Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy, 1874 ★★★½

The Perils of Gaslighting

When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.

The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of “Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the neighboring spread.

She ensnares others, too: A bounder named Sergeant Troy who leaves a pregnant lover to pursue the rich Bathsheba and a luckless shepherd named Gabriel Oak whose love for Bathsheba is more grounded in practicality and subsequently easiest for her to take for granted.

Bathsheba’s verdict on Gabriel’s proposal can be viewed as death sentence or reprieve, depending on where you are in the book: “He wasn’t quite good enough for me.”

Women! Am I right, guys?

About Bathsheba, Hardy writes: There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon the whole, true.

Bathsheba’s coy aloofness will annoy many, yet her whimsical passions and struggle to assert her own identity in a man’s world is needed to fuel the plot and engage readers. Bathsheba is vain and selfish, too easily wooed by gleaming surfaces, like her Biblical namesake ruination to those who desire her; but Hardy makes clear she has a good heart and a point or two when it comes to the battle of the sexes:

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

Bathsheba is a fantastic character of English fiction; the novel she inhabits is not quite all that, but still pretty brilliant in the main.

Hardy's Wessex, like Tolkien's Middle Earth, has been extensively mapped over the years. Weatherbury, the main setting of Far From The Madding Crowd, was based on Puddletown, in the southern English county of Dorset. It appears on the upper right corner of this map. Image from http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/426314.

What is best about Far From The Madding Crowd is the way Hardy enlivens his Wessex setting with beguiling tone poems of scenic delight. He was a novelist who preferred poetry; you see flashes of Wordsworth and Keats in the way Hardy marks shifts in season:

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and color. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.

You expect this sort of naturalism reading Hardy’s other books; what’s more unique about Far From The Madding Crowd is its amiability. Even harsher moments are delivered with dollops of humor; Hardy’s ability to draw chuckles from the folk wisdom of the local rustics remains a constant from start to finish.

“Too much liquor is bad, and leads us to that horned man in the smoky house; but after all, many people haven’t the gift of enjoying a wet, and since we be highly favored with a power that way, we should make the most o’t.”

Yet Hardy’s enveloping descriptions and his flashes of Dickens-like charm are compromised by sluggish plot development and unengaging men.

Thomas Hardy in the 1880s. By this time, he was firmly established as a novelist, after the commercial success of Far From The Madding Crowd allowed him to leave a steady job as an architect. Image from https://mirabiledictu.org/2013/07/17/thomas-hardy-the-apocalyptic-romance/.

Take Gabriel Oak, our de facto lead character with whom we witness the story unfold from first chapter to last. He is much too inert and Mary-Sue-like with his perfect disposition, overall excellence in everything he does, and unfailing loyalty to Bathsheba. Whenever she gets into trouble, Gabriel is always there to help, with an understanding nod and no expectations. His one fault, we are told, is blunt candor.

His very name screams “earth angel;” he lacks too much the stuff of everyday life. Even the other farmhands note this: “’A’s rather a curious item, but a very understanding shepherd, and learned in books.”

The other two main men, Sergeant Troy and Boldwood, are more interesting but too limited. Troy possesses a beguiling rascality (“He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded, disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile.”) But Troy’s personality shifts from chapter to chapter. Hardy alters him to suit the plot; which even good authors often do but less obviously than here.

Boldwood is in some ways the most noble of our characters; more impressive a lonesome loser than Oak as he is more human about it. Yet he is so choked by infatuation for Bathsheba that I wound up feeling sorry for her, an unusual position for a guy who has known some clever minxes in his time. By the latter chapters, he’s telling Bathsheba, who has long ago repented of her Valentine prank, that she now owes him marriage or he’ll go crazy. The scary part: She knows he’s not bluffing.

As far as the plot is concerned, Far From The Madding Crowd’s descriptive wealth comes at the expense of a forward narrative thrust. Events do move, but never swiftly. For much of the time Hardy regurgitates pastoral romantic tropes: Eyes flash, bosoms heave, sheep graze, over and over for 375 pages.

Oh, but does the man go on about those sheep!

Hardy writes about all kinds of sheep in Far From The Madding Crowd, "multitude after multitude, horned and hornless, - blue flocks and red flocks, buff flocks and brown flocks, even green and salmon-tinted flocks, according to the fancy of the colourist and the custom of the farm." Image from https://quillcards.com/blog/smit-marks-to-identify-sheep/

The best I can say about reading Hardy is that it reminds me of what Dorothy Parker said about writing. He’s very enjoyable to have read; not nearly so much to read. Not only is there that slow narrative, and a tendency toward lengthy philosophical digression (which sometimes is quite profound, but strains concentration), but Hardy’s storylines often tend to be cruel.

Far From The Madding Crowd is less this way than other Hardy novels; but its cruelty is still felt. Early on, in a choice bit of Hardy-ian randomness, Gabriel Oak loses most of his sheep flock (and his fortune, as he bought them on credit) when one of his dogs runs them off all a cliff, following too zealously the herding example of his father George, another dog in Oak’s employ.

Oak winds up shooting the pup, not out of revenge but because the animal can’t be relied upon. Hardy even finds cold humor in the situation, “another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.”

The most beastly episode in Far From The Madding Crowd involves the struggles of a young female vagabond whom we later discover is pregnant and connected to more than one of the main characters. Sick, she staggers along a highway willing herself to keep going post-by-post, accompanied by a homeless dog who comes to her, as starved for affection as she. The woman eventually finds shelter, but dies soon after along with her baby. Only the dog survives, driven off by stones.

All this pales beside the struggles of Tess Durbeyfield and other tragic Hardy characters in other bleak novels of his, but it leaves a mark. Far From The Madding Crowd has elements of comedy, and a happy ending that comes off forced but is certainly unambiguous. It’s still Hardy, though, and the story of the pregnant woman and her canine companion suggest the uncaring cosmos that reigns supreme in his other fiction and make his books so singular for their time. It’s all a question of scientific balance with him:

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colors that they are known by, and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

Far From The Madding Crowd may be Hardy’s most popular novel. It has been adapted for screen numerous times, beginning in 1915 and most recently in 2015. On Goodreads, only Tess Of The d’Urbanvilles draws more reviews among Hardy’s work, and not so high an average ranking as this (just under four stars out of five, about where I put it.)

Julie Christie as Bathsheba in the 1967 film adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd, directed by John Schlesinger of Midnight Cowboy fame. A commercial disappointment in its day, it is well-regarded by Hardy enthusiasts over 50 years later. Image from https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/only-way-wessex-making-far-madding-crowd.

If Madding Crowd is truly Hardy’s most popular work, or even just one of his two biggest hits, that would be funny given how it represents early Hardy, just four novels into his career. Before giving up novel-writing completely by the end of the 19^th-century, he spent quite a while detailing Wessex and its inhabitants. The template he uses here, a love triangle with extra angles, was recycled four years later in The Return Of The Native, a more refined novel in many ways but not nearly as fun or convincing.

I think a big reason why Far From The Madding Crowd endures so well, despite my reservations, is how it encompasses a certain type of pastoralism, lyrically and humorously but not without edges. Hearts break, people die, Hardy’s strange rules of cosmically-enforced tragic contrivances remain in effect, yet the balance between good and bad outcomes seems fairer than they do in other books (I haven’t even read Jude The Obscure yet; I hear it’s a pip!)

The last line of the novel, delivered by a comic rustic named Poorgrass, sums it all up rather well: “But since ‘tis as ‘tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.”