Far from the Madding Crowd

From Jonathan A. Cook's Introduction toFar From the Madding Crowd Hardy described his new novel to Leslie Stephen as "a pastoral tale," and the very title of the novel announced its rural pedigree. The author derived his title from the nineteenth stanza of Thomas Gray's well-known "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), a pastoral meditation on the undistinguished but not undignified lives of rural dwellers: Far from the madding [that is, frenzied] crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. Hardy's novel hardly presents characters whose "sober wishes never learned to stray";indeed, misdirected and thwarted desires are the very stuff of the novel's drama. But he nevertheless gives his rural characters the kind of dignity and humanity that Gray commemorates in his pastoral elegy and that Hardy was bestowing on a new fictional domain based on his native Dorset. The borrowed lines from Gray's poem may be said to act as a generic marker forFar from the Madding Crowdin that many of the basic elements of plot, characterization, setting, and imagery in Hardy's novel can be directly linked to the traditions of the literary pastoral. InFar from the Madding Crowd, as in the pastoral tradition generally, humanity lives largely in harmony with nature, and the year is marked by the natural rhythms of the seasons and the labors of agricultural life. In order fully to appreciate the novel as a manifestation of pastoral, it is necessary briefly to review the long literary tradition to which it belonged. The pastoral tradition in European literature began with theIdyllsof the third-century B.C. Greek writer Theocritus, whose poems often focused on the simple lives and loves of shepherds and goatherds, nostalgically recalled from the writer's native Sicily. The rural subjects of Theocritus' verse included musical and poetic contests, mythological narratives, seasonal celebrations, and elegiac laments. The tradition of classical pastoral poetry was further elaborated by the first-century B.C. Roman writer Virgil in his tenEclogues, based on Theocritan models, as well as theGeorgics, a four-part didactic poem on the required labors of the agricultural year regarding crops, trees, vines, livestock, and bees. Following Virgil, an implicit assumption of pastoral poetry was that rural life was morally superior to urban civilization. Pastoral literature was revived in the English Renaissance in the work of three of the era's leading writers: Edmund Spenser'sShepheardes Calendar(1579), a medley of twelve poems based on Virgil'sEcloguesand featuring song contests, elegies, laments of scorned lovers and frustrated poets, and criticisms of corruption in the late-sixteenth-century English church and state; Sir Philip Sidney'sArcadia(1590), a long prose narrative, set in an imaginary Greek provincial realm, combining chivalric romance with traditional pastoral interludes, and structured around the principle of rustic retreat from the outside world; and William Shakespeare'sAs You Like It(c.1600), a romantic comedy representing the sentimental benefits and ironic deficiencies of withdrawal to a sylvan retreat, the imaginary Forest of Arden, from the perilous environs of the court. Pastoral poetry continued to be written through the eighteenth century by Alexander Pope and others, but at the risk of becoming artificially restricted to the classically defined rules of the era. Although anticipated in some of the poetry ofHardy, Thomas is the author of 'Far from the Madding Crowd ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593082239 and ISBN 1593082231.