The Pictorial Element in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy

The Pictorial Element
in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy

Dr. (Mrs) PARIYA LAKSHMI GUPTA
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

A remarkable and distinctive feature of Thomas Hardy’s style in his fiction is its pictorial quality. A number of critics have commented upon the pictorial quality of Hardy’s descriptive passages and the profound influence that the visual arts exercised upon his writing and style. Norman Page remarks that “Hardy’s wide knowledge of, and lifelong interest in, the visual arts left their mark on his fiction at both superficial and deeper levels, and in the conception and presentation of whole episodes as well as in individual details of style”¹ Hardy’s novels, he adds, “contain a strong element of literary picture-making.”

Hardy’s interest in painting, which began in his adolescence, remained a lifelong passion with him. In his youth he took up water-colouring as a hobby, and subsequently, when he was an architectural apprentice in London, he was a frequent and eager visitor to the National Gallery. F. B. Pinion remarks, “The evidence indicates not only that pictures helped to quicken and enrich Hardy’s own visual impressions, but that his growing experience as a creative writer intensified his interest in the technical aspect of visual presentation” ² Lloyd Fernando points out that Hardy’s novels are full of references to painters–Perugino, Durer, Raphael, Correggio, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Turner. “Hardy’s appeal to actual paintings to embellish his writing is so widespread in the novels”, Fernando remarks, “that it seems likely that his enthusiastic interest in the visual arts deeply influenced his style as a whole. Certainly, close examination shows that individual phrases, structures of sentences, the trend of whole paragraphs and, in extreme instances, the greater portion of chapters are so closely affected by this interest of his as toconstitute a rhetoric unique in the art of the novel”! ³

Passages which show Hardy’s pictorial power are found in abundance in many of his novels and short stories. In Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, the description of Farmer Oak’s smile has the vividness of a painting: “When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun”.⁴ It is difficult to imagine a more vivid description of the smile of a human being than that given here by Hardy.

There are numerous descriptive passages in Hardy’s fiction in which he shows a painter’s talent for depicting minute, specific and graphic details. The opening of The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, shows as Benjamin Sankey remarks, “a genuine power over detail: the ability to see things clearly, render them vividly, and impose an order upon them…Each detail emerges sharply”.⁵ The description of the mug in Warren’s Malthouse in Far from the Madding Crowd is equally detailed and minute: it was, says Hardy, “a two-handled tall mug standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat; it was rather furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may have not seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation thereon ­formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and about the rim”.⁶ In Tess, Angel and Tess observe on the grey, moisture of the grass “marks where the cows had lain through the night–dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of their carcases, in the general sea of dew”.⁷ The “dark-green islands of dry herbage, the size of their car cases in the general sea of dew” is the kind of minute detail that might attract the attention of a painter. In The Woodlanders, the description of “the wilder recesses of the park” which Dr. Fitzpiers crosses to reach Mrs., Charmond’s place also shows Hardy’s keen eyes in catching minute details:

He went on foot across the wilder recesses of the park, where slimy streams of fresh moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below being coated with, a lichenous wash as green as emerald. They were stout-trunked trees, that never rocked their stems in the fiercest gale, responding to it only by crooking their limbs. Wrinkled like an old crone’s face and antlered with dead branches that rose above the foliage of, their summits, they were nevertheless still green – through yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees”.⁸

In the Hand of Ethelberta, Ethelberta, while watching the struggle between the hawk and the duck, runs after them. With his characteristic attention to detail, Hardy remarks: “Being a woman slightly heavier than gossamer, her patent heels punched little D’s in the soil with unerring accuracy wherever it was bare, crippled the heathertwigs where it was not, and sucked the swampy places with a sound of quick kisses”.⁹ In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Elizabeth-Jane and Donald Farfrae “watched individual drops of rain creeping down the thatch of the opposite rick – straw after straw – till they reached the bottom.” ¹⁰ Heilman refers to this scene and rightly remarks that “Hardy can give vitality to a scene by a careful image of one minute detail”. ¹¹

It is, however, in his description of nature and of pastoral activities that Hardy’s capacity for pictorial description is best observed. The justly celebrated description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of The Return of the Native shows Hardy’s style at its best. Samuel C. Chew rightly says about Hardy’s portrayal of Egdon Heath: “The famous prelude-like opening is one of the most magnificent pieces of modern prose, reaching a level to which Hardy but seldom attains. The description of the Heath enfolded by the night gradually resolves itself into the human business of the story. And throughout the book, ever and anon a curtain seems to lift behind the actors, and we catch glimpses of the heath, impassive and enduring amid the tragedy that is so intense for the actors therein and yet is so light when set in the balance against natural forces”.¹² The charming and idyllic shearing supper in Far from the Madding Crowd is another excellent example of pictorial representation in Hardy and has won the admiration of critics like Michael Squires, who thus comments on this “highly pastoral scene”: “The idyllic quality is unmistakable. At every juncture, peace and contentment colour the prose. The dominant impression of the scene is one of merry but serene harmony. The shearers are caught during a time of relaxed enjoyment and good-natured fun. The mood is tranquil, warm, and gently idealized; the portrait is nostalgic”.¹³ The style here has a placid serenity which is in consonance with the mood presented.

Hardy had the painter’s fascination for illumination, for the interplay of light and shade. In the shearing-supper scene referred to above, he shows a remarkable ability for presenting the delicate play of light. The warm glow of the evening, the “yellow of self-sustained brilliancy” fading over the horizon, the shearers “steeped in embrowning twilight,” the “lively new flames” of the candles–all show a true painter’s eye for illumination.

Hardy had not only the painter’s fascination for light, but he also had the painter’s sense and appreciation of colour. In his description of objects and scenes, he fills in his sketches with appropriate shades of colour which make some of his descrip­tions “narrative pictures.” Like the railway guard Brown in Bonophul’s Bhuvan Shome, Hardy might have said, “You don’t have to go to church to find God if you understand colour deeply enough. You’ll find God in colour, in the colours of the earth and sky You don’t have to go to a temple. Colour is God, Brahma, if you see it right.”

Hardy’s keen sensitivitv to colour is seen in the description of George, one ofGabriel’s two dogs, in Far from the Madding Crowd: George, he says, had “a coat marked in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years of Sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same kind ofcolour in Turner’s pitcures”.¹⁴ In A Pair of Blue Eyes, the description of trees, hills and the sky is a veritable riot of colour: “The long-armed trees and shrubs of juniper and pine varieties, were greyish black; those of the broad­leaved sort, together with the herbage, were grayish green; the eternal hills and tower behind them were greyish brown–the sky, dropping behind all, grey of the purest melancholy.¹⁵” Two more passages in the same novel show Hardy’s delicate sensitivity to colour. Consider the interplay of various shades of blue in the following passage: “At this moment appeared in the stream of vehicles moving in the contrary direction a chariot presenting in its general surface the rich indigo hue of a midnight sky, the wheels and margins being picked out in delicate lines of ultramarine; the servants’ liveries were dark-blue coats and silver lace and breeches of neutral Indian red.” (Ibid P. 156) The descrption of the rich and mellow colours of the autumn later in the novel reminds one of Keats’s famous “Ode to Autumn”: “The season was that period in the autumn when the foliage alone of an ordinary planta­tion is rich enough in hues to exhaust the chromatic combinations of an artist’s palette. Most lustrous of all are the beeches, graduat­ing from bright rusty red at the extremity of the boughs to a bright yellow at their inner parts; young oaks are still of a natural green; Scotch firs and hollies are nearly blue; whilst occasional dottings of other varieties give maroons and purple of every tinge.” (Ibid. P. 311)

Hardy’s instinctively keen eye for richness of colour in nature is also seen in this passage from Desperate Remedies: “Nothing was visible save the strikingly brilliant, still landscape. The wide concave which lay at the of the hill in this direction was blazing with the Western light, adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the heather, now at the very climax of bloom, and free from the slightest touch of the invidious brown that so soon creeps into its shades. The light so intensified the colours that they seemed to stand above the surface of the earth and float in mid­air like an exhalation of red.” (Page 27)

Hardy’s awareness of the delicate shades of colour is seen not only in his description of nature but also in his portrayal of human beings. He describes Tess’s eyes as “neither black nor blue nor gray nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises – shade behind shade – tint beyond tint –around pupils that had no bottom.” (Tess, p. 116) Later in the novel, when Tess lifts her eyes, Angel plumbs “the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet.” (Ibid. P. 220) In Desperate Remedies, Cytherea’s hair is of “a shining corn yellow in the high lights, deepening to a definite nut-brown as each curl wound round into the shade. She had eyes of a sapphire hue, though rather darker than the gem ordinarily appears.” (Page 8) In view of the examples cited above, Alastair Smart is fully justified in his remark that “Hardy, indeed, had the eyes of a painter; drawing the outlines of his forms as consciously as he filled them with substance and with colour; giving them their proper texture and lighting; fixing them firmly in a definite space; and relating them in scale to their surroundings”.¹⁶

Hardy was not only a painter of still life, but he also painted the poetry of motion with the same skill and beauty with which he portrayed some stationary object. In this context Robert B. Heilman remarks! “He can envisage the moving as well as the stationary; his large movements across landscapes are well-­known, but less has been said about his images for the movements of body and even face”.¹⁷ The description in Far from the Madding Crowd of Sergeant Troy’s sword-exercise shows the skill with which Hardy portrays movement:

He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side, just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body. The third item of consciousness was that of seeing the same sword, perfectly clean and free from blood held vertically in Troy’s hand (in the position technically called ‘recover swords’). All was as quick as electricity. (Pages 215 and 216)

The description of Bathsheba’s burning rick-yard in the same novel also establishes Hardy’s skill in describing moving pheno­mena:

This before Gabriel’s eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together, and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness. It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity like the coal of a cigar. Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down with a quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went horizontally at the like passing clouds and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity, ( Ibid, Pages 80-81)

A humorous example occurs in Under the Greenwood Tree in the description of the ladies dancing in the Tranter’s party:

The ear-rings of the ladies now flung themselves wildly about, turning violent somersaults, banging this way and that, and then swinging quietly against the ears sustaining them, Mrs. Crumpler–a heavy woman, who, for some reason, which nobody ever thought worth inquiry, danced in a clean apron–moved so smoothly through the figure that her feet were never seen; conveying to imaginative minds the idea that she rolled on castors. ¹⁸

In The Return of the Native, Hardy captures most vividly the mobility of Eustacia’s face when she speculates about Clym’s character and tastes:

On such occasions as this a thousand ideas passed through a highly charged woman’s head; and they indicate themselves on face; but the changes, though actual, are minute, Eustacia’s features went through a rhythmical succession of them. She glowed; remembering the mendacity of the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened; then, she fired; then she cooled again. It was a cycle of aspects, produced by a cycle of visions. ¹⁹

The pictorial element in Hardy’s novels is, however, not merely decorative. As Norman Page remarks, in Hardy’s hands it becomes “an economical, and effective narrative device.” By being compelled, like Hamlers mother, to “look here, upon this picture and on that,” the reader is not simply being aided to an imaginative apprehension of character and scene but is enabled tograsp some of the essential elements in the story which narrative summary could only have rendered less strikingly”. ²⁰ Commencing on Turner’s water-colours, Hardy remarked that the artist can give “for that which cannot be reproduced a something else” which has “an approximate effect to that of the real.” ²¹ By means of pictorial representation Hardy is able to dramatize situations and characters in a manner pure narrative could not have enabled him to achieve.

Footnotes

¹ Norman Page, “Hardy’s Pictorial Art in The Mayor of Casterbridge.” Etudes Anglaises, T. XXV, No.4 (1972) p. 486.
² F. B. Pinion, Thomas Hardy: Art and Thought (Totowa, New Jersey, 1977) p. 16.
³ Lloyd Fernando, “Thomas Hardy’s Rhetoric of Painting.” Review of English Literature, 6 (1965), p. 63.
⁴ Far from the Madding Crowd. (London, 1976) p. 41.
⁵ Benjamin Sankey, “Hardy’s Prose Style”, Twentieth Century Literature, II. (April 1965) p. 3-4.
⁶ Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 91.
⁷ Tess of the d’ Urbervilles (London 1950) p. 170.
⁸ The Woodlander’s (London, 1961) Pp. 204.
⁹ The Hand of Ethelberta. (London, 1971) p. 7.
¹⁰ The Mayor of Casterbridge (New York, 1966) p. 107.
¹¹ Robert B. Heilman, “Hardy’s Mayor: Notes on Style,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 18 (1963-64) p. 321.
¹² Samuel C. Chew, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist (New York, 1964) p. 42.
¹³ Michael Squires, “Far from the Madding Crowd as Modified Pastoral,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 25, No.3 (Dec. 1970) p. 323.
¹⁴ Far from the Madding Crowd, p. 70.
¹⁵ A Pair of Blue Eyes (London, 1967) p. 33.
¹⁶ Alastair Smart, “Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy,” Review of English Studies, N. S. XII No. 47 (1961) p. 262
¹⁷ Robert B. Heilman, Op. Cit., p. 321.
¹⁸ Under the Greenwood Tree (New York, 1959) p. 62.
¹⁹ The Return of the Native (New York, 1961) p. 147.
²⁰ Norman Page, “Hardy’s Pictorial Art in The Mayor of Casterbridge.” p. 506.
²¹ Cited by F. B. Pinion, Op. cit. p. 18.