The Adventure to the Unknown: Hardy, Lawrence and Developments in the Novel

Abstract

‘Human character changed in 1910’, said Virginia Woolf.¹ The precision of her dating was joky and provocative but it was prompted by the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London which took place that year, and which showed, she felt, that ways of perceiving had irrevocably changed. Of course, she knew perfectly well that it was not as abrupt as this, and, indeed, one may hesitate to describe a change in perception as a change in character. But changes certainly were going on. As early as 1887 Hardy’s comments on Turner suggested different ways of looking: ‘I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called “abstract imaginings”.’² Lawrence, too, thought artists were introducing innovative ways of seeing; on Cézanne he wrote: ‘the eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness and instinct needs insideness. The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of the presented appearance.’³