Title: Review of 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Author(s): Margaret Oliphant
Publication Details: Blackwood's Edinburg Magazine 151 (Mar. 1892): p464-474.
Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale Rearch, 1985. p464-474. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay, Excerpt
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1985 Gale Rearch, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning 中正锦城
[Oliphant was a popular late-Victorian Scottish novelist who works most often chronicled the lives of independent, resourceful, and unmarried women. Her criticism is noted for its sympathy with the views of the average reader. In the following excerpt Oliph
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ant notes flaws in Hardy's portrayal of Tess and questions his interpretation of fate.]
Tess道教 of the D'Urbervilles is the history, Mr Hardy tells us, par excellence, of a pure woman, which is his flag or trumpet, so to speak, of defiance upon certain matters, to the ordinary world. It is time enough, however, to come to that after we have done justice to the real pictures which an artist cannot help giving, with qualities of life and truth which are independent of all didactic intentions. Tess is a country girl of an extraordinary elevated and noble kind. Everybody knows what Mr Hardy's peasants in Wesx are. They are a quaint people, given to somewhat high-flown language, and confud and complicated reasoning, like, it was at first suppod by hardy guessing, to George Eliot's peasants, yet not really so, except in being more dignified, more grandio in speech than the usual article, as it comes across the ordinary ns of more common people. They are sometimes a little grotesque, but their ntiments are usually fine. John Durbeyfield, the father of Tess, is an example of this somewhat artificial personage. If he is not good Dortshire, he is at least good Hardy, which answers just as well; and the book begins by a very foolish communication made to this rural “higgler” by an old antiqu
arian parson of the fact that he is the lineal reprentative of the old race of the D'Urbervilles, who marble tombs are to be en in a great church near. The unfortunate weakly and silly straggler by the country roads takes the information to heart, and rears a structure of foolish hopes upon it which lead to nothing but dismay [All] but the queenly Tess, who is the flower of it, and who is throughout ashamed of the whole business, is of a very heavy comic kind; but the family, always granted the Hardy element in it, is a vigorous and real picture. The father, too fond of beer; the mother singing at her washing-tub, rocking the cradle with her foot, strong yet slatternly, kind yet mercenary,—quite ready to ll the beautiful daughter for the benefit of the family, and think no harm, yet loving and rving them all in her It is a pardonable extravagance to make of Tess a kind of princess in this milieu, which is a mistake that even the most experienced make from time to time, since there is scarcely a vicaress or rectoress who has not some such favourite in the parish—some girl with all the instincts of a lady, as the kind patroness will tell you. We doubt much, however, whether having pasd the Sixth Standard improves the phraology in the manner belie
ved by Mr Hardy; but this is of little importance. Tess is, we are ready to allow, the exceptional creature whom we have all en, beautiful in the bloom of first youth, capable of all things, as the imaginative spectator feels, and whom it is dreadful to think of as falling eventually into the cheerful comely slattern, with a troop of children, which her 红枣馒头Tess is plunged at once into the abyss of evil. We need not follow a story which by this time everybody has read, through all its details. It is amusing, however, to find that such a democrat as Mr Hardy, finding nothing worth his while in any class above that of the actual sons of the soil, should be so indignant at the trumpery person who has assumed the name of D'Urberville, having no sort of right to it. What could it matter? We are aware that the name of Norfolk Howard has been assumed in similar circumstances, which has made the world laugh, but had no more rious result. Mr Hardy, however, takes it very gravely, though it is a godnd to him, opening the door for all that follows. The idea of nding Tess to ek her fortune by claiming kindred with the wealthy family which calls itlf D'Urberville throws her at once into the hands of the young nsualist and villain of fiction, the rural Lothario with whom we are so well acquainted. Tess is spotl
ess as a lily—that may be granted: but a girl brought up in the extraordinary freedom and free-speaking of rural life would scarcely be entirely ignorant of evil; and indeed, as a matter of fact, she has the instinct to discourage and escape as much as possible from the advances of the ducer and rustic profligate Alec D'Urberville, who character is well known.
That she should have been taken advantage of, and dragged into degradation by mingled force and kindness, is possible; but not that, pure-minded and spotless, yet already alarmed and t on her guard as she had been, she should have trusted herlf at midnight with the unscrupulous young master who was pursuing her, and who habits she was fully informed of, in order to escape from the drunken and riotous companions who, odious as they were, were still a protection to her. The girl who escapes from her fellow-rvants in their jollity by jumping up on horback (and how about the hor? does that fine animal nowadays lend itlf to such means of duction?) behind a master of such a character, and being carried off by him in the middle of the night, naturally leaves her reputation [Poor] Tess男士穿衣搭配 yields not to any impure suggestion, whic
h is the last thing to be thought of in such a ca, but to tho mingled motives of vanity and excitement which have so large a share in this kind of moral downfall. The n of triumph over others left behind, and intoxicating superiority for the moment to all rivals, has far more to do, we believe, with feminine offences of this description than any tendency towards vice. No one could doubt what was to follow: the girl, perhaps, alone might have hoped in some incomprehensible way that she should yet escape. And indeed Mr Hardy, at the last moment, generously gives her an opportunity of running away, of which the real Tess certainly would have availed herlf; but then where would the story have been, and all the defiant pleas of the author for that virtue which is proved in his estimation by the breach rather than the obrvance?
If Mr Hardy had not labelled this poor girl as a specimen of exceptional and absolute purity, nothing could have been more piteous than [Poor] little Tess, at sixteen going back to her hou with her young eyes so fatally opened, has nothing but our pity, especially when, after a vague interval, she reappears in the harvest-field, among the other women at their work, with a baby dependent on her. The situation is one
which is as old as poetry. Mr Hardy ems to have a notion that he has invented it—but unfortunately it is not so. It has been treated in all the methods, and romance has invariably leant to the charitable side. If it is the woman who pays, at least it is the woman, the inevitable sufferer, who has all the sympathy. And the unfortunate child thus brought into the world is also a most powerful agent in fiction. Generally it has been suppod by the storyteller to be a means of redemption for the fallen woman. One remembers how Mrs Browning treats it in Aurora Leigh, elevating and developing the being of the girl Marion, who is a still greater martyr than Tess, by the revelation of maternity and the glory of the new life. But the philosophy of enlightenment and the fin de siècle has nothing to do with such imaginations. Naturally a new creed must treat such a situation in a new way, especially when the principles of that creed are indignation ... and wrath, and have no sympathy with the everlasting reconstruction which another philosophy perceives to be going on for ever in the moral as well as in the material world. Mr Hardy scornfully admits the possibility that the downfall of poor Tess may have been “a retribution,”—it being “a morality good enough for divinities,” though “scorned by avera
ge human nature,” to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. “Doubtless some of 会计年终总结Tess D'Urberville's mailed ancestors, rollicking home from a fray, had dealt the same wrong even more ruthlessly upon peasant girls of their time:” but he does not allow any return in the process of nature. This silly cant is very unworthy of any man acquainted with the crets of the heart, and verd were it ever so little in tho great problems of humanity which it is the occupation of the poet to fathom; but it is “the height of the fashion,” and we know how in the lower walks of life fashion is exaggerated, so that perhaps Mr Hardy, as an exponent of peasant life, feels himlf justified in going a little further than the commonest of n permits. His unfortunate young another is compelled to look upon her poor baby in a different and original way from all previous sufferers of her kind. She holds it on her lap in the reaping-field, “and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost dislike: then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she would never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an ont which strangely combined passionateness with contempt.”
The moralisings which follow when the unfortunate baby dies are equally remarkable. Tess is in despair, not for the loss of her child but chiefly about “She thought of the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-pronged fork like the one they ud for heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other quaint and curious details of torment taught the young in this Christian country.” Now, so far as we are aware, except, perhaps, in some quaint piece of medieval divinity still less likely to have fallen under Tess葡萄酒葡萄品种's notice than ours, the arch-fiend with the three-pronged toasting-fork (it is well to be particular), with which she was so familiar as to think that it was like the one ud for heating the oven, occurs in certain grim passages of the Inferno, but in no more popular reading. We have admitted that we have less faith in the Sixth Standard than Mr Hardy, but it ems probable that we spoke in ignorance. Has it come to that, that Dante is taught and familiarly studied in our village schools? No wonder in that ca that to pass the Sixth Standard should be a high test of a liberal education. But we cannot help fearing that Mr Hardy has here incautiously muddled up the views of the poet with tho of the Catechism. (pp. 465-69)
The next division of the story begins with something very different from this dreary stuff. It is the picture of the great dairy to which Tess, free of all encumbrances, her baby dead and oblivion closing over all her trouble, goes as “a skilful milkmaid,” “between two and three years after her return from Trantridge.” She must now have been, therefore, between eighteen and nineteen, and a most accomplished woman; for not only did she know au fond the prophecies of Ezekiel and the Inferno of Dante, but she had been at sixteen an expert poultry-woman, and now was an exceptional milkmaid, so that her gifts in every way were great. In addition to which she was beautiful—not ruddy and buxom as a country girl, but with the beauty of ancient ancestry and noble blood. The establishment into which she is received is idyllic; and nothing can be more vivid, living, and actual than the great farm, with its innumerable cows, its rustic patriarch at the head, the pretty maids all a-row, the fringe of rougher men. There is, however, a rpent in this Eden,—though it is no vicious person, no deceiver or rustic profligate like poor Tess颐和园英文's previous master, but a gentleman of the last and most painful degree of refinement, studying farming in preparation for emigrating, an Agnostic, a musician, a philosopher, and every other superf
ine thing that can be conceived. “Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that plays the harp”—is how one of the ordinary milkmaids describes him. We do not know whether it is usual for an intending farmer to learn milking, but we are sure that it is not at all usual for a young man of the nineteenth century to carry a harp about with him, which is an inconvenient piece However, it is perhaps not less unlikely that a parson's son in Wesx should carry a harp about with him, than that he should be called Angel Clare. He is truly worthy of the name, being the most curious thing in the shape of a man whom we think we have ever met with—at least out of a young lady' It is needless to say that poor Tess finds her doom in the superfine pupil, and that they soon begin to fall in love with each other. (pp. 469-70)
