Why Far From The Madding Crowd still moves me
This is the pastoral romance that holds the drama of human life at its heart
When the electricity went out, I would sit in front of the emergency light and watch the insects.
They’d flap and crash and inevitably, burn themselves to a crisp on the bright, glass-encased rod. Small, incinerated corpses would rain down the glossy tabletop-to be swept away by my mother when the lights came back on. But while the darkness still reigned, the insects would keep dashing and I’d be watching, transfixed.
But one day, during my summer holidays,(which we spent in our family home in Kerala, India), that just didn’t do the trick for me anymore.
‘Dad, I need books. Any book. Or I’ll go mad’. My father, sympathetic to my plight and obliging to the core, set off to find me something to read. It was a successful errand but I couldn’t help but be disappointed when he returned, presumably from a trip to one of our neighbour’s.
The yellowed, slightly mildewed book he thrust into my hands was far removed from the glossy paperback I had envisioned. In fact, this seemed more like a stack of papers stapled together, not having a cover either. A quick flip through revealed underlined sections in blue ink and pencil scribbles throughout. There was a book group section in the back that read like a schoolbook questionnaire, something I’d always hated (I’d always been one for spontaneous analysis and hated ‘prompts’ to get the conversation going-if you read something, you know what interests you and what you want to talk about.) I didn’t even recognize the title and the author was completely unknown to me.
For half a second, I considered putting the book aside but boredom won over-there are only so many times you can watch insects swarm light. And so, I flipped the first page.
That’s how I stumbled over Far From the Madding Crowd for the first time, the book that taught me about the reality of love like no other.
You read Austen and you stay for the sparkling social comedy, you read the Brontës for storm-tossed moors, ghostly women in attics and the ultimate delight of seeing women triumph both over life’s adversity as well as over utterly flawed men. (I was much too young then to understand Eliot’s philosophical study of life and I wouldn’t come to read Gaskell’s romances tempered with social issues until many years later, which is probably why Hardy struck a chord.)
I thought deeply about Gabriel Oak, the calm, staid man who prayed unpretentiously to God in his hut and who wasn’t too proud to stay by the side of a woman who would use but not love him. Girls would later croon over Edward Cullen but I’d always be struck by Gabriel’s earnestness and steadfastness-strong and unswayed, like the oak he is named for. Was Hardy remembering the courtship of his own wife, Emma, when he penned these resonant lines?
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up there will be you.
The latter line is a promise to love and hold that transcends all grand gestures ,a promise to always be with the person one loves, whatever happens-something Gabriel gets to prove time and time again in the course of the story.
I’ve memorized those lines and I’ve reread the book countless times, finding something new to please me every time around. I’ve read more of Hardy’s novels than any other Victorian writer I can think of, branching out into his short stories and poetry. The moment I saw a deal on an autobiography of his, I pounced. There are few authors that have shook me to the core to this extent and I never grow tired of touting his horn.
‘The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the weak places,’ Hemingway wrote. It’s a line made for Bathsheba, happy at last yet subdued, fallen from a state of youthful exuberance to one of quietly content world-weariness. It’s a line seemingly concocted for Gabriel Oak, a man who loses his home, his livelihood, his status and his love from one moment to the next. This paragraph detailing his experience strikes me anew, now that I’ve lived to see my own share of disappointments:
Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.
At twelve, this sounded marvellously tragic-now, it feels both wistful and cathartic. Hardy seemed down-to-earth, he was the first writer to speak to my middle class sensibilities. He showed me that a regular man or woman, unremarkable from the outside, could ‘contain multitudes’ and he taught me what it is to bask in a winter sunrise or look up at the sky and marvel at the vast immensity of space and its many sparkling stars.
This description of sheep-shearing in Far From the Madding Crowd proves why Hardy was a poet at heart:
It was the first day of June … the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops’ croziers, the square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,-like an apoplectic saint in a niche of malachite,-snow-white ladies’ — smocks, the toothwart, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter’s night-shade, and black-petaled doleful bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time …
When I was younger, I read Hardy to escape the dark. Now, that I am older, I return to find the dark in his work-the gloom of missed dreams and hopes, the fight against fate and lost love but most of all, to remind myself of the unbroken spirit of nature and the passion of life that will not be denied, bad ending or not.
