[In the following essay, based on a sociological study, Adey analyzes the kinds of love exhibited in Far from the Madding Crowd, especially as they relate to the character development of Bathsheba.]

At first sight, there appears little need for further study of lovers in Far From the Madding Crowd, and even less of their environment. To cite but a few critics, David Cecil has considered the courtship of Bathsheba, Virginia Hyman her moral development through her varied experience in love, George Wing her suitors, Douglas Brown her relation to the natural environment, Merryn Williams that of Gabriel Oak in contrast to Sergeant Troy's alienation from nature, and, most recently, Peter Casagrande Bathsheba's reformation through her communion with both Gabriel and the environment. To my knowledge, none has considered the modes or styles in which those and other characters express love and how far these may result from or determine their attitude to the land and its dependents, nor the tragic import in the Wessex novels of incompatibility in this sense between human beings, as distinct from that between the human psyche and the cosmos.¹

The following study was inspired not, as may be supposed, by C. S. Lewis's Four Loves, but by an article by a sociologist, John Alan Lee, called ‘The Styles of Loving’, and his book, Colours of Love.² Before enquiring into North American modes of loving, Lee amassed a collection of pronouncements on love by authors from Plato to Lewis.³ To project his conclusions back on to a century-old novel might otherwise invite derision. Few of Hardy's readers would deny that his lovers often exemplify traditional modes of courtship, and none better than those in Far From the Madding Crowd. What love-lore Hardy may have read would furnish material for another essay. My aim in this is to show how each major character's style of loving bears on that character's relations with the Wessex community and environment. But first, the styles need to be defined.

Differing somewhat from Lewis, Lee finds three primary modes, eros, ludus and storgē, with two secondary, which he calls mania and pragma. He defines eros as ‘an immediate, powerful attraction to the physical appearance of the beloved’,⁴ yet concedes that this often corresponds to the lover's mental image of ideal beauty. In his description of ludus, any reader of Chaucer, Ovid or many another poet, will recognize the ‘game and play’ of love. The game, as Lee remarks, might consist either of seduction or flirtation. Neither the most cynical players (or hunters or anglers), who care not what passions they arouse, nor the most chivalrous find it easy to douse the fire of love gradually, as Ovid recommends. In amor ludens, says the Roman poet, the lover should enjoy ‘a pleasant pastime’.⁵ As Lee explains, the ‘ludic lover’ refuses ‘to become dependent on any beloved, or to allow any beloved to become overly attached’. In this case, does he love at all? To this Lee replies that ‘a significant group of respondents’ in his survey reported acting in this way but considered themselves lovers, while ludus has been ‘socially acceptable at times in the past’ (as in the Provençal and perhaps the Elizabethan literary cultures).⁶

Lewis finds in eros the elements of physical desire, which he calls ‘Venus’, and of play in the sense of sometimes comic ritual. The idolatrous love that Lewis terms ‘romance’ is categorized by Lee as mania, after the Greek term theia mania (‘madness from the gods’). Its keynotes of agitation, sleeplessness and obsessive images of the beloved, familiar to all readers of Chaucer, are listed in countless notebooks of students as those of ‘courtly love’. To illustrate Lee's account of mania as a secondary mode derived from eros and ludus, Chaucer's Troilus loves at first sight, plays the game of seduction under direction from Pandarus, then cries exultantly ‘Now be ye kaught’ upon enticing her to his pretended sick-bed.⁷ Entrapment, histrionics and a third element, territorial intrusion, together with traditional praise of the lady's beauty and the salesman's fiction of the Other Client, make up the game that Troy plays with Bathsheba. Like other moralists, and even perhaps Hardy, Lewis would refuse to admit ludus as a form of love.

At some length, and with evident approval, Lewis describes ‘Affection’, the comradely or filial love that Lee (after him) calls storgē. This ‘love without fever, tumult and folly’, as Proudhon has it, usually comes about not through choice but through sharing work, home or leisure-time activities, often in the countryside.⁸ Whether Gabriel Oak's first proposal to Bathsheba is a form of pragma, or deliberate selection amounting in Lee's view to a derivative of storgē and ludus, or whether it is really motivated by eros, is a matter for discussion. In his subsequent loyalty, Oak undoubtedly blends storgē and agapē, the selfless benignity that St Paul defines as the essence of Christian love, and Lewis as the element required to raise eros, friendship and affection to their highest powers. This Lee regards as a compound of storgē and eros. This highly debatable judgment may shed light on Gabriel's conduct in love.

I

To begin with the style most evident in this novel, Bathsheba and Troy play characteristically different games. Before the action begins, Troy, whose name connotes both warfare and seductions, has played the soldier-lover of balladry who leaves the village maiden in distress. As the laughter of his comrades echoes from the barrack-room window, our hearts sink for his victim. If, by agreeing to marry Fanny, he seems to transcend his stereotype, it takes but the accident of Fanny's late arrival, and the titters of bystanders, to drown the still very small voice of social conscience.

‘But after all,’ she expostulated in a trembling voice, ‘the mistake was not such a terrible thing. Now, dear Frank, when shall it be.’

‘Ah, when? God knows!’ he said with a light irony, and turning from her rapidly walked away.

(p. 148)⁹

His flippant tone and rapid walk, like his unwilling marriage proposal, remind us of the ludic lover's difficulty in breaking off the game. His embarrassment renders him a more credible suitor for Bathsheba than is Boldwood yet, ironically, a more fitting agent of her enlightenment.

Bathsheba plays upon Gabriel Oak the Victorian woman's game of flirtation, as distinct from that of entrapment played by Arabella and urged upon Tess by Mrs Durbeyfield. She remarks that a marriage ‘would be very nice in one sense’, for ‘People would talk about me and think I'd won my battle, and I should feel triumphant,’ but a husband, she objects, ‘would be always there.’

‘Of course he would—I, that is’, rejoins Oak, a lover of a very different stamp.

This draws the immortal response, ‘I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband’, and the decision that ‘since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry—at least yet’ (p. 67).

The vanity Oak has already perceived exposes Bathsheba to capture by Troy, the only suitor to praise her beauty. Before thinking of her as a prospective wife, Troy begins playing the game of seduction, using what I understand to be the classic technique. By adroitly failing to free her dress from his spur he keeps her close to him, while by praising her beauty he assuages an age-old hunger not suspected, let alone appeased, by Boldwood or Oak.

He then moves literally into her territory to help with the haymaking, then both amuses and obligates her somehow to respond by gallantly taking her place at the bee-hive. Although his aura of romance, so advantageous in Bathsheba's prosaic world of farmers, bailiffs and shepherds, cannot entirely be ascribed to his skill, he thus loses no time in exploiting the happy accident of being picked out by, as it were, son el lumière in scarlet tunic and glittering brasses. His clumsily invented tale to convert his proffered gift of a watch into a family heirloom is the kind of false step likely to be taken by one more accustomed to seducing village girls than courting ladies of his own descent.¹⁰ Even here his unperceived good fortune in having his past embroidered by a maid-servant probably saves him from being dismissed as an arrant liar. Finally, he draws her literally away from her own territory and metaphorically into his by skilfully arousing a desire to see his sword-play. By making the still-trembling girl realize that, although she can manage her own farm and hold her own in the masculine game of buying and selling upon the Corn Exchange, she has depended for her life upon his swordsmanship, he gains a psychological upper hand more valuable in the game of love than was Gabriel's skill in saving her sheep. Her dependence and his own mastery he stresses with adroit inventiveness: ‘… you have been within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times’ (p. 218). No wonder she cannot avoid his kiss.

An uncharacteristic woodenness in dialogue and a clumsy authorial intrusion combine to muffle the impact and blur the meaning of an earlier conversation in which Troy has established a bridgehead by playing upon Bathsheba's vanity. It begins promisingly with Bathsheba, ‘in a restless state between distress at hearing him and a penchant to hear more’ being assured that she is ‘a most fascinating woman’. The rhetorical contrivance ‘surely you must have been told by everybody of what everybody notices’ and the banal self-betrayal ‘No—that is—I have certainly heard Liddy say they do but—’ (p. 203) ruin the peripateion even before the novelist, breaking the rule ‘Show, not tell’, adds:

Capitulation—that was the purport of the simple reply, guarded as it was—capitulation, unknown to herself. Never did a fragile tailless sentence convey a more perfect meaning. The careless sergeant smiled from a loop-hole in Tophet, for the moment was the turning-point of a career.

Hardy's comment assures us that Troy will never amount to more than a circus performer or stage-villain. By the time Hardy created Alec d'Urberville, the game and play of sexual pursuit had acquired for him a tragic portent beyond the earlier novel's dimension of melodrama.

In which style, we naturally ask, does Bathsheba love Troy? The indications appear confusing. His glittering figure and instancy of pursuit would disconcert the least responsive woman. Her inability to resist his compliments, and the amusement at his ludicrous appearance in her own bee-keeping clothes that breaks down her ‘palisade of cold manners’ (p. 211) would suggest eros. Her storming at the tearful Liddy, her abrupt departure to Bath, above all this shrewd business woman's falling for that age-old ploy, the Other Client, far more strongly indicate mania. So does her jealousy on discovering the earlier love-affair between Troy and Fanny, and indeed the very rapidity of her post-marital disillusionment. While Hardy tells us too little to indicate whether, as Lee reports of manic lovers, she had an unhappy childhood, he introduces her as having lost, or left, her parents to live with and somewhat impatiently assist her aunt.

Naturally, we recoil from placing Bathsheba in the same category as Boldwood, whose mode of love is the obvious example of mania. Lee insists, however, that the manic lover, who ‘is feeling lonely and insecure falls—or more accurately jumps—into love’ with one the observer would judge ‘an illogical choice’, a ‘total stranger’ from a different milieu and ‘not immediately attractive to the lover’. Clearly at most, though not all points, this description fits both Boldwood and Bathsheba. These ‘yearning, obsessed, often unhappy’ figures, typify ‘frustrated eros’ in their ‘urgency of feeling’. They ‘behave in many ways similar to ludus’ by attempting to ‘manipulate the lover, to play it cool’ but ‘try to be non-committal, only to panic and surrender in ignominious defeat’.¹¹ While allowing that the manic lover can recover balance by moving towards eros or ludus, Lee fails to indicate the logical converse, that a skilled player can manipulate an erotic or ludic partner into just such tearful irrationality as Cainy Ball observes in Bathsheba when she plights her troth to Troy at Bath. Indeed, the novelist himself speaks, immediately after the sword-play and first kiss, of an ‘element of folly … almost foreign to her intrinsic nature’ which, introduced ‘as a lymph on the dark of Eros … eventually permeated and coloured her whole constitution’ (p. 219). On this evidence, we can expect lovers to move between the three points of game, attraction and obsession, or ludus, eros and mania.

This supposition explains Troy's later behaviour if not Boldwood's. Even after winning Bathsheba's hand, Troy cannot resist playing the heartless trick of accepting the frenzied Boldwood's bribe and then immediately showing the newspaper announcement of his marriage. Ironically, shock and guilt at Fanny's preventable death drive him toward mania, a guiltladen, inevitably fruitless obsession that puts in jeopardy what remains of his wife's affection. Because he has never faced the consequences of his seduction, nothing but Fanny's death will bring them home to him. Fittingly, this circus highwayman meets his doom when playing his last trick on Boldwood and Bathsheba.

Though a very paradigm of the manic lover, Boldwood at first fails to come alive because the electrical metaphor presenting his stillness as ‘the perfect balance of enormous antagonistic forces—positives and negatives in fine adjustment’ (p. 153), amounts to the substitution of a theorem for an observation. When in The Return of the Native Hardy remarks of Clym Yeobright ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’, we recognize an observation from the repository of common experience; when he remarks of Boldwood, ‘His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once’ (p. 153), we pause for thought as upon hearing an abstract or metaphysical notion.¹² Admittedly, between the sending and the arrival of the valentine, the novelist has taken care to exhibit Boldwood in settings appropriate to a life of suspended animation: in snowy pastures, before ice-covered windows, or in a byre that was his ‘almonry’ or ‘cloister’; has reinforced that impression by comparing Boldwood's house to a monastery; and yet further strengthened it by his brilliant simile for the effect of seeing Bathsheba, the lighting of ‘a great tower’ (p. 154). Nevertheless, before telling us of Boldwood's humourless disposition, Hardy has already undercut the impression of one who takes everything at face value by allowing Boldwood to dissect Troy's character and expose the illusions in Fanny's love-letter with a shrewdness out of keeping with his own folly over a spoof valentine.¹³ Oak derives his view of Troy from Boldwood's account.

The very quality that provoked Bathsheba into playing that joke upon Boldwood was his indifference to her beauty, amid all the appreciative glances from other farmers and merchants. Notwithstanding Lee's stipulation that in life the beloved is ‘not immediately attractive’ to the manic lover, narrative plausibility requires a stronger stimulant than the valentine. Troilus and even the inhibited David Copperfield had the physical presence of the beloved. In Angel Clare's case not only the beauty of the new milkmaid but his own propensity for idealizing abstraction, so evident in his comment on her as a ‘virginal daughter of Nature’, dispose us to accept his falling in love. Oak has the double impetus of having seen Bathsheba in provocative situations and had his life saved by her. Boldwood's instant passion prompted by a message in unrecognized handwriting provokes a disbelief not all readers willingly suspend.

The character's isolation and lack of background intensify Hardy's difficulty. To a forty-year-old husband he could attribute stirrings of discontent; to one already established as living through the imagination and the written word more than direct contract he could ascribe images stirred into life by the message. Though among the earliest proofs of his genius, the architectural and electrical images of this chapter do not suffice to validate this sudden passion on the part of a character he has conjured up ex nihilo.¹⁴

The senders of that fateful valentine act from disparate motives. Her vanity provoked by Boldwood's indifference, Bathsheba allows the playful child in her to override her maturing judgment, the id to snatch the reins from the ego. Liddy, however, has been provoked by the collective failure of the Wessex girls in that deliberate pursuit Lee terms pragma, a compound of storgē and ludus. Liddy comically describes the game of securing an eligible husband played in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to The Way of All Flesh (or more solemnly in our computer-dating services). In one instance she also comes near to depicting mania.

Never was such a hopeless man for a woman! He's been courted by sixes and sevens—all the girls, gentle and simple, for miles around have tried him. Jane Perkins worked at him for two months like a slave, and the two Miss Taylors spent a year upon him, and he cost Farmer Ives's daughter nights of tears and twenty pounds' worth of new clothes; but Lord—the money might as well have been thrown out of the window.

(p. 109)

This brings us to the question ‘Did Gabriel offer Bathsheba pragma or storgē unalloyed?’ At first, he proposes in a style pragmatic enough to have served Trollope's Mr Cheeseacre:¹⁵

I have a nice snug little farm … a man has advanced me money to begin with, but … it will soon be paid off, and though I'm only an everyday sort of man I have got on a little since I was a boy.

(p. 65)

His very awkwardness, however, seems to rule out any notion of playing a game, while views of her posturing in her red coat before her hand-mirror and riding astride her aunt's horse have already prompted the awareness that ripens into love following his deliverance from asphyxiation. So far his love appears a compound of eros and gratitude, which his peasant-farming background and inexperience of women dispose him to present as pragma. In Hardy's original opening, Oak was already her shepherd, a fact that underlines their class-difference and makes her rescue more plausible.¹⁶ His lack of manifest passion and promise to be the kind of husband the immature girl dreads, one ‘always there’, suggest storgē. Like any pragmatic suitor from rural India to the rural England of an older day than his, upon losing his sheep he gives up his faint hope of marrying her. Yet his later rebuke of her for marrying a man she did not love ‘honest and true’ implies a belief not so much in eros as in storgē deepened by agapē, a compound implicit in his surname and Christian name. His very steadfastness in watching over her interests from the moment he enters her service, together with his original attraction to her, seems to confirm Lee's account of agapē as a mixture of eros and storgē, a blend of self-denying and comradely affection, as undemonstrative as it is unchangeable.

II

In Hardy's novels, storgic lovers serve and manage land animals, and take their place at market, church and inn with a regularity broken only by the greater cycle of birth, love, ageing and death. Manic lovers, driven by their delusions, find themselves always out of phase or bored with a life governed by sun, crops or liturgical calendar. Ludic love, as many a folksong implies, pertains to the transient or unstable, to soldiers, rakes or hucksters. To succeed, the flirt or seducer must exploit the fact of being outside the victim's range of experience, a novelty that generates excitement and illusion.

In different senses ludus both belongs and is foreign to rural society. In the ‘sequestrated vale’ of Wessex, the sport of love is played most frantically during an agricultural depression, when by way of escape from poverty and casual employment the farm-labourers and lasses of Trantridge reel out of the dance into all-covering darkness. As played by the solitary intruder, ludus invariably disrupts a harmony that has obtained between the pursued and the environment. As competition for a glamorous or high-born suitor, or dangling of a maidenhead to secure a husband with a trade, ludus pertains to Hardy's later novels. Of necessity the gamester randomly destroys social or inner harmony, the essence of ludus residing in its unpredictability, its lack of logic.

Despite its real-life origin in Hardy's favourite uncle, the character of Troy poses difficulties never quite resolved. He could plausibly be presented as wishing to marry Bathsheba for her wealth, but even Gabriel seems to fear him solely as a seducer. To her defence of him as an ‘educated man, and quite worthy of any woman’ Gabriel rejoins:

‘His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o'soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It shows his course to be down'ard’

and adds ‘I believe him to have no conscience at all.’ That Gabriel sees not pragma but ludus becomes clear from his comment that ‘what is mirth to the neighbours is ruin to the woman’ (p. 222). We recall at once the laughter from Troy's comrades as Fanny stood beneath the barrack-room window. The further argument that Gabriel never misjudges other characters might be held invalid as a self-confirming assertion, but the novelist has already introduced Troy as one who may speak brilliantly because spontaneously but who falls ‘below the commonplace in action, from inability to guide incipient effort’, whose incessant activities, ‘never being based upon any original choice … were exercised on whatever object chance might place in their way’ (p. 198). In just this random manner does he meet and become attracted to Bathsheba.

Yet Troy acts with much consistency, as well as shrewdness, to win her. Again, he joins the army upon impulse, yet accepts its discipline well enough to rise to sergeant's rank and becomes a master swordsman. As a native of Wessex, familiar with occupations such as hay-making and bee-keeping, he surely knew too well the incessant grind of the farmer's life to prefer it even to barrack-square drill. Does he not know it too well to view it as the game or hobby of gentleman-farming he evidently has in mind when he proposes re-modelling the house? A post-Freudian novelist might convincingly attribute the debauching of the labourers at the harvest-supper to a male urge to destroy Bathsheba's authority over them. Hardy leaves us unsure whether Troy bullies the men into drinking brandy and endangers the crop upon sheer impulse, or as lord of misrule for the day when the effort of gathering corn has ended, or as his wife's enemy, a kind of Loki bent on destroying her Midgard. Later, Troy the manipulator turns unconvincingly into Troy the bereaved lover. The most consistent account we can give is to say that Troy the swashbuckling haunter of race-tracks and circus-rings loves and leaves Fanny, then so chafes at the restraints of husbandry that he almost destroys the livelihood of Bathsheba and her dependents. What he does on the farm, he does to amuse himself or impress its owner.

Does the personality of Fanny Robin suffice to account for Troy's posthumous devotion? If her condition accounts for her desperate pursuit following her mistake in awaiting him at the church dedicated to souls in purgatory, her preceding self-deception clearly indicates manic love. Only her gift of a lock of hair is consistent with eros, pure and simple. With the rural community, Fanny maintains fitful contact, being glimpsed, like the Scholar Gipsy, in by-ways and back-lanes by night. She never cuts herself off from shame or sense of loss, as does Tess. It is the novelist who in a contrived incident associates her with the parish-dog. Since neither the generous Boldwood, the compassionate Bathsheba nor the tolerant rustics can blame her, nor does she seem to know, let alone be jealous of her supplanter, Fanny remains too insubstantial to lend conviction to Troy's excessive grief and retrospective love, his conversion from ludic to manic lover.

In that case, can that devotion represent a romantic self-projection like the grief of a Novalis or James Thomson? Surely Hardy's very insistence upon Troy's superficiality and following of every whim, forbids such a diagnosis.¹⁷ It also perhaps invalidates the return to the farm-house to reclaim Bathsheba. In this the novelist gives priority to considerations of plotting rather than characterization. Significantly, in earlier serial-numbers he has interwoven Troy's jilting of Fanny and Bathsheba's practical joke upon Boldwood. Now he again causes Troy and Boldwood to cross paths.

It is precisely because of this primacy of plot that we think of Far From the Madding Crowd, for all the depths of Oak and Bathsheba, as tragi-comic melodrama rather than tragedy or high comedy. Had Boldwood known Bathsheba before the arrival of the valentine, so that her image provoked desire, we could credit a love so obsessive as to rob him of all concern for the gathered crop that represents his livelihood. Since Boldwood himself comes to us unknown, it does not suffice to plead that this instant passion causes him to live ‘outside his defences for the first time … with a fearful sense of exposure … the usual experience of strong natures when they love’ (p. 154). It is true that an obsession tends to rob work and environment of their meaning and that as a gentleman farmer first observed in his residence, not his fields, Boldwood does not evince Gabriel Oak's kinship with land and animals. Nor, as an established gentleman-farmer apparently living within his means, can Boldwood be presumed so dependent as the novice Bathsheba upon a single crop. His dependence is required, nevertheless, to give point to his neglect to cover his ricks, in contrast to the feverish activity of Oak and Bathsheba during the storm.

Turning now to these central characters, both the pragmatic mode of Oak's initial proposal and the storgic or comradely affection that evidently obtains between him and Bathsheba after the second imply affinity with the earth. From his first smile that spread wrinkles like the rising sun, from his workaday clothes spreading like the tree from which he derives his name, from our first hearing his flute—a Victorian shepherd's pipe—and from experiencing with him the roll of the earth at night, we infer his intimacy with the Wessex soil of which he appears almost an outcrop. All three beneficent acts, his quenching of the fire while yet unbeknown, his healing of the sheep at Bathsheba's entreaty, and his covering with her of the ricks, entail service to the farm as well as its owner, calling as much for skill and experience as for alacrity or devotion. Upon deeming himself to have lost her, he determines to leave Wessex too; upon regaining her, he takes control of both his and her farm, so ensuring the future well-being not only of his wife but of the land and all its dependents.

Bathsheba's mode of loving and commitment to the land cannot so readily be linked, for both her playing of male role and the novel's overt moral theme complicate the issue. Oak's diagnosis of ‘Vanity’, confirmed by her yielding to the flatteries of Troy, suggest eros as her style. From the moment that, clad in crimson jacket tinted to a ‘scarlet glow’ by the sun, she gazes into a mirror, we recognize an archetype employed in erotic poems of two millennia. Her complaints about the tedium of preparing animal-food deepen our sense of her incongruity with rural life and work. Once she takes over the farm, her shrewd and decisive management invite respect yet also, from Victorians at least, a comment on her pride. That Gabriel's small library includes a copy of Paradise Lost prepares us to accept his interventions both as mentor and as rescuer when by unwarranted self-discipline in dismissing him she has endangered her sheep. By the time she hears the choir rehearsing ‘Lead, kindly Light’ and applies to her own history the line ‘Pride ruled my will: remember not past years’ she has finally committed herself to fulfilling her responsibilities to the farm and its dependents.¹⁸ Gabriel arriving at that moment to take his place in the choir, her greeting presumably drowns the words ‘those angel faces smile’ that precede the next line quoted, ‘Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile’ (p. 413), so obscuring the link between her repentance and its fortunate outcome, her reconciliation with Gabriel.

Before that reconciliation, Oak's decision to emigrate results in their last and briefest estrangement, a necessary condition of her last act in the male role, when she visits him to invite his second proposal. Implicitly, Hardy associates the theme of pride humbled with the heroine's acknowledgment of dependence upon the hero. He uses the farm as a medium for her to learn that need, to repent and mature. At the sheep-washing pool, with its religious overtones, she confesses her wrongdoing to Boldwood; when her sheep fall sick she acknowledges her dependence upon the shepherd; in the pestilential swamp she decides not to flee her responsibilities but, in her husband's apt metaphor, to ‘stand [her] ground and be cut to pieces’. A moment before using this expression to Liddy, Bathsheba makes a remark that appears to undermine the thesis of pride humbled. ‘It is only women with no pride in them that leave their husbands’ (p. 332). Clearly she alludes not to vanity but to self-respect which, as Owen Barfield has pointed out, first acquired its favourable meaning in so late a text as Wordsworth's Prelude.¹⁹ As a Victorian, Hardy values not only self-respect but also the strengthening of character that comes about through Bathsheba's exercising masculine authority over the farm-hands and throwing herself into the contest of buying and selling at the Corn Exchange. If vanity impels her to take up the male role, if she nearly brings disaster upon all through her dismissal of Oak, she exercises good judgment in ridding herself of a dishonest bailiff, and in tending the mortally-wounded Troy shows herself to have ‘the stuff of which great men's mothers are made’ (p. 403). Though she can never acquire Gabriel's skill, she had acquired the strength of character and judgment of men to become an exemplary farmer's-wife and mother.

How can we relate Bathsheba's growth-through-humiliation to her style of loving? Admittedly, Hardy intended first and foremost to write a moral tale with a happy ending brought about by maturation and that ‘change of life;’ which to Johnson was ‘the completion and sum of repentance’.²⁰ By appropriate coincidence, we first see Gabriel wearing a coat like Dr Johnson's, and a timepiece inherited from his grandfather, that together give an air of timelessness consonant with his old-world Anglican morality.

To concede that Hardy did not yet portray man's life on earth as discord without resolution would not explain the absence of élan, the air of defeat in Bathsheba's final proposal. Compared with that of Hareton and the younger Catherine, the love of Gabriel and Bathsheba assures us that the farm will prosper but lacks the sense of fulfilment, of paradise restored, that makes the end of Wuthering Heights so memorable. If Bathsheba's flirtations with Oak and Boldwood constituted her form of ludus, and her passion for Troy her form of mania, her mature love represents an acceptance of storgē as the only mode available. Not merely the prosaic appearance and phlegmatic disposition of her second husband, but the entire movement of the plot—from self-delusion to realism—rule out any attempt to depict her love for him as eros, that private world of meeting eyes and hands that Lockwood observes upon revisiting the Heights. Having lived to regret her grande passion, Bathsheba must accept the security, sound management and good heart her partner has to offer, or else leave Weatherbury, so relinquishing both her responsibility to its people and a position wherein she can employ her talents. Her various modes of loving, no less than the crises she has weathered, have made Bathsheba a heroine more substantial, as well as more engaging, than that of Hardy's next major novel, The Return of the Native.

Certainly Bathsheba does right to choose companionate love wherein is no ecstasy, but she also jettisons a part of herself that, had Troy proved a fitting husband, would have given her life an élan it will never know again. In the ‘minor-key, twilight serenity’²¹ that concludes Far From the Madding Crowd lie the seeds of Hardy's future tragedies, so largely concerned with incongruities between the style of loving desired and that which is available.²²

Notes

1. Lord David Cecil, Hardy the Novelist (London: Constable, 1943); Virginia R. Hyman, Ethical Perspective in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1975); George Wing, Hardy (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963); Douglas Brown, Thomas Hardy (London: Longmans, Green, 1954); Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London: Macmillan, 1972) pp. 116-17, 131-5; Peter J. Casagrande, ‘A New View of Bathsheba Everdene’, in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979) pp. 50-73.

2. John Alan Lee, ‘The Styles of Loving’, Psychology Today, viii, 5 (Oct. 1974) 43-50, and Colours of Love (Toronto: New Press, 1973); C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960, reprint by Collins, 1977).

3. Lee, collected hundreds of statements about the nature of love, sorted them into six categories, distributed sixty of the most ‘distinctive and varied’ to ‘professional friends in sociology, psychology, literature and philosophy’, using their comments to choose thirty as the basis for a survey by interview (Colours, p. 13). Statements summarized pp. 232-3, and quoted throughout the book. Research procedure detailed in Appendices.

4. Lee, Colours, pp. 33-4.

5. Lee's phrase (Colours, p. 58), based on The Techniques of Love and Remedies for Love, trans. P. Turner (London: Panther, 1958).

6. Cited in Lee ‘Styles’, p. 58. In Colours, p. 79, Lee insists, ‘The storgic lover never consciously selects a partner’, hence I describe Oak's first proposal as an (assumed) example of pragma.

7. Troilus and Criseyde, iii, 1207, cf. Lee, Colours, pp. 94-7.

8. Cited in Lee, ‘Styles’, p. 48; see also Colours, ch. 6, passim, and on agapē, p. 140: ‘I have yet to interview any respondent involved in even a relatively short-term … love relationship which I could classify without qualification as … agapē. I have encountered brief agapic episodes in continuing love relationships.’

9. This and subsequent pagination refers to Macmillan edition (London, 1974).

10. Robert Gittings, in Young Thomas Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1975) p. 10, gives the original as John Brereton Sharpe, farm-manager to the Marquis of Salisbury, the ‘favourite uncle’ of Hardy, who believed him to have served in the Lancers. Boldwood's account of Troy as conceived through a ‘secret attachment’ between a French governess and Lord Severn and born ‘soon after’ her marriage to a ‘poor doctor’ (p. 143), confirmed by Liddy: ‘a doctor's son by name … and … an earl's son by nature’ (p. 196), clearly warrants the term ‘upper-class’ for Troy's descent, in Norman Page, Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1977) p. 39.

11. Lee, ‘Styles’, p. 49, cf. Colours, p. 97: ‘The partner is often a total stranger, of a different social background, race or nationality, and not immediately attractive to the lover.’ Casagrande says ‘We are told little about Bathsheba's childhood, but what we are told makes it clear that it was unhappy’, inferring this from her father's adultery and ‘unprotected childhood’ (ch. 31), but admits that ‘We cannot be certain’ (op. cit., pp. 61-2).

12. Hardy, Return of the Native (London: Macmillan, 1974) pp. 333.

13. ‘I am going to be married to … Sergeant Troy … a man of great respectability and high honour-indeed, a nobleman by blood’, on which Boldwood expresses doubt after recounting Troy's history, ‘whether Fanny will surprise us in the way she mentions … a silly girl’ (p. 143).

14. For more favourable views of Boldwood's characterisation see O. E. Madden, ‘William Boldwood’, Thomas Hardy Society Review, i, 6 (1980) 193-6; and Frank R. Giordano, Jr., ‘Farmer Boldwood: Hardy's Portrait of a Suicidal Mind’, English Literature in Transition, xxi (1978) 244-53.

15. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5) vol. i, ch. xx.

16. Robert C. Schweik, ‘A Draft First Chapter of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, English Studies, liii (1972) 344-9. On Gabriel's original status and rise in revision see Simon Gatrell, ‘Hardy the Creator: Far From the Madding Crowd’, in Critical Approaches, pp. 74-98, esp. pp. 83-4.

17. This suggestion by Professor Summerfield has merit if Troy be regarded as a narcissist, thus projecting a self-image. This seems inconsistent with his sexual extraversion, though quite applicable to Thomson, whose attachment to the dead Matilda seems modelled on that to Mathilde by ‘Novalis’ (Friedrich von Hardenberg), whose pseudonym Thomson anagrammatized in his own (‘Bysshe Vanolis’).

18. ‘Lead, kindly Light’ became a popular hymn only upon being set to J. B. Dykes' tune ‘Lux Benigna’ in Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), but was doubtless familiar before then to Hardy as a young High Churchman. If he thought the omitted line applicable to Bathsheba's feelings about Gabriel, he may have expected his readers to supply it. Whether it would have been so familiar by 1873 to West-country rustics as to Hardy's readers may be doubted. See also Casagrande, op. cit., pp. 65-6.

19. A. Owen Barfield, History in English Words (3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967) p. 199.

20. Samuel Johnson, Works, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University), iv, p. 225.

21. Cecil, op. cit., p. 30.

22. I am grateful to Professors Nelson Smith and Henry Summerfield for valuable suggestions after kindly reading an earlier draft of this essay.