Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue.
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) was written at an important time in Thomas Hardy’s life, and marks an important stage in his artistic development. He was in his early thirties, in love, and thinking of marriage, a course of action that would compel him to settle on a dependable career. But would that career be in literature? When he began writing this novel in earnest, Hardy was a practising architect, living in London and working on a series of competition designs for school buildings for the newly appointed London School Board, set up in the wake of the Forster Act, which had legislated for national elementary education a couple of years earlier. But although he ‘applied himself to architectural work during the winter 1871–72 more steadily than he had ever done in his life before’, he was neither very successful nor very happy.1 He had spent sixteen years training for and working in the profession—exactly half his life to then. Yet he was still little more than a well-qualified assistant, who measured sites and worked up drawings based on the designs of the various senior architects who employed him.2
Hardy’s own ambitions as a writer were largely to blame for this failure to advance in the profession, for architecture was not the vocation he had chosen. His mother, a dominant figure in his life who was ambitious for her intelligent son, had sent him to be articled to the Dorchester architect John Hicks, while he, for his own part, dreamed Jude-like dreams of entering the Church as a university-educated man.3 But he was also cautious and pragmatic, and determined to make the most of his chances to get ahead. His early career shows all the signs that he actively sought advancement in his profession. Working in the office of Arthur Blomfield in the Strand, he entered (and won) architectural competitions, spent his spare time researching the history of Western art in the National Gallery, made sketches and notes from buildings, and prepared for the voluntary examinations of the Royal Institute of British Architects.4 But his literary aspirations remained foremost, and the mid-Victorian building boom allowed him to pursue them. As early as 1865, a note pencilled inside the back cover of a notebook shows that he was thinking of ‘cutting Arche if successf:’ in literature; but then, as if alarmed at his own recklessness, he scribbled another more reassuring note underneath: ‘—If lit. fails, try Arch’.5
Hardy spent a long time waiting for a ‘clear call … which course in life to take—the course he loved, and which was his natural instinct, that of letters, or the course all practical wisdom dictated—that of architecture’6 while he struggled to establish himself as a writer. Although A Pair of Blue Eyes was the first of his books to be published under his own name, it was his fourth novel, and brought to an end an apprenticeship that had begun six years earlier in 1867 with The Poor Man and the Lady. That first effort was, by Hardy’s own account, an inflammatory social satire which might well have been published but for a timely piece of advice from George Meredith, who read the manuscript for the publishers Chapman and Hall and cautioned its young author (who was 28 years old by then) that it might irreparably damage his literary career at the outset. Hardy eventually abandoned the idea of trying to place The Poor Man.7 But like many other writers starting out, he could not bring himself to let it go altogether, and he kept the manuscript close to hand, plundering it when he needed material for his first three published novels: a sensation melodrama, Desperate Remedies (1871) a pastoral idyll, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872); and this one— which is, significantly, much more difficult to pin down to any single genre.8 In this respect A Pair of Blue Eyes is quite different from its predecessors, and much more like the fiction that would follow it: it ‘not only cannot be compared with [the work of] other writers, but cannot be classified under any known formula of literary art’, as a critic observed in a mid-career survey of Hardy’s fiction in the Quarterly Review in 1879.9
A Pair of Blue Eyes was also Hardy’s first attempt at a novel written specifically to be published first as a serial in a popular magazine. We know from a surviving letter to William Tinsley, principal of the firm of Tinsley Brothers, who had published Desperate Remedies, that he had begun work on it as early as October 1871. Having ‘nearly finished’ a ‘little rural story’ (Under the Greenwood Tree: already completed by then, in fact10), he told Tinsley that he had set it aside at the request of ‘critic-friends who were taken with D.R.’ to make a start on another novel, ‘the essence of which is plot, without crime— but on the plan of D.R.’11 The following April he alluded again to the ‘3 vol novel’, with which, he wrote, he had decided to proceed ‘as rapidly as possible’.12 At that stage, Hardy seems not to have made much progress at all, however. His dealings with Tinsley over Desperate Remedies had been far from satisfactory,13 and nothing had come from hopeful overtures towards other more prestigious publishing houses (Macmillan had rejected him three times). By the middle of 1872, not hearing back from Tinsley about the proposed new novel, he had descended again into a period of ‘mental depression over his work and prospects’.14 If we take his own word for it, he was on the verge of abandoning novel-writing altogether and devoting his energies to his architectural career when, in July, Tinsley unexpectedly requested a novel for a serial in Tinsleys’ Magazine. Put on the spot, Hardy confessed he had ‘nothing ready’: ‘On looking over the MS.,’ he wrote back hurriedly, ‘I find it must have a great deal of re-consideration.’15 Yet by 15 August, barely a month later, the first instalment of the novel had already appeared; by the following March the serial version was finished; and by May it had been published, with substantial revisions, in three volumes.16 This gruelling regime set the pattern for the next two decades or more of Hardy’s writing life. Having ‘cut’ architecture as he had so often dared himself to do, and with no other earnings or inherited wealth to fall back on, he came to depend upon the additional income earned from serial publication, despite the constant pressure of deadlines, the interference of editors, the sacrifice of artistic unity to the exigencies of the part-issue, and the considerable constraints of popular taste.
With no previous experience of serial publication, and just a few weeks to produce the first instalment, Hardy needed to be resourceful. He finished the School Board drawings at the end of July and left immediately for Cornwall to make a start. His intention was to draw substantially upon the abandoned Poor Man manuscript for some London scenes which he would weave into a story he had ‘thought of and written down long before’, and which he now adapted, with considerable inventiveness, to locales, people, and events ready to hand in his own life.17 He settled to work in St Juliot, the Endelstow of A Pair of Blue Eyes, where he had been courting Emma Lavinia Gifford, the sister-in-law of the local rector, for eighteen months or more.18 He made the hero, Stephen Smith, an assistant architect like himself whose father was a rural master mason and whose mother came from a (supposedly once wealthy and noble) labouring-class family.19 Like Stephen, Hardy had been sent to St Juliot in March 1870 to take measurements and make preliminary drawings for the restoration of the medieval church there, and had been met by Emma on his arrival.20 In a memoir written forty years later she recalled how her brother-in-law had been laid up with gout and could not be present to meet the London architect, and how she ‘had to receive him alone, and felt a curious uneasy embarrassment at receiving anyone, especially so necessary a person’. He stayed a week, but returned, as Stephen does, later in the summer for a three-week holiday, during which time the courtship flourished. Encouraged, he ‘came two or three times a year from that time’, and Emma rode her ‘pretty mare Fanny’ with Hardy walking by her side as she ‘showed him some of the neighbourhood—the cliffs, along the roads, and through the scattered hamlets… to Tintagel and Trebarwith Strand …[and] other places on the coast’.21 Like Elfride, Emma found herself falling in love with a mysterious London professional. A few sentences from their only surviving love letter, written by Emma, is wonderfully redolent of the visionary atmosphere and erotic feeling Hardy was trying to capture in the novel: ‘This dream of my life—no, not dream, for what is actually going on around me seems a dream rather…I take him (the reserved man) as I do the Bible; find out what I can, compare one text with another, & believe the rest in a lump of simple faith.’22 But the reserved man turned out to be, as Stephen is, her social inferior, and Emma agreed to marry him against the express wishes of her family (the scene in which Stephen’s suit is contemptuously dismissed by the Reverend Swan-court echoes a scene between Hardy and his future father-in-law).23
Over the years A Pair of Blue Eyes became more and more closely associated with the St Juliot idyll in Hardy’s mind, particularly after Emma’s death in 1912 released a flood of Cornwall poems—’When I Set Out for Lyonnesse’, ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’, and many of the ‘Poems of 1912–13’. To some extent the intimacy of these autobiographical elements, and their later role in the provenance of some of Hardy’s greatest verse, have obscured other no less significant connections between A Pair of Blue Eyes and Hardy’s life in the early 1870s. In particular, as we have seen, this novel was a product of ‘the uncertainty of his position between architecture and literature’.24 It is also true, however, that Hardy himself associated ‘literature’, then as later, not with fiction but with poetry. So it would be truer to say that A Pair of Blue Eyes was a product of the uncertainty of his position between one profession and another—what fellow novelist George Gissing disparagingly called ‘the profession of letters’.25 Before he felt confident of choosing the literary profession he had to be sure it ‘paid him well’: as well as, or better than, architecture.26 Perhaps, though, ‘choose’ suggests a resolve which Hardy did not really possess. As Henry Knight tells Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, ‘… I don’t choose [to write] in the sense you mean; choosing from a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the accident’ (p. 148). The accidental constraints of economic necessity also forced Hardy to put aside any aspirations to ‘literature’ in order to make a living. He wrote to Leslie Stephen in 1874: ‘Perhaps I may have higher aims some day, and be a great stickler for the proper artistic balance of the completed work, but for the present circumstances lead me to wish merely to be considered a good hand at a serial.’27 There was nothing very unusual about this situation. Hardy wanted to be a poet but needed a steady income: like so many others in England and elsewhere he was ‘forced to abandon poetry sooner or later for the sake of literary activities which are much better remunerated, such as writing novels of manners’.28 Still, the image of the ‘literary man’—a man of cultural authority, university-educated and of independent means —had a powerful hold over him. And as we shall see, he found a way of reconciling the man of letters and the popular novelist, cultivating in its place an appealing up-to-date substitute: the image of the literary professional.
Hardy’s extreme conscientiousness about the business of being a professional literary man has often been remarked,29 but it is less often noticed that something of that conscientiousness came out of, or was brought out by, the architectural training which so deeply instilled professional values in him. In fact, in the final analysis Hardy’s architectural training not only made him an architect, it made him a novelist: it offered him a model of professional identity and culture which bestowed credibility and legitimacy on a career choice that was no less difficult to him because it was unavoidable. Fiction allowed Hardy—as architecture had, and as it allows Stephen Smith in A Pair of Blue Eyes—to move up in the world, retaining the social identity he had already assumed as a ‘practical professional man’ in London.30 That identity was effectively a substitute for class identity. It both concealed and stood in for his social origins. Thus, the Reverend Swancourt assumes that the ‘London professional man’ (p. 14) is of good character (he can be trusted with his daughter) and therefore unimpeachably of good family. The ‘guarantee of integrity … is the main distinguishing mark of the professional’,31 who asserted his competence in performance, reliability, and conduct, and justified the charging of professional fees, by a transparent, standardized process of training and examination.32 The architectural competitions which Hardy entered and won were just such forms of accreditation, and it is significant that he valued them highly as professional credentials (not just as architectural credentials), citing them in biographical entries for the rest of his life.
Professionalism came at a price, however, and Hardy’s growing disenchantment with architecture in the 1860s paralleled its rapidly accelerating professionalization. Later he recalled nostalgically how he had set out for fame and fortune in London in 1862, the year of the second International Exhibition at South Kensington. Like its illustrious predecessor, the 1851 Great Exhibition, this extravaganza of industrial and domestic design associated cultural advancement with the industrial arts. It was also, more significantly for Hardy’s interests, the first showcase for the reformist arts and crafts movement (William Morris’s firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. exhibited there). Under the influence of John Ruskin and the Gothic Revival, the Arts and Crafts movement sought to integrate the work of creative artists into the built environment. When Hardy went to work for Blomfield, one of the leading figures in the Gothic Revival, he must have imagined that his future lay as such an artist–architect. For all his diligent self-education in the history of art and architecture, however, he soon discovered that the architect was,
more than any other artist … at the mercy of his personal employer, and of Committees. After making the most scientific and skilful plans, elevations, and sections, the result of much immediate study and of long experience, he finds the whole disorganized or materially injured by the presumptuous interference of some person or persons in power, whose chief or only qualification arises from official influence and length of purse.33
In the 1860s there was already a degree of hostility between artist–architects and professional architects—those for whom the provision of professional services and the promotion of professional values overrode the claims of creative expression.34 Hardy, who described himself as ‘a “literary architect”—a person always suspect in the profession in those days’,35 carried the terms of that conflict into his writing career. The professional writer and the artist-writer vied with each other. They were, respectively, the novelist and the poet—or so Hardy would come to insist in his later years, forgetting that fiction was something more to him than ‘a trade, which he had never wanted to carry on as such’.36 From the beginning he was both the exemplary professional, proud to be known and relied upon as a good hand at a serial, and the artist faced with the architect’s old ‘dilemma of artistic autonomy’,37 believing his work would always be compromised by the demands of the professional relationship.
Not only did Hardy become a professional novelist, he became, as Simon During has argued, ‘the great novelist of professionalism and professional mobility’,38 whose fiction explores the conflict between the rewards and costs of that mobility. The attainment of a profession may have proved to Hardy ‘the most effective means of moving through the traditional class/caste system’.39 But it brought intense ‘personal pressures’, as Raymond Williams described them, preeminently a loss of continuity from his own customary past and an always uncertain connection with the cultured metropolitan society he had entered, pressures described and enacted in his fiction in ‘the making and failing of relationships, the crises of physical and mental personality’.40 In particular, During writes, there are three crucial points where these pressures erupt in Hardy’s novels. First, sexuality is dangerous because it cannot be brought under the control of the forces of professionalism, and is ‘not attuned to the career trajectories of the professional or the kind of educated woman who might become a professional’s or rich man’s wife’.41 Secondly, Hardy attempts to overcome the decline of old rural life-ways and work practices by fictionalizing ‘continuities as well as discontinuities between the peasantry and the professional so as to conjure away the history of religious dissent, the centrality of urbanization, the key economic and social function of the industrial proletariat’.42 And thirdly, there is a profound loss of intimacy with nature.
A Pair of Blue Eyes, as it carried Hardy headlong out of one profession and into another, brought those personal pressures very close to the surface. If they are only imperfectly transmuted into larger themes in the novel, that was because he was inexperienced and harried by deadlines. But all the elements identified by During are there, and in a particularly overt form: the clash between sexual desire and professional ambition; and the attempt to fuse artisanal and professional values, and in doing so reintegrate urban professionalism into rural social forms and bring it into closer contact with the natural world. Like other Hardy novels, the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes is motivated by a group (here, as elsewhere in Hardy, a triangle) of socially and sexually mismatched romantic protagonists, and it turns on the tension between their uneven mobility quite as much as their unequal standing. The story opens—in comic mode, significantly—as a thwarted romance between a rising professional in transit from the rural artisan classes to the urban middle classes, and a socially ambitious, educated young woman who is his social superior but whose mobility is curtailed by her sex. She is trapped in genteel poverty, without access to money or profession (except, not very realistically, the profession of female author). Her only recourse is to marry—above her own class ideally.
Stephen Smith is not the first of his social type to appear in Hardy’s fiction. Like Will Strong, the hero of The Poor Man and the Lady, and like Edward Springrove in Desperate Remedies, he is déclassé, and cannot speak of his social origins.43 But he is also more sunny-natured and practically minded than his predecessors, and eminently adaptable to the different worlds in which he finds himself. If he is discomfited by the discovery of his social deficiencies—how chess pieces should be handled, how Latin is pronounced, how to ride a horse—he nevertheless remains rather proud of his achievements, and confident of professional advancement and the social and financial advancement it will bring. Like Jude Fawley after him, Stephen equates education, social mobility, and wealth: ‘Shan’t I be glad’, he bursts out to Elfride, ‘when I get richer and better known, and hob and nob with [Henry Knight]!’ (p. 60).44 He is also optimistic about the long-term success of his suit, and assured that when it ultimately succeeds it will make all the difference to his place in the world: ‘Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my life,’ he declares to his mother, ‘socially and practically, as well as in other respects’ (p. 85). True to the professional ethos, Stephen is perfectly frank about the practical advantages of marrying up—franker than the equally pragmatic gold-digger the Reverend Swancourt, who secretively woos and wins the rich widow Mrs Troyton. But Stephen’s courtship does not go smoothly because the practical man has almost no practical experience either as an architect or as a lover. He is, as we hear repeatedly, ‘a very blooming boy’ (p. 23) who, although he grows in ‘professional dignity’ (p. 33), comes quickly to be dominated by Elfride. A number of critics have observed that this relationship reverses normal gender roles. The socially inexperienced, feminized Stephen is completely subjugated to the more self-assertive though equally inexperienced Elfride. She has been brought up in remote and solitary parishes by her father (her mother is dead), and has consequently enjoyed a certain tomboyish freedom from the constraints of femininity which emboldens her in Stephen’s company. Class, in other words, temporarily overrules gender, at least until Knight supersedes Smith. Then, her boldness trails off into gaucheness, and social and sexual hierarchies return to normal. Elfride is put back in her place—both as a woman and as the daughter of a nouveau riche clergyman.45
However, Hardy also makes the point in A Pair of Blue Eyes that professionalism overrules class, first by masking it—nobody asks who Stephen Smith is until he himself lets Elfride in on the secret of his parents: until then it is just assumed that he moves ‘in the ordinary society of professional people’ (p. 68)—and then by erasing it. When it becomes known locally that Stephen has been ‘feted by deputy-governors and Parsee princes and nobody-knows-who in India; is hand in glove with nabobs, and is to design a large palace, and cathedral, and hospitals, colleges, halls, and fortifications, by the general consent of the ruling powers, Christian and Pagan alike’ (p. 322), his lowly parents find themselves suddenly fêted by the local petit bourgeoisie, who had all previously snubbed them. Stephen duly arrives back in England ‘a richer man’ (p. 338) and a middle-class man: ‘the definite position in which he had rooted himself nullified old local distinctions’ (p. 338).46 And all this, he modestly confides to Knight, is but a ‘natural professional progress’ (p. 325).
But there is a price to be paid for the rise of the practical man: the sacrifice of individuality and originality of thought. The mental constitution of the aspiring Stephen, the narrator comments at one point, was one ‘rare in the springtime of civilizations’ which
seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to which, under proper training, he could not have added a respectable co-ordinate. (p. 88)
Stephen’s father, on the other hand, in common with ‘most rural mechanics’, had ‘too much individuality to be a typical “working-man”—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class’ (p. 83):
There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking, he was not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the day; or a slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better. (p. 83)
This concern with the loss of the old broad-based artisanal skills under the increasing demand for specialized industrial work practices would occupy Hardy again in The Hand of Ethelberta and Jude the Obscure,47 but here, in its first expression, it is very close to home. What he had encountered as a young professional architect was the same demand for specialization; and what he feared about becoming a professional writer was the struggle to reconcile his individuality and originality with what he called in the Life and Work the undoubted ‘pecuniary value of a reputation for a speciality’.48 He would ultimately solve this problem by specializing in stories about the Dorset countryside and culture of his early life which very often dramatize the interaction, although not always the continuity, between pre-professional and professional cultures (most obviously in the relationship between Henchard and Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1885) and Giles Winterborne and Edred Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders (1887)). But until the mid-1880s Hardy was deeply resistant to being stereotyped as a rural romancer, and deeply resistant, as an autodidact in the mid-Victorian tradition, to the specializing tendencies of the encroaching professional age, believing, as he had in the mid-1860s, that there was ‘no more painful lesson to be learnt by a man of capacious mind than that of excluding general knowledge for particular’.49 If he constantly returned to Bockhampton to work on the early novels, it was not because he was consciously planning to write about life in rural Dorset. Rather, that life—the life of a successful rural skilled tradesman like his father—was ‘always his refuge from stress’50 and offered him, as a hopeful writer prohibited the privilege of being a poet and uneasy with the prospect of becoming a commercial popular novelist, a way of conceiving himself as an artist:
Probably our countryman [John Smith] was not such an accomplished artificer in a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless. (p. 84)
To build a career as a popular writer ‘with a real literary message’, 51Hardy’s aim was to unite the best aspects of his two ideals: the ideal of the mid-Victorian literary man (the poet he imagined himself to be in the 1860s) and the late-Victorian professional literary man (the novelist he was forced by circumstances to be). If Stephen represents the danger to an original mind of a pure professionalism, his rival Henry Knight represents another kind of danger: the intellectual solipsism of the man of letters. It has been suggested that Smith and Knight are ‘projections of disparate elements within the novelist’s own character, the youthful, socially unacceptable architect gradually supplanted by the clever, sententious yet sexually immature writer’.52 But we do well to remember, as Michael Millgate reminds us, that the story, patterned on a series of parallels and rejoinders— the two games of chess, the lost and found earring, the corresponding incidents on the tower and the cliff face, the return to the Luxellian vault—traces ‘Stephen’s ever-increasing assurance and success and Knight’s growing sense of failure’.53 Therein lies a vital clue to the novel’s rigidly geometric and ironic pattern of repetitions and doublings. After the departure of Stephen to Bombay and the advent of Knight’s suit, there is little or no forward movement in A Pair of Blue Eyes. Everything hangs interminably in the air, as Knight hangs on the edge of the cliff while time closes up like a fan in front of his eyes (pp. 200–1). He is socially and intellectually far in advance of the innocent Stephen (who is meanwhile busily getting ahead in another world, the innocent world of the first half of the novel). But although Knight is, strictly speaking, a professional himself (a barrister, working out of chambers at ‘Bede’s Inn’ in London), he is immobilized by his extreme idealism. He is a fossilized remnant, one might say, of another pre-professional life form, the pure life of the mind, and soon to be outstripped by a new generation of intellectuals-in-action.
Knight is the first product in Hardy’s fiction of the potentially tragic drama of the over-evolution, the over-refinement, of consciousness. He is the man of contemplative and introspective mind for whom things do not go well because he possesses none of that ‘plastic adaptability’ supposedly ‘more common in woman than in man’. J. M. Barrie observed caustically that although he was apparently ‘meant to be a very admirable man’, Knight was, he thought, ‘simply the most insufferable prig in fiction’.54 In some ways, he is an aspiring writer’s fantasy of a London literary man, and represents certain aspects of Hardy’s (as yet unfulfilled) ambitions, making a successful living and a name for himself in the dazzling world of metropolitan intellectual journalism, as his creator had often contemplated trying to do.55 Hardy claimed in the Life and Work that Knight was ‘really much more like [him]’ than Stephen was,56 a very uncharacteristic admission that is partly an attempt at diversion (he has just reproduced passages from Emma Hardy’s journal that show how much Stephen owes to the young Hardy), and partly a declaration of the significance of his own renunciation of the purely intellectual life for the life of a professional writer. For if the unoriginal Stephen is a kind of rationalization of Hardy’s abandonment of the architectural profession, the unadaptable Knight is equally a rationalization of his decision to set aside his aspirations to poetry and belles lettres for a career in popular fiction.57
In this respect the inexperienced author of A Pair of Blue Eyes was to his worldly craft what his heroes are to their worldly situations. Knight, too, is an inexperienced lover—and really, he is the more fatally inexperienced of the three because practical knowledge, know-how, counts as nothing to him. Living the uncomplicated and cloistered life of a bachelor in the ‘distant penetralia’ (p. 121) of his rooms, in a house that is ‘all soul’ (p. 122), he concerns himself only with higher things, safely sheltered from the world going past his window:
Bede’s Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and discharges into a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth and respectability, whilst its postern abuts on as crowded and poverty-stricken a network of alleys as are to be found anywhere in the metropolis. The moral consequences are, first, that those who occupy chambers in the Inn may see a great deal of shirtless humanity’s habits and enjoyments without doing more than look down from a back window; and second, they may hear wholesome though unpleasant social reminders through the medium of a harsh voice, an unequal footstep, the echo of a blow or a fall, which originates in the person of some drunkard or wife-beater, as he crosses and interferes with the quiet of the square. Characters of this kind frequently pass through the Inn from a little foxhole of an alley at the back, but they never loiter there. (p. 120)
A spectator at his own personal ‘Humanity Show’ (p. 125), ‘the musing unpractical student’ (p. 273) is animated by a ‘spirit of self-denial, verging on asceticism’ (p. 318), whose wrongheaded ‘moral rightness’ (p. 317) brings him undone when sexual desire and love conspire to involve him in humanity.58 He is not déclassé like Stephen, but all the same he struggles to make sense of a social reality he does not fully live inside. What he knows he knows only abstractly, coldly, in theory. When he falls in love, he finds his theoretical convictions and ideological heterodoxy turned on their heads (like Angel Clare and Jude Fawley, who long to be able to quarantine the life of the mind from the life of the body). A radical in matters of ‘social and ethical’ inquiry (p. 60), and a leading contributor to a radical journal, The Present, his relationship with Elfride reveals him to be in practice a deeply, instinctually conservative man.
The critique of intellectual idealism focused on Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is also carried out in the ironic counterpoint set up between a generalizing discourse about women and a plot which turns on the limitations of men’s knowledge of women. Much has been made of the tendency of the narrator to offer platitudes about women: ‘A woman must have had many kisses before she kisses well’ (p. 56); ‘Women accept their destiny more readily than men’ (p. 74); ‘women are cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form’ (p. 96); ‘Elfride had her sex’s love of sheer force in a man’ (p. 118).59Most of these occur early in the novel, significantly enough (as if the narrator were changing with the characters). There are also occasional generalizations about men (‘shrewdness in love usually goes with meanness in general’, p. 258). Moreover, a great deal of sententious generalizing is indulged in by the characters themselves, male and female, with profound consequences for the plot. Elfride, for example, is attracted to Stephen Smith because she takes at face value her father’s generalizations about ‘men of business’ and their character. The arch-generalizer, however, is Knight. He boasts complacently to Stephen about his ignorance of women: ‘it is only those who half know a thing that write about it’, he says, happily confessing, ‘All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities’ (p. 124). The narrator later confirms this weakness: ‘In truth, the essayist’s experience of the nature of young women was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, but practically was nowhere’ (p. 161).
Ironically, Knight’s excessive sexual fastidiousness prevents him from falling in love with any woman who is not as inexperienced as he is. Needless to say, an experienced woman is something very different from an experienced man. His slavish devotion to the ‘pure idea’ implies a knightly devotion to sexual purity, embodied in the virginal maiden. Elfride must be, he demands, ‘as unpractised as I’ (p. 271). In earlier editions Knight says ‘as unused as I’, suggesting in the double meaning of ‘unused’ —inexperienced and not previously owned by any other man —some questionable assumptions about women that Hardy later subdued. Knight’s obsession with Elfride’s virginity, her ‘raw state’ (p. 271; her ‘unused state’ in earlier editions), is not primarily about men’s objectification of women, but about the exclusion of women—a rising social group, like professionals—from the newly available professional trajectories. If, as During notes, ‘the professional man is the social type against which all other characters are implicitly measured’ in Hardy, where does that leave women, whose destinies must continue to be worked out through love and marriage and not through professional advancement?60 The social immobility of women outside marriage is stressed by one of the novel’s eloquent theorizers, Mrs Smith, in Chapter X:
Every woman now-a-days … if she marry at all, must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father. The men have gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every man you meet is more the dand than his father; and you are just level with her men all move up a stage by marriage. Men of her class, that is, parsons, marry squires’ daughters; squires marry lords’ daughters; lords marry dukes’ daughters; dukes marry queens’ daughters. All stages of gentlemen mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of gentlewomen are left single, or marry out of their class. (pp. 85-7)
Elfride, like Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, and Sue Bridehead after her, is unsure of what she wants, what she is entitled to, and what she can command: what is in her power to be and do. Her indecisiveness cannot be solemnized, as Knight’s is, by the clash of ‘ideal ambitions’ (p. 304) and worldly circumstances (he is, the novel repeatedly hints, a Hamlet figure). Elfride’s ambitions are brought up short by the same constraints, but her indecisiveness can be construed only as coquetry, even though the narrator points out that woman’s ‘ruling passion—to fascinate and influence those more powerful than she’ (p. 179)—is subdued in her.
It is ironic, too, and revealing of the ideological deadlocks in this novel, that Elfride’s belated pragmatism cannot avert her tragedy: indeed it is rather helped along by the sacrifice of ideal ambitions to practical compromises. At first she suffers from having too little of the plastic adaptability of her sex—she has more of Sue Bridehead than Arabella Donn, to look forward to Jude the Obscure —because, as she is well aware, a pragmatic woman is taken as a scheming woman. Knight ‘wished earnestly to direct his powers into a more practical channel, and thus correct the introspective tendencies which had never brought himself much happiness, or done his fellow-creatures any great good’ (p. 304). But Elfride is too imaginative and not practical enough to influence him in her favour (p. 296). Ultimately she falls victim to her one and only pragmatic decision—to marry Luxellian in order to help her family and turn her ‘useless life to some practical account’ (p. 351).
Elfride’s story presents significant formal challenges for Hardy. As the heroine of a rudimentary Bildungsroman, A Pair of Blue Eyes is centrally concerned with her growth and development, which it traces, however, through a clumsy transition from one dramatic mode to another, as the comedy of inexperience gives way to the tragedy of experience. But for many readers A Pair of Blue Eyes is neither properly comic nor properly tragic, but something in between —and something other than a tragicomedy. It is true that nothing in the development of the story or in Elfride’s character prepares us for the catastrophe. Her death by miscarriage is almost an afterthought—an unfortunate accident, but not dramatically dependent upon anything that has gone before it. The novel is more successful at invoking an idea of tragedy, or rather an idea of the relationship between comedy and tragedy, an idea that preoccupied Hardy throughout his life: that ‘comedy is tragedy if you only look deep enough’.61 Wanting to look deeper into the comic themes of Under the Greenwood Tree, which had captured the essence of its Shakespearian title (taken from As You Like It) in the melancholy sweetness of the courtship between Fancy Day and Dick Dewy, he begins A Pair of Blue Eyes with the same intention: to explore the impermanence of youth and young love. Hence the book’s epigraph:
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.
(Hamlet, I. iii. 7–10)
The initial love scenes between Elfride and Stephen, presenting a ‘very interesting picture of Sweet-and-Twenty’ (p. 17), invite us to finish Feste’s song from Twelfth Night: ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ But the epigraph comes from Hamlet, and hints darkly at some incipient tragedy. Young love may be ‘sweet, not lasting’, but it may also be something to fear. In the scene from which the epigraph is taken, Laertes warns Ophelia about Hamlet’s ‘trifling’ attentions and counsels her to ‘fear’ them. Compressed in the epigraph, therefore, is the brief love of Elfride (the ‘violet’ echoing her blue eyes) and Stephen, both in ‘the youth of primy nature’, and the more ominous arrival of Knight, with his Hamlet-like fixations and suspicions. It also acts as the prologue to a number of related allusions to mutability: the power of time to destroy everything of human value. Echoes are heard in Shelley’s ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’, a setting of which (set to music by her mother) Elfride sings for Stephen in Chapter III:
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier! (p. 21)
Shelley’s poem laments the inescapable dependence of transcendent things—beauty, love, music, splendour, and poems themselves—on their expression in fragile material forms: a cloud, a human body, a lute, a lamp. Lines from it foreshadow Elfride’s fate—she is the ‘weak one … singled | To endure what it once possessed’—and Knight’s torments, when love’s ‘passions will rock thee’ and ‘Bright reason will mock thee’.
The shift from comic to tragic mode is in keeping with the novel’s other patterns of repetition: characters and scenes introduced in the comic first half return or are repeated in the second half as grim doubles of themselves. Mrs Jethway is notable in this regard. She starts out as an insignificant figure of fun. Elfride blithely sits with her new lover on Felix Jethway’s grave (he died, his mother believes, of unrequited love for Elfride). As the novel proceeds, Mrs Jethway gradually becomes more prominent and sinister, and is ultimately transformed into a Gothic avenger, a piece of stage machinery (necessary to Hardy) to bring about Elfride’s downfall. Similarly, the episode in which Elfride loses her earring in the alcove on the cliff when she and Stephen first kiss begins as an inconsequential love-game between the two comic lovers. When Elfride remembers where the ‘stray jewel’ must have dropped, she recalls ‘a faint sensation of some change about me’ (p. 62). It is not until much later that the sexual implications of her loss—and the sensation of change—are forcefully, and very effectively, realized. In the companion scene in Chapter XXVIII, when Knight kisses Elfride, she is again discomposed and claps her hand to her ear, saying involuntarily: ‘Ah, we must be careful! I lost the other ear-ring doing like this’ (p. 259). By Chapter XXX, when Knight, flushed with jealousy, recalls the incident and realizes its significance, the jewel lost in the alcove has become the worm in the bud. Elfride’s concealment of her first lover is transformed into her concealment of her lost ‘other’—her virginity: ‘We must be careful. I lost the other by doing this!’ (p. 284).
These Gothic appurtenances and strained coincidences are all of a piece with what Michael Millgate describes as the novel’s ‘persistent alternations of mode, and … general failure to establish functional relationships between disparate elements of the total fiction’.62 To Millgate it is less a tragicomedy than (borrowing from Hamlet’s Polonius) a ‘comical-tragical’ novel, a designation which has ‘the advantage of emphasising the separation of the two elements and of suggesting, even so, no more than an approximation to authentically comic and tragic effects’.63 Indisputably A Pair of Blue Eyes fails in achieving dramatic unity: do we put that down to the novel’s ‘immaturity in its views of life and in its workmanship’, as Hardy did in the 1912 postscript to the Preface? Or was he, pressed for time, forced to stitch together incongruous elements from earlier novels: a tendency towards melodrama and sensationalism, clumsily manifested in the daring sexuality, jittery tone, and laboured coincidences of Desperate Remedies; a rare talent for vivid poetic description; an interest in the fiction of ideas and a self-conscious literariness; and a new element—the intimately known and closely observed life-ways of village working folk so much admired by a handful of readers of Under the Greenwood Tree? The answer, I think, lies with the novel’s two heroes. Neither man can be entertained as a satisfactory partner for Elfride, and Hardy is determined that both shall end up unhappy and incomplete: hence the necessity for the denouement. But what happens at the level of the story is also happening at the level of the novel’s discourse. Neither the litératteur nor the professional triumphs because neither is complete: each has something the other needs. Played out in the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes is a drama of the inadequacy of the purely literary and the purely professional standpoints for a writer taking the plunge at last as a popular novelist with a real literary message.
Hardy must have believed he had just failed to synthesize literary and commercial imperatives in A Pair of Blue Eyes because he finally decided, hesitantly, against including it among the ‘Novels of Character and Environment’ in his classification of his works for the 1912 Macmillan Wessex Edition. Instead he settled it at the top of the second category, the ‘Romances and Fantasies’, and linked it back to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Woodlanders, and the other major novels by remarking in his 1912 postscript to the Preface that it represented ‘the romantic stage of an idea which was further developed in a later book’ (p. 4).64 However, as Pamela Dalziel has pointed out, A Pair of Blue Eyes is indeed ‘as much a “novel of character and environment” as a romance’ because, while its plot might be ‘highly artificial, character in fact determines events rather than vice versa’.65 It is, as Hardy’s friend Horace Moule declared in his Saturday Review notice, a book ‘of really tragic power’ which, he wrote, had ‘been evolved’ out of ‘simple materials’.66 By ‘simple materials’ Moule meant, presumably, the simple-minded materials of run-of-the-mill serial romances such as Tinsleys’ Magazine normally published (A Pair of Blue Eyes was, according to John Sutherland, ‘the only novel of literary note’ to appear in its pages67). Hardy’s novel is abundant in the stock plot devices and rhetorical flourishes of the magazine story: secrecy and mystery; thwarted love; impassioned and highly conventionalized declarations of desire (as when Elfride swoons as she summons up those ‘divinely cut lips of his’: p. 39); elements of adventure and suspense, including a (literal) cliffhanger; and the ‘loves and woes, expectations and despairs, of imaginary beings’ —all in a high-melodramatic register (see Appendix). The self-consciousness with which the novel handles these orthodox romance ingredients—Hardy had one eye on the requirements of the form and another on its artistic possibilities— has been somewhat diminished by the layers of revision he later lavished on A Pair of Blue Eyes (this novel was revised more often and more thoroughly than any other). The original Tinsleys’ Magazine version of the opening of Chapter I juxtaposes a dense, ironic, prefatory apology for the significance and insignificance of the ‘beings’ in the story (somewhat in the manner of Sir Walter Scott’s prefaces), with an opening scene in which ‘Elfride Swancourt is reading a romance’ (see Appendix). That she is reading a Tinsley romance seems to be indicated from the ‘crimson covers’ of the volume (‘lavishly and colourfully bound three-deckers were a hall mark’ of Tinsley’s68) which so absorbs her:
The title of the novel it is not worth while to give, but it detailed in its conclusion the saddest contretemps that ever lingered in a gentle and responsive reader’s mind since fiction has taken a turn—for better or worse—for analysing rather than depicting character and emotion. (Appendix)
The original function of this abandoned beginning was to place what is now the opening description of Elfride as a ‘girl whose emotions lay very near the surface’ (p. 7) firmly within the context of the conventionalized woman reader of romances (a function taken up by the later characterization of her as a conventional ‘silly’ lady novelist—author of The Court of Kellyon Castle69). Its purpose was also to update the conventional eighteenth-century warning against the reading of romance by women—as in Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), for example—and place Elfride in the company of other heroines who are avid consumers of romance, overly imaginative girls on the brink of womanhood whose only experience of life is through fiction (as Austen did in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility; and Flaubert in Madame Bovary). ‘She never forgot that novel’, the narrator of the Tinsleys’ version observes, not because it ‘was the most powerful she had ever read’ but because ‘it was the last time in her life that her emotions were ever wound to any height by circumstances which never transpired’ (Appendix).
‘Circumstances’: this key word in Hardy’s vocabulary draws together his conceptions of tragedy and romance. As Peter Widdowson has argued, tragedy is really something closer to satire in Hardy: a form of fiction in which ‘the farcical absurdity of the human lot in the general scheme of things is made predominant’.70‘A Plot, or Tragedy,’ Hardy wrote in a note attributed in the Life and Work to April 1878, ‘should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events produced by the said passions, prejudices, and ambitions.’71 But the events themselves do not always take place in a probable universe. We see for the first time in A Pair of Blue Eyes the distinctive quality of Hardy’s tragic romances: ‘the power of mere events on certain kinds of character’, Moule noted, calling the novel a ‘tragedy of circumstance’ —an expression that would have its later significant echo in Hardy’s own expression the ‘satire of circumstances’.72 Hardy was fascinated by ‘strange conjunctions of phenomena, particularly those of a trivial everyday kind’ (p. 65), and deliberately introduced especially unusual or striking events, events that seem scarcely plausible in realistic stories. For him it was ‘not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter’.73 For this reason, his absurdist tragedies are never far away from farce: ‘If you look beneath the surface of any farce you see a tragedy,’ a note of 1888 records; ‘and, on the contrary, if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce’.74And for the same reason, Hardy’s realism is never far away from romance.
A Pair of Blue Eyes is almost more Hardyan than any of Hardy’s novels because it teeters so precariously between tragedy and farce, and between realism and romance. This is the only occasion on which methods, concerns, and motives that are, in subsequent novels, almost diametrically opposed, coalesce—albeit uneasily. The balance between improbable incidents and probable characters is not yet very well struck in A Pair of Blue Eyes. As a result, it allows us to see clearly in one work the two directions of Hardy’s fictional imagination, towards the tragic novels, on the one hand, and towards those romances of contemporary life that are more properly comedies or satires of manners, on the other: most especially The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), but also A Laodicean (1881), and Two on a Tower (1882). Like these other so-called ‘minor’ novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes is set more firmly in the here and now than Hardy’s best-known fiction.
Most of all, the callowness of A Pair of Blue Eyes gives us a remarkable insight into the importance of romance in Hardy’s fiction. It is, we might say, a ‘romance of character and environment’, and prompts us to read the major novels afresh in this light. Hardy’s life and the first phases of his work were framed, after all, by the two major revivals of romance during the modern period. He was born in the immediate aftermath of the romance revival associated with Sir Walter Scott and the Romantic poets, and dominant between 1780 and 1830; and he established himself as a novelist in the years directly before the resurgence of romance in the 1880s associated with Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, and others, which led on to a boom in mass-market fictional romance in the 1890s and beyond.75 The epigraph to his first published novel, Desperate Remedies, was from Scott, and introduces what will amount to a cardinal principle of Hardy’s fiction: ‘Though an unconnected course of adventures is what most frequently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality.’76 Here he openly identifies himself as a ‘romance-writer’, something he became increasingly unwilling to do as romance fiction flourished in the commercial marketplace, preferring ultimately to call romance by another name: artifice 77 But he means by artifice what Stevenson meant by romance when the latter wrote: ‘the novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material … but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant.’78 Hardy’s fiction puts on display its immeasurable difference from life, invoking one definition of romance in Johnson’s Dictionary —’a lie; a fiction’—in its fascination with the fanciful and improbable. And like Scott’s ‘Essay on Romance’ in the 1822 supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which describes it as ‘a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents’79), Hardy’s use of the word ‘uncommon’ in a passage in the Life and Work teases out the relationship between realism and romance in his writing:
The real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction is to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal…
The writer’s problem is, how to strike the balance between the uncommon and the ordinary so as on the one hand to give interest, on the other to give reality.
In working out this problem, human nature must never be made abnormal, which is introducing incredibility. The uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters.80
A Pair of Blue Eyes shows Hardy trying to strike that balance between the uncommon and the ordinary, striving for a high theatricality in painterly scenes of human and natural landscapes in which effects of light predominate, and in vividly rendered ‘incidents’— odd scenes in which the viewer is drawn by curiosity to some combination of effects and by ‘strange conjunctions of phenomena’. This novel is full of remarkable vignettes, which have a kind of light and warmth all of their own: they stand out like small lyric poems (which, in a way, they are), of such intense interest to Hardy in themselves that they betray a certain reckless indifference to the whole of which they are supposedly a part. As I have suggested, this is not altogether a by-product of Hardy’s hurried and inexpert job of putting this ‘ragbag’ of elements together under the superheated, artificial conditions of serial publication.81 A reviewer of Far from the Madding Crowd counselled him the following year to ‘revise with extreme care, and refrain from publishing in magazines’ if he was to write a first-rate novel.82 But really, the brilliance of his writing is difficult to disentangle from its badness, and almost every one of Hardy’s contemporary critics recognized very early on that this was writing ‘so clever’—a word that turns up in virtually every review in the 1870s, and suggests one important link between Hardy and Knight, whom Elfride dismisses as ‘Mr Clever’83—writing ‘so original in atmosphere and in character, that its brilliant qualities are likely to neutralise the glare of its equally prominent faults’.84 The reviewers were nonetheless inclined to give those faults a great deal of prominence, so that Hardy’s growing fame was accompanied by a notoriety for ‘bad writing’: a tendency to ‘clumsy and inelegant metaphors, and … mannerism and affectation’,85 improbabilities and artificialities of plot, chance and coincidence, and poor characterization. (Who can forget Henry James’s telling jibe in his review of Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘Everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs’?86) In recent decades critics have come to recognize in these ‘faults’ —which many of his contemporaries condemned as the lapses of taste of an arriviste and an autodidact—something of the subversive genius of Hardy’s imagination. That subversiveness was not a product of his audacity (he was not in the privileged position of the avant-garde, free to break with aesthetic traditions) nor an unintended side-effect of his vulgarity. It is true: he was denied a university education and the social capital it delivered. Just as Stephen cannot pronounce his Latin or ride a horse, so Hardy did not know—superior critics said—when not to use absurd coinages like ‘prelusively’ (p. 14), or ‘synthetised’ (in Chapter VII of the first edition; Hardy later substituted ‘cried’). Whether he believed, as Knight did, that a time was ‘coming when every man will pronounce even the common words of his own tongue as seems right in his own ears, and be thought none the worse for it; that the speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age’ (p. 49), is unclear. He would soon have learned that writing could not completely conceal the ‘irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart’ (p. 81). But what matters is that he did finally achieve what he set out to do: to make a good living as a professional, and make great art.