SOURCE: “Mr. Hardy's Novels.” British Quarterly Review 73 (April 1881): 174-83.

[In the following excerpt from an early review of Hardy's novels, the critic compares Hardy to some of his contemporaries and points out the salient features of his fiction. However, the reviewer states that Far from the Madding Crowd is not one of Hardy's best works.]

When George Eliot died it was not unnatural that men should at once ask themselves if she who had been confessedly the greatest living English novelist had left any successor in the true province of literature. The question, floating in so many minds, was answered promptly and decidedly by one journal, not without influence on opinion, which claimed the falling mantle for Mr. Thomas Hardy. It was a surprise to many who read the words that such a claim should have been made; the English public, greedy for amusement, careless about good, finished, and subtle literary work, is very slow to understand that of stories which have charmed a leisure hour some are destined to pass into complete forgetfulness, having merely served to waste a part of the season, while others become a part of the literature of the country, to be read and re-read, and to place their characters as living beings among the viewless companions of our thoughts.

The power of creating personages which live, and become even more real than many historic phantasms is rarer than we may think. Most people who make pretensions to the study of literature have read not only Shakspere, but Ben Jonson and Dryden, to say nothing of Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wycherly, Congreve, Farquhar. Yet while the mere titles, the plot, and many isolated passages remain in the memory, how few there are who could name more than the title-character of any one play, who could be sure that they would not give to one author or to one play the dramatis personœ of another, while they no more confuse Shakspere's plays than they mentally assign the children or the wife of one friend to another, or travel into the Midland Counties to visit one who lives in Devonshire.

Now if we ask ourselves who in English fiction have made their brain children our familiar friends, whom not to know is to be wanting in acquaintance with letters, and with the thought of the past and present, we shall find they are but few, Shakspere, Fielding, Richardson, Miss Burney, perhaps—though her king, princes, and royal household are, for a wonder, more real than her fictitious characters—Sir Walter Scott, Miss Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and for those who have once become imbued with the spirit of his works, Hardy.

We shall see the difference between any of these and their fellows by taking authors whose works ran side by side—Miss Ferrier with Sir Walter Scott, Mrs. Brunton with Miss Austen. In Miss Ferrier's work Miss Pratt stands out with exceeding vividness, but we believe that many would find it difficult to say in which novel she found her place; and who can recall a single character in Mrs. Brunton's very clever novels, ‘Self Controul’ and ‘Discipline’? In the creation of living persons, not mere lay figures round whom dress, furniture, scenery are to be arranged, we believe that the author we are now to study is the successor of George Eliot. The test is one any reader can apply, and to those who do so we have every confidence that Fancy Day and Dick Dewey, Ethelberta Petherwin, Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye, Parson Swancourt, and all the host of minor persons, each with its own distinctive mark, will become to their minds and memories as real and indestructible, say, as Adam Bede or Romola, and even as those drawn by Shakspere's mighty hand, though they lack his perfect art.

Another test is one which is not so sure, since there is not, in spite of Mr. Matthew Arnold, any definite standard of literary excellence. There are those who imagine that Mrs. Henry Wood writes English, and that Ouida knows the value of the words she uses; they are wholly unable to distinguish between the faculty which is amused by an intricate if impossible plot, and that which tries and weighs style, plot, characters, the thought and learning involved in rather than displayed upon the book, against the masterpieces of fiction which the criticism of time has already tested and pronounced genuine. This test is that of literary style, wholly neglected by the majority of our novelists, whose name is Legion. The most part aim at telling their story, and depend on the story only for any value the book may possess. Some who are agreeable narrators, and who give a picture of the time in which we live fairly enough in its superficial aspects, write in a style which we feel to be simply abominable the moment we pause to consider the words in which the story is conveyed. Perhaps no writers of the nonenduring, merely ephemeral, yet pleasant kind, have ever written more or been more widely read than Mr. Trollope and Mrs. Oliphant. We doubt if there is in all their writings one single passage on which any reader has ever dwelt for its own sake, for the thought conveyed in the given sentence, for the music of the words, or for the description of scenery apart from the context. We should be surprised to find that any intelligent person who keeps a book of extracts, no mean test of the beautiful in literature, has ever taken the trouble to copy into it a passage from either of these writers. To hurry through the mere story and see what is done with the puppets is the aim of the reader; none dwell on the page as they dwell on the words of Scott, some of whose prose chapters are little more difficult to learn by heart than is his ordered verse, or on scenes like that at the Rainbow in ‘Silas Marner,’ or Dinah's preaching, or Hetty's dreadful pilgrimage in ‘Adam Bede,’ or as now and then they lingered leisurely over Kingsley in his rich word-painting of a South American forest, or of the blazing solitude of the African desert. A really great novelist has always chapters that are quotable and readable apart from the context, for the pleasure which they give of themselves, just as scenes of a dramatist, or a chapter in the Bible can be read detached: it is in fact a note of true literature. The abdication of Mary Stuart in ‘The Abbot,’ the interview between Jeannie Deans and Queen Caroline in ‘The Heart of Midlothian,’ are types of chapters to be found in the works of all really great writers; but who ever cared to read a solitary chapter of more than two or three persons within our own memory?

But more is wanted than the power of creating characters and a good literary style. The first-rate workman rarely writes with set purpose to draw a moral. It is inconceivable that Shakspere should have called one play ‘Jealousy, or the Moor of Venice,’ or another, ‘God's Revenge against Murther.’ He thinks of a man, Othello or Macbeth, and exhibits his qualities, he does not think of qualities and the consequences of qualities, and invent men and incidents for them. Perhaps the only exception to this among really great writers is Dickens. He, no doubt, set himself in one book to demolish Yorkshire schools, in another to reform sick nursing, and so on, but in so far as he is didactic he is tedious. Smike is a bore, and the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce could scarcely be more wearisome in the Court of Chancery itself than it is in ‘Bleak House.’

Again, a writer must strike some deep human interest which shall be quite independent of the circumstances of the time in which the scene is laid. Garrick probably moved men as much, or more, playing Hamlet or Macbeth in the wig of the period than a modern actor in a costume studiously archæological, in conformity with some feigned but definite period in Denmark's history, or the most recognized Celtic traditions. It is by his intensely human sympathy that Scott triumphs, in spite of the fetters which he imposes on himself by his archæological details; and Romola because she is so true a woman makes us forget the somewhat too elaborate though very clever ‘cram’ with which the story of her life is overladen. In her other works George Eliot has for the most part taken a society which changes little—homely people with homely lives. It has been remarked that a boundless sympathy was her characteristic, but on a somewhat low level. Mr. Hardy, in the same way, but even to a greater extent, takes life where it changes least, and considers it in its most simply human aspects.

It is because there is in another remarkable writer of our day little sympathy with humanity, as such, that we do not mention him as the literary successor of George Eliot. Mr. George Meredith has no feeling of toleration for a fool. He is an accomplished literary artist, limited by this, that the only men and women worth writing about at all are those who speak in epigrams as brilliant as his own writing which describes them. When he introduces a fool and a bore the things he makes them say are often excellent; it is difficult to tell by what stroke of genius it is that the man who says so good things is yet so intolerable. Mr. Meredith is a delightful study to the diligent reader, but he is a study; he is laboured and affected, difficult sometimes as the chorus of a Greek play, always, we fear, caviare to the general, whereas the true novelist should, like the true dramatist, appeal to the many. Men must be amused, and they come to the novel as the relaxation from work. The ‘Lustige Person’ and the Manager in the Prologue to Faust have reason on their side against the high-flown arguments of the poet. The most broadly human is the truest artist after all.

All great writers are autobiographical; at least, have drawn largely from their own experiences; where we do not know that they are so, as in the case of Shakspere, it is probably because we know so little about them. The true artist must use up what has come to him, and the highest originality is the transmutation in the alembic of the brain of the material accumulated by the worker, or by others who have gone before. Originality which is not based in a large degree on personal experience is a making of bricks not only without straw, but with very little clay.

Few men have used their own experiences so much as Mr. Hardy, to whom we definitely turn after this somewhat long exordium, yet few have ever seemed so original to those who are in sympathy with the life which he describes. That he is less known than some far inferior people, arises from the fact that a certain country training, and somewhat of his own wide sympathy with nature, and with the simpler forms of country life, is needed before he is read and understood. In these days of overgrown towns men only take short rushes into country life, and know but little intimately of what they see; yet more than ever, and increasingly is it the case, that the readers of books are in towns and not in the country. We do not pretend to be wholly ignorant of some personal details of the author's life, but are sure that even one who was so would construct without difficulty a theory which would not fail widely when it came to be verified. That Mr. Hardy, like Mr. Barnes the Dorset poet, is sprung of a race of labouring men in a county where the real old families are attached to the soil, and the county aristocracy, except perhaps in Purbeck, are comparatively new comers that he is not ‘too proud to care from whence he came,’ that, on the contrary, he regards his stock as reason for exceeding pride on two grounds—one the dignity of labour, the other that the country workingman is of nearer kin to that nature which he idealizes and personifies, till it has all the characteristics of some great supra-natural human being;—that he is thus anthropomorphic, but not in a theological sense, is apparent on the face of what he writes.

A closer observer might go further, and find autobiographic hints in the account of a young architect's life in A Pair of Blue Eyes, and in A Laodicæan, now publishing in ‘Harper's Magazine;’ yet more in the minute touches whenever a building of any kind occurs in the course of his story; in the relations, apart from those of rivalry in love, existing between the same young architect and his friend Henry Knight; in other family revelations wherein it were impertinent to follow; especially as we must always remember that only the simplest basis of fact is used for the embroidery of fiction. …

Now Mr. Hardy gives us always sufficient indication of dialect to produce the impression he wishes. One who knows the country of which he speaks catches the keynote and has the tune always in his ear; but the outsider is not puzzled by too much dialect and many strange words; the author has the true sense of what is needed for his art, and the strength of reserve. …

And next he is an interpreter of the simpler aspects of nature to many who have no time to commune with her, and learn her secrets at first hand. Year by year masses of our people, and they our chief readers, see less and less of simple quiet country scenes. Brick and mortar swallow up our lives, and when we escape from them, it is to the sea or to the mountains, not to lose ourselves in English woods, or wander over the downs and in the green lanes which exist only here, and date from British days, older still than the great Roman roads still to be traced in the west in unexpected places, green across hill and dale. Only a few days since we spoke to a young clerk who had escaped from London on Sunday into one of the loveliest districts of Surrey, and we asked if he had walked through a certain yew-tree grove, the wonder of the neighbourhood. To one country-bred there was something pathetic in the avowal that he did not know a yew-tree, nor indeed any one tree from another. …

In all his books, without any effort, Mr. Hardy brings in nature as a personality, now aiding, now at war with man, now subdued, now triumphant, but always as living and in relation to human life. There is something of the relic of old paganism in his way of viewing her, as indeed there is so much of it in his own county. And he likes to take us where we see her moods—with the keeper into the heart of the wood; with Gabriel Oak the shepherd, to the wild hill-side and the chalk-pit; with the reddleman across lanes and commons known to but few even of the country folk; to the brow of the cliff beetling over the sea, where ‘it rained upwards instead of down, the strong ascending current of air carried the rain-drops with it in its race up the escarpment.’ He has learned many of the multitudinous languages in which nature speaks, both with tongues and looks, as truly as the king in the ‘Arabian Nights’ had learned the speech of beast and bird. …

What Mr. Hardy does in reference to death he does also in reference to the other ills attendant on life—disease, sorrow, superstition. He could not bear the tragedy, or help us to bear it, unless he showed the strand of comedy interwoven; he is ironical in the deepest sense.

In Far from the Madding Crowd he touched deeper notes, but we do not think the book so great a success as his earlier or his later work. The heroine, who as usual plays fast and loose with her lovers, a young farmeress and heiress in one, is a less womanly woman, with all her coquettish ways, than are his other fantastic creations. The tragedy of Bold's suicide, and of the death of the girl Bathsheba's husband has betrayed, is somewhat too deep for its surroundings. Not that such subjects are unfit for fiction; to assert they were so would be to be unleal to Shakspere and Scott; but in Far from the Madding Crowd the character of the piece, so to speak, is melodramatic rather than tragical, while the incidents, or some of them, require a more harmonious setting. Still there are great merits in the book, the same love of nature, the same subtle analysis of motive, unexpected yet true complications of plot, as in A Pair of Blue Eyes. What is especially new in the work is not of any very deep interest.

In reviewing the whole series of Mr. Hardy's works—not at all too great in quantity to be admirable in quality during a period of ten years—the first general fact that strikes us, assuming him to be an accurate observer, is the unchanging character of the country side and the country folk. The old features of the landscape remain more perhaps in Dorset than in any other county. …

Perhaps nothing is more surprising to those who have only known English country life from such novels as Miss Yonge's than to see the extraordinarily small part played by the clergy in Mr. Hardy's books. In truth, the ordinances of religion summed up in the parson have but scant influence on the life of the English labourer, and of the country folk generally. He is not the all-pervading spiritual presence which the religious spinster of the upper class supposes; he is a gentleman who touches their lives at sundry points, but is to keep within his own limits, and intrude on them no more than they intrude on him. Of dogmatic differences in the Church they are wholly ignorant. We have known a succession of clergymen in the same country parish within five years, varying from the extremist Calvinism, through a phase of High Churchism scarcely to be distinguished from Popery, to a liberalism differing in nothing but name from Unitarianism. All were accepted by the parishioners, the differences of doctrine were never distinguished except so far as they implied differences in practice, or interfered with any of the habits of an unchanging people.

The Church in Wessex has not eradicated superstition (how, indeed, should it do so?), has only affected morals to an unappreciable extent, while even education has waited for the day of School Boards and modern Acts affecting labour. Were it to be objected to Mr. Hardy's books that there is about them here and there a kind of frank paganism, an acceptance, without moral blame, of superstition, no hasty scouting of the possibility of witchcraft, a forgetfulness of the triumphs of civilization; we should reply that these are some of the essential characteristics of the people and the country among which he has lived, that he gives life as he sees it, and not as it ought to be according to the ideas of certain outsiders.

With regard to one side of country life, on which he is as well informed as all others, it may be thought that he deliberately chooses only that which is fair and virtuous and pure for the sake of the picture he wishes to draw, and into the grace of which he will introduce no incongruous feature, that he has left out the most essential elements. This is not so. The English labourer is frank, but he is not coarse, save as Fielding's novels are coarse; that is, he introduces words which do not find their way into drawing-rooms, but he would recoil as from a snake in the grass at the thoughts and suggestions which are in many fashionable novels; his very vices have in them more of clumsiness and horse-play than of deliberate evil. He is purer than his town neighbours: if chastity consist in truth to one woman through life, so that the chaste man might adopt Arthur's words to Guinivere, ‘For I was ever virgin save for thee,’ we assert that the agricultural labourer stands higher than any other class in the community; he is truthful, honest, and trustworthy, and if he exceed in liquor, he certainly in this has no monopoly of vice or of needless indulgence.

If Mr. Hardy has indeed drawn his characters on the whole favourably, in spite of their many shortcomings; if he has drawn true gentlemen in his village carpenter John Smith, the reddleman Diggory Venn, the tranter Dick Dewey, it is because these men and their prototypes are so in fact. ‘Though,’ as Dickens said of the brothers Cheeryble, ‘they eat with their knives and never went to school,’ we never expect to find in any rank or position truer or more high-minded gentlemen than some Dorset labourers we are proud to call friends. But those who associate with them—a difficult matter for whomsoever is not bred among them—must expect that plainness of speech so graphically described in the novels under consideration. …

Our pleasant task is almost done. We think we have said enough to show that here is a novelist who—while he excites little short of wonder and enthusiasm in a certain section of the public, the comparatively few who know him—has not at all taken hold on the great popular mind, sometimes slow to discover when a new genius has arisen in the intellectual sky.

We have only to say more, that while Mr. Hardy is never didactic, never dogmatic, never definitely religious—the novelist who is so imperfectly apprehends the difference between a novel and a sermon, spoiling both—his whole influence is pure, ennobling, and gracious; there is no line from beginning to end of his works we could wish to blot, no book which does not leave the reader heartily amused and raised in moral tone.

That Mr. Hardy has taken his place in the true literature of England is to us beyond question. For his sake and for their own we trust the larger public will recognize the fact, and steep themselves in the fresh healthy air of Dorset, and come into contact with the kindly folk who dwell there, through these pages, and then test their truth, as they can, in summer visits to the wolds, hill-sides, and coasts, which their ‘native’ has described so well.