runs a chain of brothels; her Cambridge-educated daughter Vivie happily becomes
a cigar-smoking actuary. Mrs Warren defends social convention, Vivie wins the argu-
ments. The play could not be legally staged in a public theatre in England until 1926.
Shaw used the theatre as a tool of social reform, presenting situations which chal-
lenged conventional attitudes, directing a stream of ideas at audiences, provoking
while entertaining. The published plays have long argumentative prefaces and
lengthy stage directions. A foe of Victorian pieties, he attacked theatrical censorship,
medical fraud, the English devotion to class and accent, the British treatment of
Ireland and so on. As his ideas have gained ground, his plays have lost their chal-
lenge. We admire his versatile technique in tickling the middle class while attacking
its preconceptions, but his topicality has dated. He attacked the dreaminess of W. B.
Yeats, who retaliated by dreaming of Shaw as a smiling sewing-machine. He was
perhaps more of a mechanical tin-opener, opening minds with paradoxes.
Shaw was not modest – he thought himself better than Shakespeare, or said so.
But time and his own success have turned the tireless craftsman, wit and educator
into an entertainer. The English tend to regard Irishmen who make jokes as funda-
mentally unserious. The ‘dreamy’ W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), who spent more than half
his life in England, took a long way round to a more lasting achievement. Yeats and
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) are dealt with later, as is the poetry of Hardy.
nFiction
Thomas Hardy
The art ofThomas Hardy(1840–1928) went into his poetry (see p. 337), but after his
marriage he put it aside to earn a living as a novelist. He finished with fiction in Jude
the Obscure (1896). The six novels listed after Under the Greenwood Tree are consid-
ered major, but there are fine things in the three Romances; the classes are not exclu-
sive.A Pair of Blue Eyes was the favourite of the French novelist Marcel Proust
(1871–1922); it also provides a background to the poems Hardy wrote after his wife’s
death.
Hardy’s first novel,The Poor Man and the Lady, was declined by Macmillan as too
fiercely satirical. He wrote Desperate Remedies (1871),a heavily plotted sensation
novel, and then the pastoral Under the Greenwood Tree. Ingenuity, fantasy and
romance are found in the more serious Novels of Character and Environment. Like
Dickens, he borrowed from folklore, popular theatre and broadsheet ballad
tragedies. Despite this ‘stagy’ quality, he visualizes settings topographically (he was
trained as an architect) so that their firm features are readily envisaged, as with the
famous description of Egdon Heath which opens The Return of the Native. I n The
Mayor of Casterbridge, the town (based on Dorchester) is so laid out that the reader
locates each scene in street, tavern, house or workplace. Hardy lived much of his life
out of doors. Improbable or coincidental scenes can be visualized because he has
made sure we see them clearly, often setting them against natural backgrounds. He
places human figures against a geological world which has been inhabited for
immense periods of time. In his tragic novels he endows his puppets with nobility,
co nsciously following Greek models. Environment and action are often more
important than character. His characters, rather than showing psychological devel-
opment, are made of simple elements and experience a variety of emotions as plot
FICTION 317Thomas Hardy(1840–1928)
A selection: ‘Novels of
Character and Environment’:
Under the Greenwood Tree
(1872), Far from the Madding
Crowd(1874), The Return of
the Native(1878), The Mayor
of Casterbridge(1886), The
Woodlanders(1887), Tess of
the D’Urbervilles(1891), Jude
the Obscure(1896).
‘Romances and Fantasies’: A
Pair of Blue Eyes(1873), The
Trumpet Major(1880), Two
on a Tower(1882).