and situation act upon them. His novels build up to climactic scenes. His mixing of
genres invokes a greater variety of dimensions than is found in other novelists.
Hardy’s obscure birthplace ‘far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’ (Gray’s
Elegy) gave him a long perspective, increased by the longevity of his family. His
grandmother told him of ‘that far-back day when they learnt astonished / Of the
death of the king of France’ (‘One We Knew (M. H. 1772–1857)’). Hardy observed
that Wordsworth could have seen him in his cradle, as Gray could have seen
Wordsworth in his. Hardy’s last visit to London was to attend the wedding of Harold
Macmillan to the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. (When Macmillan asked the
Duke for his daughter’s hand, Devonshire remarked that he supposed books were
better than beer. Books had gone up in the world. Macmillan was a member of
Hardy’s publisher’s family, and later became Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963.)
When Hardy died in 1928, two years before D. H. Lawrence, he had not written a
novel for thirty-three years. That career had ended in a storm of protest:Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, and especially Jude the Obscure, shocked a public Hardy had earlier
wooed with rustic humour, and such winning characters as Gabriel Oak in the abun-
dant tragicomedy ofFar from the Madding Crowd. The middle novels which end
unhappily,The Mayor of Casterbridgeand The Woodlanders, do not depart absolutely
from what may befall star-crossed lovers in romantic tragedy. He had concealed his
views (see p. 310) from the pious and the prudish in a career as a popular novelist,
buying a financial independence. He then booby-trapped the Wessex of the end-
paper maps with the corpses of Tess and Jude and their symbolically named chil-
dren, repaying the public for the accommodations he had had to make.Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Al l the nove ls have moments of grandeur, and The May or of Caster bridge is a
balanced tragedy, but perhaps his most powerful book is Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A
Pure Woman. Tess Durbeyfield is the hope of her poor family. After the horse on
which her father’s work depends is killed in an accident, she goes to work for a rich
re lative, Alec, who seduces her. Tess improvises a baptism for the child, who dies; the
vicar is reluctant to bury the child (called Sorrow) in consecrated ground. In a later
summer, as a dairymaid,she becomes engaged to Angel Clare, the agnostic son of an
ev angelical clergyman. On her wedding night she tells her husband about her past.
Disgusted, although he has been no angel himself, he leaves her. Things at her home
get worse. Working on a harsh upland farm, she meets Alec, who has become an itin-
erant preacher but gives it up to pursue her. Her letters to Angel unanswered, she
becomes Alec’s mistress for the sake of her family. She kills him, then spends a
hidden ‘honeymoon’ in the woods with Angel, who has returned. She is arrested at
Stonehenge and hanged, leaving Angel with her younger sister. ‘ “Justice” was done,
and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with
Tess.’ This comment outraged readers: the book not only attacked social hypocrisy,
double standards, the Church, the law and God, but seemed by its subtitle to
condone adultery and murder. Hardy expressed surprise.
The ‘faults and falsity’ in Tess(Henry James’s phrase) come from Hardy’s ambigu-
ous use ofpopular methods. The crude plot and simple characterization of the
‘shocker’ lured the public into an ambush where conventional values were upended.
The pure woman’s confession that she has been ‘ruined’ by the devilish Alec causes
her impure Angel to abandon her. Her innocent fineness then causes the ‘reformed’
Alec to abandon evangelism. The Victorian reader sees that the conventional norms318 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900