[In the following essay, Sullivan explores Hardy's notion of “evolutionary meliorism” as it is exhibited in various manifestations of the concept of time in Far from the Madding Crowd.]

Efforts to define Thomas Hardy's philosophical position go on, and on, and on. It has been argued by scholars, and repeated endlessly in seminar and term papers, that he viewed the world as a pessimist, a determinist, or a fatalist. Hardy himself did not want to be considered a philosopher,¹ but he did, on a less abstract level then suggested by the isms noted above, generalize about kinds of action which he thought best for men, and his generalizations do not imply the philosophic positions usually attributed to him. He chose to describe his own ‘idiosyncratic mode of regard’ in the following terms: “let me repeat, if way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst: that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism.”² The process of ‘evolutionary meliorism,’ he said in the same essay, could be achieved by proceeding so that,

pain to all upon it [the world], tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces—unconscious or other—that have “the balancings of the worlds” happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.³

Perhaps it has been for good reason that few critics have tried to see Hardy's novels in terms of evolutionary meliorism. The phrase does not have great currency, and since Hardy did not define it precisely, few have found it useful for thematic discussion of the novels. Moreover, the concept of evolutionary meliorism derives from nineteenth century rationalism, and if it describes Hardy's thought, then it would seem as if we must deny his modernity. Unfortunately, those terms used most frequently in thematic discussion of his novels, such as ‘pessimism,’ or ‘determinism,’ or ‘fatalism,’ although they have the virtue of greater currency, and suggest a fashionable twentieth century despair, lack precision in terms of specific Hardy novels. Farfrae, for example, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, adapts his behavior to changing circumstance and is eventually rewarded. Surely that reward would not have been his had his creator held a purely fatalistic, or pessimistic, view of the world. And in that much maligned sixth book of The Return of the Native, that most well-behaved couple, Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright, link happily for ever after—surely not the conclusion an absolute determinist would have provided for the novel, even under pressure from a fatuous reading public. Other works, such as The Hand of Ethelberta, or Under the Greenwood Tree, or Far From the Madding Crowd, fail to conform to the notions of determinism, or fatalism, or pessimism. Thus it might be well to look more closely, despite its drawbacks of definition and currency, at the phrase which Hardy chose to use to describe his thought—evolutionary meliorism.

Nineteenth century science, the science which made current and acceptable the concept of evolution, was dominated by geological and biological discoveries which made man aware of cosmic, as opposed to clock, time. The evolutionary development of the world, man discovered, had been the work, not of a few thousand years, measurable by man's experience, but of aeons. Such a time scheme dwarfed that held previously by most men. A variety of responses to the new time scheme were possible, and its effect upon thought and literature of the nineteenth century was extremely profound. But whatever else the new time scheme taught man, it must have taught him patience. It taught Hardy, at any rate, to expect melioration to take place over an immense span of time, and that one could seldom expect to see the results of one's efforts to amend the world, but that on any ‘commonplace day,’

In some spot undiscerned on sea or land,
                                                                                some impulse rose,
Or some intent upstole
Of that enkindling ardency from whose
                                                                                maturer glows
The world's amendment flows.(4)

One would certainly need patience to live in such a world. Even the very manner in which Hardy chose to describe ‘evolutionary meliorism’ suggests something of the patience necessary for those who hoped for change. Man could, “stage by stage,” if way there be, with a modicum of free will, on rare occasions, work for the improvement of the world. Since present conditions took ages to effect, it seemed presumptuous to assume that man could effect great and sudden change in those conditions through his own puny activities. Occasions for effecting change didn't appear frequently, and when they arrived man needed to act “through scientific knowledge,” not precipitately, on emotional grounds.

Thus the concept of ‘evolutionary meliorism’ implied a behavioral standard for the individual in relation to time. Hardy's concern with behavior in relation to time may be seen thereby to have an abstract justification. Such a concern was embodied in numerous works. Being ‘too late,’ i.e., out of the proper time, seems to be a frequent difficulty for many of his characters in many of his novels. However, the idea is given its clearest, most concrete fictional embodiment in Hardy's use of images associated with time as indices to character in Far From the Madding Crowd.

Above all, in a world in which change for the better may be ages away, man must be patient; he must resign himself to nature's timetable—which science had shown to be terribly slow. To achieve such resignation was to achieve the proper relationship with time. The rustics in Far From the Madding Crowd, who, through occupation and life style, are kept very close to nature, generally maintain, the novel seems to argue, an ideal relationship with time. In the first place, they respect the power of time. As emblems of that power their watches are given almost religious significance; a watch, to the rustic, has the quality of a fetish. Cain Ball, the shepherd's helper who serves under Gabriel Oak, carries with him a “rather large watch, which dangled in front of the young man pendulumwise.”⁵ Jim Coggan, another rustic, carries “an old pinchbeck repeater which he had inherited from some genius in his family” (p. 241). Paradoxically, however, it is not mere clock time that the rustics respect, but rather time as it is measured by the traditions of their rural life. The building they are associated with, their communal malthouse, has an “Elymas the Sorcerer” pattern upon the door, a pattern Roman in derivation and consequently of great age (p. 59). Inside the malthouse everything is associated with a communal sense of the past. The stone-flag floor has been worn by previous generations until a path shows from the doorway to the kiln; the maltster who operates the place is so old his children are already great-grandfathers. The malthouse habitants revere such great old age. They stop whatever they are doing, when at the malthouse, to pacify the old maltster, who is quick to become irritated when others claim honor for being old, honor which he, understandably, feels to be his proper due. The rustics thus realize their linkage through the ages with the forms which have gone before them. Their sense of time, like that suggested by the ‘evolutionists’ of the nineteenth century, transcends clock time.

Gabriel Oak relates properly with time. Like the rustics, he carries a watch as a fetish; he has, “By way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size” (p. 2). It is an heirloom, older than his grandfather, and he is careful with it, so much so that he only uses it on special occasions when he is dressed up. Most of the time Oak tells the time by natural means—a knowledge of the sun and the stars. Later we are not surprised to learn that one of his many skills is his ability to make sun-dials. His function in the plot is as the enduring, long suffering lover. He waits patiently through the time of Bathsheba's courtship by Boldwood, her marriage to Troy, the violence which marks the end of Troy and Boldwood, and finally Bathsheba's mourning period, until, at last, evidently as much because of endurance as anything else, he wins the hand of the lady farmer. The allusions and the incidents suggest Gabriel's abiding respect for the eternities of time. And although they put him in a perspective with a vast dimension, the added depth suggests that his actions and character are in accord with the dimension—as eternal as time rather than transient. They serve to enhance his dignity rather than to make him appear small.

Hardy is very specific about the libertine Troy's attitude towards time. He tells us of it in the following words:

He [Troy] was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity … His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday: the future, tomorrow; never, the day after.

(p. 190)

But carpe diem, in a world in which change is only wrought by the slow hand of time, is at least impractical, if not sacrilegious. Troy also has a watch, but he treats it without the proper respect. It is his only heirloom from his natural father, but when he sees that Bathsheba does not have a watch he urges her to take his. Thus Troy, that child of impulse—a bastard—gives up his only connection with his father—on an impulse. It is also revelatory of Troy's attitude towards time that he keeps Fanny Robin's hair enclosed in his watch—a sentimental but ineffectual gesture. Moreover, whereas Oak told the time by the sun and the stars when he didn't use his watch, Troy is associated with an unnatural time image other than his watch. It is during his abortive effort to wed Fanny that we see the following paragraph devoted to telling the time:

There was a creaking of machinery behind, and some of the young ones turned their heads. From the interior face of the west wall of the tower projected a little canopy with a quarterjack and small bell beneath it, the automation being driven by the same clock machinery that struck the large bell in the tower. Between the tower and the church was a close screen, the door of which was kept shut during services, hiding this grotesque clockwork from sight. At present, however, the door was open, and the egress of the jack, the blows on the bell, and the mannikin's retreat into the nook again, were visible to many, and audible throughout the church.

(p. 130)

This grotesque machinery, as far removed as possible from the natural means by which Oak tells the time, foreshadows the sinister complications which will be the result of Troy's improper regard for time.

Boldwood's dislocations with natural time are just as severe as Troy's but the imagery used to suggest that dislocation is not as explicit. Boldwood has on his mantle an elaborate timepiece, “surmounted by a spread eagle” (p. 112). Such a timepiece, although not necessarily grotesque, suggests a pretentious kind of artificiality—a concern with time in a shallowly historical sense rather than with the realities of time as sensed by the rustics. For unlike Oak, Boldwood has no sense of communal time, and therefore his actions are often not in accord with the actions of his neighbors, and this, eventually, leads him to disaster. When at the corn exchange, for example, he is the only male who does not seize the occasion to praise Bathsheba with his attention, and this neglect makes her think of him when she finds the terribly fatal valentine. Later, when he is having dinner with Bathsheba and the rustics, he regards her only when the others have turned away. We are told that “when they [the rustics] thanked or praised, he was silent; when they were inattentive he murmured his thanks” (p. 179). At any rate, he acts outside the proper, i.e., communal time scheme, and is therefore not well equipped for success in Hardy's Wessex.

Bathsheba learns the proper respect for time from her experience. The first action we see her undertake in the novel is out of accord with the proper time for it. She is looking in a mirror while sitting on top of a wagonload of household goods in the middle of the road. Hardy wrote of the situation as follows: “The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of such an act—from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time of traveling out of doors—lent to the idle deed a novelty it did not intrinsically possess … Woman's prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight” (p. 5). From this relatively innocent dislocation with time she progresses to more serious difficulties. Once she has risen in the world she becomes quite new fashioned, concerned, like Troy, with the pleasures of the moment yet, like Boldwood, given to pretense, to the aggrandizement of the importance of her moment in time. Either way, she succumbs to a sense of clock time, of historical rather than communal, i.e., natural and evolutionary, time. Her unreflecting attitude without regard for the future makes her, like Troy, obedient to impulse during the early part of her career. That she sends the valentine to Boldwood is ample evidence of her impulsive attitude. Later, when she is becoming established as a farmer, the old maltster interprets her purchase of “great watches, getting on to the size of clocks, to stand upon the chimbley-piece,” as a form of pride (p. 120). However, after her marriage to Troy, she no longer acts impulsively; for example, she refuses until after the most lengthy contemplation to even consider a proposal from Boldwood. Later, her period of mourning for Troy equals the traditional, and therefore, perhaps, communal, length of time—one year, and finally, her marriage to Oak would suggest that she will adopt his true, communal, conception of time.

Nature's way of change was as slow as the process which caused imperceptible transitions on Norcombe Hill. To adapt to nature's way was, Hardy evidently felt, to accept its pace, its measure of time. If man were attuned to that pace, as were the rustics, and Oak, then he could work patiently for moderate change in his condition. The novel thus exemplifies at least one aspect of Hardy's concept of evolutionary meliorism. Perhaps, in order to insure a more complete understanding of other Hardy novels we should forsake the more current, but less exact labels so often used in thematic discussion of his work, and explore instead the relationship between the author's avowed philosophic position and the form of his novels.

Notes

1. Hardy disclaimed the role of the philosopher on various occasions. He argued that a novel is “an impression, not an argument” (The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, New York, 1930; 175). On another occasion Hardy argued that The Dynasts was “based on a tentative theory of things … whether it [the theory] was true or false little affected his object …” (The Dynasts, New York; 1919; viii). Still later, in reply to a 1917 article in the Fortnightly he argued that his works of art should not be treated as “scientific systems of philosophy” but as “seemings” or “impressions” which were “used for artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age, and are plausible, till somebody produces better theories of the universe” (The Later Years, 175).

2. Thomas Hardy, “Apology,” Late Lyrics and Earlier, Wessex Edition, V (London, 1926), ix. Two studies have traced the melioristic aspect of Hardy's thought. J. O. Bailey in “Evolutionary Meliorism in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy,” Studies in Philology, LX (July 1963), 569-587, traces this aspect of Hardy's thought in Hardy's poetry, but argues that the idea did not really develop early enough in Hardy's mind to be of any bearing upon the novels. However, Roy Morrell, in a brief article (“Hardy in the Tropics: Some Implications of Hardy's Attitude Towards Nature,” Review of English Literature, III [January 1962], 7-21) and later, in a book-length study, (Thomas Hardy; The Will and the Way, Kuala Lumpur, 1965) sought to demonstrate how those ideas associated with evolutionary meliorism were also apparent in the novels. Morrell's studies, insofar as they were concerned with evolutionary meliorism, were primarily concerned with demonstrating that the idea did, indeed appear in the novels. What follows, in my study, is an attempt to reveal that idea pattern as fundamental to the structure of one early novel.

3. Thomas Hardy, “Apology,” Late Lyrics and Earlier, Wessex Edition, V (London, 1926), x.

4. Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York, 1925), 105.

5. Thomas Hardy. Far From the Madding Crowd (New York, 1918), 250. All my page references are to this edition.