I should not be reading my first Hardy novel in my 70s. It was not by oversight or accident that I have not done it earlier; it was a more or less conscious choice. Back in the early 1970s, when I was still young and more sensitive than I am now, a BBC dramatization of Jude the Obscure appeared on Masterpiece Theatre. With Alistair Cooke, no doubt--those were wonderful days, when a British import with a British-sounding host (he had long since come over here and become an American citizen) was a hugely refreshing change from American network TV. Well-acted dramatizations of serious novels were something from another world altogether. And there were no commercials! 

But if you know Jude you know that one of its most important events is a horrendous murder-suicide. It disturbed me so much that it not only killed any impulse I may have had to read the novel, but, along with an impression of Hardy's fiction as being pretty bleak in general, discouraged me from reading any of it at all. 

That was understandable to a point, I suppose, but fifty years is long enough to maintain that sort of prejudice, and to allow it to prevent me from ever reading a novelist generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest. So with my recent foray into Hardy's poetry as a catalyst, I took up the one Hardy novel on my bookshelf: Far From the Madding Crowd.

It happens to be his first big success, and I can see why. As I read more 19th century novels it becomes clearer to me that that century was the great century for the novel, much as it was the great century for the symphony. As the symphony of that time combined accessible musical appeal with technical complexity, the novel combined the sheer enjoyment of storytelling with a high level of craftsmanship and profundity of insight. 

This novel certainly belongs with those. It begins with a premise that made me think of Jane Austen: a proud and headstrong young woman must choose among several suitors, and there is more than a little doubt as to whether she will choose wisely. But the similarity to Austen doesn't go much further than that--Hardy's world is rural and his scope broader than Austen's, his people more directly involved with agriculture and the natural world in general--with the world outside the family and a fairly small and homogenous social circle. Hardy's headstrong young woman is confronted with some very elemental and practical challenges. 

We meet one of the suitors before we meet the young woman. His name is Gabriel Oak, and if you figure that with a name like that he's going to be a pretty good solid fellow, you're right. The young woman is named Bathsheba Everdene, which I thought a somewhat peculiar name to give to a daughter in Victorian England. Bathsheba was David's wife, yes, but before she was David's wife she was Uriah's, and committed adultery with David, though it isn't clear from the biblical account whether or not she was willing. Yes, she was greatly honored later, in her own time and on through Jewish and Christian history. But it still seems a bit odd as a choice of name. 

On the other hand, the name lends a suggestion of sensual allure to Miss Everdene, an allure which she certainly possesses. Her parents are dead, and she has inherited a farm, which she undertakes to run by herself, clearly something unusual in the eyes of her neighbors, but perhaps not entirely unheard of. Although she has confidence enough in her ability, it is in part the confidence of one who has not done a thing and thinks it doesn't look so very difficult. Gabriel Oak is of considerable help to her. But he himself is a man of no property at all; he doesn't start out that way, but becomes so through a misadventure involving his dog and his sheep which might be funny, in fact is almost funny, if it weren't so very disastrous. And so she regards him as beneath her, and not at all eligible as a suitor. 

The other two suitors are a handsome and charming soldier--yes, we are quite right to be wary of anyone so described--and a middle-aged bachelor farmer who had never contemplated marriage and whose life is overturned when a casual and very foolish gesture on Bathsheba's part reduces him to helpless obsessive adoration of her. 

One of the Hardy poems that I remember encountering as an undergraduate is a comic one called "The Ruined Maid," which describes satirically the not-so-tragic plight of a country girl who has become what I suppose can be loosely called a courtesan:

"O 'melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I would meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty"--
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

There is an actual ruined maid in this novel, and her story is tragic in fact, and not in the least amusing. Far From the Madding Crowd is, taken as a whole, not a gloomy novel, but there is a good deal of suffering in it.

The milieu in which this suffering occurs is rural agricultural England, which must have seemed timeless in Hardy's day. Some months ago the daily poem at Poems Ancient and Modern was "The Man With the Hoe," by Edwin Markham, which is based on the famous painting by Jean-Francois Millet. Markham denounces at length the near-bestial stupidity which he attributes not only to the man in the painting but to his whole class of poor agricultural laborers. Here's a link to the post. He's mainly concerned with denouncing the man's oppressors, which is fair enough, but I objected to his characterization of the man, who is repeatedly referred to as a "thing," as follows:

I grew up in the rural South, with segregation still de jure till I was in my teens, and de facto after that. I knew (and sometimes worked with) poor black people whose whole life involved demanding physical labor, and whose education didn't go any further than the barest levels of literacy and simple arithmetic. Poor white people, too, but the blacks were of course poorer. I can assure you that they were mentally very very much alive, even if they never so much as heard Plato's name.

Fairly early in this novel we encounter the laborers who work the fields of Bathsheba's farm and others, and the scene quickly dispels any notion we might have that they resemble Markham's caricature. It takes place in the "malthouse" of Bathsheba's farm. I naturally had to look that up. "Malt" is a word that I know only in connection with beer and whiskey, and I really had never given much thought to what it actually is. Now I know, and will leave it to you to read the Wikipedia article if you're interested. The important thing here is that the malthouse is where malting is done, and that that process makes it a pretty warm and cozy place, where the farmhands gather to rest, talk, and drink. The color and vivacity of the talk and the talkers may of course have been enhanced by the author, but as this is a pretty realistic novel I don't see any reason to doubt that it's reasonably representative of the actual. It may have been people like these who helped to furnish Tolkien's picture of hobbits: their lives and thinking are very circumscribed, but within those limits very far from stupid. Today, when even ordinary people think of themselves as sophisticated, I suppose it's easier for them--us--to mistake naivete for stupidity. But it is a naïve mistake. 

The sheer richness of Hardy's narration is maybe the chief and certainly the most immediate pleasure of reading this novel. It was a month or more ago that I finished the book. Just now I picked it up and read a few passages again, and found it hard to put down. As I'm currently reading The Pickwick Papers that's a pretty impressive competitive showing against another Victorian master.

The edition I have is a Penguin Classics one with a copyright date of 1978 and a printing date of 1985. I have no memory of when or how I acquired it. I think it's out of print, and as far as I can tell from a quick search not readily available. That I suspect may be due to the fact that it is in greater demand than one might suppose, as it has an introduction by Ronald Blythe, well-known for Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, and many other writings centered on rural England. The introduction is lengthy and marvelous, most likely far more interesting and useful than what you would to get from a contemporary academic. It would be worth your while to seek out this edition. Since this post is already rather long I'll leave it at that.