[In the following chapter from his study of Hardy and classic tragic forms, Kramer asserts that Far from the Madding Crowd is not a tragedy but does exhibit some of the tragic dichotomies, which would appear in later novels.]

The critical reputation of Far from the Madding Crowd has remained the most stable among Hardy's novels, and for good reason. Few issues tantalize and puzzle its readers. The first installment in Cornhill Magazine showed that it would be a powerful novel. Published anonymously as a serial, it at first provoked speculation that George Eliot was the author,¹ but Hardy's grammatical and syntactic infelicities were soon compared unfavorably with her skill.² All in all, the immediate critical response was warm, despite qualifications, and the novel has continued to hold a high place among the Wessex novels. It became the standard against which the rest were evaluated, and remained so throughout Hardy's career. That the others were usually thought inferior is more an index to critical predisposition than to the final superiority of Far from the Madding Crowd; but that it could be consistently used for a model indicates that its solid merits were recognized. The novel is still widely praised for its rustic characters, its dramatic scenes, its closely detailed, accurate, and, more importantly, evocative depictions of sheep-raising, and its correlations between man's repetitious but sometimes frenzied activities and the calmly implacable but sometimes ferocious forces of nature.

Far from the Madding Crowd is incidentally but crucially at the heart of this study which emphasizes Hardy's use of a variety of formal methods to express tragedy. Its principal technical feature works against tragic expression, although Hardy indicates an awareness of the possibility of turning the novel into a tragic fiction. Moreover, the technique he employs here—schematism and dichotomy—is congenial to an initial exploration of many themes he later developed. Thus, these aspects of the techniques of Far from the Madding Crowd are pertinent to a full understanding of Hardy's methods and ideas; the greater subtlety of the later novels blurs the edges of a vision of life composed of dynamically contrasting forces which Hardy expresses in Far from the Madding Crowd. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interpretation of Hardy's novels as architectural constructions is not inaccurate; but critics and early readers of Hardy failed to observe his efforts to subordinate his instinctive “architectural vision” to humane studies of emotion and thought which through his skill he was able to develop over the years. Thus, although his last novel, Jude the Obscure, is built on the idea of contrasts, as Hardy admitted,³ it possesses greater passion and understanding than Far from the Madding Crowd, in which the contrasts are organizational devices for plot and character presentation and never become dramatic interplays of personality and philosophical viewpoints. We also see in Far from the Madding Crowd the degree to which this architectural patterning is innate to Hardy, in the balance of sentence structures and antithetical contents of his sentences. The architectural filigree is an integral device for communicating Hardy's vision of the world and for indicating the interpretive limits of the novel.

That Far from the Madding Crowd is the most rigidly conceived and schematically executed of Hardy's novels is a critical cliché. The symmetry of the overall plot is nearly perfect, according to James Wright:

At the beginning, we see the shepherd Oak wooing Bathsheba. Shortly after his failure he begins to blend with the landscape in his silent devotion to the heroine. Then Bathsheba more or less promises herself to Boldwood. Just as she is to accept Boldwood's offer of engagement, she becomes infatuated with Sergeant Troy. Boldwood joins Oak in a hopeless patience. Shortly after Bathsheba's marriage to Troy, she begins her descent. She learns that he is a cad, and marriage seems hell to her. After the incident of Fanny Robin's death, Troy vanishes. Boldwood emerges from the background to woo Bathsheba again. Troy returns, and is killed. Boldwood is imprisoned. At last, Bathsheba and Oak are together, as they were at the beginning. We might schematize the action according to the number of wooers surrounding Bathsheba as the novel progresses: 2-3-4-3-2.⁴

Wright comments that although “the scheme is charmingly neat … it is also satanically false to Hardy” in that it bypasses Hardy's embodiment of his vision in a rich context of knowledge of nature. The scheme may indeed be satanically false in this respect, but its charming neatness is supplemented by being aesthetically true, for this novel contains a number of dichotomizing elements that parallel the sharp outlines of plot as Wright sketches it and that lead us, in this early Hardy novel, straight into the essential quality of his vision and of his “message” concerning human life.

In passages of both description and analysis, in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy uses contrasting terms and details to convey shades of meaning. Hardy's intention would appear to be the attainment of precision and denotativeness, although the matters dealt with are connotative or evaluative. Instead of giving the effect of a balanced consideration of the issues, Hardy's mannerism creates a sense of rigidity and limits imaginative identification. Isolating the elements in a human quality, or indicating the extremes of a manner, or ascribing general meaning to an individual act—all these practices, which are pronounced aspects of the style of Far from the Madding Crowd, create a schism between the conception Hardy presumably has and its realization or rendering. With equal cause, a reader's reaction to this technique could be to recognize it either as a grotesque turning of human subtleties into mechanical variations or as a writer's effort to overcome the fuzziness of his idea as to what he actually wants to make of his materials. Some examples of Hardy's schematic style in this novel are: when Oak first sees Bathsheba she is thinking about her “face and form”; Oak thinks that “the self-consciousness shown would have been vanity if a little more pronounced, dignity if a little less” (p. 20). [All quotations from the Wessex edition (London: Macmillan, 1912)]. When Bathsheba leaves, the infatuated Oak returns to his work “with an air between that of Tragedy and Comedy” (p. 21). Preparing to propose to Bathsheba, Oak makes “a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind—of a nature between the carefully neat and carelessly ornate—of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection” (p. 28). After describing the illusion that the clouds, snow, and surfaces outside Troy's barracks resemble a cavern, Hardy notes: “We turn our attention to the left-hand [that is, abstract] characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if anything could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath” (p. 96). Another example of this quality of Hardy's style is his description of Bathsheba's reading the Book of Ruth to learn whom she is to marry: “It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete” (p. 108). Finally, Boldwood in entering the malthouse bestows upon each man already there “a nod of a quality between friendliness and condescension” (p. 125).

The variety of the quotations makes evident that Hardy employs this technique in nearly every facet of the novel—characterization, plot, philosophizing, setting. The quotations are obviously dichotomous in their division of features of human life into categories. The book abounds with other, less clear instances of schematism. For example, Hardy comments about Oak's early love for the youthful and vivacious Bathsheba, “Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants” (p. 27). Mark Clark is “a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink with was, unfortunately, to pay for” (p. 62). In describing the night when Fanny arrives at Troy's barracks to remind him that he had promised to marry her, Hardy employs a range of potential reactions to the moment: “It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise” (p. 95). Again, “the whole effect” of a certain sunrise “resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age” (p. 114).

These examples are clearly written, but the same technique is employed with Hardy's strained erudition and gnarled phraseology which have brought groans of exasperation for a full century. An example from the first description of Gabriel will illustrate:

On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section.

[P. 1]

Even the explanation that follows immediately, “that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed,” is more of a self-ironic comment on the phraseology than it is a clarification of it.

I

The total effect of Hardy's technique has not gone unnoticed by critics, although it has not been discussed at length.⁵ Since Hardy's artistry is developmental rather than static, the technique is not used again in such a completely artificial fashion. Although he never became a fine stylist, he improved. As he proceeds to different aspects of his major themes in each novel, the methods he uses to convey the themes are appropriately altered also. His manner is direct in Far from the Madding Crowd, and not unexpectedly we find revelations here of Hardy's 1874 concepts of the themes he later made peculiarly his own, such as his ideas about tragedy, free will, and time.

Clearly, the schematic style has great effect upon the characterizations. Each major character has at least one set of opposing qualities. Oak, conveniently enough for his happiness, has arrived at the age of twenty-eight knowing his intellect and emotions are separated, a state of self-awareness that keeps him from being either an impulsive youth or a prejudiced family man (p. 3), and allowing him to weather utter financial ruin with only a modicum of despair and even to attain a more dignified calm in the process (pp. 41, 44). The description of Gabriel's personal appearance uses contrasting extremes to indicate his ordinariness in Bathsheba's eyes:

Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the middle line between the beauty of St. John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of distinction or notoriety. The red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden seemed to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and told her man to drive on.

[P. 6]

Hardy's penchant for creating character out of opposing qualities occasionally results in a wooden being. Indeed, the first description of Sergeant Troy in chapter 25 presents him as possessing contradictions, modifications, and opposites beyond which he almost never develops. His attitude toward time obliterates the past and stunts the future, leaving him shriveled in the present (p. 190); he seems to have immense capacities for pleasure because he has no moral sense of the threat of experience, but actually he has less than more serious-minded people have (p. 191); his reason and his propensities do not influence each other (p. 191); his vices are spruce rather than ugly (p. 191). Though he is full of energy, “his activities were less of a locomotive than a vegetative nature” (p. 191), by which Hardy seems to mean that Troy is indifferent about the area of his activities—“they were exercised on whatever object chance might place in their way.” Troy even carries on personal relationships in terms of contradictory absolutes: “in dealing with womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no third method. ‘Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man,’ he would say” (p. 193). The initial expectations set up in chapter 25 are fulfilled in the remainder of the novel, when Troy slips abruptly from aimless flattery to honest admiration of Bathsheba (pp. 202-03); when he stops loving her abruptly after marriage (p. 299) and comes again to prefer Fanny (cruelly telling Bathsheba so after Fanny's death [p. 345]); when he is easily discouraged from reforming by the “accidental” action of a waterspout (pp. 364-65); when he goes indifferently for a swim and seizes the existence of a strong current to have it thought he had drowned; and finally when he returns from his wanderings lusting almost as much for Bathsheba's wealth as for her person (pp. 416, 421). Since Troy's character throughout has no subtle features, the reader shifts aimlessly from bemused acquiescence in his audacity to disgust at his rootlessness, but never gives Troy the sympathy that he offers to Boldwood. Troy's failure to attract sympathy can, I think, be attributed to Hardy's method of characterization. Always suspended between alternatives of mood or attitude, Troy never presents himself as being; and because his alternative patterns are not developmental, he never presents himself as becoming. In effect, then, Troy is characterized by a sequence of vignettes held together by his relationships with other characters rather than by any unity within himself.

Boldwood, too, is a stiff figure; but he is more consistent within the context of the novel because the alternatives which divide his energies more closely resemble the dichotomous qualities in other characters, and because they suggest a personality created by experiences more profound and painful than any in Troy's life. Boldwood seems to have a symmetrical existence (p. 112), though it is actually a symmetry composed of “enormous antagonistic forces” presently held in “perfect balance” (p. 137). Suitably, the dichotomous elements in Boldwood's make-up are absolute indifference and self-indulgence: “His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent” (p. 137). He says at one point that he prefers his present misery of being in love to his former “ignorant and cold darkness” (p. 231), an indication that for Boldwood a moderate middle position is not possible. A completely serious man, “he had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil” (p. 137). Once having devoted himself to the sender of the valentine even before he knows who had sent it, Boldwood's absorption with Bathsheba and his increasing frenzy during the evolution of the situation—through Bathsheba's rejection of his proposal, her marriage to Troy, her “widowhood,” and her final reluctant agreement to reward his suffering and constancy—are inevitable. The essential unity of Boldwood's nature, his own awareness of the extremities he allows himself to go to (p. 261) counter the disparate and aimless but headlong rush of Troy toward their mutual destruction. Self-control marks the early Boldwood; its decay traces the effects of a contradictory, frustrated impulse upon a distracted extremist personality. Fearing Bathsheba may be lured into loving Troy, he is conscious that he has lost the dignity and firmness of his old self (p. 261); but notwithstanding, he does not hesitate to show himself ethically inferior to Troy. He tries to bribe Troy to marry Fanny, and he readily accepts the idea that Troy has brought Bathsheba to dishonor when he hears her invite him into her house (pp. 263-67). His grief at the loss of Bathsheba makes him indifferent whether or not his grain ricks are protected from rain (p. 294), an abandonment of worldly responsibilities whose culpability is suggested by the firm acceptance of the importance of material realities by Oak. Once the disequilibrium is formed in Boldwood's personality, it can never be dislodged, not even, perhaps, if Bathsheba had ultimately married him. His equilibrium may have been unsettled before the time of the novel, for there are “old floodmarks faintly visible” that reveal his “wild capabilities.” But precisely because the reader has never seen him at “the high tides which caused them” (p. 138), he cannot believe Boldwood has the capacity to reestablish the stolidity and calm of his initial appearance in the novel.

It is, however, in the characterization of Bathsheba that the dichotomy of Hardy's style has full power, and here it is effectively modified by the vital individuality of the character. Despite the masculine agricultural interests that dominate the novel, Bathsheba is the unifying element. She alone develops new facets to her character over the course of the action; Boldwood and Troy may evince what appear to the other characters to be new traits, but the traits are implicit in the author's initial presentation. Oak, it is true, also develops, but very early in the novel (p. 44), and only through authorial pronouncement—his behavior before the loss of his sheep does not indicate he had ever seriously lacked dignity, the “new” characteristic he acquires. Bathsheba, on the other hand, definitely evolves from a flirtatious, light-hearted girl to a self-confident farmer, to a chastened but stubborn wife, to a tormented woman wanting only peace, to a subdued female anxious for the protective strength of a Gabriel Oak.

The terms of dichotomy that distinguish Bathsheba's character are initially similar to those used to characterize Oak—intellect and emotion. On Bathsheba's first appearance, looking at herself (surreptitiously) in a mirror, the terms to describe her might be vanity and a consciousness that vanity is not admirable; on her second appearance, riding a horse astraddle instead of sidesaddle and lying flat on her horse's back to pass under a low branch, the terms might be practicality and awareness of propriety (pp. 4-7, 17-21). At this early stage of the novel, the division in Bathsheba's character bears largely upon her attractiveness for Oak and upon the wisdom of an ambitious sheep farmer marrying a girl whose habits of mind are not yet fixed. But the issues rapidly become more complex and morally significant. Following Boldwood's first proposal, Hardy-as-narrator analyzes Bathsheba's character in an expository section (pp. 148-49). Bathsheba is a woman who appeals to her “understanding” for deliverance from her “whims,” terms that clearly parallel “intellect” and “emotion.” An example of Hardy's dichotomous phraseology is the following:

Bathsheba's was an impulsive nature under a deliberative aspect. An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion. Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.

[P. 149; my italics]

By indicating that Bathsheba in her uneducated state allows irrationality to dominate her rationality in situations leading to action, Hardy prepares the ground for her to learn a facet of life that constitutes a major theme in his fiction: the necessity to control the impulses which put one in opposition to the forces of the universe. He also prepares us for Bathsheba's great error in her personal relationships. Since she has no “whim” for the “married state in the abstract” and no emotion toward Boldwood, she has no trouble in behaving correctly toward him. Indeed, she nearly allows herself to marry him, an act bereft of passion but buttressed by months of deliberation. But Troy, unlike Boldwood or Oak, does create, or at least awaken, impulses in Bathsheba that reenforce the sense of her unreliability in matters of emotion. Throughout the novel Bathsheba seems torn between the unconscious desire to be sexually mastered and the desire to maintain sexual independence and even to exert sexual authority. Hardy says that “Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance” (p. 214); and even more clearly dichotomous is his remark that Bathsheba “felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her discretion” (p. 215; my italics).

Bathsheba's abandonment of self-reliance and discretion repeats the action of her father toward the problem of fidelity to her mother. Her father's “will” had been chaste, but his “heart” had wandered (pp. 69-70), a problem that was solved (humorously) only when Mrs. Everdene was induced to take off her wedding ring and thus prevent her husband from giving “his eyes to unlawfulness entirely,” as Joseph Poorgrass puts in. This indication of a dichotomy that is in Bathsheba's blood, so to speak, emphasizes the depth of her task in reconciling the two aspects of her personality, and suggests further the structural balance achieved in the novel through Oak's mastery over opposing qualities that are similar to those that war within Bathsheba. The suggestion, explicitly, is that Bathsheba requires an external control of her impulses, a control that Oak provides by example and, at the end of the novel, by his marriage to her.

Hardy's analysis of Bathsheba after the sword-exercise display by Troy (a heated scene that is replete with sexual connotations⁶) explains Bathsheba's discordant qualities at the height of their manifestation. Though she is a “woman of the world,” it is a world of rural verities. “Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay in her making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into consequences”; even the “folly” of falling in love as she does is “almost foreign to her intrinsic nature” (pp. 214-15). The complexity of personality which this analysis implies—especially the abandonment that Bathsheba feels toward Troy, and her feeling that impulse is more pleasant than discretion where Troy is concerned—goes far to justify the peculiar rationale with which Bathsheba pursues Troy to Bath: she goes to see him in order to renounce him (and thus save his life from Boldwood's jealous fury) (p. 247). Once there, of course, she is easy prey to his threat to love someone else if she will not marry him. Troy obviously understands Bathsheba's subconscious motives better than she does.

The middle portion of the novel presents a Bathsheba who is between two primary stages of her development. (In the sense of being a personality evolving in definable progression she indicates another aspect of Hardy's schematic style.) As Troy remarks shortly after their marriage, Bathsheba has lost her “pluck and sauciness” (p. 299); as Hardy remarks after Fanny's death and the confrontation with Troy, Bathsheba has lost the “vitality of youth in her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years” (p. 367). She does not remain in this awkward stasis. She becomes more charming to the “middle-aged” Boldwood because “her exuberance of spirit was pruned down; the original phantom of delight had shown herself to be not too bright for human nature's daily food, and she had been able to enter this second poetical phase without losing much of the first in the process” (p. 382), a syntactically complex way of suggesting that Bathsheba if left alone would be able to adjust herself to widowhood. She is not, of course, left alone; and after being forced by Boldwood to come to a decision, she remains hidden behind a mask of inability to feel. Finally, almost totally subdued and dependent on Oak, she enters into a mature recognition of the limitations and blessings of unambitious existence.

II

The presentation of Bathsheba particularly, then, makes decipherable the purpose of Hardy's schematic style, showing how thoroughly this technique dominates the expression of values in the novel. We begin to see how such a style can benefit a book like Far from the Madding Crowd, which presents Hardy's first full effort to unite the abstract themes that are characteristic of his great novels. In tracing Bathsheba's development from one extreme of the impulse-discretion continuum to the other, Hardy suggests that the ideal state is not one of perfect balance, as for instance, it is implicitly in Jane Austen. Oak, the moral touchstone, keeps his impulse always supremely controlled; he subdues his personal feelings because he senses that the universe is a mighty and potentially destructive force. The peasants, the moral base of the society, generally accept the conditions of their lot, and when they “rebel,” or give way to impulse, as Joseph Poorgrass does in stopping for drinks while bringing Fanny's body home for burial, they are brought up sharply. Hardy's emotional allegiance may be with the strugglers, but his vision of the universe urges upon him the awareness that exertions of ego or desire bring on chastisement and suffering. He who attempts to override universal forces (including those portrayed in social bodies and laws) is made to realize the cost of self-expression and self-indulgence.

The contradiction that is inherent between Hardy's idea of man's correct posture toward nature's overbearing force and his sympathy for those who do not or cannot maintain that posture sets up in Far from the Madding Crowd a pattern of dichotomies that continue to engross Hardy in later novels.

Man in Hardy's works is an alien element within the cosmos. A sentient being, he gains no special attention from the forces that are unconscious and therefore supremely indifferent to his hopes and efforts. The forces of the universe that oppose man do so partly in the form of chance and accident, such as the waterspout that despoils Fanny's grave after Troy has repentantly planted flowers there, partly in the uncontrollable demonstrations of raw might, such as the famous storm that threatens Bathsheba's stored crops and destroys Boldwood's. Those forces diminish the stature of man, revealing his comparative triviality and minuteness. As Gabriel and Bathsheba together watch a particularly spectacular flurry of lightning during the storm on the night of the harvest feast, Gabriel is thrilled by her presence and touch; “but love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe” (p. 287). Another scene of nature's danger to man is when Troy is swept out to sea on the current and in the distance sees Budmouth “quietly regarding his efforts” but indifferent to their success or failure (p. 370).

In Far from the Madding Crowd, one feature that sets off man from nature is that man projects his own mood onto natural scenes; the scenes possess in themselves only potentiality of interpretation. The small whirlpools in the river outside Troy's barracks make sounds “which a sad man would have called moans, and a happy man laughter” (p. 97). Bathsheba, frightened by Boldwood's threats against Troy, thinks of ways to warn Troy; she gazes at “indecisive and palpitating stars,” notes “their silent throes amid the shades of peace” (p. 237), and regrets that she has no peace of her own. In man-created scenes, too, there is an artificial mood placed upon objects. As Troy waits amid the tittering old women for Fanny to come to their wedding, a church clock ticks. “One could almost be positive that there was a malicious leer upon the hideous creature's face, and a mischievous delight in its twitchings” (p. 131). Troy accepts the waterspout's destruction of the flowers as a sign that his effort at reform is being ridiculed:

Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth closely, and his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain. This singular accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, was felt as the sharpest sting of all. … A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course. Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the merest opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would have been hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement; but to find that Providence, far from helping him into a new course, or showing any wish that he might adopt one, actually jeered his first trembling and critical attempt in that kind, was more than nature could bear.

He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up the hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all. He simply threw up his cards and forswore his game for that time and always.

[Pp. 363, 364-65]

The narrator's tone implies that Troy reads mockery into entirely coincidental events—but even the narrator refers to the “vengeance” that the spout directs animistically into Fanny's grave (p. 362).

The complexity of man's relationship with nature is also sharply delineated in the occurrences following Bathsheba's night spent in the thicket after she has fled from Troy. When she first awakens, she is refreshed and rejuvenated by the spontaneity of the chirping birds, the beauty of the sunrise. “Day was just dawning, and beside its cool air and colours her heated actions and resolves of the night stood out in lurid contrast” (p. 347). Another aspect of nature is made apparent to Bathsheba instantly; looking toward the east, “between the beautiful yellowing ferns” she sees a fungi-infested swamp, ugly and malignant, which “exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth” (pp. 347-48). Recognizing the malign aspect that nature can direct toward man, Bathsheba is made fearful “at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place” (p. 348). But seeing the two sides of the same situation does not exhaust the significance of this scene. Immediately after recognizing the evilness of the swamp, and still miserable about Troy and Fanny, Bathsheba is able to be “faintly amused” at a rustic boy's method of learning his psalter (p. 348). And the evil aspects of the swamp are disparaged by the servant girl Liddy, who walks across the swamp in her anxiety to assure herself that her mistress is all right after a night of sleeping in the open (p. 349). By relegating dangerous conditions in nature to a secondary place in day-to-day living, Liddy demonstrates the peasant's right to a stable existence. Liddy's act is a great deal like Oak's construction of a lightning rod during the great storm. Hardy's point is clear in both contexts. Man does have the possibility of free will and effective action in the face of what may seem to be a rancorous universe. Oak's knowing how to circumvent the dangers of lightning, and Liddy's selflessness and peasant's disinterest in challenging nature's authority, save them from destruction. But both could have been destroyed, a fate common to Hardy's later characters whose exercise of free will expresses rebellion against external power rather than acceptance of their own limited human abilities.

Hardy is also concerned with what he often called “the natural,” which in Far from the Madding Crowd he presents through contrasts. What is natural is admirable to Hardy, what is unnatural is undesirable or destructive. Hardy uses the blazing Christmas engagement party Boldwood gives toward the end of the novel to make this point explicitly:

Intended gaieties would insist upon appearing like solemn grandeurs, the organization of the whole effort was carried out coldly by hirelings, and a shadow seemed to move about the rooms, saying that the proceedings were unnatural to the place and the lone man who lived therein, and hence not good.

[P. 412]

Even Boldwood's love for Bathsheba is judged adversely. His devotion does not stabilize his character, because it is based on misconceptions and inner imbalances. There is an ominous imagistic suggestion of Boldwood's inadequacies in a world where natural impulses are admired, in his first appearance as love smitten. After receiving the valentine and learning who had sent it, Boldwood cannot keep his eyes from Bathsheba at the next meeting of the Corn Market. But Bathsheba is not favorably impressed by his attention. “This was a triumph; and had it come naturally, such a triumph would have been the sweeter to her for this piquing delay. But it had been brought about by misdirected ingenuity, and she valued it only as she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit” (p. 135). The psychological sources of unnaturalness in Boldwood are only hinted at by Hardy through Boldwood's almost delighted acquiescence to a six-year secret engagement to a woman who insists she cannot love him, and through his eager fetishistic accumulation of women's clothing of Bathsheba's size (pp. 442-43). He is not capable of Troy's forthright sexual purposiveness or of Oak's patient suppression of passion by means of physical activity and determined professional achievement.

In contrast to the distortions of Boldwood's personality, supposedly anchored but actually open to the gales, Bathsheba's whims are those of an inherent inconsistency natural in an inexperienced but generally kind girl.⁷ And Oak's reliance upon tradition gives him a secure natural protection against both external threats to his well-being and internal temptations to his peace of mind—so secure, indeed, that Oak is never significantly tempted or threatened. That he does not become an uninteresting, wooden figure attests to Hardy's wisdom in placing Oak in a subordinate role in the plot while developing contrasts among the characters who surround him and in time provide him with a context in which to manifest his strength.

The idea of natural should not be equated with nature in a limited frame of reference, however. Natural is more than individual predispositions, basic drives, or behavior modeled on animal-like impercipience toward the future. Hardy does not forget that one facet of the externality which affects man's fate is society. That which is natural, then, might well be a special attribute of a society-oriented way of life, so long as that attribute provides a resource against life's incertitudes. This consideration explains a preference expressed by Oak toward two alternatives that superficially may seem equally unacceptable. When Bathsheba confides to him, fifteen months after Troy's disappearance at sea, that Boldwood is urging her to consent to a long engagement and that she thinks she must assent or Boldwood will go out of his mind, Oak evaluates the possible engagement in terms of heat and cold: “If wild heat had to do wi' it, making ye long to overcome the awkwardness about your husband's vanishing, it mid be wrong; but a cold-hearted agreement to oblige a man seems different, somehow” (p. 409). The advocacy of a “cold-hearted agreement to oblige a man” does not obviously typify Oak, nor does it immediately seem consistent with Hardy's usual attitude toward human relationships, while “wild heat” at least refers to an aspect of animal nature in humanity. That Oak prefers coldness to emotion as a guide to the conduct of personal relationships is a consistent manifestation of his principles, however. A cold-hearted agreement in this context becomes, in other contexts, a rational and businesslike approach on how to decide issues. For example, Oak's energetic efforts to protect the wheat and barley ricks during the storm are impelled primarily by materialistic and utilitarian considerations, albeit underlined by the thought that the ricks are the property of “the woman I have loved so dearly.” He precisely calculates the value of the grain and sees the usefulness of grain in a deeper perspective: “Seven hundred and fifty pounds in the divinest form that money can wear—that of necessary food for man and beast: should the risk be run of deteriorating this bulk of corn to less than half its value, because of the instability of a woman?” (p. 279). Later, with the job of covering the ricks partly finished, the danger of lightning becomes more apparent. Again, his reflections are in materialistic terms: “Was his life so valuable to him after all? What were his prospects that he should be so chary of running risk, when important and urgent labour could not be carried on without such risk?” (p. 285). And finally, during the heavy rain he drives in spars randomly, covering “more and more safely from ruin this distracting impersonation of seven hundred pounds”(p. 292). For Oak, concern with agricultural husbandry is materialistic, and although such concern could be dignified by being called an abstract duty, Oak sees it as a matter of finance and produce. Even his love life shows a similar straightforward acceptance of financial necessities. After the collapse of his sheep-raising venture in chapter 5, he accepts as inevitable and natural that Bathsheba should ignore him as a possible object of love. To Oak, and to his society, to lose one's position is to lose something intrinsic in his relations with others. With the other farm workers, who had never had any position, Oak's ill fortune is a matter for commiseration and comment, but not for undue lamentation or affected pity. For Oak, then, and for his society, frank, non-avaricious materialism is natural; and his advocacy to Bathsheba of a cold-hearted engagement with Boldwood allows her a way of life that is compatible with both her personal reluctance and her public responsibleness. None of the heroes of Hardy's later novels is able to piece together a fabric that justifies according to a social standard the individual's self and his responsibilities; this indicates a cause—as well as an effect—of the collapse of the détente between society and the individual in Wessex. Those characters closest to Oak—Winterborne and Melbury in The Woodlanders—are unable to provide a balance between the opposing demands of society and of individualism. Indeed, Melbury's temporary alienation from principle deprives Giles of a context in which his selflessness can be fulfilled.

III

Far from the Madding Crowd can generically be called tragic only by accepting Boldwood and Troy as protagonists and by defining tragedy in the broadest sense as education through suffering. Given the terms of our discussion, it is not immediately evident why this should be so: most modern theories of tragedy are based on the idea of dichotomy, balance, or dialectic. Nietzsche's description of the conflicting but balanced poles of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses is developed more recently by Richard Sewall and Murray Kreiger, although they prefer the concept of irresolvable tension to that of perfect balance. But at least two factors prevent the novel from being a tragedy. Its moral message of accommodation to universal forces forestalls the asking of ultimate questions; in Kreiger's terms, the “tragic vision” of which Oak is capable is overwhelmed by an “ethical vision” which keeps him in his place, earnestly striving toward humdrum, if healthy, goals. Equally to the point, the pervasiveness of the schematic style helps us to understand why the novel is not tragic. The aesthetic method of Far from the Madding Crowd is simply too stark, too rigidly antithetical, to create reader involvement or complexity of reaction. The assumption of the aesthetic in this novel is that any and all reactions to situations will be between two extremes, or on one of two extremes. Both the alternatives and the preferable choice are clearly indicated, preventing ambiguity and terror raised by unforeseeable alternatives, and in effect obviating suspenseful allegiance to a beleaguered ideal whose ultimate value is in question.

Hardy continued to use the schematic method, but certainly the more direct and unmodified its use the less successful the novel. The Return of the Native, for instance, is permeated with this sense of dichotomy—primarily in the cleavage between the tragic connotations in the chapters “Queen of Night” and “‘My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is’” and the mundane persons of Eustacia and Clym, and in the descriptions of Eustacia and Clym as characters symbolic of world views. The effect of this early mannerism of Hardy is to atomize his characterizations in The Return of the Native well beyond the desiderata of tragedy. This device was consciously used by Hardy, but his style of tragedy was still evolving in The Return of the Native, and his use of dichotomy was only partially successful. Jude the Obscure demonstrates a successful employment of dichotomous structure which can be attributed to the greater complexity of personality discussed above, and to the broadness of the contrasts (see n.3). The dichotomies of Jude the Obscure are not expressed through the rhetoric of the sentence and paragraph as pervasively as they are in Far from the Madding Crowd.

The possibility of tragedy in a context where the individual will counts for very little is a major concern throughout Hardy's career; in Far from the Madding Crowd he initiates his expression of the central feature of tragedy in fiction, intensity of personality realization, coordinating this feature with other basic concepts. While the idea is developed much more subtly later, especially in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy's first approach is in the familiar dichotomous manner: he defines by setting qualities and characters against each other. It is pathetic little Fanny Robin who provides him with the opportunity to theorize, to indicate that tragedy cannot exist without strength in the individual character. As she struggles painfully toward the Casterbridge workhouse, Hardy notes her inability to soliloquize grandly: “Extremity of feeling lessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the strong” (p. 305). The division according to potentiality between tragic and non-tragic persons is restated after Fanny's death, as Hardy directly compares the physical sufferings of Fanny and the psychological sufferings of Bathsheba when Troy kneels at Fanny's coffin to kiss the corpse of the girl he had spitefully refused to marry. “Capacity for intense feeling is proportionate to the general intensity of the nature, and perhaps in all Fanny's sufferings, much greater relatively to her strength, there never was a time when she suffered in an absolute sense what Bathsheba suffered now” (pp. 343-44). Through this simple and perhaps unnecessarily obvious contrast, Hardy outlines what he considers the essential component of tragedy, the intensity of inner experience (rather than the breath of experience). At the outset of his career, then, Hardy does not adhere to the Aristotelian theory of tragedy based on an emphasis on plot and on the worldly position of his protagonist; his fondness for sensational plots cannot prevent us from seeing that his created beings are the basis of his popularity. The marvel is that he created so many individuals capable of intense suffering without repeating himself.⁸

Accompanying the dichotomous expression of tragic potentiality is the never-resolved dialectic concerning free will and determinism (or effects of circumstance); this dialectic is dealt with strikingly in Far from the Madding Crowd. Never in his career was Hardy able to settle the conflicting claims of philosophical determinism and seeming freedom in choice and act. The Mayor of Casterbridge is in part a brief for free will; The Dynasts presents explicit images of a mechanistic universe; but neither work excludes the opposing concept, and the well-known final passages of The Dynasts imply a meliorist view—which Hardy learned in part from Eduard von Hartmann—that as the universal Will becomes more conscious of its own workings, there will be greater opportunities for effective individual free will. Hardy's analysis of the responsibility for Boldwood's infatuation is one of his most complex grapplings with this conflict. Boldwood is absorbed in guessing at the motive of the sender of the valentine, mistakenly assuming that there must have been a motive. “It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue” (p. 113). Boldwood's ignorance makes him think he is taking the latter course, the more deterministic one, but as the reader knows, Bathsheba did not intend to start a “chain of events.” Hardy makes explicit their acting at cross-purposes: “Boldwood's blindness to the difference between approving of what circumstances suggest, and originating what they do not suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba's insensibility to the possibly great issues of little beginnings” (p. 134). Bathsheba, then, thinks she has the choice of making a consequence-less act, but her future is strongly determined by this act of purposeless free will. (The act is, however, described in such a way as to emphasize the accidental features in the linking of events culminating in the sending of the valentine—especially the fortuitous existence of a seal that prints “Marry Me,” surely not a usual item on farmers' writing desks [see pp. 110-11].) Boldwood, on the other hand, thinks he is affecting a chain of events he did not initiate, but actually he provides the impetus for all that follows. The point of these expository sections in the novel is that what seems to be an act of free will is not; conversely, what seems to have been determined by a force external to the individual is actually initiated by that individual. The implication of the dichotomy is clear: human vision is too limited, its perspective too egoistic, for the absolute truth of the quality of man's freedom to be ever securely known by the individual, and, by extension, by the race of man. The irony of the situation revealed by the valentine incident spills over into the rest of the book, until finally Bathsheba thinks that she is being “coerced by a force [Boldwood] stronger than her own will” (p. 407), not only to promise to enter into a six years' engagement but also to fancy that she ought to promise. Bathsheba's directionlessness act of free will has led her into a situation permitting no honorable alternatives. Fortunately for her own sense of integrity, not to mention her happiness, Boldwood is caught in the chain of events consequent upon his own unintentional act of free will. His murder of Troy frees Bathsheba and, ironically, gives her back a measure of freedom of choice.

Another dichotomous theme applicable to both Hardy's entire body of work and his idea of tragedy is that of time. In Far from the Madding Crowd, time is used to contrast two ways of life, the timeless and permanent life of Weatherbury agriculture, and the exceedingly temporal and transient life of Troy and, as the novel develops, of Boldwood, both of whom are so involved in the frenzy of immediate activity that they cannot adjust to another time pattern. Weatherbury time is developed through the existence of the shearing barn, as old as the village church, but unlike the church still used for the purpose for which it was originally built and still a benefit to mankind (p. 165). The descriptions of recurring rural activities throughout the book also reflect upon the timeless quality of Weatherbury life. And of course the coexistence of five generations of Smallburys demonstrates an indifference to age differentials among peasant stock that is closely allied to their “Oriental indifference to the flight of time.” Opposed to this sense of immanent continuity is Sergeant Troy, to whom “memories were an encumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity,” a man who cared “for what was before his eyes,” who “was vulnerable only in the present. … With him the past was yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after” (p. 190). Troy wants to have Bathsheba's traditionally furnished farmhouse redecorated, because in the old house he feels “like new wine in an old bottle” (p. 271). Boldwood cannot adjust his psychological time-sense after Troy's disappearance; he cruelly bullies Bathsheba into a lengthy engagement. Further, he betrays his disavowal of tradition when he asks Oak whether there is “any [necktie] knot in fashion” before his Christmas party (p. 414)—an act consistent with his “unnatural” behavior in planning such a party. In a limited respect, the peasants and Troy look at time similarly. The lives of both pass as an instant. The difference, however, is essential and obvious: the “instant” of the peasants' lives is centuries in length; their lives are an instant because they do not distinguish themselves apart from their forefathers and progeny (p. 463); they do not even distinguish historical from artistic events (p. 396). Troy's life is an instant, on the other hand, because its sensations are short in duration, usually failing to survive the immediate event he is participating in. Theoretically, perhaps, either time-sense can be employed in a narrative seeking to express the tragic. Yet clearly for the formulation of Hardy's own tragic sense, the peasants' view of time is paramount. It establishes an aura of permanence—in values, in personality traits, in social customs. It is against this aura that new traditions are evaluated and that protagonists struggle, trying to change or to exploit the “permanent” conditions of life. This struggle on the stage of time is most formative for the tragic plots of The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge, but each of Hardy's novels relies on contrast in time-senses for an important share of its characterizations and effects.

IV

Although Hardy works out some basic concepts of the mode within the story, Far from the Madding Crowd is not a tragedy. In addition to the effect of the schematic style, the novel does not achieve the power of tragedy because—unlike almost all of Hardy's creative expressions that approach tragic power—it possesses a resolution that awards happiness to the hero and heroine. It does so without the irony that makes Fancy Day's marriage to Dick Dewy in Under the Greenwood Tree a delightfully human sustainment of conflicting desires. Oak marries the mistress he has faithfully served for so long; and there is little doubt that Hardy intends the reader to understand Oak is being rewarded for his patience and his resignation, for his subservience to what Hardy later in life called the Immanent Will, and which in 1874 went by the name of circumstance. This denouement makes Far from the Madding Crowd the most positive in outlook of Hardy's novels, and along with its portrayal of a healthy and self-confident society it has become through the denouement a kind of touchstone for the other Wessex novels in the minds of contemporary reviewers and novel readers.

Literary critics generally are skeptical about the plausibility of happy endings in novels, but in Far from the Madding Crowd the ending is implicit in the novel's presuppositions about the relationship between struggle and punishment, acquiescence and contentment. The ending is true to its conditions and context; but there are certain modifying aspects of the denouement that critics have not overlooked. They note the peasants' anticipations of future strife in the marriage of Oak and Bathsheba, and the speed with which “the author disposes … of the rest of the story” after Troy's death.⁹ Richard Carpenter thinks the ending is “a questionable sop to our feelings,” and suggests that “the novel does not really end ‘happily’” because “the vibrant and proud girl we see at the beginning has been as thoroughly destroyed as Troy and Boldwood.”¹⁰ I am not persuaded that these opinions are valid. It is true that the peasants josh Oak on the evening of his marriage because he can say “my wife” without a chill note in his voice, and that Jan Coggan adds, “twirling his eye, … ‘That improvement will come wi' time’” (p. 463). But Bathsheba and Oak have been too thoroughly tested and have come through too successfully for these remarks to carry much foreboding. As Joseph Poorgrass says with a “cheerful sigh” to close the novel, “But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly” (p. 464). Oak receives precisely the kind of happiness he would choose: an unexciting filling of the general “void within him” that had led to his first falling in love with Bathsheba (p. 16).

But the ending of Far from the Madding Crowd does have a false quality about it, an internal belittlement of the sense of the natural shaping of personality through experience that the major part of the novel portrays. This falseness results, I think, from Hardy's reluctance to compromise the suspense of the plot action leading to the climax of Boldwood's frantic and desperate shooting of Troy. In order to create the kind of tension necessary to justify aesthetically Boldwood's violence, the plot lines must be direct and the characterizations straightforward. It must seem as if the resolution of Bathsheba's fate lies of necessity somewhere between the contradictory jurisdictions of Boldwood, the imperious and dogged suitor, and Troy, the imperious and egoistic husband, neither of whom has any compunctions in forcing Bathsheba into sexual or financial situations against her will. Her will, of course, by this time favors peace; she says she no longer has feeling or emotion (p. 418); she wants merely to be left alone by Boldwood and to remain deserted by Troy. To have allowed Oak a position in this Hardyan variant upon the ménage à trois would have destroyed the suspense and the dichotomous style that sustains it, for if Hardy had offered the suggestion that Bathsheba had matured to the point of being able to accept Oak romantically before her husband and Boldwood are removed from the competition, there would have been less tension in the preparation for the violent resolution of Troy's and Boldwood's pursuit of Bathsheba. The reader would have had in his mind a confidence—or at least a distracting suspicion—that Bathsheba would simply turn to Oak at the proper time. The reader may have such a suspicion, nonetheless, but it is not through direct authorial guidance.¹¹

Even with these difficulties of emphasis, it is conceivable that Hardy could have satisfactorily carried off the ultimate union of Oak and Bathsheba had he truly felt the union was inevitable. But the strain in fulfilling reader expectation is indicated by the sudden sinking of the novel's tone through conventional patterns of coyness and flirtatiousness, much as happens in the similar and more notorious situation where Hardy's personal inclination and novelistic convention differed—book 6 of The Return of the Native with its coy courtship of Diggory Venn and Thomasin. Even though Hardy's inclination is evidently to reward Oak with Bathsheba's hand and her rented lands—that is, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy's inclination and novelistic convention are the same—his inclination does not inspire his imagination. Oak is prevented by an old oath (p. 36) from proposing to Bathsheba again—presumably the justification for having Bathsheba initiate the courtship leading to their marriage. The best device Hardy can muster to bring Bathsheba to the point of declaring her desire to marry Oak is Oak's statement during the winter that he intends to emigrate to California, an intention he drops immediately upon Bathsheba's expression of regret. He neglects to inform her of his change in plans, and three months pass with no further communication between the two about Oak's supposed departure. Bathsheba becomes more and more eager to have Oak remain in Weatherbury; Oak makes arrangements to take over another farm, again without telling Bathsheba. When Bathsheba makes her “climactic” visit to Oak's house at night to beg him to alter his plans of emigration, then, it is a purposeless errand. She thereupon falls into coquettishness as she had done in the early scenes when she forces Oak to admit his love for her, distorting her novel-long development toward sobriety and chastisement. Her laugh, “It seems exactly as if I had come courting you—how dreadful!” (p. 456), may make explicit Oak's reward for constancy, but it also stresses the comic conception of the reward system that Hardy is employing. Hardy implies that Bathsheba's previous disdain of Oak can be compensated for only by total subservience and by a turnabout of the sexual roles in the courtship which mocks Bathsheba's earlier efforts to usurp masculine prerogatives. This insertion of the comedic into what has been to this point a somber assessment of the difficulties of gaining even that modest measure of happiness which the universe is willing to permit, disrupts the novel for this brief but crucial period during the denouement.

Taken as a whole, however, Far from the Madding Crowd offers a mature view of life. The themes of Hardy's later novels are extensions of their early schematic expression in this novel. The other novels discussed in this study take tragedy for their major mode, as opposed to the subsidiary and undeveloped role that tragedy plays in Far from the Madding Crowd. In The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy seeks a traditional pattern for tragedy which he can employ in a Wessex setting.

Notes

1. The Spectator, January 3, 1874.

2. For example, The Observer, January 3, 1875. Henry James, at the beginning of his life-long tepid response to Hardy's work, admitted it was “extremely clever,” but disliked it because it lacked “magic” and “proportion.” Nation (New York), December 24, 1874. These contemporary reviews are reprinted in Thomas Hardy and His Readers, ed. Laurence Lerner and John Holstrom (London: Bodley Head, 1968), pp. 23-38.

3. Later Years, p. 42: “Of course the book is all contrasts—or was meant to be in its original conception. Alas, what a miserable accomplishment it is, when I compare it with what I meant to make it!—e.g. Sue and her heathen gods set against Jude's reading the Greek testament; Christminster academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint; marriage, no marriage; & c., & c.”

4. James Wright, Afterword, Far from the Madding Crowd, Signet ed. (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 378.

5. Guerard, Thomas Hardy, p. 68.

6. Richard C. Carpenter, “The Mirror and the Sword: Imagery in Far from the Madding Crowd.” NCF 18 (1964): 331-45.

7. Bathsheba is accused of unnatural behavior by certain characters. Troy thinks there is something “abnormal” in a woman as independent as Bathsheba appealing with “childlike pain and simplicity” to be kissed also, after Troy has kissed the dead Fanny (p. 344); and Pennyways the discharged bailiff thinks her drinking cider through a straw not a “‘nateral way at all’” (p. 417). But these references to “unnaturalness” characterize the perversities of the speakers more than those of Bathsheba.

8. See Guerard's listing of developmental character traits that affect heroines in successive novels, for example, Marty South and Suke Damson in The Woodlanders being “combined” to form Tess Durbeyfield (Thomas Hardy, pp. 141-42). Still, the configuration is different for each individual.

9. George Wing, Hardy (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), p. 52; Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy, pp. 49-50.

10. Richard C. Carpenter, Thomas Hardy (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 87.

11. In fact, Hardy may go too far in the other direction. Some of the awkwardness in the final union of the protagonists would have been lessened if Hardy had not assured his readers, before Troy is killed, that Bathsheba finds it impossible to love Oak, or anyone (pp. 402, 410). It strikes me that Bathsheba is sincere on p. 410, that is, she does not have affection for Oak despite her irritation that he did not declare his own love when she asks his advice concerning Boldwood's proposal.