Thomas Hardy

 

When reading Thomas Hardy's fiction, be prepared to devote almost every waking moment to it until you are finished being dragged through the narrative arc of fond hopes, near misses, dashed hopes, and final tragedy that each of his novels delivers with consummate mastery.

Be prepared to be devastated. 

 

In Lady Chatterley, D. H. Lawrence (a devoted reader of Hardy) articulated with a few deft strokes a theory of the novel that I think holds its own with that of any critic. 

 

There is a scene in Chapter 9 when Connie is reflecting on Mrs. Bolton’s gossip. Lawrence interrupts the flow of her thoughts to opine on "the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead." He goes on to note that, improperly handled, the novel can descend to mere gossip.

Hardy’s novels, though veering to the edge of gossip in their subject matter, avoid that precipice and are properly handled—so properly handled that I think it fair to regard them as instruments of moral education—the best and, in my view, only authentic form of moral education outside of lived experience: one that refuses to stoop to "the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton."

This in addition to his exquisite feeling for the natural world, for landscape, for architecture, and for the vast literary resources upon which Hardy drew.

 

Hardy's own sympathetic consciousness, like Lawrence's, emerged from "the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy" that characterized so much of white, evangelical Christianity in the England of their day and, sadly, the America of ours. 

 

Though rarely recognized as such, both novelists rose above the stifling indoctrination of their early religious training to become important moralists. We should have the temerity, if not the wisdom, to read them as such.