Hardy's Romantic Diptych: A Reading of A Laodicean and Two on a Tower

HARDY'S ROMANTIC DIPTYCH: A READING OF A LAODICEAN AND TWO ON A TOWER By Pearl R. Hochstadt (Long Island University, Brooklyn Center) It is "very fresh and delightful ... to find a writer of such distinct genius who has little or nothing to say about either morals or passion, and yet thinks love is the chief business of life, and can devote himself so fully to the rending of its devious ways." Thus Havelock Ellis in an 1883 essay in the Westminster Review applauded a writer who was clearly coming into the forefront of the ranks of living novelists, the forty-three year old Thomas Hardy. The two novels he could point to as the latest demonstration of Hardy's "distinct genius" were A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882), and Ellis was prepared to cite them In predicting the future direction of Hardy's development as a writer: It may be safely said . . . that he will scarcely write another novel of the peculiar power, and, it might be added, the peculiar weakness, of Far From the Madding Crowd. It seems more probable that he will pursue the vein of comedy which began in The Hand of Ethelberta, and is, perhaps, the most characteristic outcome of his genius—that subtle and unimpassioned tracing of aspects of life at once delicate and simple, whch are best touched by the fine observation, the tender irony that we have found to be the most constant elements in Mr. Hardy's work. What fresh variations are possible within these limits it would not be well to predict, but It is probable that, of stories in this manner, A Laodicean and Two on a Tower will not be the last. (p. 132) Today we can look back and recognize how misleading Ellis was as a prophet. Not only have A Laodicean and Two on a Tower sunk almost out of sight in the hierarchy of Hardy's canon; every popularly received notion about Hardy flatly contradicts Ellis's premises. Where could we find anyone subscribing to the idea that "the vein of comedy" represents the "most characteristic outcome of his genius"? Could the author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure possibly be described as "unimpassioned"? And how can one imagine that "Hardy of Wessex," the triumphant creator of that characteristically primitive rural domain, would ever abandon it for its diametric opposite, the milieu of "polite society"? Yet in their own day Ellis's assertions were plausible enough. True, the next novel to appear after Two on a Tower was The Jlayor of Casterbridge (1886), firmly reestablished in the heart of rustic Wessex, and the one novel of Hardy's in which the love story is clearly of subordinate interest. But 1890 saw the publication of A Group of Noble Dames, a collection of sketches featuring the romantic vicissitudes of titled ladies. And it is well to remember that, contrary to popular myth, Hardy's career as a novelist did not end with Jude (1895), but with the 1896 revision of that "delicate" and "unimpassioned" fable The Well-Beloved, ,whose hero, Jocelyn Pierston, is thoroughly at home in London drawing rooms. In rejecting Ellis's image of Hardy, we run the risk of violently misconstruing a writer whose subtlety Ellis was not alone in praising. 23 Moreover, there is another reason for lingering over Ellis's remarks. After all, The Mayor of Casterbrldge was the exception among Hardy's novels in not being first and foremost a love story. And there has been a persistent critical tradition which has followed Ellis's lead in focusing its regard on what one of its adherents, Desmond Hawkins, has called "the love world." Here too, however, we are confronted with a thoroughgoing revisionism^ Scarcely one of these critics sees Hardy's treatment of love as "delightful." For Arthur Symons and Pierre D'Exideuil, sexuality is an aspect of Hardy's fatalism. D. H. Lawrence, creating his own myth about Hardy's aims, faults him for failing to resolve the internal conflict between his liberating "aristocratic" sensibilities and their constraining "bourgeois" opposites, a charge which Hawkins echoes in observing that, despite Hardy's sympathy...