SOURCE: Daniel, Clay. “Hardy, Milton, and ‘The Storm—the Two Together’.” English Language Notes 37, no. 2 (December 1999): 32-41.

[In the following essay, Daniel discusses allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost in one chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd.]

One of Hardy's most memorable chapters is “The Storm—The Two Together” in Far From the Madding Crowd. An overlooked source for this scene is Milton's epic simile of the weighing scales in Paradise Lost. Hardy often alludes to authors such as Milton “to raise his novels from the level of pastoral romance to the realm of the masterpieces he so admired.”¹ In “The Storm—The Two Together,” Hardy alludes to Milton also surreptitiously to undercut the generic expectations of a reading public with whom even Leslie Stephen was “careful.”² This public was “given, according to the mood of the nation at this time, to nostalgic dreams of a rural England that was lost.”³Far From the Madding Crowd, by all accounts, was received as a splendid response to this nostalgia. More recent readers, however, have noted that the novel provides a “grotesque pastoral” in which the “reader … could hardly fail to note how often the events of the novel work against the concept of a peaceful pastoral that the title leads him to expect.”⁴ In “The Storm—The Two Together,” Hardy uses Milton to disguise the dark, troubled depths that swirl beneath the conventionally idyllic surface of his novel. Milton had gone to the pastoral world to represent the problems that beset his society, and Hardy follows him into a pastoral world that is as bright and as depraved as Milton's complex paradise of sin, death, betrayal, frailty, seduction, lust, and contemplated suicide.

Hardy prepares for his adaptation of Milton's epic simile by identifying Bathsheba with Eve; and he uses this pivotal identification to define Boldwood as Adam, Troy as Satan, and Gabriel as the angel who guarded Eden. The significance of Bathsheba's identification with Eve is suggested by her last name: Everdene. She is an ever-green and ever-flawed Eve, still lingering within the precincts of paradise. This characterization is adroitly developed by Hardy's first description of her. Bathsheba appears in pastoral splendor, withdraws a looking-glass, and smiles at herself: “She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more” (9). The narrator explains, “Woman's prescriptive infirmity has stalked into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the freshness of an originality” (10). This scene vividly recalls the original woman's first glimpse of herself in a lake that to her “seem'd another sky”:

                    I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon return'd,
Pleas'd it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love.

(4.462-65)⁵

Bathsheba “has her faults. … And the greatest of them is—well, what it is always … Vanity” (Hardy 11). The cracks in the mirror of Hardy's “fair product of Nature in the feminine kind” (10) clearly parallel those of Milton's “novelty on Earth, this fair defect / Of Nature” (10.891-92), “longing to be seen / Though by the Devil himself” (10.877-78).

Boldwood is the Adam destroyed by Hardy's Eve. Milton describes “two of far nobler shape erect and tall, / Godlike erect, with native Honor clad” (4.288-89). Hardy describes the “upright” Boldwood as “erect in attitude, and quiet in demeanour. One characteristic pre-eminently marked him—dignity” (75). “His large forehead” (95) also suggests Adam's “fair large Front” that “declar'd / Absolute rule” (4.300-01). Boldwood's lofty isolation leaves him, like Adam, without a history—“No mother existed to absorb his devotion, no sister for his tenderness, no idle ties for sense” (97). Hardy, in fact, explicitly identifies Boldwood with Adam when he characterizes Boldwood as one who “had never before inspected a woman” and to whom “women had been remote phenomena”:

On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market-house as usual, when the disturber of his dreams entered, and became visible to him. Adam had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. The farmer took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.

(93)⁶

Adam recounts seeing Eve formed in his dream, waking “to find her, or for ever to deplore / Her loss” (8.479-80). Raphael then rebukes him as uxorious (8.561-95). Boldwood's similar adoration of Bathsheba will cause his destruction. Hardy enhances this point by quoting Milton (PL 5.449-50) to ascribe jealousy to Boldwood, “the injured lover's hell” (94). As this hell begins to simmer, and Boldwood is reduced to “an unhappy Shade in the Mournful Fields by Acheron” (182), Hardy fuses Adam's decision to die with Eve, his subsequent bitter repudiation of her, and his frustration at being unable to refuse life or wife from God. Boldwood regrets that “the first woman” he had ever loved (158) had cost him his self-respect and standing (160). He laments, “O, could I but have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well!” (158).

Gabriel, as appropriate to a shepherd who owns a copy of Paradise Lost, echoes Milton's angel in several key ways. Most obviously, “his Christian name was Gabriel” (7). He had “a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal”; and his face retained “some relics of the boy,” though “at the brightest period of masculine growth” (8). These descriptions echo traditional, Miltonic, representations of angels as “prime / In Manhood where Youth ended” (Michael; PL 11.245-46) who bear themselves with “mild” dignity (Raphael; PL 5.371). He, like Eve's protectors, keeps an anonymous “strict watch that to this happy place / No evil thing approach or enter in” (PL 4.562-63). He is assisted in this watch by the Wessex equivalent of “th' unarmed Youth of Heav'n” (PL 4.552): Cainy Ball. This boy, as his mother had thought she had named him after the slain brother rather than his slayer, lends an especially edenic touch. Gabriel also is aided in his watch by his knowledge of the heavens (8, 14). This knowledge had helped him many times to escape the “evil consequences” of possessing a faulty—and punned—watch (8).

Sergeant Frank Troy—ironic scion of the Lords of Severn—is the literary descendant of Satan, especially in his guise of dashing warrior reduced to playing the “Plebeian Angel militant / Of lowest order” (PL 10.442-43). As the novel begins, the déclassé Troy resides in a place “of which the chief constituent was darkness” (69). We meet him on “a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity.” He is “as good as in the county gaol” (71). Yet it is no ordinary gaol but the “Dungeon … Prison” of Satan (PL 1.61, 71), the dimmed, sorrowful, once-brightest of Heaven gone to seed: “If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if anything could be gloomier than the sky, it was the wall, and if anything could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath” (70). Satan escapes from his dismal prison to ruin Adam and Eve and to unite paradise and hell; and the similarly devilish role to be played by Troy in relation to Bathsheba and Boldwood is presaged by Hardy's fusing Milton's descriptions of Eve's first, vain glimpse of herself in a pool that she mistakes for sky, the despoiled Adam and Eve's appearing more naked in clothes (9.1113-15, 1138-39), and Sin and Death joining Earth to Hell by building “high Archt, a Bridge” (10.301) across Chaos:

From this chaotic skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received additional clothing, only to appear more naked thereby. The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor; for the instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and that encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without any intervening stratum of air of all.

(69-70)

As with Bathsheba and Gabriel, Troy's identification in this infernal triad is enhanced by his name. Satan is not frank, but neither is Troy. But “Troy” suggests a correspondence with Satan as a loser of epic contests; and something of serpent lingers in sergeant, especially when he speaks. As Troy pitches the farmer's suicide (180), Boldwood replies, “Devil, you torture me!” (179). This “juggler of Satan” (182), the “stripling” Troy (161; PL 3.636), with his “devil-may-care tone” (176), proves especially adept with women such as Bathsheba:

Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by deluging her with untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may acquire powers reaching the extremity of perdition, is a truth taught to many by unsought and wringing occurrences. And some profess to have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and jauntily continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible effect. Sergeant Troy was one.

(132)

Satan's “sovran Mistress … sole Wonder” and “Empress of this fair World” (9.532-33, 568) soon become Troy's thrice-repeated “Queen of the Corn-market” (133). In this seduction, “the careless sergeant smiled within himself, and probably too the devil smiled from a loop-hole in Tophet” (135). Hearing of Troy's encounter with Bathsheba, Boldwood laments that his Eve has sold herself to Troy “soul and body … so utterly” (180).

These identifications climax in the storm scene. Gabriel is alerted to the approaching storm by the presence of a toad and “the serpentine sheen” of a garden-slug (188). Each of these signs recalls Satan in Paradise Lost. The serpent/slime imagery points to Satan “mixt with bestial slime” in his successful attempt on Eve (PL 9.165). In his prior, unsuccessful, attempt, Satan had become “squat like a Toad” whispering with “Devilish art” into the ear of the sleeping Eve (4.800-01). Milton's description of the “toad” that is apprehended by the angelic watch includes military and agricultural imagery:

                    As when a spark
Lights on a heap of nitrous Powder, laid
Fit for the Tun some Magazin to store
Against a rumor'd War, the Smutty grain
With sudden blaze diffus'd, inflames the air:
So started up in his own shape the fiend.

(4.814-19)

Hardy similarly describes Gabriel, in opposing Troy's imperilling the harvest: “In juxtaposition to Troy, Oak had a melancholy tendency to look like a candle beside gas” (187).⁷

In his representation of the “storm” in Eden, Milton identifies Gabriel with Libra (sign of God's weighing scales), which interposes between Satan (whom Milton identifies with Scorpio: sign of lust and death, the dragon and the serpent) and Eve (whom Milton identifies with Virgo: sign of fertile Demeter and virginal Proserpine, and usually personified holding “an ear of corn, or a spike of grain”).⁸ Hardy retains this triad to structure his storm scene: Bathsheba (Eve/“Queen of the Cornmarket”/Demeter/imperilled virgin Proserpine) is preserved by Gabriel from the menace associated with Troy (Satan/Serpent/Dragon). But he modifies Milton's simile in several significant ways. First, Hardy's Eve is awake. As “out leapt the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend,” Oak beholds “the only venturesome woman in the parish” (192). This is not so much an optimistic assertion that a woman can defend herself as it is the troubling admission that she must defend herself against a danger for which she is responsible. Bathsheba's harvest is menaced by the ravages of a storm that is closely linked with Troy, “ruling now in the room of his wife” (185). Troy imperils this harvest by ignoring Gabriel's warnings and then getting the farmhands drunk at his harvest dance and “Wedding Feast” (187). The dangers posed by this hireling swell into the vast destruction “breathed from the parted lips of some dragon about to swallow the globe” (190).⁹

Though willing to credit “a direct message from the Great Mother” indicating that catastrophic storms must occur, Hardy repudiates messages from a providence that can avert devastation by determining conflicts before they begin.¹⁰ Milton asserts that “all the Elements / At least had gone to rack, disturb'd and torn / With violence” had God not interposed his scales to signal Gabriel's victory in protecting the sleeping Eve (PL 4.993-95). Hardy, however, insists that the elements must go “to rack” as the “heavenly light” yields “diabolical sound” that is not seduction but destruction (193). The chapter's first sentence flutters with the presence of stirring, angry angels: “A light flapped over the scene, as if reflected from phosphorescent wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled the air. It was the first move of the approaching storm” (191). As in Eden, the focal point of the battle is the firmament: “Manoeuvres of a most extraordinary kind were going on in the vast firmamental hollows overhead. The lightning now was the colour of silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed army” (192). Gabriel arms himself with “his ricking-rod, or poniard …—a long iron lance.” This weapon recalls the angelic “Spear” that ignites the detected Satan (PL 4.810). In the novel, after a fierce struggle, Gabriel's rod shivers with the grisly form of the dragon-storm in the heavens:

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized … a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones—dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green … one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod.

(193-94)

Where Milton had subtly hinted at the connection between Satan and death by identifying him with Scorpio, Hardy personifies death in the storm against which his Gabriel must struggle. Hardy's Gabriel echoes Milton's victorious angel when he announces, “But Heaven be praised, it is all the better for us” (194). Yet this Gabriel's effort hardly can be called a victory. It is at best, as Gabriel also says, “a narrow escape.” The melding of paradise and hell, portended by the first glimpse of Troy in his “gaol,” has been completed by the storm: “A sulphurous smell filled the air; then all was silent, and black as a cave in Hinnom. … The darkness was now impenetrable.” The “venturesome” Bathsheba has merged with the “bold … ad'ventrous Eve” who plucks the apple (9.921). Clearly, the storm has revealed Bathsheba's own folly—if not fall—in marrying a hireling-devil. Her “love, life, everything human,” even in Gabriel's eyes, “seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.” Those who slept through the storm are worse off than she. Their dismal condition is represented in epic terms. Emerging from the barn, “the whole procession was not unlike Flaxman's group of the suitors tottering on towards the infernal regions” (197). The chief victim of Troy's pursuit of Bathsheba is the over-loving Boldwood. Boldwood, deranged by his courtship of Bathsheba, has allowed his corn to be destroyed by the storm. His is “a carelessness which was like the smile on the countenance of a skull” (199).

One of Milton's sources for identifying the epic scales with God's judgement is Daniel 5:27: “Thou hast been weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” This verse is quoted by Joseph Poorgrass in his assessment of Boldwood's prospects at his trial for killing Troy: “‘Justice is come to weigh him in the balance,’ I said in my reflectious way, ‘and if he's found wanting, so be unto him’” (294). This second judgement eerily echoes the thunder and lightning of the first. Largely due to his “insane” behavior during the storm (295), Boldwood is spared the noose; his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Adam, too, is pardoned by God, who “delays / His hand to execute what his Decree / Fix'd” (10.771-73). For Milton, this was the seal to a felix culpa. For Hardy, it is merely culpa. Troy goes from prison to hell, and Boldwood goes to prison and hell. Hardy has rewritten Milton to suggest a paradise, lost, permanently, by Eve. After losing his corn, Boldwood had lamented to Gabriel, “I had some faint belief in the mercy of God till I lost that woman” (199). Quoting Jonah, Boldwood adds, “‘I feel it is better to die than to live.’” Nevertheless, hearing of the commutation, “‘Hurrah!’ said Coggan, with a swelling heart. ‘God's above the devil yet!’” (297). Hardy here takes a page from Pippa Passes. In light of Hardy's adaptation of Milton's weighing scales, God, if anywhere, is not above his tormented creation. A slain devil has united a despoiled Heaven and earth, Gabriel “‘is joined to idols’” (308), and Boldwood-Adam is condemned to a lingering suffering rather than to the death he craves.¹¹ Milton's God has been displaced by Hardy's “Great Mother.” Whoever or whatever she may be, her judgements are heavy, enduring, and not unlike those wrought by the “nature” of Hardy's later novels.

Notes

1. Marlene Springer, Hardy's Use of Allusion (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1983) 4.

2. In his 12 March 1874 letter to Hardy, Stephen wrote of the novel,

   May I suggest that Troy's seduction of the young woman will require to be treated in a gingerly fashion, when, as I suppose must be the case, he comes to be exposed to his wife? I mean the thing must be stated but the words must be careful—excuse this wretched shred of concession to popular stupidity; but I am a slave.

   Quoted from Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, ed. Robert C. Scheik, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1986) 343. Citations of Far From the Madding Crowd will refer to this edition.

3. Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1988) 32.

4. Charles May, “Far From the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders: Hardy's Grotesque Pastorals,” English Literature in Transition 17 (1970) 150; Lewis Horne, “Passion and Flood in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Ariel 13 (July 1982) 39. May summarizes this debate in arguing that Far From the Madding Crowd is a distortion of pastoral (147-50). He also notes the impact of epic on the work, citing Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1912; New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) 97-169. Also see Michael Squires, “Far From the Madding Crowd as Modified Pastoral,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970): 299-326.

5. Citations of Milton refer to John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957).

6. Also see page 81.

7. Hardy's echo in Return of the Native is even more explicit. When the protector Venn slaps the destoyer Wildeve on the shoulder, the narrator comments that Wildeve “started like Satan at the touch of Ithurtiel's spear” (The Return of the Native, ed. James Gindin, Norton Critical Edition [New York: Norton, 1969] 121).

8. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Myths of the Zodiac (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978) 72. For Milton's development in this scene of the classical myths associated with Virgo, Libra, and Scorpio, see Clay Daniel, Death in Milton's Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1994) 39-41.

9. To characterize Troy as a “hireling or novice” (13) that is Gabriel's antithesis, Hardy also alludes to Milton's denunciation of “Blind Mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold / A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least / That to the faithful Herdman's art belongs!” (Lycidas 113-31). This passage—in its descriptions of sheep “swoln with wind” and a “shearer's feast” that excludes “the worthy bidden guest”—would seem to have suggested, in addition to the significance of musical ability to characterize Gabriel, two central episodes in Far From the Madding Crowd: the blasting of the sheep and Troy's “harvest supper and dance” (185)/“Wedding Feast” (187). Hardy quotes Lycidas 126 in Chapter 21, which recounts the blasting of the sheep. In Hardy's twist to the theme of the good shepherd, “God was palpably present in the country,” things prosper, and sheep are regularly fleeced—and eaten—in “the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled church with transepts” (112-13). From this angle, Gabriel is identified with Satan as eavesdropper and associate of fire (16, 20-23, 37-38, 39-42).

10. Howard Babb discusses nature as a moral force that enacts, rather than represents (as in Paradise Lost), the story's theme (“Setting and Theme in Far From the Madding Crowd,” (ELH 30 [1963]:147-61).

11. Poorgrass's concluding quotation of Hosea 4:17 (“Ephraim is joined to Idols”), then, far from being “comically irrelevant” (308n), is the culmination of Hardy's identification of Oak with Solomon, especially Solomon as “that uxorious King, whose heart though large, / Beguil'd by fair Idolatresses, fell / To Idols foul” (PL 1.444-46; 1.400-05; PR 2.169-71). When Bathsheba appears headed for marriage with Boldwood, Oak quotes Ecclesiastes 7:26: “‘I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!’” (120). He would have done well to quote the entire verse: “… whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.” Oak himself is taken by “this Ashtoreth of strange report” (42).