SOURCE: Williams, Merryn. “Far from the Madding Crowd.” In Thomas Hardy and Rural England, pp. 130-35. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Williams states that the worth of characters in Far from the Madding Crowd is measured by their level of concern for their farm livelihood and the members of their community.]

Far from the Madding Crowd is a much more substantial novel than its predecessors, and several themes which were only glanced at in Under the Greenwood Tree are now fully sustained. There is still a good deal of indifferent writing, and a tendency towards shallow philosophising, yet this is definitely the first of Hardy's major works.

Of all his novels, it is the most optimistic and positive. The tensions, far greater than those in Under the Greenwood Tree, are still contained and harmoniously resolved in the end. It was the novel which the Victorian critics wanted him to write over and over again, and referred back to nostalgically when they were deploring the ‘pessimism’ of Jude [Jude the Obscure] and Tess [Tess of the d’Urbervilles]. But it is not a rustic idyll—although most people thought it was—or a simple romance about three men and a girl. The characters are defined in terms of their work more clearly than in any of the earlier novels: Gabriel and Bathsheba are skilled land-workers or overseers; Boldwood is a respectable gentleman-farmer; Troy is a drifting soldier who could have done much better things with his life. All of them are subordinated to the novel's central preoccupation—the care of the land and flocks, and the maintenance of the community in a condition of health. Individuals are characterised as good or bad directly through their contributions to these ends.

Hardy illustrates what this means in his description of sheep-shearing in the old barn, which has endured for generations because it is necessary for ‘the defence and salvation of the body by daily bread’. He comments:

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of these two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time … For once mediaevalism and modernism had a common standpoint.

The barn is ‘timeless’ not in a romantic or mystical sense but because the human needs for food and shelter never change. The workers in the barn are engaged in a ‘timeless’ activity because they are meeting these needs:

In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

The flashy Troy is contrasted with these workers in the most direct language. ‘With him the past was yesterday; the future, tomorrow; never, the day after’. Completely absorbed in the moment he is unaware of all permanent needs and emotions; his activities are ‘exercised on whatever object chance might place in their way’ and his feelings continually change. His energy usually takes the form of casual destructiveness—we see him aiming ‘light cuts at the horse's ear with the end of the lash, as a recreation’—and his profession is destructive too; he is a soldier, After marrying Bathsheba he squanders the money which she needs to keep up the farm and almost ruins her financially. ‘Nothing has prospered in Weatherbury’, a labourer comments, ‘since he came here’. It is only superficially that he is fascinating, in the ‘scarlet and gilded form’ in which Bathsheba sees him. Shorn of his brilliant externals his human quality is poorer and meaner than that of anyone else in the book.

However it is a mistake to see him, with Douglas Brown, as a destructive urban figure invading a peaceful agricultural community. It is not nearly so simple as that. For one thing he is not the only destructive force in the community (Boldwood is in many ways equally negative) and also—as we shall see later—the community badly needs a positive stimulus from the outside. Troy's links are not so much with cities—he has grown up in Casterbridge—as with the army and the aristocracy. He is an earl's illegitimate son, in many ways a preliminary sketch for Alec d'Urberville (his treatment of Fanny is much the same as Alec's of Tess). Moreover, he represents none of the qualities of education and modernisation which Brown associates with urban influence. He does not try to modernise the farm, but neglects it, and he has had a good education which he has thrown away. Hardy is not praising him when he describes how ‘he wasted his gifted lot, and listed a soldier’. As Gabriel says, this ‘shows his course to be down'ard’. He would have admired him far more if he had developed such abilities as he had.

If Troy is not a sophisticated urban invader, neither is Bathsheba just a simple country maiden who succumbs to his wiles. She is a vain girl, rather like Fancy Day, and she resembles her, too, in being better educated and on a higher social rung than the ordinary villagers. Her parents were townsfolk and she is a stranger to Weatherbury, where the people are surprised by her self-reliance. But, unlike Fancy Day, she is bitterly punished for her vanity and thoughtless flirtations. Having trifled with Boldwood's and Gabriel's feelings, she finds herself tied to Troy who is incapable of loving her or indeed anyone else. We have suspected this before, but we do not fully realise it until we are shown what he has done to Fanny, in her agony on the road to the Casterbridge workhouse, which is shunned by everyone except the most destitute poor.

Bathsheba has to suffer both for her cruelty to Fanny, although this was unconscious, and for betraying her own deepest instincts by marrying Troy. She is rejected by him, imagines herself to be rejected by Gabriel, and has to recognise her share of the responsibility for Boldwood's collapse. As a result, she is agonisingly purged of self-centredness:

Taking no further interest in herself as a splendid woman; she acquired the indifferent feelings of an outsider in contemplating her probable fate as a singular wretch.

When she helps Gabriel to replant the flowers on the grave of the dead girl she had seen as a rival, ‘with the superfluous magnanimity of a woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness upon her instead of love’, she has finally learned to be more like him in not thinking first of herself.

Gabriel is exceptional because ‘among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes’. He keeps silent for years about his love for Bathsheba and brushes off references to the subject—‘I must get used to such as that; other men have, and so shall I’. Boldwood ‘who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel’ is really his moral inferior because he allows his love to turn into a monomania which blinds him to all responsibilities. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy made a rather similar study, in greater detail, of a man who lets his individual passions, which he refuses to control, drive him outside the community. Boldwood is admirable because of his strength of feeling, but destructive and therefore evil because he has let himself become a fanatic. His infatuation causes him to neglect his farm (a symbolic abandonment of social responsibility) and finally drives him to the most extreme anti-social act, murder. That he is not, like Tess, hanged for it is an indication that Hardy still felt at this time that anti-social forces could be controlled and need not work through to full tragedy. The two destructive forces, Troy and Boldwood, end by annihilating each other and the community's shattered peace is restored.

The differing attitudes of the three men are illustrated strikingly in the symbolic storm scene—in many respects the central scene of the book. Troy has forced the labourers to get dead drunk (or ‘look elsewhere for a winter's work’) although he has been warned that the ricks are in danger. Boldwood allows his own ricks to remain exposed because he is absorbed in his despair over Bathsheba's marriage. It is afterwards said that ‘a condition of mental disease seemed to afford the only explanation’ for this ‘unprecedented neglect’. Gabriel, on the other hand, risks his life, although he has been equally hurt by Bathsheba's rejection, to protect her ricks from the storm. His reasons for doing so are mixed:

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? ‘Never, if I can prevent it’, said Gabriel.

But there is also a deeper reason:

It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: ‘I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly.’

Bathsheba and the corn, the human beings who sustain the land and the food which sustains them, become at least equal in their value in Gabriel's eyes. The product of human labour and the value of unselfish human love are defended at the same time.

Bathsheba is significantly the only person who comes to help Gabriel. Throughout the action, although she treats him badly, she is dependent on his strength and endurance to help her through her personal disasters, just as she swallows her pride to appeal to him when the sheep have to be cured. Their relationship is grounded in the experience of years of shared labour—what Hardy calls ‘similarity of pursuits’—in the care of the crops and animals, the well-being of the farm and those who work on it—which is what, in the end, matters most to them both. For Bathsheba is a much stronger character than Fancy; there are much deeper things in her than the passion for being admired. Her feeling for Gabriel, ‘growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality’ turns out to be ‘the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam’.

Gabriel can too easily be seen as the romanticised archetypal countryman. His name and occupation are relevant here. He is the traditional Good Shepherd, saving the flock from disease and new-born lambs from the cold. Yet his character, though strong and simple, is not so from any absence of skill or intelligence. He is only able to cure the sheep because he possesses a certain kind of knowledge which nobody else in the neighbourhood has. The labourers unanimously look up to him as ‘a clever man in talents’:

We hear that ye can tell the time as well by the stars as we can by the sun and moon … and that ye can make sun-dials, and print folks' names upon their waggons almost like copper-plate, with beautiful flourishes.

Besides his familiarity with the traditional skills of outdoor life, Gabriel knows how to play the flute and read his small collection of books to some purpose—‘he had acquired more sound information by diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from a furlong of laden shelves’. Like Bathsheba, he is gifted with a much higher degree of talent and energy than the rest of the community, and so is able to rise to a leading position within it. The simple, reductive pattern of an organic village society threatened by an alien intruder is inevitably complicated when we remember that Gabriel and Bathsheba are intruders themselves. Weatherbury is a sluggish place (‘notoriously prone’, says the Preface, to ‘fuddling’) and the people are ‘as hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any in the whole county’. In fact they are remarkedly like the shiftless Durbeyfield family, quite incapable of coping with the emergencies which come up naturally from time to time in any rural community. It is always Gabriel who has to get them out of their difficulties, like the fire, the storm, and the sheep-disease (as well as recalling them to a sense of decency when Joseph leaves Fanny's coffin outside the inn and gets drunk). Gabriel is himself a victim of one of these calamities when his sheep are destroyed. ‘Sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king’ and left ‘with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more’ he becomes a victim of the rural labour-market when he has to offer himself for work at the hiring fair. Like Bathsheba he has to pass through ‘an ordeal of wretchedness’ before he can find security. Suffering is as real in old-fashioned Wessex villages as it is in the cities and Christminster; Gabriel's great strength is in his ability to adapt and endure. It is through sheer initiative, mixed with luck, that he reaches his final successful and happy position, because as he says himself he was ‘made for better things’ than a life of mechanical toil.

Thus the rural community is not so much threatened from outside by the growth of urbanism as confronted with a series of internal crises which grow out of man's perpetual struggle with nature. In this struggle, those who are most likely to make a success of their lives are the resourceful and persevering, whose qualities are based on a real love and understanding of nature.

In the end the easy-going Weatherbury community, having expelled the destructive forces which menaced it, is revitalised by the two outsiders, Bathsheba and Gabriel. It is as if their eventual and long-postponed union—unromantic and unexciting, as Hardy stresses—has restored the desirable norm to the village; the norm of maintaining communal labour, looking after the sheep, getting food from the land. It is because both of them fundamentally want to live according to this norm that they possess a real basis for marriage, for they have both developed into mature human beings, who are prepared to grapple seriously with their responsibilities both in work and in love.