Opening 'The Woodlanders': The Road in Thomas Hardy, as Tragic and Evolutionary Convergence

OPENING THE WOODLANDERS: THE ROAD IN THOMAS

HARDY, AS TRAGIC AND EVOLUTIONARY CONVERGENCE

RICHARD LANSDOWN

Many years ago, Herbert Grimsditch made the simple but

profound observation that ‘Hardy is fond of beginning his

stories with a road, along which a pedestrian makes his

way’ – this pattern helping ‘to set off humanity very

well against the background of the earth’.1 ‘Fond’ would

be an understatement. The Hand of Ethelberta begins on ‘A

Street in Anglebury’ where the heroine meets her old

suitor, Christopher Julian. Jude Fawley sets off on his

abortive trip to Christminster along a ‘white road’ that

‘seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the sky’;

he’s standing on a similar bit of roadway when Arabella

throws a pig’s pizzle at his ear. A Laodicean opens with

George Somerset on a twilight path; he witnesses the

heroine refusing baptism, becomes benighted, and ends up

following a telegraph wire – leading to the heroine’s

castle – where it departs from the road. The Mayor of

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Casterbridge opens with Henchard’s dysfunctional family on

the road to Weydon Priors where he will divest himself of

them, A Pair of Blue Eyes with Stephen Smith being driven to

West Endlestow, the ‘moving outlines’ of the two men

being seen ‘against the sky on the summit of a wild lone

hill in that district.’ After an elegiac introduction to

Egdon Heath, the second chapter of The Return of the Native

begins with the heroine’s father, Captain Vye: ‘Before

him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and

white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and

bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on

a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the

furthest horizon.’ (This image for a light road on a dark

landscape formed a sub-obsession with Hardy: it recurs in

his poem, ‘The Roman Road’, which ‘runs straight and

bare/As a pale parting-line in hair/Across the heath’,

and in a draft passage from The Woodlanders, where ‘the

largest of the woods shows itself bisected by the highway

as a head of thick hair is bisected by the white line of

its parting’.)2 Tess of the D’Urbervilles opens with John

Durbeyfield ‘walking homeward from Shaston to the village

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of Marlott’, when he encounters the meddling parson who

changes his daughter’s destiny with a passing remark. Two

on a Tower opens with ‘a gleaming landau’ coming to a halt

‘where the old Melchester Road, which the carriage had

hitherto followed, was joined by a drive that led round

into a park at no great distance off.’ The Well-Beloved opens

with ‘A person who differed from the local wayfarers…

climbing the steep road’ leading onto ‘The Isle of

Slingers’, or Portland Bill.

That is just the full-length fiction. ‘The Three

Strangers’ begins in Shepherd Fennel’s home, located at

‘the crossing of two footpaths at right angles hard by’;

Phyllis Grove is to meet her Melancholy Hussar ‘at a

point in the highway at which the lane to the village

branched off’; the second chapter of ‘The Withered Arm’

is back on the road from Anglebury to Holmstoke: a ‘long

white riband of gravel’ that was ‘empty, save of one

scarce-moving speck, which presently resolved itself into

the figure of a boy’; ‘Fellow Townsmen’ opens with

Charles Downe on foot and George Barnet in his phaeton,

both on the turnpike road leading into Port-Bredy;

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‘Interlopers at the Knap’ opens on ‘The north road from

Casterbridge…tedious and lonely, especially in winter-

time’. (‘Yet this neglected lane’, we learn, ‘had been a

highway to Queen Elizabeth’s subjects and the cavalcades

of the past. Its day was over now, and its history as a

national artery done for ever.’) The story of the First

Countess of Wessex has the coach road, ‘stretching ahead

in the pale night light like an unrolled deal shaving’,

as well as a ‘lonely and solitary length of the old Roman

road now called Long-Ash Lane’ down which the heroine

elopes. Roads of just the same kind recur in ‘The Grave

by the Handpost’ and ‘A Changed Man’ in the collection of

that name.

The poems are nearly as forthcoming. ‘The Roman

Road’ we have already seen; there is also ‘A Wet Night’,

with the narrator walking ‘Mile after mile out by the

moorland way’ and pondering a time ‘When worse beset, ere

roads were shapen here’. ‘At Castle Boterel’ opens with a

‘junction of lane and highway’ and involves the walking

experiences of other visitors, ‘foot-swift, foot-sore’,

which cannot compare with his the time he had there with

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his lover; ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’ features a ‘stunted

handpost’, marking ‘the crossways close thereby’, on

which his lover unwittingly adopts the posture of

crucifixion. ‘Silent I footed it by an uphill road’, the

narrator of ‘The Last Signal’ confesses, before seeing

the coffin of his friend flashing by in front of him;

‘Where Three Roads Joined’ marks a spot of long-lost

happiness; and ‘The Weary Walker’ amounts to a lament

over life itself, forever still in front of him: ‘Ever

the road!’ Even The Dynasts has a momentary scene (Part

Two, Act V, Scene v), on ‘The Old West Highway out of

Vienna’, as the court escapes the capital: ‘the huge

procession on the brown road looks no more than a file of

ants crawling along a strip of garden-matting.’

The reader is getting the point: roads infest

Hardy’s imagination to a degree an extent that the recent

study by Scott Rode only begins to encompass.3 Some

scattered quotations from the novels will indicate how

pervasive the theme is: ‘the glazed high-road which

stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a directing-post

where another road joined it…lying like a riband unrolled

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across the scene’;4 ‘green lanes, whose deep ruts were

like Cañons of Colorado in miniature’;5 ‘the road, still

adhering to its Roman foundation, stretched onward

straight as a surveyor’s line till lost to sight on the

most distant ridge’; ‘the old western highway, whose

course was the channel of all such communications as

passed between the busy centres of novelty and the remote

Wessex boroughs’;6 ‘the hard, white, turnpike road…

followed the level ridge in a perfectly straight line,

seeming to be absorbed ultimately by the white of the

sky’;7 ‘she followed the path towards Rainbarrow,

occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of

rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this

season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten

liver and lungs of some colossal animal’;8 ‘The tape-like

surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he

could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded onto

the white vacuity of its perspective’;9 and, finally, ‘a

carriage-road, nearly grown over with grass, which Anne

followed as it turned and dived under dark-rinded elm and

chestnut trees’.10 Tess, in particular, is an encyclopaedia

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of roads, with its ‘three-mile walk, along a dry white

road, made whiter to-night by the light of moon’ on the

night of Tess’s seduction (p. 80), Angel’s ride with his

father when Alec D’Urberville is mentioned (p. 212), the

‘long and unvaried’ lane Tess walks from Port-Bredy to

Flintcombe Ash (p. 352), and the road she tramps back

from the Clares, in her good shoes: ‘Its dry pale surface

stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure,

vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-

droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there’

(p. 391). Finally, there is that ‘long and regular

incline of the exact length of a measured mile’ which

Angel and Liza-Lu climb to witness the heroine’s

execution at the end of the novel (p. 506).

Why are roads so important to Hardy? And what is

their significance as regards setting humanity off

against the background of the earth?

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I.

Tragedy and evolution are perennial themes in the study

of Thomas Hardy’s fiction. They are colossal themes, too,

and I must issue some caveats and make some

generalizations before turning to Hardy’s imaginative and

dramatic fascination with roads as objects inflected by

both natural selection and by fate. On what Dale Kramer

calls the ‘often roiled dispute’ as to ‘whether tragedy

was still an art form’,11 carried on after the publication

of George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy in 1961, for

example, I still find myself attracted to Steiner’s

account. Though I am sceptical regarding his religious

explanation for the decline of tragic significance in the

modern world, I am sure that that decline has taken

place. For the purposes of this article it is not enough

to regard tragedy as ‘an extremely sad and unexpected

event’, or as a plot involving ‘the WORTHY encompassed by

the INEVITABLE’, as Hardy himself believed12 – though

neither of these definitions is completely beside the

point. It is not enough for tragedy that an innocent

should die, or that the tragic victim be more ‘sinned

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against than sinning’, as King Lear says that he is.

Tragedy must involve the extremely sad and unexpected

death of someone finer than ourselves: someone whose experience

has granted him or her an insight into human existence

not to be arrived at by other means, which inspires pity

and fear of a spiritual kind in those who to whom it is

communicated.

So anagnorisis, or ‘recognition’, is not a restricted,

technical, and incidental element in tragedy, but central

to its effect. The tragic hero or heroine can start out

in a state of egocentric folly, like Dr Faustus, or self-

indulgent narcissism, like Antony and Cleopatra. But as

long as men and women such as these are eventually

brought to a position from which they can, on the brink

of death, and when the knowledge is no longer of use to

them, recognize the hopelessness of the human condition,

tragedy will be the result. Anagnorisis is not just a matter

of discovering that the daughter you cast out always

loved you most; it is a matter of discovering that we are

to the gods as flies to wanton boys. It is not enough to

discover that fulfilled political ambition is no

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guarantee of happiness; you must discover that life is a

tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Lear and

Macbeth are themselves responsible for the disasters that

they respond to, but we nevertheless respect such

recognitions as tragic ones. Without that respect for

someone nobler than ourselves we have what are really

only sad (albeit enlightening) stories like The Wild Duck,

or Ghosts – or Thomas Hardy’s novels, as a rule.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a case in point. At its climax,

after the heroine has re-encountered her husband in the

dining room of a Sandbourne boarding-house, she is

followed back to her apartment by her landlady, who spies

on her through the keyhole. What Mrs Brooks hears, in ‘a

low note of moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to

some Ixionian wheel’ is:

‘O – O – O!’

and, eventually, to her lover in the next-door room:

‘O God – I can’t bear this! – I cannot!’ (pp. 486-7)

It is not enough for us to have Tess bound to an Ixionian

wheel. She must be able to convey something about how

that feels and what it means. Tess is ‘sympathetic,

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loving, loyal, honest, conscientious, hard-working,

unassuming, and, most of all, selfless – even when the

exercise of these qualities, as it often does, clearly

works against her welfare.’ This makes her ‘a remarkable

young woman’13 – but not remarkable enough for tragedy. In

his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ D. H. Lawrence argued that

modern tragic literature confronts ‘the immorality of

nature’ ‘only passively, negatively’, and confines itself

instead to ‘transgression against the social code…as

though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.’14

Lear rebels against ‘the immorality of nature’ in all its

‘eternal incomprehensibility’; Hardy and Ibsen rebel

against social and intellectual phenomena (the sexual

double standard, idealism, hypocrisy, materialism, and so

forth) that are profound, to be sure, but subject to both

time and human understanding. So all tragedy is

pessimistic, but not all pessimism is tragic. ‘Hardy’s

tragedy’, a reviewer of The Return of the Native wrote in 1879,

‘gives us the measure of human miserableness, rather than

of human grief – of the incapacity of man to be great in

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suffering, or anything else, rather than of his greatness

in suffering.’15

By the rule of thumb I have tried to outline the

novel of Hardy’s that comes closest to being a tragedy is

probably The Mayor of Casterbridge. Henchard’s capacity for

anagnorisis is not as profound as Lear’s or Macbeth’s, but

he is indeed ‘highly significant as a type of human

character’: ‘wrong-headed, faulty, imprudent…but withal a

“man of character” – that is to say, a man of principle

and rugged determination.’16 Imponderable qualities like

character, principle, and determination certainly

contribute to view of existence hammered and stammered

out in ‘Michael Henchard’s Will’ at the novel’s close (p.

384):

& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.

& that no flours be planted on my grave.

& that no man remember me.

Henchard’s will is more than a measure of human

miserableness; it is a tragic vision of desolation. The

death of Giles Winterborne (from The Woodlanders) is very

different, as Dale Kramer points out. It ‘is pitiful and

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pathetic because he is a physically strong man made

physically helpless; but because he never challenges –

indeed never comprehends – the forces that destroy him,

his death is not tragic.’17

(That a degree of articulacy must accompany tragic

effect is debatable. Bertolt Brecht regarded tragedy as a

bourgeois form, but George Steiner is convinced that

Mother Courage, at least, is a tragedy. At the climax of a

production he saw, he recollected the actress making a

silent gape of complete horror: ‘a sound that screamed

and screamed through the whole theatre so that the

audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind’.18

Shakespeare, too, has Edgar remark, ‘the worst is not,/So

long as we can say, “This is the worst.”’ So tragi

inarticulacy is an element dramatists are aware of.

Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, furthermore, are

empresses, kings, and generals; Tess is a dairymaid.

(Perhaps Mayor Henchard’s tragic recognition is related

to his social status, which is higher than most of

Hardy’s protagonists — though his spelling is unreliable,

to be sure.) The issue of articulacy is bound up with the

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overall theme of this discussion: Hardy’s effort to

reconcile tragic and evolutionary forces in his fiction

drove him to choose characters in whom anagnorisis proved

difficult to reproduce.)

Where the question of evolution is concerned, I’m

sure Gillian Beer is right to argue that ‘Darwin’s

romantic materialism, which resulted in a desire to

substantiate metaphor, to convert analogy into real

affinity, should be understood as part of a profound

imaginative longing shared by a great number of his

contemporaries’, Hardy included.19 As Roger Ebbatson puts

it, evolution, ‘with its potent vocabulary of struggle,

fitness, and survival,’ provided ‘a kind of myth of

origins’ to writers of Hardy’s time,20 ‘whereby the

contradictory processes of socialisation and

individuation could be examined with a new sense of their

complexity’ – and with a new sense of human miserableness

that might provide materials for a renewed variety of

tragedy.

Darwin and his metaphors lent plenty of material to

late nineteenth-century pessimism. ‘One may say’, he

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wrote as early as 1838, ‘there is a force like a hundred

thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted

structure into the gaps in the œconomy of Nature, or

rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.’21 This

is the kind of vocabulary that led to the pessimism we

see in Joseph Conrad’s letters to Cunningham Grahame from

1897. The universe ‘evolved itself’, Conrad wrote,

out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it

knits.… And the most withering thought is that the

infamous thing has made itself; made itself without

thought, without conscience, without foresight,

without eyes, without heart…. It knits us in and it

knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death,

corruption, despair and all the illusions — and

nothing matters.22

Hardy shared Conrad’s fascination with the mechanical

aspects of natural selection. Having watched a group of

women at a church service in Kensington, he wrote:

Their real life is spinning on beneath this apparent

one of calm, like the District Railway-trains

underground just by – throbbing, rushing, hot,

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concerned with next week, last week…. Could these

true scenes in which this congregation is living be

brought into church bodily with the personages, there

would be a churchful of jostling phantasmagorias

crowded like a heap of soap bubbles, infinitely

intersecting, but each seeing only his own.23

Conrad’s knitting machine and Hardy’s Underground are

their versions of Darwin’s diabolical wedge-hammerer: an

evolutionary mill – ‘without thought, without conscience,

without foresight’ – bent on and living off extinction,

and apparently assimilable to tragic destiny.

‘It would be easy’, Gillian Beer writes, ‘to make

either an optimistic or a pessimistic selection from the

Origin’,24 but neither Conrad nor Hardy contemplated the

former possibility. (An ‘optimistic’ interpretation of

the Origin in Hardy’s time might have been a more brutal

one than his humane pessimism: the idea, entertained by

white imperialists, that ‘natural selection’ justified

their domination of other, ‘lower’, peoples.) Both showed

their readers what Hardy called ‘the real moving forces

of the great tragi-comedy of human life’,25 and those

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forces were destructive ones. For them as for Darwin,

‘extinction and natural selection…go hand in hand’,26 and

the teeming populousness of modern societies only made

natural selection a more appropriate myth to employ in

contemplating them. ‘Let it be borne in mind’, Darwin had

written, ‘how infinitely complex and close-fitting are

the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other

and to their physical conditions of life.’ The struggle

for existence, accordingly, ‘will be most severe between

the individuals of the same species, for they frequent

the same districts, require the same food, and are

exposed to the same dangers’ – whether on an entangled

bank, an island in the Malay Archipelago, or a Wessex

village. ‘As all organic beings are striving’, Darwin

said, ‘to seize on each place in the economy of nature,

if any one species does not become modified and improved

in a corresponding degree with each of its competitors,

it will soon be exterminated.’ Standing still is

evolutionary suicide, and ‘a grain in the balance will

determine which individual shall live and which shall

die.’27

17

In Darwin we apparently find Lawrence’s immorality of

nature, in all its eternal incomprehensibility, brought

down to earth from the heavens Lear excoriates, to a new

heath, like Egdon, in which not the gods but natural

selection plays with us like flies. The Fates and the

Furies, accordingly, are a kind of euhemerist myth of the

survival of the fittest, and hamartia is an

anthropomorphic form of biological mal-adaptation. In

‘Candour in English Fiction’, written for the New Review in

1890 (a year before the publication of Tess), Hardy

detected ‘a revival of the artistic instincts towards

great dramatic motives’, of the kind ‘formerly worked out

with such force by the Periclean and Elizabethan

dramatists, to name no other.’ But this was not a simple

return: ‘not a moment of revolution but – to use the

current word – evolution.’ ‘Hence, in perceiving that

taste is arriving anew at the point of high tragedy,’

Hardy went on:

writers are conscious that its revived presentation

demands enrichment by further truths – in other

words, original treatment: treatment which seeks to

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show Nature’s unconsciousness not of essential laws,

but of those laws framed merely as social expedients

by humanity, without a basis in the heart of things;

treatment which expresses the triumph of the crowd

over the hero, of the commonplace majority over the

exceptional few.28

So Hardy made an ambitious connection between a renewed

form of ‘high tragedy’ and a set of ‘essential laws’,

written ‘in the heart of things’ – natural and cultural

alike – which dictate the levelling of heroic exaltation.

For him, the revival of something Periclean and

Elizabethan necessarily involved the ‘current’

intellectual interests of his time, among which Darwinism

was dominant.

II.

Of all Hardy’s novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles is ‘perhaps the

most sophisticated, subtle and complex in bringing to

bear upon its protagonist a concatenation of Darwinian

factors.’29 But a strong case can also be made for The

Woodlanders as regards tragedy and evolution being

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imaginatively intertwined by a novelist attempting to

renew the genre. ‘Though Tess and Jude are tragic on a

scale much greater than anything in The Woodlanders,’ Ian

Gregor suggests, ‘there is a mood operative in that novel

much more deeply pessimistic than anything else in

Hardy’s fiction.’30 (In certain respects, The Woodlanders is

a more pessimistic reprise of Far from the Madding Crowd. In

the earlier novel, the countryman finally wins his object

of desire from the interloper; in the later one, the

reverse takes place.) Certainly Hardy’s ‘keen awareness

of evolutionary realities permeates The Woodlanders, adding

a nightmarish subtext of degeneration and extinction

(both natural and cultural)’ that even the two more

famous novels hardly rival.31 ‘The specific “variety” of

tragedy that Hardy treats in The Woodlanders’, Dale Kramer

argues,

portrays the source of life’s misery as a quasi-

transcendental condition of life, the expression of

which suggests determinism, but whose operation is

more accurately thought of not as pre-fated but

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simply as the consequence of the interaction of

natural forces struggling for life and supremacy.32

Michael Millgate’s analysis is even more Darwinian in its

vocabulary:

Hardy presents, almost in the manner of a ‘roman

expérimental’ a small group of central characters,

carefully selected and differentiated as to birth,

education, wealth, and class, divided quite

specifically into the two basic groups of woodlanders

and ex-urbanites [not to mention men and women], and

deliberately subjected to a wide range of the

misfortunes which nature, society, sexual drive,

human folly, and simple accident can bring. Working

with the established human ecology…Hardy transplants

exotic growths (Mrs Charmond and Fitzpiers) from

elsewhere. He also takes one promising plant (Grace

Melbury) from its natural soil, forces it in hothouse

conditions, and then transplants it back to its place

of origin.33

This is tragedy as ‘cosmic ant farm’.34 J. Hillis Miller

skirts the language of Darwinism, per se, but shows us

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exactly where it overlaps with human affairs in this

novel:

The landscape, the past, language, artifacts old and

new, men and women in their living together – these

for him [Hardy, in The Woodlanders] form a complicated

structure of interpenetrating realities, a dynamic

field of tensions and interactions both spatial and

temporal. This field constitutes the humanized world

into which an individual is born. So closely

interwoven are these elements that any one of them

may stand for the others or provide a means of access

to it. Nature, other people, and history have been

assimilated into language, and history has been

incarnated in roads, dwellings, and furniture.35

This ‘dynamic field’, practically instinct with

evolutionary process and potential, is, to all intents

and purposes, ecology as a tragic stage.

Whereas Kramer, Millgate and Miller assimilate

tragedy and evolution where The Woodlanders is concerned,

George Levine separates them.36 For him, the generic

heterogeneity of the novel – tragic, comic, pastoral,

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romantic, even farcical – is itself ‘evolutionary’: The

Woodlanders is something always in flux and therefore

generically un-categorizable. Still, the novel makes as

large a set of claims for itself as a tragedy as it makes

copious use of the vocabulary of Darwinism. There is a

well-known passage when Winterborne follows the heroine

and her father into the Hintock woods:

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss,

rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves,

skirted trunks with spreading roots whose mossed

rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves,

elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks in which

stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days

and ran down their stems in green cascades.

This is a landscape saturated with life, death, and their

interdependence:

On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi

grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled

Intention, which makes life what it is, was as

obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a

city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was

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crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate

the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled

to death the promising sapling. (p. 53)

Here is the mill of natural selection at work,

constraining the individual spurt of life under the

pressure of the natural (or urban) economy.

The ‘Intention’ rules the roost at Little Hintock,

with its ‘over-crowded branches in the neighbouring wood

which were rubbing each other into wounds’ (p. 17), dawns

so dark ‘you couldn’t have told poor men from gentlemen’

in the primal soup (p. 30), the ‘external phenomena’ in a

man’s form of dress or posture which attract women to him

(p. 39), the ‘helpless stationariness’ of the nicknacks

in Grace’s old bedroom (p. 48), the ‘freemasonry of

education’ which elevates Grace and Mrs Charmond above

the other women of the neighbourhood (p. 56), the

‘unfitness for modern lives’ of Hintock House and the

‘fragility’ to which those lives have themselves

‘declined’ (pp. 58-9), Mrs Charmond’s own ‘adaptable,

wandering, weltbürgerliche nature’ (p. 61), the antagonism

between the two women’s complexions (p. 62), the woodside

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pheasants roosting close to the tree trunk or along its

boughs as the wind dictates (p. 68), the ‘intangible

Cause’ which produces family irritation as well as the

‘old simple indigenous feeling’ which Grace retains

towards Winterborne (p. 80), the breeze which makes ‘the

point of each ivy-leaf on the trunks scratch its

underlying neighbour restlessly’ (p. 84), the ‘curious

mechanical regularity of country people in the face of

hopelessness’ that reminds us of Darwin’s encounters with

giant tortoises in the Galapagos (p. 118), Winterborne’s

lack of what the heroine calls ‘perseverance’ (p. 135),

the ‘helpless immobility’ and ‘meditative inertness’ of

the village (p. 158), Grace as the ‘passive cause’ of

Winterborne’s desolation (p. 167), Fitzpiers’ belief that

he belongs ‘to a different species’ from the labourers he

sees from his hotel window (p. 169), Grace’s combination

of ‘modern nerves with primitive feelings’ (p. 276), and

the ‘mutual rubbings and blows’ the trees give each other

in ‘wrestling for existence’ which is like a ‘struggle

between…neighbours’ (pp. 288-9). The novel is positively

awash with evolutionary language – movement and stasis,

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progress and decline, adjustment and oppugnancy: so much

so as to suggest that the cardinal distinctions between

nature and humanity could themselves ‘interpenetrate’ and

dissolve away.

Both nature and humanity are utterly intent on

filling gaps in the economy of nature: occupying niches,

as Darwin put it. ‘Niche’ is a term that straddles nature

and society effortlessly – especially as regards a

society as stratified but also as mobile, in class,

gender, and professional terms as Victorian England.

‘Grace Melbury takes advantage of her uprooting from the

Hintocks’, Roger Ebbatson points out, ‘to marry into

another niche in society than her father’s’; but she

ultimately finds herself ‘in mid-air between two storeys

of society’.37 Fitzpiers explains his decision to practise

in Little Hintock on Darwinian lines: ‘I took a map, and

I marked on it where Dr. Jones’s practice ends to the

north of this district, and where Mr. Taylor’s ends on

the south, and little Jimmy Green’s on the east, and

somebody else’s to the west. Then I took a pair of

compasses, and found the exact middle of the country that

26

was left between those bounds’ (p. 50) – not that it does

him any good, as he is as effectually squeezed out of his

niche as everybody else is. Grace tells her father, ‘I

wish you had never, never thought of educating me’ (p.

208), as her education only renders her maladapted to her

‘native air’ (p. 84). Like Mrs Charmond, she and her

husband have to abandon their foothold in the Little

Hintock economy. There would have been a time when

Winterborne and Marty South could and should have

married, sharing as they did an ‘intelligent intercourse

with Nature’ (p. 306) which attuned them to each other,

much as an ‘unwritten code’ unites Winterborne and

Grace’s father (p. 27). But everything has changed in

that niche, too: ‘The new order, in the figures of

Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond, destroys the old, represented

by Giles, Marty and the Hintock community’,38 and the fact

that the doctor and the fine lady cannot govern the

forces they have unleashed is cause for neither grief nor

satisfaction: those forces are evolutionary and

impersonal.

27

There is a distinction, however. Humanity can

recognise the ‘Unfulfilled Intention’, mourn it, rage

against it, or otherwise reinterpret it, as fatal

malignity or coincidental happenstance. Either such

interpretation would be wholly un-Darwinian. For Darwin,

according to Kevin Padian, ‘the “tangled bank” metaphor

of species interactions is synergistic: the fates of all

organisms are interrelated in the ecological web of life.

There is nothing coincidental about the presence or

absence of these species. They have evolved together over

eons.’ It follows that ‘coincidence would have no meaning

to Darwin because no organisms but us humans would see

any significance in their fates.’ ‘Virtually all patterns

that humans label Chance have particular determinants…,

and no important process in evolution is truly random in

its cause’, so for Darwin, chance is ‘a series of

determined imponderables: only epistemological ignorance

keeps us from figuring out the myriad causes behind it.’39

The forces that crush the sapling in Hintock Woods might

be invisible, but they exist all the same. So, too, with

people: ‘no man’s hands could help what they did’,

28

Fitzpiers tells Grammer Oliver, ‘any more than the hands

of a clock’ (p. 50). Though we do not know what forces

make us act as we do, those forces still exist, awaiting

discovery.

Tragedy also concerns itself with free will. We are

as flies to wanton boys because we ultimately have no

such thing. But in so far as Hardy saturated his

experimental population of human subjects with tragic

coincidence and tragic destiny as well as with

evolutionary determinism, he created an intellectual

problem. As an evolutionist he wanted to borrow the force

of Darwin’s mill — its hundred thousand wedges, its

knitting action, its Underground trains scurrying about

on their tracks, and all the other ‘purblind doomsters’

alluded to in his poem simply called ‘Hap’. As a

tragedian he wanted to deny the mill’s accessibility to

rational explanation, because that would reduce its power. He

wanted to have the dramatic benefit of determinism on the

one hand, and chance and malignity on the other.

So The Woodlanders is as intent on tragedy as it is on

natural selection. Just as the ‘Unfulfilled Intention’

29

passage demonstrates the novel’s Darwinian credentials,

so Hardy’s suggestion that ‘from time to time, dramas of

a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the

real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely

knit interdependence of the lives’ under scrutiny under

High Stoy Hill (p. 8), demonstrates its tragic ones.

Though one variety of determinism is scientifically

demonstrable and the other is in the imagination, Hardy

exploits the idiom of tragedy in The Woodlanders with just

as much care as he does that of Darwinism. Indeed he

assimilates them. Grace has been educated ‘far above the

level of the daughters hereabout’ (p. 20), and is ready

for a fall; Little Hintock itself, the eternal hamlet,

‘had at some time or other been of greater importance

than now’ (p. 26); the community ‘evinces some shyness in

showing strong emotion among each other’, which only

leads to tragic repression (p. 46); and ‘the regular

terrestrial roll’ of this isolated realm suddenly suffers

‘something dissociated from these normal sequences, and

foreign to local knowledge’, as if it was the State of

Denmark, when Fitzpiers begins experimenting with

30

coloured light (p. 49). ‘Good and great fall as well as

humble’, we are gloomily informed (p. 152), and there are

clear anticipations of Tess when a meddling parson tells

George Melbury that his ancestors had once owned the

manor Mrs Charmond now occupies, and when we learn (from

the impressionable Melbury, it is true) that Fitzpiers’

own family ‘were lords of the manor for I don’t know how

many hundreds of years’ (p. 152) before he lowered

himself to one of the professions. In allying himself to

the House of Melbury, Fitzpiers himself worries that he

is ‘casting a die by impulse which he might not have

thrown by judgment’ (p. 154), thus exposing his tragic

flaw. The ‘curious effect of bottling up the emotions’,

which people experience in Little Hintock (p. 179),

drives Mrs Charmond into the married doctor’s arms, and

brings about her own demise in due course when Marty

South’s ‘bullet met its billet at last’ in the form of a

lock of her hair: ‘tragedy had been its end’ (p. 303).

But in assimilating tragedy with evolution Hardy

created an artistic as well as an intellectual problem

for himself. To believe in natural selection is to

31

believe that it can ultimately be understood: but not by

its victims, only by those who study it. To believe in

tragedy is to believe in recognition: that the victim can

recognize, if never understand, the inevitability of

human suffering. Hardy’s interest in those ‘essential

laws’ of nature that Darwin revealed made ‘arriving anew

at the point of high tragedy’ almost impossible, because

the ‘essential laws’ of the tragic realm are

incomprehensible. Tragedy is in the vocabulary of The

Woodlanders, therefore, but not in the narrative — not in

what Aristotle would have called ‘the plot’. Mrs

Charmond, for example, dies offstage in utterly

melodramatic circumstances, during a confrontation with a

previous lover on the rebound from South America (p.

303). Melbury walks about the neighbourhood, Hardy says,

with ‘a tragic vision that travelled with him like an

envelope’ (p. 216), like Hamlet’s ‘nighted colour’. In

fact, he just feels guilty at encouraging his daughter to

marry the wrong man. Winterborne’s old servant, Robert

Creedle, provides a rural eulogy for his master, saying,

‘Well, I’ve knowed him from table-high; I knowed his

32

father…and now I’ve seen the end of the family, which we

can ill afford to lose, wi’ such a scanty lot of good

folk in Hintock as we’ve got.’ (p. 302.) It is an

affecting speech, but hardly a tragic summation — and in

fact we can detect in Creedle’s words more concern for a

loss of social biodiversity than tragic grief. Given her

education, her love for the hero, and the extent to which

her life has been stained by what her father regards as

‘the tragic colour of the antecedent events’ (p. 294), we

might expect a more profound level of insight from Grace

Melbury. But, like Tess, she ends up over Winterborne’s

corpse, only ‘moaning in a low voice, “how could I — how

could I!”’ (p. 291.) What Hardy calls her ‘timid

morality’ prevents a deeper response, and within some

months she is tidying up his memory by observing to

herself that ‘Nothing ever had brought home to her with

force as this death how little acquirements and culture

weigh beside sterling personal character’ (p. 310): a

remark well worthy of a Victorian young lady’s

commonplace book.

33

III.

So George Levine is right: ‘the clear connection between

Hardy’s bleak vision of a competitive and indifferent

natural world in The Woodlanders and Darwin’s “Struggle for

Existence,” does not,’ as he says, ‘get one far enough.’40

Or rather, the connection breaks down. Darwin did not

bequeathe Hardy a renewed concept of ‘high tragedy’ based

on a new understanding of ‘essential laws’ or a new

vision of ‘the immorality of nature’ and its ‘eternal

incomprehensibility’. Rather, Darwin taught us that

nature is amoral and comprehensible. There is no

implacable force of evil or ‘hap’ — just a lot of

determinism we haven’t worked out yet. It is ignorance

that frightens us, not reality. Hardy himself persisted

in a state of indecision about this connection: too timid

a moralist to commit himself to tragedy, he was too

sceptical about scientific truth to abandon that vision

of the world that tragedy provided.

But if Hardy was a failure as a tragedian he was a

success as a novelist, and his efforts to reconcile

tragedy and natural selection left him with a set of

34

immensely fruitful imaginative and dramatic ideas. The

most significant of these was his imaginative

incorporation of natural selection as a competitive

pressure operating on what Todd Bender calls ‘a

geographical space closely resembling the South of

England in Victorian times superimposed on the Kingdom of

Alfred the Great’41 – a biota of individuals seen in both

space and time: in geological succession and geographical

distribution, as the Origin has it. But his thinking also

includes a profound interest in inanimate things, which

register (and, it may be, urge or resist) the passage of

time and the ebb and flow of human emotion.

Of all inanimate things in Hardy roads are the most

resonant because they embody, evoke, or dramatize both

forms of determinism, tragic and evolutionary. Roads

fascinated Hardy because they are objects where tragedy

and evolution intersect. Manifestly they are cultural

products, built with purpose; but often they must go

where nature or custom dictate. A road often has its

origin in an immemorial folkway. It is true that the road

sets humanity off against the background of the earth,

35

and exposes a travelling creature as tending towards some

destiny, like Oedipus. But human beings are not the only

animals who make roads. Hoofed animals do, as do rabbits.

So do ants. Considering ‘the old ways’, Hardy wrote,

‘Many successive generations of ants continue to use the

same track they have once taken to. I have been shown

ant-roads by old men who stated that they have been

familiar with them from their earliest recollections.’42

Mrs Yeobright has a similar vision on Egdon Heath, in

which the barrier between man and insect is even more

thoroughly eroded:

In front of her a colony of ants had established a

thoroughfare across the way, where they toiled a

never-ending and heavy-laden throng. To look down

upon them was like observing a city street from the

top of a tower. She remembered that this bustle of

ants had been in progress for years at the same spot

— doubtless those of the old times were the ancestors

of these which walked there now.43

Thus the road is an inanimate object of a very

special kind: something planned, willed, and put to human

36

purpose from Roman and Elizabethan to modern times, but

also a line between two points, and so immemorial,

instinctive, and necessary. And roads form patterns of

movement between and among destinations, link them, turn

the isolated into the connected, and establish a web

whereby culture, looked down on from high enough a tower,

resembles nature. In ‘Roads’, Robert Louis Stevenson said

that a meadow footpath sets us free:

we seem to have slipped for one lawless little moment

out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we

revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies

of personification…and attribute a sort of free-will,

an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband

of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly

adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before

our eyes.44

But Stevenson was too blithe; there are no ‘lawless

little moments’ in Hardy, any more than there are in

Darwin, and no road ‘cunningly adapts itself’ to the

landscape in his work – it goes where time, topography,

and its builder tells it.

37

‘We can clearly see’, Darwin wrote, ‘how it is that

all living and extinct forms can be grouped together in

one great system; and how the several members of each

class are connected together by the most complex and

radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably,

disentangle the inextricable web of affinities between

the members of any one class – though of course those

affinities are there, all the same.’45 This is in part a

case of the nineteenth century writing Darwin, as Gillian

Beer would point out. ‘George Eliot’, George Levine

writes (with the fifteenth chapter of Middlemarch in

mind), ‘saw a deterministic universe as a marvelously

complex unit in which all parts are intricately related

to each other, where nothing is really isolable, and

where past and future are both implicit in the present.…

For [her], every man’s life is at the center of a vast

and complex web of causes, a good many of which exert

pressure on him from the outside and come into direct

conflict with his own desires and motives.’46 For Hardy,

too, humanity is best seen ‘as one great network of

tissue which quivers in every part when point is shaken,

38

like a spider’s web if touched.’47 ‘Hardly anything could

be more isolated, or more self-contained’ than the lives

of Marty South and Giles Winterborne, he suggests: ‘yet

their lonely courses formed no detached design at all,

but were part of the pattern in the great web of human

doings then weaving in both hemispheres, from the White

Sea to Cape Horn’ (The Woodlanders, p. 24). The great web

requires no consciousness among those making it up. It is

a product of what Hardy would call in The Dynasts (Part

One, Act VI, Scene iii) ‘the controlling Immanent Will’:

‘a brain-like network of currents and ejections,

twitching, interpenetrating, entangling, and thrusting

hither and thither the human forms.’ It is no paradox,

then, to describe The Woodlanders as ‘a reciprocal network

of people in painful isolation’,48 and roads in Hardy are

the inert and inanimate symbols and products of networked

isolation: the ‘lonely figure on the broad white

highway’…‘common to all the world’.49 Also with Middlemarch

in mind, Raymond Williams sought to preserve a

distinction between the network and the web. ‘The

network’, he argued,

39

connects; the web, the tangle, disturbs and obscures.

To discover a network, to feel human connection in

what is essentially a knowable community, is to

assert…a particular social value: a necessary

interdependence. But to discover a web or a tangle is

to see human relationships as not only involving but

compromising, limiting, mutually frustrating.50

I think Hardy would have found this distinction

unrealistic. We may think we can distinguish between the

networks of human solidarity and the webs of human

frustration but, like Darwin’s varieties, the one keeps

blending with the other.

IV.

The first chapter of The Woodlanders contains Hardy’s

greatest evocation of the road as network and web,

evolution and tragedy: ‘the forsaken coach-road running

almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south

shore of England’, and lost half way in ‘extensive

woodlands’ which almost obscure it. The trees ‘make the

wayside hedges ragged by their drip and shade’, and at

40

one particular spot ‘the leaves lie so thick in autumn as

to completely cover the track’. This atrophied highway

does not tell a story: it embodies one, evoking as it does

the long-deceased ‘gay charioteers’ and ‘blistered soles’

that have passed over it for centuries. ‘To step…from the

edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare,’

Hardy writes, ‘was to exchange by the act of a single

stride the simple absence of human companionship for an

incubus of the forlorn.’ It is to step from nature (and

evolution) into culture (and tragedy) – or would be, if

Hardy demonstrated any confidence in that distinction.

Certainly it is to enter the world of human dread, as

opposed to natural indifference.

The ‘loiterer’ who steps from the Darwinian mill on

to the human stage is barber Percomb, the ultimate mal-

adapt (like ‘a canary in a thorn hedge’). Utterly immune

to the intimations the narrator shares with the reader,

and ‘mainly puzzled about the way’, Percomb taps the road

with his citified cane and, as if by magic – though it is

following its route exactly as usual – help is at hand in

the form of local transport:

41

presently a slight noise of labouring wheels, and the

steady dig of a horse’s shoe-tips became audible; and

there loomed in the notch of sky and plantation a

carrier’s van drawn by a single horse.

Is this chance or destiny? The meridional road is a

straight line. At the brow of a hill the surrounding

woods and hedges transform that line into a notch picked

out against the evening sky, as if by the storyteller,

but in fact only by virtue of its route and Percomb’s

position along it, below the hill at the stile he has

just crossed. Five minutes earlier, five minutes later,

and Percomb would remain lost, fail to see Mrs Dollery’s

van, and abandon his attempt to buy Marty South’s hair –

and Mrs Charmond would retain Dr Fitzpiers as her lover

at the other end of a totally different novel, lying in

what Hardy elsewhere called ‘the darkness of the

unfulfilled’.51 The intersection is tragically

coincidental, then: it starts a sequence of events that

will end in death. The barber may wander in the gloaming,

and the carrier’s van rumble along as slowly as may be,

but in fact their lines are drawn with Sophoclean

42

exactitude, like the convergence of an iceberg with the

Titanic. Alternatively, it is pure chance. The quality of

events lies not in themselves, but in how they are

interpreted.

This intersection lays down the first geometric

lines of an evolutionary and tragic web. The motions of

humanity and nature may appear random and arbitrary, but

looked at another way every line is direct. Bees and

butterflies fly ‘straight down High Street’ in

Casterbridge, ‘without any apparent consciousness that

they were traversing strange latitudes’, and the town

itself sits on the countryside ‘like a chess-board on a

green table-cloth’.52 Swithin St Cleeve makes his way from

his astronomical tower to his grandmother’s house across

the field ‘in a line mathematically straight’, just as

Ann Avice Caro disappears from Pierston’s view ‘up the

rigid, mathematical road’ that crosses Portland Bill.53

Clym Yeobright does a good deal of walking in his

unhappiness, ‘and the direction of his walk was always

towards some point of a line between Mistover and

Rainbarrow.’54

43

Mathematical curves hold Hardy’s attention just as

straight lines do. The old maltster in Far From the Madding

Crowd ‘seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve

approaches a straight line – less directly as he got

nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at

all.’ At the other end of the novel Fancy Robin’s grave

is exposed by the gradual extension of a ‘liquid

parabola’ of rainwater from a gargoyle on the church roof

above.55 Seductive women are twice associated in his

fiction with the concave-convex shapes of certain

varieties of decorative moulding: Lucetta Le Sueur ‘flung

herself on the couch’, we are told, ‘in the cyma-recta

curve which so became her’, hoping to re-infatuate

Henchard; and the lips of Eustacia Vye (that ‘raw

material of a divinity’, wasted on Egdon Heath), when

viewed from the side, ‘formed, with almost geometric

precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design

as the cima-recta, or ogee.’56

Mathematically predictable lines bring us back to

Mrs Dollery’s van, trundling towards barber Percomb along

what is nowadays the A37 from Dorchester to Yeovil:57

44

‘rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an

extraneous object’, and pulled by an ‘old horse, whose

hair was of the roughness and colour of heather, [and]

whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by

harness and drudgery since colthood’. Van and horse, like

the road they travel, have been placed by usage and old

association in that murky twilight between nature and

culture. After twenty years on the same route the horse

knows the road ‘as accurately as any surveyor could have

learnt it by a Dumpy level.’ When the van is still, the

reins are attached to a hook above the driver’s head,

‘forming a catenary curve from the horse’s shoulders.’

(‘The curve formed by a chain or rope of uniform

density’, according to OED, ‘hanging freely from two

fixed points not in the same vertical line.’) Such are

the lines drawn by culture, from manufactured substances

and with rational purposes. By contrast the only function

of the ‘loose chain’ lost somewhere near the van’s axles

‘was to clink as it went’ – like one of those

‘rudimentary, atrophied, or abortive organs’ Darwin

speaks of in the thirteenth chapter of the Origin.

45

Like her horse Mrs Dollery is ageless, sexless, and

immune to selection. She wears ‘especially in windy

weather, short leggings under her gown for modesty’s

sake’, and a hat instead of a bonnet. But every morning

before she starts, she cleans another notch in the vista

that is being organized for us: the rear window of her

van. When the spectator looks through that window her

passengers are picked out by the frame: ‘a square piece

of the same sky and landscape that he saw without, but

intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers;

who, as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads

nodding in animated private converse, remained in

cheerful unconsciousness that their mannerisms and facial

peculiarities were sharply defined to the public eye’ –

as if in a work of fiction. But who or what are we to

understand is doing the picking out, and in response to

what ‘essential laws’: those of art or nature? Is the

distinction between chance and destiny beginning to

erode? Does chance even exist?

‘The “catenary curve” formed by the reins of the

carrier’s van which we encounter at the opening of The

46

Woodlanders,’ John Bayley remarks, ‘is a wholly gratuitous

piece of…knowledge, and yet it does make us feel the

presence of the van, in the context of road and

journey.’58 I hope I have said enough to suggest that

these apparently indifferent objects and the lines they

inscribe evoke a deeper pattern. On the one hand there is

the ancient and immemorial ‘evolutionary’ world of the

unremarked-upon, ‘timeless, ageless and impersonal’,59

cheerfully or apathetically unconscious – Egdon Heath the

world over, ‘untameable, Ishmaelitish’, wearing ‘the same

antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment

of the particular formation’ since the beginning of

time.60 On the other hand there are those individuals

picked out from that brown dress and from ‘the background

of the earth’ – and they will suffer loss, death, or

both. There are those inside Mrs Dollery’s van, ‘the

commonplace majority’, able to ‘survey life and discuss

the incidents of the day with placid smiles’ (and Hardy

goes inside just such a vehicle in ‘A Few Crusted

Characters’, whose recollections persuade the native not

to return), and there are the ‘exceptional few’ who are

47

the objects of that survey, isolated, subject to the full

force of natural and sexual selection.

‘This place was the Little Hintock of the master-

barber’s search’, a ‘sequestered little world’ at the end

of what Hardy originally called ‘a half-invisible little

lane’, ‘sunk in a concave, and as it were snipped out of

the woodland’, like the rear window of Mrs Dollery’s van.

Little Hintock is ‘outside the gates of the world’,

isolated and vulnerable to evolutionary and tragic change

for precisely that reason; more listless than meditative,

more meditative than active; a place where the dwellings

produce ‘tall stems of smoke, which the eye of

imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet

hearthstones’ now to be dislodged. The line between

nature and culture has almost disappeared, like the

forsaken coach road itself. The chimneys look like trees,

and the entire place is almost given over to the wood,

its single street buried in dead leaves, the air smelling

of pomace and decaying foliage, the only sound being ‘the

hiss of fermenting cider’. The houses, some of which were

once ‘inhabited by people of a certain social standing’,

48

are in various stages of decline into this primordial

substrate, and such is the ‘closely-knit interdependence

of the lives therein’ that the villagers have lost the

sense of privacy and make no use of curtains, which

allows Percomb to inspect the inhabitants house by house

through their windows.

One house, however, is in ‘an exceptionable state of

radiance’ against the gloom, its fire blazing so far as

to illuminate the smoke emerging from the chimney: picked

out and isolated against the surrounding gloom and decay.

The door is ajar, ‘so that a riband of light fell through

the opening into the dark atmosphere without’, and ‘Every

now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would

flit for a moment across the outcoming rays and disappear

again into the night.’ Here is another kind of line,

summoning moths to their destruction: the ‘streak of

light’ that guides Fitzpiers to Little Hintock House on

the night of his accident, the ‘bar of fiery light…

proceeding from the half-open door of a smithy’ which

draws Henry Knight and Stephen Smith out of the rain and

towards the climactic discovery of Elfride’s marriage,61

49

and the ‘tremulous pathway of bright moonshine…stretched

over the water’ which George Barnet sees at Port-Bredy

the night his wife deserts him in ‘Two Fellow Townsmen’.62

At the other end of this line is the nineteen year-

old Marty South, reduced to hardworking penury not by

nature — as Hardy says, ‘the fingers which clasped the

heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or

swept the string’ — but by ‘a cast of the die of

Destiny’: except that nature and destiny have blurred in

Little Hintock. The ‘provisional curves of her

childhood’s face’ have ended in ‘premature finality’, but

Time has awarded this ‘particular victim’ of his a rare

head of hair by way of recompense. A tragic gift — or is

it the case that it is the gift of her parents, just as

her social status is: the one genetically determined, the

other socially and historically so? Can we any longer

confidently distinguish between the two forms of

convergence and the exceptionalism they produce, and

commit ourselves to one form of explanation at the

expense of the other?

50

The Woodlanders illustrates a highly productive problem in

Hardy’s intellectual and creative position: that is, a

deep uncertainty about the extent to which laws like

natural selection could be distinguished from the law of

tragic fatality. The compromise he hammered out may have

put tragedy beyond him, because anagnorisis in the isolated

protagonist is inconsistent with the evolutionary

machine. (‘It has knitted time space, pain, death,

corruption, despair and all the illusions — and nothing

matters.’) But that compromise certainly allowed tragic

elements to live on in his fiction —where sparagmos, in

particular, remains a live and terrible force, for

Henchard, Tess, Jude, and others. Roads, as epitomes of

chance and determinism — depending on how you look at

them, like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit — provided a key

imaginative insight and stage for him, from which he

could again and again launch dramatizations of this very

problem in human understanding.

51

1 Herbert B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

(1925; New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 45.

2 Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1981), p. 5.

3 See Scott Rode, Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads (New York: Routledge,

2006).

4 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 30.

5 Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 114.

6 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp.

235, 368.

7 Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 37.

8 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 420.

9 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 490-

1.

10 Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 43.

11 Dale Kramer, ‘Hardy: The Driftiness of Tragedy’, in Rosemarie

Morgan (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2010), p. 371.

12 Jeanette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of

George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1978), p. 2, and Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy,

1840-1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 251.

13 John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An

Entangled Bank (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 85.

14 D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 29-30.

15 R. G. Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 58.

16 Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, p. 46.

17 Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (London: Macmillan,

1975), p. 98.

18 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1962), p. 354.

19 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2009), p. 37.

20 Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton:

Harvester, 1982), p. xiv.

21 Paul H. Barrett, et al. (eds.), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844:

Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1987), p. 375.

22 Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.), The Collected Letters of

Joseph Conrad, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.

425.

23 Hardy, Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 210.

24 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 94.

25 Lennart A. Björk (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Vol. 1

(London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 136.

26 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996), p. 141.

27 Darwin, ibid. pp. 67, 63, 84, 378.

28 Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions,

Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 126-7.

29 Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels, p. 69.

30 Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber

and Faber, 1974), p. 164.

31 Lesley Higgins, ‘Pastoral Meets Melodrama in Thomas Hardy’s The

Woodlanders’, Thomas Hardy Journal, 6.2 (June 1990), p. 111.

32 Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, p. 95.

33 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Macmillan,

1994), p. 250.

34 Kevin Padian, ‘Evolution and Deep Time in Selected Works of Thomas

Hardy’, in Morgan (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, 232.

35 J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 110.

36 See George Levine, ‘The Woodlanders and the Darwinian Grotesque’, in

Keith Wilson (ed.), Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

37 Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self, p. 8, and The Woodlanders, p. 202.

38 Glenn Irwin, ‘Structure and Tone in The Woodlanders’, in Norman Page

(ed.), Thomas Hardy Annual No. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 79.

39 Padian, ‘Evolution and Deep Time in Selected Works of Thomas

Hardy’, p. 232.

40 Levine, ‘The Woodlanders and the Darwinian Grotesque’, p. 180.

41 Todd K. Bender, ‘Competing Cultural Domains: Borderlands and

Spatial/Temporal Thresholds in Hardy, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence’,

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 21 (2005), p. 174.

42 Bjork (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Vol. 1, p. 34.

43 Hardy, The Return of the Native, p. 343.

44 Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (London: Chatto and Windus,

1916), pp. 215-16.

45 Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Beer, p. 351.

46 George Levine, ‘Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of

George Eliot’, PMLA, 77.3 (June, 1962), p. 270.

47 Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 177.

48 John Hughes, ‘“For Old Association’s Sake”: Narrative, History and

Hardy’s The Woodlanders’, Thomas Hardy Journal, 18.2 (May 2002), p. 57.

49 Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, p. 373, and A Pair of Blue Eyes, p. 260.

50 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto

and Windus, 1970), p. 88.

51 Hardy, A Laodicean, p. 304.

52 Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, pp. 65, 105.

53 Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 13, and

The Well-Beloved (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 109.

54 Hardy, The Return of the Native, p. 207.

55 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1975), p.

131, 323.

56 Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, p. 178, and The Return of the Native, p. 76.

57 M. R. Skilling, ‘Investigations in the Country of The Woodlanders’,

Thomas Hardy Journal, 8.3 (Oct. 1992), p. 66.

58 John Bayley, An Essay on Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1978), pp. 91-2.

59 Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality (London:

Athlone, 1974), p. 28.

60 Hardy, The Return of the Native, p. 6.

61 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, pp. 427-8.

62 Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 141-2.