The technique of Thomas Hardy

Front matter

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Preface

Since the death of Meredith and Swinburne, Mr. Hardy remains the last of the great Victorian masters. His extraordinary charm, together with his significance as an interpreter of hfe, has attracted many critics to write extensively of him, and especially of his novels. Poets of such distinction as Lionel Johnson and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie have written beautifully of him in prose; and he has been made the subject of one exhaustive study, especially in reference to his philosophy, by Mr. F. C. Hedgcock, presented to the University of Paris as a thesis for the degree of Docteur es-Lettres. University professors like Mr. H. C. Dufl&n, of Birmingham, and Dr. Samuel Chew, of Bryn Mawr, have made elaborate studies, now of the Wessex Novels, now of his whole literary output. The study which I am offering is more special than any of these. It is a study of Hardy's novels almost exclusively in reference to their technique.

Studies in the technique of the novel are, it seems to me, imduly rare. The literary history of the novel has been largely taken up with subject-matter, style, social significance, the differentiae of realism and romanticism. Until the appearance a few months ago of Mr. Percy Lubbuck's brilliant and subtle book on The Craft of Fiction, the novel has been very little subjected to that technical study which has been carried so far with the epic, the sonnet, the short story, the drama. By technique I mean the structural art of the novel: the method of assembling and ordering these elements of subjectvi PREFACE

matter, social criticism, and the like. The novel has been so democratic a medium, so little regarded as anything more than an evening's entertainment or the vehicle of instruction and propaganda, that scant attention has been given, especially in Saxon countries, to strictly artistic standards applying to it. And such standards as have been imported from the continent have reference rather to style — le mot precis — or mere truth to nature. These are certainly matters of the first importance; and it would be hard to exaggerate the service rendered to art by Mr. Howells' worship of Balzac or Mr. Moore's worship of Flaubert. But there is a limit to what can be said upon these subjects, and the limit has long since been reached. Only the genius can find a fresh word to say on the subject of realism, romance, or style. Form, on the other hand, is virgin soil; and there is no aspect of novel-writing that more invites to patient and leisurely study.

It is not by accident that the author of The Craft of Fiction is one who was a personal friend of Henry James and the editor of his letters. No writer of novels in English has given more attention than James to the question of technique, and probably none has had a stronger influence on the technique of novelists now writing. It was this consideration which led me to make such a detailed study of him in an earlier volume. If James is not a popular story-teller, it is not, I think, because of his preoccupaition with form, but in spite of it. The proof hes in the relatively great popularity of Mr. Conrad, who owes so very much to the technical example of James. The case of Mr. Conrad, by the way, shows what confusion reigns in the critical mind in reference to the

PREFACE vii

technique of the novel. Mr. Conrad is often regarded as a novelist who holds our fascinated attention in spite of his violation of all the plain rules of story-teUing. And this because he does not always tell his story straightforward in chronological sequence, and because he so often interposes the mind of some Captain Marlow between us and the events of the story! It is evident how little attention has been given to the art of telling a story when critics blame a great writer for emplo)dng two of the commonest of the methods of the colloquial spinner of yams for piquing the curiosity, maintaining suspense, and creating the illusion of truth.

Far be it from me to suggest that there is some one sacred method of writing a novel, and to join with those who, at one time or another, have imdertaken to put in an academic straight-jacket the writer of plays, of epics, of short-stories! There are many excellent methods: I am as well pleased with that of Dorothy Richardson or Waldo Frank as -with that of Edith Wharton; and I find the diverse methods of H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy as well adapted to their respective aims as the diverse methods of Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But I think it would be interesting to have these various methods classified, and in the case of the great novelists, to have available a somewhat detailed description of their practice. This is an undertaking especially suitable to the imiversity teacher and his more advanced pupils; it calls for all the taste and discretion at their command, as well as appealing to their special genius for scrupulous and systematic observation of fact. And such study would be well worth while in the present stage of creative fertility and critical barrenness. For one thing it would viii PREFACE

direct our attention to the neglected subject of method. And it would put us in a better position to judge how far this and that novelist has employed method of any kind, and how far he may have suffered from his neglect or gained by taking thought.

In the case of Hardy, the reader must often wonder whether he was a deliberate structural artist, whether the occasional greatness of his work was not rather the result of a technique which came to him, as we say, by inspiration, and whether indeed the unfailing charm of his work, in whatever degree of greatness, is not something independent of questions of technique. Technique is but one of several factors determining the appeal of any writer; and Hardy with his frequent obliviousness to art is a greater novelist than James with his unceasing vigilance. Moreover, questions of technique are so intimately boimd up with questions of philosophy and subject-matter that they cannot be considered altogether in isolation. But structural art is a more important matter than it has been generally considered; the work of Hardy, like that of Meredith, suffered decidedly from the typical Victorian indifference to it. And the moral of our present study will be derived in large part from technical considerations; we shall be mainly concerned with whatever principles of composition, consciously held or followed instinctively, we can find in Hardy 's novels, great or less great.

J. W. B.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

July IS, 1922

Contents

PAGE

Art and Ceatt in the Novels of Hardy: Foreword . 3

Part One: Progress in Art

I. Ingenuity: Desperate Remedies . . 23

I II. Irony: A Pair of Blue Eyes 36

illl. SETTmo: Far from the Madding Crowd .... 45

IV. Drama: The Return of the Native 80

Part Two: More Craft than Art

V. Relapse: The Hand of Ethelberta . .... 109

The Trumpet-Major . . . • 113

A Laodicean .... ... 117

Two on a Tower ... ... 121

The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid . 124

The Well-Beloved . . .127

VI. Movie: The Mayor of Casterbridge . . . 134

VII. Chronicle: The Woodlanders 158

Part Three: Art and Craft at One

•jVUI. Fity: Tess of the D'Urbervilles . . . . 179

1 IX. Truth: Jude the Obscure . 218

ART AND CRAFT IN THE NOVELS OF HARDY: FOREWORD

ART AND CRAFT IN THE NOVELS OF HARDY: FOREWORD

The most remarkable thing about Mr. Hardy's novels, for anyone who takes them in sequence, is their extreme unevenness of quality. It is everywhere agreed to rank the author of Tess of the D'Urbervilles as the most serious EngKsh novelist of his time. No one doubts that he has produced works of noble beauty, has made an illuminating representation of life, has ranged his facts in the light of a significant philosophy. And yet this artist, this philosopher, this scientist in human nature, is the author of works that by their crudeness positively put his lovers to the blush.

It is not merely that he served a long apprenticeship, that he was exceptionally late at arriving at the fullness of power. There is something regular about a slow development in one's art, something legitimate and pleasing to the mind of the critic, who doesn't like to think of such things as coming too much by inspiration. Quite a different thing is the backshding of an artist who has once found his salvation — the production of greatly inferior work, of obviously less serious work, after he has proved his capacity for the best. We are content to recognize in Desperate Remedies the imitativeness, the offer of ingenuity for originality, proper to a first novel. But after he had found his own rich vein in Far from the Madding Crowd, to undertake that abortive experiment in "comedy," The Hand of Ethelherta; after

4 ART AND CRAFT

he had produced the Sophoclean drama of The Native, to indulge in the ahnost childish melodrama of A Laodicean! As for The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, there is something brazen in coming to us, the connoisseurs, with such wares. Or is it possible that he was not really coming to us, the connoisseurs, but had in mind a quite different market, for which he was fabricating a quite different sort of wares ?

What really was the attitude of Thomas Hardy toward his art? What ideals did he actually hold for a novel? And how far was he willing to compromise his ideals for the sake of popularity ?

What he thinks of his own work often appears, so far as the exigencies of the trade allow, in the several prefaces attached to the novels in the collected edition or earlier. Of Desperate Remedies he speaks very candidly. It was "the first published by the author," and was written " at a time when he was feeling his way to a method. The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt, too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest." A similar condescending, or apologetic, tone may be heard in the prefatory notices to many of the later novels, especially those classified as "novels of ingenuity" and as "romances and fantasies."' I fancy that Mr. Hardy, if he felt free to express an opinion, would be likely to pass more severe judgment upon certain of his performances than any of his readers.

' These are two of the headings under which the stories were classified in the collected "Wessex Novels" of Messrs. Macnullan. The strongest of his novels, as well as two volumes of his tales, are included under "novels of character and environment."

It is notorious what a superciKous attitude he has taken, in these later years of poetic production, toward his stories in general. But if he could so far condescend as to distinguish among his fictions, he would certainlyexpress himself more emphatically on the diflFerence between, say, the "somewhat frivolous narrative" of Ethelberta and the "stories of more sober design" between which it came as "an interlude." He knows!

Mr. Hardy seems always to have taken a serious view of his obligations to the truth of human nature. This appears both in the articles on the novel which he contributed to magazines,' and in certain prefatory declarations in reference to his own, even his earlier, works. Even in Desperate Remedies, with its tangled melodramatic plot, "some of the scenes, and at least one of the characters" were "deemed not unworthy of a little longer preservation." Even in The Hand of Ethelberta, while "a high degree of probability was not attempted in the arrangement of the incidents," "the characters themselves were meant to be consistent and human."

But still, so far as the incidents were concerned, a high degree of probability was not attempted in their arrangement; and in general it is clear that Mr. Hardy did not take so seriously truth to event as truth to character. In his magazine articles he shows a considerable indulgence for improbabilities in the plot of a novel, declaring that minute vraisemblance is not essential

' See especially his article on "The Profitable Reading of Fiction" in the Forum for March, 1888.

6 ART AND CRAFT

to a true representation of life. Human nature is human nature, but a plot is a plot.

It is in Kne with such a view that the author should not think it necessary in every case to invent his own plots. One might think this essential in order that the sequence of events should be precisely what would naturally follow from the characters and the circumstances in which they are placed. But this is not the kind of scruple that troubles an author of Hardy's force in the manipulation of materials. We know that, in the case of at least one of his greatest novels, he did not find his own plot — in Far from the Madding Crowd. This fact came out when the novel was dramatized, and it proved to have the same plot as Pinero's play, The Squire. Tiresome litigation resulted; and it appeared that the same woman had sold the plot separately to each of the two authors.'

We may here at least suppose that, if the story was not made to fit the characters, the characters were made to fit the story, and that their acts and the conclusion were duly considered in reference to the proper "inevitableness of character and environment in working out destiny."^ But there is the case of another more high-handed and supercilious treatment of mere plot in the still more serious work. The Return of the Native. We have it from Hardy's own lips that, in this masterpiece, he was deliberately conforming to the taste of the British pubHc by appending to his tragic story a conclusion in which the minor characters remaining on the stage are happily joined in matrimony. The story was

• This statement is made in the Critic, XL VIII (1906), 293. " Mr. Hardy's own words in the Forum article referred to.

originally intended to close with the drowning of Wildeve and Eustacia at the end of the fifth book; and Mr. Hardy directs readers with "an austere artistic code" to "assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.'" But "certain circumstances of serial publication"^ — ^presumably the advice of the editor of Belgravia — led him to add a supplementary book, entitled Aftercourses, which, as Hardy mischievously expresses it in the argument prefixed to this book in the magazine version, "shortly relates the gradual righting of affairs after the foregoing catastrophe." It was a considerable sacrifice to the gods of the mart. To be sure, there was nothing improbable about the marriage of Thpmasin and Venn; and the reddleman quite as well deserved the lady by long suit and service as Gabriel Oak deserved Bathsheba in an earlier story. But The Return of the Native was a work of such beautiful harmonious design, with the material so cunningly disposed in the five original books, like acts, and the story brought so straight and just to its inevitable tragic ending, that it was a great pity to have the effect impaired by this half-hearted concession of tepid happiness.

Hardy is certainly not given over in general to the convention of the happy marriage as the conclusion of a tale in which, for the entertainment of the reader, the course of true love is made to run not smooth. A review of his plots would show at once his predilection for the period following marriage as provoking the most varied and illuminating display of human nature. As

' These quotations are taken from Professor Cunliffe's introduction to The Return of the Native in the Modern Student's Library published by Scribners.

8 ART AND CRAFT

late as 1880, however, and after the publication of nearly half his novels, he found himself strenuously dictating a narrative "to a predetermined cheerful ending." He hopes that A Laodicean may find favor with "that large and happy section of the reading pubUc which has not yet reached ripeness of years; those to whom marriage is the pilgrim's Eternal City, and not a milestone on the way."

It is probable that a large proportion of those who have "reached ripeness of years" will join their suffrages to those of their juniors in favor of stories that picture marriage as "the pilgrim's Eternal City, and not a milestone on the way." And no doubt Hardy was doing well to keep in touch in this respect with the great reading public, during at least the earlier half of his career, while he was making a place for himself. That is presumably the price which most young writers have to pay for the privilege of writing later as they please.

^' And it is clear that Mr. Hardy never did get far out of range of his pubUc' He never — like Meredith — ignored his public; he never — like Mr. George Moore ■ — ^wrote for a foreign public, as it were; he never — like Henry James — abandoned in mid-career a pubUc whom he had once secured.

•Mr. Hardy's consideration for the sensibilities of the public is shown throughout his career by his singular delicacy in the treatment of all that pertains to sex. This is particularly evident in the emasculated versions of incidents in The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'UrbervUles, The Well-Beloved, and Jude the Obscure, as first given to the public in serial form. In The Return of the Native, some of the excisions and modifications incident to this process were continued through many years of serial publication. The curious reader

It is clear that he did not disdain the inherited tools of his trade. I will not say that he did not write for an ideal. But he did not set up an ideal without regard for the views of the reading world. He did not live in an ivory tower. The novel he conceived of as a piece of work for the entertainment of readers. He produced for consumption. He was bent on doing good work; but he was likewise determined to make a success.

He was a regular craftsman — like Dickens, working for the success of his popular magazines; like Shakespeare, actor and manager, working over popular plays for the King's Company, having in mind the motley audiences of the Rose and the Globe.

Here was a young man conscious of artistic abihties, but not at first sure in what direction they lay. He was soon satisfied they lay in the direction of letters rather than of architecture. He felt sure he could write novels; but he was not at first sure what kind of novels to write. He had to try out various kinds, to determine where his own vein lay. We must bear in mind that the true art of Hardy is an original creation — and that is something that carmot be hurried into existence. There it lies in the depths of time, in the great mystery of uncreated things. We recognize it now; it seems as is referred to my article on "Bowdlerized Versions of Hardy," dealing particularly with The Native, which appeared in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XXXVI (1921), 632-45. The alterations in The Well-Beloved were noted by Dr. Mary EUen Chase in her thesis for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Minnesota; in her subsequent thesis for the Doctorate of Philosophy she made a similar study of The Mayor of Casterhridge, Tess, and Jude. These studies win no doubt be published in substance within the next year or two.

lo ART AND CRAFT

natural and familiar as the forms which have been with us since the beginning of the world. But before it came, no one conceived of it, no one dreamed it — not the author himself. The author himself had to find it. And when he did find it, he had to recognize it; he had to have the faith to declare, against the indifference of the world: "Here is a great new thing I have found; here I will rest." How should Hardy have known in advance the priceless value of that "Wessex" of his childhood recollections? How should he have been able to distinguish in that "Wessex" what he actually felt and knew from what he thought he felt and knew, having absorbed it from hteraiy tradition ? And when he had actually separated the good new wheat from the moldy grain of traditional art, how should he have found strength of faith at once to hold to the good ?

His first novel was submitted to Chapman and Hall for publication; and the author was advised by the publisher's reader — one George Meredith — that, for a first novel, it dealt too much in social criticism.' Perhaps it was the swing of the pendulima which led to the writing of Desperate Remedies, the first novel to see the light. This appeared in 1871. It was the year following the death of the author of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend; and if there were two novels of the preceding decade which had as great a vogue as those of Dickens, they were, I suppose, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. Is it any wonder that the aspirant for honors in the novel should have put forth a book in which the principles of

' This statement is made by Edmund Gosse in an article in the International Rmevi for September, 1901.

FOREWORD II

composition were "too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and moral obKquity are depended on for exciting interest" ?

The greatest puzzle comes in the years following The Return of the Native (1878). The artist capable of producing that strong and shapely work was surely capable of judging it to be his great original contribution to the English novel. And yet we find him, in the five years that follow, turning out, one after the other, and each worse than the other. The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower, and The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. In most of these novels there is a promising subject, and we are led to expect a really significant picture of human nature and the social order. But the possibilities of the theme were generally not worked out, the actual recourse of the novelist being to complicated and melodramatic intrigue. With The Romantic Adventures he reached his nadir. In the following years he produced two really fine novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders; but not before 1891, the date of Tess, not for twelve years after The Native, did he offer any work approaching it in splendor.

Perhaps we should take into account the long illness referred to by Mr. Hardy in the Preface to A Laodicean. This illness may be sufficient to explain both the inferiority of that novel and the continued low level of his work in Two on a Tower and The Adventures of a Milkmaid. But there are other clues equally promising. In the composition of The Native virtue must have gone out of the author. One cannot presumably go on producing such work without intervals of rest. Was it not natural, after the strenuous labor on this master-

12 ART AND CRAFT

piece, for Mr. Hardy to turn deliberately to tasks of less exacting nature ?

The whole record, moreover, leads one to suppose that Mr. Hardy made a more or less conscious distinction between the demands of his art and those of his craft; and that, in the intervals of his great original efforts, he felt called upon to try out for himself the more customary — not to say shopworn' — ^methods of the trade. The present-day reader, brought up on the greater novels of Hardy, can make no such distinction: he cannot detect good craftsmanship where he does not rejoice in the recognition of fine art. However it may have been in the past, this novelist is bound to find his readers henceforth solely among those who love him for his art; and such readers are sure to regret as a loss to art whatever was written with an eye to the craft alone.

Plot was, for Hardy, the one thing needful. Perhaps he thought that was what the pubHc wanted, and perhaps he was right. But that was not all. Plot was, I believe, the one thing essential in his own ideal of a novel. He seems to have read life in terms of action, objective action; in terms of brute incident, things happening. And he craved, moreover, complication of incident, a web of action crossing and recrossing.

He seems to have been strongly under the influence of the older English novelists. His language is conservative, precise, a little cxmibrous, a little quaint, favoring in idiom the eighteenth-century writers, or at the latest Walter Scott.' He seems to have been very little

'■ It is also at times very beautiful, as I shall take more than one occasion to point out.

influenced by the continental fiction of his day.' He escaped abnost wholly the great contemporary tendency to subordinate incident to psychology. In the code of his contemporaries, there is no greater artistic disgrace than the unexcused emergence of the naked fact. Every fact must give account of itself in terms of character and sentiment. And it is against the code to make use of a major incident where a minor incident would do. But the mind of Hardy is very matter of fact. He is deeply impressed with the objective conditions of happiness. And he cleaves to the school of Fielding and /- Scott; he employs the large bold stroke. He is not afraid of incident. He has an Elizabethan gallantry in confronting life in its whole range of action and passion. And he is too often carried away by his audacity. However interesting his theme, however true to life , his characters, he insists on embroiling them in action \ so strange and tangled as to produce on the reader's j mind an impression of artificial contrivance. Even in his latest novel of all, if we were not so much absorbed in the psychology of Sue and the aspirations of Jude, we should be inclined to question the plausibility of a plot which takes on so remarkable a pattern as is indicated by the following schedule of parallel actions and recurrences:

Jude marries Arabella; Sue marries Phillotson.

Jude divorces Arabella; Sue is divorced by Phillotson.

Sue remarries Phillotson; Jude remarries Arabella.

' Very little influenced, at least, in matters of technique; more so, perhaps, in philosophy and subject-matter, though I do not feel confident even of this.

14 ART AND CRAtT

In Two on a Tower, we have a sense of unreality as we contemplate the series of unlucky accidents which prevent the happiness of the leading characters. That Swithin's great astronomical discovery should have been forestalled by about six weeks is quite on the cards for an aspirant to fame in science. That Sir Blount's death should have taken place really six weeks after Lady Constantine's remarriage, so rendering it void, begins to look like a malign arrangement of fate. That she should have learned of coming motherhood just too late to catch Swithin, somewhere out of reach in the Southern hemisphere, looks like an arrangement of the author's. And that she should die of joy at being kissed by her returned lover some years later, when there is no longer any bar to her felicity, is nothing short of persecution.

Mr. Hardy loves in plot the fantastic, the surprising, something to strike the imagination. He is fond of ranging in that neutral ground where irony and poetry join hands, where the circumstances of men's lives combine in patterns bizarre and thought-provoking. His plots are often original to the point of incredibility. And yet he has no scorn for hackneyed motives' — those

' We have the secret marriage, for example, in Two on a Tower, The Romantic Adventures, and The Well-Beloved; the Squire of Low Degree in A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Woodlanders, and the little novel, or long tale, called The Waiting Supper; the villainous illegitimate son in Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, and A Laodicean; the woman's secret, fatal or otherwise, in Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta, Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (see section 5 of chapter viii); the return of the absent one in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Waiting Supper, with the theme in Two on a Tower, Tess, and Jude the Obscure.

popular plot-formulas that have piqued the curiosity and arrested the fancy of readers from time immemorial. The secret marriage; the "squire of low degree," favored by the heroine but not by her parents; the villainous illegitimate son; the woman's fatal secret; the return of the absent lover, or relative, thought dead, to spoil sport for the living — each of these makes its appearance more than once, most of them three or four times, in the novels of Hardy.

But Hardy is Shakespearean in his ability to give a gloss to commonplace action; and he is Shakespearean too in his faculty of combining time-honored motives in such a way as to give the effect of novelty, and restore them to their original power of provoking wonder. No one need be surprised to find the illegitimate son to be a villain, not since the son of Gloster practiced villainy in King Lear. But the fashion in which young Dare leads his father into wrongdoing in A Laodicean is a bright new coin in the story-teller's mint.