Nature

Abstract

From the first, reviewers of Hardy’s novels appreciated and applauded him as an exponent of traditional pastoral — not just his ‘sensitiveness to scenic and atmospheric effects’, but specifically ‘that vein of his genius which yields the best produce’, namely the ‘graphic pictures of rustic life somewhere in the West Country’. Proof of the sheer vivacity and impressiveness of Hardy’s portrayal of a pastoral world is provided paradoxically by the scepticism and scorn his rural transfigurations sometimes provoked. One contemporary reviewer, R. H. Hutton, whole-heartedly praised ‘the physical forms of nature and the external features of the farm-work’ in Far from the Madding Crowd, and then aspersed with absurdity Hardy’s idealising of rural intelligence. Reviewing the same novel on Christmas Eve 1874, Henry James patronisingly described Hardy as ‘evidently very much at home among rural phenomena’ and his characters as ‘children of the soil’.¹ Nevertheless, to their reviewers, Hardy’s early novels breathed the clean, fresh air of south-west England, with a coastal fragrance able ‘to neutralise the glare and noise of the hot London street…’. And it is this contrast between invigorating, innocent countryside and corrosive, corrupting metropolis running through Hardy’s novels that gives them the hallmark of traditional pastoralism.²