VICTORIAN MORALS
253
Shaw, the tinker of the lower-class, both have this faculty because
they have not been brought up in what was for Butler the prison–
house of abstract moral codes and formulations and surrounded by
all
kinds of taboos and bugaboos which attempted anyway to repress
instinct completely and to regulate all human conduct--even human
thought-by acquired precepts. Butler thought that St. Paul was the
real villain in Western history, for he represented formulated law.
If
Butler embodies the comedy of this revolt against middle-class
consciousness, Hardy embodies in his career as a whole, first, its anti–
type
as pastoral and, second and finally, its antitype as tragedy. The
world of
Far from the Madding Crowd
or
The Woodlanders
is the
idyll from which, with some exceptions, the bugaboo of consciousness
is
absent, and where time has stopped and nature is benignly soft.
There was a Hardy "mood," which all his admirers loved and which
has
no parallel in English literature. D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the
best
and most perceptive critic of Hardy, summed it up in a letter
written in 1918 from a cottage in Berkshire: "It is very nice here–
Hardy country- like
Woodlanders-all
woods and hazel copses, and
tiny little villages, under the church, with fields slanting down, and
a hazel copse almost touching the little garden wall... .
"4
Hardy
himself
described Little Hintock, the locale of
The W oodlanders,
as
"one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where
may usually be found more meditation than action, and more pas–
sivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises,
and results in inferences wildly imaginative." Marty South and Giles
Winterbourne, the real if not the titular hero and heroine, are
Ar–
cadian
primitives, taciturn, in tune with the natural world-whose
symbols they can decipher like hieroglyphs- instinctive, and per–
aonal: "Her [Marty'S] face had the usual fullness of expression which
is
developed by the life of solitude. Where the eyes of the multitude
beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away indi–
viduality." Despite their mutual tragedy and Giles's death, they are
outside the hell of consciousness. But as Hardy'S career went on, the
rustics got, in Henry James's phrase, squeezed into their "horrid age,"
with its formulations and conceptualized taboos. Tess is described as
being surrounded by a host of "moral hobgoblins," false and contrary
to
her instincts, that harass her waking life and hound her to her
death. Lawrence said that in Hardy none of the central characters
