The cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold.
In a world where the blind only are cheerful we should all do well to put out our eyes.
As the youthful schoolmaster gazed… he entered on rational considerations of what a vast gulf lay between that lady and himself, what a troublesome world it was to live in where such divisions could exist, and how painful was the evil when a man of his unequal history was possessed of a keen susceptibility.
THOMAS HARDY surely belongs among the greatest of Victorian storytellers. Early in his career, his Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) was, to his chagrin, taken to be the work of George Eliot. But Hardy's work is entirely distinct. In his rejection of the strategies of consolation that marked the work of his famous predecessors, his novels consistently imply a social and cosmic bleakness that has seemed to many readers almost absurd in its excess, and in its culmination in the suicide of the child, 'Father Time,' in Jude the Obscure (1894). Hardy's true greatness as a novelist, however, resides not in his cosmic or social philosophy but in the tensions and contradictions his novels generate as they register both an extraordinarily intense sensitivity to and pleasure in the physical world and life itself and a profound anxiety about the dangers of indulging that sensitivity. The old religious struggles for personal restraint and resistance to the world are replaced in Hardy, who no longer can believe in any world but the material, by a new aesthetic austerity. Self-control becomes for Hardy a condition for survival in a world he thought had no relation to human consciousness and sensibility.
I want to argue in what follows that the distinctive character of Hardy's fiction grows from the way his remarkable powers of sensuous responsiveness play off against the contingencies of society and biology. More specifically, I focus on the way his acute powers of observa-533- tion, almost visionary in the intensity with which they register the phenomena of the natural world, complicate his attitudes toward the class structures that govern society and the powerful sexual drives that govern human behavior. Hardy's visible world belies the human social organizations and moral conventions that ostensibly contain it. It also implies the pervasiveness of seeing: everything in Hardy's world is open to observation-is, in all likelihood, being observed. There are no real secrets in this world, only the desire to keep them.
Thus, for Hardy, the sexual desire that is implicit in the sensuous intensity of vision is itself exposed to the observation of others. And sexual desire is evidence of the fundamental animality of human nature: the 'ape and the tiger' that Tennyson wished dead. For Victorian writers, sexuality meant affiliation with the low rather than the high, and particularly with the lower classes. To be a visionary of Hardy's sort is not to be respectable. To love the visible world in all its sensuous particularity is to be self-evidently déclassé-either as artist, which allows for a fairly complicated form of respectability in some cases, or as plebeian.
Hardy's vision forces him into dramatic self-contradiction. It reveals to him the terrible injustice of class distinctions and the absurdity of human conventions of respectability, but in his own life he struggled to achieve respectability at all costs-usually through evasiveness and disguise (as when he wrote his autobiography under his wife Emma's name). Vision also dramatizes the extraordinary seductiveness of sexuality and nature and at the same time their power to compromise and elude him. It forces him and his characters into self-consciousness, and his novels imply a constant alertness (never quite adequate to the curiosity of the world) to the possibilities of shame and exposure. The protagonists are damned by respectability and by resistance to it, for convention is not merely outside them like a police force but inside them like a conscience. In Hardy himself, the conscience produces not guilt but shame. His characters are not guilty in their transgressions-Tess Durbeyfield, for example, is a 'pure woman,' although she has been raped and has become a murderer. But Hardy, in his evasiveness, recognizes his own fear of the kinds of transgressions he allows Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), or Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). His novels, in their evasiveness, reflect his shame at that fear, his admiration of those uncompromising in their rejection of the respectability that might protect them from their dooms. -534-
Seeing too intensely, too intensely aware of the consequences of being seen, deeply sympathetic to the outcasts of society, desperate to avoid being himself cast out, passionately in love with the physical world, terrified of its indifference to his passion, Hardy writes novels whose power resides not in their implicit commentary on social or cosmic issues but in their ambivalent and culturally significant fusion of his great powers of vision with his deepest desires and anxieties about social success and sexual union.
Like the neurotic and often possessed John Ruskin, Hardy was, then, plagued with vision. The experience of the eye shapes Hardy's work, as it did Ruskin's. Their powers of vision invariably revealed to them much that they did not want to see, in particular their own complicity in the conventions and systems of social injustice and sexual desire that frightened and appalled them. With an architect's eye, Hardy saw history in objects; with a naturalist's eye, he saw how phenomena connect or conflict; with a novelist's eye, he read society in complexions, patterns of labor in postures, systems of hierarchy in costumes. And with the peculiar modern self-consciousness of the nineteenth century, he was constantly aware of the conditions that made observation possible. For Hardy as for Ruskin, deep uneasiness about the social position from which he was empowered to see provoked an even greater intensity of sight and sensitivity to the richness of the visible world and to its beauties, threats, deceptions, and injustices.
Thus, as I have been arguing, precise observation becomes inextricably linked to questions of class and of sexuality. (I want to emphasize sexuality over gender because the gender and class issues in Hardy seem to develop from the direct sexual energy that can be counted on, in almost every novel, to disrupt the narratives male protagonists write for themselves.) Class is a determiner of position for both observer and observed; sexual desire provokes intense observation and at the same time constantly threatens the stability of class. But differences in class and sexual energy led to radically different perspectives. For Ruskin, an evangelical child of commercial privilege, observation required not only the most accurate reporting but the most authoritative interpretation of the visible world. He developed an astonishingly powerful and beautiful voice, which-however muddled and uncertain Ruskin himself often became-pronounced upon the visible and hence upon the moral and the social with the authority and assuredness of a 'graduate of Oxford,' as he is described on the title page of the first volume of Mod- 535- ern Painters (1842). Hardy, whose Jude would gaze longingly toward the distant lights of 'Christminster,' avoided the prophetic forms of nonfiction and made his living writing novels, switching permanently to poetry only after a full, successful, and, from his point of view, thoroughly compromised career as novelist, rarely and evasively venturing into nonfiction. His prose often strains against the colloquial in what has been taken as his awkward and self-conscious attempt to prove he belonged among those graduates of Oxford who did not have to write for a living. Critically he has always paid the price for this. As Raymond Williams complains, traditional critics patronizingly identified Hardy as an 'autodidact.' And Hardy's excessive sensitivity to criticism suggests how vulnerable he was to precisely this kind of class-based judgment, how much he sought to disguise or overcome his social position, and how far he was compromised and shamed in his apparent condemnation of social hierarchies.
Though his early novels are full of caustic satire at the expense of the rich and the aristocratic, as a writer he differs most strikingly from Ruskin in his self-conscious evasiveness. For Ruskin, seeing is prophecy; writing is engagement with the real and persuasion to moral reform. For Hardy, seeing can indeed be prophetic, but it can also be delusive and it is always dangerous; and writing is a medium for lying and evasion as well as for representation. It is a salable commodity and constantly subject to misinterpretation and to unintended revelations. The difficulties of writing are allied to the complexities of seeing, for Hardy is as concerned with being seen as with seeing, and he is uncannily sensitive to the possibility that someone is watching. He is thus equally alert to the need for disguise and to the possibility that what one sees will be misunderstood, and particularly preoccupied with observation in unguarded moments. Seeing, like writing, both exposes and disguises, and unpredictably.
Self-consciousness and seeing are complexly interconnected, each visual event shaped in its significance by the degree to which observed and observer are alert to their conditions. Hardy's astonishing powers of natural description normally depend on the narrator's deep consciousness of the pervasiveness of watching and nature's
