SOURCE: Yelland, Cris. “Hardy's Allusions and the Problem of ‘Pedantry’.” Australia Journal of Linguistics 4, no. 1 (1995): 17-30.

[In the following essay, Yelland builds on the work of previous critics in a discussion of whether Hardy's use of allusion is “pedantic,” and how Hardy's sense of cultural pluralism relates to Victorian concepts of high culture.]

1 HARDY'S ‘PEDANTRY’ AS A LITERARY CRITICAL QUESTION

A good deal of Hardy criticism, from Victorian reviews on, is severe on Hardy's faults of style. Elliott (1984: 13-19) opens with a brief but damning collection of critical hostility stretching from the first review of Desperate Remedies in 1871 on and into the 1970s. Page (1980: 151-2) opens similarly, as does Chapman (1992: 34-5). Most of the criticism of Hardy's faults of style centres on the problem of ‘pedantry’. This term includes heavy-handed generalisations, pretentious Latinism in lexis, and strained allusions to scientific facts and to objects of high culture, especially paintings.

One problem with the question of pedantry is that the grounds for accusing Hardy of it have changed. For instance, to a modern reader, narratorial displays of knowledge may be offputting, but display of knowledge was a common, and highly-valued, feature of Victorian writing. George Eliot's displays of knowledge were valued enough to be collected and published on their own, as if they were the fruit in the fictional pudding (Main 1874). Further, the degree to which various kinds of knowledge on display were thought objectionable has changed too. Consider this passage from Far from the Madding Crowd:

We now see the element of folly distinctly mingling with the many varying particulars which made up the character of Bathsheba Everdene. It was almost foreign to her intrinsic nature. Introduced as lymph upon the dart of Eros it eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution.

(Hardy 1978: 243)¹

A modern reader might object to this on the grounds that it contains a redundant classical allusion, redundant because it is either mystificatory (if you do not know what the dart of Eros was) or snobbishly decorative (if you do). But the Saturday Review objected because of the medical language in it, not the classical allusion:

A quack doctor before the days of Public Vaccinators might have written such a sentence as a talking advertisement. But a man of refinement, and not without a sense of humour, might surely have put the not unprecedented fact that a girl fell in love with a soldier in simpler and less professional language.

(Cox 1970: 39)

The Saturday Review's reaction is comparable to William Watson complaining of words ending in ‘logy and ism’ in Tess (Cox 1970: 198), and Andrew Lang complaining of Tess's ‘odd mixture of science and literature’ (Cox: 1970: 196). This hostility to one element of Hardy's style is symptomatic of a general tension between the claims of classical and scientific knowledge in the late nineteenth century, the tension which had issued also in Culture and Anarchy, which preceded Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill by five years. Hardy's practice of juxtaposing kinds of knowledge usually kept apart was, in this context, a serious fault, and exacerbated by a related fault, that Hardy did not only bring in ‘inappropriate’ material, but also did so in strained and clumsy ways.

By contrast, many modern critics see some elements of Hardy's stylistic heterogeneity as a virtue. Elliott (1984: 19-34) concedes Hardy's ‘janglings and oddities’, but approves of the mixture of archaisms, technical language and orthodox educated language in Hardy, and of the varied life-experiences which he claims produce it. Salter (1973: 145-64) praises the ironic effect of ‘pedantry’. Similarly, Page argues that Hardy was a careful stylist, and that his mixture of styles, though often awkward, makes for ‘vitality’ (Page 1980: 151). Chapman argues similarly, in praise of the ‘variety’ of Hardy's style (1992: 36-42). Arguments like these, conceding that Hardy's style is often ‘pedantic’ but claiming compensating virtues, are dominant in criticism in the second half of the 20th century. Stylistic heterogeneity indicates a rich cultural variety, and this is worth the price of ‘pedantry’. Widdowson (1990: 219-25) goes further, to argue that stylistic ‘awkwardness’ is a valuable device for subverting cultural hegemony.

There has been, then, since the 1870s a general agreement that Hardy's style has elements of ‘pedantry’, though reactions to ‘pedantry’ have varied. The most hostile reactions were those of Victorian reviewers, for whom ‘pedantry’ was ‘viciously stimulated workmanship’ (Cox 1970: 15), ‘an intellectual graft on coarse and vulgar thoughts’ (Cox 1970: 23), or ‘verbose and redundant’ (Cox 1970: 28). In what follows I shall discuss two elements of Hardy's ‘pedantry’, his use of generics and his practice of allusion, in detail, to identify what makes for ‘pedantry’ in Hardy's style. Then I shall argue that the hostility of many Victorian reactions to ‘pedantry’ was part of a conservative defence of a specific cultural hierarchy, one with classical learning firmly at the top, and that the period of Hardy's writing was a period of anxieties about the nature of ‘culture’ in general. I shall restrict my discussion to Far from the Madding Crowd, because the problem of ‘pedantry’ has particular importance for the novel which established Hardy as a successful writer with no need to display cultural credentials.

2 GENERICS AND ALLUSION AS ELEMENTS OF ‘PEDANTRY’

Most modern critics are concerned to minimise the problem of Hardy's ‘pedantry’. There is one full-length book on Hardy's allusions, Springer's Hardy's Use of Allusion (1967), and this too is concerned to justify this aspect of ‘pedantry’ and lessen the unease which it might create. The book adopts a seemingly commonsensical procedure, a ‘target’ method of dealing with allusions and the other aspects of ‘pedantry’. Faced with the frequent allusions in a Hardy novel, Springer looks them up, then presents the texts or other things alluded to as ‘targets’, as sub-texts which are activated by allusion. For example, Springer notes a high proportion of Biblical allusions and echoes in the parts of Far from the Madding Crowd which deal with Gabriel Oak, and argues from this that Oak should be read as an admirable, because Christian, hero (1967: 73-6). This approach has its scholarly value, but it tends to obscure the problematic qualities of this aspect of Hardy's ‘pedantry’. The approach re-privileges the areas of knowledge which are used as targets, and restates or reimplies that fiction has a conventionally pedagogic function. In this respect, the modern reader, who is likely to be using the New Wessex edition, the Penguin, or the OUP paperback, is in a position quite different from that of Victorian readers with their unannotated book or serial editions. The note in the modern text is a strong signal to readers to suspend their relationship with the text to turn to the back and look it up. Armed with enough information to ‘get’ the allusion, we can then co-operate in the sharing of meanings which the allusion offers. The editor of a modern students' edition acts here as a go-between to maintain a relationship of teacher and favoured pupil between author-narrator and reader. In the Victorian reading situation the practice of allusion was much more risky. An allusion which ‘failed’ by being ‘strained’ or ‘awkward’ could rupture the collaboration between author and reader, so that the reader might accuse Hardy of showing off, of wrongly mixing (confusing) registers, of knowing the wrong things or of making false comparisons.

One primary effect of annotation is to provide the reader with enough (instantaneously) previous knowledge to grasp the information offered in the allusion. Whether or not the reader has, or can be given, this information might seem to be the primary criterion for whether an allusion succeeds or fails, but I believe that it is not. While there is a pleasure in ‘getting’ an allusion, and the informational content of it is its most prominent feature, it is not crucial to success or failure. Compare, for instance, an example from a novelist famous for her allusions:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.

(Eliot 1972 [1872], Ch 1)

and an example from Far from the Madding Crowd of Hardy at his most pedantic:

The others shambled after with a conscience-stricken air; the whole procession was not unlike Flaxman's group of the suitors tottering on towards the infernal regions under the conduct of Mercury.

(p. 314)

Most readers would agree that Eliot's allusion succeeds and Hardy's fails, but this difference cannot be due to the difficulty of ‘getting’ the allusion. Certainly, the allusion to Flaxman is hard to ‘get’, but if we are being honest about it, the allusion to Italian painters is very nearly as hard; but the fact that we cannot, when we encounter the opening of Middlemarch, give an accurate account of the Blessed Virgin's sleeves does not seem to matter. What then is the source of success or failure, effortless wisdom or straining pedantry, in different allusions?

The chief obstacle to understanding this question is the assumption that an allusion is primarily there to give information, by ‘cueing’ another literary work or cultural artefact. Fowler (1981) suggests instead that the significance of allusions to high-cultural objects or to cultural stereotypes is not in the recognisable truth or untruth of the propositions they contain, but in the way they create and maintain a close relationship between narrator and reader. Fowler's discussion begins with Barthes' S/Z (1970), and argues that it is seriously undertheorised, though stimulating and productive. Barthes' account of the ‘five codes’ of realist fiction suffers, in Fowler's view, from the fact that Barthes' account of his codes does not connect them to linguistic specifics (1981: 97-8). Fowler's discussion is part critique of Barthes, part a remedying of this weakness, in that Fowler explores the concrete linguistic specifics of one of the codes, the one which Barthes variously terms the ‘Referential’, the ‘Cultural’, or the ‘REF’ code. Central to Fowler's discussion is a syntactic construction which is common in 19th century fiction, a past tense narrative or descriptive clause whose object is a complex noun phrase with the following structure: demonstrative determiner + head + relative clause with its verb in the present tense. The relative clause uses the present tense to make a statement which purports to be true universally, outside as well as inside the world of the fiction (Fowler 1981: 103). Although Barthes' examples are from Balzac, the construction which Fowler identifies is easy to find in English fiction. The opening sentence of Middlemarch is one example:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

(Eliot 1972 [1872]: Ch 1)

Is there a familiar kind of beauty which is thrown into relief by poor dress, a known category like ‘gamine’ or ‘Junoesque’? No, but the deictic ‘that’ behaves as if there is, and the reader accepts and co-operates with the empathy between narrator and reader so offered. This is followed by the authority of the generalisation, realised in the generic present tense. What happens in the opening of Middlemarch is that the narrator asserts authoritative knowledge and readers grant the narrator's authority willingly, because they are allowed a share in it. The construction which Fowler identifies, which I shall call a ‘REF construction’, can be divided into two components, a ‘familiariser’ (here the demonstrative) and an ‘asserter’ (here the generalisation), the two working together and almost simultaneously. Under ‘familiariser’ I include demonstrative determiners, ‘the’ as determiner, which has a similar, slightly weaker, effect, and the use of first- and second-person pronouns, all of which Fowler categorises as ‘“interpersonal” usages designed to implicate the reader’ (1981: 105). In his discussion of the ‘Referential Code’, Barthes is eloquently scathing about the ‘army of stereotypes’ which ‘stalk’ 19th century fiction (Barthes 1970: 206), but even he understates the case and the potency of the kind of construction which Fowler identifies. The familiariser in particular not only alludes to pre-existing stereotypes, it confers existence on them. The frequent use of demonstratives in advertising slogans (‘that Friday feeling’, ‘bridge that gap’, ‘that Condor moment', etc.) is one example of this, and George Eliot's invention of a ‘familiar’ though non-existent kind of beauty is another. The fact that Eliot's allusion above is to a category, a ‘kind’ of beauty, is also important in this process. The vagueness of it, relative to the specific reference to a particular painting by Flaxman, gives readers space to construct a meaning, a target of the allusion, out of their own cultural knowledge. This knowledge may be, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, but it is not felt to be so. We do have an idea of what the Virgin Mary's sleeves looked like, although it may be gained from sources other than Italian paintings, from illustrations in children's Bible stories, or wherever. The specific reference is much riskier, a blunt pass/fail situation in which you either know the painting or you don't.

Fowler's discussion, (I have greatly simplified a long and suggestive essay) affords two valuable insights into the problem of Hardy's pedantry. The first is the importance of precise analysis of how allusions are constructed; the second, much larger, insight is that the significance of allusion is primarily interpersonal, to do with the combination of empathy and authority which the 19th century narrator typically claims and shares. Fowler's work makes it possible to explain why the opening of Middlemarch is not ‘pedantic’ and the allusion from Far from the Madding Crowd is. George Eliot's reference to Italian painters appears with an invitation to empathy in the ‘that’, but the Hardy allusion consists only of a direct comparison between the drinkers and Flaxman's suitors. There is no empathy created, only a qualification of the narrator's authority in the weak ‘not unlike’. The readers are thus assigned a role of receivers of information, and asked to be the audience for a display of knowledge which they are not allowed to share. The success or failure of an allusion, in short, is in large part a question of syntax and modality, rather than the difficulty of its informational content.

Fowler's discussion is mainly about generic statements in narratives, but his principles can be applied, in a modified form, to specific allusions to objects like paintings. I shall divide my discussion, taking Hardy's generics first and then his specific allusions.

One problem, and opportunity, for the Victorian narrator, is that there are many ways of making generic statements, many transformations of the ‘core’ form ‘All X are Y’. Generics can occur in both plural and singular form, and can be syntactically concealed, for instance in a relative clause, or further transformed into prenominal adjectives. In chapter 1 of Middlemarch, for instance, there are numerous generalising constructions. Many of these are restricted in their application, by being in the past tense, or being tied to an individual character's perception, or to ‘general [i.e. provincial] opinion’. There are also the following narrator's generics:

(i) Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

(ii) Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.

(iii) For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit, and …

(iv) Poor Dorothea! … so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

(v) … but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?

The first two of these are REF constructions, demonstrative + head + relative clause structures. The second part of (iv) is also a relative clause. All of the relative clauses are restrictive, an important point which I shall take up later. The first part of (iv) is a ‘core’ generic, but its effect is muted by its being not a complete sentence, but the conclusion of one, and by the explicitly interpersonal exclamation ‘Poor Dorothea!’ at the sentence's beginning. Generic (v) is also the conclusion of a sentence, and it too has an explicit appeal to the reader's agreement, in that it is a rhetorical question. Example (iii) is a ‘core’ generic, but the rest of the sentence is not, and the fact that the sentence opens with the conjunction ‘For’ stresses the connection with the preceding, non-generic, sentence. Eliot's practice here is to indulge freely in generics, but to conceal them, syntactically by mixing them in sentences with non-generic clauses, rhetorically by attaching explicit appeals for agreement. Here these are an exclamation and a rhetorical question; elsewhere, as in Chapter 15 of Middlemarch, which is very rich in generics, there is a high frequency of first- and second-person pronouns, as in:

(i) We belated historians must not linger after his example …

(ii) Most of us who turn to any subject we love …

(iii) We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman …

There are also frequent REF constructions, a number of modified REF constructions with determiners other than a demonstrative, and other variants. What connects Eliot's generics is that they almost always include some element functioning as ‘familiariser’. A generic may be syntactically concealed, or, when Eliot makes generic statements in a clear form close to the core, she attaches first-person pronouns. Hardy, by contrast, freely uses simple generic constructions without familiarising elements. The opening of Chapter 29 is a good example:

5	We now see the element of folly distinctly mingling with the varying particulars which made up the character of Bathsheba Everdene. It was almost foreign to her intrinsic nature. Introduced as lymph upon the dart of Eros it eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution. Bathsheba, though she had too
10	much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage. Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false - except, indeed, in that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows to be true.
15	Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When 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 situation. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

(p. 243)

There is one familiarising element in this passage, the ‘We’ at the beginning. After that, the passage moves through the register clash which so irritated the Saturday Review to a series of generic statements, from ‘Perhaps’ (line 7) onwards to the end. There are seven generics altogether in this short passage. In what forms?

The first two, connected, assertions, in the sentence beginning ‘Perhaps in no minor point …’ (lines 7-11) are blatantly generic, announced as such by the ‘woman’. All the finite verbs in the sentence are in present tense, with none of the flexible movement between narrative past and generic present which is typical of George Eliot. The next sentence, the first of the second paragraph (lines 12-13), does move from narrative past to the generic half-concealed in a subordinate clause, but the remaining four assertions are purely generic. Their impact is intensified by the fact that they are four separate sentences. There is no familiarising element and no syntactic concealment of the assertions. Two other features give the passage its abruptly authoritarian quality. The first is that the ‘balanced’ structure of the first generic sentence (lines 13-15), and the repetition and reiteration of key lexical items throughout the passage, ‘self-reliance … strong … strength … strength … weakness … weak’ make for a strong tendency to epigrammatism, which increases the impact of the assertions. The second is that this epigrammatic quality is enhanced by the abstract nature of the lexical items themselves; as well as the repeated abstractions, there are ‘constitution … womanliness … understanding … advantage … inadequacy … novelty … condition’. By these means, the generic assertions announce their presence very clearly. The only mitigation of the impact of the assertions is the ‘Perhaps’, which is not so much a familiariser as a failure of nerve. Overall, the effect of the blatant generics is one of over-long, limp epigram, as if the parade of assertions in the second paragraph represents successive failed attempts to find a construction witty enough to end on.

Fowler makes only a passing reference to the practice of scientific or high-cultural allusion, describing it as ‘a further mechanism for activating REF’ (Fowler 1981: 105). The principle that allusions are primarily significant as interpersonal devices between narrator and reader still applies to specific allusions, but to divide Hardy's allusions into ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ demands some additional concepts. As a preliminary, specific allusions in Far from the Madding Crowd can be defined as essentially metaphors, having an underlying form ‘X in the novel resembles Y in the real world’. This form appears in several surface structures.

To analyse these structures, I shall adopt the terminology of Leech (1969). In this terminology, the thing which is under discussion in a metaphor or simile is the ‘tenor’, the thing to which it is compared the ‘vehicle’, and the connection is the ‘ground’ of the comparison (1969: 151). Leech also offers the suggestion that metaphors can be ranked according to their unexpectedness, that (his examples) ‘many moons ago’ is more expected as a measure of time than ‘a humanity ago’ (1969: 31). In this scheme, the unexpectedness of a comparison is a function of the semantic distance (in normal usage) between the tenor and vehicle of the comparison.

The simplest category of specific allusions in Far from the Madding Crowd includes things like the quotation from Barnes on p. 456, which is simply a borrowing, like the quotations on p. 188 (from Milton) and p. 210 (from Keats). These decorate the narrative and display the narrator's reading, but the fact that they are marked as quotations renders them unthreatening—the narrator explicitly makes a comparison which the use of quotation marks admits to be simply decorative. And literary allusions were valued commonplaces in Victorian fiction. To use Milton for the phrase ‘the injur'd lover's hell’ when dealing with Oak's suffering in unrequited love involves no shift of meaning at all, only a pseudo-comparison whose ground is obvious and explicitly given, and where the distance between tenor and vehicle is perhaps chronologically great, but semantically close to zero.

Most of the specific allusions in Far from the Madding Crowd take the form of a simile. Oak sees Bathsheba ‘in a bird's-eye view, as Milton's Satan first saw Paradise’ (p. 63); a half-mile of road stands before the exhausted Fanny Robin ‘like a stolid Juggernaut’ (p. 325), feasting labourers become ‘as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven’ (p. 208), and there are many other examples. In all these examples, and most of the others, the structure easily allows for the ground of the comparison to be given before the allusion itself, thus producing the form ‘tenor—ground—vehicle’. The structure is: Oak's seeing (tenor)—bird's-eye view (ground)—Satan (vehicle). This pre-digests the allusion and renders it ‘reader-friendly’, for the reader is able to accept the information given in the comparison, and this will suffice even in default of previous knowledge. You do not have to have read or remembered Paradise Lost to get the point of the allusion, the ‘bird's-eye view’. Nor is it necessary to know what a Juggernaut actually is, only that it is ‘stolid’. Where the ground is explicitly given, and appears before the vehicle, the allusion is rendered familiar automatically. The simile on p. 51 is an exception to this, and so more dangerous in terms of the relationship between narrator and reader: ‘He wore … a coat like Dr. Johnson's’. Here, the ground is not given, and the reader may be alienated. A version giving the ground, ‘a coat as baggy as Dr. Johnson's’ would be more inviting.

In addition to explicit similes, there are many loose or qualified similes which stress the fanciful nature of the comparisons they make. The repentant behaviour of Oak's dog is ‘a sort of Commination service’ (p. 75); an anticlimax is ‘somewhat resembling that of St John Long's death’ (p. 200); Oak is ‘a species of Daniel in her kingdom’ (p. 146) (my italics). These stress that the semantic distance between tenor and vehicle is unusually great. They often, as in the above examples, further stress their oddity by not pre-giving their grounds, but reserving the grounds for a relative clause post-modifying the vehicle, like the Commination-service ‘which, though offensive, had to be gone through once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good’ (p. 75), or a post-modifying prepositional phrase, ‘St John Long's death by consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease’ (p. 200). This produces the structure tenor—vehicle—ground, in which the comparison is not justified or explained until after it has been made. Premodifying the noun functioning as vehicle would enable the reader-friendly structure tenor—ground—vehicle.

Extensive post-modification of the noun functioning as vehicle is a characteristic of Hardy's specific allusions. Withholding the grounds of the comparison until after it is made, then insisting on giving it, especially at length, has an estranging effect, especially if the semantic distance between tenor and vehicle is very great. Some examples are:

(i) [A group of labourers] advanced in the completest balance of intention, like the remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpae, which, distinctly organised in other respects, have one will common to a whole family.

(p. 126)

(ii) The disturbance [the effect of the Valentine on Boldwood] was as the first floating weed to Columbus—the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.

(p. 149)

(iii) Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line—less directly as he got nearer.

(p. 153)

(iv) She was in a state of mental gutta serena; her mind was for the minute totally deprived of light at the same time that no obscuration was apparent from within.

(p. 438)

The first of these examples has the vehicle of the comparison post-modified in a lengthy non-restrictive relative clause, and the other three have similar postmodification in appositional explanatory units which are reduced relative clauses. Like the first, these clauses would, in full form, be non-restrictive. The difference between a restrictive and a non-restrictive postmodification here realises a difference in modality, between alluding to shared knowledge, on the one hand, and imparting it from a position of unshared superiority, on the other. For instance, in (ii), ‘Chain Salpae which … have one will’ could be read as assuming some previous knowledge of Chain Salpae in general, and specifying a particular variety of them. But the actual, non-restrictive, structure, ‘Chain Salpae, which … have one will’ assumes no previous knowledge at all. There is a marked contrast here between Hardy's practice and George Eliot's. Eliot's restrictive relative clauses assume that the reader shares much of the narrator's knowledge, and that that knowledge can be alluded to. Hardy's structure, tenor - vehicle - non-restrictive explanation of ground, should not properly be called an allusion at all. It does not offer to allude to what is already known by narrator and readers, but to inform the readers of what they do not know, assigning them a role as receivers of information, not sharers in it. Perhaps the readers even know as little of Chain Salpae as do the labourers to whom they are compared. The comparisons are themselves highly unfamiliar to begin with, and the effect is very much heightened by the syntactic structure which insists on giving the ground, but only after the comparison has been made. And there is no familiarising element in the comparisons. In the structure of the noun phrases functioning as vehicle there is no demonstrative determiner to act as a familiariser; (i) and (ii) above have ‘the’ as determiner, which has a mild familiarising effect (though this is offset in the second by the epithet ‘remarkable’), but (iii) and (iv) have the estranging ‘a’, in ‘a hyperbolic curve’ and ‘a state of mental gutta serena’. This combination of stated unfamiliarity with insistence on giving the ground separates reader and narrator here, and leaves the reader in a kind of intellectual no-man's-land, and the narrator talking to himself. This contrasts with the much more orthodox and reassuring effect of the combination of a demonstrative determiner with a restrictive relative clause, as in:

… that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section …

(p. 51)

The ‘Laodicean neutrality’ above is one example of the most discreet structure for a specific allusion—the reduction of the vehicle to an epithet premodifying the head noun which functions as the grounds of the comparison, with a minimum of postmodification. A variation on this is to give the grounds in a brief postmodification. Other examples are:

Oak could pipe with Arcadian sweetness

(p. 90)

… fingers extended to an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern …

(p. 102)

Saint-Simonian notions of share and share alike …

(p. 105)

In all these examples, the vehicles and the grounds are very closely juxtaposed, producing an effect of tactfulness and easy command of the relationship between the ‘small’ of Wessex and the ‘great’ of the educated world. It is not that Hardy was incapable of this effect of wearing learning lightly; he uses orthodox allusive structures like the above epithet/vehicle + head/grounds structures freely. But he also freely used structures which disturb the relationship of empathy between narrator and reader which allusion should normally promote.

3 ALLUSION AND THE ‘COMMON CULTURE’

In his discussion of allusion, Wheeler (1979) argues that allusion in Victorian fiction, especially allusion to a small group of texts including Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible, had a cohesive effect of reminding readers how much they shared a culture:

Whereas the modern reader has greater breadth of knowledge, however, the Victorian reader had a more detailed familiarity with a few of the key works which formed the literary corner-stone of the ‘shared culture’ of the age.

(Wheeler 1979: 17)

Wheeler's quotation marks around ‘shared culture’ are important. To see why, we can look to the division between different uses of the term ‘culture’ which is made by, among others, Williams (1958, 1976), Johnson (1979) and Bennett et al. (1977). In essence, they divide ‘culture’ into two concepts: the first might be called ‘high culture’ (culture 1): a concept of culture derived from classical learning, involving moral and aesthetic virtues of various kinds and defined by its opposite, which is an absence called ‘anarchy’ or something equally pejorative. The second ‘culture’ (culture 2) is not a normative term, but a descriptive one, and tends easily to pluralism and relativism. The first meaning is usual in the 19th century, the second in the 20th. The significance of literary study in this division is that, as Baldick (1983: 59-82) has argued, literature was held by many to have especial significance in accommodating culture (2) to culture (1). Here, for instance, is Matthew Arnold juggling with two meanings of ‘culture’:

this culture (to call it by that name) of the Barbarians was an exterior culture … those studies by which, from the world of thought and feeling, true culture teaches us to fetch sweetness and light …

(Arnold 1868: 203)

Arnold's ‘true culture’, derived from ‘thought and feeling’ (not action) is a construct made out of culture (1) and defined by rejection of its perceived opposite. It is also a minority interest, except that the ‘us’ seeks to construct it as shared and thus ‘common’. Arnold's difficulties about ‘culture’, like those of Ruskin, Mill and others, derived from the contradiction between their concept of culture as essentially classical and the pressure, through educational provision and the growth of a mass reading public, to accept, accommodate or colonise the culture of ordinary people. The process was paralleled by the political process of the extension of the franchise. The agonising over the 1867 Reform Act and the fate of the railings round Hyde Park had its counterpart in the struggles of Arnold and others to maintain their ideals of culture while simultaneously defending and extending their applications.

The normative concept of culture (1) was derived from the classics and the social institutions, the universities and the public schools, which maintained the dominant position of classical learning. Even in those educational organisations explicitly committed to broadening the cultural franchise, the influence of classical culture was dominant. John Morley, addressing the London University Extension Society in 1888, found in ancient universities the source of his inspiration:

It is true that we cannot bring to London, with this movement, the indefinable charm that haunts the grey and venerable quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge … but I hope … that every partaker of the benefits of this society will feel himself and herself in living connection with those two famous centres …

(Morley 1890: 195)

Literature and its study were generally perceived as having the very significant role of promoting socio-cultural cohesion. This role was to be fulfilled without challenging the institutions which maintained the dominant culture; instead, literature was to serve as a diluted version of the classical culture which was reserved, through the public schools and the universities, for the ruling elite. In this task, the practice of allusion, of making reference to the ‘shared culture’, was an especially prominent and significant practice.

Hardy's relationship with this cultural project was uneasy. Debarred from a university education by family poverty (Gittings 1978: 74), discouraged from classical reading by his early mentor Moule (Millgate 1982: 71), he trained as an architect, and educated himself otherwise by broad and intensive reading (Millgate 1982: 89-92). He was also, all his life, acutely sensitive about class distinctions, and capable both of radical and deferential reactions (Millgate 1982: 172, 195, 202). As a result, the ‘three strands’ which he saw his life as composed of, the professional, the scholarly and the rustic (Hardy 1970: 32), were not accommodated into the hierarchic ‘common culture’ of his time. One modern critic has described Hardy's stylistic heterogeneity as an expression of his ‘legitimate desire to call things by their proper names’ (Page 1980: 159). Cultural pluralism in the 20th century has legitimated this desire. It was a grave stylistic fault to Hardy's conservative contemporaries, because it challenged their ideas of cultural hegemony. Hardy sometimes smooths the way for an allusion or a generic, and sometimes foregrounds it as much as seems possible, constructing himself in turn as relaxed polymath and as cultural iconoclast. The structure for allusion which I identified earlier, of tenor—vehicle—lengthily explained ground, undermines the very idea of there being a ‘common’ or ‘general’ or ‘shared’ culture. A ‘common’ culture which has to be constantly explained is obviously not common at all.

It is clear that the peculiarities of Hardy's allusive practice in even an early novel like Far from the Madding Crowd were not the result of incompetence; he was capable of ‘normal’ allusive constructions, but he often also used structures which brought different elements of culture (in its descriptive sense) into clear and equal focus. He transgressed the boundaries of the ‘common’ culture of his time, and showed in doing so what a precarious construct it was.²

Notes

1. All quotations from Far from the Madding Crowd are from the Penguin edition, London 1978.

2. I wish to thank the editors and readers of Language and Literature for their meticulous and very helpful comments on the first draft of this article.

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