‘The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.’
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867)
It might seem odd, as we explore the way in which storytelling has over the past two centuries become detached from its archetypal roots, to devote a whole chapter to the works of just one author. But the seven major novels written by Thomas Hardy between 1872 and 1895 provide such rich insight into this process of dis-integration that it is worth pausing to examine them in some detail. We have seen many examples of the types of story which represent the end-result of that process. What Hardy’s novels show us is the pattern of disintegration actually taking place. We see an author whose stories begin apparently still securely anchored in the archetypal framework: but who then gradually loses touch with it, in a way corresponding directly to the crumbling apart of his own inner world.
When in the late 1960s a film version of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) launched Hardy’s stories back into vogue, one explanation offered for this was that these colourful evocations of life in the English countryside before it was disrupted by all the disintegrative pressures of the modern world appealed to the late-twentieth century’s almost insatiable appetite for nostalgia. But obviously the last thing that can be said about Hardy’s books is that they convey any cosily nostalgic view of the past. On the contrary, there are few stories so bleak in the English language: a sense of gathering gloom and despair hangs over the sequence of novels like a cloud.
In general there are two features we may note in his major stories which give us a particular clue as to what is happening. The first is the way the world they describe is so sharply polarised. On the one hand there is the timeless, rooted world of the Dorset countryside in which Hardy himself had grown up. This is personified in the rustic characters who appear in the early novels like a comic chorus: the carol singers of Mellstock in Under the Greenwood Tree, the bucolic drinkers in the Weatherbury malthouse in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is reflected in Hardy’s beautifully observed descriptions of nature: the flowers and insects of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native; the trees which whisper and rustle and sigh through almost every chapter of The Woodlanders. Above all this rooted natural world is summed up in those three almost interchangeable figures, Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd; Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native and Giles Winterborne in The Woodlanders. Each of these rock-like characters, representing the timeless virtues of unselfish goodness and practical common sense, is cast in the role of looking on, shrewdly but sadly, while others in the story get carried away by self-deceiving fantasies, recklessly encompassing their own destruction.
At the other pole, intruding into this rooted world like a growing shadow, is the repeated appearance of a very different type of male figure: a predator on women, dark, heartless, promiscuous, without roots or moral centre, who inflicts misery and destruction on all those who fall under his spell: Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd; Damon Wildeve in The Return of the Native; Edred Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders; Alec D’Urberville in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Making up a third significant group in the novels are the tragic characters caught between these two poles: those who have gone out into the wider world, lost their centre and their roots, and then make doomed attempts to put them down again: Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native; Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge; Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders.
The other notable feature of Hardy’s novels is the remarkable extent to which they are centred on their characters’ hopeless search for the right partner: the ‘other half’ who would make them whole. Tess, Jude, Giles Winterborne, Mayor Henchard, Grace Melbury, Eustacia Vye, Sue Bridehead, Farmer Boldwood: the list of Hardy characters who seek vainly for their true ‘other half’ is almost endless. No other writer has ever been so obsessed with mismatches, with the hero or heroine whose life seems blighted through having been landed by a malevolent fate with the wrong woman or the wrong man. And in both these general features of the novels we can see, thanks not least to the illuminating biography by Robert Gittings, just how Hardy’s stories reflected the unfolding of his own inner life: as a deeply melancholy, insecure man who for 50 years, having been estranged from his own rustic roots and youthful faith, wandered through an inward world in an ever-increasing confusion of bitterness and despair, seeking an innocence, a sense of certainty and wholeness which would never come again.
Hardy was born in 1840 in the little thatched cottage near Dorchester which is still preserved today much as it was: a perfect picture-postcard image of old rural England before the modern world broke in. His father, a respected local stone-mason, was known for his rustic fiddle-playing, in church and at village weddings. Through his childhood and teens, the country people, scenes and customs of this remote corner of Dorset were all the world Hardy knew. But already he was marked out by his intelligence, his avid reading and his sense of separateness for a very different destiny. With the simple religious faith of his upbringing, he dreamed of being a clergyman; although he then began to study as an architect, and even spent a short time in the distant great city of London. He showed his susceptibility to the opposite sex in a series of intense, unconsummated passions for various girls. Gittings shows how ‘mother-dominated’ Hardy was, and how ill at ease in his relationships with the opposite sex. In his late twenties, he gravitated towards his career as a writer. He met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, the socially superior daughter of a west country solicitor. And in his early thirties he at last wrote his first successful novel.
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the happiest and most innocent of his books, is like a charming retrospective snapshot of his own youthful state. In plot terms, it is a romantic Comedy. It centres on how its handsome young hero, Dick Dewy, marked out from all the other villagers he has grown up with, falls in love with Fancy Day, the pretty, independent-minded young farmer’s daughter, socially a cut above him, who has moved into the schoolhouse to run the village school. But before he can win her hand, in keeping with the Comedy plot, two rivals loom up in his way. Her father, like so many ‘unrelenting fathers’ before him, is determined she should not marry her young lover but someone of higher social status, a well-off fellow-farmer, Mr Shinar the churchwarden. She is also proposed to by Mr Maybold, the new, modern-minded young clergyman. These two also play a key part in the story’s main sub-plot, their determination to end the age-old practice of having the music in church accompanied by a rustic orchestra, and to install a modern new organ played by Fancy Day. The heartless way in which the vicar consigns the village musicians to the scrapheap is a symbol of how Hardy saw the new world of the future breaking in on the traditional ways of country life, and it is telling that this innovation is identified with both Dick’s rivals for Fancy’s hand. But in the end the way is clear and in the final pages the young couple are married, presumably to live happily ever after.
In the light of what was to come, this romantic Comedy reads like nothing more than a simple wish-fulfilment fairy tale. Two years later, just before Hardy’s own marriage, came Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). This was the last novel he wrote in the cottage of his birth, still surrounded by his family and the rustic world of his youth. Again the basic plot is that of Comedy. Again we see the hero and heroine meeting early in the story, and much of the action is again taken up with the problems posed by two rivals for her hand in marriage. But although the story still comes eventually to a happy ending, this is no longer achieved with anything like the fairy tale ease of Under the Greenwood Tree.
The hero Gabriel Oak, strong, good-hearted and self-contained, a maturer version of Dick Dewy, is as complete a man as any character in Hardy. We first see him as a self-reliant young farmer in his late twenties, at the moment when he encounters the story’s beautiful but vain and headstrong young heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Again, like a more developed version of Fancy Day, she is just arriving to settle in the parish. They have further meetings, exchanging teasing badinage, and it is not long before Oak is in love. He even dares propose marriage. But Bathsheba says she is too independent. She needs someone to ‘tame’ her, and tells him he is not strong enough to do it. Shortly afterwards she disappears, to take over a farm she has inherited, and Oak is struck by disaster, when all his sheep plunge to destruction over a quarry face. He has lost his livelihood, his farm, everything. He is cast into the shadows, doomed to live ‘below the line’ as he seeks work as a lowly shepherd. Crossing the country by night, he sees an ominous blaze of flame. It is a wheat-rick on fire, threatening to destroy others. Farmhands are rushing around in confusion, but Oak at once takes charge and the potentially disastrous fire is extinguished. Impressed by his cool common sense, the farm’s owner orders that he be taken on to run the farm as manager. Only then do the two discover each other’s identities, and that his new employer is Miss Everdene.
The greater part of the story is then taken up with how Gabriel, from his subservient position in the shadows, has to watch while, ‘above the line’, his impulsive, imperious mistress makes one mistake after another. The first is her leading on of a rich, older neighbour Farmer Boldwood, when she has no intention of marrying him. So forthright is Oak in remonstrating with her for such folly that Bathsheba dismisses him. But almost immediately a crisis arises on her farm, when her sheep become fatally distended from eating clover. She has to plead with Oak to return, as again the only man with the strength of character and practical knowledge to save her.
Her next, much more catastrophic mistake comes with the arrival in the neigh-bourhood of the dashing philanderer Sergeant Troy. Swept off her feet by his ‘dark masculine’ charms, Bathsheba stumbles recklessly into marriage. On the night of the great party to celebrate their wedding and the bringing in of the harvest, only Gabriel observes the approach of a storm. The entire harvest, piled in unprotected ricks, is in danger of being lost. Troy contemptuously dismisses his warnings, ordering all the womenfolk home so that he can urge on all the men into a drunken stupor. When the strange behaviour of various animals provides three successive portents that the storm is likely to be of awesome proportions, Gabriel works demonically to get the ricks covered. As the first lightning flashes appear, he is joined by Bathsheba. Together they work on through the heavenly bombardment until, in the nick of time, just as the rain arrives, the task is complete. For a third time, by the Rule of Three, Bathsheba has been saved by Gabriel showing himself in a crisis to be a whole man: strong, disciplined, intuitively aware, unselfish; the very opposite of his weak shadow lying drunkenly asleep in the barn, Bathsheba’s husband.
Indeed we now see just what a dark figure Sergeant Troy truly is, in his callous treatment of Fanny Robin, the frail, unhappy village girl he has promised to marry, who has borne his child and whom he has cruelly abandoned to live off Bathsheba. This infantile anima-figure is Hardy’s first ‘persecuted maiden’. The story moves in melodramatic crescendo towards its climax. The feckless Troy begins to gamble away his wife’s money. The rejected, desperately ill Fanny crawls through the night to die, with her baby, on the steps of the workhouse. When her body is returned for burial in the village, it is brought to lie overnight in Bathsheba’s house and, from looking into the coffin to see the two corpses, she discovers her husband’s dreadful secret. Troy distractedly exhibits in death all the love towards the infantile anima he had failed to show in life. He disappears from home, swims out to sea and is taken to be dead. Eventually Farmer Boldwood, still dreaming in his broken state that he may one day win Bathsheba’s hand, throws a Christmas party, to which she is invited as honoured guest. In the middle of the festivities, a mysterious stranger arrives in disguise. It is the dark figure of Troy, come to lay claim to his horrified wife. Boldwood shoots him and is sentenced to be hanged, although at the last minute this is commuted to life imprisonment.
Shattered by all that has happened, Bathsheba spends months withdrawn from the world, scarcely speaking. When the following summer she begins to venture out again, she encounters Gabriel, who tells her he will have to leave her employ. The threatened loss of the one solid figure in her life on whom she has come totally to depend finally works the trick which at the beginning of the story had seemed unthinkable. She has finally been tamed; softened into her inner femininity as completely as Katherina by Petruchio, or as Emma by Mr Knightley. Recognition dawns that she only wishes to be married to Gabriel, the honest, true, selfless man who has all along been as sturdy in her support as the tree whose name he bears. The story ends with the loving couple being joyfully greeted on their return from church by the chorus of rustic musicians, playing the same ancient instruments which had celebrated the victories of Marlborough a century and a half before. Not only have hero and heroine found wholeness in each other: they are united with the timeless world of the Dorset countryside where their new life can begin.
In bringing his manly hero to such a triumphant happy ending, we might think Hardy was imagining the kind of man he would like to have been himself: a countryman at one with his natural surroundings and with every admirable human quality. But between completing the novel and its publication, Hardy went through the most dramatic watershed of his life. Now engaged to be married to Emma, he moved away from Dorset and up to London. Here, in the literary circle around his new editor Leslie Stephen, he met various intelligent, lively, liberated young women, including his illustrator Helen Paterson, with whom he was so taken that even at the end of his life he was still wondering whether he should have married her. He abruptly severed all links with the world of his upbringing (no member of his family was invited to his wedding). Yet for all the heady excitements of his new life, he was far from finding anything in the outside world to compensate for the simple certainties of the world he had left behind. Quite suddenly he lost his religious faith. Even before his marriage, he was already beginning to be haunted by the possibility that he could have chosen better for himself than the naive, provincial Emma Lavinia. And as Gittings observes of Oak’s acceptance by Bathsheba: ‘no Hardy hero from that time onwards ever comes to such an assured and happy ending. From this moment on, the tragic and defeated hero arrives in Hardy’s novels for good.’
In 1876 Hardy returned with Emma to Dorset: not to the simple life of a peasant, but to live in a new, middle-class, red-brick villa in the little town of Sturminster Newton, far apart from his family. His return to his native county inspired him to write The Return of the Native, describing how the wanderer Clym Yeobright returns from the sophisticated world of Paris to try to rediscover his roots on the great wilderness of Egdon Heath. But the attempt does not work. The mould has been broken. From its opening paragraph the book is shot through with a gathering darkness, often a quite literal darkness, as in all the scenes which take place at night or in twilight, which is quite new in Hardy’s writing.
The story begins with four main characters, two masculine, two feminine. The contrast between the two men is not unlike that between the two central male characters in Far from the Madding Crowd. Diggory Venn, like Oak, is strong, good-hearted, self-contained and solitary. Damon Wildeve is as much a dark, heartless philanderer as Sergeant Troy. Similarly the restless, neurotic Eustacia Vye, longing to escape from this suffocating rural backwater, is as much a forceful opposite to the gentle, passive Thomasin Yeobright as Bathsheba had been to the infantile anima figure of little Fanny Robin. As the narrative opens Wildeve has been carrying on a secret affair with Eustacia, while Venn, the reddleman, moves mysteriously about the heath, nurturing a hopeless love for Thomasin. But, in a fit of caprice, to hurt Eustacia, Wildeve woos and marries Thomasin himself. With all its pent-up emotion and potential misunderstandings, it is like the start of a particularly black comedy. And the trigger for it to unfold to its black conclusion is the return to the heath of Thomasin’s cousin Clym Yeobright, after several years in Paris (where Hardy had spent his honeymoon).
Desperately wounded by her lover’s marriage to Thomasin, Eustacia sets her sights on the newcomer, hoping he will sweep her away from this claustrophobic little world back to Paris. To the horror of his mother, as strong-minded and dogmatic as Hardy’s own, they get married. But Clym shows no sign of wanting to leave the heath and, as his eyesight fails, becomes a humble furze-cutter. The marriage begins to disintegrate, tempting Eustacia to resume her secret affair with Wildeve. When Clym’s mother, after a sequence of misunderstandings in vainly trying to bring about a reconciliation between her son and his wife, exhausts herself and dies of a heart attack, this precipitates the climactic catastrophe in which the two ‘dark’ lovers try one stormy night to elope and are swept to their deaths by drowning. The weak, mother-dominated Yeobright is left motherless, wifeless and alone, to wander the countryside as an eccentric preacher.
At least there appears to be a partial happy ending to the story, as the two ‘rooted’ characters, Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright, are finally brought together in marriage. But even this, Hardy tells us, was not his original intention, whereby Thomasin was to remain a widow and Venn was simply to vanish mysteriously from the heath. Their wedding was only concocted at the last minute while the story was being serialised, because Hardy’s dismayed publishers felt the unrelieved hopelessness of his original ending might have been too much for readers to take.
What we see here is how Hardy’s novels were beginning to follow a similar pattern to that we saw emerging in nineteenth-century opera, with Donizetti and Verdi. The underlying plot is still that of Comedy. But now it is Comedy without any recognition or breaking in of the light. In contrast to his earlier books, Hardy’s imagination could no longer encompass the kind of story which ends in a hero and heroine being brought triumphantly together. From now on, the characters rising up from his unconscious seem increasingly trapped in a kind of twilight, fatally mismatched with the wrong man or the wrong woman. And in this inability to bring masculine and feminine into balance, we see the reflection of a fundamental split which had opened up in Hardy himself.
As we have seen, the archetypal ending of stories where a hero and heroine come together in perfect union symbolises something much deeper than just a marriage. It is the image of complete human integration, where the two become in every sense one: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The hero, become a fully mature man, is at last integrated with his anima, that mysterious defining component in human identity we call the ‘soul’. And it was precisely this point of maturity which Hardy, unable to become fully a man and therefore unable to realise his inner feminine, was unable to reach: as his fiction came increasingly to reflect. Whenever in a story there is outward trouble between a hero and heroine, we can be sure that something has gone awry in the hero’s relations with his inner feminine; and that this may equally well express what is going on inside the author whose unconscious has created that character. It was no accident, for instance, that shortly after Tolstoy had, in Anna Karenina, conjured up one of the most haunting of all portraits of a beautiful woman throwing herself to destruction, he should have entered on the most profound spiritual crisis of his life. The world had become totally meaningless to him, he wished to kill himself and actually wrote that he felt he had lost his soul.
Coincidentally, the very years when Tolstoy was entering this crisis, 1878 and 1879, were also a time when Hardy himself was entering on one of the unhappiest phases of his life. His relations with his own outward ‘other half’ Emma were sharply deteriorating. They left Dorset again for London, where he produced three curiously artificial, superficial novels which might have come from a different author. He then returned to Dorset, to the town of Dorchester where he designed a rather ugly house for himself, and here he wrote easily his bleakest book to date, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Again this was on the theme of a rootless hero trying to put down new roots for himself; quite specifically in Dorchester. But it was also of a man who has committed an offence against his feminine ‘other half’ so deep that it can never be expiated.
At the beginning of the story, in a fit of drunken bragadoccio, the hero Michael Henchard actually sells his wife and child; and it turns out that, in doing so, he has sold his soul. Initially he is filled with remorse and tries to make amends. He arrives in the far-off town of Casterbridge (Dorchester), where he builds up a considerable fortune and becomes the leading citizen of the community. He is even reunited with his wife and what he imagines to be his child. But he then gets sucked into an ever deeper mire of deception and self-deception; and, when his wife dies, the tragic reversal begins to close in on him. He discovers that his imagined daughter, his beloved Elizabeth-Jane, is not his child at all. Hardy is remorseless in showing how everything Henchard has built up is gradually stripped from him by Donald Farfrae, his former protégé and partner, who has now become his shadow. He loses his business, his home, his good name. He loses to Farfrae the woman he had hoped to make his second wife. He turns to drink and is humiliated in every way.
Finally he loses to Farfrae the one thing he has come to prize above all else; Elizabeth-Jane, the shining anima-figure who has remained in his life like a reborn version of his lost wife. In this sense she turns out to be as illusory a vision as Helen to that other hero who had sold his soul, Faustus. Robbed of all he has ever hoped for, Henchard wanders out into the wilderness to die: leaving, as a wedding present for the daughter he has lost, at her marriage to the man who has usurped everything he once proudly owned, a little goldfinch in a cage. Eventually the ‘little creature’ is found in its ‘wire prison’, dead: an outward and visible sign of what has already happened to the soul of poor Henchard himself. And when, next to his corpse, they find his pitiful last will and testament, scrawled on a scrap of paper, asking that no one should mourn his death or even remember him, its lost, despairing words are as chilling as anything Hardy had yet written.
His next book was The Woodlanders (1887), in which he returns to the countryside to describe the polarisation between the rustic, rooted world and that of the rootless, intrusive outsiders more starkly than ever. On one hand is the natural world of the trees and the woodland folk who live among them; above all Giles Winterborne, the man of the trees, and little Marty South. On the other is the world represented by the weak, vain young Edred Fitzpiers, his head full of dreams of experimental science; by the rich, spoiled Mrs Charmond, who has taken the big house; and also, alas, by Grace Melbury, the woodland village girl whose ambitious father had sent her off to school in the outside world and given her ideas above her station, or certainly above any such absurd idea as that she should marry Giles Winterborne, whom she has loved since childhood. In a now familiar tangle of mismatches, Grace returns to marry Fitzpiers, who then begins an affair with Mrs Charmond, leaving Grace to run off for sanctuary to Winterborne’s cottage, which leads in turn to his death. Selflessly watching all this egocentric confusion, Giles and Marty are like a kind of replay of Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright. But this time there can be no happy ending even for them, let alone for anyone else.
The death of Winterborne, as a projection of Hardy’s own lost, rooted self, is symbolically a terrible moment. At least in the previous books it had been only the rootless ones who died, while Winterborne’s previous incarnations, Dick Dewy, Gabriel Oak and Diggory Venn, had each come to a happy ending. One of the most moving moments in all Hardy is that where Grace Melbury realises, only after Giles is dead, that it had all along been plain little Marty South, with her hair shorn off, who was Giles’s true mate: ‘You and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew ... the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers themselves’. That, and Marty’s final farewell over Giles’s grave (‘No, no, my love, I can never forget ‘ee; for you was a good man, and did good things’) are Hardy’s elegy for the instinctive world he had lost for ever, where man is at one with nature and faith is the knowledge of that fact.
As the sequence of Hardy’s novels neared its conclusion, it is interesting to note how their changing mood had reflected the pattern of the fantasy cycle. Having begun with the youthful ‘anticipation stage’ of Under the Greenwood Tree, they had continued with a ‘dream stage’ in the eventual imagined happiness of Far from the Madding Crowd. They had worked up through the ‘frustration stage’ of The Return of the Native to the gathering nightmare of The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. Now they were to culminate in the two most terrible self-revelations of all.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1888), subtitled A Pure Woman, was the only one of Hardy’s major novels to centre round the fate of a heroine rather than a hero. Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful country girl from a poor and simple Dorset home, becomes bewitched by her father’s story that she belongs to a great and ancient family. Going out into the world, she successively falls prey to the two socially superior men, the ‘dark masculine’ seducer Alec D’Urberville and the weak, moralistic, hypocritical Angel Clare, with whom, in different ways, she is so fatally mismatched. We have seen both these types before, in the predatory Troy/Wildeve figure and the religiose Clym Yeobright. But now there is no strong, good-hearted, male figure, like Gabriel Oak, to provide ‘light’ contrast to their darkness. He has finally dropped out of Hardy’s inner landscape with the death of Winterborne. Now, for Tess, there is nothing left but these two oppressive dark male opposites competing to destroy her: until the nightmare finally becomes so intense that she is driven to murder the cruel monster who was originally responsible for her downfall and is hanged for the crime.
It is not surprising that Tess was Hardy’s own favourite character, for she really was the deepest projection of all of his own inner feminine. And once we see her in that light, how even more poignant does her story become. We see Tess, the ‘persecuted maiden’, Hardy’s anima, wandering blindly and distractedly across the face of an ever bleaker and more inhospitable Dorset countryside, looking for a home and a resting place where she might be whole, but eventually so tortured that she kills and is killed. In Hardy’s oft-quoted phrase at the close of the book, ‘the President of the Immortals’ had ‘ended his sport with Tess’. But of course the real power manipulating Tess from one improbable coincidence to the next, remorselessly stacking up the odds against her to such deadly conclusion, was not some vengeful deity, that God in whom the atheist Hardy no longer believed. It was Hardy himself. Even in the story we can only too easily see aspects of Hardy in both the men, unworthy of her, who make her their victim. D’Urberville is that recurring, heartless predator who represents the shadow of his unrealised masculinity. Angel Clare is the weak, high-minded progressive, first foreshadowed in Yeobright, who echoes what Hardy himself had been in his own youth. The story Hardy was unconsciously recording was nothing less than that of the stifling of his own soul.
His last major novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was a fitting conclusion to the sequence of stories he had written in just over 20 years, because it was little more than an unconscious spiritual autobiography. It is the only one to be set almost entirely away from Dorset. But in the eagerly self-improving young country boy, of firm religious faith, whom we meet at the beginning in a little Berkshire village, it is not difficult to see the young Hardy of 30 years before. Jude Fawley’s great ambition is to journey to the university city of Christminster (Oxford), shining on the horizon: the place where he would be able to realise himself to the full, in the company of scholars and men of intellect and distinction, just as Hardy himself had dreamed of when he was young. But on his way to the distant city, in an echo of what happened in Hardy’s own life, he foolishly gets lured into marriage with a gross, stupid girl who in no way measures up to his lofty spiritual aspirations. Arabella abandons him, and he meets his soulmate Sue Bridehead, an idealised version of one of those liberated young women who had so taken Hardy’s fancy in the London of the 1870s, when he was already engaged to his future wife.
From then on Jude’s story is one of growing agony and disillusionment. Although he has arrived in Christminster, it in no way lives up to his idealised expectations. After seeming to have won Sue, the love of his life, she then, as an elusive anima, slips away from him again, to marry his academic mentor Phillipson. He wins her back again and they have two children. But just when Jude has a last moment of hope that he and Sue might now remain together, this is shattered by the last of those horrendous, inwardly symbolic moments which chequer Hardy’s last novels. Jude’s young son by Arabella, ‘Old Father Time’, stabs the two babies, then hangs himself, leaving the message ‘Done because we are too menny’. It is the final catastrophe: the death of the children Hardy himself never had. Abandoned by Sue for the last time, Jude loses himself in an alcoholic haze. He is drawn back to live in poverty with the raddled Arabella and, before reaching the age of 30, dies a lonely, miserable death, amid the most alien surroundings imaginable.
When Jude was published it provoked uproar. Described by one reviewer as ‘Jude the Obscene’, it was castigated as ‘indecent’ ‘degenerate’ and ‘nihilistic’. By now Hardy’s outward estrangement from his roots and the world of his upbringing was so complete that when he bicycled through the village outside Dorchester where many of his relatives lived and they crowded to their cottage doors to wave to the great man, he stared stonily ahead and cycled on. The row over the book also marked his final estrangement from the increasingly evangelical and strait-laced Emma Lavinia (who signed letters to the papers ‘An Old-Fashioned Englishwoman’). His only solace lay in an absurd series of infatuations with fashionable ladies up in London, would-be writers like Mrs Henniker and Agnes Grove. The scene was set for the last 30 years of his life, dominated creatively by that great flood of poems of nostalgia and loss which reached its climax after Emma’s miserable and painful death in 1912: poems in which he sought to recapture that contact with the feminine which had proved so elusive through his life, and whose presence, as in Sergeant Troy’s outpouring of grief over the corpse of Fanny Robin, never seemed so real to him as in death.
The other great task of Hardy’s last years was the attempt to build up, through the biography he dictated to his second wife Florence, the picture of himself he wanted the world to see; in which, for instance, he portrayed his father, quite untruthfully, as feckless, and himself as the son who had single-handedly restored the fortunes of a once-important Dorset family, long in decline. This exercise in polishing up his persona was futile: partly because, despite his efforts to erase them, sufficient of the external facts about his father, his family and his life have survived for us to be able to see just what a sad, self-centred caricature the biography presented; and partly because he had left such a luminous record of his true inner life in the novels and poems. To devote so much time to such a pretence was hardly the sign of a man at ease with himself and the world; or of a man who had ever really come to terms with all those disintegrated components of his personality he had projected into his novels. Ultimately there was no apter epitaph on Hardy’s life than the gruesome fate of the great man’s mortal remains when he died in 1928. His cremated body was interred amid empty pomp in Westminster Abbey, just as his life out in the great world had long since turned to ashes. His heart was returned to be buried in Dorset where he had grown up: to the place his heart and his soul, his unrealised inner feminine, had never really left.
The way in which the gradual disintegration of Thomas Hardy’s inner world was reflected in his novels gives us a particularly vivid picture of a process which was more generally taking place all over the Western world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Europe and America were carried by the advance of science and technology ever faster towards the modern world, as hundreds of millions moved from the countryside into the newly industrialised cities, as ancient ways of life vanished, as social hierarchies began to break down, as old forms of religion and morality began to dissolve, people were losing touch on an unprecedented scale with that framework which had given them so much of their sense of outward and inward identity. In psychological terms, they were losing contact with much of that which had helped root human existence in the Self. What we see reflected in stories is a perfect model of what then happens, as the ego comes increasingly to the fore.
In the next two chapters we shall look at two of the most revealing ways in which the storytelling of the past hundred years has reflected this split between Self and ego. The first of these, as we shall see in the works of such twentieth-century storytellers as Chekhov and Proust, Pirandello and Samuel Beckett, is how, once the split has taken place, the ego eventually comes to a point where it has no sense of belonging to anything greater than itself. We see how it is in fact the framework of the Self which ultimately gives human life its sense of structure, meaning and purpose; and how, once contact with that is lost, the isolated ego is at last left facing nothing but a dark and empty void.