Hardy and the Visual Arts

30:3, Reviews I am anxious about these thousand words You've written. At this juncture every word is an object to be considered anxiously with heart searchings and in a spirit of severe resolution. Don't write them (words) hurriedly. I am glad you have written no more than one thousand. If it had been only one hundred I would have said: it is well. (178) And Conrad habitually chronicles his weariness, his frustration, his despair: "You have no idea how your interest in me keeps me up. I am unutterably weary of thinking, of writing, of seeing of feeling of living. ... I plod without much faith. Its money. Thats all" (197). But he also writes of happier moments: of concerts to be attended with friends (454), of manuscripts posted at the last minute (434), and of the minutiae of daily life that invigorate the correspondence and enliven the reader. But the Karl-Davies Letters do not simply record. An introduction and notes provide contexts for interpretation, and illustrations give insights into Conrad and his circle: an X-ray photograph of Conrad's hand; R. A. Sauter's portrait of Galsworthy; Stephen Crane standing beside a smuggler's den at Brede Place; Ted Sanderson playing an oboe; and H. G. Wells's photography. Add to these an occasional map, an appendix containing corrigenda to volume one, and handsome book design—all set the standard for subsequent editions to follow. The volumes in the Cambridge Letters will be joined soon by the first text of the thirty volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Conrad. Collectively, these two editions might be viewed as culminating more than thirty years of very active Conrad scholarship that have included, among other important works, the major contextual studies of Conrad's life by Karl (Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, 1979), Ian Watt (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 1979), and Zdzislaw Najder (Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, 1983). When the two editions are complete, and when Bruce Teets's second Conrad volume in the Annotated Secondary Bibliography Series is published, the record of the contextual basis for Conrad's literary life will have attained a completeness equalled by few twentieth century writers. Students of English literature in transition remain grateful for the solid contributions of people like Karl and Davies in what often seems to be a gossamer world of post-structuralist criticism. Ray Stevens Western Maryland College HARDY AND THE VISUAL ARTS J. B. Bullen. The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. $54.00 The relationship, both technical and associative, of Hardy's novels to the visual arts has received recurrent attention since Alastair Smart's 1961 RES 345 30:3, Reviews essay "Pictorial Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy." The most substantial work on the subject—by Joan Grundy, Arlene Jackson, and Norman Page—has centred on technique and allusion rather than on more complex perceptual and compositional questions. J. B. Bullen's book, while covering some familiar ground, pushes forward to original insights about the importance of vision, literal, aesthetic, and metaphorical, to Hardy's major fiction. By selective use of the Literary Notebooks and with an assured grounding in nineteenth-century intellectual and art history, Bullen places Hardy within a mainstream of Victorian thought for which Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater are the primary theoretical influences . Hardy's visual imagination, which creates "moments of stasis . . . frequently structured on the pictorial model," makes a crucial contribution to the dialectic between "being" and "becoming" that forms the melancholic core of Hardy's thought and consequent narrative practice. Two opening chapters establish a context for the argument by general discussion of Hardy's interest in the visual arts and by analysis of the three early novels, Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Eight chapters on individual novels follow, each one pursuing the motif of perception and visualization in terms suited to the specific work. Thus in relation to Far From the Madding Crowd, perception is explored as an aspect of understanding, achieved by different characters to radically differing degrees and moral ends. Discussion of The Return of the Native emphasises...