certain evi dence of his "belief in love as a destructive force in human life. All of his art, so far as it is a scrutiny of per sonal relations, centres in the varying issues of the strongest human passion; his truth of realism is nowhere more incisive than when it is concerned with the betrayals, disenchantments, and incompatibilities in love. One of the deepest emotions known to man, in its various manifes tations it necessarily takes great place in the moulding of human affairs. Throughout his analysis of the passion, though he is cognizant of the possible best in the feeling, he is sorrowfully aware at all times of the earth-drag present and the sorrow resulting. Parental love, presenting possibly the fullest op portunity for the development of a selfless devotion in man, suffers from the introduction of those earthly ele ments that reduce it to a selfish, jealous possessiveness, lacking entirely the high devotion and self-abnegation romanticists attribute to it, and causing ultimate misery to all concerned. Friendship, offering full opportunity for the growth of an ideal relationship resulting from 251 choice, free from necessity, and untrammeled by convention, is changed similarly through the intrusion of selfish ele ments, and consistently fails to offer the expected happi ness. And in the love between brother and sister, based on an elemental community of interest, the one generally loves more deeply and is made to suffer by the very depth of the affection he holds and the sacrifices his own love exacts of him. But it is in the love between the sexes, "the strongest passion known to humanity,” that the fullest analysis of this emotion as a destructive force is pre sented. Here the individual is intensified; the conflict between man and the Immanent Will attains most tragic sig nificance; tragedy lurks, and the shadow of doom is on the lovers, because to the more universal struggle between man and destiny is added the more particular struggle between two individuals, for, in the final analysis, the passion is simply egoism shared by two persons— it is a counter sense. Man and Woman constitute together an antinomy which cannot be resolved. Their dualism is opposed to a harmonious union. The conflict, in short, must end in dual defeat, for the pair and for its champions. Philosophically, the novels and poems, taken as a whole, are an expression of the belief that the world is governed by a force neither good nor evil, but rather in different to man’s feelings. Artistically, they are the 253 creation of a world so governed; a world in which individu ality and desire are always in conflict with an indifferent governing power, just as in Greek tragedy individuality and desire are in conflict with fate or with the gods. It is from this conflict that tragedy for the individual results. In Hardy’s characters, we see man— great or small— burdened by destiny, the irony of circumstance, the indifference of fate, which he is unable to curse, bless, or defy. It is cold and passionless, and in its hands happiness seems but a jest. He feels with Schopenhauer that in everything in nature there is something of which no explanation is pos sible, and Hardy, like the German philosopher, finds this to be the manifestation of a blindly striving will or feel ing rather than reason. God becomes a blind Immanent Will, a sort of careless Fate or tendency to which we are sub jected and which responds to no human appeal. Men and women are always snatching at happiness, striving to express themselves and to live their hopes; they are ever breaking themselves against a power that takes no heed of them. Yet in Hardy there is a sympathy deeper than tolerance for humanity. His realization of the hopelessness of the strug gle between men and the All-Mover prevents any trace of contempt for man; all may be futile, but he sees the great ness of the struggle; human life in reference to the enor mous past may be trivial, but in its allotted span it is 253 heroically grand. In this double vision of man’s greatness and his futility lies the secret of the "humanitarian pity" that caused him to preface Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Shakespeare’s words: Poor wounded name! My bosom, as a bed, Shall lodge thee, till thy wound be thoroughly healed. Hardy’s indictment of the World Purpose as a cruel irresponsibility is in accord with his full intention to re veal life, and to criticize it, and since life is a physio logical fact, "its honest portrayal must be concerned with . . . . the relations of the sexes, and the substitutions for such catastrophes as favor the false coloring best ex pressed by the regulation finish ’they married and were happy ever after,* of catastrophes based on the sexual re lationship as it is,"1 His aim is to portray the truth of what life and character are without reference to what man would like them to be. He has no patience with those who want their truth so furbished and garnished with romantic imaginings that the essence of reality is lost. He is not a writer for moral cowards: his message is for those who wish to face life as it is, to see its problems. His de sire is to excite a reflective and abiding interest in the 1 Hardy, "Candour in English Fiction," in Life and Art, 75. 254 minds of readers of a mature age, who are weary of puerile inventions, who desire candid accuracy, and who consider that in representations of men and the world the passions should be proportioned as they are in life. Truth was his magnet, and from his own hitter experiences he wrote: If the true artist ever weeps it probably is then., when he discovers the fearful price that he has to pay for the privilege of writing in the English language— no less a price than complete extinction, in the mind of every mature and penetrating reader, of sympathetic belief in his personages.2 In line with this aspect of his art, Gibbon’s grave spirit questions him: How fares the Truth now?---111? — Do pens but slily further her advance? May one not speed her but in phrase askance? Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still? Still rule those minds on earth At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled: ’Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?*3 It is his aim for truth, his decision that no previous general conception of what ought to be should be permitted to influence full recognition of facts themselves, that causes him to portray accurately the tragedy of individual love. Man aspires to greatness, strives to affect his motion 2 Ibid.. 77. 3 Hardy, ’ ’Lausanne in Gibbon’s Garden,” in Collected Poems, 95. 355 in the great onward movement of existence, but he is in evitably a part of the force itself. As Galsworthy has sug gested in The Inn of Tranquility. Mwe are all little bits of continuity”; each of us but a drop in the same ocean of being. The individual protests against the over-law that populates and moulds the world, either intellectually as did Knight,4 Jude,^ Clare,6 and St. Cleeve,7 or instinctive ly as did Tess,8 Eustacia,9 and Bathsheba.10 But love, the rule of the racial Will-to-Live, brings ruined hope, blasted life, and death. Only two eases of persons rising to a higher life through love are to be noted in the works of the novelist. One is Clym Yeobright1! who, it must be remem bered, but carried out the plan which in the first instance caused tragic dissension between him and his mother, and ^ A 'P&iT of Blue Eyes. 8 the Obscure. 6 ^ess of the DfUrbervilles. 7 ^o on a Tower. 8 foss of the DfUrbervilles. ^ Return of the Native. f f ar from the Madding Crowd. W- The Return of the Native. 256 later between him and his wife. The other is Charlotte de Staneey12 who rejects the world and enters a convent, not so much, one feels, because of conscious purpose to a higher love, but because life has crushed her and there she will find peace. And, as I have noted, but three of the many pairs of lovers within the novels reach even an approximation of contentment: Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae,15 Bathsheba and Oak,14 and Thomasin and Venn*15 The reason that these men and women have achieved some calm earthly happiness is be cause they have not allowed themselves to be carried away too tempestuously and irrevocably by their own desires, be cause they have not submitted to all the rigours of the law of sex* But even theirs will not be supreme and estatic happiness; it will be, at best, a calm contentment. The fact that human passion is a motivating force for tragedy may be illustrated by diagrams picturing the workings of the passion and the results to the individual within Hardy’s novels: 12 on a Tower. 13 The Mayor of Casterbridge. 14 Far from the Madding Crowd. 15 The Return of the Native. 257 Desperate Remedies Mrs* Ma anston Oythere Springrove Manston, a suicide. Mrs, Manston murdered. Miss Aldclyffe dead. Under the Greenwood Tree Foreshadowings of unhappiness in their married life built on a false foundation; "Ind she thought of the secret she would never tell.” Solid red lines mark strong passion between major characters. Solid blue lines mark strong passion between minor characters, or between one minor and one major character. Broken lines mark transient passion between either minor or major characters, but nevertheless passion that many times leads to disaster. Fancy Day: Dick Dewy A Pa-3-r of Blue Byes Smith Elfride Lord Luxellian .Knight Elfride married unhappily to Lord Luxellian, dead. Lives of Knight and Smith blasted through disillusioned love. Far from the Madding Crowd ^ 'vBoldwood Fanny dead. Fanny’s and Troy’s illegitimate child dead, Troy murdered by Boldwood, Boldwood insane. Fanny Bath she b jiProy Oak 259 The Hand of Et halbert a Picotee— Bthelbert Jtfay Julian .Lord Mountclere Lovewell and Nay disillusioned in love, Ethelberta through her marriage gains money but not the social position and happiness expected, Picotee and Julian unhappy. The Return of the Native veobright enn Mrs, Yeobright dead. Eustacia and Wildeve dead. Thomasi Eustaci ildeve The Trumpet Ma.ior ^ohn Loveday Bob Loveday John Loveday sacrifices his chance for happiness, and leaves Anne to his incontinent and faithless brother. A Laodicean Be Stancey omerset De Staneey’s life ruined when he loses Paula through the trick of his bastard son. Charlotte, her life desolate of hope of Somerset’s love, enters a convent. Paula, though married to Somerset, wishes he were a De Stancey of ancient lineage. Two on a Tower ishop Helmsdale Lady Constant ini ■>Swithin St • Cleeve Tabitha Lark Lady Constantine, her life with the Bishop blasted through her previous union with Swithin, dies of unhappiness at the latter*s lie. He was not true to her and did not want an aged and sorrow-marked woman for his wife^. It Is assumed he married the flighty Tabitha. The Mayor of Casterbridge Lucetta dead. Lucetta*s child born dead Henchard dead of broken heart— alone. 262 The Woodlandera Grace, Mrs. Charmon Her lover Marty South •iles Winterborne Mrs. Charmond murdered by dis appointed lover. The lover*s suicide. Giles dead. Gave his life to protect Grace’s honor. Marty’s love unrequited. Grace married to sensualist Fitzpiers. Teas of the D'Urbervilles Tes gel Glare ec DJIIrberville Sorrow, Tess’s illegitimate child, dead. Alec murdered by Tess. Tess hanged. 263 Jude the Obscure Phi Hot son Sue, Arabella Jude Little Father Time, son of Jude and Arabella, a suicide. The two children of Jude and Sue murdered by Father Time. Sue*s third child born dead. Sue returned to Phillotson and tragic unhappiness. Phillotson*s life and ambition ruined. Jude dead. The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (Drama) Queen Iseult^ — ---- King Mark Iseult the White-Handed--—— -SsaWTristan King Mark murdered. Tristran murdered, Queen Iseult, a suicide. I have failed to include The Well-Beloved among the graphs. It is a fantasy, and hence presents nothing greatly to add to the general problem of tragedy re sulting from the passion. 264 Thus this "Homer of British pessimism” in his depic tion of the mighty monotony of all destinies gives full vindication of his expressed opinion that ’ ’civilization can hardly escape the humiliating indictment that while it has been able to cover itself with glory in the arts, in lit eratures, in religions, and in the sciences, it has never succeeded in creating that homely thing, a satisfactory scheme for the conjunction of the sexes.”- 1 - 6 A complete survey of the novels and the poems pre*- sents even stronger vindication for the thesis that with Hardy love is a blind, malevolent engine of destruction in the number of individual tragedies and crimes cited in con nection with the working out of this theme in human life. The following table sets forth concisely the result of such a survey: SUICIDE (a) Hovels and Short Stories Desperate Remedies The Return of the Native Manston Eustaeia Jude the Obscure Father Time 16 Hardy, "On the Tree of Knowledge,” in Life and Art» 118 265 The Woodlanders Alicia*s Diary The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall The Grave by the Handpost {b) Poetry The Flirt*s Tragedy (2) The Bash Bride The Newcomer *s Wife The Second Night The Vampire Fair Plena Timoris At Shag*s Heath At the Mill The Forbidden Banns Aristodemus the Messenian War-Wife of Catknoll MURDER ( a . ) Novels and Short Stories Desperate Remedies Mrs. Manston Far from the Madding Crowd Troy The Woodlanders Mrs. Charmond Mrs. Charmond*s lover Charles de la Feste Queen Iseult The father The son 366 Tess of the DHJrbervilles Jude the Obscure The Tragedy of Two Ambitions i What the Shepherd Saw ^ - John Horseleigh, Knight The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (b) Poetry The Tree A Trampwoman1s Tragedy The Sacrilege On the Death-Bed The Duel A Sound in the Night The Fight on Burmover Moor The Forbidden Banns On Martock Moor Aristodemus the Messenian The Brother Ballad of Love’s Skeleton The Single Witness The Reluctant Confession Alec D’Urberville Two children The father The lover The husband The lover 267 NON-VIOLENT DEATHS (a) Novels and Short Stories Desperate Remedies A Pair of Blue Eyes Far from the Madding Crowd The Return of the Native Two on a Tower The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the D’Urbervilles Jude the Obscure To Please His Wife The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion The Winters and the Palmleys The Imaginative Woman The Withered Arm Barbara of the House of Grebe Marchioness of Stonehenge The Lady leeway Manston Mrs. Aldclyffe Elfride Fanny Robin Mrs. Yeobright Eustacia Wildeve Lady Constantine Henehard Lucetts Giles Winterborne Tess Sorrow Jude Sue’s last child Husband Two sons The lover The lover The wife The wife The son The lover The husband The first husband The Lady Penelope The child (h) Her Death and After The Dance at the Phoenix To a Motherless Child The Slow Nature The King's Experiment. The Tree The Trampwoman*s Tragedy A Sunday Morning Tragedy A Vampirine Fair The Woman in the Rye The Cheval Glass The Sacrilege The Nettles The Whaler's Wife The Dead Woman The Two Wives A Country \Yedding (2) The Last Time Julie-Jane The Turnip-Hoer A Sound in the Night Poetry ILLICIT LOVE (a) Novels and Short Stories Desperate Remedies Far from the Madding Crowd A Laodicean The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the D'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure The Trumpet Major A Changed Man The Fiddler of the Reels On the Western Circuit The Withered Arm For Conscience |'Sake Enter a Dragoon Andrey Satchel and the Parson and the Clerk Lady Mottisfont The Duchess of Hamptonshire The Honorable Laura A Mere Interlude (b) Poetry The Burghers My Oecily Long Plighted The Dame of Atherhall (2) San Sebastian The Ruined Maid The Supplanter A Trampwoman*s Tragedy (2) A Sunday Morning’s Tragedy The Flirt’s Tragedy Four Footprints The Conformers The Dark-Eyed Gentleman The Dawn after the Danee After the Club Danee A Wife Waits Julie-Jane The Husband’s Yiew A Wife and Another A Vampirine Fair The Coquette, and After The Dance at the Phoenix Panthera A Conversation at Dawn The Elopement The Workbox One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes At Tea At a Watering Place At the' Altar Rail In the Nuptial Chamber In the Restaurant On the Death-Bed Rake-He11 Muses Over the Coffin The Duel The Dolls The Dead and the Living One Cross Currents The Moth-Signal The Wedding Morning The Chapel-Organist She at His Funeral Her Late Husband Tess’s Lament The Christening The Newcomer’s Wife I Rose as My Custom Is The Recalcitrants In the Days of Crinoline The Statue of Liberty The Two Wives A Sound in the Night A Military Appointment (£} The Chosen (5) The Fight on Durnover Moor The Caricature The Harbor Bridge At a Pause in a Country Dance On Marstock Moor A Hurried Meeting The Mound Reluctant Confession The Whaler's Wife War~Wife of Catknoll The Dead Bastard In the Marquee An Evening in Galilee A Practical Woman Burning the Holly A Daughter Returns The Single Witness Ballad of Love's Skeleton SEDUCTIONS (a) Novels and Short Stories Desperate Remedies Far from the Madding Crowd Tess of the D’Urbervilles Jude the Ohsoure For Conscience’Sake On the Western Circuit Inter a Dragoon . Lady Mottisfont Audrey Satchel and the Parson and the Clerk The Withered Arm A Mere Interlude (h) Poetry San Sebastian My Cecily The Coquette, and After The Supplanter The Ruined Maid A Trampwoman * s Tragedy A Sunday Morning’s Tragedy The Flirt’s Tragedy After the Club Dance 274 The Dark-Eyed Gentleman Julie-Jane The Husband’s View The Christening A ?/ife and Another Panthera One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes (7) A Conversation at Dawn In the Restaurant The Wedding Morning The Chapel-Organist A Sound in the Night Rake-He11 Muses Statue of Liberty The Dolls The Fight on Durnover Moor (2) At a Pause in the Country Dance At the Mill A Hurried Meeting One Evening in Galilee Twenty suicides, twenty murders, forty-seven seduc tions, forty-eight deaths, and ninety-eight examples of illicit love are connected with the portrayal of this devastating emotion in Hardy’s novels and poems. Without 275 doubt, then, for him this passion, the strongest force in life, proves itself to be in the case of the individual the greatest motivating force for human tragedy. Whether it be in the love of mother for child, brother for sister, or man for woman. ’*.... sorrow and sickness of heart at last .... that’s the end of all love according to Nature’s law#n^7 17 Hardy, The Woodlanders« 192 APPENDICES APPENDIX I SYNOPSES OF THE NOVELS 278 Desperate Remedies —* 1871 Miss Bradley, daughter of a retired officer, has had an illegitimate child. Therefore she refuses to marry a young architect, Ambrose Graye. He later marries another woman and has two children, a son, Owen, and a daughter whom he names Gytherea in memory of his lost love. The death of the architect leaves the two orphans without re sources. By a curious chance, Gytherea becomes the personal maid of Miss Bradley, who calls herself Miss Aldclyffe, The latter discovers that the girl is the daughter of her old lover Graye, and forms the romantic project of bringing about a marriage between the girl and her natural son, Aeneas Manston, whom she has reared without disclosing to him the secret of his parentage. Manston she appoints steward of her property. He readily accepts her plan, because Gytherea*s beauty has inflamed his sensual nature. However, on the eve of the wedding Miss Aldclyffe discovers that her son has been married and has abandoned his wife. She naturally abandons her project and insists that Manston recall his wife. Mrs, Manston leaves London to come to her husband. Arriving at her destination she finds no one to meet her and is forced to find lodgings at the village inn. The inn during the 279 night is destroyed by fire and it is believed that she has perished. The principal obstacle to his union with Cytherea thus being removed, Manston renews his suit and in spite of Springrove, another young man in love with her, Gytherea marries Manston and departs for Southampton, Immediately, however, news is spread about that the first Mrs, Manston has been seen alive after the fire. Owen Graye and Springrove follow Manston and take Gytherea from him, Manston then advertises in the paper for his first wife, at last receives word from her, and they take up their married life together, Springrove, however, is not satisfied with the situ ation, Through his efforts it is finally brought to light that Manston had met his first wife after that fire, and in order to assure his marriage with Cytherea had killed her and had concealed her body. The woman with whom he has been living had been hired by him in order to divert suspi cious attention from his deed, Manston commits suicide; his mother dies of a broken heart; Springrove and Gytherea, it is expected, will marry. 280 Under the Greenwood Tree — 1872 In this romance is recounted the love of Dick Dewy and Fancy Day. Dick falls in love with this young school mistress, but the course of their love does not run smoothly because of the inconstancy and the coquetry of the girl. ! She loves Dick because he is so honest and so good; but she also craves the admiration and flattery of other men. Hap pily, her father does not favor Dick’s suit; and she, ob stinate and spoiled, therefore looks with favor on the young rustic. However, during the course of the romance Dick suffers many unquiet hours because of Fancy’s harmless amatory adventures with other men of the village in better circumstances than he. In fact, she accepts the proposal of the pastor of the village while she is engaged to Dick, but later repudiates her assent, very frankly avowing the fact that her favorable reply had been dictated by her de-? sire for admiration and because ,rit is my nature to be fascinated by the idea of surroundings more elegant and more luxurious than those of my companions," At the end, after her many vacillations, she marries Dick— and thinks of the secrets of her past flighty love affairs that she will never tell. 281 A Pair of Blue Byes — 1873 llfride, the only daughter of Mr. Swanscourt, the pastor of the small village of Endelstow, falls in love with Stephen Smith, a young architect, who comes from Lon don to draw the plans for the restoration of the old church. Smith tells her in glowing terms of his friend Knight, an intellectual person who has done much for the young archi tect. However, when Swanscourt discovers that Smith is the son of a simple mason of the village, he refuses to allow the marriage. Elfride and the hoy decide to elope. After many hesitations, Elfride meets Stephen in Plymouth, but they discover that a license obtained in London is not ac ceptable in Plymouth. They go on to London, but during the interim of the journey, Elfride has time to think, and she finds that she cannot go on with the marriage. She returns to her home, still engaged to Stephen* Later, Stephen accepts a post in India, hoping to make a name for himself and prove acceptable to Swanscourt. Elfride, ambitious for fame in the literary world, writes a romance which draws down a caustic criticism from Knight, Smith’s friend. He later comes to Endelstow, and since it develops that he is a distant relative of Elfride*s mother, he makes himself known to her. In her love for Stephen, Elfride was the dominant 282 one; but in the love that develops between her and the older and more sophisticated Knight, he is the master, Stephen returns from India, but Elfride does not reply to his letters, and does not wish to see him. He learns of her love for Knight, his old friend, and says nothing. The principal charm Elfride holds for Knight is his belief in her utter ignorance in all matters of love. Through a series of small disclosures, and through the interposition of Mrs. Jethway, a half-crazed woman whose son has loved Elfride formerly, he learns of two supposed love affairs. Disbelieving in her innocence, he leaves her. Elfride follows him to London to implore his love and pardon, but her father follows and brings her back. He insists upon her marriage with Lord Luxellian, an old peer of the country, whom she does not love. Later, Knight meets Smith in London and then learns of the innocence of his and Elfride*s love. Both, men hasten down to Endelstow to make reparation to the girl and to plead for her love. But the same train that bears the two rivals carries the girl's dead body. 285 Far from the Madding Crowd — 1874 This is the most miscellaneous of all of the greater novels; the glare of melodrama crosses its comedy and its idyl. The story is primarily concerned with the love af fairs of Bathsheba Everdene, a country girl with enough a cleverness to render her impatient of the rustic Darby-and- Joan conception of marriage. She is loved by two country men: the shrewd and faithful Gabriel Oak and the stalwart, love-maddened Boldwood. She refuses Oak?s proposal of marriage: "and at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be, and whenever I look up, there you will be." This picture dismays her with its intolerable ennui. She will manage her own farm; she will be independent. But with the advent of Sergeant Troy, a dashing Don Juan, things are changed. Bathsheba is swept off of her feet by the adventurer; she marries him and melodrama enters the country idyl. He is untrue to her; he is using her love for him to get the money necessary for his gambling and his escapades. But light dawns on Bathsheba when she discovers the secret of her former serving-girl, Fanny, when the latter is brought home to her house for burial. Troy has to admit that he has had an affair with the girl, and that the baby 284 in the coffin with Fanny is his, Troy leaves. Boldwood then renews his suit. At the great party given hy Boldwood, Troy returns to he shot by the half-maddened farmer. Then Boldwood goes insane. Only then does Oak renew his suit, and the story ends after the impulse and passion have brought death to one character, insanity to another, and final union to Bathsheba and Oak, 285 The Hand of Ethelberta ~ 1876 Ethelberta Chickerell, daughter of a butler and one of ten children, has ambitions for wealth and social posi tion. Her two assets are her beauty and her intelligence. She becomes a governess, and eventually marries the son of the family she serves, against the wishes of his parents. But during the honeymoon, the bridegroom takes cold and dies. Some months later his father dies also, and Lady Petherwin, the mother-in-law, is reconciled to Ethelberta and has her come to live with her on the condition that the girl shall not reeognize her family publicly* Ethelberta develops into a charming woman; she be comes a poet, and publishes anonymously a book of love poems whieh is hailed as a great success. But the tone of the book displeases her mother-in-law, and when she dies a few months later it is discovered that she has left Ethelberta nothing but her town house in London. Ethelberta, ever resourceful, opens her campaign against the world by moving her family to the house in Lon don where they act as her servants before the world. In her search for money, she fits herself to be a public reader of romances of which she is the author. Success is achieved, and she is greatly sought after. Julien, the lover of her youth, she encourages slightly, but only with 286 the hope that he and Picotee, her younger sister who loves him, may marry. After various hesitations, and various weighings of the monetary advantages involved, she marries an old roue, Lord Montolere. She is not happy, possibly, but she has achieved material success for herself and for her family. 287 The Return of the Native — 1878 The hero of this novel, the "native,” is Clym Yeo bright, formerly a jeweler in Paris, but now returned to the village of his birth on Egdon Heath* The renunciation of his trade is caused by his desire to lead a broader, more unselfish life* He plans to open a school in the village, and to educate and uplift the rustics about him. His Quixotie schemes of helpfulness are upset, however, by his falling in love with Eustacia Vye, a beautiful, pas sionate, discontented woman, "the rai'sr material of divinity." She has encouraged Wildeve, the proprietor of a small inn, before Clym’s coming. Wildeve, like Eustacia, found life on the Heath a veritable exile, and his desire for life, glamorous life, in the capitals of the world corresponded with the girl’s vision of happiness. However, wounded by her indifference after Glym’s return, he contents himself with marrying Thomasin Yeobright, the niece of Clym’s mother, Mrs, Yeobright. In spite of his mother’s objections to his union with Eustacia, Clym and the girl are married. This is the beginning of a troubled life for Clym, severed from his mother and from his ideals. Finally, Mrs. Yeobright tries to overcome the division that marriage has made between her and her son, but her own jealousy and temper and Eustacia*s 888 jealousy and distrust make the division worse. She knows of Eustacia*s former affair with Wildeve, and one day when she comes to the door of the cottage Clym and Eustacia occupy upon the Heath, Eustacia, believing she has come to tell of her past indiscretion, refuses her admission. In the terrific heat, Mrs. Yeobright, a victim of sunstroke, is bitten by an adder and dies. Clym believes that she died despising him, and suffers great remorse. He later discovers that Eustacia had refused to admit his mother. He turns on her in fury, and they part. Wildeve meanwhile has inherited a legacy, and he leaves Thomasin, hoping to fly with Eustacia. On a wild stormy night on the heath, Eustacia is the victim of a self-sought death by drowning, and, in endeavoring to rescue the woman, Wildeve is also drowned. Clym is free again to begin his cherished career of usefulness. As an open-air preacher he seeks an outlet for his philanthropic spirit. Thomasin and a native of the Heath, Diggory Venn, a man who has loved her for years, are married. B89 The Trumpet Major — 1880 The miller, Loveday, finding his home too large since his wife died and his two sons have left him, marries Mrs* Garland, widow of a local man, and with her comes her charming daughter, Anne. Then the army comes to protect the city of Weymouth from the expected invasion by Napoleon. John Loveday, the trumpet-major, the elder son- of the miller, falls in love with Anne. However, when he proposes, she can but assure him of the deep affection of a friend. Later, Bob Loveday, John’s younger brother, and his fiancee arrive. However, the marriage between the two does not take place, primarily because the inconstant Bob has fallen in love with Anne, and also because John recognizes in the fiancee the former mistress of an officer of his regiment• There is then a struggle between the two brothers for the affections of Anne, Bob is called away, and during his absence, hearing of his various amatory exploits, Anne f turns to the faithful John. Then comes a letter from Bob to John telling him of the former’s real love for Anne, and pleading with his elder brother to intercede for him. John sacrifices himself heroically. He gives the girl he loves to the inconstant Bob and departs for battle and death. 290 A Laodicean — 1881 Paula Power, the heiress of a wealthy engineer, en gages Somerset, a young architect, to restore parts of the old Castle de Stancey which she has purchased. She finds herself responding to his love. Her friend, Charlotte de Stancey, also loves Somerset, hut out of loyalty to her friend keeps her passion hidden. Dare, the illegitimate son of Charlotte’s brother Captain de Stancey, is determined that his father shall marry Paula and wealth, in spite of the fact that his father has made a solemn vow to have nothing to do with women. The boy arranges for his father to see Paula, and the older man immediately becomes the slave of love. Thanks to the in trigues of Dare, Somerset is discredited in Paula’s eyes, and she accepts de Stancey, Paula, without fine family background, is greatly attracted by the idea of bearing the old and famous name De Stancey. However, when all of Dare’s plans seem to be on the point of turning out satisfactorily, Paula learns the truth of de Stancey’s past and of Dare’s paternity. She refuses to marry the Captain. She looks for Somerset whom she really loves, and after she has explained everything to him and asked his pardon for her distrust, they are married, though she still wishes that he were a De Stancey of noble 291 lineage. Charlotte, her love for Somerset impossible of fulfillment, retires to a convent. 392 Two on a Tower — 1882 lady Viviette Constantine, a woman of twenty-eight years, whose hushand, a taciturn and unsympathetic man, has left on an exploring trip into Africa, is alone in her great house, and is obliged by the vow she has made to her husband before he left, to have nothing to do with any social life during the period of his absence. She finds a young man, Swithin Saint-Cleeve, has been using an old tower on her place as an observatory for astronomical ob servations. The two fall in love. Some time later word is brought of her husband’s death in Africa. There remains no real obstacle to their marriage. However, Yiviette is in fear of what will be said if she, an older woman and a woman of means, should marry a man younger than herself and of peasant stock. They decide, consequently, upon a secret marriage• Just before he leaves for Bath where the marriage is to be performed, Swithin receives a letter acquainting him with the fact that he is the recipient of an inheritance from an uncle whom he has never seen provided he does not marry until he is twenty-five years of age. He decides to tell Yiviette nothing of this, because he fells sure she will not allow him to give up the bequest. The marriage over, they return to their homes and take up their lives 293 as before. Meanwhile, Viviette*s brother Louis arrives to visit her. Viviette fears his anger, and does not tell him of her marriage. Louis, full of ambition for himself and for her, tries to arrange a marriage between his sister and the Bishop of Melehester. But at this time word comes that her husband, Sir Christopher, whom she believed dead, was not dead at the time of her marriage with Saint-Cleeve. She hurries to acquaint Swithin with this new turn of events, but in his absence from the observatory she finds the letter telling him of the legacy. She determines that he shall accept the legacy, and that he shall leave and carry on his research work until his twenty-fifth year when he may return and they will be remarried. However, after his departure she finds she is preg nant, and all efforts to locate Swithin failing, she ac cepts the Bishop of Melehester in order to hide what people would consider her disgrace. Years later when Swithin returns, the Bishop is dead and Viviette is again a widow. But Swithin no longer loves the older woman. However, to ease her heart*s pain he tells the chivalrous lie, and, her heart overflowing with gratitude, Viviette dies in his arms. 294 The Mayor of Casterbridge — 1886 A man of twenty-eight years, Michael Henchard has a wife and a child. In a drunken orgy, he sells his wife to a sailor, Newsome. The next morning, overcome with remorse he comprehends the enormity of his act. He takes a vow to touch no strong liquor for twenty years. When next we see Henchard, fortune and honor are his; he is the mayor of Gasterbridge. Delighted with the in-? telligence and the science of the young Scotchman Farfrae, he has taken him as a friend and has made him his manager. Meanwhile, his wife, believing in the rightness of the transaction whereby she was sold to Newsome, lives as the sailorfs wife, but one day overhearing a conversation that causes her to doubt the validity of the exchange, she goes in search of her real husband, Michael Henchard. She finds him in Gasterbridge; she makes herself known to him; he takes her and her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, whom he believes to be his own child, and decides to make restitu tion to them. However, before this he has had an affair with another woman, Lucetta Templeman, who comes to Caster- bridge to confront him, and to bring about a marriage with him. Farfrae, without knowing the woman, helps Henchard frame a letter to her wherein he placates her and sends her a large sum of money as recompense. 295 But in the meanwhile Farfrae has been growing in the eyes of the populace; he is now considered a greater man than Henchard, and this arouses the latter*s jealousy. Far- frae has been attentive to Elizabeth-Jane, but the mayor will have none of it. Later when Henchard*s wife dies, he discovers that this girl whom he has come to cherish as his own is in reality the daughter of Newsome, the man to whom he sold his wife, and that his own child is dead. Then, too, Lucetta, Henchard*s former mistress, favors Farfrae, and that they have been secretly married. Elizabeth-Jane, whom Lucetta had befriended in the past in order to have some tie with Henchard, is living with Lucetta since she had been dismissed by Henchard at his discovery of her parentage. Henchard*s fortunes go. from bad to worse. Though he dismisses Farfrae, the Scotchman prospers, and Henchard loses his money and his position. He finds that he loves Elizabeth now, and she comes back to him. However * Newsome returns and Henchard lies determinedly to keep Elizabeth in ignorance of her true paternity. By a series of coin cidences, undelivered letters and overheard conversation, the people of the town learn of the former mayor*s relation ship with Farfrae*s wife, and enact the "skimmity ride," where two figures, clothed and made to resemble Henchard and Lucetta, are driven through the town for all to see. 296 This manoeuvre reveals the truth. Lucetta in anguish and remorse dies and her child is horn dead. Elizabeth-Jane learns that Newsome is her father, and when Henchard returns, a broken man, to her wedding with Farfrae, she dismisses him coldly. She repents too late. She and Farfrae go out to look for him, and find his dead body upon the heath. 297 The Woodlanders — 1887 In her infancy, Melbury has promised Grace, his daughter, to Giles Winterhorne, son of an old friend, in reparation for the wrong done by Melbury to the elder Winterborne in marrying the woman they both loved, Grace has been given a fine education. When she returns to her home, Melbury is struck by the difference between his daughter and the humble people of Little Hintock, and re fuses to allow the marriage to take place. Grace becomes the companion of a Mrs. Charmond, a rich widow, and there meets a doctor, Fitzpiers, of old and relatively distinguished family. Grace, intrigued by his air of distinction, promises to be his wife. But soon the girl repents her marriage, Fitzpiers is unfaithful; he has an affair with Mrs. Charmond and with a village girl, Suke Samson. Grace and her father hear of these indiscretions, and Melbury insists that his daughter should divoree Fitzpiers and shouls marry Winterborne, to whom he had promised her. But it is found that the divorce is not easy to obtain. And meanwhile Fitzpiers returns, asking pardon. Grace, because of her father’s insistence that now Mrs. Charmond is dead (killed by a jealous lover) she should return to Fitzpiers, leaves her father’s home and takes refuge in her flight with Giles Winterborne, who 298 has always loved her. Night comes, and with it storm, and she cannot leave his cottage. Giles, fearing to compromise the reputation of the girl he loves, sleeps in a miserable hangar outside. Because of this exposure to the rain, he contracts a fever and dies. Fitzpiers finds Grace caring for Giles, and believes she has been his mistress. However, after Giles’s death, Fitzpiers succeeds in winning Grace back to him, and they continue their married life. But the remembrance of Giles is kept fresh in the heart of Marty South, a poor peasant girl, who for years had hopelessly loved him. 899 Tess of the D'Hrbervilles — 1891 This novel is the embodiment in fiction of the Tragedy of the Woman; the world-old story of her fall and of her battle with man to recover her virginity of soul# Tess, a beautiful village girl, is a lineal descendant of the ancient D'Urberville family. Her far-off gentle blood shows itself in her passionate sensitive nature# By a mere accident she becomes the prey of a young man of gross instincts, Alec D*Urberville, who has no real right to the ancient name. She returns to her home soiled and dismayed. Her child is born and dies. ”Her physical blight becomes her mental harvest”; she is lifted above the groping mental state of the peasants around her. This etherealization has fatal results. As she was once the victim of man's vices, she is destined to become the victim of his conventional virtues. At a farm far removed from the scene of her di sgrace, she meets Angel Clare, a preacher's son. He, supposedly liberated in thought, is bound mentally by convention. Their mutual love ends in marriage, all her efforts to ac quaint him with her secret having proved unavailing. On their wedding day Tess tells Clare of her past, but only after he has confessed his "eight and forty hours of dis sipation with a stranger in London.” From that hour she 300 ceases to be for him "enskied and sainted,” and becomes a mere soiled thing which had drifted in its perilous beauty across his path. He leaves her; and her struggle with her anguish of spirit, her poverty, and her despair leads to her final tragedy. She returns to Alec D’Urberville to assure support for her family. Then Angel returns repent ant, and Tess, primitive being that she is, sees the way out— she kills Alec, first cause of her misery and Angel’s unhappiness. But she is taken, hanged, and ’ ’the President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” 301 The Well-Beloved -- 1892 Jocelyn Pierston is the plaything of his artistic temperament, which forces him to look everywhere for ideal beauty. At the age of twenty he discovers in his young neighbor, Avice Caro, a being who approaches this idealiza tion. He pays court to her, not without success. But on the eve of the wedding he recognizes that she is not the personification of his ideal. He abandons her. At the age of forty he returns to his native town, and there sees a young girl, the living image of the girl he loved twenty years before. She also is named Avice Caro; she is the child of the girl he had abandoned. He pays court to her, but when he learns she has been married, though now separated from her husband, Jocelyn reunites the two and returns in solitude to London. Twenty years later he returns again. He finds the third Avice, beautiful and desirable. In spite of the difference in their ages, he pays court. Pressed by her mother, she accepts. But at the last moment her youth / revolts; she flees with her humble fiance and abandons Pierston in the same fashion that he had abandoned her grandmother and her mother. 302 Jude the Obscure - — 1894 Jude, a young man of the people, is ambitious to become a scholar* However, before his desire can be accom plished, he is ensnared by a vulgar natural woman, Arabella Donn, who lusts for him. She drags his high ambition down to the sordid basis of mere animal sex. Finally freed of this entanglement, but with his ambition for scholarship dimmed, he plans to become a divine. However, he meets Sue Bridehead, a distant cousin, and falls in love with her. In pique because of a lover’s quarrel, Sue marries Jude’s old schoolmaster, Fhillotson. However, her husband is physically repulsive to her, and she cannot be his wife. Her love for Jude, and his for her, continue, and finally they go away together. It is her desire that no physical intimacy shall enter into their companionship. They occupy the same house; they are perfect comrades. However, one night Arabella returns and asks Jude to come to her. Sue, hysterical with jealousy, relents to Jude’s demands, and becomes his mis tress in fact. Later Arabella sends little Father Time, the child of her marriage with Jude, to them, and Sue ac cepts him with love. In the meanwhile, Phillotson has divorced Sue at her request, and Jude and Sue have made various and futile 303 attempts to get married* They cannot bring themselves to tie their love; their experiences have made them fearful of a bond* They are advanced thinkers and can see in mar riage no compensation but merely a binding of a love that is better free, and that can only bring happiness when it is unconfined* The final episodes of the tragedy are reached when Sue acquaints little Father Time, Jude's and Arabella's precocious child, with the fact that she is to have another child. He feels poignantly the misery of existence, and his one solution is his own suicide and the murder of Sue's and Jude's children. Sue sees in this catastrophe but a just retribution for her sin; she will repent; she will heap agony upon herself. She returns to Phillotson in tortured submission and becomes his wife in reality. Jude is left to Arabella and damnation. He dies alone, moaning his love for Sue. APPENDIX II BIBLIOGRAPHIES A Bibliography of First Editions of Thomas Hardy PROSE Desperate Remedies, Tinsley Brothers, 1871. (Published anonymously.) tinder the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, Tinsley Brothers, 1872! {Published anonyr mously.} A Pair of Blue Eyes. '(Serial in Tinsley*s Magazine, September 1872-July 1873.) Tinsley Brothers, 1873. Far from the Madding Crowd. (Serial in the Cornhill Magazine, January-December 1873.) Smith, Elder, and Company, 1874. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. (Serial in the Cornhill Magazine, July 1875-May 1876.) Smith, Elder, and Company, 1876. The Return of the Native. (Serial in Belgravia, January- December 1878.1 Smith, Elder, and Company, 1878. The Trumpet Major. (Serial in Good Words, January- December 1880.) Smith, Elder, and Company, 1880. A Laodicean: or the Castle of the de Stanoys. A Story of Today. (Serial in Harper * s Magazine. December 1880- December 1881.) Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and R i vingt on, 1882. Two on a Tower. A Romance. (Serial in the Atlantic Monthly, 1882.) Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle* and Rivington, 1882. The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. (Short Story in ‘ blie Graphic, Summer Number 1883; Harper * s Weekly. June-August 1883.) New York: George Munro, 1884. The Mayor of Casterbridge; The Life and Death of a Man of Character! (Serial in the Graphic. January-May 1886.) Smith, Elder, and Company, 1886. 306 The Woodlanders. (Serial in Macmillan*s Magazine, May 1886-April 1887.} Macmillan and Company, 1887. Wessex Tales. Strange Lively and Commonplace. Stories. Volume I contained The Three Strangers. The Withered Arm, and Fellow Townsmen. Volume II contained Inter lopers at the Knapp and The Distracted Preacher. Macmillan and Gompany, 1888. Tess of the DfUrbervilles. A Pure Woman. (Serial, with omissions, in the Graphic. July-December 1891.) J. R. Osgood, Mcllvaine, and Company, 1891. A Group of Noble Dames. Short Stories. (This book con tains The First Countess of Wessex. Barbara of the House of Grebe. The Marchioness of Stonehenge, Lady Mottisfont. The Lady leenway. Souire Patrick*s Lady. Ann. Lady Baxby. The Lady Penelope. The Duchess of Hamptonshire, The Honourable Laura.) J. B. Osgood, Mcllvaine and Company, 1891. Life * s Little Ironies. A Set of Tales with some Colloquial Sketches, entitled: A Few Crusted Characters. (This book contains The Son*s Veto. For Conscience* Sake. A Tragedy of Two Ambitions. On the Western Circuit. To Please his Wife, The Melancholy Hussar o£ the German Legion. The Fiddler of the Reels, and A Tradi tion of 1804. Also A Few Crusted Characters, which was first published as Wessex Folk: A Prologue and Nine Colloquial Sketches in Harper * s New Monthly Magazine.March-June 1891.) J. R. Osgood, Mcllvaine and Company, 1893. The We11-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament. (Serial in the Illustrated London News as "The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament,** October- December 1892.) J, B. Osgood, Mcllvaine, and Company, 1897. Jude the Obscure. (Serial as **The Simpletons" in Harper * s New Monthly Magazine. December 1894 (Chapters 1-6), continued as "Hearts Insurgent” (Chapters 7-51), January-November 1895.) Reprinted with considerable alterations as Jude the Obscure. J. R. Osgood, Mcllvaine and Company, 1896. A Changed Man, The Waiting Supper and Other Tales. Con cluding with the Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. 507 (This hook contains A Changed Man; The Waiting Sapper; Alicia^ Diary: The Grave by the Handpost; Enter a Dragoon; A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork; What the Shepherd Saw; A Tale of Four Moonlight Mights; A Committee Man of ’ ’The Terror”: Master John Horseleigh. Knight; The Duke1s Reappearance; A Family Tradition; A Mere Interlude; The Romantic Adventures of a Milk maid* ) Macmillan and Company, 1913. Life and Art; Essays, Notes, and Letters. (This book contains How , 1 Built Myself a House (1865), The Dorsetshire Labourer (1883), The Rev. William Barnes. B.‘ D., (1886). The Profitable Reading of English' Fic tion (1891), Memories of Church Restoration (1906) Dialect in the Novels 71878). On the Use of Dialect (1881), Why I Don’t Write Play3 (1892),~On the Tree of Knowledge (1894), Laws the Cause and Misery (1912), Appreciation of Anatole France '(l9l5)V' The War and Literature (1915). To“Tinsley (1870), On the Treat ment of a Certain Author (1890), On Censorship of the Drama~Tl9Q9) . On ”Tess” in America (1892), On Recog nition of Authors by the State (1891), Maeterlinck’s Apology for Nature~Tl908) , On ’ ’ The Well-Beloved” (1897), To Clement K. Shorter (1901), On the War (1914), On the Stevenson Club (1923).) Greenberg, 1925. TERSE Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Harper and Brothers, 1898. Poems of the Past and the Present. Harper and Brothers, 1902. The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars. Macmillan and Company, Part I, 1903; Part II, 1906, Part III, 1908. Time’ s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. Macmillan and Company, 1909. Satires of Circumstance. Lyrics and Reveries with Mis cellaneous Pieces. Macmillan and Company, 1914. Selected Poems. Macmillan and Company, 1916. 308 Moments of Vision, and Miscellaneous Verses. Macmillan and Company, 1917• Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses. Macmillan and Company, 1922. The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel Lyonesse. Macmillan and Company, 1923. Human Shows, Far Phantasies: Songs and Trifles. Macmillan and Company, 1925. Winter Words, in Various Mood and Metres. Macmillan and (Tompany, 1928. 309 Bibliography (used in this study) PRIMARY SGORGES Hardy, Thomas, Collected Poems. London: Macmillan and Gompany, 1923. . . . Life and Art. Edited by Ernest Brenneke. New York: Greenberg, Publisher, 1925. . . . ., Novels. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897. Desperate Remedies Under the Greenwood Tree A Pair of Blue Eyes Far from the Madding Crowd The Hand of Ethelberta The Return of the Native The Trumpet Major A Laodicean Two on a Tower The Mayor of Gasterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the D’Urbervilles The Well-Beloved Jude the Obscure Wessex Tales Life’s Little Ironies A Group of Noble Dames A Changed Man and Other Stories • • • •> The Dynasts. London: Macmillan and Gompany, 1923. ....... The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923. .......Winter Words, in Various Moods and Metres. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1928. 310 SECONDARY SOURCES Abercrombie, Lascelles, Thomas Hardy. New York: Viking Press, 1927. Berle, Lina Wright, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: A Con trast . New York: M. Kennersley, 1917. Beaeh, Joseph Warren, The Technique of Thomas Hardy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. Braybrooke, Patrick, Hardy and His Philosophy. Philadel phia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1927. Brennecke, Ernest, Life of Thomas Hardy. Chicago; Uni versity of Chicago Press, 1922. . . . ., Thomas Hardy* s Universe: A Study of a Poet1s Mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin,""1924, Burton, Richard, Masters of the English Novel. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909, Bury, Y. Blaze d’, Les Romanciers Anglais Contemporains. Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1900. Chase, Mary Ellen, Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1927. Calverton, V. E., Sex Expression in Literature. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926. x Cazamian, Louis, LfAngleterre Moderns: Son Evolution. Paris: Flammarion, 1916, Chew, Samuel Claggett, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Bryn Mawr College, 1921, Child, Harold H., Thomas Hardy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916, Cunliffe, J. W., English Literature during the Last Half Century. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1920. Pp, 40-59, Dawson, William James, The Makers of English Fiction. New York: F. H. Revell and Company, 1905. Pp.' “ 262-298. 311 Duff in, Henry Charles, Thomas Hardy; A Study of the Wessex Novels. New York: Longmans7 G-reen and Company, 1921. Exideuil, Pierre d*, Le Couple Humain dans 1TOeuvre de Thomas Hardy. Paris: Les Editions de la Revue Novells, 1928. Follett, Helen Thomas, Some Modern Novelists. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928. Pp. 127-150. Follett, Wilson, The Modern Novel. New York; Albert A. Knopf, 1923. Freeman, John, "Thomas Hardy." The London Mercury. March, 1928. Frierson, W. C., L*Influence du Naturalisms Francais sur les Romanciers 'Anglais de 18Q5 a 1900. Parife: Marcel Girard, 1925. Grimeditch, Herbert B., Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. London: H. G. and G. Witherby, 1925. Hardy, Mrs, Florence Emily (Dugdale), The Early Life of Thomas Hardy. 1840-1891. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928, • • • • * The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928. New York:" ’ The Macmillan Company, 1930. Gosse, E. W., Some Diversions of a Man of Letters. New York: Charles Scribner*s Sons, 1919. Pp. 2'33-258. Gould, Gerald, The English Novel of Today. London: John Castle, 1924. Hedgcock, F. A., Thomas Hardy. Penseur et Artiste. Paris: Hachette, 1911. Johnson, Lionel P., The Art of Thomas Hardy. New York; Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1923. Mayoux, J, J., "L*Amour dans les Romans de Hardy." Revue Anglo-Amerioaine, February, 1928. . . . ., "La Fatalite^Interieure dans Les Romans de Hardy." Revue Anglo-Americaine. January-February, 1927. 312 MeDowall, Arthur S., Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study. London: Faber, Limited, 1931. Phelps, William Lyon, The Advance of the English Novel. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1910. Pp. 33-r55. Sharp, William, Papers Critical and Reminiscent. New York: Duffield and Company, 1912. Pp. 241-265. Salberg, Gerda, Thomas HardyT s Frauen im Lichte seiner Weltanschauung. Mulhouse. Editions "Alsatia.” 1927. Sime, Jessie G., Thomas Hardy of the Wessex Novels. Montreal; L. Carrier and Company, 1928. Squire, J. C., "Thomas Hardy." The Observer. January 12, 1928. Symons, Arthur, A Study of Thomas Hardy. London; C. J. Sawyer, Limited, 1927. Taufkirch, R., Thomas Hardy*s Romankunst. Marburg, 1912. The London Times Literary Supplement. "Thomas Hardy Ts Novels." January 26, 1928. Yillard, Leonie, La Femme Anglais du XIXe Siecle et son Evolution d*apres le Roman Anglais Contemporain. Paris: Didier, 1920. Weltzien, Erich, Die Geb&rden der Furcht in Thomas Hardy*s Wessexromanen. Berlin: W. Deyhle. g.m.b.h. 1927. Whitfield, A. Stanton, Thomas Hardy. the Artist. the Man, and the Disciple of Destiny. London: Grant Richards, Limited, 1921.

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