Tag Archives: Thomas Hardy

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

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Published in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd is the story of the young, independent and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (what a name!) and three very different men. Gabriel Oak is a thoughtful, competent young shepherd who meets her and quickly proposes marriage. Mr. Boldwood is an older, gentleman farmer who has no experience with women and falls in love with her too. Francis Troy is a semi-aristocratic soldier who has experience with women and is not to be trusted. It wouldn’t be much of a story if Bathsheba chose the right one right away.

The novel is set in the region of southern England that Hardy called “Wessex”. There are many fine descriptions of the countryside and country life. The downside is that there are a few too many discussions between the local rustics, who speak in dialect and serve as a rural Greek chorus.

The title is from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

The characters in Hardy’s first popular novel do live far from the crowds, but don’t always avoid madness. They might get under your skin a little bit (it’s remarkable how fictional people can affect us).

One of my favorite passages comes near the end of the novel:

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship — camaraderie — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death — that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.

One Way Literature Can Help

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When I was in college, many years ago, there was this girl. I can’t remember exactly what the circumstances were, but one night I was trying to get or stay on intimate terms with her and said something that was really dumb (foolish, pathetic, etc.). The gist of it was that no one else would ever be as important to me, but what I said was even more melodramatic than that. Her appropriate response was something like “are you kidding?”. As you can tell, I’m still embarrassed more than 40 years later. 

Well, I’ve been reading Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in 1874. The heroine, Bathsheba Everdene (quite a handle, as people used to say), has given the local gentleman farmer, Mr. Boldwood, the mistaken impression that she might marry him. It all started when, on a whim, she sent him a valentine. Then she encouraged him some more. He’s never had any experience with women and has fallen in love with her. Meanwhile, she’s fallen in love with a dashing but unreliable young soldier. Miss Everdene tries to let Mr. Boldwood down easy, but he doesn’t take the news very well. Some excerpts:

Oh, Bathsheba, have pity on me! … I am come to that low, lowest stage – to ask a woman for pity! … I am beyond myself about this and am mad… I wish you knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible … In bare human mercy to a lonely man, don’t throw me off now! There was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! … I took for earnest what you insist was jest [that damned valentine!], and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest… I wish your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well! … Bathsheba, you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! … Where are your pleasant words all gone – your earnest hope to be able to love me? Where is your firm conviction that you would get to care for me very much? Really forgotten? Really? … Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down! … I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don’t care….Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of recklessly renouncing you and labouring humbly for you again. Forget that you have said No, and let it be as it was!

I know it’s only fiction, but what I said to that young woman a long time ago doesn’t embarrass me as much now.