A GROUP OF NOBLE DAMES.*
ADMIRERS of Mr. Hardy may often be heard to wonder how it is that, in spite of the genius displayed in his novels, in spite • A Group of Noble Dames, By Thomas Hardy. London : James Osgood, monThine,anii Co. 1891. of their high imaginative qualities, of their faithfulness to nature, and of their splendid literary workmanship, they are, after all, unsatisfactory. Mr. ThIrdy can write sentences which Mr. Stevenson himself has said he would give his eyes to have written. He has drawn country people and described country life as they have never been drawn and described before. He has contrived to be as faithful to the realities of the village and the sheep-fold as Jean Francois Millet, and has yet preserved in his woodmen, farmers, and carters an idealism and a heroic sense of beauty as great as that which Frederick Walker threw upon his canvas. In his country pictures are to be found neither the squalor of the great Frenchman—if squalor can be applied to the impassioned ugliness of the Sower or the Woodcutter— nor the over-statuesqueness of the Englishman. The woman in "The Angelus" is too graceless,—one might almost say, too sordid. The girl in "The Harbour of Refuge" is too much the Venus of Milo in a sun-bonnet. Marty South, however, holds the true balance between poetry and realism. Again, Mr. Hardy can paint with a master's hand a stretch of grassy down dotted with sheep, or a wind-swept heath, where "the fuzzen and the broom" blow beside some lonely barrow whose tenant has quietly rested "under the drums and tramplings of three conquests." Nor does his empire of art stop at the woods and fields. He can describe certain of the human emotions, can lay bare certain portions of the human heart, in a manner only rivalled by the greatest writers of fiction. Yet, in spite of all these gifts, who can read Mr. Hardy's books and not feel that something is wrong, that some fault of omission or commission spoils his whole achieve- ment? There is something in the novels which prevents the reader taking them to his heart as he takes the works of Scott, Dickens, and even Thackeray.
What is this something P Many readers of Mr. Hardy will have guessed it from his previous books. Those who have not will find it written plain in A Group of Noble Dames. It is the low view of women pervading all Mr. Hardy's novels that robs him, and will continue to rob him, of the full sympathy of his readers. It is not that Mr. Hardy is in the habit of filling his novels with bad women, with Becky Sharps or Beatrixes—that might be a defect of judgment, or of knowledge of the world, but it would not poison his novels. What Mr. Hardy does is to paint the average woman—the woman who is neither all good nor all bad, the woman to whom our sympathies are intended in a great measure to be directed—as a creature devoid of any approach to nobility of instinct. They are often drawn as virtuous, kindly, and anxious to do as little harm as possible to those about them ; but around the whole creation is suf- fused a sense of moral squalor which is often little less than revolting. Take Grace, in The Woodlanders. She is a mere animal,—an animal of gentle nature, no doubt, and physically of pure instincts, but none the less a mere animal. The way she lets, first Giles, then Fitzpiers, then Giles again, and again Fitzpiers, win her love, can only be described as loathsome. Elfrida, though the pathos of her fate partly redeems her, is in truth little better than Grace. With the virtuous heroine of The Return of the Native it is just the same. She is an animal, though not a bad animal. No spark of nobility of feeling, and no faintest touch of heroism, ever enters- into the composition of Mr. Hardy's heroines. Some win more of our dislike than others, but only because circum- stances happen to be more against them. We feel, however, that in the last resort they are all capable of acting as parts as those played by Grace or by Ethelberta in The Hand of Eth,elberta. Even Bathsheba Everdene, Grace Garland, and the supposed daughter of the Mayor of Casterbridge, have nothing in them which can make us say, These are women who are good all through.' They were not tried severely enough to show their lack of high-mindedness, that is all. Only in Marty South, and she is after all but sketched in outline, do we get a noble woman. What makes the defect on which we are dwelling more remarkable, is the that Mr. Hardy is always insisting upon heroism in his men. The Reddleman in The Return of the Native, Gabriel Oak in Far from. the Madding Crowd, Giles Winterborne in Tie Wood- tandem and John Loveday in The Trumpet-Major, to mention only a few, are true knight-errants, and knight-errants, too, who- have in them no touch of romantic unreality. They are honest, unselfish men, ever willing to sacrifice themselves to a high
ideal of duty,—men whose dvotion to the women they love is as single-hearted as it is unquenchable. Mr. Hardy is clearly not unable to give us noble women because he does not realise the existence of nobility in human nature. Why, then, does he write as if "the whole sex could but afford" Grace Fitzpierses and Elfrida Swancourts P The obvious answer is, that he is a cynic who takes a low view of women, and who will not paint what he cannot see. This explanation is, however, a little too obvious to be true. It is far more likely that Mr. Hardy is one of those novelists who find it extremely difficult to realise those inner female characteristics which must be relied on if a novelist is to depict a heroic woman. It is possible that Mr. Hardy may feel he would fail in good women, though he does not doubt their existence in real life. That this is so is supported by the fact that Marty South, his one heroic woman, is kept in the background of the story—in a position where distinctness of delineation is not required. It is far easier for a man to draw an Elfrida Swancourt than a female Reddleman, and an artist who felt himself weak in women would soon realise this. Again, Mr. Hardy is obviously bitten by that love of depicting the irony of human existence which is characteristic Of so much modern fiction, and this irony is well displayed by contrasting a heroic with an animal nature. Either the man or the woman has to be heroic, but both must not be. Granted this rule, the writer who finds himself in greater artistic sympathy with men than with women will give the preference to his male characters.
In attempting to analyse the tendencies which have pro- duced a series of women such as are depicted in A Group of Noble Dames, we have left ourselves little space to deal with the book itself. Suffice it to say that it is a collection of Wessex tales, supposed to have been told by the members of an Antiquarian Club on a wet day. For one reason or another, there is a certain nauseous element connected with all the stories, but upon this fact we do not propose to dilate. We will set forth, however, the plot of one of the tales, which may stand as a sample of the rest. Barbara, the only daughter of a rich Baronet, runs away with and marries a young man of bumble descent but great personal beauty, Edmond Willowes. The old people, however, love their daughter too much to make any great fuss, and the runaways are soon received as son and daughter. It is decided, however, that Edmond shall be sent to travel on the Continent with a tutor, to get polish. After Edmond has been away a year, a letter comes to say that he has met with a terrible accident which has injured his face almost beyond recognition. Ulti- mately he comes home, and his wife in great trepidation receives him. He arrives late at night, and when he has entered the room, Barbara sees that her husband wears a pink silk mask. After the household has retired, he asks if she can bear to look at his disfigured features. She says she can. He removes the mask, but the sight of a head without nose or ears, and with every outline obliterated, is too much for her, and she rushes out of the room and hides in the con- servatory. Poor Edmond feels that it is impossible for her to live with him, has his carriage got out again, and drives off, leaving a letter to say that he is going abroad again for a year. After that time he will return again, and try whether his wife can endure the spectacle of his misfortune. Barbara, who is partly sorry, partly glad, to be rid of the trial, hears, how- ever, in a few months, of her husband's death, and she then marries an old admirer, Lord Uplandtowers. All goes on smoothly till a sculptor in Italy sends over a full-length statue of Edmond made before he was injured. The work of art is so lifelike and so beautiful, that Barbara's old love for her beautiful first husband revives. She keeps the statue in an .alcove in her boudoir, and at night, when she can be alone, steals down and goes through a sort of ghastly love-making with the image. Her lord finds this out, and is furiously jealous. His revenge is to get at the statue, to hack off the ears and nose, and to mutilate it as nearly as possible in the same manner that poor Edmond was mutilated. The effect of the discovery of this trick on Barbara may be imagined. But Lord Uplandtowers' cruelty does not stop here. He has the mutilated statue fixed in a cupboard opposite the bed in which he and his wife sleep, puts inside a couple of wax lights, and in the middle of the night pulls open the doors of the cupboard with a string, and discovers his ghastly peep- show. And now comes the characteristic part of the story. Most novelists would have let Barbara die of fright and misery.
Not so Mr. Hardy ; he only makes the poor frightened creature beg and pray her lord not to terrify her by the sight of the mutilated statue. If he will do this, she will give him all the
love she had been squandering on the marble. Lord Upland- towers consents, and from that moment she loves him with a hideous, slavish passion :— "The strange thing now was that this fictitious love, wrung from her by terror, took on, through mere habit of enactment, a. certain quality of reality. A servile mood of attachment to the Earl became distinctly visible in her contemporaneously with an
actual dislike for her late husband's memory The upshot was that the cure became so permanent as to be itself a new disease. She clung to him so tightly that she would not willingly be out of his sight for a moment."
Such is this atrocious little story,—a story as unnatural as it is disgusting. No doubt it is the nastiest in the volume, but the others are very little better. In a word, Mr. Hardy's attempt to give us a group of noble dames is an
utter failure. Indeed, so unpleasant is the taste left by his book, that we cannot but hope that he will speedily give us a group of noble men as a corrective. With men as his subject, we need not be afraid of the moral squalor which pervades the present work.
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