BOOKS.
"FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD."•
No one who reads this very original and amusing story will doubt for a moment that it is the production of a very high order of ability and humour. Everything in the book is fresh, and almost- everything in the book is striking. The life of the agricultural districts in the South-Western counties—Dorsetshire probably— is a new field for the novelist, and at least so far as the physical forms of nature and the external features of the farm-work are concerned, it has been mastered by the author of this tale. The details of the farming and the sheep-keeping, of the labouring, the feasting, and the mourning, are painted with all the vividness of a powerful imagination, painting from the stores of a sharply-out- lined memory. The reader sees in turn the life of the shepherd in lambing-time, of the bailiff and his out-door labourers at the homestead, of the mistress on her pay-day, the interior of the malt- house and its gossip, the corn-market at the county town, the thunder-storm which breaks np the fine harvest weather, the rural inn and its company, the sheep-fair on the downs, the tenant- farmer's Christmas merry-making or effortat merry-making, and the village group which watches the entrance of the Judge into the Assize town ; and from everything he reads he carries away new images, and as it were, new experience, taken from the life of a region before almost unknown. A book like this is, in relation to many of the scenes it describes, the nearest equivalent to actual experience which a great many of us are ever likely to boast of. But the very certainty we feel that this is the case—that we have no adequate means of checking a good deal of the very fresh and evidently closely-observed detail which we find in this book— puts us upon asking all the more anxiously whether all the viva- cious description we have here is quite trustworthy, not only in its picture of the scenery and ways of life, but in its picture of the human beings who give the chief interest to that scenery and those ways of life. And here the reader who has any general acquaintance with the civilisation of the Wiltshire or Dorsetshire labourer, with his average wages, and his average intelligence, will be disposed to say at once that a more in- credible picture than that of the group of farm labourers as a whole which Mr. Hardy has given us can hardly be con- ceived,—that he has filled his canvas with an assemblage of all the exceptional figures which a quick-witted humorist might discover here and there and sift with much pains out of a whole county ; that if any one society of agricultural labourers were at all like that which we find here, that class, as a whole, must be a treasure-house of such eccentric shrewdness and profane-minded familiarity with the Bible, as would cancel at once the repu- tation rural England has got for a heavy, bovine character, and would justify us in believing it to be a rich mine of quaintnesses and oddities, all dashed with a curious flavour of mystical and Biblical transcendentalism. Even in the delineations of the less humble characters there is plenty of reason to suspect that Mr. Hardy has from time to time embodied in the
• Far from the Madding Crowd. By Thomas Hardy. 2 vole. Smith, Elder and Co.
objects of his studies some of the subtler thoughts which they have suggested to his own mind, or some of the more cultivated metaphors to which he would himself have given utterance had he been in their place, but which come most unnaturally from the mouths from which they actually proceed. Thus when the farm-labourers are coming up to be paid, the malt- ster's great grand-daughter, Liddy Smallbury, who is the farming heroine's humble companion, — half-friend, half-servant,— an- nounces this event to her mistress in the words, " The Philistines are upon us 1" just as an art critic might say when the general public swarm in on the day of a private view ; and again, the old maltster, who can't either count or speak English, is made to say, when moralising on the uprooting of an apple-tree and the trans- formation of a pump, with an extravagance that must be intended for broad humour, " How the face of nations alter, and what great revolutions we live to see now-a-days !" Nay, even the poorest creatures in the story break out into the same kind of intellectual banter, not only at times, but almost habitually. For instance, Jan Coggan, a rural labourer, who, on his first introduction, is delineated as the joker of his class, though an elderly member of it, is described as bantering a poor fellow named Laban Tall (who is under the strict dominion of a wife he has just married), on his early retreat from their social gathering, in the following words, " New lords, new laws, as the saying is !"—a remark, as it seems to us, of quite another moral latitude and longitude, just as _ the repeater-watch which, it appears, on the occasion of a drunken revel in the barn—in celebration of the harvest and of the mistress's marriage—that the same Jan Coggan carries in his waistcoat -pocket, seems to suggest a totally different world of physical belongings. But the peculiarity, as we have already hinted, of this tale is, that not merely one or two, but almost all the labourers introduced in it talk in a peculiar style, deeply infiltrated with the suggestions of a kind of moral irony mostly borrowed, no doubt, from the study of the Bible, but still applied in a manner in which neither uneducated Churchmen nor uneducated Dissenters—(and these people are all of the Church)—would dream of applying it. When Manse Headrigg, in Old Mortality, says, " By the aid of my God I have leaped over a wall," the humour is in the novelist, not in her who applies the text in grim puritanic seriousness. But when Bathsheba Everdene reproaches her servant, Mary- ann Money, "u person who for a face had a circular disc, furrowed less by age than by long gazes of perplexity at distant objects," with not being married and off her hands, and that individual replies, "What between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand for- lorn as a pelican in the wilderness,—ah poor soul of me !" we recognise at once the introduction of a satiric vein belonging to the author's own mental plane into the lan- guage of a class very far removed from it. The same traces of an intellectual graft on coarse and vulgar thoughts are visible in every one of the many amusing and often most humorous conversations recorded'in this book. The whole class of hoers, sowers, ploughmen, reapers, &c., are—if Mr. Hardy's pictures may be trusted—the most incredibly amusing and humorous persons you ever came across,—full of the quaintest irony and the most comical speculative intelligence. Mrs. Cramp is an im- possible though most amusing impersonation of the monthly nurse. But Mrs. Gamp makes no claim to any shrewdness beyond the shrewdness of the most profound selfishness ; for the rest, she is only a delightful and impossible concentration of the essence of all conceivable monthly-nurse experiences. But these poor men are quizzical critics, inaccurate divines, keen-eyed men of the world, who talk a semi-profane, semi-Biblical dialect full of veins of humour which have passed into it from a different sphere.
Mr. Hardy himself has adopted a style of remark on his own imaginative creations which is an exaggeration of George Eliot's, but he has made the mistake which George Eliot never makes, of blending a good deal of this same style of thought with the substance of his drawings. The following passage strikes us as a study almost in the nature of a careful caricature of George Eliot :—
"The phases of Boldwood's life were ordinary enough, but his was not an ordinary nature. Spiritually and mentally, no less than socially, a common-place general condition is no conclusive proof that a man has not potentialities above that level. In all cases this state may be either the mediocrity of inadequacy, as was Oak's, or what we will venture to call the mediocrity of counterpoise, as was Boldwood's. The quiet mean to which we originally found him adhering, and in which, with few exceptions, he had continually moved, was that of neutralisation: it was not structural at all. That stillness, which strack casual observers more than anything else in his
character and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest of inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous antagonistic forces— positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once."
Again, the words we have italicised in the following short de- scription of the labourer Joseph Poorgrass, when he is in a state of alarm at Shepherd Oak's burst of wrath, are still more close to George Eliot's ordinary style of criticism on her characters, and might easily have betrayed a casual reader into a belief that it was her• work he had taken up :— " We hear that ye be a extraordinary good and clever man, shepherd,' said Joseph Poorgrass with considerable anxiety from behind the maltster's bedstead, whither he had retired for safety. "'Tis a great' thing to be ()lever, I'm sure," he added, making small movements associated with states of mind rather than body ; "we wish we were,. don't we, neighbours ?"
But George Eliot never confuses her own ideas with those of her dramatic figures, as Mr. Hardy seems to us so often to do. For instance, the exceedingly amusing but rather impossible person just referred to in the previous extract, Joseph Poorgrass, is made to• say, in the course of a speech intended to prove that he must leave- his drinking companions and get to his work, "I've been, drinky once this month already, and 1 did not go to ohurch a-Sunday, and I dropped a curse or two yesterday ; so I don't want to go too far from my safety. Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered lightly,"—where we maintain that the- last sentence is quite out of the plane of the rest of the speech, and much more in the style of half-cynical culture. Again, in the same- conversation, Jan Coggan remarks, " Joseph Poorgrass, don't be so miserable. Parson Thirdly won't mind. He's a generous man ; he's found me in tracts for years, and Pm consumed a good many in the course of a long and rather shady life ; but he's never. been the man to complain of the expense, sit down,"—where,. again, we maintain that the tone of the words we have italicised is not the tone of such a labourer at all, but the tone of a man of some culture girding at himself. Indeed, throughout his most amusing and humorous pictures of the rural labourer's talk, Mr. Hardy seems to us, while using first-rate materials derived froin, real observation, constantly to be shuffling his own words or tone of thought with those of the people he is describing. It is the main fault of drawing in a most amusing book. But it is a great one..
As to the main characters of the story, it seems to us that two, namely, Serjeant Troy and Farmer Boldwood, are both of them conceived and executed with very great power, while Shepherd Oak_ and Bathsheba remain from the beginning to the end only half- conceived and half-drawn figures. The stiffness, the awkward. reserve, the seeming stolidity, the latent heat, and the smouldering- passion which when once kindled eats up Farmer Boldwood's whole nature, are painted with the pen of a considerable artist, nor- does the vigour of the picture ever flag for a moment; and the- tragical denouement is in the strictest keeping with the first descrip- tion of Boldwood's mode of receiving Bathsheba's careless valentine; Again, Serjeant Troy's bold and unprincipled gallantry, his reck- less selfishness, and his bursts of at once cruel and remorseful_• passion when he finds he has killed the only woman he ever- loved, without casting a thought on the fact that he has also- rained the happiness of the woman he married, but did not love, are equally strongly painted, and the scene in which he exhibits to Bathsheba his dexterity with his sword is one of quite exceptional power and skill. Among the minor characters, the common-place, but good-natured Liddy Smallbury, Bathsheba's servant-com- panion, and Fanny Robin, the victim of Serjeant Troy, seem to us much the most complete and consistent. There are delicacy and finish in both these common-place studies, and barring the one ex- clamation we have quoted from Liddy, "The Philistines are on us," there is nothing whatever out of drawing. Liddy's language of familiar praise and remonstrance to her mistress is always admir- ably conceived, and even in the smallest details her bearing is perfectly imagined, as, for instance, in the scene where her mis- tress summons the labourers on the farm to make it known that she will employ no bailiff for the future, but at the same time inaugurates her own reign by the generous present of half-a- sovereign each. When Bathsheba poured out her small heap of coin on the table, "Liddy took up a position at her elbow, and began to sew, sometimes pausing and looking round, or, with the air of a privileged person, taking up one of the half-sovereigns lying before her, and admiringly surveying it as a work of art merely, strictly preventing her countenance from expressing any wish to possess it as money." That is but a touch. But every- thing seems to us to be in keeping with that touch. And the few scenes in which Fanny Robin is sketched are equally skilful.
It is a disappointment to us not to speak equally well of the hero
and heroine, as they may be called, Oak and Bathsheba,. But they appear to us to have shared the fate of so many heroes and heroines in more cultivated classes, of being liable to the charge of a certain want of intellectual meaning. Oak is from the first a paragon of a shepherd and manager, and though he can speak his mind plainly enough to the mistress to whom he is so much devoted, there is always a sense on the reader's part of not really knowing the background of his character. Bathsheba is at first much more strongly outlined, and during the scenes in which she falls in love with Troy we begin to think Mr. Hardy is likely to make something great of her. But, on the whole, she falls back into an uninterestingness of which we cannot exactly define the reason, unless it is her disposition to shilly-shally with Farmer Boldwood after her loss of Troy, which seems un- natural in a young woman of so very strong a character, who had already had so much experience of the consequences of a false step.
It would be a very defective criticism of this striking tale which said nothing of the beauty of its descriptive sketches. Many of them are pictures of the most delicate and vivid beauty,—water- colours in words, and very fine ones too. Take this, for instance, of a summer dawn :—
" A coarse-throated chatter was the first sound. It was a sparrow just waking. Next : Chee-weeze-weeze-weeze ' from another retreat. It was a finch. Third Tink-tink-tink-tink-a-chink I' from the hedge. It was a robin. Chuck-chuck-chuck ! ' overhead. A squirrel. Then, from the road, with my ra-ta-ta, and my rum-turn-turn ! ' It was a ploughboy. Presently he came opposite, and she believed from his voice that he was one of the boys on her own farm. He was followed by a shambling tramp of heavy feet, and looking through the ferns Bath- sheba could just discern in the wan light of daybreak a team of her own horses. They stopped to drink at a pond on the other side of the way. She watched them flouncing into the pool, drinking, tossing up their head; drinking again, the water dribbling from their lips in silver threads. There was another flounce, and they came out of the pond, and turned back again towards the farm. She looked further around. Day was just dawning, and beside its cool air and colours her heated actions and resolves of the night stood out in lurid contrast. She per- ceived that in her lap, and clinging to her hair, were red and yellow leaves which had come down from the tree and settled silently upon her during her partial sleep. Bathsheba shook her dress to get rid of -them, when multitudes of the same family lying round about her rose and fluttered away in the breeze thus created, like ' ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.' There was an opening towards the east, and the glow from the as yet unrisen sun attracted her eyes thither. From her feet, and between the beautiful yellowing ferns with their feathery arms, the ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. A morning mist hung over it now—a ful- some yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun, yet semi- -opaque—the hedge behind it being in some measure hidden by its hazy luminousness. Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the -common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades -of which glistened in the emerging sun like scythes. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous -coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree-stump; some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood, others were saffron-yellow, and others tall and attenuated, with stems like macaroni Some were leathery and of richest browns. The hollow seemed a nursery of pesti- lences small and great, in the immediate neighbourhood of comfort and 'health, and Bathsheba arose with a tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place. There were now -other footsteps to be heard along the road. Bathsheba's nerves were still unstrung : she crouched down out of sight again, and the pedestrian came into view. He was a schoolboy, with a bag slung over his shoul- der containing his dinner, and a book in his hand. He paused by the gate, and, without looking up, continued murmuring words in tones .quite loud enough to reach her ears, 0 Lord, 0 Lord, 0 Lord, -O Lord, 0 Lord ':—that I know out o' book. ' Give us, give us, give us, give us, give us :—that I know. Grace that, grace that, grace that, grace that : — that I know.' Other words followed to the same effect. The boy was of the dunce class apparently ; the book was a psalter, and this was his way of learning the collect. In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles, and Bathsheba was faintly amused at the boy's method, till he too passed on. By this time stupor had given place to anxiety, and anxiety began to make room for hunger and thirst. A form now appeared upon the rise on the other side of the -swamp, half-hidden by the mist, and came towards Bathsheba. The female—for it was a female—approached with her face askance, as if looking earnestly on all sides of her. When she got a little farther round to the left, and drew nearer, Bathsheba could see the new-corner's profile against the sunny sky, and knew the wavy sweep from forehead to chin, with neither angle nor decisive line anywhere about it, to be the familiar contour of Liddy Smallbury. Bathaheba's heart bounded with gratitude in the thought that she was not altogether deserted, and she jumped up. ' Oh,-Liddy I' she said, or attempted to say ; but the -words had only been framed by her lips; there came no sound. She had lost her voice ty ,exposure to the clogged atmosphere all these hours of night.—' Oh ma'am ! I am so glad I have found you,' said the girl, as soon as she saw Bathsheba.—' You can't come across,' Bathsheba said in a whisper, which she vainly endeavoured to make loud enough to reach Liddy's ears. Liddy, not knowing this, stepped down upon the swamp, Baying as she did so, 'It will bear me up, I think.' Bathsheba never forgot that transient little picture of Liddy cross- ing the swamp to her there in the morning light. Iridescent bubbles of dank subterranean breath rose from the sweating sod beside the waiting-maid's feet as she trod, hissing as they burst and ex- panded away to join the vaponry firmament above. Liddy did not sink, as Bathsheba had anticipated."
On the whole, the book is amusing and exceedingly clever even in its mistakes and faults,—so that whether we admire its de- lineations of life, or think them impossible, we are always inter- ested, and always inclined to admire the author, though not for his mistakes. This is a very rare characteristic of modern novelists. Most of them are conventional when they go wrong ; Mr. Hardy goes wrong by being too clever,—preposterously clever where the world is stupid,—too original where he ought to be accommo- dating himself to the monotonous habits of a world which is built on usage. It is a rare kind of mistake.
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